Hey everybody. I hope you all had a merry Christmas and are looking forward to the new year! I want to start 2026 off talking about a level of longevity in life that we rarely hear of.
I’m going to be talking about Johnny and Jerry Carroll. Johnny just celebrated his 101st birthday on Dec. 12. On April 18 of this year, he and Jerry will be married for 80 years. Then, Jerry will turn 100 on June 28, 2026. How do you get to 101, one might ask? Hard work and having a strong faith is the key, says Mr. Carroll.
Just ask yourself, how many folks do you know in their 100s, one being a World War II veteran, who have been married for 80 years? How did they make it to the present day?
Johnny met his future bride, Jerry, in Nashville while he was delivering groceries one day to her house. They met in 1942 and Johnny was drafted into the Army in 1943 during World War II. They got engaged just before he went off to war. He had gotten a six-month deferment from the Army so he could get his diploma at East High School in Nashville. But at that point, Johnny took a train to Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, and then he went on to Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. He went on to serve in the Pacific Theater.
Johnny left stateside from Camp Stoneman in California and he, along with nearly 1,000 troops, was on a ship that was a converted freight liner. At the bottom of the ship the men were stacked six bunks high. They shipped out for the Pacific Theater on Nov. 1, 1943, and would not land until Jan. 1 of 1944 in Humboldt Bay on New Guinea. The troops stayed on the water for another month, as the Japanese were still occupying some of the Philippine Islands. The American troops finally unloaded the ship in February 1944 at Humboldt Bay. Johnny’s adventures included getting to eat beans and sandwiches and nearly cutting off his finger opening up a can of beans.
The Philippines are comprised of thousands of islands. Johnny, an ammunition corporal, and his fellow troops set up on Leyte Island. He says they hauled sand 24 hours a day, shoveling sand onto the beach to help build the land up so they could put a base there. His battery of soldiers were mainly used to operate anti-aircraft guns. Once they got everything set up, the colonel came in and told the soldiers to forget everything they knew about the 90 mm guns, because they had gotten brand new 120 mm guns that could reach targets up to 16 miles away. The shells weighed 100 pounds.
Johnny tells me the story of being in Manila when the bomb was dropped in Japan, in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He also was in Manila when general Douglas MacArthur walked right by him to give a speech at the university of Santo Tomas in 1945. The Japanese had used the university as a prison, while the United States had used it as a hospital during the war.
Johnny Carroll made it home safely in 1946 and made Jerry his bride. They borrowed her dad’s car and drove to Murfreesboro, where they had their honeymoon at the James K. Polk hotel (located at the corner of Spring Street and East Main Street, where the Truist Bank building is today). Johnny became a milkman for Jersey Farms. He was actually my parents’ milkman for years, and I remember him from my childhood. The couple had three children: Betty, David and Alan.
The whole family got together for Johnny’s 101st birthday on Dec. 12. I asked him to tell me some stories about what had changed over the years. He told me his mother had lived in Brooklyn, New York City, and she took him to the World’s Fair in 1936. He got to see things of the future like microwaves and wireless telephones. He remembers horse-drawn wagons, the iceman and milkman, and saw the beginnings of radio, television, computers and cellphones. Basically, he saw everything from the horse and buggy age all the way up to the jet age. In 1936 he saw a projection TV for the first time. He also got to see the future superhighway system take shape, along with the development of subdivisions and commercial developments that spun off from the superhighways. This would all take place in the 1950s after President Eisenhower put in the Interstate Commerce Act to build all of the superhighways.
Later in life, Johnny got to attend the 1982 World’s Fair in Knoxville.
It’s very rare these days to know somebody who has survived World War II, is over 100 years old and, come April, will have been married to the same person for 80 years. Wow! Johnny and Jerry act nothing like a centenarian-plus-one and a soon-to-be-centenarian at all. The Carrolls are both full of energy and living active lives in a home on Elliott Drive in Murfreesboro. Johnny still works out with his weights in the morning. I hope we can all have the energy that these two have when we reach our advanced years.
I hope everybody has a wonderful and prosperous new year. Remember to always go out and do something nice for somebody. God bless!
By the way, during the interview, I found out Mrs. Carroll and my mother are Beta Sigma Phi sorority sisters. That’s a story for another time. It’s a small world, after all.
