Two weeks ago, I told you about my tour of Merrill Gardens at Renton Centre. I told you that I had met some delightful folks — each one with a story, each with a life well-lived. I promised to tell you about Maury. Maurice Marler to be exact.
Maury was walking briskly down the hallway when Linda, Merrill’s community relations director, persuaded him to talk to me during my first visit (she had given me a heads up that this was one interesting fellow). You see, he’s 90 and he’s taking flying lessons, she said. I definitely wanted to hear more. He’s a retired Air Force navigator. “C’mon in,” he said, inviting us into his neat apartment. “ Let me show you what I was just listening to.” With the speed of someone a third his age, he guided us into his office, dialed up his computer and the next thing we knew we were listening to SeaTac tower. Earlier, he had been amazed to listen to one of the Blue Angels landing. He received his pilot’s license – the original one — in 1941. He applied for his new one, and when the licensing bureau called his doctor to verify his health — they were told that the doctor was out of the office having heart surgery. We had a great laugh about that. “Would you like to know some of the planes I have flown?” Maury asked. Sure, I said. Without skipping a beat he said: “B-17, B-29, B-50, RB 47,” he paused, “Are you keeping up with me?” Yes, I laughed. “KC135, B52, C124, C141, and C46 and 47.” Hope I got all of those right, Maury.
Maury grew up in a small town in northern Utah, but his military career has taken him all over the country and the world, including the Pentagon. Most of his storied career has been teaching aviation cadets the fundamentals of aerial navigation; he served in WWII, the Korean War and Vietnam, but never saw combat. On my second visit with him, he shared some of his tales of mid-air refueling, while stationed at Fairchild AFB in Spokane. Some of these trips were astonishingly more than 24 hours in flight. He described traveling to Greenland and Labrador — “take a left at Alaska.” On another trip there was the aurora borealis in front of him where you could “pluck the stars out of the sky.” There were some frightening trips as well. One of his most harrowing trips involved a trip where everything was upside down at 37,000 feet. Upon landing, they found they lost thousands of pounds of fuel. Surely, by grace of God, they were able to land.
These days, he is a deacon with his Mormon church, has a men’s club that meets regularly at Jack in the Box (JITB), travels quite a bit, including a trip to Salt Lake City every year, and spends his time working on indexing census records. His wife has been gone 19 years, but because of his faith, they are married for eternity. I asked him what contributed to his longevity. He attributed part of it to genes — his mother was only six weeks shy of turning 100 and he takes Vitamin E regularly. Both of those make sense, but then there are those three times weekly JITB hamburgers. (I told him I didn’t dare tell my husband that, he’d take up the practice!) But back to the flying lessons. When he moved to Merrill Gardens, he “thought I’d had flying out of my system.” However, when he saw the planes taking off and landing from Renton Airport, he knew he had the itch to fly again. His goal, now that he’s been given the “OK” on his health status, is to fly solo again. Maury readily admits that the standards are much more rigorous than when he received his first license, but he’s up to the task. I don’t doubt it for a minute. After all, last year at the age of 89, he went parasailing in Mazatlan. I thought it sounded really scary. “Oh, it was easy,” he said. But that’s another story.
Susan Bressler is an active member of a number of Renton organizations, including the Renton Chamber of Commerce. E-mail her at scbressler@comcast.net.
