‘I was almost a firecracker!’ World War II vet from Lexington celebrates 100th birthday

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They’ll have two birthday cakes this week for Paul Frederick. Without a doubt, he’s earned every slice.

The Lexington native and lifelong resident has undoubtedly left his mark.

He earned the Purple Heart while serving in the Pacific Theater in World War II. He raised a family with his wife of 71 years and worked until he was almost 80. He led a troop of Boy Scouts for years and served the youth in his church.

“One of my theories is, keep moving,” he said.

Frederick’s next feat?

Turning 100 on July 5.

“I was almost a firecracker!” he said of his birthday with a grin.

The centenarian is having two birthday parties to celebrate the occasion, one with his immediate family and another with friends at Sayre Christian Village, where Frederick lived until April, when he moved to the Thomson-Hood Veterans Center in Wilmore.

Frederick, full of good humor and wit, reflected on the last century in a recent interview with the Herald-Leader.

Growing up in Fayette County, Frederick was the eldest of four brothers.

“We made our own entertainment,” he said. “There wasn’t no TV to watch.”

“I went to a little three-room schoolhouse on Versailles Road where McDonald’s is now,” he said.

As a teen, he attended Lafayette High School and worked in his dad’s service station before he headed off to school each morning.

“My job was to open up at 6:00 a.m.,” he said. “That didn’t mean no 6:10, 6:15.”

Then the United States entered World War II.

“I knew they was going to get me, so I dropped out of school and joined the Marines,” Frederick said.

He enlisted July 30, 1942, and was sent to basic training in Parris Island, S.C.

Frederick, a private first class with the 3rd Division of the 21st Regiment, was sent to California, then on to New Zealand in 1943.

“They thought Japan was going to invade Australia,” he said.

After training in New Zealand, Frederick was shipped to Guadalcanal.

Then, in the early morning hours of Nov. 17, 1943, he was aboard the U.S.S. McKean, a destroyer transporting troops to Bougainville, when it was hit by a Japanese torpedo.

“Everybody’s got a guardian angel,” Frederick said.

He had just been talking to several buddies and had told them he wanted to get a drink of water and check the time. He said he hadn’t gone far when the torpedo hit, killing all four of the men he had just been with.

Frederick ended up in the water for almost 90 minutes before being picked up by another boat.

“If it hadn’t been for that life jacket, I wouldn’t have been here,” he said.

Frederick sustained burns to the side of his head and his arm, but he said he was later told the oil and salt water had helped them heal.

He spent several months recovering, then was sent back to active duty.

Frederick served as a machine gun rifleman until, he said, “they made a bazooka man out of me.”

He fought in a number of battles in the Pacific, including on Guam and in the Battle of Iwo Jima.

Frederick received an honorable discharge on Oct. 18, 1945.

“I never did get homesick,” he said, “til they dropped the bomb and signed the peace treaty. I said, ‘I want to go home.’”

Frederick was awarded the Purple Heart, along with a number of other medals. Looking down at them recently, he mused, “What they are, I don’t know, but they’re all legal anyway!”

Several years ago, Frederick’s story was set to music through the song “Guardian Angel,” a part of the Operation Song World War II Preservation Project.

And, 60 years after he would have graduated from Lafayette High School, he finally received that high school diploma he had given up to enlist so many years earlier.

In 2003, Frederick became the first person in Fayette County to receive a Veterans Diploma under a new state law that permitted honorably discharged veterans of World War II to receive their diplomas.

After the war, he went back to work at the service station until 1963, when he became an employee of the U.S. Postal Service.

He retired from the post office in 1989 and then took another job delivering cars for Thrifty Car Rental until he was almost 80, he said.

Pop Fred, as he is known to many, spent years as a Boy Scout leader and youth group sponsor at Broadway Christian Church.

“Twenty-mile hikes, it didn’t matter to him,” said Roger Singleton, a close friend who was in his Boy Scout troop and was part of the Broadway youth group.

“He always had the station wagon with canoes tied to the top” on youth group trips, said his friend Savana Rowe. “He probably could have been on ‘Survivor.’”

Frederick attributes his longevity to that “keep moving” philosophy — along with “good genes” and a healthy lifestyle.

“When I was about 25, I quit smoking and quit drinking, which, I never did drink that much,” he said.

Frederick and his wife, Myrtle Zimmerman Frederick, who died in 2016, were married 71 years and had two sons, Larry, who lives in Lexington, and Jack, of Cincinnati.

Frederick still remembers the day he met Myrtle in June 1942.

“She looks pretty good,” he recalls telling his buddy. “I wonder if she’d date me.”

They went to the drive in two or three times, he said, before he was shipped overseas. After that, they corresponded as friends — that is, until he came home on leave.

“She called me. I was over at the service station,” Frederick recalled.

“You coming over tonight?” Myrtle asked.

“Well, I’ll think about it,” Frederick said he replied.

That evening, he said Myrtle asked, “If I take my lipstick off, will you give me a kiss?”

“Well, yeah,” came his reply.

Frederick clearly relishes telling this story.

“So that started it,” he said.

He still remembers where they were sitting on Upper Street when they got engaged.

“We whipped Germany. We was still fighting Japan,” Frederick recalled. “I said, ‘If this war was over, I’d ask you to marry me.’

“She said, ‘Why wait?”

And he remembers how they got married while he was stationed in Williamsburg, Va.

“She wanted to be a June bride. I looked, but I couldn’t find no place to stay,” he said.

One day, Myrtle and his mother showed up anyway.

Frederick said it was “guardian angels” who helped them find two rooms in the same house.

“We got married on a Saturday afternoon,” he said. “I had to be back in camp the next morning at 7:00. ...That was our honeymoon, but we made up for it over the years.”

What was their secret to a successful marriage?

He said they took short trips to state parks once or twice every year, just the two of them.

And, he said, “I don’t like to argue. I ain’t gonna argue. And she didn’t either.”

After a pause, he added, “I might’ve pouted a few days.”

“I didn’t tell her how to wash dishes, and she didn’t tell me how to cut the grass.”

When asked what the best part of his life has been, he answered without reservation: “Being married to my wife. The whole 71 years.”