Services for Weber will be at 12:30 p.m. today at Conroy Funeral Home. He died Sunday of congestive heart failure at 85.
“He was the most cheerful person I ever met and an amazingly pleasant guy,” said friend Skip Beckley.
Childhood friend, comedian Jonathan Winters, said Tuesday that Weber had “a great sense of humor.”
In a job that took him all over the community, Weber became “the unofficial mayor of Springfield,” said retired Wittenberg University public relations director Don Perkins. “He knew everybody and everybody knew him.”
Long time News-Sun Managing Editor Jack Bianchi called Weber “the best ambassador” the newspaper had, adding that Weber’s natural curiosity also helped reporters to get their stories.
Born in Springfield Nov. 8, 1925, Weber graduated from Springfield High School in February of 1944 and on April 3, 1945, bailed out of a B-17 hit by a burst of German anti-aircraft flak. Eight of the 10 crew were killed, Weber surviving when a Dutch fisherman plucked his exhausted body from the North Sea.
Weber spent the month before his liberation hungry, unwashed and marching until he thought he could march no more.
“Then I heard the German guard click a bullet into the chamber of his gun,” Weber told historian Barton Kummerow. “I did 10 more miles that day and never complained again.”
After attending Miami University and Wittenberg on the GI Bill, Weber married the girl he introduced himself to in high school by saying, “Hey, kid, you want a stick of gum?”
Eleanor, his wife of 58 years, said Weber became a devoted father two their two daughters, Valerie Meyer and Vicky Linville, and a doting grandfather who regularly reported his granddaughters’ tennis results to his friends.
Perkins called him “a great, great friend.
“I probably will not miss the passing of anyone more than I will miss Howdy.”
A telling life
SPRINGFIELD — Ten years ago, in “Heartland,” a book he wrote for the opening of the Heritage Center of Clark County, historian Burton Kummerow captured what it was like to meet Howard O. Weber.
“At 75 years young, he still has the twinkle of a schoolboy with mischief on his mind,” Kummerow wrote in his book’s epilog. “Within moments of a greeting, the stories from a busy life start flowing. He soon has you ... traveling back to 50-year-old adventures that could have happened yesterday.”
Weber’s uncounted stories were among the things his friends talked about Tuesday as an epilogue to Weber’s life, which ended Sunday at age 85.
“He had more stories than a children’s book,” said friend Don Perkins.
“He could go years without repeating the same story and have everybody in stitches,” added Weber’s former boss, retired Springfield News-Sun managing editor Jack Bianchi. “I think for the newsroom, we never had a bad day when Howdy was working.”
In a phone interview from his California home, comedian and childhood friend Jonathan Winters recalled the time he and Weber were riding on a bus to Dayton in the days before World War II, cutting up by telling stories to one another loudly in faked German accents.
Weber’s daughter, Vicki Linville of Columbus, recalls Winters calling their home on her dad’s birthday.
“He’d never call as himself,” she said.
Among the fake identities he assumed was of a News-Sun reader beckoning Weber to take a picture of his large tomato.
Winters called Weber “a complete extrovert,” something Weber’s wife, Eleanor, said made him known wherever he went.
“We’ve even been in Vegas and seen people from Springfield,” she said. And when Weber was hospitalized recently in Columbus, “his nurse asked him if he was Howdy Weber the photographer,” she added.
When her son was studying in Amsterdam, Linville said the family visited another place her father was known. Along with eight men who died and one other who survived, his name was on a bronze plaque not far from where the B-17 in which he was flying plunged into the North Sea April 3, 1945.
Weber, who had been in and out of the hospital and rehabilitation facilities since October, was “a gentleman of the old school,” said Perkins, “as courteous a man as I’ve ever known.”
Perkins said Weber also “loved Springfield with a fervor I think was matched by Dick Kuss (also a native) and a few others.”
Behind those great stories, he said, was a man with “a great heart.”
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368.
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