Column: On Veterans Day, recalling a shared salute from 76 years ago

They typically follow that ritual on both Veterans Day and Memorial Day, because to George and Corrine, at 94, the meanings intersect. It remains impossible for them to separate any remembrances of service from their friendship with a teenager named Jules Nicomette. He was a guy they always knew as "Nickie," a close buddy with whom George shared an impromptu high school graduation day salute.

Seventy-six years later, the couple said there are only a few others who still remember the school hall, at that moment.

Corrine and George have been married 74 years. They started dating at the old Bishop Neumann High School in Williamsville, almost 80 years ago. Their wedding was in 1946, not long after Corrine went to Buffalo's Central Terminal with George’s mother and sister to greet her fiancé when he arrived home by train, after serving in the Pacific Theater in World War II.

“They stood back,” George said last week of his mom and sister, “so Corrine was waiting at the gate.”

He was looking at his wife as he said it. Veterans Day carries deep meaning for them both. At their Amherst apartment, Corrine hangs onto a box of letters they exchanged during the war, correspondence that began before she left high school. The way they met was a prescient gamble on George's part: He was a junior high student in Batavia in the early 1940s, the son of a man who ran a grocery store, when his parents told him they wanted him to attend a Catholic high school.

This was long before Notre Dame High School opened its doors in that community. George was accepted at Canisius High School in Buffalo. For a year, he climbed out of bed early each morning to catch a bus at the store and go on toward Erie County, before riding home again every night. Finally, he worked up the nerve to share his major concern with his dad:

There were no girls at Canisius. His parents offered a compromise. George had an aunt who lived in Williamsville, and she was willing to allow him to stay with her while he attended the now-closed Bishop Neumann High School, resolving the problem.

“You came to the right school,” Corrine said to George in a deadpan way during an interview a few days ago, thinking of how her life changed based on his choice.

They noticed each other quickly. Corrine used to babysit for some of her cousins not far from where George stayed. He would stop over to talk while she was there, ducking out before the adults came home. As for Corrine, she said they were maybe 15, walking together on Milton Street in Williamsville, when they held hands for the first time.

"I don't remember our first kiss," she said, "but I remember that."

Their class had only 32 members, including Jules, much better known as Nickie. He and George became best friends within a tight knit group. In a 1944 yearbook note, Nickie recalled how they'd gather at 10 a.m. each day for hurried conversations in a stairwell. They hung around a soda bar at Hutts Dairy and went to dances at the school gym, which Corrine loved most of all.

Over sundaes at Hutts, George and Nickie made their plans. They used to watch the whole school come together at assemblies to applaud graduates leaving for the war, and the two teens decided to enlist. They put together enough courses to graduate early, in January 1944. Nickie, living out a dream, became a U.S. Marine, while George initially entered a Navy aviation program before switching to the regular Navy once D-Day arrived.

They both made it home from training in June 1944 for Neumann’s graduation. They were in full uniform, at the end of a line of kids walking across stage. Just before accepting their diplomas – in front of their girlfriends and family and their entire class – they spun around at the same moment to salute the audience.

Corrine, even now, smiles at that memory. “At Neumann,” she said, “everybody loved each other.”

From there, George and Nickie went separate ways, though they kept writing back and forth. George began training to serve on landing craft in the Pacific, duty that took him to the old Naval Station at Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. He was stationed there in February 1945 when an officer said he had a call from home.

It was his mother. Nickie had died in the invasion of Iwo Jima.

“I remember there was this grassy area there, not far away,” George said. “I went up there and wept.”

He and Corrine, still holding hands, speak of Nickie as if they saw him last week. George was in the Philippines that September when the war ended. He had already asked Corrine to marry him. They exchanged vows less than a year later. George thought at the time about becoming a pharmacist, but he pivoted to spend 26 years in marketing with Airco Industrial Gases, eventually retiring as a purchasing agent with a new company.

The Kleins raised four children, moving briefly to New Jersey before spending most of their lives in Williamsville. They are great-grandparents who endured their share of joy and tragedy. For almost eight months, they have kept close to home in the pandemic, a crisis that swept away plans for many formal events to mark 75 years since the end of the war.

For the Kleins, it is living memory. Nickie's remains were eventually sent home, and George was a pallbearer at his buddy's funeral. He and Corrine stayed in touch with Nickie's parents, even spending their honeymoon with the Nicomettes in Florida. They had always called their boy “Sonny” and they took to calling George “Sonny Jr.”

Nine years ago, when then-Eagle Scout candidate Kiran Prasad designed a memorial garden at Amherst State Park in Nickie's honor, George was one of a handful of classmates who took part. Now, with plenty of time on his hands, he finds himself going through photos and yearbooks, contemplating the reason he decided to switch high schools, a decision that led him to the girl he still calls “my heart and soul.”

In 1944, on the eve of the day two young men left for the war, George and Corrine went on a double date to the movies in downtown Buffalo with Nickie and his girlfriend. They were teenagers, at that age when you trust your friends beyond anyone, and they felt sure such close bonds would endure after the war.

On a Veterans Day 76 years later, the Kleins prove it is true.