JOHNSONBURG — It is mid-morning and 88-year-old Joe Scida of Johnsonburg is hurtling through Cleveland Hopkins International Airport in a wheelchair.

Scida is late for a flight, the final leg of his trip home from France, where he and 28 other D-Day veterans were on hand to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Allied assault against Hitler’s Army.

Despite running behind schedule, the plane is held for him.

He recalls how the pilots greeted him at the gate with smiles, and how instead of being irksome the plane’s passengers were grateful. 

One man pulled a business card from his pocket inscribed with a lengthy ode to military veterans like Scida, thanking them for their sacrifice.

It marked the end to a long, emotional week for Scida, one in which he returned to the beaches of Normandy, France, where as an 18-year-old Higgins Boat pilot with the U.S. Navy, delivered countless soldiers to the sands of Omaha Beach, some to their deaths.

The details of that day for Scida are largely muddied by fear and adrenaline as much as the fog of war.

He recalls sensory information like the feel of turbulent North Atlantic waters, the sounds of firepower, roiling black skies with clouds so thick “you could almost touch them.”

Perhaps freshest in his mind is a still palpable sense of fear. 

Scida says anyone who claims they weren’t afraid “is either lying or crazy.”

“Everyone had their own little private war I think,” Scida said. “No two people can tell the same story.”

Scida’s story begins in 1943, when after graduating from Johnsonburg Area High School, he enlisted in the U.S. Military, his reasons for joining being economics as much as a desire to see the world and serve his country.

“It was poor times, it was the Depression and I always wanted to see the ocean and wanted to serve my country … I was first generation,” he said.

He joined, trained with the naval amphibious forces in Florida, Virginia and England, learning to operate his D-Day vessel, the Landing Craft, Vehicle Personnel (LCVP) before that fateful day. After a back injury suffered in the line of duty, Scida recovered in England. He spent the months immediately following the war decommissioning military bases in England, where he met his wife Kay, an English native who built grenades for the English war effort.

She returned with Scida to the United States, where the two built a life for themselves in Johnsonburg and where they remain today.

On a recent morning, the couple sits in their sun drenched dining room surrounded by photos of children and grandchildren as they look over military memorabilia, postcards from Europe and for Kay pictures of home.

Joe thumbs a French Legion Medal of Honor presented to him at the recent D-Day commemoration, where he rubbed elbows with presidents, ambassadors and 27 of his fellow D-Day veterans.

It was his sixth trip back to the battlefield since the invasion.

“The first time I couldn’t wait to go back, to see the beach, to see the difference. I was so happy to see what I saw. It was so peaceful with people walking freely on the beach instead of all of that barbed wire and of that clutter and all of those bodies,” Scida said.

The trips are organized by The Greatest Generation Foundation, a non-profit international group which offers the opportunity for war veterans to return to their battlefields at no cost to them. The organization’s website says it is working to “ensure that the honor and sacrifice of these veterans is never forgotten,”

But those like Scida worry the World War II legacy has already begun to fade.

In World War II more than 12 percent of the population served in the military, whether volunteers or draftees. That has changed. Currently, less than .5 percent of the population serves in the armed forces.

In addition, the average age of World War II veterans in 92. Members of the Greatest Generation are dying at a rate of 550 per day, with an estimated 1.2 million remaining of 16 million who waged what has come to be known as “The last good war.”

“We’re all dying off,” Scida said, adding the thinning ranks of World War II veterans and fewer military service members is resulting in a changing relationship between the American public and its veteran community.

Scida hopes older generations will continue to impart to younger, “what happened and why we’re living so good in this country” long after the last World War II veteran is gone.

He holds the copy of the business card handed to him by the stranger on the plane at the Cleveland airport promising to do just that and seems reassured.

Meanwhile, mere blocks from Scida’s home, Ridgway artist Tom Copella is putting the finishing touches on a military themed mural outside 501 Market St.

The work, inspired by one of Normal Rockwell’s “The Saturday Evening Post” covers, was commissioned by the Johnsonburg Community Trust with the help of private individuals. It measures 60 feet by 21 feet.

Copella began at the end of April and expects to have the work ready for a Fourth of July dedication.

He can be found at the location most days, gingerly scaling homemade scaffolding and endlessly touching paint brush to brick. Copella begins with a scale drawing, each inch of which equals a foot on the actual wall, slowly transferring his vision from the drawing board to the vertical spaces.

In Johnsonburg, bystanders, tattooed young men with pit bulls tethered to their arms, stare up at the work with curiosity from an adjacent, overgrown lot.

Copella said the public’s reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. “They’ve never seen anything like it.”

His previous works can be found adorning hardware stores and power plants in Florida, where he lived for a number of years after graduating from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh.

The Johnsonburg mural is among his first since returning to Elk County, where he was born and raised.

The military theme holds added significance for Copella, whose father, a World War II veteran, died three months ago.

In his honor, Copella incorporated his father’s likeness in the mural along with those of two local veterans, George Cherry and Victor Chirillo. Joe Scida was not involved in this project. 

Copella said with one of the highest volunteer rates during World War II, Johnsonburg’s military ties run deep and he hopes to showcase the local military tradition through his latest work.