War Vet Finally Able to Deliver Message of Peace

Four years after they met at a peace march in Barstow, Wallace Perry finally found Marylyn Scott on Thursday to tell her that he had kept a promise.

In a telephone call that ended a quest, Perry, a 67-year-old Torrance resident, told Scott that he had found her father’s grave in Belgium, just as she had asked in March, 1986.

For years after Perry made good on his promise, he had been unable to locate Scott to tell her. But Thursday, aided by friends of Scott, he did.

“I’m so touched,” Scott, 53, said by phone from Ukiah, in Northern California.

Said Perry: “I feel like I’m floating.”

Perry met Scott as the Great Peace March passed through Barstow. The Army Air Corps veteran of World War II told Scott that he often traveled to Belgium, where he is organizing support for a peace memorial.

Scott asked Perry if he would find the grave site of her father, Pvt. George Scott, who was killed Sept. 4, 1944, in a tank battle in Belgium.

And if Perry did find it, she asked, would he place a medal inscribed “Peace on Earth” on the grave?

During a 1988 trip to Belgium, Perry made a Memorial Day visit to the American Cemetery in Henri-Chapelle and found Scott’s grave.

After returning to the United States, he tried to contact Marylyn Scott at her home outside Calpella, in Mendocino County. But he was unable to reach her by phone or by letters.

Until Thursday.

A Veterans Day story of Perry’s quest led to phone calls from Scott’s friends in Los Angeles. They told Perry that, although Scott has no telephone, she could be reached either at the private grade school where she teaches art one day a week or at the Mendocino Environmental Center, where she works as a volunteer.

On Thursday afternoon, after the two spent three days unsuccessfully trying to contact each other by phone, Perry finally reached Scott at the school.

“She said she felt honored by what I had done,” said Perry, who is making plans to meet with Scott again. “I told her, ‘What the heck. A promise made is a promise kept.’ ”

In a telephone interview, Scott said she remembered Perry’s promise but never received his letters.

Scott, a mother of six, said she never tried to contact Perry because “I felt that he was probably too busy with his life, and I was busy with mine.”

Perry’s odyssey, Scott said, was a poignant tribute to a father she remembers as a good man.

“I remember my father very well,” said Scott, who was 7 years old--not an infant, as Perry had thought--when Pvt. Scott died. “He didn’t have to go to war at his age and with a family. But he felt he had to fight for peace.”

The memories of her father, she said, have been strengthened by Perry.

“It is as though Wallace brought my father’s spirit alive for me,” Scott said. “And that is wonderful.”