Joe Lancello, 100, poses with his family in honor of his 100th birthday.
Submitted photo
GREENFIELD – Smiles abounded for Joe Lancello Day March 7, and the 100-year-old Greenfield man was humbled.
Surrounded by close friends and family with a caravan of neighbors driving by, Lancello was still overwhelmed with the birthday celebration days later. While grateful for the recognition of service in World War II, he was thinking of those that didn’t make it home.
“I really didn’t do that much in the war; I mean, I did what you know the rest of the guys were doing except I was one of the fortunate ones,” he said. “We left 125,000 over there in Italy. they’re all resting in the graves and you just think to yourself, ‘Well my God, if all these people got back the way I did and they all had families, wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing?’”
Mayor Chuck Fewell declared March 7 Joe Lancello Day for the veteran who has spent more than half of his life in Greenfield and has worked hard to learn mechanics, serve his country and provide for his family.
Born March 7, 1922, Joe Lancello grew up during the Great Depression in White Plains, New York. He described it as a neighborhood filled with the rich, but he wasn’t one of them.
“We had the rich people that played golf; we were the poor people, we were the caddies,” he said.
Only 8 at the time, Lancello remembers the Depression being the main topic of conversation and the family just getting by. His father was a barber, and his family moved into the basement of the barbershop to make ends meet, getting coins out of pinball machines to buy food.
Lancello recalls doing anything to make a buck: he would caddie at the golf course, shine shoes and deliver papers to the rich neighbors like Richard Hellman, Al Jolson and Charles Erwin Wilson, the CEO of General Electric at the time.
Lancello graduated high school in 1941 and had dreams of attending college but couldn’t afford room and board. He was drafted into the US Army the same year.
After he got his “wavy, Italian hair” cut, Lancello attended basic training and joined the US Army Air Corps, which soon became the Air Force. Mechanically inclined, he learned about building engines and servicing planes in the states before he was promoted to sergeant and headed overseas to Naples, Italy. Lancello’s main job in the 15th Air Force was to work in the ground crew, servicing planes as they returned from battle – many of them badly damaged with heartbreaking evidence of devastation.
His squadron serviced C54 transport planes there to fly troops home from Europe before they went to the South Pacific to fight the Japanese.
“I remember one time the sky was full of planes, it was shaking and I thought, ‘Oh man, someone’s gonna get it today.”
When the war ended, he was able to come home by way of Casablanca, Morocco. Still dreaming of a higher education, Lancello was grateful for the GI bill that would provide it. But all the colleges he applied to near his east coast home on the east coast were at capacity, so he turned to the midwest. Lancello was accepted to Purdue University and received a degree in 1950 in mechanical engineering; one of Lancello’s classmates was astronaut Gus Grissom.
Lancello met his wife Jean on a weekend trip back home, when his brother convinced him to get his nose out of the books for one night of fun at a dance. They wed on July 8, 1948, and the two were married for 65 years.
They had two children, Joan and David; two grandchildren, Cindy and Jessica, and four great-grandchildren, Jean, Adam, Louise and Alice.
Professionally, Lancello was a mechanical engineer, first landing a job at RCA making radio tubes. The majority of his career was at Western Electric Shadeland Avenue plant in Indianapolis. He’d help design telephones, from princess sets to novelty sets like Mickey Mouse, who was flown in from Florida and walked around the plant for inspiration.
“I was a mechanical engineer, and I tried to improve things,” he said. “I was just an engineer that got things done so we could make good telephones, and we did.”
He also worked on other developments, and had the idea to streamline janitorial services by developing the floor scrubbing machines that can still be seen today in large companies and hospitals.
“I wasn’t a great inventor or anything like that. I was a developer,” he said. “The time I spent at Purdue was well worth it. I was just so fortunate they had the GI bill and I got that education and I enjoyed that work.”
These days, Lancello is grateful for his family, and for the friends and acquaintances who celebrated his special day last week. Reflecting on his time of service, Lancello said he grew from being a wisecracking kid from New York, teaching him hard work and dedication.
“The Army made a man out of me,” he said.
Lancello still vividly remembers stepping back onto U.S. soil.
“I kissed the ground when I got back home and said, ‘I’ll never leave this place again.’”
