John and Antonio Aranda will celebrate their 90th birthdays together today, identical twins whose lives were interrupted by country and duty during World War II.
By the time the government came calling in 1942, the 1938 West High School graduates were working at a luggage company across from the Gates Rubber Company.
John had just married. Tony was living at home, the sole support of their mother and younger sister.
“We were drafted,” John said. “We didn’t have any choice in the matter.”
Suddenly, they were half a world apart.
Tony — an Army Air Corps technical sergeant — was deployed in Asia, fighting in Tasmania, India and China.
John — an Army infantry technical sergeant — spent two years in Alaska, where Kodiak Island was a major staging site for the North Pacific, and then was sent to France and Germany, where he ended up guarding POWs.
John didn’t really know where Tony was. The letters they sent took months to reach each other and were riddled with censor-cut holes where any reference to location had been excised.
But they’d become accustomed to long separations, which started long before they even learned to talk.
John, born first, weighed 6 1/2 pounds but Tony weighed just 3 1/2 pounds.
Their parents decided Tony should stay on their New Mexico farm with his grandparents, to be nourished on goat’s milk and goat cheese.
The boys didn’t reunite until they were 9, when Tony joined the rest of the family in Denver.
When the twins were 12, their father died, and their mother struggled to support the boys and their sister after the Great Depression.
“She had an awful time,” John said. “She cleaned houses, did whatever she could do. We were on relief and everything else.”
But the family held together, even when scattered during World War II.
Their mother even mailed them birthday cakes, but they arrived months late and spoiled.
In an era before e-mail and cellphones, they kept in touch as best they could, with letters.
“Football time is here again,” John wrote to Tony in one letter. “I’m just hoping West comes out on top.”
“My birthday was rather nice,” Tony wrote to his mother. “The boys sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to me, and they managed to get a jelly roll from someplace, and a cup of water for a party.”
Festivities are much more lavish now, more than a half-century later, as their large family gathers to honor their nonagenarian patriarchs.
John, a hardwood finisher, and his wife, Belen, have been married nearly 70 years, and have lived in Lakewood for 50 years.
Tony’s wife, Vivian, passed away in 2005. Tony, who worked as an aerospace design draftsman, lives in California. He hadn’t seen John in four years, since they met for their sister’s funeral.
They’re still active. Tony takes long walks every day, and John just got his driver’s license renewed.
They’re among the dwindling number of World War II veterans still alive, but downplay any sense of wartime heroics.
“They’re very nonchalant,” said Leslie Roseberry, Tony’s daughter.
“They thought they just did their duty. They didn’t question it,” she said. “That’s why they call them the Greatest Generation.”
Colleen O’Connor: 303-954-1083 or coconnor@denverpost.com
