Freelance Writer · Soprano · Actor
Freelance Writer · Soprano · Actor
Story and photo by Connie Shakalis
Oh, Happy Day
Lora (“Lori”) Day eased herself into the galvanized round bathtub, after her parents and five older siblings had taken their once-a-week turns in the heated suds. Today, a resident of Gentry East, she can have the tub — daily — all to herself, “now that I live in the lap of luxury in a house that could be considered a mansion compared to that drafty old one.” She grew up in an Indiana river-town, where gardens thrived, laughter rang, and dinner might comprise fried groundhog (culled from the turnip patch) with squirrel and dumplings.
The Day family always ate well — her dad was a butcher at the IGA — but the six offspring had their chores, and Lori still does. “I know what work is,” said the retired Navy electronics technician and mother of a high school senior. Whether restaurant waitress AND dish-washer, breakfast cook, or fishing-worm distributor, Lori’s jobs generate income. One day, bored with her position as a cook, a teenaged Lori noticed an ad for the Navy. Surreptitiously she applied, got the job, then informed her surprised parents.
Life got exciting. “Until boot camp, I had never seen the ocean, been on a plane, or left Indiana,” she said. Lori is her parents’ only child to join the military and her family’s only female to finish high school. In addition, she attended the University of Hawaii. She served in the Navy from 1983 to her retirement in 1994 and experienced the world outside the Midwest. During duty in Southeast Asia she witnessed two typhoons and the infamous eruption of Mount Pinatubo, which nearly sank their sister ship. “It was raining concrete. That was a really wicked natural disaster,” she said.
But further tragedy lurked. Toward the end of the Gulf War, Lori fell from the top of an oiler, a combat logistics ship, and hit a barge. “Doctors told my mom I would die — then, that I would not talk or walk, ever,” she said. But those doctors didn’t know Lori Day. The girl who had crawled through the black, web woods collecting 80 dozen worms per night to sell for fishing; the grade-schooler who had trudged a mile each way (up hill both trips) to school; the teenager who made money by working double-shifts at a restaurant. Her doctors’ eyes squinted as Lori began to sit up, converse with her mother, and get out of bed and on with her life. She had spent half a year in a variety of hospitals. “That was 25 years ago, and I keep improving.” (She even mowed her Gentry lawn last month.)
Despite typhoons, falls, and wars, Lori thinks every young person should join the armed forces. “I traveled, saw different cultures and people, and made lasting friends,” she said. “The Navy is the best job I’ve ever had — and I’ve worked since I was nine.”
Lori is a member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and Paralyzed Veterans of America.
Original published in The Gentry Lifestyle · July 2016