RUN FOR THE WALL Jean and Larry

May 12, 2025 - In Ontario

Great day!! Reconnecting with the RFTW family is always a lot of fun.

Task for the day: get registered. Hitch (Tai) brought her daughter when she registered. She became an honorary member. She got a button showing she is an FNG (Fine New Girl/Guy).

All riders have to register. You have wrist bands showing you are part of the Run. Also the bikes get ribbons to show the same. This helps the road guards recognize quickly if a non-registered person jumps into the pack. It does happen occasionally.

The Elks are hosting RFTW with meals, rooms for meetings and even a place to wash the bikes. Nice to start with a clean bike.

Great place for hosting meals.

I always like to walk in the parking lot. Some bikes have awesome custom paint jobs.

Here are a few of them.

As you see on this bike is the banner "Ambassador".

There are a lot of positions people hold to get this mission cross country.

Here are a few more. You will learn more about them as the Run progresses.

Also today, Lance and Bernadette offered a rider's skill practice session.

Here is the path you had to complete. All set up with cones.

This looks very confusing to me.

It was very well attended. There was a little challenge posed to Lance: do it with a passenger.

Guess who got to be the passenger? Yep you guessed.

Now I understand the path. But they forgot to tell me one thing. There was a place for a quick stop. My helmet kind of hit Lance's. Lance said "Oops forgot to tell you".

Ron ran the path a lot.

Ron decided to accept the challenge to do it with a passenger.

OK this time I am ready for the quick stop.

Way to go Ron!!! And I did not hit his helmet.

Time for dinner. The Elks had steak, baked potato, salad and dessert. AWESOME!!

During dinner we were honored to have a guest speaker.

Tom Crosby was a child POW in WWII. He is now 91.

I went to the internet and looked up Tom. This is a little lengthy but to me it is worth reading. I am sure you can look up more info.

U.S. tanks broke down the gates of the Santo Tomas Internment Camp in the Philippines on Feb. 3, 1945, freeing 3,700 prisoners who were held there by the Japanese.

These people weren’t soldiers who fought on the Pacific front of World War II. They were Western civilians who got trapped in the capital city of Manila after Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, which pulled the United States into the conflict.

About 500 of them were children, including 8-year-old Tom Crosby.

Crosby lived what he remembers as an idyllic childhood in Manila, the son of an American businessman and his wife, who worked for the chamber of commerce. The couple had settled in the Philippines, in a villa staffed with nannies and other helpers.

Crosby’s parents separated by late 1941, and his father returned to the United States. He stayed in Manila with his mother, brother, grandmother and aunt.

On Dec. 8 of that year, Japanese forces began bombing U.S. military facilities in the Philippines. They invaded the country two weeks later. Crosby and his family spent Christmas night huddled in an air-raid shelter.

Just after New Year’s, Japanese soldiers ordered all foreigners to pack some clothes, mosquito netting and three days’ worth of food.

“We didn’t know if it was going to be three days (of detention) or much longer,” Crosby said.

The expatriates — mostly American, British and Australian — were loaded aboard trucks and taken to the sprawling grounds of the 330-year-old University of Santo Tomas in downtown Manila.

Women lived in one building. Adult men bunked on cots in a gymnasium, while boys and younger men were divided by age and separated into classrooms on the third floor of the education building. Crosby and his brother turned over desks and pushed them together to form temporary beds, until the Red Cross provided real ones later.

The third year of internment — 1944 — brought near starvation. Meat disappeared from the menu. Meal portions grew ever smaller. Many of the prisoners, including Crosby, developed beriberi, a malnutrition disease caused by a lack of vitamin B1, which is found in milk, meat and grains.

Crosby’s grandmother sometimes boiled shoe leather and made her grandsons drink the foul-tasting brew for the bit of protein it contained. He also remembers rummaging through the guards’ garbage for bones to use in his mother’s soup.

“(My mother) couldn’t believe we had sunk so low,” he said. “But it saved our lives.”

During their last evening of captivity, Crosby heard gunfire in the distance. He wasn’t sure if Japanese or American forces were winning.

On the evening of Feb. 3, 1945, a few hundred cavalry soldiers liberated the camp — all but the building where Crosby and other young prisoners were held hostage by 65 Japanese guards. The U.S. troops shouted through bullhorns at the boys to move to the back of the room and lie down.

“That’s when all hell broke loose,” Crosby said. “There was a shootout. I still remember the tracers coming in the windows, taking out the ceilings over our heads.”

Unable to dislodge the Japanese, the Americans granted them safe passage out of the compound after 36 hours of negotiations.

“The rescue teams got to us just in time,” said Crosby. “It was a relief to be reunited with my mother. I didn’t know if I would see her again.”

Three months later, Crosby and his family steamed across the ocean on a Liberty ship and arrived in San Francisco on the day Germany surrendered. They moved to San Diego in 1949. Crosby spent four years in the Navy.

During the speech tonight, he made the comment that at the age of 11 he was 48 pounds.

One of his most vivid memories was the American flag being hung and the freed prisoners sang "God Bless America" over and over again.