Charles Ernest Romans a member of the Beaver Dam congregation of the Jehovah´s Witnesses

[Guest Kurt]

Memoir of a high flyer: At 92, Tazewell Co. native reflects on his wonderful life

The life's journey of Charles E. Romans was cleared for takeoff 92 years ago this summer on a 100-acre farm near Armington in rural Tazewell County.

He has yet to touch down for a landing.

The winged metaphors have been fully earned, by the way.
No less a figure than 20th-century aviation pioneer Charles A. Lindbergh is a special guest star in Romans' life ... and in fateful/coincidental ways no Hollywood screenwriter would dare try.

In the flower of his young manhood, Charles served his country during World War II as a B-25 pilot, earning his Greatest Generation stripes several times over.

What followed occurred closer to earth (careers in public transportation, photography, trucking and more), but Romans' sights were forever set on a higher plane — whether through his faith as a Jehovah's Witness or his hard-fought crusades against the medical establishment he came to know too well through his first wife's breast cancer and the births of his own children.

Some 50 years after his last B-25 mission, Romans decided that an account of that high-flying life might make an interesting read for Greatest Generation survivors and their heirs.

The result is titled "Silver Wings to Golden Years," with several subheadings attached: "My Greatest Generation memoir" ... "How a Midwest farm boy became a B-25 pilot, then lived the rise and fall of the middle class" ... and "The way we were."

Choose one, or all.

"So many of the things I grew up with are no longer around us," observes Romans, who turns 92 on Aug. 3. He's already planning his next two or three volumes.

"That was part of my motivation in writing the book ... to preserve the conditions we grew up in and lived in before and after the war, before they are all forgotten."

Of special interest to Pantagraph-area readers is Romans' evocation of rural pre- and post-Depression life in Tazewell County, with occasional side trips to nearby Armington, Minier, Stanford, McLean and Bloomington-Normal.

"My parents, Henry and Lorene Romans, farmed the 100-acre John Daly farm until the house burned in 1934," says the author. "It was my home for nine years."

Two sisters and twin brothers were also born on the farm, followed by education at the one-room Hartford Grade School in rural Armington (one of the few buildings of his youth still standing, he notes, today as a private residence).

Romans' memories are impressionistic and slightly fragmented, as most childhood recollections are:

"The folks took me to church in Stanford wearing Knickerbocker pants."

"We went to the zoo in Bloomington where the monkey house was my favorite attraction."

"We went two miles to Armington to Saturday night movies and visits to Mrs. Allen who was a girlfriend of Buffalo Bill in her younger days."

"In 1941 and 1942, I worked for Elbert Richmond on his farm near Armington. During shearing season, I caught the sheep and tied each fleece into a bundle." 

"The train that came through each day at the elevator crossing hit a car that my Uncle Bill was in. ‘I just shut my eyes and thought of death,’ Bill said. He landed on his feet and walked away."

The book's breezy, anecdotal style can be traced to its origins in a series of newspaper columns Romans began writing in his 70s for the Butler County Banner in Morganstown, Ky., where his family moved in the mid-1930s after a fire destroyed their rural Armington farm home.

Each column centered on an episode of his life, from his Central Illinois origins, onward through his war service; his first marriage; his 20-year tenure as a streetcar/bus driver in Portland, Ore.; his long run as a coast-to-coast trucker ("the nation was my playground"); and his second marriage to wife Libby Jane, who turns 100 this year and is still living at home with Charles (she picked up the phone for this interview, and sounded like someone many years her junior). 
Libby Jane is a main player in one of the book's most compelling narrative threads, which ties Charles and his future wife together when both are still children living a state apart.

"In St. James, Mo., 8-year-old Libby Jane Forester took an airplane ride with a barnstormer named Charles A. Lindbergh," begins Romans in his forward to the book. 

The ride came courtesy Libby Jane's older half sister, who grabbed her and took her to see the yet-to-be-famous Lindbergh. She paid $5 for the 15-minute ride, with Libby Jane seated next to Lindbergh in the cockpit.

Romans suspects she very well may the last living person who can lay claim to having flown with Lindbergh.

Meanwhile, a state away, a separate but equal Lindbergh connection was being forged in Tazewell County the very same summer.

"One night in 1926, Lindbergh bailed out and crashed his plane 10 miles from where I was sleeping."

There's more to the intersecting stories and the aerial ties that would bind Libby Jane and Charles together a half-century prior to their meeting.

One of the nicest compliments Romans says he has received since the book's publication was the simple observation, "You've had a very interesting life."

No argument there, he says ... except that it ain't over yet. 

"Now the future is here," he insists, "and I am ready to live it. The best is yet to come."

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The Green River Chapter NSDAR has selected Charles E. Romans as one of the Veterans of the Year for 2011<<<click.