The Daily Populous

Friday December 28th, 2018 day edition

image for Austinite Richard Overton, America's Oldest Veteran, Dies At 112

Richard Overton, the oldest known American World War II veteran, has died.

Overton, who turned 112 in May, was the oldest man in the United States.

He enlisted in the Army in 1940 and was part of an all-black engineer aviation battalion.

"Uncle Sam called me in, and I went there and I had to do it," he told KUT's Audrey McGlinchy in 2015.

He served in Pearl Harbor and in the Pacific theater at Okinawa and Iwo Jima.

"I'm glad I'm back home, and I'm glad I didn't get like some of the others.

He had breakfast with the president and Vice President Joe Biden, before attending a wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. »

TIL that Theodore Roosevelt --a successful boxer at Harvard, got into a bar fight after a man called him 'four eyes' in reference to his spectacles and suggested he pay for drinks. The man held two guns and told Roosevelt to "set up the drinks." Roosevelt knocked him out and took away his guns.

Authored by nps.gov

Roosevelt never specified the exact date of the event, but the incident likely occurred in the summer of 1884.

That year, Roosevelt was still relatively unknown in the area and grieving the loss of his wife and mother earlier that year.

There, he encountered a bully who, like others had done who did not know Roosevelt well, teased him about his glasses. »