James Ormiston O'Neal's Obituary
Jim O’Neal was born in Carlisle, Indiana on January 29, 1924, the middle son of five children born to Walter and Martha O’Neal. A close family, they were deeply challenged when the deprivations of the Great Depression forced the children to be placed with various relatives for its worst years. In adulthood, Jim joined the US Air Force as an officer and pilot. He had a distinguished 30-year career serving in such places as the Pentagon, Greenland, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Okinawa, retiring in 1971 as a Lt. Colonel. He met his future wife, the British Enid Lord, while stationed in Karachi, where they married in 1953. From this union were born three daughters, Katherine, Carol, and Karen.
Jim was a humble man who rarely spoke of his extraordinary life or accomplishments. In the course of his duties, he was awarded 16 commendations, including the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Bronze Star, the Air Force Commendation Medal with One Bronze Oak Leaf Cluster, the Air Medal with Two Bronze Oak Leaf Clusters, and the Meritorious Service Medal. And yet, he never kept any of them, giving them instead to his proud parents for safekeeping. Whenever we asked him about these medals, he would merely say, “What medals?”
He was a man who cheated death on numerous occasions. At the age of four, his appendix burst. Medical science not being as advanced in the 1920s as it is today, the doctors told his mother that he wouldn’t live. Martha said, “Oh, yes he will!” When he did live, the same doctors told her he would never walk again. To which Martha once again said, “Yes, he will!” He was in bed for a year. He had to learn to walk all over again. But she kept him with her always, puttering in the kitchen as she worked, feeding his recovery with her fierce determination.
While stationed in Greenland there were no vegetables available except brussel sprouts. Jim often said, “I didn’t mind having them every day for dinner, but when they started serving them every day for lunch too, that was too much!” He never ate another brussel sprout again. During his tenure there, Jim dove into the icy water and saved the life of a drowning man. For this he was awarded the Soldier’s Medal, “the highest honor a soldier can receive for an act of valor in a non-combat situation, held to be equal to or greater than the level which would have justified an award of the Distinguished Flying Cross, had the act occurred in combat.” He never told us about this. But once again he had cheated death while valiantly saving the life of another.
While serving in Vietnam as an Intelligence officer, he was sitting in a Saigon movie theater when a bomb exploded inside. A man who was sitting two seats from him was killed, but Jim was spared.
Policy dictated that no one could serve two consecutive terms in Vietnam, so the Air Force worked around this by having Jim fly troops into the war zone from Okinawa. He did so repeatedly, many times braving heavy fire from the Viet Cong.
In 1971, while driving back from L.A. to Tucson, where they were newly stationed, Jim’s family was involved in a horrific auto accident, a head-on collision with drunk drivers. Enid, who was driving at the time, was killed instantly. All his daughters were injured. But Jim was physically unhurt.
In later years, Jim suffered from congestive heart failure, COPD, and emphysema. It seemed as if every Christmas season was heralded by the news that Jim had pneumonia or bronchitis again. He was hospitalized numerous times. On five or six occasions over the years, his alarmed family rushed to his “death bed” from various corners of the country, only to find that he’d somehow, miraculously, rallied. Just this last January, we celebrated his 91st birthday in his temporary nursing home room, with balloons and cake and cards and a room full of people who loved and admired this gentle, resilient man.
Death may have come for him at last, but Jim certainly gave it a run for its money!
He lived another forty-four years after Enid’s death. He later married Terry while living in Morgan Hill. After their divorce, he finally found happiness once again in a 12-year relationship with Doris Barbata, which sadly ended when she passed away in 2007.
We will remember Jim as a kind and generous man. Until their deaths, he always sent a portion of his earnings not just to his own parents, but to his deceased wife’s as well. Sometimes he was generous to a fault. But we always knew that he was the one man we could go to if we were in trouble or needed help, because we knew he would take care of things. Without judgment and without making us feel guilty or indebted. He never spoke of his generosity. He just doled it out without seeking repayment or praise. Growing up, whenever we met any of the people he worked with, they would always say the same thing to us: “Your father is a saint.”
We will miss our quiet, gentle, unassumingly heroic father. But we feel so blessed to have had him with us for as long as we did.
In addition to his three children, Jim is survived by his brother John O’Neal, sister Nancy Zorn, five grandchildren (Colin, Janie, Dustin, Kelton, and Calder) and five great grandchildren (Julian, Milla, Harper, Louis, and Weston.)
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