The year was 1943, and Mel Giller was 17 years old. He was walking along a street in his hometown of Boston and spotted a U.S. Marine Corps recruiting office. On an impulse, he decided to enlist.
“I was anxious to get in the war,” said Giller, 89, who now lives in Tucson.
After rigorous Marine combat training and special training in Hawaii for amphibious landings, Giller got into the war all right — taking part in one of the most important campaigns in the Pacific.
“We boarded troop ships. They said we were going to invade the Philippine Islands,” he said. “We hit the beach near the end of 1944.”
After taking the beach, Giller and his fellow Marines battled the Japanese in dense jungles.
“I got malaria in the jungle,” said Giller, who attained the rank of sergeant. “We fought, but I actually remember very little of the specifics of the fighting. That also happened to others. A doctor in Manila told me most of the guys in combat push that away. They don’t want to remember.”
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After fighting in the Philippines, “We were on a troop ship, going someplace to train for an invasion of Japan, when the war ended,” Giller said. “We heard some scuttlebutt about a bomb” — one of two atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan in 1945, leading to a Japanese surrender.
With the war over, Giller and fellow Marines traveled home, landing in San Francisco.
“There were thousands — thousands! — of Marines marching through San Francisco,” he said. “It was bedlam. I got to a phone and called my parents.”
Tim Harrington, Giller’s son-in-law, said, “Mel is 89 years old and the war was 70 years ago. He is still as proud today of being a Marine as he was when he was 17.”
If Giller’s service in World War II was a life high point, there were many more to come.
After gaining extensive experience in real estate as a builder, developer, marketer and Realtor, he devised a new approach to real estate auctions and launched a high-end auction company in 1975.
“I took the auction program and raised it to a level that had never been done before,” Giller said, selling more than 10,000 properties from Hawaii and Florida to the Spanish Riviera and Thailand. After conducting highly successful auctions in Thailand, he moved there and remained for 15 years — returning to the United States about three years ago and residing in Tucson.
“With the businesses, he swung for the fences every time,” Harrington said.
Giller said he shut down much of his business operation 19 years ago after his wife, Janet, suffered a stroke. She died in 2007.
Giller said he holds loving memories of her as well as enduring respect for his many Marine comrades. And he shares a philosophy that has guided him through a long and fascinating life: “You have to have an imagination that soars like an eagle.”
Contact reporter Doug Kreutz at dkreutz@tucson.com or at 573-4192. On Twitter: @DouglasKreutz
