Re: POW Camp Couldn't End USO Romance

Date: April 21, 2004

"POW camp, diverted letters couldn't end USO romance  

BY BYRON CRAWFORD, THE C-J

Steve Palas was a young soldier in tank training at Fort Knox in early 1951. Pat Osborne was a volunteer at the Louisville USO Club.

She was about the prettiest girl and the best dancer he had ever seen. He couldn't jitterbug or samba and could barely slow dance, but he waited patiently to slow dance with her between taps on the shoulder from other GIs who waited in line.

There would not be many dances before Palas would leave for Fort Hood, Texas, then ship out to Korea. But he had already proposed marriage by the time he left Fort Knox, and she already knew she was in love with the young corporal from Lumberton, N.C., who could not dance. She promised him she would wait.


Steve and Pat Palas met at the Louisville USO Club in 1951. They lost touch but eventually married in 1954.
The United States was in a bloody tug of war for control of Korea. Palas was a tank commander. The last note she got from him was a big, beautiful Valentine card.

"Then nothing. No letter or anything," she said. "From word going around, I had heard that he'd been shipped to Korea into the battle zone. I really thought he was dead, because I didn't hear anything from him for many months."

Much later she would learn that her mother, who did not want her to marry, had intercepted three of Palas' letters just before he was captured by the North Koreans. He, not having gotten an answer to his letters, assumed she had found someone else.

But true love waits.

"I WENT on with my life, but when I went to work at Greater Louisville (Federal Savings and Loan), I would excuse myself and go back to the bathroom and cry," she said. "My heart was broken."

Osborne was on a vacation trip out of state with her mother when Palas phoned her home one afternoon to ask her father where he could find her. Now 70 pounds lighter, he had been released from a prisoner of war camp and was finally back in the United States. He had waited in a Louisville cafe across the street until everyone left the bank after work but had not seen her.

Knowing she was still single made the wait much easier until she returned home.

The two married about one year later, on June 1, 1954, and will celebrate their 50th anniversary in a few weeks with their three children and four grandchildren.

They now both are retired from the insurance business, and both do volunteer work for several community organizations. Steve officiated high school football and baseball games for several years and now is an umpire in high school and college softball leagues.

The United Service Organization in Louisville, where the Palases met, became a model for the USO across the nation. During the 1960s it relocated from 824 S. Fourth St., now Spalding Auditorium, to Third and Chestnut streets, and during the 1990s moved to Louisville International Airport. The USO has modified its mission from entertaining troops to assisting military personnel who are traveling.

"Young people today could not possibly understand what it was like back then," said Doris Batliner, a retired Courier-Journal librarian who was a young singer and member of the volunteer Kentucky Colonelettes dance troupe that entertained service personnel at the USO in Louisville for several years.

"THE WHOLE country was doing something. It was a whole different mind-set and a whole different era," she recalled. "I think, more than anything else, the soldiers who came to the USO were starved for normal contact with people. They were just kids and didn't know what they were going into, and most of them I think were scared to death. If I had a nickel for every time I sang `I'll Be Seeing You,' I'd be a rich woman."

Steve and Pat Palas' song was Nat King Cole's "Unforgettable."

Their hope is to locate a white-over-baby-blue 1953 Chevy Bel-Air, like their first car, in time for their 50th anniversary — and if they are lucky, to find "Unforgettable" on the car radio for one golden moment of remembering.

"I guess we might ride around for a while," Steve said. "Or maybe just sit there and smooch."

Byron Crawford's column appears on the Metro page Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. You can reach him at (502) 582-4791 or e-mail him at bcrawford[at]courier-journal[dot]com

©2004 The Courier-Journal"