Former Marine tips cap to veterans

PALMER — Many veterans wear their pride on their sleeves. For World War II vets who live at the Alaska Veterans and Pioneers Home, they can now display their service even more prominently.

The 23 World War II veterans who call the Palmer facility home have new military baseball caps thanks to Bill Hutchins. The Palmer resident gave out the hats, each displaying the individual’s branch and theater of service, during a Friday ice cream social at the home. A veteran himself — he was a Marine from 1959 to 1965 — Hutchins said giving out those hats to appreciative veterans was “one of the best days of my life.”

“Those guys, man, I’ll tell you, it was just an honor to be in the same room with that many World War II veterans,” Hutchins said.

The idea for purchasing and sharing the hats came from a visit to the Veterans Administration medical clinic in Anchorage, he said. There, he met a 95-year-old World War II veteran who said he lived at the Palmer pioneers home. He saw the hats being sold at the VA clinic, so decided to buy one and bring it to the man.

“He got to telling me about his naval experience,” Hutchins said. “So, when I got ready to leave, I started to walk out the door and saw all these hats.”

The hat sat in his car for a while before he finally got around to delivering it. That’s when Hutchins said he realized how much such a small recognition meant to the aging veteran.

“Just to see the pride in his eyes when I handed him that hat — man, it was just a great thing,” he said. “In the nursing home there, they can wear a cap every day. I saw that pride in him, so I said I would like to get every one of these guys a hat.”

Hutchins asked Celia Conrad, the center’s recreation director, for a list and was surprised when she responded with 23 names of just World War II veterans. The facility is home to 47 veterans overall.

That first hat cost Hutchins $15, but when the VA clinic heard what he was doing, it decided to sell him the rest at half price. The payoff, Hutchins said, came Friday when the veterans received their hats. S Something as small as a baseball cap meant the world to them, he said.

“You should’ve seen their faces, just to see the pride in them,” he said. “The World War II veterans are different from the rest of us. You don’t hear them talking about the war much. I had an uncle who had been in that damn war from 1941 to the latter part of 1945, and not one time did he come home after boot camp. He and another guy were the only two guys from their battalion to survive. He was with Patton for all those years.”

Although Hutchins was a Marine for six years, a stint that likely would have gone longer if he hadn’t suffered an injury, he said Americans today owe special gratitude for those who served in World War II.

“As I’ve gotten older, I realize that if it wasn’t for that generation, we might be saying ‘heil Hitler’ still today,” he said. “What they did goes beyond the call of duty, that’s for sure.”

The baseball caps allow veterans to show their service every day, Conrad said, and it’s something they do with pride since getting them.

“A hat is something they can still pick up themselves and wear,” she said. “They are able to display their service and wear their pride, and it means the world to them. I see a lot of proud veterans at this home. They wear them with pride, and a lot of them didn’t have a lot to display about their years of service, so this is great.”

Now that he’s given out hats to the 23 World War II veterans at the Palmer home — 13 Army, eight Navy, one Marine and one Merchant Marine — Hutchins said his next project is getting hats to recognize the service of the other veterans there.

‘He stood up

for his troops’

Like most veterans, Hutchins has a few stories of his own from his time in the Marine Corps. For part of his time, Hutchins said he served with Col. Archie Van Winkle, Alaska’s only Congressional Medal of Honor winner. Van Winkle was a captain at the time and commander of Hutchins’ battalion.

“He was a leader, he sure was,” Hutchins said. He recalled a time when his company was detoured to Lebanon while on a ship bound for California. To kill some time, the Marines and Navy men had some athletic competitions. As the boxer in his company, Hutchins was chosen to get in the ring.

“They matched me up with this kid who was champion of the 6th Fleet,” Hutchins recalled. “We get in the ring and we were just getting after it and he was just beating the crap out of me.”

That went on for two rounds, then in the third, Hutchins came out and took his opponent down with a wrestling-type maneuver.

“That third round bell rang and he was going to finish me off,” he said. “So I took him down, and little did I know that the kid was the admiral’s fair-haired boy.”

The next day, Hutchins said he was called up to see the admiral, who gave him a tongue-lashing over the fight. That’s when Van Winkle, then just a captain, stuck up for him.

“Van Winkle, boy he was a gutsy guy,” Hutchins said. “That admiral ran me out of there and this was a captain yelling at the admiral sticking up for me. I could hear the admiral yelling, ‘I’m going to put him in the brig and he won’t ever see daylight again!’”

Van Winkle came out and told Hutchins to bury himself with duties below deck and not let the admiral see him for the rest of the trip, he said.

“That’s the kind of guy he was,” Hutchins said. “He stood up for his troops.”

Contact Greg Johnson at 352-2269 or greg.johnson@frontiersman.com.

If you want to help Bill Hutchins purchase baseball caps that display the branch and specific arenas of service for the veterans at the Alaska Veterans and Pioneers Home in Palmer, contact Hutchins at (907) 982-5200.