WWII combat engineer became a champion for peace and equality.

By R. Kurt Osenlund, BucksLocalNews.com


Leon Bass is a fine storyteller, and he has an incredible story to tell. The extremely eloquent 85-year-old, who lives in an apartment in Newtown’s Pennswood Village, has lived a life that would warrant a feature film. A WWII combat engineer who grew up before the Civil Rights Movement, he’s seen and endured hateful atrocities at home and abroad, only to emerge victorious as a resolute soldier for peace, equality and enlightenment.

Along with four brothers and one sister, Bass was raised by parents Henry and Nancy in a Philadelphia household. After graduating from West Philadelphia High School in 1943, Bass was voluntarily inducted into the Army and sent off to Camp Wheeler in Georgia for basic infantry training. He was placed in an all-black unit under the leadership of white officers.

“It was horrendous,” Bass says. “I had never experienced the kind of racism I experienced there. It was present in Philadelphia, but nowhere near as blatant. My father used to want to take me back to his hometown in South Carolina, but my mother always advised against it. I understood why when I got to the South. It was a very painful experience.”

Bass spent four months at Camp Wheeler before becoming a combat engineer and moving on to Camp McCain in Mississippi, a base that would send him out on long outdoor “maneuvers” to practice battle tactics. He then made his way to Camp Robinson in Arkansas to prepare for overseas duty, and soon found himself in Fordingbridge, a country town in Hampshire, England that would serve as a post to organize supplies. In December 1944, he crossed the English Channel into France and awaited orders in the bitter cold.

“When orders came down, we were told we were going to be part of the third army under the command of General George Patton,” Bass says.

Bass and the rest of the men in his unit were assigned the duty of repairing a bridge near the town of Martelange in Belgium. The bridge needed to be fixed so tanks, guns, men and ammunition could pass through and reach the adjacent town of Bastogne, where Americans were trapped by German soldiers.

“We worked night and day,” Bass says, “in spite of the weather, in spite of the land mines we would encounter, in spite of that one plane that seemed to fly over every day trying to bomb the bridge. And we finished it on time. And all of those resources reached the other side and we were able to defeat the enemy. And that was all part of what we now know as the Battle of the Bulge.”

Bass says he was very proud of the victory, but seeing the bodies of the men who died in the battle got him questioning what he was doing at war in the first place. Knowing full well he may also die in battle, he began wondering what he was fighting for, remembering all the times he was discriminated against in America: denied the privilege of drinking at a water fountain, unwelcome at a restaurant, forced to stand for 100 miles on a bus with vacant seats.

“I was angry at my country,” Bass says. “I felt used and abused. I’m going to protect all these people with my life, should that become necessary? Fight to preserve all the wonderful things I’m not good enough to enjoy? But the war went on, and I had to keep my anger down inside.”

Bass received new orders to report to Weimar in East Germany, and before long he saw something that would alter his life and outlook forever. A lieutenant drove him and a fellow soldier to Buchenwald, a concentration camp.

“I was to have the shock of my life,” Bass says.

At 19, Bass had never even heard of a concentration camp, and received the rudest awakening imaginable. Bass saw what he calls “the walking dead” – people who were skin and bone with skeletal faces. He says the stench of death and human waste was unbearable. He saw torture chambers, and human experimentation labs with body parts in jars of formaldehyde. He saw human skin stretched out on tables, crematoriums with human remains and stacks of corpses.

“And I knew it was all because the Nazis were saying these people weren’t good enough and therefore could be terminated,” Bass says. “Something changed. I came into the camp angry, but now I could see more clearly. I understood that human suffering was not relegated to just me – it can touch all of us. I had seen the face of evil, and the hate I saw in the South couldn’t even compare to the hate of the Nazis. I realized I had something to fight for – I had to help to destroy that evil. I decided that if I made it home, I would do something to effectuate change.”

Less than a year later, in January of 1946, Bass made it home, and he got busy. Using the financial benefits from his military service, he got into West Chester University, where he still had to face down racism, unable to stay in the dormitories or eat in the cafeteria. Only the second member of his family to attend college, he focused on his education, and began to adopt a non-violent protest mentality. After graduation he got a teaching job at an all-black elementary school in Philadelphia, and saw such landmark developments as the rise (and tragic fall) of Martin Luther King, Jr., the bold actions of Rosa Parks and the start of the Civil Rights Movement.

Bass became an elementary school principal in South Philadelphia, then the principal of an all-white school in the Northeast. Finally, he was called upon to be the principal of Benjamin Franklin High School, “the toughest school in the city” that, at the time, was all-male.

Bass has a knack for cleverly and dramatically unfurling the details as he recounts his life. There’s the sense he’s not only told this story before, but perfected the way he tells it. And then he explains how an Auschwitz survivor visited Benjamin Franklin High School one day, and wasn’t well-received by the unruly students until Bass told them to pipe down and listen, that he had seen the same things she did. After her presentation the survivor pulled Bass aside and told him he had a story to tell, too, and he needed to speak out.

“That was 1971,” Bass says, “and I’ve been speaking ever since. I’ve spoken at colleges, universities, maximum security prisons, churches, places across the country, overseas in Ireland, Bermuda. I was just at Plymouth Whitemarsh High School and soon I’ll be at a high school in Chicago. Because that evil is still with us. People are still doing evil things to each other. It will take over our hearts and minds if we let it, but we must not let that happen.”

Former deli owner received three Bronze Stars in Korea.

World War II veteran turns 95 years old on Feb. 10.

By Petra Chesner Schlatter, BucksLocalNews.com


*Editor’s note: Danny Quill was one of the first veterans to be profiled in our “Saluting Our Veterans” series. In honor of Mr. Quill’s 95th birthday, we spoke with him about a very interesting aspect of his life.*

Looking back on his life, World War II veteran Danny Quill of Morrisville remembers when he had homing pigeons.

“I flew pigeons in the ‘60s and ‘70s,” said Quill, who turned 95 years old on Feb. 10.
Homing pigeons, he said, have saved lives. He pulls out an article about “G.I. Joe,” a pigeon that saved the lives of 1,000 British soldiers during WWII because of a message it delivered.
“I’ve had that article for over 60 years,” Quill said.

His life, in a way, previously centered on homing pigeons and racing them. He talked about how he had them since he was 16 years old. Quill reminisces as he sits in his easy chair with his cat, Queenie, on his lap. Quill said the cat sleeps on his feet to keep him warm.

Quill is still a member of the Delaware Valley Pigeon Club in Horsham and the Bristol Homing Society. He has two white sweatshirts with pictures of homing pigeons on them.

“Pigeon flying was good,” he said. “I had a lot of friends.”

“When I got rid of my pigeons, they auctioned them off,” Quill said. “I took 70 up and brought three back and I got $1,600. Then the fellows that bought them two years later wrote me and said my pigeons were breeding winners.”

“I had pigeons, chickens, golden pheasants and silver pheasants,” he recalled about raising birds while he and his late wife, Ann, lived in the Woodside section of Lower Makefield Township.

“After my wife died, I was living alone,” Quill said. “I got rid of practically everything. She died in 1976. I got rid of them all. My buddies — a couple of them died. They used to train my pigeons.”
Quill said he raised and flew homing pigeons because “It’s a great, great sport and a lot of fun.”
“When you put them in the race — when that pigeon comes home — it has a counter mark on its leg,” he continued. “You drop that into the clock and you turn the key and it tells the time. We have a regular clock.”

For a race to Minnesota, he would release his homing pigeons at 8 o’clock in the morning and they returned home at 4 o’clock.

“There may be 1,500 or 2,000 pigeons in one big race,” Quill said.

His homing pigeons had personalities of their own. He described what one of his favorites did. “I’d leave her out,” he said. “You’d call her and she’d fly up and sit on your shoulder. My wife used to call her. She’d land on top of my wife’s head. She didn’t like that too much.”

Quill raised champion pigeons. “I won with them,” he said. Often, Quill would have about 150 homing pigeons at one time.

“Today, it’s too expensive for training pigeons,” he said.

Another reason he gave up the sport was the high cost of feed. “You’ve got to feed them a certain kind of feed — all different kinds of grain,” he explained. “It’s regular mixed-up grain with all kinds of seeds.”

To prepare for baby pigeons, Quill would use tobacco stems to make a nest. Each female laid two eggs. “The male and the female take turns sitting on them,” he said. “Then the male feeds them. It’s something they throw up for their babies.”

Quill described what homing pigeons do when they’re not racing afar, sometimes traveling 600 miles in a day. “You leave ‘em out every day to exercise and then you whistle to come back in the coop,” he said. “They’re looking for feed. You let them fly for a while and then they come in.”
Describing what the pigeons look like when they take flight, Quill said, “Oh, man – their speed I can’t explain. They spin and spin and go around and around in a circle.

“They’ll go for a half mile in a big circle way up in the air and they’ll exercise,” Quill said. “Then, they’ll start coming down low to your coop and you whistle. You shake the feed and they’ll come into the coop to get their feed.”

Quill said the homing pigeons “go way up – you can just about see them. But the real pleasure is to see that one come home, and it comes down VOOM!! They’re glad to get in the coop and glad to get home.”

Bristolian and Purple Heart recipient loved to dance.

By Tim Chicirda, BucksLocalNews.com


Dominic Marino is more affectionately known as “Brownie,” but is also known as a military hero with a Purple Heart, a long-time husband, a dedicated man in the community, and one heck of a dancer.

Staff sergeant Dominic “Brownie” Marino was drafted into the army when he was 21 and was sent for 16 weeks basic training to Camp Livingston in Louisiana.

Home to the 28th Infantry Division, it was first known as Camp Tioga and renamed Camp Livingston in honor of Chancellor Robert R. Livingston, negotiator of the Louisiana Purchase.
Brownie's next assignment was in Camp Gordon Johnston. Acres of beaches and woods along the shores of North Florida were converted to a base with the sole purpose of training amphibious soldiers and their support groups.

This Florida facility trained over a quarter million men for amphibious assaults during World War II, readying them to embark upon the Great Crusade.

The next stop for Brownie was Camp Pickett located in Blackstone, Va., about 30 miles west of Petersburg where there was enough land, water and other resources needed to establish a post large enough to simultaneously train more than one infantry division. This site of logistical efficiency also offered easy railroad access to both mountain and coastal training sites.

Brownie then left the U.S. for England and then Tenby, Wales, and most likely received one of history’s most discouraging pep talks, “Good bye and good luck.”

His responsibility was to create the correct setting of the elevation, traverse and charge to position guns and establish an outpost line of resistance to cover an entire mile or more radius area with 60-mm mortar and machine guns. The results of a single, well-executed barrage could be decisive, and equally appalling.

After the D-Day invasion, he ventured through France from July 19 until November 10 in 1944 when he was seriously injured in action by a sniper shot in the shoulder that traversed straight through his back. Battle in the dense impenetrable conifer Hürtgen Forest, barely 50 square miles east of the Belgian–German border was so costly that it has been called an Allied "defeat of the first magnitude." He was transferred from the front lines to a school house in Belgium where he was operated on and remained in a hospital in Paris for 2 weeks. He was awarded the Purple Heart.

***
Brownie, the youngest of five children, grew up on Butler Street in Trenton’s famed Chambersburg neighborhood also known as “The ‘Burg.”

Brownie played baseball and football in school and as a kid, he played hardball and pitched quoits, using real horseshoes “the ones you put on a horse; metal, steel.”

Dominic was married to his wife, Yolanda, for 63 years from 1945 until her death in 2008. The couple was married in St. Ann Church and lived on Wood Street in the Zefferi home before moving to Winder Village. They moved back into the Borough, purchasing a home on Wood Street about 30 years ago.

They had three children: Bristol Borough resident Dominic John Marino (Brownie, Jr.), Levittown resident Maryann, and Jennett.

***
Brownie worked in the Fort Dix Army Camp carpentry shop for 26 years expertly woodworking for the GIs and their wives. He has designed handcrafted furniture in his small basement workshop for almost every family member.

He also was an integral part of the construction crew for the Italian Mutual Aid-Fifth Ward Association building on Wood Street.

***
Despite this busy life, Brownie, along with his late wife, had a true passion for dancing.
Brownie and Yolanda belonged to the Bordentown Elks and went dancing there. It was the Paso Doble Ballroom every Friday night for the foxtrot, jitterbug, Lindy Hop, and the Cha Cha, an offshoot of the Mambo.

Brownie danced even through his service tenure. His favorite music is any music during the swing era, Big Bands and all the Sinatra songs,

“You can dance to it," said Brownie. "I don’t know the words. I didn’t think about words!”

***
Correspondent Cate Murway contributed to this article.