My father-in-law was Michael Hanbury from Jackson Heights, Queens and Bill Collins was from Astoria, Queens. They didn't know each other but both enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1949. I did not know either man then since I was one year of age and still smiling while I was wrecking my cotton nappies. Mike and Bill both served with A Company/1st Battalion/5th Marines in the bad time of 1950 at Chosin Reservoir in Korea. Mike was a squad leader/rifleman and Bill was a machine gunner. Mike got hit but they tied up at the Marine Corps League later on after that Truman "police action".

Fast forward to 1970. I'm a year out of the Marine Corps after four years of service and on a lark I walk into the Marine Corps League joint at 21-80 Crescent Street in Astoria, Queens. I met a lot of WWII and Korea Marines there and some guys that were Marines prior to WWII. One fellow, Jimmy Sullivan, was a WWI Marine. I was welcomed to the bar and joined. The Marine Corps League is an accredited veterans organization. I met Mike's 16-year-old high school hottie daughter there but this post is about Bill Collins.

Collins was in his 40s and worked for the "railroad" (NY Central originally) both before and after his time in the Marine Corps. He was a good Irish Catholic boy with a great job in the Sunnyside Yards close to home as an air brake inspector foreman and mechanic. He had never been married. I snagged his buddy Mike's daughter when she was 18 for a bride and Bill began to think.

Collins had been dating a pretty Irish girl named Nora for more than thirty years on and off. She was a pretty girl and never married. She had a great job in a Manhattan office. She lived with her parents in a nice house in Astoria but they died and she got the house. She loved Bill Collins but he was married to "trains" and the Marine Corps but once I got married his thinking shifted and just a few months after I got married in May of 1973 Bill and Nora got married. I was there. A good guy and his girl up in their forties cavorting like they were the teenagers they both were when they first dated and knew they had some love going.