A 97-year-old Pearl Harbor veteran is having a ‘big year’

Jim Schlegel arrived at Pearl Harbor as a 22-year-old Army private just three months before the Japanese attack.

“I had never seen Japanese airplanes until that day,” the 97-year-old Elgin man said. “And I didn’t know they were Japanese when it was happening.”

After the Japanese planes bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, more than 2,000 American soldiers and sailors were dead.

Schlegel was a part of the “Mountain Troops,” caring for the horses and mules on the base. On the day of the attack, he was cleaning stables. He said the attack was “one hell of a surprise” to everyone on the island.

He attended a Pearl Harbor anniversary luncheon on Monday in Aurora. He wore a Hawaiian shirt adorned with Navy ships and palm trees and a Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands Medallion of Valor that read “WWII valor in the Pacific. Our grateful islands remember.”

Schlegel chose Hawaii as his base because he wanted to see the “girls in the grass skirts,” according to his daughter Beverly Capiga. He was about to be drafted when he decided to volunteer for the Army, so he was able to choose his assignment.

Schlegel and another Pearl Harbor survivor, Navy veteran Joe Triolo, were honored at the luncheon, which was sponsored by the Aurora Navy League Council 247 and the Aurora Rotary.

“I remember nothing but devastation from that day,” said Triolo, 96. “We were all just wondering what would happen next.”

“I feel honored to be here,” he said. “People need to remember that day.”

Schlegel said he gets butterflies when he attends the annual luncheon. “I have been coming here now I think for about 10 years. I enjoy it, and I feel very honored.”

Schlegel served a few more years in Hawaii.

By 1945, he was back in Chicago and watched at Wrigley Field as the Cubs lost the World Series. Seventy-one years later, his granddaughter Helen Schlegel created a GoFundMe page to get her grandfather tickets to his second World Series. Much to the family’s surprise, hundreds of people donated to the page.

In the end, Marcus Lemonis of CNBC’s “The Profit” gave Schlegel his two front-row tickets to Game 3, which he attended with his son. The family donated the money raised online to the Purple Heart Foundation.

“This has been a big year for him,” Capiga said of her father. “It’s been a good one.”