SUNSET BEACH — Ray Puknys’ life began in conflict and grief, with him fleeing across war-torn Europe with his mother and sister, soon after mourning the death of his freedom-fighting father. It ended in comfort and peace, with him sleeping at home, soon after enjoying his last coastal Carolina sunset with his wife of nearly 65 years and entertaining his children and grandchildren with the stories of a remarkable life.
He was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, to Captain Jozuos Puknys, an instructor at Lithuania’s military academy, and Elena Savizkaite Puknys, a nurse at the local hospital. In June 1940, the Soviet Union invaded and occupied Lithuania, and Captain Puknys was pressed into involuntary service in the Red Army. A year later, Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, its invasion of the Soviet Union and its occupied territories. In the chaos of the Red Army’s retreat, Captain Puknys led a revolt, liberating the Lithuanian soldiers under his command. They would escape north to the Labanoras Forest where they joined the local partisans.
Captain Puknys was killed on June 25, 1941, in a fire fight with Red Army troops. At his father’s funeral, a grieving, furious, 2½ year-old Ray grabbed at the honor guards’ rifles and demanded to join the fight against the communists. Three years later, the Red Army would return to Lithuania. Knowing that her family would be persecuted, Elena fled Lithuania with Ray and his younger sister, Dalia. Ray remembers witnessing soldiers killed in gun battles, daytime skies blackened by the allied bombers above, and nighttime skies reddened by the cities on fire below. He remembers his mother disappearing for days in the German countryside after she was shot in the head as a suspected looter. She survived and returned to continue the journey.
They stopped at a refugee camp somewhere in Germany where the guards made Ray drop his pants to prove he was not circumcised (and thus not Jewish). At that camp, they met Father Peter, a monk from a Lithuanian monastery in Maine looking for fleeing Lithuanians. He advised them to find the U.S. Army in Austria. He said the American GIs would keep them safe. They did. They also gave Ray his first Hershey bar and his first ride in a Jeep. Elena, Ray, and Dalia spent the rest of the war and a few years after in Italy, mostly in displaced-persons camps up and down the Italian Peninsula. Ray’s job in Italy was to hunt birds with an old rifle, so his family and their hosts could eat.
Elena, Ray, and Dalia arrived in New York Harbor on Christmas Eve 1949. After a few years in Maine under the care of Father Peter, Ray ended up in northern New Jersey. That is where he met and fell in love with Anne Acorn, the beautiful blonde with the cute rear end who was his friend Stan’s sister-in-law. Ray did not distinguish himself in high school, but Anne saw he was handsome and knew he was thoughtful and kind. She remembers him driving a Pied Piper ice-cream truck, helping find and fix up bikes for the kids on his route who did not have bikes of their own. It didn’t hurt that he also pulled down some serious bank on that ice-cream route: about $300 per week, a small fortune in those days.
After graduating high school, Ray joined the Army, where he thrived. Shortly after he completed basic training, his commanding officer recommended him for officer candidate school. On graduating OCS, he was offered his choice of assignments. He chose flight school. He married Anne in June 1960 but left almost immediately for his flight training at Fort Rucker in Alabama. In 1962, he was shipped off to the Korean peninsula, making good on his vow at his father’s funeral to join the fight against the communists.
He flew extremely dangerous intelligence-gathering missions along the DMZ. While in Korea, he also had himself circumcised. (Look, this is his story, not mine. I was asked to write them down, not edit them for content.) His children thought (hoped?) it was some kind of delayed show of defiance to the Nazis, but, in reality, he did it because Korea was unbearably hot and humid for half the year, and a guy gets very uncomfortable down there.
After leaving active duty, he served in the Army Reserves at Fort Dix, where he and his fellow weekend-warrior pilots patrolled the shores of New York and New Jersey, keeping them safe from Soviet Invasion. Captain Puknys, apparently especially concerned about the security of the local nudist beaches, was known to fly more patrols around them than most of his compatriots. But his most famous exploit, the feat that made him a legend at the Fort Dix Officers Club, was conceiving, planning, and executing the clandestine, but, by all accounts, enormously successful, Operation Retsbol.
He also decided to go to college. Notwithstanding his unremarkable high school record, he finished first in the engineering school of the Stevens Institute of Technology. On graduation, the President of the school confided in him that he had been offered the highest starting salary of any graduate in the school’s history—as a test pilot for Boeing. Ray spent the next few years arguing with Boeing management and engineers, who had never flown anything in their lives, as they presented him and the other test pilots with increasingly preposterous and ill-conceived machines that they believed were capable of flying, at least on paper. The birth of Ray and Anne’s daughter Lydia ended his career as a test pilot. He took his first safe job since driving the Pied Piper truck, flying passenger jets for Eastern Airlines.
Flying for Eastern was the greatest joy of his professional life. But its mismanagement was the source of his greatest frustration, especially after he became the pilot union’s representative, which provided him a front seat to witness the stupidity that riddled the airline. Knowing that Eastern constantly teetered on the brink of insolvency, Ray entered law school. In a few years, so did Anne. Together, they founded Puknys & Puknys, Attorneys at Law, a literal storefront mom and pop law office on Blackwell Street in Dover, New Jersey. They hated it. Eastern finally, and predictably, ceased operations in 1990. Ray and Anne practiced law together for another decade, but in 2000 they took down their shingle and retired to Sunset Beach in North Carolina.
He lived out the rest of his life in Sunset Beach, leaving only with Anne to visit their kids and grandkids in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and California. Being crazy people, they would also occasionally drive to the Canadian Rockies, through the Yukon, and up into Alaska.
At Sunset Beach, he fished, and he biked, and he puttered around the inlets in his boat. But mostly he and Anne just enjoyed their view from their back porch. At about 5:30 on most days, you could join them for a cocktail, where the stories and laughs would keep coming until the sun hit the horizon, at which point everyone would stop talking and simply take in the most amazing sunsets that can be seen on this planet. You would often hear them say—sometimes in unison, sometimes in call-and-response, and sometimes slurring—that they “done good.” He lived a remarkable life: war refugee, immigrant, soldier, officer, Army pilot, valedictorian, test pilot, airline pilot, lawyer, union rep, and all-around fun-loving guy who loved to raise hell now and then. But most of all, he was a loving—and loved—husband, father, grandfather, and friend.
He is survived by his wife, Anne; children, Lydia, Erik, and Diana; sons-in-law, Richard “Micky” Harold and Matthew Schad; daughter-in-law, Colleen Kavanagh; and his grandchildren, Kurt, Liam, Kelsey, Alec, Abby, and Evie. We have family wager on whether he asked Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates if he wanted to see the socks his Lithuanian grandmother knitted for him.
In lieu of flowers, donations in Ray’s name to the National Park Foundation would be appreciated.
