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ST. JOSEPH — The day Bruce Voges returned home to the United States after a nearly two-month voyage across the Atlantic Ocean on a once-scuttled World War II vessel was the most emotional day of his daughter’s life.
Michele Lawhead remembers seeing her father standing on the bow, tan and waving a red hanky as the ship docked before a crowd of thousands in Mobile, Ala., on Jan. 10, 2001.
At 74, he played an instrumental role among the crew of veterans who had committed themselves to restoring and retrieving the watercraft from Greece.
During the more than 4,000-mile expedition across open water, they survived a harrowing storm off Sicily and engines that repeatedly quit.
“While we were proud of them, we missed him; they made it home on an unbelievable, incredible voyage that you couldn’t believe they actually made it happen,” Lawhead said. “Dad never gave up on it.”
Mr. Voges, a proud two-war veteran, former Ogden bank president and boatswain’s mate of that unforgettable voyage, died June 3 at 98. Born and raised in Terre Haute, Ind., he was by all accounts an innate leader who left an indelible mark on every person who crossed his path.
“He was a patriot, loved his country, loved his family, loved everybody he met,” said his son, Tim Voges.
“I mean, I know there’s a lot of people who say good things about people, but I can’t think of anybody saying something bad about him.”
At just 17 in 1944, Mr. Voges lied about his age in order to enlist in the Navy.
He spent a significant portion of his service in the Pacific Theater on a landing ship tank (LST) — a large, 328-foot-long vessel Winston Churchill credited for determining the outcome of the war as they were designed to carry troops, vehicles and cargo straight to shore.
Tim Voges said his father was the first to land on Iwo Jima in February 1945, the site of a bloody five-week battle against the Imperial Japanese Forces and where Marines raised the American flag on Mount Suribachi in what became an iconic image of the war.
In a 2015 conversation with The News-Gazette, Mr. Voges recalled stepping foot on the island and his feet sinking 8 to 10 inches straight down into volcanic ash. He said his first day helping pilot an LST lasted close to 30 hours as he transported Marines in and wounded soldiers out.
“Hopefully, you’d get a break for a bologna sandwich and coffee,” he said.
Mr. Voges remained in the Navy for 21 years, serving on other ships in World War II and in the Korean War, before becoming an instructor at the Great Lakes Naval Base and retiring as a senior chief petty officer in 1964.
Back in Illinois, he worked as a computer specialist for Magnavox Co. in Urbana. But when the lab, which developed weapons for the Vietnam War, was preparing to relocate, Mr. Voges decided to stay put. He had met his wife, Katie, on a blind date in 1954, and, after uprooting many times for his military career, the couple had settled in Ogden with their daughter and two sons.
Mr. Voges only ever got his GED as he left high school early to join the military. But a neighbor who owned the First National Bank of Ogden soon offered him a job as a teller.
Even though it was only an entry-level position, Mr. Voges’ daughter Michele Lawhead said it was her father’s distinct integrity that caused the owner to hire him with the intention of grooming him to become the president of the branch.
“You know, how do you just pick somebody like that who worked at Magnavox and say, ‘I’d love you to come work at our bank, and we envision you becoming the president of the bank’?” Lawhead said. “I mean, that says a lot for his character.”
In the ensuing 17 years Mr. Voges spent at the bank, Tim Voges said his father would sometimes provide loans out of his own pocket to applicants who didn’t meet the bank’s lending requirements — and they’d always pay him back when they could.
“We’d be eating dinner or something, and there’d be a knock at the door, and he’d go out and meet somebody on the porch and come back, and we’d find out it was somebody he knew that he considered a friend that was maybe on hard times or something and just didn’t qualify,” Tim Voges said.
Notably, Mr. Voges wasn’t the only one who rose through the ranks. After starting off as a server at the Lincoln House Restaurant when it opened in Ogden in 1963, Katie eventually bought the local establishment from its owners with another couple. The husbands — Mr. Voges being one — then often worked behind the scenes, cleaning and doing maintenance at the eatery.
‘Where they wanted to be’
At age 72, Mr. Voges could have easily spent his later years resting on his laurels. But he felt called upon to relive his youth and retrieve something left behind in the wars he fought. In 2000, Voges and a group of other veterans traveled to Crete to repair a scuttled LST with the intention of piloting it back home to the U.S.
While the project was improbable from the start, the crew of 40-60 eventually dwindled down to around 28 veterans — with an average age of 74 years between them — as expensive repairs stretched on and authorities hesitated to allow the men to embark on the dangerous trek.
Meanwhile, Mr. Voges’ grandkids were at home, entering their senior year of high school and last season vying for a state football championship — a big deal for the sports-centered family who thought he was only going to be gone for six weeks.
“To leave your family once again on an unknown journey over to Greece and spend six months over there, while people are over here, their lives are going on, you’re losing family members and stuff, and he can’t be home for it, it was just again, his love of country and saying, ‘Hey, you know what, this is bigger than me and bigger than you, and this is going to be an ongoing museum or monument for sailors of this generation,’” Tim Voges said.
When the final crew arrived in Mobile, the veteran crew looked 20 years younger, Tim Voges remembered. Mr. Voges’ involvement with the LST-325 was then just beginning.
Jeff Kurtz, a lecturer at the UI Gies College of Business, recalled seeing national coverage of the homecoming and reaching out to the veteran to see if he needed any help repairing the ship once he learned Mr. Voges was local.
Kurtz then joined the Voges family and many others in the laborious effort to restore the ship into a floating museum. In 2003, one of Kurtz’s students, Park Paige, then created a campaign to market the vessel to port cities ahead of its public tour up the Mississippi and Ohio River.
The LST-325 continues to tour its history by its own fully operational engines to this day. It was on these early river junkets — and in particular one cruise around the Eastern coast to Boston — that Kurtz and Paige said they were lucky to witness Mr. Voges’ decades of Navy experience first-hand.
“There would be 20 World War II veterans in a group of 30 or 40 guys, and a bunch of Korean War vets in there as well, and when we would work, everyone would look up to Bruce. He was the leader, he was the one who had a vision,” Paige said. “If he wanted anything he wanted done, it was just our privilege to step up and be the one who got to do it.”
Voges’ style — unassuming, but knowledgeable and never domineering — is the kind of “servant leadership” Kurtz said he tries to teach to his business students. Even in his old age, Mr. Voges would work long hours and never asked someone to do a task he wouldn’t do himself.
Tim Voges was on that 10-day expedition to Boston and recalls that one night, near a cape off North Carolina, the crew was in the middle of a terrible storm that sent the ship diving under 30-foot-tall waves.
He wasn’t worried until he went below deck and saw his father and the other Navy veterans gathered and calmly staring down at the three welded joint sections in the floor — where they knew the ship would break apart if the sea proved too rough.
“All those old guys just took it in stride, and for them, if they were on that ship and something happened, they were where they wanted to be,” Tim Voges said.
‘Grand old man of Grand Avenue’
Mr. Voges’ affinity for people didn’t fade after Katie passed away in 2011 and he moved to St. Joseph. Neighbors got used to seeing him whenever the weather was warm, puffing on a cigar while parked in a chair outside his open garage, smiling and waving to anyone who passed.
Tim Voges said his father never knew a stranger. Mr. Voges was the “Grand old man of Grand Avenue” who handed out a silver dollar whenever a neighbor had a new baby, and he kept a bowl of water out to chat with the dog walkers who stopped by. Last year, he received more than 400 birthday cards.
And he stayed busy: Mr. Voges spent a week doing electrical work for a friend’s new house and carved nearly 150 wooden ribbons for breast cancer awareness, handing them out for free so long as people sent their money on to cancer research.
One St. Joseph resident, Alison Jones, frequently jogged past his house as she trained for the Boston Marathon in 2020. When the race was canceled due to the pandemic, she decided to compete remotely with a local course in the neighborhood.
Though she and Mr. Voges would wave to each other on her runs, the two had never formally met. So she’ll never forget it, Jones said, when she turned down his block on race day and saw him stand out of his chair, extending a small American flag in his hand for her to carry across the finish line.
The interaction left her in tears when she brought her family over to his house later that day, the first of many visits. Jones said she and her children came to see Mr. Voges as like their own grandfather.
“Everytime we visited, he always asked our kids what they were up to, what activities they were in, I mean he’s just a very caring individual,” Jones said. “I always would ask if he needed anything while I was there, if there was anything I could do for him, and he always said, ‘No.’ Up until the very end, he tried to be as independent as he could be.”
In a similar vein, Mr. Voges was confused when a flock of lawn flamingos painted red, white and blue were planted on his lawn one day in 2023.
It was a creative fundraising tactic facilitated in part by his daughter-in-law Tami Fruhling-Voges, the mayor of St. Joseph, seeking donations for students in the St. Joseph-Ogden High School Constitution team.
While participants typically just offer a donation and see the flamingos pass on, Mr. Voges was curious about what the students were learning about, said Marshall Schacht, the team’s coach. Mr. Voges vowed to supply a continuing sponsorship if the team visited the country’s war memorials when they competed in Washington, D.C.
Schacht added that when Mr. Voges met the students, he didn’t just want to share stories from his career, or let them pay their respects and move on — he sincerely seemed to admire and want to connect with them.
“The fact that he really respected them was really moving to these kids,” Schacht said. “That this man who has served his country and done so much over the years was very genuine in his appreciation for who they were and what they had to say.”
Every Saturday over the past five years, Mr. Voges’ three kids have gathered at his house, without fail, for a morning game of pinochle. Once all retired, they bumped up their games to almost every day, recording a close record of who won each of their more than 800 games.
That was where Mr. Voges was two days before he died: sitting at a table in his home, playing cards with his children. And afterward, he went outside to his usual post, enjoying the weather from a seat in his open garage.
“Talk about knowing how to live at the end of your life and take it all in,” Michele Lawhead said. “I’m so glad it was this time of year that he was still enjoying the open air.”
