Harry McLaughlin
December 30, 1926 – April 29, 2023
Harry A. McLaughlin, a diehard fan of the New York Yankees, got to live a dream last summer when he was honored as the Veteran of the Game at Yankee Stadium on Old-Timers’ Day.
During the seventh-inning stretch of the July 30 game between the Yanks and the Kansas City Royals, a photo of McLaughlin as a young sailor flashed on the jumbotron and tens of thousands of fans stood up and cheered, as “God Bless America” boomed through the stadium.
Sitting in the living room at his daughter Debi’s home in The Villages, his eyes welled with tears as he stared in disbelief at the TV screen.
His family says the fact that he lived to see his beloved team bestow the honor made his death at age 96 on April 29 at the Trinity Springs assisted living home in Oxford hurt a little less.
McLaughlin, a retired steel company executive who raised a family with his wife Norma in Jericho on Long Island’s North Shore, spent his final years in The Villages and Oxford. His friends and extended family remember him as a modest man known for his grace, sense of humor and incredible generosity. His favorite pastimes were golf — he was particularly proud of his two holes in one — hanging out at the library, gardening, traveling the world, and spoiling his grandchildren with kindness.
Born in 1926 in the Bronx, home of the Yankees, McLaughlin attended Manhattan’s prestigious Stuyvesant High School and enlisted in the Navy at age 17 in 1944 after graduating with honors.
Following basic training in upstate New York and naval training in Camden, New Jersey, McLaughlin boarded the USS Fall River at the Philadelphia Navy Yard as a Seaman First Class.
He and his fellow sailors on the battleship trained in the waters around Cuba for the planned Allied invasion of Japan in the fall of 1945. But the invasion was called off when Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender on Aug. 15 of that year after President Harry Truman decided to drop the world’s first atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The USS Fall River later played a key role in Operations Crossroads, a postwar experiment in the South Pacific aimed at determining the impact of atomic bombs on naval vessels. The nuclear testing site was at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
McLaughlin, however, was called back to the States just a week before the July 1946 tests began because his tour was ending. He was later awarded the American Theater Medal and World War II Victory Medal.
For several decades after the war, McLaughlin worked for Grand Iron Works, a large steel fabrication and erection company in the South Bronx that constructed the steel skeletons of dozens of New York City buildings and bridges, including the MetLife Building and the Port Authority Bus Terminal in midtown Manhattan, the Belmont Park racetrack and the original stadium used for the U.S. Open Tennis Championships.
McLaughlin was vice president for projects when the 80-year-old company closed in 1984. He finished his career as the general manager of Twin County Steel in St. James, N.Y.
He is survived by his wife of 73 years, the former Norma Musante; a daughter and son-in-law, Debi and Fred Cionek, of The Villages; a son, Ken McLaughlin, and daughter-in-law, Nicki Pecchenino, of Scotts Valley, California; three grandchildren, Scott Cionek (Meghan Foley-Cionek) of Bolton, Massachusetts, Glenn Cionek (Rebecca Roberts) of Boston and Christopher McLaughlin, of Scotts Valley; and one great-grandchild, Willa Cionek of Bolton.
A memorial service with military honors will be held Friday, May 5, at 3 p.m. at the Florida National Cemetery in Bushnell.