He grew up near Colby, Kansas. He worked on his family’s farm all of his young life, sowing, raising, and harvesting corn, never traveling far from the fields, never seeing what lay beyond the corn stalks and sunflowers that stretched forever in all directions. The farm was seventeen hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean; sixteen hundred to the Atlantic. He’d only seen images of beaches in stories he’d read in National Geographic. His one wish was to see a beach, if only just once.

His wish came true. In March of 1944, his eighteenth year, he received word from his uncle about an overseas job. He left the farm one cool spring morning. His first stop was North Carolina. He learned a new trade. Twelve weeks later, he left for England, a place he’d only read about as a boy.

He was not a boy anymore. He was a man. Ready to do man’s work. Soon after arriving in England, he boarded a boat. Ten hours later, the door of the boat opened. He saw his first beach.