Making Mother’s Day : Stolen Medals of Marine Who Died on Okinawa in 1945 Find Their Way Home After 36 Years

The war took Mary McGee’s rascally, red-haired son from her; it killed him on a May day in 1945 on Okinawa, and it buried him there with his Marine buddies.

On Wednesday, the Marines gave back to Mary McGee something of her son, Bobby.

Three weeks ago, about 36 years after the teen-age Marine’s posthumous medals were stolen from his mother’s linen closet on Long Island, a “religious hobo” idly combing the trash dumpsters of 23rd Street in New York City, came upon a little cardboard box. Inside were Pvt. Robert McGee Jr.’s medals.

The “hobo,” a postal employee who called himself only “Brother Frank” and said he was a God-fearing Christian, took the box to a Marine Corps office in New York. The Marines tracked down Mary McGee, who now lives near the Marine Corps Air-Ground Combat Center here.

On Wednesday, Mary, 85 and nearly blind, got back her boy’s medals, 41 years after he died.

“I’m getting a piece of my life back,” said the widowed, Scottish-born McGee, who moved to Twentynine Palms in 1960 and joined the Gold Star mothers, women who have lost their children to combat.

“I feel that these medals are completing my existence. It’s a part of my life that has been missing a long, long time,” she told The Times.

In front of reporters and her Gold Star Mother friends on Wednesday, Mary gently took a red velvet cushion from Maj. Gen. J. P. Monahan. On it were the glittering combat medals--the Purple Heart, the World War II campaign medal, the Asiatic-Pacific campaign medal. She also received something else: a photo of her son, fresh out of high school and fresh into his Marine dress greens and new sharpshooter medal. That had been in the box, too.

“It’ll never again be out of my sight,” she promised tearfully, her left hand lying across the framed photo.

The bronze discs with their purple, gold and red striped ribbons were as bright as the day in 1945 when she had first tearfully opened the blue cardboard box before hiding it away. While the rest of the world had been cheering V-J day, Mary McGee had mourned at the sight of the victory medals.

“He had just gotten out of high school and enlisted,” she recalled. “I said, ‘I won’t allow it.’ But I thought, ‘It was the end of the war, maybe this’ll take some steam out of you.’ I remember just pulling his red hair, saying, ‘We’ll talk about this tomorrow,’ but he had his mind made up.”

So painful was it to look at the medals that she had half-forgotten where she had put them. Then, in 1950, her home was ransacked by someone who found the box, thrust deep in the linen closet.

Then, on a chilly day last month, a man in a too-big overcoat walked into a 15th-floor public affairs office of the Marine Corps in New York, “very nondescript, very quiet, very purposeful,” recalled Gunnery Sgt. Ernie Walter.

He appeared, said Lt. Mike Imsick, like “a sort of religious hobo,” who said he often looked in dumpsters “just to see what’s there.”

He pulled the box out of his pocket and laid it on Walter’s desk. It was immaculate; “It had to have been put away since the day it was stolen,” Walter said.

As Walter opened the small Leatherette box, labeled “Purple Heart,” “Brother Frank” pulled some religious leaflets titled “Thought for the Day” from his long overcoat and laid them on the desk.

“I figured we’d have time to talk about it, but the next thing you know, the door is closing behind him. By the time I got out in the hall, the elevator door was closing, and he was gone,” Walter said.

Walter looked at the hundred-plus McGees listed in the New York phone book and instead called military records. He didn’t think much of his chances; if they failed to find relatives, “Plan B was, we were gonna set up a shadow box for them here in the office.”

Traced His File

But with McGee’s serial number, he traced his file--and a 1984 Gold Star letter with Mary McGee’s address.

“It was just too simple. I called information in that town, and said, ‘Well, Mrs. McGee, a small box containing medals and two photos of a Marine . . .,’ and right at that point she said, ‘Oh my God!’ and started to cry.”

Now, the medals will go on her bedroom wall. “I can’t explain it, I just know God was good. I can’t see them, but I know they’re there.”