He was born on the Fourth of July — less than 60 years after the Civil War.
A World War II vet who fought the Japanese at Pearl Harbor turned 104 years old on Independence Day — and all he wanted for his milestone birthday was a joyride in the sidecar of a motorcycle.
Ira “Ike” Schab of Beaverton, Ore., said he was proud to share his birthday with the United States, which he valiantly defended for eight years as a member of the US Navy, according to NBC affiliate KGW 8 in Portland.
And with a little help from a local nonprofit — the Washington County ABATE — Schab got to don a helmet and relive his glory days, which once included a 1947 Harley with a 74-cubic-inch engine.
“Boy, that was a good bike,” he told Fox 12 Oregon from the sidecar of a more modern hog.
The former US Navy musician relived other, less pleasant memories, too — including his recollections of Dec. 7, 1941, when Imperial Japan launched the fateful Sunday morning attack on the Hawaii naval base that propelled America into the greatest war in the history of the world.
His daughter, Kimberlee Heinrichs, told Fox 12 that her dad — who was 21 at the time — had just picked up his morning cup of coffee when Japanese bombers rolled in.
“[He] had to drop it and heard everything, went up on deck and saw the [battleship USS] Utah capsize, I believe, at that moment,” she said.
That day, Schab — a sousaphone tubist then assigned to the destroyer USS Dobbin — put down his instrument and picked up anti-aircraft ammunition, which he loaded into the guns that furiously fired back at the Japanese planes.
“It was pretty scary,” Schab told Fox. “Just scared, ‘When’s it gonna hit me? When am I gonna die? You don’t know what’s going to happen. And the uncertainty is … hard to describe. You just can’t.”
Heinrichs said previously that after the battle, her dad helped pull bodies of deceased sailors from the island’s once-pristine waters.
“You know it was a significant thing,” she told Hawaii News Now in 2021. “He was pulling bodies out of the water because, frankly, everybody was pulling bodies out of the water.”
“It was days and hours of helping people out,” she added last week.
For decades, the vet wouldn’t talk about the experience. But he started to open up more recently, even going to Pearl Harbor to speak about the infamous day on its 75th anniversary.
“I think it was a real traumatic experience for many of the men who went through that,” Michele Ware, another of Schab’s daughters, told the NBC affiliate. “I think it became more important for him to speak about what he had experienced.”
Schab added that he wants the younger generations to remember the sacrifice he and his ilk made to save the world from the dark specter of fascism.
“They should know everything they can about Pearl Harbor,” Schab said.
Heinrichs said she never expected Schab — a father of five who worked as an engineer after the war — to reach his remarkably advanced age.
“We’re really proud of him,” she said. “He’s never been like some great hero of yore —but he’s mine.”
Looking back, Schab — who drinks cocktails as he “shoots the breeze” with his fraternity brothers over Zoom every Friday night — said his life had been “pretty good.”
“I can’t complain,” he said.
