By Jason Klaiber
Staff Writer
For several decades, Elton Fairbank had not publicly talked about his time in the United States Navy during World War II.
Recently, however, he began glancing through his scrapbooks.
Once late April rolled around, he participated in Honor Flight Syracuse’s 13th mission to Washington D.C., a trip to the national memorials dedicated to military veterans.
Just this past month, Syracuse University recognized Fairbank as the SEFCU Hometown Hero at its football game against the College of the Holy Cross.
And now, on Saturday, Nov. 9, he will be one of two grand marshals for the 2019 CNY Veterans Parade and Expo.
“Everything is sort of being regenerated here just in the last year or so,” Fairbank said.
Lisa Kennedy — the events team leader for Honor Flight Syracuse and Fairbank’s personal guardian around the nation’s capital during that April trip — will be the other marshal for the noon parade at the New York State Fairgrounds.
Currently 93 years old, Fairbank enlisted as a Seaman First Class, Gunner’s Mate Striker in 1944, immediately after graduating from Jamestown High School.
Soon he found himself in the Pacific Theater aboard the USS Saint Paul, a battle star-awarded heavy cruiser known presently to have fired more rounds of ammunition than any other in history.
During his service on the Saint Paul, Fairbank traveled through the Panama Canal on the way to Pearl Harbor.
“It was quite an ordeal for a big war ship at that time to go through the canal,” he said. “We even had to take things off the ship to fit into the locks.”
The ship also joined Adm. William Halsey’s Third Fleet, a naval force formed by about 200 vessels.
Fairbank’s ship fired the final hostile rounds before Japan’s surrender, the formal signage of which he observed through binoculars while anchored less than a quarter of a mile off the stern of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.
Fairbank’s brothers Bill and Sherman also served in the Navy during World War II.
Before them, their father fought in World War I. After them, the youngest son Perry joined the Navy during the Korean War.
“We were a very patriotic family, and I felt it was my duty and my privilege to serve this country,” Fairbank said.
Returning home from the war, Fairbank said he met his family members at a bus station without any “fanfare.”
“Being in the war and everything was a thing of the past, and I got on with my life, as I think we all did,” he said.
Fairbank eventually attended Brockport State on the G.I. Bill, earning a bachelor’s degree in health and physical education in 1950.
In 1954, after teaching and coaching in Hancock, New York, he completed graduate work at Syracuse University.
The next year, he set off on a career with the American Red Cross, beginning by teaching first aid classes and later becoming the executive director and division manager of the Central New York division.
Fairbank retired from the Red Cross in 1981 and spent the following eight years as a faculty member and chairman for Syracuse University’s health and physical education department.
A father to three children, one of whom has passed away, Fairbank lived in LaFayette for 50 years before moving to Manlius with his wife Alice two years ago.
