By Cathy Salustri

Bill O’Connor was ready to die in September. I saw him on a bay cruise that left from St. Pete Beach, and he had come straight from a doctor’s appointment where his doctors told him he had prostate cancer as well as lower bowel cancer.
Beach locals know the tall, gentle, joking man in the motorized scooter only as “Mr. Bill.” Mr. Bill lives across the street from the Dolphin Landings boat docks, and on the first and last Wednesday of the month he takes his scooter down to the docks to see if the twice-monthly bay cruise will go out. This night was no different, even if he seemed down. He appeared on his scooter with his Navy hat on, his suspenders adorned with medals from World War II.
“I got a bit of bad news today. I have cancer,” he announces after he parks his scooter and stands. His voice quavers a bit but his eyes remain dry. He tells us briefly about his diagnosis, then changes the subject.
“My son’s coming tonight,” he says proudly. His son, Dan O’Connor, a St. Pete Beach police officer, arrives straight from work. Dan is one of six O’Connor children, but the only one who lives in Florida and the impetus for his parents moving away from the cold, white north.
Despite his obvious joy at seeing his son, Mr. Bill is sad. Dan tells us his father didn’t want to treat the cancer and only agreed to one treatment while he thought things over.
Three months later he admits he’s glad he allowed doctors to treat him, although he says he was initially skeptical of radiation.
“I never heard of it, I didn’t want no part of it, and I said, ‘If God wants me he can have me without all this radiation,” he says Monday night from his 10th floor condo. As he speaks the sun flames into a brilliant orange and red behind his back.
When he buzzed me in to his condo Monday night I hadn’t seen Mr. Bill since that night in September and I didn’t know what to expect. I do not expect him to be standing at the door, waiting for me, and I am relieved at how strong and healthy this 85-year-old cancer patient looks.
I am there because he has an amazing canon of stories. When we started to talk to me on the boat that night in September he told me captivating tales about World War II. He told me about taking his children boating. Somebody, it seems, needs to hear these stories.
I am there to hear some of these stories. He welcomes me into the condo and presses a blackberry brandy into my hand “to warm me up.” Mr. Bill towers over me by 18 inches and seems every bit as alive, perhaps more so, as he did in September.
“How are you feeling?” I begin.
“With both hands!” he replies jokingly, then gets serious. “Two more treatments and I’m done. I finish up this week. Git-r-done!”
That is Mr. Bill’s Christmas gift to himself, his wife, six children, seven grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren: he’s going to live a while longer.
Doctors told him he would be dead by Christmas without the treatment. Now, he says, he has a few more years. Not that the years behind him haven’t been good; he’s had a full life. It just isn’t over yet.
Mr. Bill was a Navy corpsman (“A medic,” he explains to me when he sees my puzzled look) in the Pacific theatre of World War II.
“I was out on a salt boat. We went and took young, healthy marines and dropped them off. Then we went out and waited,” he says.
They returned to pick up the wounded and bury the dead at sea.
“Those were bad days,” he says quietly, adding, “but your number ain’t up until it’s up.” On trips to shore the corpsman would pick up the wounded and leave the men with “NT” written on their forehead. NT stood for “No Transport” because another medic believed the men would die, even with treatment. Mr. Bill reluctantly left these men except for one time.
“They blew the whistle, which meant ‘we can’t take no more wounded’ and we ran back to the boat.”
A wounded soldier with NT on his forehead caught his attention.
“He was moaning and said, ‘Take me, take me!’ and we grabbed him,” Mr. Bill remembers. They got the soldier on the boat.
“Dr. Pumfrey said, ‘We ain’t got enough to do? Do you know what this means? This man’s dying,” Mr. Bill says, then adds:
“Five days later he was still alive.”
After the war he married Betty, who met him on a train en route to see her fiancé. In short order the fiancé was a thing of the past and, despite a brief breakup because she wasn’t Catholic, 62 years after their wedding day they’re still going strong.
“She hustled me, don’t let her tell you any different,” he jokes. Betty looks up from her book and raises her eyebrow at this. She smiles and says nothing, just lowers her eyes back to her Fern Michaels book.
At the urging of Betty’s uncle, Mr. Bill joined the Toledo Fire Department. He ultimately became the fire chief. During his tenure he wrote a history of the fire department. Betty helped put the book together. As he neared retirement, the department went on strike. Disgusted by the strike, he quit the department. Even now, the strike makes him angry.
“They had to call on volunteers. I quit. Firemen don’t strike. And they did. They left that city bare,” he says with emotion.
Two years ago Dan called them and said he’d found the perfect place for them. They moved in to a condo two floors above him. They each got a motorized scooter. Being out of the snow and in the sunshine gave them a new lease on life, their son says.
Mr. Bill says he’d probably be dead if Dan hadn’t moved them out of Toledo, because he doesn’t believe he would have found out about the cancer.
“What’s supposed to be is supposed to be,” he says, then points his finger at Dan, who is in the kitchen, counting out medicine with his mother. “That’s our boy there,” he says with a smile.
Their son enjoys having his parents close as much as they enjoy being close. Right now Dan’s busy restoring a boat much like the one his father taught him to handle when he was a pre-teen.
“We all came of age on it,” Dan remembers, “I just want him behind the wheel of a 26-foot Lyman once more in his life.”
Midway through the interview, Mr. Bill tells me to stay put and returns with a box. “I’m Santa Claus,” he says “pick something or two out of here that you like.”
It is a box of costume jewelry, well-made and well-kept. I protest, but the look in his eye tells me that I will leave his home with a piece of jewelry. I select a pair of silver earrings and a pink and gold necklace, remembering my grandfather and his penchant for giving me very similar pieces of jewelry. My throat closes as I swallow tears. It seems so unfair that someone like this has to get sick, has to endure a battle with cancer that he may or may not win. He has so many stories, has done so many things. There isn’t nearly enough room in this paper to retell his life.
Mr. Bill doesn’t call himself a hero. He saved countless soldiers in World War II and then more men as a fireman, but he doesn’t focus on this. He proudly displays his medals and loves to tell stories, but he isn’t boastful. I wonder where the soldier- the NT left for dead- is today. I wonder if he knows anything about the man who saved him over 50 years ago. I wonder if that man knows Mr. Bill’s name.
I can’t tell that soldier about Mr. Bill, about how he still remembers that young man left for dead.
But I can tell you. I don’t know how much longer Mr. Bill will live—and I certainly hope he’ll be buzzing around St. Pete Beach on his scooter for many more years—but I am lucky to know him and glad to hear about his life. When you see him buzzing around Dolphin Village, stopping in the Publix or the Regions, you should know you are in the presence of an extraordinary man who fought so we could celebrate freely this Christmas.
Thank you, Mr. Bill, and Merry Christmas. May you celebrate many, many more.