‘It was my duty to my country’: Life of 107-year-old Santa Rosa vet has spanned both world wars

Al Maggini was no kid the last time a global war erupted amid ruthless aggression and signs of wholesale atrocity.

The native of San Francisco was 26 years old, married and cultivating a career when the U.S. answered the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor by declaring war on the Empire of Japan and Nazi Germany.

Owing to his marital status, Maggini was not subject to the draft. But he told his wife, Helen, that if he did not enlist, “I knew I would feel horrible the rest of my life.”

“Helen never said one word about it,” he recalls. “It was my duty to my country. She knew I had to go.”

Maggini joined the U.S. Army Air Corps and trained as a pilot before switching to navigator. Based in England and assigned to a B-17 Flying Fortress bomber, he lost friends and at times wondered if his time was up. On nearly all of his 35 missions, anti-aircraft flak exploded all around him over Germany and its military assets in occupied Europe.

On this Veterans Day, Maggini plans to stay home in Santa Rosa and enjoy a quiet Friday that will belie his status as a genuine and unique Sonoma County superstar.

Remarkably vibrant

The retired stockbroker is, for one thing, remarkably vibrant at 107 years of age. He’s no longer driving a car, instead getting from Point A to B in a golf cart or relying on rides from friends or kin, but for a time past age 100 he still zipped about in a sexy, black Porsche Carrera GTS.

In the thick of the war in 1944, Maggini was a 29-year-old lieutenant who seemed an old guy to fellow GIs in their teens and early 20s. Today, he’s among the most senior of the country’s rapidly diminishing corps of World War II veterans.

According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, of the 16 million Americans who served in the war, only about 167,000 — a little more than 1% — are still alive. The youngest were about 18 when the war ended in 1945, and today are 95 or not far from it.

Just last January, the Louisiana man believed to be America’s oldest World War II veteran, Laurence Brooks, died at age 112. Brooks’ apparent successor as the longest-living warrior, Ezra Hill of Maryland, died Oct. 4 at 111.

Today the country’s oldest vet is believed to be former Beringer Winery employee Raymond Monroy of St. Helena in Napa County. Monroy, who was 30 when he enlisted in World War II and became an aircraft mechanic at bases in the Pacific, turned 110 last May.

For Al Maggini to be in the company of Monroy and other century-old American vets is but one distinction for a man whom combat duty was merely the beginning of a life of service.

The three-story Albert Maggini Hall on the main campus of Santa Rosa Junior College was named in tribute to the leadership and vision he exhibited through his record 33 years on the school’s board of trustees.

As a member for more than six decades of the charitable foundation of what is now Providence Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital, he’s credited with attracting more than $200 million to the health care institution’s mission.

Maggini was a force, too, on the board of the Hanna Boys Center in Sonoma Valley. He’s often said he enjoys soliciting dollars for worthwhile local organizations, and he regards community service and philanthropy as imperative.

He has for decades been roundly thanked and honored and celebrated by grateful organizations, elected officials and individuals from throughout Sonoma County and beyond.

A framed letter at his home enshrines one of his proudest moments: In 1997, Maggini was stepping back from a half-century of full-time work as a stockbroker. Arthur Levitt, then chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, cited him by name in a speech as exemplifying the highest standards of the profession.

VIP treatment

As has become the norm, friends and admirers from multiple facets of Maggini’s exceptionally full life treated him to an entire series of parties when he turned 107 on Sept. 15.

In recent years, the World War II aviator has received VIP treatment at veterans observances hosted by groups that include the Pacific Coast Air Museum and Santa Rosa’s Rotary and Kiwanis clubs. Especially memorable was what happened to Maggini on Veterans Day of 2020.

He sat buckled just behind the pilot and co-pilot as a splendidly restored 1942 transport plane, The Spirit of Benovia, rumbled down a runway at the Charles M. Schulz-Sonoma County Airport. The aircraft, owned by Benovia Winery founders Joe Anderson and Mary Dewane, was one of the converted, twin-engine Boeing DC-3 airliners that proved indispensable to the Allies in World War II, moving vast numbers of paratroopers and tons of cargo, towing gliders and evacuating casualties.

In September 2021, Maggini peered skyward as vintage military planes buzzed his 106th birthday party hosted at the county airport by the owners of Sonoma Jet Center. One speaker, Windsor Mayor Sam Salmon, told Maggini, “You’re not a hard act to follow. You’re an impossible act to follow!”

Among the leading traits of the combat veteran, successful stockbroker, extraordinary community volunteer-philanthropist and fundraiser, and formerly avid golfer, skier and runner: He’s bowtie-dapper, bright, modest, funny, a classic Greatest Generation gentleman.

Ask Maggini the secret of his remarkable longevity and he might well respond, "I'm not sure I can credit the martinis, but they didn't hurt!"

He knew he had to enlist

The first World War was spreading, though the U.S. had yet to join, when Maggini was born in San Francisco on Sept. 5, 1915. The eldest of three sons of Albert and Alice Maggini, he went to work straight after graduation from St. Ignatius High School in 1933 because the Great Depression was on and his dad’s death at just 39 left him the man of the family.

Maggini became a financial-district documents runner for the equities brokerage firm Mitchum & Tully. He was working his way up when he and Helen Ryan, who’d met on a blind date, married in 1939.

Just two years later, Imperial Japan’s surprise attack on American ships and forces in and around Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor drew the U.S. abruptly into World War II. Some months later, in 1942, Maggini’s younger brothers, both still single, had joined the fight and he knew he, too, had to enlist.

He’ll tell you he wasn’t at all drawn to slogging about on battlefields as a soldier or Marine and eating canned rations, or being a seaman and sleeping on a bunk stacked in the belly of a ship.

“I knew I wanted to fly,” he said, “because I knew I didn’t want the other two options.”

He enlisted in ’42 in the U.S. Army Air Corps, predecessor to the Air Force. He commenced pilot training, soon coming to sense that he was no Jimmy Doolittle. He felt it was taking a bit too long for him to master the skills essential to assuring that he’d outfly his foes.

High-performance flying, he said, “Did not come to me right away.”

In time, an instructor told him he could indeed become a bomber pilot. But America just then had enough pilots and was short on the navigators responsible for plotting a precise route to a target, and then the route back to base.

Maggini was happy to switch to navigating, a science he came to relish.

A navigator, he said, “is what I should have been in the first place.” Fact is, he added, “I was a damned good navigator.”

Fighting flak

He was assigned in 1944 to the 8th Air Force, 351st Bomb Group, 509th Squadron, which flew missions against Hitler’s Germany from a base in Polebrook, England, north of London. Maggini became part of the 10-man crew of a Boeing B-17, an imposing, four-engine war machine capable of carrying more than 4,000 pounds of bombs and 13 aerial-combat machine guns.

As formidable as the high-altitude, long-distance Flying Fortress was, it was vulnerable to being shot down by the German fighter planes and anti-aircraft artillery placements responsible for defending the strategic bombing targets: oil refineries, factories manufacturing aircraft, tanks, munitions and such, strategic bridges and railroads, power plants, airfields, submarine installations and ordnance depots.

Maggini recalls that by 1944, fighter planes with Germany’s air force, the Luftwaffe, had been largely vanquished by the Allies and outperformed by the North American P-51 Mustang fighters that escorted the B-17s.

But every bomb crew dreaded flak, the deadly shards of metal shot from German anti-aircraft cannons.

Maggini and every surviving B-17 crewman harbored grim memories of bombers in their formations bursting into flame or tumbling out of the sky after being struck. On nearly every mission Maggini flew, his heart pounded as anti-aircraft projectiles exploded into fragments capable of ripping through airplanes and bodies.

He said, “All you did was look out the window and you saw the burst, and you wondered after the burst if you were going to get hit.” His plane was hit, but never badly enough to bring it down.

His head shook in wonder as he said, “Not one guy in our airplane ever got hit. We were very, very lucky.”

Many of his fellow aviators were not. “We lost 23% percent of the people we sent in,” he said.

Historical accounts of the 351st Bomb Group note that of the 279 B-17s that flew out of Polebrook from 1943 through the end of the war, 124 — 44%— were lost in combat.

“I think often of how fortunate I was,” Maggini said.

At war’s end, he returned home to Helen and to his career as a stockbroker. The Magginis moved to Sonoma in 1947 and had a home built there. In 1978, Al founded the Santa Rosa office of Merrill Lynch.

He and Helen had been married 63 years when she died in 2002.

Today, Al Maggini is one of a relative handful of people on Earth whose lives span the two world wars that brought the deaths of perhaps 100 million people and also incomprehensible destruction, disruption and misery.

With missiles now flying and relations among superpowers frayed, Veterans Day 2022 finds Sonoma County’s longest-living vet hoping, in the way that only someone who’s seen and heard, felt, tasted and smelled global-scale killing and ruination can hope, that he won’t live to behold World War III — nor will anyone else, ever.

Chris Smith is a retired Press Democrat reporter and columnist. You can contact him at csmith54@sonic.net.