Charles H. Malloy, 35 year employee of DuPont Chemical Company, decorated World War II Vet, and member of America’s Greatest Generation, celebrated his 99th birthday on 2/19/24. I am forever grateful to him for imbuing me with a love of family and country, for driving me to success in the business world, and for being the rock in our family into his 100th year.
At the age of just three years old, he was abandoned by his father, and from 1928 to 1936, my dad and his brothers, Marty and Frank, were raised by the nuns in Saint Vincent’s Orphanage, in the Tacony section of Philadelphia. Note the picture of him and his brothers standing with their mother on the day they were taken to St. Vincent’s, in the autumn of ‘28.
In 1943, he would graduate from West Catholic in Philadelphia, and head right into the Army, where he would become a medic. His brothers were already in the Service, Marty, in the Army Air Corp in India; Frank, on the Navy battleship, the S.S. Wisconsin, in the South Pacific.
During the frigid winter of 1944 and 1945, in Northeastern France, my dad attended to the wounded during hard fighting against the Germans, west of Strasbourg on the Rhine River. As he recalls “we never saw the ground that winter, because it was covered in snow.” For his bravery, he was awarded the Silver Star, Bronze Star and Purple Heart. The citation for the Silver Star reads “ignoring his own wounds, he sought out and found aid for other wounded soldiers before finding care for himself.”
Having been discharged from an Army hospital in England in the spring of ‘45, he was assigned to duty in Paris in the summer of ‘45 (see the picture of him on the Champs-Elysees).
My dad would attend Saint Joseph’s College in Philadelphia on the GI Bill, and graduate in 1950. Soon after, he took a job with the DuPont Chemical Company, where he worked for his entire 35 year-career. He’s now been retired for a longer time than his tenure at DuPont.
He would marry Marion in June of 1955, and this year, my mom and dad will celebrate their 69th wedding anniversary.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this kind, selfless, hard-working, persevering, amiable Irishman is his being such a wonderful father, despite growing up with no father of his own.
He loves his God; he loves his country, and he loves his family: 3 children, 5 grandchildren, 4 great grandchildren. #GREATESTGENERATION.
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