Veteran of the Month – Theodore R. Marolda

Name: Theodore R. Marolda

Place of Birth: Winsted CT

Date of Birth: May 6, 1923

Military Branch of Service: United States Marine Corps

Enlisted, Commissioned, or drafted?: Enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor

Service Dates: Sworn in Jan 3, 1942 – Discharged Jan, 1946

Highest Rank: Gunnery Sergeant (then called Tech Sergeant)

Military Job: Amphibian Trackers

Duties: Transport men and material ship to shore during landings then resupply and back up infantry once ashore.

Unit, Division, Battalion, Group, Ship, Etc. (Please do not abbreviate): A Company, First Amphibian Tractor Battalion, First Marine Division, Fleet Marine Force
War, Operation, or Conflict served in: World War II

Locations of Service: South Pacific Theater of Operations

Battles/Campaigns: Guadalcanal (landed on day one of the first American offensive operation of WW11), New Guinea and Cape Gloucester (earned four battle stars)

Decorations: Four Battle stars, Unit Presidential Citation

Combat or service-related injuries: Concussion (bomb explosion during air raid on Guadalcanal), Malaria (multiple times) Jaundice.

Family info (spouse, children?): Wife Margret Marolda (Carol) deceased 5 years, married 65 years. Five Children, three sons and two daughters (Dr. Theodore Marolda DDS, Lawrence Marolda, David Marolda, Margret Halloran and Carol Nardi). Eleven Grand children and two great grandchildren.

Volunteer work:

• Raised money for the Catholic Church.
• Raised money for the new catholic school.
• Led the effort to raise money for the town’s World War II memorial and did the dedication of the completed monument.
• Involved in the boy scouts.
• President of the Kiwanis club for multiple years.
• Organized and ran the annual Kiwanis tag sail to raise money for scholarships for 25 years. Helped finish construction of a roof for a fellow member of the Marine Corps league when the one armed Korean war veteran injured his good arm while building his roof.
• Chaired the catholic schools annual snow ball committee (multiple times) and provided much of the materials for decorations and donated his and his employees labor to the effort.
• Board member of the Winsted savings bank. Board member of the Salvation Army. Chairman of the board for the Winsted town bicentennial committee (1972) and the same for the US bicentennial 1n 1976 (also donated the labor of his employees and children to make these events happen).
• Active member of the Elks Club, the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the Marine Corps League.
• Two-time president of the Chamber of Commerce (including during the great flood of 1955 and the ensuing rebuilding effort.
• Chaired the committee for the towns annual Laurel Festival at least five times (again donating the labor of his employees and children).
• Donated generously to virtually every local fund raising effort for over forty years.
• Spoke about the war and the great depression at the Gilbert school and at Ms. Porters in Farmington.

Bio/Narrative/memorable events (information provided by Marolda’s son):

As you may be begging to gather from reading the previous section my father’s biography reads like a novel about a uniquely American success story.

My father was born in 1923 and came of age during the great depression. He was the youngest of twelve children in a relatively poor family headed by Italian immigrant parents.

When his father had a stroke, when he was 16, my father left school to go to work and help support the family. By then it was already obvious to family and friends that he was going to be somebody.

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor my father enlisted in the Marine Corps the next day. At his request he was actually inducted a few weeks later after the holidays (he was 18 years old).

Within months he and two regiments the First Marine division were on their way to the Solomon islands, after abbreviated training. They landed on Guadalcanal in early August 1942. It was the first US offensive action of WWII, the first D-Day of the war. The Japanese, who until that time had gone from victory to victory, reacted violently. The Japanese navy drove the US navy from the waters around Guadalcanal before the US supply ships were done unloading the Marine’s equipment and most of their food. The men would have starved but for captured Japanese rations.

What followed was a still legendary six-month land, air and sea battle. At one point the military was going to abandon the effort to support the forces on the island and leave the men to their fate. It took the direct intervention of President Roosevelt to save them (he did not believe that the morale of the country could stand another defeat).

My father and his comrades suffered from malnutrition, malaria and a sense of abandonment. For the first months after the landing the Japanese had control of the air and the sea. Consequently they were able to bomb and shell the Marines at will, including the most severe bombardment of the entire war on any front when a number of Japanese battle ships with barges of spare 14 inch shells dropped over a thousand 14 inch shells onto the American positions during a single evening. My father spent that night hugging the ground as he and his group were burying ammunition stores and arrived back to late to dig in before the shells began to hit.

The Japanese made several major attempts to recapture the Island. All were beaten off with heavy fighting and casualties. My father had malaria and jaundice. He has a ringing in his ears to this day from a bomb that killed two of his friends who were a split second behind him as they all dove for a bunker during an air raid.

He went on to two more landings on New Guinea and Cape Gloucester before returning to California in January of 1945 after more than two and a half years in the pacific. When he left the Corps in January of 1946 he was a Gunnery Sergeant and the Marines (at a time when the force was releasing men by the hundreds of thousands) offered to make him a Master Sergeant if he would reenlist. As he had married my mother the previous January he declined.

My mother, the former Margret Carol, was the girl he had been seeing since he was 15 and she was 14. He had married the most beautiful woman in town. She was so remarkably attractive that my high school friends admitted to me that they used to come over to my house to stare at my mom (this was when she was in her early fifties). They were together and very obviously in love until her death in 2009, shortly before their 65th anniversary. When, later in life she had developed Alzheimer’s disease my father cared for her himself with very little assistance. He was able to keep her at home until the final three days of her life. He has a will of iron.

Upon his return to Winsted in 1946 he and his brother Ed (WWII veteran US Army) started Winsted Floor Covering and employed a third brother, Victor (WWII veteran US Navy). For the first year and a half they were in business my father also worked third shift at the brass mill he had worked at before the war. By then he had two sons. Within a few years they were able to buy the Winsted furniture company. They combined the furniture store with the floor covering business into what was then the largest retail establishment in Litchfield County. He ran the business for 35 years until his retirement in 1985.

My father was a major civic leader in Winsted and chaired, at one time or another, every committee worth mentioning in town, President of the Chamber of Commerce etc. He is extremely well respected and the example of his WWII service directly lead a good number of the friends of his children to emulate him and enlist in the service, most in the Marine Corps.

Along the way he fathered a third boy and two daughters. He was extremely successful and was able to help all five of his children with college and at multiple other points in their lives. He has eleven grandchildren and two great grandchildren and is a towering figure and example in their lives and has, at times, provided assistance with their educations.

In 2009, in what is likely the last significant act of his long civic career, he and his two brothers were parade marshals of the Memorial Day parade. They appeared in full uniform and represented WWII vets of all three branches of the service. My father’s uniform was his actual WWII Marine dress greens.

Today he is 92 and more active than most men 15 or 20 years his junior. He is an avid reader of history and as smart as a whip. He lives independently in the same eight-room house he has lived in for the last 65 years. A few months ago Ralph Nader was in town for an event at the Winsted historical society. He spent most of the evening speaking to my father who was a friend and contemporary of his parents in Winsted (thankfully they did not talk politics as they would not agree on much).

He did pretty well for a poor Italian kid with a ninth grade education.