Alvin Meiklejohn Jr. – Obituary & War II Memories
ALVIN MEIKLEJOHN JR.
OBITUARY & WAR II MEMORIES
MEIKLEJOHN, ALVIN J., JR. June 18, 1923 March 1, 2010. Al Meiklejohn was born in Omaha, Nebraska, June 18, 1923 to Alvin J. Sr. and Beryl Fallon. His family moved to Denver while he was an infant where he attended Denver schools, graduating from South High School in 1940. He had a brother Milton who pre-deceased him. He married Lorraine June Mindrup on April 25, 1953 who died on June 30, 2009. Together they raised four children, Pamela Kelsall, Shelley Dressler, Bruce and Scott. He is also survived by 11 grandchildren. During World War II, Meiklejohn served in the United States Army Air Force from 1941 to 1946 as a pilot with the 350th Squadron 100th Bomb Group H. achieving the rank of Major with several decorations. He flew 35 missions over Europe as the pilot of a B-17. Following World War II, he attended the University of Denver and received a B.S.B.A. degree and a J.D. degree. He is a licensed certified public accountant and attorney-at-law. He received the degree of L.L.D. (Honorary) from the University of Northern Colorado in 1998. Meiklejohn was president of the law firm of Jones & Keller, P.C. and its predecessor firm Jones, Meiklejohn, Kehl & Lyons, where he had a distinguished law career exceeding fifty years. Meiklejohn had a long history of public service starting when he was elected to the Jefferson County Board of Education in 1971 for a six-year term. Four years of this term he was President of the Board. He was elected to the Colorado State Senate for the first time in 1976, and was reelected without opposition in 1980, 1984, and 1988. Most recently Meiklejohn was re-elected in 1992. He retired in December, 1996. He was Chairman of the Senate Committee on Education. Meiklejohn was a member of the Commission on Uniform State Laws and was Chairman of the Colorado Commission on Achievement in Education. Al Meiklejohn was a member of the Northwest Metro Chamber of Commerce, and was a member of the Board of Directors of that Chamber. He was a member of Oriental Lodge No. 87, AF&AM, Rocky Mountain Consistory, and EI Jebel Shrine. He is also a member and Past President of the Transportation Lawyers Association. In 1968, Meiklejohn was Co-Chairman and one of the founders of the Transportation Law Institute, which is sponsored jointly by the University Of Denver College Of Law and the Transportation Lawyers Association. From 1973 to 1977, Al Meiklejohn was a member of the Executive Committee of the Colorado Association of School Boards. He served as President of the Association in 1975 and 1976. Meiklejohn was elected to the Board of Directors of the National School Boards Association in 1975, and served until 1977. He was a member of the Education Commission of the States. Al Meiklejohn has received numerous awards. In 1954, the State Junior Chamber of Commerce made him “Young Man of the Year.” More recently, the Denver Regional Council of Governments twice (1980 and 1987) awarded him its Distinguished Service Award. The Arvada Chamber of Commerce has given him its Arvada Image Award. The Colorado Association for Retarded Citizens named him the Outstanding State Senator, as has the Senior Lobby. In 1992 the United Veterans Committee named Meiklejohn as “Legislator of the Year.” The Colorado State P.T.S.A. has given Al Meiklejohn a Distinguished Service to Education Award. The alumni association of the University of Colorado at Denver gave Meiklejohn its 1989 Legislative Recognition Award. Westward newspaper named him the 1991 “Legislator of the Year.” The University of Northern Colorado presented Al Meiklejohn with its 1989 Crystal Apple Award for distinguished service to education. The Colorado Transportation Conference gave him the 1989 Roderick L. Downing award for his efforts to improve surface transportation within Colorado. Meiklejohn was the first legislator in history to receive the Downing award. He has received many other awards and recognitions for community service. Most recently, Al Meiklejohn served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum. Perhaps he was most proud of the decision of the Jefferson County Public Schools to name its newest elementary school located in Arvada after him. Visitation will be Thursday, 4-7pm at Crown Hill Funeral Home, and funeral service, 1:00 PM, Friday at Holy Cross Lutheran Church, 4500 Wadsworth Blvd., Wheat Ridge, Entombment immediately following at Olinger Crown Hill Tower of Memories and reception after. Contributions may be made to the Al and Mindy Meiklejohn Endowed Scholarship at Red Rocks Community College or The Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum.
Published in Denver Post from March 3 to March 4, 2010
The following article appeared in the Rocky Mountain News ( Denver Colorado ) on the 27th of May 2006 – written by columnist Bill Johnson.
Memories draw vet to England
He wants to go back one last time, to get there the same way he left it, to stroll in the green grass of the countryside and to remember. He knows Howard Thayne will be there with him. Hell, not a day passes, he says, that Howard doesn’t visit with him.
Oh, he will recall all the others, too, both the living and the long-ago dead, most of whom he can still call by name, more than six decades later.
Alvin Meiklejohn, Jr. soon will be 83. But when he steps off the ship next week for the short drive into the English countryside and the town of Diss, he knows he will be21 again, one of the youngest of the B-17 pilots in the European theater, his head filling with images of exploding 155mm flak and the unrelenting German fighter planes..
“Why I am going is really hard to explain,” he says, looking away as he sits behind his desk at a downtown law firm. “It’s just a very sentimental thing to do, to reminisce about that old band of guys I served with, the things we did.”
It will be his seventh trip back to the old airfield, Thorpe Abbott Station 139, from which his Army Air Corps unit, the 100th Bomb Group, flew 306 missions over Nazi Germany, dropping some 19,200 tons of bombs.
Al Meiklejohn flew 35 missions from early 1944 until nearly the war’s end, logging some 850 combat hours at a time when the average life span of an Air Force B-17 crew was 11 missions.
“I remember this major – I can still see his face – told me after our fifth mission to just assume I was dead already. And I did. But when I got to 30, the ballgame changed, and those last five missions were hell, just sheer hell.”
There isn’t nearly enough space here to give the man’s full resume one that includes a 20-year career in the Colorado Senate, where he was known as “Asphalt Al, the Kiddies Pal,” a fierce champion of transportation and education. Later this year, they will open Al Meiklejohn Elementary School in Jefferson County .
He joined the Colorado National Guard while at South High School in Denver , where he graduated in 1942. Called to active duty, he spent the first months as a corporal in an artillery unit.
“I remember we were put on the coast of California – we thought we were going to be invaded! I was in this (gun) pit, all dirty and tired, when I see this guy flying overhead in a P-36. I thought, “There’s a job! Outside, clean and sitting down.”
His first assignment out of flight school was as a B-17 flight instructor in Florida . It lasted until early 1944, when they began grabbing up any pilot who fly a Flying Fortress.
He arrived in just ahead of D-Day.
He tells, horrific stories of planes exploding in midair, of flying through clouds of airplane parts, fuel and human remains.
“It was just war, but the thing I wanted most was not to be badly injured and survive,” Al Meiklejohn says, almost whispering, “if I was to get hit, I wanted it over with.”
He remembers most Dec.31 1944, the day he calls the Battle of Hamburg, when his flight group, having lost its fighter escort, lost 12 planes carrying 10 men each in five minutes. And then, there was mission No. 35. He remembers losing two engines, losing altitude and being peppered at almost point blank range by German ground gunners, of screaming “Mayday!” over and over into his radio, and of making an emergency landing.
“I got through all of it without a scratch. Other guys, some better, more skilled died. Dumb luck I still don’t fully understand.”
So he will go back. Howard Thayne, he knows, will be with him. He was the only man among the nine on his crew that didn’t survive the war.
“I think of him every day,” he said.
He will take his wife, Mindy, his daughter, Shelly, her husband, Dr Morris Dressler, and their three children.
It was Shelly who thought of the QEII. Al Meiklejohn had flown his previous six times to . He’d try it.
When he made the arrangements, he told his travel agent the last time he was on a ship was the Queen Mary, coming home from World War II.
Last week, he received an email from Cunard, which operates the QEII, as it earlier had operated the Queen Mary.
It keeps a list of every soldier who sailed back to from the big war. Al Meiklejohn’s name was on it. As a result, they were giving him a frequent traveler discount.
The trip from New York to Southampton will take six days, three fewer than it took Al Meiklejohn and 20,000 other soldiers on the Queen Mary to make the journey coming the other way.
“Back then, they put out an announcement that if we fell off, they’d throw us a life-preserver, but that the ship wasn’t stopping.”
“I imagine that won’t happen this time.”
