Season 3 Prequel: OPERATION MAGIC CARPET Tribute on Memorial Day 2021... A Replay Before This Year's 2 Part Special Memorial Tribute to the USS Houston and its Crew in 1942

THE SIDNEY ST. JAMES SHOW

A REPLAY: Memorial Day Tribute to Friendship & Patriotism

'Home Alive By ‘45’

Operation Magic Carpet 2021

Operation Magic Carpet was the most extensive combined air and sealift ever organized during wartime. Elmer A. Struss, my father, was an officer in the Navy, one of many assigned this task and helped bring back home millions of soldiers at the end of WWII. It was called… by all the servicemen and women as the scope expanded worldwide as “Home Alive By ’45!”

My special presentation on this Memorial Weekend is of the First Nighttime Torpedo Drop in Naval History, Operation Magic Carpet, and action in the theater of Northern Africa. Today, my words are a tribute to the patriotism about Eagle Lake, Texas’ Three Musketeers, as they were known in school in the 1920s and 1930s… Robert Jack “Coogie” Ney, Elmer Struss and Freddie Frnka..

Over my entire life growing up, I heard some pretty wild stories of these three men who fought for our country during World War II. The stories I heard and some treasured pictures from the 1920s dug out of Antonio & Cleopatra cigar boxes go way back before the War. As a matter of fact, before relating their wartime contributions, I want to talk about something else amazing between the three… their FRIENDSHIP with each other.

Let’s first talk about friendship and the differences in levels of friendship.

Good friends are those that care for each other…close friends really understand one another… but ladies and gentlemen, TRUE FRIENDS, stay forever…beyond all words and beyond all distances, beyond all boundaries… wherever they might move to and between one another and absolutely beyond time itself…!

You know, speaking from personal experience, we all have made friends in our lives over the years. I suppose I got started in Mrs. Mina Kveton’s Kindergarten Class in 1956, and still to this very day, some of those friends I made then as a six-year-old are true friends… even though we lost contact with each other as we grew older. We make as adults and stay in touch with other friends as long as we live close to, and it’s convenient to stay in touch, but then over time, one moves away, or busy schedules slowly pull us apart, and we start to lose touch. Those friendships fall into what I call the good friends' category.

But then, there’s that last group of friends – those we all call our true friends or, in my granddaughter’s language of today, BFFs – they are those we have a mutual caring about. We understand each other’s hearts, and where bonds are formed between us that span any distance in proximity… from one side of the world to the other and where the bonds run so deep that no amount of time apart or lack of words being said between us, will change the way we feel about those friends. These, my loyal listeners, are our true friends, and when one comes into your life, cherish it for all its worth!

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