WWII hero now spends time making instruments

There are aging heroes living quietly and anonymously among us, and Glade Jorgensen is one of them. He is old and gray and slow, and nobody would guess his exploits. Nobody would guess that he flew into clouds of flak and dodged enemy fighters while trying to stop the Nazis.

World War II vets are a dying breed, of course. Catch them while you can. Step right up, folks, and meet the citizen-soldiers — carpenters, businessmen, teachers, musicians — who saved the world from evil. This is what draws you to men like Jorgensen.

He had planned to be a musician; fate and war turned him into a pilot. Instead of playing gigs at the Hotel Utah and Lagoon, he found himself dropping bombs on Nazi boats in Europe. He earned not one, but two Silver Stars for valor in battle. You pretty much have to die to get a medal higher than the Silver Star.

He never did return to that music career.

"I feel it was right," he says. "It turned out the way it should have been all along."

He sits on a couch in a house he built with his own hands and decorated with guitars and harps that he built with his own hands. Jorgensen still drives a car and mows and gardens the acre of land on which his house rests. He is 96.

"He's always busy," says Alice, his wife of nearly 70 years. Jorgensen likes to say Alice is the best thing he brought home from the war years. They met while he was training for the Air Corps in California. She was 18, he 25.

Jorgensen is thumbing through one of the many scrapbooks that chronicle nearly a century of living. He narrates his story as he turns the pages.

He grew up in a tiny home just a few blocks from here. They were a family of 11 living in a two-room house and sleeping three or four to a bed. His father was a farmer and a sheepherder, and money was tight. Jorgensen took up music in the fifth grade. His father eventually scraped up enough money to buy him a trombone.

Jorgensen played in and arranged music for several dance bands, playing at venues in Salt Lake City and Provo. He paid his way through BYU with his music and managed to save a whopping $15 for a new suit of clothes to replace the hand-me-downs he was wearing. He wound up giving $8 to help his father and the clothes had to wait. He hoped to make a living with his music — he earned a music degree at BYU — but those dreams ended when he was drafted into the Air Corps in the summer of 1941. He was a company clerk until he volunteered for pilot training and was accepted. He started in a PT-13 biplane and graduated to the B-24 bomber after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.