Max McClellan is a pretty amazing man. A WW II veteran, Max tried to join the Marines in 1943 at age 15 but his mother prevented it.
She didn't, however, keep him from the US Army in 1945.
McClellan wanted to go to war; he wanted to go so badly that he swapped urine samples with another man during his Army physical after failing the first three times because of sugar in his sample.
That's all in the News Journal article; what I couldn't fit in due to space restrictions is this:
Max didn't have the best home life and often preferred to be off by himself on an assortment of adventures. One occurred in April of his seventh-grade year. He hated junior high school...a lot. So, one morning the thirteen-year-old left home at his regular time on his bicycle, as if he were going to school. Max had other plans, though; he just kept riding his bike.
And riding.
Max McClellan didn't stop until he reached a truck stop....in Toledo. At midnight.
"I was cold and tired. I didn't have any money, so I just stepped inside the door to get warm. I didn't know what I was gonna do, but I was headed for my older sister's house just north of Detroit. This truck driver came over to me and said, 'You're a runaway, aren't you?' He just knew."
Being a 13 year old in a truck stop at midnight had been a dead giveaway.
"The owner came over and asked if I was hungry. I told him I didn't have any money," McClellan recalled. "He fed me and gave me a place to sleep, at the top of a stairway where there was a little landing, a blanket and a pillow. In the morning, he fed me again and got me a ride with a truck driver headed to Detroit."
But what about his bicycle?
"The owner said he'd keep it for me, for when I came back through."
Max made it to his sister's house. She gave him a place to stay and he got a job.
"I started working at a bowling alley as a pin-setter. They didn't have those automatic jobs like the alleys have now."
McClellan had been working there about a week when a policeman approached him.
"You're a runaway." Max thought he'd be going to the juvenile house.
"But he didn't arrest me; he made a deal with me: if I promised to head back home in the morning, he wouldn't run me in."
Max hitched a ride the next morning with another trucker. He ended up back in Toledo at the same truck stop.
"But I discovered that my bike had a flat tire. The owner, he'd kept his word, and he fixed that tire for me."
Max started back to Mansfield.
"I was going through Fostoria and it started pouring rain. That was miserable," he said. "I was wet and cold and still had quite a ways to go."
Max got hungry, too.
"I was going through Ganges and saw this little stand where they were selling vegetable plants. I was pretty hungry by then. They had tomato plants, and I thought 'well, if you can eat tomatoes you ought to be able to eat the plants, too.' " Max grabbed a couple of plants and started eating them.
"Then my face and lips started to swell up."
He got on his bike and started peddling again, not stopping until he eventually got home. I asked Max what his parents had to say.
"Nothing. I think my sister must've called them or got word to them where I was, so they knew I was coming home. I walked in like nothing had happened, boiled some water and drank a cup of tea. That took the swelling right out of my mouth", he recalled.
...and he never went back to school again, either.
Max McClellan points to himself in a group photo of his unit in Formosa, now called Taiwan, where he was stationed in the 1950s.
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