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US WWII/Korean War Navy, born 1927. Peleliu, Leyte Battles of WWii, Inchon in Korea. Witness to Operation Crossroads atomic tests in 1946 EDWARD JANEK Hand Signed 4PAGE LETTER & 4X6 PHOTO & 3X5 CARD . YOU GET ALL 3 AUTOGRAPH ITENS. %100 Authentic Autographs . PHOTO & CARD isIn GREAT Condition & High Quality photo . RARE AUTOGRAPH ITEMS. Will be shipped SUPER FAST . to you & will be Well packaged . I will ship to you . The SAME DAY you pay :) YES .. I even ship on Saturdays . Payment MUST be made in 4 days or less after this listing ends ! Combined s&h is $1 Extra each additional listing . In the 4 day Period . Check out my other Low priced autographs & my Fantastic Feedback :) Ad my store to your follow list . I do list NEW Low priced Autographs EVERY DAY ! Upon Request . I do offer my Lifetime Guarantee COA . Just message me At checkout . Thank you :) Amanda U.S. Navy veteran Eddie Janek served in World War II and the Korean War. The first floor of his Galveston home holds his Navy mementos that survived Hurricane Ike.PHOTO: JENNIFER REYNOLDS It would be hard to find anybody who worked harder or lied more than Eddie Janek did to achieve a youthful goal to put himself in harm’s way during World War II. Through forgery, and with the help of accomplices, Janek managed to join the U.S. Navy at the age of 15. At 17, he went ashore at one of the most dangerous places on Earth doing one of the most deadly jobs ever devised by man. A spry 95 now, Janek has outlived all the buddies who shared the awesome and frequently awful experiences of that war. He’s got his memories, though, and a room full of mementos — military patches, posters, rows of the medals, a fleet of model airplanes and photos of a fresh-faced teenage boy in a crisp uniform grinning and clueless. It’s a museum to a long life that began inauspiciously, was directed by luck, good and bad, and took its protagonist on an improbable journey from a cotton patch, through two wars, to 16 years in elected office and into the ranks of entrepreneurial millionaires. It began April 28, 1927, at Providence Hospital in Waco, where Edward Alois Janek was born, the product of an affair between his widowed mother and a married firefighter, he said. The family worked on a cotton farm in West, Texas, a town of about 2,500 today about 25 miles north of Waco. “We were dirt poor,” Janek said. Along with that hard lot, fate gave the young Janek a severe stutter, which he still works around today. Eddie Janek, who served in the U.S. Navy during World War II and the Korean War, displays his medals at his home in Galveston.PHOTO: JENNIFER REYNOLDS The family moved to Galveston in 1942 when his sister married a man who’d gotten a job on the island, he said. Janek had completed the eighth grade. That would be the extent of his civilian schooling, he said. “I came to Galveston wearing overalls, beat-up shoes and a straw hat,” Janek said. “I had never turned on an electric light or flushed a toilet.” He acquired a bicycle and applied for a delivery job at Broadway Drug Store, where they asked whether he knew the city well. “I lied and said ‘Oh yes, I know Galveston real well,’” Janek said. He got hopelessly lost but met another boy who showed him around. Needing a second job to augment the 8 cents an hour he was making, Janek applied to be a pinsetter at a bowling alley. Had he ever set pins before, they asked. “I lied and said ‘Oh yes, I have a lot of experience,” Janek said. After watching Janek for a minute, another pinsetter asked two questions — Had he ever set pins before and had he ever even been in a bowling alley before. id="google_ads_iframe_/132916964,22646413721/coastmonthly.com/features_5" name="google_ads_iframe_/132916964,22646413721/coastmonthly.com/features_5" title="3rd party ad content" width="728" height="90" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0" aria-label="Advertisement" tabindex="0" allow="private-state-token-redemption;attribution-reporting" data-load-complete="true" data-google-container-id="2" style="box-sizing: border-box; border-width: 0px; border-style: initial; display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; vertical-align: bottom;"> He’d done neither. The colleague taught Janek how to do the job. “I don’t know why people always helped me,” Janek said. “Maybe they felt sorry for me because I stuttered so bad.” A photo of Eddie Janek’s U.S. Navy training class hangs on the first floor of his Galveston home. Janek, who served during World War II and the Korean War, is on the far left. “The shortest one in the class,” he said.PHOTO: JENNIFER REYNOLDS Those pragmatic lies were test runs for the first big one, which occurred at a recruiting office where Janek, still 15, forged his mother’s name and joined the Navy. He didn’t get past Houston before the lie was discovered, though. He was threatened with harsh punishment and sent home. His response was to alter the birth date on his Catholic confirmation certificate and try again. Back in Houston, he met a skeptical medical officer. “He didn’t buy that I was 17, and said it didn’t matter anyway because I was too small,” Janek said. “I had to be at least 5’2 and 120 pounds and I was only 5’1 and 90 pounds.” Janek pleaded his case, though. “I told him nothing was going to stop me from joining the Navy,” he said. It must have been a compelling argument, because that Navy officer falsified an official government form to state this stuttering boy was qualified to serve. “From 15 to 17, my whole life was lies,” Janek said. Those caught up with him in 1944 at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi, where we worked as a plane captain, responsible for pre-flight checks on training aircraft. “I still can’t believe the Navy put a dumb 16 year old in charge of what was probably a $2 million airplane,” Janek said. U.S. Navy veteran Eddie Janek talks about how he lied about his age to join the Navy during World War II at his home in Galveston.PHOTO: JENNIFER REYNOLDS In March that year, Janek was called before a panel of officers that had determined he was not, in fact, old enough to serve. “I tried to lie, but they told me they weren’t interested in hearing any of my bullshit,” Janek said. Still, instead of putting him out of the Navy, they confined him to barracks from March 25 to his 17th birthday on April 28, he said. “I could leave to eat, that’s it. When I turned 17, I was back in the Navy.” A comeuppance, of sorts, came when Janek requested sea duty, thinking he’d serve as a plane captain on an aircraft carrier. Instead, the Navy sent him to San Bruno, California, and into the gentle hands of the U.S. Marine Corps to become a beach master. “This was at a racetrack,” Janek said. “We slept in the stalls and learned basic infantry skills. Those Marines really loved training sailors.” On Sept. 15, 1944, Janek went ashore on the island of Peleliu with the 1st Marine Division as a beach master responsible for keeping order during the chaos of an amphibious assault. It was an extremely dangerous job. Beach masters had to stay on the beach, had to stay upright and constantly move around. “We wore the Marine green,” Janek said. “We went in with the first wave and had to control the beach. Our casualties were high.” A model of a Corsair hangs with other World War II aircraft that Eddie Janek saw in his time in the U.S. Navy during World War II.PHOTO: JENNIFER REYNOLDS The Battle of Peleliu resulted in the highest casualty rate of any amphibious assault in U.S. military history. About 40 percent of the 28,000 Marines and soldiers of the U.S. Army’s 81st Infantry Division were casualties — 1,800 killed, 8,000 wounded. Once the beach was secure, Janek and other beach masters worked as stretcher bearers, also a bullet-magnet job. He did the same again that October during the Battle of Leyte Gulf, when Gen. Douglas MacArthur returned to the Philippines. After some rest, he finished the war among the crew of a troop ship. He was aboard one in 1946 for the atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll. He left the regular Navy, but stayed in the reserves and got called up for combat in 1951. He was aboard a troopship and went ashore during the second landings at Inchon. Janek spent a career working for the telephone company, retired in 1984 and founded J&J Telecommunications. He made a million and has lived long enough to give it all to his children and charity, he said. For years, a group of about 16 veterans would gather from time to time on the first floor of Eddie Janek’s house among the mementos to swap stories. They’re are all gone now. Faded away like old soldiers do. “These are my reminders,” Janek said with a gesture toward his artifacts. “They are memories of all the things we did when we were young.”