Joe Watson with his late wife Marilyn - he called her 'Lynne' - at their 65th wedding anniversary celebration. Credit: Family image

I met Joe Watson 20 years ago, this summer. In 2005, six decades after the end of World War II, there was a gathering at the Onondaga County War Memorial, part of the Oncenter complex, to honor hundreds of gray-haired veterans who survived the war — and, beyond all else, to reflect on the many names on the wall of those who never made it home.

When I introduced myself to Joe, he was with his wife Lynne and a 4-year-old grandson, Colby. In those years, I was a columnist with The Post-Standard | Syracuse.com. In a piece I wrote at the time, I mentioned how Joe — for specific reasons of loss and loyalty I’d soon come to understand — was so “overcome with emotion that he couldn’t speak.”

At that moment, Joe was 83. Tuesday will be his 103rd birthday. He’s an extraordinary guy, and I need your help with a small project over the next few days. There’s something simple but beautiful we all can offer to Joe as a gift – and I hope you don’t mind bearing with me as I use this column to explain both the how and why.

Over the years, my handshake with Joe at the War Memorial evolved into a longtime friendship. During many conversations, he told me how he was raised in Brooklyn, whose melody of an accent never completely left his voice. Joe and his brother, his only sibling, were young children when their father died. Like millions of Americans, their mother struggled to stay afloat with the daily budget in the harsh days of the Great Depression. They were forced to give up their house. They moved from apartment to apartment.

As soon as Joe finished high school, he went to work full-time. In 1941, he was a teenager, listening to a football game on the radio, when he heard a news flash that changed millions of lives: Pearl Harbor had been attacked by Japanese war planes. The world was soon at war. Joe was drafted. His Army battalion was part of the Normandy invasion.

Joe survived. He made it back. Five of his closest friends did not. He would create a little memorial to them inside his house, a daily reminder of humility and perspective. Joe told me how he met his wife-to-be wife, Marilyn Johnson — he always called her “Lynne” — at his church. He worked for the Brooklyn Trust, a bank intertwined with the fortunes of Walter O’Malley and baseball’s Brooklyn Dodgers, the team Joe revered: On lucky days, through the bank, he’d get tickets to Ebbets Field.

Joe Watson, in Europe, during World War II. His 103rd birthday is Tuesday. Credit: Family image

The young man who knew only struggle as a child began on ground level as a bank messenger, then built an astounding career. He took night classes, even as he and Lynne raised four children. He kept accepting promotions. Eventually, in a moment of sheer chance, he learned of an opportunity Upstate, at the old Syracuse Savings Bank. Joe took it. He moved his family to Syracuse — where his kids went to Corcoran High School — before he and Lynne settled in Fairmount.

When he retired from the savings bank, he was a vice president.

All of it builds into why I’m looking for your help, for his birthday.

Joe lives now in Brookdale Summerfield, a senior living community on Velasko Road in Onondaga. Lynne died nine years ago. Joe still misses her intensely. His memory is vivid, his mind electrically sharp, but in many ways these are particularly hard and challenging times. He is facing significant health problems. He has lost much of his vision and his hearing. He loved to read, which is now almost impossible, and even watching television is difficult.

He misses golf, which he played into his 90s, and he jokes to his children that he holds his own mother responsible for the struggles and frustrations of longevity, since she lived to be 104.

What I appreciate, more than ever, is Joe’s soul, warmth and friendship. Years ago, I witnessed how Joe organized a Veterans Day gathering every year at Fairmount Community Church, an annual tribute to those who served. Realizing how quickly the World War II generation was fading from the landscape, he led a community effort — and this was in his late 80s — to inform families of World War II veterans that the names of those vets could be added to a “World War II Memorial Registry,” officially tied to the World War II Monument in Washington D.C.

Joe was also an anchor for his family during a sequence of staggering grief. In 2006, state Trooper Craig Todeschini — married to Joe’s granddaughter, Kristi — died during a police pursuit. Four years later, Joe’s granddaughter Jenni-Lyn Watson — a skilled dancer and a student at Mercyhurst College — was killed by a former boyfriend, who responded with rage and violence to the end of their relationship. In 2014, the family endured the tragic death of another grandson, Jeff.

Joe Watson, about to tun 103, in a recent photo. Credit: Family photo

Amid the unthinkable, Joe did what he could to offer strength and consolation. When I wrote about him at the time, his children told me how Joe — never one for talking much on the phone, a guy who historically would answer, and then would quickly hand the phone to Lynne — suddenly would linger when they called, for longer conversations. A great-grandfather who had endured searing loss in the Great Depression and during a world war told me he operated on a simple lifelong principle, even as he neared 90:

 “To give up,” he said in one of my columns in The Post-Standard, “would be destructive for myself and for my family.”

All of that is only a snapshot of a profound life, and here is what I’d ask. So many of us now in our 60s or 70s were raised by parents of that same generation, who were a whole lot like Joe: They grew up with so little, appreciated what they had — and maintained keen knowledge of what you define as real problems, and what really aren’t.

Outside of family, Joe’s not feeling well enough these days for visitors. But I think I can safely say, for his birthday, he’d appreciate what I’m about to suggest. His daughter Debra and son David have given this idea their blessing:

If you have a minute, I’m wondering if you could drop a card or note to Joe, just wishing him the best as he turns 103 as a reminder of community appreciation.

Here’s the address:

Joe Watson, c/o Brookdale Summerfield

Apartment 229, 100 Summerfield Village Lane

Syracuse, 13215

He has no idea I’m writing this piece, and every birthday card he receives will arrive as a surprise. I don’t know about you, but there’s a lot of things I wish I could have said to my own parents, their lives shaped by the same time and events, about what they endured and what they sacrificed for us — yet all too quickly, in the way it happens, they were gone.

In a sense, for so many of us, Joe’s birthday offers one more chance.

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Sean Kirst is a columnist with The Central Current. He has been an Upstate journalist for more than 50 years. He held his first reporting job as a teenager and worked for newspapers in Dunkirk, Niagara...