Everett Mann still makes dinner for his daughter, tries to keep up his prized yard, and has a funny story from his Army days in World War II. He also recently celebrated his 101st birthday with a favorite meal and a shirt that reads: “It took me 101 years to look this good.”
“I really don’t feel like I am an old man,” Mann told Cowboy State Daily from the Rawlins home he shares with his daughter, Beth O’Grady. “My legs are a little wobbly, there’s things I can’t do and I accept that, but I really have no complaints.”
Born in Casper in 1925, Mann graduated high school in 1943 and entered the Army, serving with the 158th Quartermaster Battalion as a driver. He landed on Normandy Beach six days after D-Day, climbing down rope nets from a Liberty ship onto a landing craft. The German opposition, he remembers, was “still pretty hot.”
As a jeep driver, he ran messages, escorted supply convoys and distributed ammunition, food and clothes to the front lines.
His first Purple Heart came from a German buzz bomb in Belgium. “They just put enough fuel in it, tried to drop it in the right place, and one pretty near us,” he said. “I got a lot of shrapnel and glass from that.”
The second came during the Battle of the Bulge, when exposure to bitter cold left him with frostbitten feet. Doctors planned to amputate his toes until a shipment of the new miracle drug penicillin arrived. “When we got the penicillin, we had a lot of shots and it stopped the gangrene,” he said.
One of his favorite war stories involves a new lieutenant he was driving around. The officer reprimanded him for driving too slow. “He said, ‘Look soldier, when you see my leg come up, you get this vehicle moving,'” Mann recalled. “He came back to the Jeep and threw his leg up and I took off and hit his leg and he spun around and fell on the ground. He didn’t say anything to me. He just got in the Jeep, and we took off.”
After the war, Mann returned to Wyoming, worked 35 years at the Sinclair Refinery, and became active in the AFL-CIO union, eventually serving as its president. He was appointed by Gov. Ed Herschler to the union’s state executive board.
In Rawlins, he served two terms as city councilman and two terms as mayor, proud of building a sewage treatment plant and replacing 10 miles of the city’s aging wooden water pipeline from the mountains.
His wife Mary Elizabeth passed away in 2006. He now lives with O’Grady, who says her father is still “a lot of fun” and cooks for her every day. Daughter Karen Mann Austin remembers him as a quiet family man and “big jokester” who took the family camping every weekend even while working full-time and serving as mayor.
Mann’s secret to longevity? “Just be happy and treat people decent and don’t be fussing all the time and be mad.” O’Grady adds: “And eat everything you want … including candy.” Mann confesses a lifelong sweet tooth—especially chocolate—and says biscuits remain a favorite from Depression-era Casper, where his family ate rabbit, chicken and pancakes.
What’s next? “Oh, just keep eating candy,” he jokes. “And enjoy life one day at a time, enjoy my family and friends, and that I live in Wyoming.”
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