Purple Heart Anglers annual "Take a Vet Fishing" event

The Purple Heart Anglers are having their annual "Take a Vet Fishing Event" on Sunday June 1, 2014
.  Anyone who would like to participate or volunteer to help, call Randy (415) 370-9930

August 7, 2012 Purple Heart Day

Copperopolis Resident WWII USMC Melvin Ogg receives Purple Heart

On December 18, 2011 at a special ceremony in Copperopolis, 89 year old USMC Melvin Ogg received his Purple Heart for wounds received on the island of Bouganville in 1943. Calaveras County Sheriff Gary Kuntz, multiple veterans from WWII, Korea, Vietnam and Iraq, family and friends were in attendance.

Retired WWII USMC Colonel West, who served in the same theater as Ogg, was given the honor of pinning the Purple Heart on Ogg.

Ogg, with wounds barely healed, returned to the field and continued to serve in the USMC on Guam and the Soloman Islands until September 1945.

Medals for Mel by, John Howsden

Sixty eight years ago Mel Og was a Twentyone year old Marine standing in the middle of the jungle on Bougainville with an axe in his hand getting ready to chop down a tree. Unbeknownst to Mel, a few miles away in another part of the jungle, a Japanese’s artillery crew was firing an artillery shell with Mel’s name on it.  The shell landed on the other side of the tree. Mel is living proof to the saying, “you never hear the one that gets you.” Although the tree he was about to chop down landed on top of him, it also saved him from being shredded by shrapnel. Instead he was knocked unconscious and suffered an injury to his collar bone.

He woke up in the First Aid station wrapped in a blanket with a fellow Marine sitting across from him shaking his head and saying, “I thought you were dead man, you weren’t even breathing when they brought you in.” Mel took a swallow of the rum the medic had given him to ease the pain and said, “Well I’m obviously not dead.” Mel healed and rejoined his outfit, but for some unknown reason he never received his Purple Heart.