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Pilot Returned for Burial
Jessie Lucas waited until she knew for sure her son was dead before giving up herself.
The 87-year-old former Marmet resident died Sept. 5 in Escondido, Calif., three weeks after learning the military had positively identified the remains of her son, shot down over Laos in 1966.
“She always really thought he would walk in the door someday,” said Martha Pritchard Lucas-Ryan, a Marmet native and the widow of Army pilot Larry Lucas.
Larry Lucas was 26 and the father of three children when he was shot down Dec. 20, 1966. In 1989, a doctor met a village chief in Laos wearing American dog tags with the name Larry Francis Lucas on them. Still no remains were found until 10 years later.
It was then — three years ago — that the Army said it had recovered some bones and began the painstaking work of making a positive identification. In August, the family was informed that Larry Lucas’ remains had been identified.
Friday, he will be buried with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery.
He won’t go alone. Lucas-Ryan and a host of family and friends plan to be in attendance.
Chesapeake resident Brenda Michaelson Thomas has chartered a bus to take a group from Lucas’ hometown to Arlington, Va., for the ceremony. The idea started at the Marmet Labor Day celebration and it seemed like it would be easy to find 25 riders necessary for a chartered bus.
Thomas knew her father, W.H. “Hoot” Michaelson, intended to attend the service if he had to drive himself to Arlington. He had been Lucas’ Boy Scout leader. “It just kind of came about from that,” Thomas said.
Then came the D.C.-area sniper and, Thomas said, a number of people dropped out. “It was fun and games until about a week ago and since then it’s been a headache,” she said of planning the trip.
Last week at least two more riders were needed. Thomas said those going agreed to pony up the cash for the other two seats. Then on Monday, four members of an MIA-POW group from Hurricane called and booked the last seats, assuring the bus would be filled.
Most Marmet residents knew Lucas’ parents. Jessie and Ray ran two restaurants in their years in the Upper Kanawha Valley town, the Drivette Restaurant, located on the Charleston end of the town, and the Lakeside, located at the Chesapeake end.
Their son went to schools in Marmet and became one of the first Eagle Scouts from Reynolds Memorial Methodist Church. Around the time he was leaving Marmet Junior High for Charleston High, he began dating Martha Prichard.
They married while he was a forestry major at West Virginia University, where he also was an ROTC student, and they had three children.
They had a happy military life in Texas. He got orders in May 1966 to report to Vietnam. She took the kids back home and moved across from her parents’ 99th Street home.
Planning to meet him in Hawaii for Christmas, she was awakened at 6 a.m. Dec. 20, 1966, by an Army officer with the news.
Lucas-Ryan said it was a confusing time in her life. She was a widow with her oldest child, Mark, not yet 6, and daughters Melissa, age 4, and Andrea, who had recently turned 2,
A last letter from her husband came late, saying if she received it he would not be coming home. He told her “to remember the good times” and go on with her life. “It kind of basically gave me permission to move on,” she said.
She felt like she needed to get away from her hometown. “Marmet, to me, represented loneliness and sadness,” she said, recalling the time.
That led her back to Texas, where she and her husband had some of their happiest times before he was sent overseas. “It was almost like if I went back there I might find him,” Lucas-Ryan said.
While there, she met David Ryan, also a military man, and married him within a year. The couple has been together for the 35 years since, moving to Escondido, Calif., where Ryan is a judge.
“He brought Larry’s kids up, and did a magnificent job, and basically sort of rescued me because I was so, so unhappy,” she said.
During that time, she never let her children forget their father, but never had a grave to take them to for laying flowers or remembering.
“All those years on Memorial Day we didn’t have a grave to visit,” she said. “We would go to a local cemetery service out of honor to him.
“It gave us a good feeling to at least go to a good service.”
They never really expected his body to be brought home. “As the years wore on, it was less likely that it would happen,” Lucas-Ryan said.
After learning three years ago that the Army might have found her late husband’s body, she contacted a cousin, Ravenswood native Michael Holmes, and told him he was to bring the body home and do the funeral eulogy. A history teacher and Vietnam veteran, Holmes has developed his own curriculum for teaching about the Vietnam War that includes the story of Larry Lucas.
“So he’s kept his memory alive for 36 years,” Lucas-Ryan said.
Last week, Holmes escorted the body from Hawaii back to the mainland.
Saturday, the family had a service for Larry Francis Lucas in California. Men who had served in the military with Lucas came from as far away as Idaho and Georgia. There was an Army honor guard that played “Taps” and Lucas’ 10-year-old granddaughter sang the national anthem.
“It’s like it just happened,” Lucas-Ryan said. “It’s like we just got the news.”
“[Lucas-Ryan] said they shed a lot of tears at the service Saturday, but she said it was a good cleansing,” said Thomas, who has recently been in regular contact with her junior high classmate.
Holmes was to escort the body to Arlington, where family and friends will gather for a 1 p.m. burial service Friday Nov. 1, 2002.
“It gives us a feeling of peace and comfort to have him back on this soil,” Lucas-Ryan said.
wrote by:
staff writer
Tom Searls
Charleston Gazette
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