Family of Veterans Takes Loss Personally

With Bob Hope’s death Sunday at the age of 100, Jesse “Jay” Morales Jr. has lost a link to his father and his son.

The three generations of Morales men, who served in World War II, Vietnam and the Persian Gulf respectively, all saw the entertainer perform near their combat zones. The senior Morales, Jesse Morales Sr., a Marine artilleryman in the South Pacific, is now deceased, and the youngest, Scott, is an Army reservist living in North Carolina who served with an airborne unit deployed overseas in Kosovo and Bosnia.

Jay Morales, an adjutant of American Legion Post 8 in Los Angeles, attended two Hope performances in Vietnam, in 1965 and 1968. Morales, a Marine air reconnaissance officer, helped escort the comedian by helicopter on both tours.

“The guy that you saw was the same guy you saw on stage; he was very friendly,” recalled Morales. “He was always making jokes. I remember when we took off in the helicopter, he asked if he should buy traveler’s insurance.

“Whenever my father was around and Bob Hope came on television, everything stopped and we had to watch the show,” said Morales, who appeared on a network television special in 1993 celebrating Hope’s 90th birthday and his contribution to America’s veterans. “And then, lo and behold, my son saw him during the Persian Gulf War too.”

The Morales family is really no different from hundreds of thousands of other servicemen and women who saw their morale soar with one of Hope’s scores of performances at military stations at home and overseas over more than 50 years.

Hope’s first foray into morale-building came on a radio show in May 1941 at March Field near Riverside. With the U.S. entry into World War II that December, Hope stepped up his entertainment campaign and, along with his USO troupe of Frances Langford, Tony Romano and Jack Pepper, visited fighting men in England, Africa, Sicily, Ireland and the South Pacific.

World War II veteran John Ibe vividly recalled a Hope show on Oct. 12, 1944. Ibe was a 23-year-old enlisted man preparing for battle on his aircraft carrier near the Admiralty Islands in the South Pacific.

“He gave us a performance that was unforgettable,” said Ibe, head of a family real estate development company in San Diego. “They brought ‘home’ to the South Pacific. I tell you, that’s all we talked about as we left the island and got ready for battle.”

Two weeks later, a Japanese kamikaze pilot slammed into Ibe’s carrier and sank it during the Battle of Leyte Gulf, which killed nearly 900 Americans. Ibe clung to life among the wreckage and was rescued a couple of hours later, he said.

“Some of the guys I was sitting with that day [Hope performed], that was among their last memories,” Ibe said.

That show, coupled with Hope’s longtime dedication to the American military, inspired Ibe and three other Leyte Gulf veterans to spearhead a drive for a $10-million monument to Hope on the San Diego coast. The proposal calls for five life-size bronze statues of Hope entertaining troops during World War II, in Korea and Vietnam, in Europe during the Cold War and in the Persian Gulf. A bronze globe, set above a water fountain, would unite the circle of statues, which would be equipped with motion-activated recordings of Hope delivering jokes.(Money is being raised for the project, whose Web site is at www.hopetribute.org.)

“We were in an atmosphere of killing and surviving,” said Jack Yusen, president of the Bob Hope Military Tribute. “Hope brought a little bit of home to us, and he continued to give of himself to the troops.

“It’s amazing what he’s done,” said Yusen, who spent 55 hours in shark-infested ocean waters after his destroyer was sunk at Leyte Gulf.

If completed, the monument would be one of a host of accolades for Hope’s service to the military. Among others, the Navy named a new class of ships after him in May 1997; the Air Force emblazoned his name on a new C-17 in June 1997, and most recently, in May 2000, Hope was presented with the Order of Horatio Gates Gold Medal from the U.S. Army Adjutant General Corps for maintaining high morale of soldiers around the world.

Perhaps his greatest honor came in October 1997, when Congress unanimously declared him an honorary veteran -- the first individual so recognized in the nation’s history.

Those honors suit Jay Morales just fine.

“My dad would always say, ‘That guy is a treasure, a national treasure.’ I didn’t really understand it as a kid, but he was right.”