A Manager He Can Count On
October 5, 2012 | News & Press Releases
Every Tuesday morning 91-year-old Merton “Mert” Hansen and his wife Jeanne get in their car and drive a couple of blocks to the Johnston, IA, Hy-Vee for groceries. When they arrive they go up to customer service and have the clerk call for Nate Swalley, manager of store operations, whom they think of as a member of the family. When Swalley first moved to Johnston, from Leawood, KS, Mert was the first customer to welcome him.
“I hear we have a new manager here,” Mert said to Swalley, welcoming him to the community in 2005 with the first handshake of a friendship that would soon mean more than the loyal customer and new store manager could ever imagine.
“Mert and Jeanne are pillars of this community,” Swalley says about the World War II veteran and his wife of 67 years. “He has kind of taken me under his wing since I moved here. It’s hard to say no to Mert. He has that twinkle in his eye and he just adopts you.”
Mert, a retired major in the Marine Corps, was a dive bomber pilot who flew observation missions over Iwo Jima in World War II. His job was to spot and identify dug-in enemy soldiers and relay their positions to American Marines on the ground.
Mert recalls one mission he flew where his mechanic was surprised he made it back. “He told me I had been hit 42 times,” Mert says. “But I told him those bullets go right through the plane’s fabric so I had really only been hit 21 times.”
In 2009, when Hy-Vee helped bring the Honor Flight program to central Iowa, the former Major wanted to go but he was worried about traveling alone at his age. Swalley stepped up and told him that he didn’t have anything to worry about, and even though it was too late for him to serve as an official guardian on the flight, he would meet Mert in Washington, D.C.
“I told him I would be waiting for him at the WWII memorial and he wouldn’t have anything to worry about. I actually beat the buses there,” Swalley says. “Right when they got off I saw Mert walking toward me, leaning on his cane.”
Mert says Swalley was the perfect companion and made the trip even more worthwhile. “We were together the whole day and he was so much help to me,” Mert says. “We hit it off right from the first monument.”
Their friendship was solidified on that trip and the two have considered each other family ever since.
On a warm June afternoon in 2011 Mert received a strange phone call from Duncan Cameron, a pilot for Southwest Airlines living in Tennessee who collected and restored old airplanes. He and Jeanne had company over and when she answered the phone she tried to tell Cameron that Mert was busy.
“We weren’t sure if we should take him seriously,” Jeanne says. “He would not take no for an answer though and when he started talking about the war I finally handed the phone over.”
Cameron had the skeleton of an old consolidated Stinson OY-1 observer plane flown in World War II, and according to old flight logs Mert was one of two pilots still alive who had flown it in combat.
“People may reunite a pilot with a similar aircraft but never the exact aircraft,” Cameron says.
Cameron felt it was his duty to rebuild the aircraft in a timely manner so that Mert could see it in person and he also wanted to enter it in the prestigious National Aviation Heritage Invitational airshow for restored aircrafts held in conjunction with the Reno National Championship Air Races in Reno, NV. But there are a few requirements: in order to enter you must be invited and you have to fly the plane to the show.
Cameron and his partners had a lot of work to do.
Shortly after Cameron’s phone call Mert told Swalley the good news.
“It was a 14-month process and there were different things that needed to be taken care of before Mert was going to be able to see the plane,” Swalley says.
The couple’s Tuesday shopping trips became weekly plane updates and before long a date was set. Cameron told Mert that the plane would be ready to land in Reno for the airshow beginning September 13. But Mert would have to travel.
“First Duncan and his guys needed to finish the plane, and then Mert needed permission from his doctor to travel with his oxygen tank,” Swalley says. “They were both very worried about traveling but I kept telling him, ‘Mert, you just have to ask and I’m there for you.”
On Thursday, Sept. 13, Mert, Jeanne and Swalley boarded a plane for Reno. During the trip Swalley and Jeanne would battle it out with Sudoku puzzles and other games while Swalley learned how to change out Mert’s oxygen tank battery pack as fast as if he was in a NASCAR pit crew.
When they finally arrived, Mert stole the show.
As Mert, Jeanne and Swalley made their way to Mert’s old plane for the first time, Nate says, the Marine Corps pilot recognized it right away.
When he finally got up to it he ran his hands along the green canvas over Cameron’s replicated patch work bullet holes as he thought about all of the people who meant so much to him 70 years ago.
“I kept thinking to myself, ‘Why am I the only one who can be here to enjoy this?” Mert says. “It brought back a lot of memories about friends I had more than 60 years ago. But behind me were all kinds of friends, my wife and Nate who were there to enjoy it today.”
It was an emotional moment for everyone involved, Swalley says, “For the rest of the airshow Mert was like a superstar.”
Pilots and veterans thanked Mert for his service. Camera crews and reporters couldn’t get enough of him. Mert shook so many hands he hardly had time to eat.
“It was amazing,” Swalley says. “I’m so happy Mert got to experience it and I can’t believe I was there.”
Cameron’s restored plane was named the Grand Champion at the airshow and he received the Neil A. Armstrong National Aviation Heritage Invitational Trophy. He recently flew Mert’s old plane up to Iowa and the former Marine Corps pilot who flew the aircraft in very different circumstances 68 years ago finally got to do what he’s been waiting 14 months for, take it for a spin.
But before takeoff, he, Jeanne and Duncan lined up for a photo in front of friends, family and a Des Moines news station camera crew there to capture the moment.
“Where’s Nate,” Mert called out as flash bulbs burst and cameras started clicking. “He needs to be in here too,” he said with a big grin on his face as the couple’s second son jumped into the photo.