Handbook N-P - Fulton County Public Library

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Finally, they came to a vehicle road, where he hailed down an army convoy. A soldier
got out of a four-wheel-drive weapons carrier and sat on the hood with a Tommy gun on his lap so
the family could be transported to a naval logistics compound, but the convoy commander would
not take Tanny.
“The thin, exhausted thing just ran and ran and ran after us,” Jim Oliver recalls. “Becky
cried big tears for a long time. We deserted him, our loyal dog who guarded Mama and all four of
us kids throughout the War, and he didn’t understand why we did. And I still don’t know why,
after these many decades. No one knows what happened to our loyal Tanny.”
When the Eighth army mo ved to Japan, Reece Oliver served with the occupation forces
in Seoul, Korea, to help set elementary school standards, then was reassigned to the Philippines
where he served for a few months with the military police in central Luzon, which had become a
fertile territory for incipient communist infiltration.
Since his work with the Philippine public school system had ended when the Japanese
closed all schools at the beginning of World War II, he retired from the army to begin a third
career as branch manager of the Philippine Alien Property Administration for Mindanao and Sulu,
which had headquarters in Davao City.
After the alien property in that part of the country was liquidated in 1949, he and his wife
decided he would return to Indiana with the three oldest children so they could receive good
educations while he worked to secure her entry into the country as a non-quota immigrant.
The four moved to his old home near Akron and, his days as a world-traveler and
adventurer ended, he worked to improve the farm until the family was again reunited.
After his wife and youngest son rejoined them, he taught management classes at various
military installations. When Flora Oliver returned to the Philippines to conclude family business,
he and the children remained in Akron where he assumed the role of Mr. Mom, willing to shuttle
his sons to Scout meetings or to recite Kipling, Shelley or Tennyson to them.
And he counseled them. Able to trace his ancestry to Revolutionary War veteran Samuel
Lane, who moved to Akron only a few years after the town was settled, he had returned to Akron
with four children whose brown skin and slightly oriental looks opened them to racial slurs and
made them feel ostracized when a local church prayed the Philippines could be Christianized.
They had prayed daily with their mother during those long years of hiding in the jungle,
and they felt neither heathen nor different.
“I did not survive a war to listen to bigots,” Jim Oliver complained to his father after a
teacher lectured his class about miscegenation and a supervisor lambasted him for his brown skin.
“The best way to fight public discrimination,” Reece Oliver replied, “is to silently go
about improving yourself. Get an education, achieve goals, be certified, garner trophies, then your
accomplishments will be so evident that people will be embarrassed to openly discriminate against
you.”
His family was again reunited when Reece Oliver retired from Bunker Hill Air Force
Base in 1959. In 1961, while working on his family’s farm, he suffered a crippling stroke that led
to his death in 1966.
Although he received the Bronze Star, ribbons for his guerrilla and intelligence work and
would, were he living, be authorized to wear a host of commemorative medals, Reece Oliver
remains a shadow hero who left no memoirs and had no movies made about his life. He simply
lived his life one close call at a time.
LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON
By Ann Allen
The article about Reece Oliver would have been impossible to write without the
assistance of his son, Jim, who saved the picture post cards his father wrote home, pieced together
time lines and contacted his siblings, all Akron High School graduates.
Bob, a former speech therapist now retired from the IRS, lives in Littleton, CO.