CROSS, S.C. – The Berkeley County community is invited to help celebrate a major milestone birthday of a local WWII veteran and hero.
This Saturday, the family of Vester Owens will celebrate his 100th birthday with a parade in his honor this Saturday.
The parade will start at the Dollar General in Cross and end at Cross High School. Owens will be in attendance to celebrate his big day.
“Please join us as we celebrate the life and service of our hometown WWII hero,” posted Owen’s niece, Theresa Smith Prioleau, to Facebook.
According to his family, Owens was reared on cotton farmland where his family earned a living in Cross. Some of that land now lies beneath Lake Moultrie since the damming of the Cooper River in the late 1940’s.
Born in 1922, Owens’ has said that his favorite memory in Cross was carrying sacks of corn to the grist mill to be ground into the Southern delicacy or into meal or flour, and although there were schools in Cross, the distance was substantial, and no buses existed for black children.
In 1942, while working in Charleston with his brother at a creosote factory, Owens was drafted into the United States Army, sent to Fort Bragg, and later shipped to Europe with other segregated blacks who were assigned to the bottom of the ship.
Owens worked with the supply unit bringing supplies across the English Channel to France and preparing for the invasion. Risking his life as German forces attempted to cut off the necessary supply lines, he helped the largest invasion in history move forward. He served in Normandy, France, on D-Day during that historic and bloody encounter.
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As fighting moved inland following the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944, his unit’s convoys were at the rear with supplies like ammunition, fuel, and rations, which the German forces would attack to prevent supplies from getting where they were needed; and
According to Owens’ family, his memories of the war-torn country remain vivid, as he recalls seeing areas where no houses remained standing as far as the eye could see.
Whereas, by the Lord’s mercy, he made it back alive after four years in the Army, but returned to a segregated United States where black soldiers did not receive the large, public receptions that White soldiers received; and
In 1948, President Harry Truman signed an executive order to desegregate the military. Owens reenlisted, joining the newly formed United States Air Force, and was stationed at Fort Worth, Texas, where he lives today. He retired in 1967.
While Owens has called Texas home for decades now, his family said he is determined to come “full circle” and return to his roots – back where it all began.
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