[wwmiv]

An article about my grandfather, Wendell Wise Mayes, Jr.:

Vet, 93, says Navy years on WWII carrier forged him into an adult

http://www.mystatesman.com/news/loca...X7BiqD51CHelJ/

Mayes, who now lives at the Brookdale Westlake Hills senior living community in Austin, spent his postwar years becoming a longtime radio broadcasting and cable television executive before earning multiple college degrees after retirement, including a Ph.D. as recently as four years ago. He also organizes a luncheon to honor other veterans at Brookdale Westlake Hills.

“We call Dr. Mayes ‘Amazing Mayes,’” said Laura Clark, the resident program coordinator at Brookdale Westlake Hills. “He’s the kind of the guy that just jumps in with both feet, and he’s just really done a whole lot.”

Mayes was born in San Antonio in 1924, the son of a radio station owner and grandson of William Harding Mayes, a former Texas lieutenant governor and newspaper publisher who founded the University of Texas School of Journalism in 1914.

Wendell Mayes attended Schreiner Institute (now Schreiner University) in Kerrville for a semester. He transferred to the University of Texas for a year before joining the Navy in 1942 after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

After boot camp and special training as a radar operator assisting fighter pilots on night flights, Mayes finally went to sea aboard the Yorktown in October 1944. In an autobiography, Mayes wrote that he’d gotten five battle stars for his uniform ribbons but the only “enemy” he saw while on the Yorktown was when sailors rescued a “half-drowned Japanese teenage fisherman” whose boat was sunk by shellfire.

Mayes spent four months on the Yorktown before his air group was transferred to the carrier Lexington, now a museum in Corpus Christi. Mayes said he remembers sailors coming back to the fleet and telling him about the Battle of Okinawa and kamikaze suicide planes attacking the Yorktown and other ships. The sailors told Mayes about 18 other radar techs he trained with who were on the ship who were injured or killed, leaving Mayes and one other technician as the only two left uninjured.

“I can’t tell you how it made me feel,” Mayes said. “I felt lucky.”

Mayes continues to stay involved with other veterans and personally invites them to a monthly luncheon at Brookdale Westlake Hills, where he interviews the veterans and has them share their story, which he has combined into a published book, “Brookdale Westlake Hills Veterans: A Book of Honor.”