LYNN — There’s always a story. Sometimes you have to ferret it out and other times in lands in your lap. Both methods work.
The ceremony to celebrate the extension of the lease of the VA Medical Clinic on Boston Street was well under way Thursday morning when a woman was wheeled in during Lynn Veterans Services Director Mike Sweeney’s remarks. Sweeney paused mid-sentence to recognize her.
“This is Lorrie Landry and she’s a veteran of the Korean War. She was in Japan singing to wounded soldiers,” Sweeney told the enthusiastic gathering.
There’s the story.
In a conversation after the speaking program, Landry, a delightful and spry woman who is 92 years young, relayed that she decided to go into the military after her older brother, Norman Landry, left to serve in World War II. She enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps after graduating from Lynn Classical, went through basic training and leadership school, and ended up in Army Special Services, whose task was to improve the morale of the troops. As an accomplished singer, it was a perfect fit.
Landry was stationed at Walter Reed Medical Center in Maryland and Fitzsimons in Colorado before being transferred to a U.S. military hospital in Tokyo that treated soldiers injured in the Korean conflict.
“They call it a conflict, but the hospital wouldn’t call it a conflict,” Landry said, indicating that some of the injured soldiers she encountered looked very much like they had been at war.
In addition to singing — jazz was her specialty — she greeted celebrities such as comedian Bob Hope, jazz legend Louis Armstrong, and ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his puppet, Charlie McCarthy, who came in to perform for the troops.
“I was always stationed at a hospital,” she said. “It was such a pleasure to be able to entertain. People would tell me I had an easy job, but it wasn’t easy.”
Landry was in an Army band that played in theaters, hospitals, and orphanages. She once sang Christmas carols in a show at a Tokyo theater, and could never have expected that performance would come up eight years later, back in Lynn.
One morning when she came out of the house she was living in on Washington Street, Landry went to a canteen truck to buy a cup of coffee.
“Do I know you?” the driver wondered.
“I don’t think so,” Landry answered.
“Do you sing?” he asked.
At that point, it didn’t take too long for them to figure out that he was one of the soldiers in the audience at that Christmas show. He and three friends were on a four-day leave from the battlefield and came to Tokyo for the holiday, which they would obviously spend away from their families.
“We were never happier than when you sang those Christmas carols for us,” he told Landry.
“That was the proudest moment of my life,” she said, still genuinely touched by the exchange more than 60 years later. “I will never forget that.”
After getting out of the Army, Landry was a professional jazz singer until the 1970s, when rock and roll became dominant and, she said, “out went jazz and in came crap.”
“Every place that had jazz was now doing rock and roll,” she said of the live-music situation at the time.
Landry got a job as a greeter at the J.M. Fields department store in Vinnin Square. She took an interest in the role that security played and ended up working as the store detective, interceding when shoppers neglected to check out before leaving.
When Marshalls bought out J.M. Fields, Landry stayed for 26 years and advanced to director of loss protection, then worked in customer relations.
Landry has lived on Adams Street in the Highlands for 26 years. She never married, but her siblings have provided her 27 nieces and nephews. She was very happy about the news of the VA Medical Clinic staying in Lynn.
You might say it was music to her ears.
