Carbondale resident, 10th Mountain Division vet John Tripp celebrates a century
The Sopris Sun
Will Grandbois photo
John Tripp never wanted to be 100, and he thinks that may be why he reached that milestone this week.
“It’s reverse psychology,” he quipped. “The lord doesn’t want me, the devil doesn’t want me, so you’re stuck here with me in purgatory.”
He acknowledged that his wife, Rene, who he lost after two years of declining health in 2006, might have had something to do with it.
“She was an unbelievable lady,” he said.
The marriage came 72 years earlier, between deployments in 1944. His father told him at the time that “any damn fool who takes on two battles at once I have no sympathy for whatsoever.”
Many of Tripp’s stories come back to World War II in the end, but the tale actually starts in Waterbury, Connecticut, where he was born on July 28, 1919.
Republished in the Post Independent by permission. Read more at the Sopris Sun.
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