GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — Two days before his 103rd birthday and 80 years after the end of World War II, Maj. Dwayne Nickerson sat down with News 8 to recount his service. It all began on an infamous day in 1941.
“I heard from up in by bedroom, I was building model airplanes and my dad and uncle had their heads against the radio. ‘Did you hear that?’” Nickerson recalled. “The news was coming in from Pearl Harbor, you know. I was in high school, and my folks wouldn’t let me quit school to join the service.”
The next year, with diploma earned, he signed up — finding his way into the pilot seat of a Waco CG-4 glider.
“They called it ‘combat,’ but the ‘C’ didn’t stand for combat. It stood for cargo,” Nickerson explained…