D-DAY VET, COMMUNITY LEADER CALLED ‘A HERO’
Jack Port’s 15 months of service as an Army rifleman in Europe during World War II came to define his life. But friends say that the work the longtime Escondido resident did after the war in the business, education and charitable communities made him a local legend. Port passed away peacefully at his North County home last month at age 98.
Over the past 20 years, Port became well known for sharing his experiences about landing on Utah Beach in Normandy during the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944, and fighting his way across Europe in the bloody months that followed.
He would return to the small towns of Normandy more than 30 times for D-Day commemorations and became a beloved adopted son. In gratitude for his service, France awarded Port its highest military award, the French National Order of Legion of Honor, in 2009. And in 2018, the French city of Saint-Pois named its high school after him, the Ecole Publique Jack Port.
“He was a total hero in France,” said Jack Raymond of Escondido, who was one of Port’s closest friends for more than 60 years. “It’s such a great loss. I think the region, the state and even the nation has lost a hero.”
For nearly 30 years, Port ran a men’s clothing store in downtown Escondido, and he served on the San Diego County Board of Education for 28 years. With Raymond, he co-founded and was a longtime director for both North County Bank and the Escondido Community Foundation. He also helped launch Escondido’s first hospice organization.
Last fall, the Escondido History Center named Port as one of the city’s eight Escondido Legends, a program that Raymond underwrote with $1,000 scholarships in each of the eight men’s and women’s names. Raymond
described Port as a gregarious and generous man.
“He was very giving, very open to new ideas, new experiences, new projects and new causes,” said Raymond, who said he and Port played tennis and had breakfast together every Saturday morning for nearly 40 years. “He was always such an inquisitive guy.”
Born in Los Angeles on April 10, 1922, Port was 5 years old when he moved to Escondido with his parents, Charles and Rena Port, and Jack’s older brother Marvin in 1927. The Ports were Estonian Jews and were one of the city’s first Jewish families. At 6 feet tall, Port was a basketball star and a senior class leader at Escondido High School. After graduating, he attended the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was studying when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, thrusting the U.S. into war.
Port left college and got a
draft deferment to work for Consolidated Aircraft in San Diego. But in September 1943, he left the factory to enlist in the Army because he felt compelled to fight. While working on his memoirs in 2013 and 2014 with local World War II historian Linda Dudik, Port said he joined the battle to combat the racist stereotype that Jewish men were cowardly and didn’t make good soldiers.
Assigned to the Army’s 4th Infantry Division, he arrived in England on April 19, 1944, just seven weeks before D-Day. He told Dudik and local schoolchildren that he was afraid that day. He dropped his rif le in the water and dug a foxhole so deep that he had a hard time climbing out the next day.
And that was just the beginning of seven months of near-continuous combat as his division fought its way through Normandy, liberated Paris and slogged it out in the Battle in the Hirtgen Forest and the Battle of the Bulge. Among the many combat decorations he received were two Bronze Stars for valor and a Purple Heart medal.
Dudik has interviewed many dozens of World War II veterans for her historical website wwiiexperience.com and several books, and she said her conversations with Port stood out because of his honesty about the carnage of war and how it affected him. He told her that if most people ever had a real taste of it, there would be no more wars.
“Jack spoke to issues that other veterans I know preferred not to bring up,” she said. “He talked not only of the deaths of men in his unit, but also of civilian deaths, especially of children. Jack felt the emotional cost of war, not just during the battles but long after the war was supposedly over. I believe that at his core, Jack Port was a humanitarian. What he experienced in World War II, I think, related to the humanitarianism that so motivated his community work in his postwar life.”
After the war, Port returned home to Escondido, took over the Port’s Men’s
Wear store his father had started on Grand Avenue in the 1920s, and he married his fellow Escondido High alumnus, Elaine Eichman. They had five children together and were married for 71 years until her death in 2018.
Before he retired in 1993, Port was active in the Escondido Chamber of Commerce, the Escondido Boys & Girls Club and many veterans and service clubs, including Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Elks Club, the American Legion, the Masonic Lodge, Al Bahr Shriners and Kiwanis. With the Escondido Community Foundation he helped raise more than $2 million for local nonprofits. And he served for four years in the 1960s on the Escondido School Board. He was also appointed to a state commission for nutrition education, launched a homeless program for students and worked with ADAPT, which provided addiction services to veterans.
About seven years ago, Port and his wife moved into the Ocean Hills senior community in Oceanside. Joe Ashby, who was one of Port’s neighbors in Ocean Hills, said most people have no idea how much Port and his wife, a dedicated community volunteer, did for others.
“When I think of Jack, I think of the totality of all he did for the community, and how gifted his wife was,” Ashby said. “They just did a wealth of things.”
Port and Raymond were among a small group of longtime buddies who met for breakfast at Charlie’s café in Escondido every weekday for decades. When Port was no longer able to drive to the breakfast gatherings in recent months, his friends went to him. They gathered at his bedside just a week before he died around March 27. The family has not announced any plans for memorial services or burial information.
“Jack did a lot in his lifetime,” said friend Bob Wilson of Rancho Santa Fe. “He left quite a legacy.”