SHAWNEE, Okla. (KFOR) – A WWII veteran in Shawnee is just a couple of weeks away from the triple digit milestone of turning 100 years old.
“It feels good to know I’m still kicking around here,” Noah Hines said as he laughed.
Noah J. Hines, also known as “Sonny,” is as happy as could be and feeling good at 99 years old.
“I’m in pretty good shape, I think, as of now,” he said.
Sonny Hines was born in Muskogee on Feb. 1, 1924.
He had nine siblings and his family moved around a lot due to his dads job with the railroad.
He said they never really owned a home when he was younger and going through the Depression.
“The banks was going bankrupt and we had that big dry spell out western part of Oklahoma,” he said. “We was pulled out of school a quite a bit of the time to work, you know, to try to help keep your family moving, food on the table.”
His dad was tragically killed when Sonny was middle school age.
His mother and siblings eventually settled in Shawnee.
It was after the Pearl Harbor attacks that Sonny decided to enlist in the Army with a good friend of his.
“I couldn’t wait to get in there,” he said.
He trained across the U.S. and Puerto Rico and even resupplied at Pearl Harbor before he eventually went to Guam for nine months.
“That’s when the bomb was dropped on Japan,” Sonny said.
From there, he was sent home and discharged. That’s when he married his first wife, Peggy.
He had seven kids throughout his life and worked in several positions on the railroad for 30 years until he retired in the 80s.
Since then, he’s seen his first and second wife and two of his children pass. But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t kept up with the memories.
He has two big family books full of 100 years of memories. He’s also got his discharge papers from 1946, two booklets with information on his military unit, the 15th bomb squadron, as well as his military uniform hanging in his home.
“You’d probably take about a week to come down here and go through all this stuff,” Sonny said as he flipped through pages of his family books with pictures dating back decades.
Sonny looked back on all of it with nothing but a smile.
“I think it’s a pretty good life, you know? And I’ve enjoyed it,” he said.
Sonny told KFOR that they have a few plans for his birthday. One of them is with their church and another is at a Meeker restaurant, where they plan to have about 120 people out to celebrate his big day.
