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Friends honor veteran from Woodstock at Wyo. memorial
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By Sally Voth -- svoth@nvdaily.com
WOODSTOCK -- Though he's never set foot in Wyoming, Woodstock native Lee Gochenour has made his mark in the Cowboy State.
A paver bearing his name, rank and status as a World War II veteran was placed at the recently dedicated State of Wyoming World War II Memorial Monument in Cody, Wyo.
Four of Gochenour's friends were behind the honor, which took the 89-year-old Woodstock native by surprise.
"I had no idea," Gochenour said this week. "This thing arrived in the mail one day, and I didn't even know. It made tears come to my eyes almost. These four guys did that."
Gochenour met Thomas Knapp, of Maryland, McLean resident Dennis Lucey, Colorado resident Fred Moore, and Bill Finefield in the 1980s when Finefield hired him as an automatic data processing facilities security representative at the Office of Telecommunications and Information Systems at the Defense General Supply Center in Richmond.
He was 62 at the time.
"I was impressed with him from the day he walked through the door," Finefield said. "The admiral called me over and said I shouldn't hire him. I said, 'Why, sir?'"
The admiral's response was Gochenour was too old and would probably retire in five years.
"My response was, 'So what -- look what we get for five years of service,'" Finefield said.
He was told the decision was up to him.
"I said, 'Then, he's hired,'" Finefield recalled. "He was an unbelievable personality, hard worker, enthusiastic, never let anything get in his way."
Gochenour was instrumental in renovating and expanding the computer room. Finefield remembered a weekend when all the computer equipment had to be moved from one side of the room to the other. He asked where Gochenour, at this point in his late 60s, was.
"They said, 'He's under the floor,'" Finefield said. "I started pulling up floor panels looking for him. I found him and he was crawling around under the floor. He was towing a couple cables. I said, 'What in the hell are you doing?' He gave me a sheepish grin and never answered me. He had been there 14 hours."
Finefield told Gochenour to go home, and Finefield also went home.
"I got to the house, and I called back [the office], and he answered the phone," Finefield said. "He's a very, very interesting character and a very dedicated individual. I never met anybody like him."
Highly regarded throughout the Defense Logistics Agency and the companies it works with, Gochenour has been awarded the Meritorious Civilian Service Award, Finefield said.
"I just can't tell you how much he's respected and admired by people who knew him in the federal service and the various big companies that we worked with," he said.
That includes Lucey, who was a lead sales rep for StorageTek.
"You've got a great person in Lee Gochenour," Lucey said in a Monday phone interview. "Here's a guy, that even though he's well into his 80s, he acts and thinks like a 25-year-old. He's got that young approach to life. He's probably one of the most enthusiastic people I've ever met in my life. He's a can-do guy."
Gochenour stayed with the DGSC until he was 77. But it's for his service in the U.S. Army Air Force during World War II and beyond for which his friends honored him.
Finefield said Cody, the town where he retired to, has an active Veterans of Foreign Wars post. On Aug. 15, a World War II memorial was dedicated at a veterans park, and he, Lucey, Knapp and Moore decided to buy a walkway paver in tribute to Gochenour.
After graduating from Massanutten Military Academy and the University of Wisconsin, Gochenour shipped overseas in 1942 with the 116th Infantry. He flew B-17s over Germany with the Eighth Air Force.
"Everybody's lives depended on one another," Gochenour said.
He did not elaborate much more on his wartime experiences.
"We was just up there doing what we had to do," Gochenour explained.
After the war, he flew C-54s in the Berlin Airlift, and remained in the Air Force for 31 years -- active for eight of those years -- retiring as a lieutenant colonel. He spent much of his career working for the government.
"I've been in computers since 1950," said Gochenour, who's been back in Woodstock for 10 years. "I wrote a lot of software for IBM. I enjoyed [government work]. I worked with some of the finest people you ever could work for."
He stays in frequent contact with Lucey, Knapp, Finefield and Moore, and looks forward to seeing his paver.
"I hope to get out there, maybe next year, the good Lord willing," Gochenour said.
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