World War II veteran’s life journey includes amazing ‘epiphany’

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Howard “Mike” Spencer was flying solo, high above German-occupied territory, when his P-47 Thunderbolt Fighter plane was badly hit by enemy fire.

Highly trained to make an emergency crash landing, the young pilot did everything he was supposed to do according to emergency procedures, but to no avail. The P-47 kept declining in altitude, and he was fast approaching the ground.

Out of options, Spencer looked up through the plane’s canopy and shouted, “I need help.”

And he is alive and well today, at age 98, because he received it.

“A voice came clearly into my senses,” he said one recent day as he told his story. “The message came clearly: check the fuel transfer pump.”

The pump was right next to his seat. So, he did. And discovered he had not checked it properly.

“I turned it, as the voice had told me, and the engine roared to life,” he said. “It’s amazing, that I got the message, and that it saved me from crashing.”

That sense of being guided has never left Spencer, who wrote a book about his life two years ago, called “One Man’s Journey, The Life, Lessons & Legacy of a World War II Fighter Pilot.”

He calls what happened to him, an “epiphany,” saying, “even today, I feel somebody is always with me. I know I have a contact I can use.”

Spencer never heard the voice again. But the memory of it has remained a comfort. When people ask him if he is afraid of dying, he tells them he is not. “I don’t fear it,” he said. “But I enjoy life. And here I am. My life is good.”

A resident of Ponte Vedra Beach since 1988, he moved to The Palms at Ponte Vedra assisted living community a few weeks ago and is very happy there.

Casey, his wife of 65 years, died 10 years ago. He has three adult children, two daughters and a son, as well as two grandchildren and one new great grandchild, born the same day he moved into The Palms.

Writing his book, with the help of biographer Ken Overman, took a year, Spencer said. “You don’t write your life story easily.” Since then, he has shared his story as a guest speaker on many occasions, including with many area book clubs.

“I will be 99 in February,” he said. “My objective is 102. Why not? My doctor said I could easily break 100.”

Born February 27, 1921, Spencer grew up in Youngsville, Pa., a small town of 2,000 people about 100 miles north of Pittsburgh, near Lake Erie. The second of four children, he was five-foot tall and weighed only 100 pounds when he graduated from junior high, which prevented him from playing sports, where he said “all the excitement was.”

Since the football team was not looking for him, he decided to become an expert in outdoor survival. He took his German Shephard, Ludi, into the wilderness, where they lived off the land and slept on the ground, covered with pine boughs. He knew where the squirrels and birds went for the night, so he and Ludi never went hungry. “I did that for two years,” he said. “My mother never said anything, except for ‘where have you been for the last two days?’ And I said, ‘out in the woods.’ My dog loved it and I loved it.”

At age 18, Spencer went to a two-year college in Boston, and after graduating with a major in finance, landed a good job with Westinghouse. Then, one day when he and some friends were coming out of a movie theater, they saw a crowd of people gathered in front of an ice cream shop.

“I said, ‘what’s going on?’” Spencer said. “And they said, ‘some Japanese guys just bombed Pearl Harbor.’”

A week later, Spencer enlisted in the Army Air Corps because he knew a war was coming and he wanted to choose his role in that war. He wanted to be a pilot.

After a year of training, “I became an officer, a gentleman and a pilot all at once,” Spencer recalled. As a fighter pilot, he was sent to England, where he flew missions back and forth to German-occupied France. After D-Day, he was sent to a base in France, then Germany, as the Allied troops inched closer to victory. His squadron eventually crossed the Rhine River in Germany, which was “a big deal,” he said. “Because it opened up all types of possibilities.”

Spencer flew a total of 89 missions and was shot down twice but never seriously injured.

“I thought to myself, this is a lousy career,” he said. “I’m going to fly to Germany, where everybody wants to kill me. But that was my job.”

Spencer and Casey married in 1946 and Casey worked as a secretary so her husband could go back to school and earn a degree at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. After that, he climbed the ladder of success in business, taking the family at various times to Australia, Holland and Hong Kong, eventually becoming Chief Executive Officer at a small company.

He enjoys talking about his life, he said, because “I had such an interesting life. A desire to always be better drove me. And I could never stop.”

Now that he is long retired, Spencer said he is still determined to make the most of life and to live as long as he can, even though he does not fear death.

“I behave, I exercise, I eat right, and I sleep at least nine hours a night,” he said. “And I like fun. I flirt. With flirting, you get to talk to girls. That keeps me young.”