By Berry Tramel
The Oklahoman
Cleta Niemann, 90 years young, still remembers the last time she saw her brother-in-law, Waddy Young.
Sixty-five years have passed, and Niemann still recalls their last exchange, in Salina, Kan., where Young was stationed in the U.S. Army before shipping out.
"That morning I told him goodbye,” Niemann said. "‘Be sure and do this up right, so the children won't have to go.' ”
Young told her not to worry, that he felt like the war was over, but "there were things to do before the world was right.”
The world has not been right for Waddy Young's family since Jan. 9, 1945, when his B-29 was shot down near Tokyo.
"A kind, dear young man,” Niemann said.
Young will be inducted into the Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame on Aug. 20, when he also will receive the Bob Kalsu Freedom Award.
That's really sort of backward. Somewhere along the line, the late Kalsu should have been given the Waddy Young Freedom Award.
They are two-of-a-kind. OU football stars who lost their lives in war.
Kalsu, chances are, you know quite a bit about. Del City boy. OU All-American in 1967. Buffalo Bills rookie of the year in '68. Killed in Vietnam in 1970. Memoralized by a riveting Sports Illustrated story a few years ago.
Kalsu's story remains alive to Oklahomans, thanks in no small part to the Jim Thorpe Association, which runs the Hall of Fame.
Young, chances are, you know little about. Ponca City boy. OU all-American in 1938. Played two seasons with the NFL Brooklyn Dodgers. Killed at sea in 1945.
Young was quite the athlete. Not just a great end on Tom Stidham's 1938 Orange Bowl team, but a wrestler for the Sooners and the campus heavyweight boxing champ.
Quite the war hero, too. Accumulated more than 9,000 combat hours and commended for distinguished service.
Young was assigned to B-29 duty in the Pacific. His plane, Waddy's Wagon, was part of the historic first Tokyo mission from Saipan in November 1944.
Two months later, as the formation of B-29s returned to base, one badly damaged plane lost speed and altitude while still under attack.
Waddy's Wagon dropped back to help. His last radio transmission: "We are OK.”
The Army notified Young's mother in Ponca City that Waddy was missing, and she called her other son, Francis, husband of Cleta Niemann and working in Arkansas at a gunpowder plant.
"We were hoping he would be found, but tragically, he wasn't,” Niemann said.
"He was like a brother to me. Waddy was always very close to us.
"A very special person. Very, very outgoing. Always concerned with other people. Right there if you need him.”
Waddy Young has been gone 62 years. Wars have come and gone, claiming the lives of other good men, Bob Kalsu included.
"I'm just sorry that my children were too young to remember him,” Cleta Niemann says of Waddy Young. "He's been gone from our lives for many years, but he never was forgotten.”
