Today would have been the 103rd birthday of William “Bill” Summers Anderson [1]. He passed away on June 29, 2021, at age 102 [2]. The following is from his biography at the Infogalactic wiki:
“He was born March 29, 1919, in Hankow, China. On December 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Hong Kong was also attacked by the Japanese. As a member of the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps (HKVDC), Anderson fought the Japanese but after 17 days of heavy fighting, Hong Kong surrendered.
On Christmas Day 1941, exactly four years after he had escaped from the Japanese in China, he became a Prisoner of War (POW) and lost his second home. For the first two years, he was in a prison camp in Hong Kong before being moved to Nagoya, Japan as part of a group of 400, to work in a railway locomotive factory. Here the work was very hard; inmates worked 13 days out of 14 and were beaten on occasion. Towards the end of 1944, Japan was being bombed regularly. In May 1945, a large air raid over Nagoya knocked out the factory and the POWs were sent across the country to Toyama on the west coast to work at a branch of the locomotive factory. Toyama was almost totally destroyed in a fire bomb raid on August 1, 1945, after which the POWs were confined to barracks until the Japanese surrender on August 15, 1945.
He was evacuated from Japan to the Philippines and as a British citizen, sent to England after two weeks of recovery in Canada. After the war, he became chairman of NCR Corporation.”
In 1983, just before he retired, Anderson was reportedly America’s highest-paid business executive with a compensation of $13,299.000
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This is also the birthday of the gifted electronic and orchestral musician Vangelis. (Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou.)