I’ve heard my grandfather’s voice just once. It was on a 1949 episode of the NBC radio show This Is Your Life, recounting his escape from occupied France after a German night fighter shot down the plane he was flying on a secret mission a month before D-Day. Some seventy years after World War II, I perched in a windowless corner of the UCLA Film & TV Library Archives, there on a tip from my uncle that my grandpa had shared a slice of his war story—which he otherwise seldom spoke of—on this popular mid-twentieth-century radio show a few years after the war.Article continues after advertisement
Patriotic marching band music came through my head phones and transported me to another era. Then came the deep, emphatic radio voice of the show’s host, Ralph Edwards, who teed up the episode’s guest of honor: The person-of-the-day whom my grandpa— along with a handful of others from the United States and France whose lives this hero had touched—had been brought to the Hollywood studio to surprise and celebrate. This person was, Edwards announced, “a Marine whose life has been packed with enough adventure, thrills, hair-raising escapes, raw courage, and excitement to make half a dozen movies.” His name was Peter Julien Ortiz.
