2 Gunners Reunite After 51 Long Years

It was the height of World War II in 1944. In a B-17 bomber, two very different men--both members of the 401st Bomb Group--flew over Germany.

Joe Lagrasta, a boisterous 19-year-old from Syracuse, stood poised in the tail gunner’s spot. Even with enemy planes within view, he would usually be yakking away to his crew mates, telling stories or cracking jokes.

In the belly of the plane, nicknamed Jill’s Jalopy, 20-year-old Dorin Selles from the Bronx crouched in a fetus position to fit into the ball turret. Quiet by nature, he would listen to Lagrasta’s tales.

Decades passed. Some of the stories faded from Selles’ memory. Lagrasta had meanwhile shelved his wartime tales, having told them so many times to his wife and children. Selles wanted to hear the stories again, and Lagrasta was eager to tell them.

Little did the two men know that 20 miles was all that stood between them. Lagrasta had settled in Van Nuys, Selles in Westlake Village.

“Here I’ve been searching all over the country for people from my crew, and I play golf at the Westlake Village Golf Course right near his place, and we never crossed paths until now,” Lagrasta lamented. “We never knew we lived so close.”

Selles, 72, and Lagrasta, 71, met again Saturday afternoon for the first time in 51 years in a nervous but joyous reunion at Lagrasta’s Van Nuys home.

“This is just an incredible thing to be able to see each other again and revisit the times we had back then,” Lagrasta said as he and Selles flipped through documents harking back to the 35 bombing missions they flew together.

“It was a rough war, but there were good times.”

For Selles, seeing, or rather, hearing Lagrasta again made time stand still.

“It’s as though only a day passed because he’s exactly the same,” Selles said.

“Physically we’ve changed, but his voice is the same and his retentive memory is fantastic. For me this is bringing back a part of my life that I just don’t remember.”

Only last week, Selles had called the chairman of the committee that plans reunions for the 401st Bomb Group to say he wanted to get involved in their activities. The Florida-based chairman mentioned that Lagrasta lived close by.

Selles called his old buddy, and they made a plan to meet the next day. “My husband has been on cloud nine ever since he got the phone call a couple of days ago,” Mary Lagrasta said. “He’s been trying for so long to find someone from the crew.”

The Lagrastas had moved to Los Angeles right after the war and settled in Van Nuys, where he worked as a production foreman for General Motors for 33 years and raised three children.

Selles, who returned to his hometown after the war, arrived in L.A. with his wife, Clarice, and two children in 1966. Two years later they moved to Westlake Village, where he worked as a pharmacist.

“I could’ve had this friendship since 1966,” Selles said. “It’s sad to think of that time lost.”

During their six-hour reunion, Selles and Lagrasta pored over old photos. And of course, they talked endlessly about old times.

The visit lacked the hoopla of a large, organized function at an impersonal meeting hall. It was more intimate with the two men and their wives reminiscing and making introductions over a lunch of pasta, fat-free meatballs (Joe grinds the meat himself) and a cake decorated with a B-17 bomber and a message: “We found each other 51 years later: Dorin & Joe.”

Selles and Lagrasta flew together from the time they met in 1943 at the Air Force training camp in Pyote, Texas, until Oct. 3, 1944. They flew bombing missions over Germany and France in the plane’s two loneliest gunning positions--tail gunner and ball-turret gunner.

Lagrasta began searching in 1978, after attending a reunion of members of the 401st.

“I went to this reunion, and there were almost full crews there, and I was the only one there from my crew, and I thought, ‘Gee, why can’t we locate people so our bunch can be together reminiscing like those guys?’ ” Lagrasta said in his rapid-fire speech.

In 1986, he found the plane’s co-pilot, Tom Yomans, and pilot, Jack Lippert, both of them residents of Georgia. With that luck he thought he’d try for others. But after a futile five-year search, he gave up.

“I figured that I just wasn’t going to find anyone anymore, but now look at this. Right here in my back yard almost. This is great,” he said.

Selles and Lagrasta plan to attend the 1996 reunion of their bomb group and squadron in San Diego.

“Meeting Joe just opens up a door that had been closed for so long,” Selles said. “It just reminds me again that I was a part of something big. I realize now how fortunate I was to live through that. And it’s a wonderful opportunity to share that with someone again.”