World War II friendship still endures
There was a time when the age difference between 97-year-old Frank Petit of St. Charles and 91-year-old Walter "Bud" Altenburg of Palatine loomed large.
"We've been friends for 71 years," says Altenburg, who was barely graduated from Maine East High School, newly married and not old enough to legally buy a beer when he met Petit, the old man of their platoon, who was 26 and had a wife and two kids back on the farm in the Kane County town of Virgil.
The pair figure they met on the U.S.S. Washington as soldiers traveling to the war in Europe in 1945. They became friends as they trekked through France and Luxembourg on the way to Germany, maintained that friendship while serving in Japan and New Guinea, saw it grow when they came home and expanded their friendship to their families, and still keep it going today as widowers who get together every couple of months.
"If you were from Illinois or Wisconsin, you could connect on a more even basis than with some lad who came out of Alabama," Altenburg says. "Frank just fit it. It was kind of like he was an older brother."
They served together with a supply company preparing gasoline, ammunition and food to be loaded onto trucks for troops ahead of them. The trucks were manned by a squadron of African-Americans. While the military was segregated, Altenburg says he served along black soldiers during his training at Camp Hale in the mountains of Colorado.
"That helped me in life," says Altenburg, who spent most of his civilian career in the construction business.
Petit wrote home to his wife and kids every day. His daughter, Jane Petit, 64, of St. Charles, says the family still has those letters as well as some sent to him from home that Petit brought back from the war.
"He set a goal for all of us," says Altenburg. His younger sister, Donna Saewert, 86, of Palatine, remembers their mother sobbing at the kitchen table when the war began. Altenburg wrote letters as often as he could. Because the soldiers were forbidden to share their location, Altenburg says he let his wife know where he was stationed first by changing his middle initial in his name each time he wrote to spell out the word England.
"We didn't stay long enough to get Luxembourg spelled," he says.
Petit took black-and-white photographs, developing the film whenever he got the chance. The old friends can look through scrapbooks filled with those photos.
"Here we are on the same page of being young," Altenburg says.
They can swap stories about how scratchy their clothes would be from the salt water as they hung them off the ship on a rope to wash them, or how the Marines would shoot the mines they saw floating in the water. They were in France for V-E Day (Victory in Europe), and shipped out to Japan, they spent time in Hiroshima after the atomic bomb had been dropped and the war was won. The took a ship back.
"That was a trip of 44 days I was sick for 43 of them," Altenburg says. "Frank was sick for one."
Earning "bedroom points" for being a father, Petit got to come home a month earlier that Altenburg. One of 13 children, Petit and his wife Helen stayed on the farm and had eight children, one of whom died in a car accident. Altenburg and his wife, Lorraine, lived in Mount Prospect for 62 year and had three children. Petit's wife died in 1995, and Altenburg's wife died in 2015.
Altenburg, who rides his three-wheel bicycle 8 miles a day, says he is grateful the pair can still get together and enjoy a friendship now entering its eighth decade. He says he's always ready to see Petit if he can. After all, Altenburg says, "he helped me grow up."