Bob Baron: A very spicy life

By Wendy Ellis, Honor Flight Chicago Veteran Interview Volunteer

If variety is the spice of life, then Bob Baron can tell you, his life has been very spicy.

Bob describes himself as a “war baby”, born in 1942 in Brooklyn, New York, the second of four boys.  When his father was drafted and went down to Penn Station to report, the officer in charge told anyone over the age of 32 with two or more children to step out of line. His father did and they sent him home. They were out of the Army.  So his father served as an air raid warden instead.  That may be why Bob felt it was “his duty” to enlist in the US Marine Corp in 1962 when he was 19-years-old. 

“I wanted to be a pilot,” says Barron. “I was guaranteed aviation.”  After 13 weeks of basic he was sent to Jacksonville, Florida, to Mechanics Fundamental School, and then to Memphis for Jet Engine School.  Not exactly the wings he’d hoped for, but the beginning of a decades long commitment to serving his country.  He returned to his squadron, VMA 131, as an A4 Skyhawk Mechanic, the same aircraft John McCain flew.  He was stationed at Naval Air Station Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, New York, until his active duty ended in 1964.  But he wasn’t done. He enlisted in the Marine Reserve and didn’t retire until 2002, a 40-year commitment.  

Once in the reserves Bob went back to his old civilian job as a salesman for Dan River Textile Company, and it was that job that brought him to Chicago in 1967.  He transferred from his old reserve unit to VMA 543 in Glenview, still as an A4 Skyhawk mechanic.  But four years later the military decided to move the Skyhawks to New Orleans and bring down the C119 Flying Boxcars to Glenview.  It was back into training for Bob, who became the first Chicago area Flight Engineer for the C119 and later an instructor to those that followed.  

By then Bob was fully committed to Chicago, working as a Dan River sales rep at Sears, the textile firm’s biggest customer. He had also met and married his wife of 54 years, Estelle. 

“She was a teller at LaSalle Bank and I was trying to get my nerve up to ask her out.”  It took a little push from his friends, but one day he got in line at her window to cash his paycheck and asked her out. As she gave him his money she also passed him a small piece of paper. “The bank guard saw this note go between us and thought I was robbing the bank,” says Bob. “He came over to me with his hand on his gun and said, ‘What’s going on here?’ I told him I had asked her out and she gave me her phone number. And he said, ‘Good for you!’”

In 1975 the C119s were on their way out.  Bob even crewed one down to the Boneyard, aka Davis- Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona. Meanwhile, back home, Glenview was Transitioning to the KC130, refueling tankers, known as the Hercules.  “I had to go to flight systems and simulator school, flight engineer school for the 130s,” says Bob. “You have to learn the mechanics on a new airplane. They’re very different. The 119 was a reciprocating engine, had a Wright 3300 engine, whereas the 130 is a turboprop, a jet engine.”

From there, Bob was able to fly with Westpac, the unit deployment program for the USMC, designed to transport troops safely from base to base in the Western Pacific in the late 70s.  

“It was great. We’d fly from El Toro in California, to Hawaii where we’d pick up cargo and troops. Then we’d fly them to Okinawa, on to the Philippines, and generally we’d do refueling missions somewhere in between or off aircraft carriers. From the Phillipines we’d go to Korea, and either bring troops in, or take them back to Okinawa.” 

Bob flew with VMA 234 until 1998. By then he was an aircraft maintenance chief, but his tour was up so he needed a new home. That new home finally took him overseas.  He became Operations Chief for Engineer Support company of the Sixth Combat Engineers in Desert Shield and Desert Storm. His crews built bunkers and field hospitals and drove armor plated bulldozers through minefields with troops following. He finally came home in 1991.  With 28 years in active and reserves, and only 47, Bob put in for 2 more years, but the Marines were “Looking to get rid of all the high paid help” as he puts it.  They sent him a letter saying he would have to move to the Retired Reserve. “That’s the gray area of retirees,” says Bob. “You’re not actually retired. You’re in the inactive reserve until your 60th birthday.” Finally, in 2002, Bob put in his papers for retirement from the Marines.  But it wasn’t until 2007 that he retired from his job at Dan River Textiles.  A year later, the company went out of business.

It’s hard to believe with all the other activity in his life that Bob would have time for a hobby, but he has also been the proud owner of prize-winning show dogs.  “We’ve been showing dogs since 1980,” says Bob. “We’ve had big winning Doberman Pinschers.  Our biggest winner, Lexi, won the Doberman Pinscher Nationals as a veteran. We lost the last of our Dobermans last September, so now we’ve got a smaller dog.”  But his dedication to his dogs goes beyond showing them. Over the years Bob has trained therapy dogs and works with PTSD patients at Captain James Lovell Federal Health Care Center in North Chicago.   He is also a member of the Civil Air Patrol. He has survived a stroke and a bout with cancer.  When Afghanistan started, Bob even tried to reenlist, but by then he was 67 and decided his wife would probably divorce him. So he made the wise decision not to pursue it.  

There are so many more stories from Bob’s years in the reserves, but there is not enough space to tell them all, like his unscheduled stop at Midway Island during one Westpac trip or the time he took a platoon to Northern California for mountain warfare cold weather training, and then they sent them to the desert. Or the time he got his younger brother out of hot water for refusing to go to the rifle range during basic training because he had a hearing loss and had been told to avoid loud noises. “I laid out his options,” says Bob. “You either go to the rifle range, use good hearing protection and qualify, or you get a doctor to certify that you can’t go, or you get courtmartialed.”  In the end his brother qualified and was sent to Vietnam with the 32nd heavy artillery. Unfortunately he returned home deaf in one ear.  

Although he feels many vets are more deserving than he for a seat on Honor Flight’s next trip, Bob is looking forward to it after a three-year wait. He left the Marines as a Master Sergeant, but was given the honorary rank of Lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Auxiliary, where he is still listed as Aircraft Maintenance Officer. “18 years later I still do all the paperwork, but I don’t do the hands on maintenance because its a lot different now,” says Bob. “But I know everything that has to be done.”  Bob is now 82 years old, and wherever his private life has taken him,  looking back on his lifetime of military service, he says, “I would do it all again in a heartbeat.”