Tuesday, July 20, 2021, is officially Earl Hansen Day in Silvis.
The World War II veteran and John Deere Harvester retiree turned 100 on Tuesday.
During a reception Sunday at New Perspective Senior Living, where he has resided for about the past four months, Silvis Mayor Matt Carter read the proclamation and presented Hansen with a gold key to the city.
More than 75 people showed up to see Hansen, who was born July 20, 1921, in Ringsted, Iowa. Woodrow Wilson was president.
He’s been living at the senior living facility for about four months. Before that, he had lived in the home he built for his wife and three sons, Roy, who is 74, Lloyd, who is 71, and Chris who is 69.
Roy Hansen said that their father turning 100 is something wonderful to ponder.
“I mean 16 and 21, that’s the important ones, right?” Roy Hansen said with a laugh. “I guess 100 has to fit in there somewhere. The more you think about it when you make it that way, 100 definitely fits.”
Roy Hansen said his dad is someone who took care of things himself and taught his sons to do the same.
“He built the house back in 1957,” Roy Hansen said. “He had Miller Brother’s Construction dig the basement and put the frame up and he worked at Deere, and built the house, had some of the neighbors; he hired an old guy who was retired to help him sheet rock and insulate it.
“He’d look the house and think of his accomplishments and how it all fit into his and my mom’s plans.
“He was very mechanical,” Roy Hansen said of his dad. “Growing up, I thought every dad fixed everything in the house, fixed everything on the cars. You know that’s what I thought every dad did. I used to build race engines until just a few years ago and I learned it from my dad.”
Earl Hansen passed his work ethic onto his boys, Roy Hansen said. In order to afford the house, “he worked on a second job and he learned to build cabinets. The cabinets in the house are made out of mahogany and so they’re real special.”
Earl Hansen retired after working 31 years at John Deere Harvester in East Moline.
He enjoyed working on his own cars and using his hands.
“I overhauled my own cars,” Earl said Sunday. “I repaired my son’s cars to keep them going in the early days. But after they got educated, they fixed their own cars.”
Earl Hansen said he preferred Chevrolets, particularly the Impala. “They were good cars,” he said.
He was fighting in the mountains of Luzon, Philippines, against the Japanese as a mortar man for Company C, 136th Infantry, 33rd Division long before Gen. Douglas MacArthur made his return.
“The Philippines took three divisions,” Earl Hansen said. “There were 13,000 men in each division. Two of the divisions were placed from the coast into the mountains. We were in the middle so we were the ones that got shot up all the time. You were lucky if you didn’t get killed.”
Lloyd Hansen said that there were stories of his dad sliding down a mountain in the Philippines with bullets chasing after him.
Earl Hansen married his wife, Mary, on July 10, 1942, and three months later he was in the Army. He returned on New Year’s Eve, 1945.
Returning from war, Earl Hansen built a very happy and successful life, said family friend Ken Gullet, who was Earl Hansen’s neighbor.
At the reception, Earl Hansen’s grandchildren, great-grandchildren and a great-great-grandchild were on hand to witness the event.
Around the reception room were poster boards with all memorabilia of Earl Hansen’s life. On one of the boards was a newspaper article from the July 2, 1945, edition of the Moline Dispatch.
That article tells of two Moline soldiers, Earl Hansen and Leonard E. Johnson, in the drive for Baguio in northern Luzon. It was C Company’s job to attack a Japanese strongpoint on a ridge line east of Baguio, with the mission of diverting the Japanese forces while two other companies took another part of the ridge. The Japanese were waiting in ambush and the only way out for withdrawal was over a 30-foot bluff.
Hansen spent 23 months fighting in the South Pacific, including the second battle for Morotai in the Netherlands East Indies, on New Guinea and through the battles of northern Luzon. He earned a Bronze Star and was entitled to wear the combat infantry badge, good conduct medal, the Asiatic-Pacific theater ribbon with a battle star of New Guinea, and the Philippine liberation ribbon with a battle star for the Luzon campaign.
Roxann Horton, who was Earl Hansen’s neighbor for three years, summed up the feelings of the day: “He’s an exceptional man.”
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