His and Hers: Yuma veteran recalls time during service

Glenn J. Gifford knew about second chances.

While out at sea during World War II, the impact from a torpedo blew the young sailor off his ship. Glenn was briefly thought to be “missing in action.” But out of a group of sailors, he was the lone survivor.

Surprisingly, his wife of 38 years never knew of this brush with death. She knew Glenn injured his eye in combat, which needed surgery years later. One of his war buddies told the harrowing story at Glenn’s funeral.

Glenn, who went on to become a Navy chief, died Oct. 11 after a long illness. He was 84.

“He was proud of the Navy and his service,” his stepson Roy Grubbs said, explaining why his stepfather may have omitted such an exciting detail from his career. “Like a lot of veterans he didn’t talk about a lot of things” pertaining to the war.

Glenn joined the Navy at 17, after Pearl Harbor. He served aboard a minesweeper, a ship assigned the dangerous task of locating underwater explosives. On a historic note, he and other crewmembers witnessed the formal Japanese surrender aboard the USS Missouri, his wife said.

Clarinda Gifford sat at her dining room table days after her husband’s funeral. Each time she walks by her husband’s chair in the living room she thinks of him. Nearly four decades of marriage will do that.

“I can be thankful we always had good times and shared life until the end,” she said.

Veterans Day was special to them both.

“We’d put our hats on,” she said. “It would bother him to go through Yuma and see so few flags up.”

Clarinda, too, is a veteran, having served in the Women’s Army Corps from 1951-53. The WAC, as it was called, was the women’s branch of the Army until it disbanded in 1978.

“I was proud I was a veteran and could do something for my country,” she said.

Clarinda joined while in her early 20s, after being laid off from a factory job in Rochester, N.Y. The message “Uncle Sam Wants You” was tempting to the unemployed woman looking for adventure. She walked into the recruiter’s office and said “I want to see the world.”

She ended up in Tokyo, Japan, learning a new language and befriending the local children.

“I carried top-secret folders from one place to another,” she said. Some of those documents she personally delivered to Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

“He was a wonderful fellow, nice to everyone,” she said.

Clarinda met her first husband overseas. She soon left the military and settled into domestic life, but the couple divorced while their children were still little.

As a single mom, she was thankful her veteran status landed her a job at the Post Office, but she still struggled to make ends meet.

Clarinda had been single for 11 years and living in California when she spotted a neatly groomed man dining alone in a restaurant one afternoon. His name was Glenn. He was also divorced. They struck up a conversation.

Months later they married, neither wanting to pass up a second chance at love.

The couple traveled a lot. A framed picture from the early '80s shows the couple arm-in-arm in Hawaii, Glenn wearing a floral shirt that matches Clarinda’s dress.

He used to regret they hadn’t met sooner, she said. Still, Clarinda is grateful for the time they spent together.

“We had 38 years of a good marriage,” she said. “We enjoyed each and every day.”

Glenn, after retiring from the Navy, moved to Yuma and worked as a fuel supervisor for Marine Corps Air Station until 1992.

“He said everything he learned he learned in the Navy, that it gave him a good job for the rest of his life,” Clarinda said.

Glenn’s health deteriorated in recent years. He suffered from a number of illnesses, including Alzheimer's, but the disease had not progressed to the point he no longer remembered her, Clarinda said.

Glenn spent his last two months at Life Care Center in Yuma. His weight dwindled from 240 to 186 pounds. Clarinda visited daily, usually spending all day with him.

Shortly before his death she told him she loved him. He said he loved her, too.

In his final hours, “I sat there with my hand in his,” she said.

He wasn’t able to speak anymore, but she hoped he felt her presence.

“I’d tell him, ‘It’s all right. I’m here with you. I’m going to be (here) ‘til the end.’”

And at the end, Clarinda watched as they draped the American flag over her husband’s body.

"Glenn would have been proud of that,” she said.