W.W.II widow will be there in spirit By DONALD BRADLEY – The Kansas City Star

The image, born in the mind of a young bride, still comes to La+ura Lilley  60 years later.
	She's standing in Kansas City's Union Station, wearing her prettiest dress and holding a baby. She smiles as the high school sweet-heart she married comes through the door leading from the trains. Tall, strapping and beaming, he wears an Army uniform and totes a bag over his shoulder. The war is over. Finally, it is their time. "Here is your baby boy," she tells him. 
Never happened.
Patrick Lollis, a 1939 graduate of  Westport High School, was killed two months before his son was born. His B-17 was blown out of the sky by German anti-aircraft fire on.

First glance
 Because of health problems, a Raymore  woman will not make the trip to France where a small town on Sunday will honor her husband's bomber crew. All but one perished there during World War II. A French farmer removed the wedding ring from Patrick Lollis,  a 1939 graduate of Westport High School, and it eventually made its way back to Kansas City.


See W.W.II, A-6 Continued from A-I

Aug. 8, 1944, over a small town in France.
Townspeople collected and tidied the bodies of the dead crewmen. A farmer buried them on his land, decorating the graves with stones and markers. But first he removed Lollis'wedding ring, wrapped it in a white handkerchief and put it in a drawer. He later sent it on a journey that took years but eventually led back to Missouri and the navigator's young bride.
On Sunday, the town of Périgny will honor the crew and thank their families by unveiling a marble tablet engraved with the airmen's names. The tablet will be mounted in front of the town hall.
An invitation to the ceremony surprised Lilley,  who later remarried and now lives in Raymore.  It was she who had wanted to thank Périgny for taking care of her fallen husband. " He was just a boy, and they were so good to him and the others," Lilley said this week.
The couple knew their baby would be a son, Lilley  said. They had decided on the name, Michael. Now 59, Michael Lollis  lives in Las Vegas. He thinks Périgny's gesture says much about relations between France and the United States. "The governments of our countries have not been on the best of terms recently, but I think this shows it is good people that give our countries their true character," Lollis said. But neither he nor his mother will make the trip to France. He doesn't want to go without her, and health problems will keep Lilley  home at the Raymore  retirement community where she lives. She's eager, however, to talk about her first boyfriend.
The two grew up in the same Kansas City neighborhood ; she lived on Locust Street, he on Gillham Road. He went to her 13th birthday party. They and friends often played at Gillham Park, sometimes staying too late and having to run home. They dated off and on throughout high school at Westport. "We'd get in a fight and go with somebody else for a while, but we always knew we were supposed to come back to each other," Lilley said. After graduation, she stayed close to home to attend community college while Lollis  went off to the University  of Missouri. They married in 1942 after Lollis  quit college and joined the Army Air Corps. She was 19 ; he was 20. She followed him to training stops in Texas, Oklahoma and Tennessee. She last saw him at an airbase  near Kearney, Neb. "Men he flew off into the night," she said.
	Lollis  was the navigator on the “Varga Venus” a B-17 that was part of the 100th  Bomb Group - known as the "Bloody 100th'' because of high casualties. Thousands of B-17s  were lost. Others often limped home from missions. Newspapers at the time wrote about one such trip. With one engine out, Lollis'crew  was ordered to ditch what they could to lighten the load. Guns and ammo went into the English Channel. One man reportedly stripped and even threw out his underwear. "What else can we throw out? he asked. "How ‘bout the navigator he weighs the most" another yelled. "Don't throw me out, I've got leave coming up," the 6-foot, 4 inch, 200-pound  Lollis  said. He wrote his wife nearly every day. , 6
The crew had flown 25 missions - well above average when they took off on Aug. 8, 1944. Gilbert Borba,  the only survivor, later said that shortly before arriving at its target, German flak hit one of the plane's engines and its "waist." The tail assembly broke away and- the plane nosedived. Nine of 10 crewmen died. Borba was taken prisoner. Yann  Thomas, a Normandy resident who organized Sunday's ceremony, told the families that he spent two years researching the crash. He said the farmer who removed Lollis'ring that day made a promise to the big airman that the ring would make it back home to America. After the war, he took the ring from the drawer and gave it to a British military officer. In 1948, the ring, engraved with the couple's initials, was delivered by mail to Lilley's  home. The information was part of the overall story told to all the families of how a small French town treated the fallen airmen. American bombers went down all over Europe, but because of Périgny's  tiny size, townspeople seemingly treated the crew like family. "The memory is still present in this town," Thomas wrote in a letter to Lilley. After the war, the bodies were returned to the United States for burial. She remarried in 1952 to Roy E. Lilley,  a World War I veteran who also flew for the Army Air Corps in World War II. He died four years ago at age 101. Their marriage lasted nearly half a century. But memories of Patrick Lollis last, too. "He was a great big lovely Irishman," she said. "in his letters home, he would always tell me to pat the baby for him. I looked so forward to that homecoming at Union Station. I imagined all that summer what that would be like." Sometimes, she still does. It is a joyous image, locked timelessly in the mind of a young bride.
To reach Donald Bradley, call (816) 234-  7810 or send entail to dbradley@kcstar.com