Posted on: Friday, April 18, 2003
HAWAIIAN STYLE
In war and peace, veteran has lived a charmed life
It was another time, another war — one when Albert Spear, like a cat, began to peel away at his nine lives.
He's been shot at, survived exploding grenades, ditched a plane in the Pacific and piloted another smack into a snowbank in Antarctica.
His story as he tells it: Fearing being drafted after Pearl Harbor, he, like others, enlisted. The year was 1941. He helped build sea ramps, hospitals and air strips in "faraway places with strange sounding names" as Bora Bora, New Hebrides, Borneo and Guadalcanal.
"I hit all the major invasions — Coral Sea, Midway, Wake Island — in harm's way," said Spear, 82, of upper Nu'uanu. "I had guys killed right in the tent with me" during grenade attacks. In the Borneo invasion, half of his outfit perished. Spear? He got nary so much as a scratch.
In the thick of battle, he listened one night as Tokyo Rose "busted" his unit's "trump card." They had dug fox holes cleverly under their tent's cots. "Now don't you guys go hide in those fox holes!" she chided. By morning, Spear would be one of the few left standing.
Seventy percent of the men shipped home. "There was a tremendous medical problem on these (Pacific) islands," Spear said. Malaria, dengue fever, elephantiasis. Spear? Nary a sniffle, scratch or sneeze. "Ol' Al didn't have a mosquito bite!" he boasts.
His luck continued in 1956. About 3:15 a.m. on Oct. 17, he was aboard a four-engine Pan American Stratocruiser halfway between Honolulu and San Francisco. It was the days of fine food and wine, starched napkins and china, and passengers sleeping in berths.
One of the plane's four engines shut down. Then a second. The plane, with 24 passengers and seven crew, plummeted to 1,000 feet. Well-dressed women in hats, clutching infants, buried their faces in pillows.
Lips moved in prayer — and seemingly were answered as the Coast Guard ship Pontchartrain miraculously appeared below. The crippled plane flew circles around the ship to await daylight.
After a five-hour ordeal, the plane dropped into a pathway of floating flares and "runway" of fire foam spread by the Pontchartrain.
The sounds of crushing metal and rushing water replaced the hum of the engines. Twin babies behind Spear flew through the air. Inside the hold, two dogs, 3,300 canaries and a parakeet — along with quantities of merchandise, Chinese silk dresses, fabrics from Asia, and 700 pounds of flowers — headed with the plane for the murky depths of the Pacific.
All aboard survived.
Spear told of the ordeal in the pages of the Oct. 29, 1956 issue of Life magazine. Many of the pictures with the article were his.
But fate wasn't done with Ol' Al. "Wintering over" in 1957 in Antarctica with research operation "Deep Freeze II," the pilot of a small, ski-equipped plane asked: "Ever fly one of these babies?" "Hell no!" said Spear, "but I'd love to."
"I was doing just fine for about 10 miles," he remembers. "My horizontal bar was just perfect." All of a sudden, "KABAM!" — without aid of a horizon in the barren white wilderness, Spear had flown the pair smack into a snowbank — perfectly horizontally, of course.
He walked away — with the promise to the pilot he'd never admit he was flying the plane.
He's survived car wrecks unscathed, watching other victims thrown across two lanes. Undaunted, he walks under ladders and dares black cats. He's never even so much as fallen down stairs. His guardian angel, he says, is doing overtime.
He does nurture one fear: "Facing the wife (Seiko)" when he gets home late."Yeah, she raises hell!" Spear said.
And that scares him.
