America’s Oldest Living WWII Veteran Celebrates His 110th Birthday

photo credit: MoorInfo

American’s Oldest Living WWII Veteran

Lawrence Brooks is American’s oldest living WWII veteran and has just celebrated is 110th birthday on September 12th!

According to his service documents, Lawrence was a former Private 1st Class soldier and served from 1940 to 1954. He started serving as a personal assistant to three higher-ranking officers within the 91st Engineer Battalion, stationed in New Guinea. His daily duties were to cook, clean their sheets, uniforms and shine their shoes.

The National World War II Museum

Fast forward to 2014, the oldest WWII veteran to be alive was Mr. Richard Overton at 112 years old until he passed away making Lawrence the new record holder. The National World War II Museum in New Orleans officially recognized Lawrence as such and honored him by throwing him a birthday party. They’ve been celebrating his birthday every year since.

The museum’s vice president, Peter Crean, said: “We absolutely love Mr. Brooks. We’ve told him, ‘As long as you keep having birthdays, we are going to keep having birthday parties for you here.’ We consider him ‘our veteran.’”

Lawrence is blind in one eye, has poor vision in the other and uses a walker to get around. Regardless, he believes he has lived so long because he has always liked people so much and says even though he knows he doesn’t have many birthdays left he’s not worried about it. “God has let me live this long already,” he says.

Happy Birthday, Lawrence Brooks! May you have many more!