Eulogy for Herman Rex Reheis

EULOGY FOR HERMAN “REX” REHEIS MAY 2, 2011

Thank you all for being here today. It’s wonderful to have so many of Rex’s friends, neighbors, and fellow members of this church here this morning to join us in celebrating his life. Rex was born in 1916 and was just three months short of turning 95 years old when he passed on last Friday. He was brought up in rural Kansas and Oklahoma. He had good parents, one sister, lots of aunts and uncles and first cousins. He outlived almost all of them. When he got out of high school in 1935, he started his military career in the most dead- end job in the Army. He was a horse cavalryman at Fort Riley, Kansas. He began dating our mother, Maxine Hall, around 1938. He became an airplane mechanic in 1940 in the Army Air Corps and Rex and Maxine married in December 1941, 19 days after Pearl Harbor threw America into World War II. The Air Corps figured that if Rex could fix a plane he could fly one and they needed pilots and officers (that is, leaders with opinions and he always had a lot of those!) So he trained to become a pilot, and during World War II, he and Maxine had two kids, my older brother Joe and me. Later on, well after the war, they had Marith, their daughter. Rex went to war flying a Mitchell Bomber (a B-25) in the Pacific Theatre during 1944 and 1945. After flying some 35 dangerous missions, he was wounded in combat and was on his way back home when Japan finally surrendered. He remained a bomber pilot as the Army Air Corps became the U. S. Air Force, and he spent the rest of his military career as a pilot and maintenance officer during the Cold War years. He and many others like him kept our nation prepared for the next big war with the Soviet Union. Thank goodness that war never happened. They raised our family wherever the Air Force sent them, on bases from Maine and New Mexico to England. Rex retired from the Air Force late in 1967, and he and our Mom settled in Warner Robins, eventually building their dream retirement home on Lake Jackson in Turtle Cove. They moved to Jasper County in 1976 and were here the rest of their lives, longer than they had lived anywhere else. Georgia replaced Kansas as home. 2

In retirement, Rex turned a hobby into a home business, restoring antique automobiles and their parts. He was avid at it, and became one of America’s best known experts on 1928— 1933 Model A Fords. He won state and regional trophies for his car restorations. He specialized in Model A parts and his 2500 restored carburetors and 1500 restored water pumps are still keeping old Fords running all over this continent and at least three others. He restored six whole cars himself, and used them as second cars in his two car household for over 50 years. In fact, he taught all of us kids how to drive behind the wheel of a Model A. And heaven help us if we ground the gears. Rex was still restoring, selling, and shipping his re-worked parts as recently as six months ago. But he wasn’t all about machinery. He had the gift of music which he gave to us kids. He loved to sing and dance. And he enjoyed sports—especially golf and bowling. He could bowl with either hand until just a few months ago. Rex was a fine, old-fashioned husband, father, and grandfather. He and Maxine were happily married for over 63 years, until her passing in 2005. He gave us all love, support, values and the flexibility to become whatever we wanted to become. He believed that if you want to have a friend, you need to be a friend, and he practiced that. He had an outgoing personality, to say the least, and he helped friends, neighbors, and even strangers his whole life, and did so gladly. Rex had his flaws, as we all do. His became more apparent in his last 5 or 10 years. His hearing was bad, and he got grumpy and lost patience in situations where he couldn’t hear the conversation. He forgot that he was no longer a commanding officer, and he was pretty short with people who didn’t think his way was the best way. And for the last five years or so, he usually wanted to be the speaker rather than a listener. Hearing loss, memory loss and finally Alzheimer’s all played a role in that. He especially loved to talk about his World War II experiences, and all you who knew him for a while probably heard those stories several times. They were his most vivid memories. As my sister-in-law Gerry Gardner recently said, “When Rex was around, it was like an adventure. You never knew what was going to happen or be said next.” My wife Diane recently said that Rex was the luckiest man we have ever known, and I believe she’s right. He was incredibly lucky: 3

-- He had a wonderful wife who had the love and patience and endurance to stay with him for over 63 years. -- He had three pretty good children and a bunch of good grandchildren and great grandchildren whom he loved. --He got wounded, but not killed in the Big War. --He suffered some consequences but he sure didn’t die young from flying an observation plane through a nuclear cloud during the first hydrogen bomb test near Bikini Atoll. --As a SAC pilot, he never had to drop his payload of nuclear bombs on his Russian targets. -- He never flew a plane into the ground, though he had one quit on him and he had to bail out of it to stay alive. --Thanks to medical science, good doctors, and an amazing constitution, he survived kidney cancer, lung cancer, lots of skin cancers, and instead of going blind from cataracts, he got lens implants in his 70’s that restored his better than 20-20 vision. --He was happy the vast majority of his life, doing what he wanted to do. He even renewed his pilot’s license and flew into his late 80’s. --He had a very good quality of life and was highly functional until just a month or two ago. --He outlived—in all senses of that word-- by 15 or 20 years the average American male born in the same era. Rex Reheis was a proud member of the Greatest Generation. He was a patriot, a productive citizen, a good husband and father, a good neighbor, a good Christian. There should be no grief here. Only gladness. He has gone off once again into the Wild Blue Yonder.