AROUND TOWN: USO celebrates with the stars

What better way to salute the USO on its 70th anniversary than with USO entertainers. “Bob Hope” was talking golf, “Marilyn Monroe” turned the guys giggly and “Frank Sinatra” crooned to the ladies.

Impersonators all, they turned heads at the Antlers Hilton on Oct. 1.

The star with no apostrophes around his name was Wayne Newton, the real “Mr. Las Vegas” who received the Rocky Mountain USO Champion of Freedom Award and who  posed with everyone who wanted a photo, signed autographs and was an all-around nice guy.

Sure, he’s had Vegas plastic surgery, there’s a permanent George Hamilton tan and teeth are blinding white, but so what. He was there for the troops.

He had wanted to have a military career and registered at age 18 during Vietnam, he told the audience of more than 500. Then he saw a 1Y (for asthma) on his Selective Service card. What did a 1Y mean, he asked. “Young man, it means the Russians will have to be in the lobby before we would call you,” the recruiter responded.

Newton has been on the entertainment front line with the military since Vietnam and was the first performer to entertain troops with a USO show in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

During USO tours he has a very personal tradition, asking soldiers if there is anyone at home they want him to call to pass along a message. He has made 7,000 calls. There are always two calls because the families hang up the first time he calls. Then he tries back to assure them he really is Wayne Newton. One poignant call went to a woman and he passed along a message from her daughter who was happy and doing fine. Then the mother told him her daughter had just been killed. He apologized but she said he shouldn’t. He was the last person to see her daughter alive and if he hadn’t called she wouldn’t have that final message and wouldn’t have known that before she died she was doing okay.

Newton said what he has given “is the best part of me and the part of me I am the most proud of. But what I have done pales in comparison to what you (the military in the audience) have given.”

Honorary Freedom Dinner chair Gen. Kevin Chilton shared his memory of  Newton and wife Kat “asleep on each other shoulders,” held securely by the red straps inside a C-130. Not the most luxurious and comfortable of aircraft but the Newtons had become accustomed to it, the general said.

The star-power honoree, a formal meal eaten to background music of a Tuxedo Junction swing band, a table set for the celebration but with empty chairs to signify fallen comrades, a standing ovation for active-duty military and an Audie Murphy color guard were just some of what made the evening special.

It all added up to a broad smile on the face of USO Director Joe Aldaz. After all, the $73,000 raised, plus $20,000 of in-kind donations and services will go for programs and services that through September had gone to the more than 145,000 troops and their families at the Rocky Mountain USO Centers at Fort Carson and Denver International Airport this year alone.  

Now Aldaz has to catch his breath and start planning for next year.

The presenting sponsor was Lockheed Martin and others included TriWest, Northrop Grumman, Clear Channel, The Gazette, Barefoot Wine, USAA, Kroenke Sports, FTD and Security Service Federal Credit Union.

PHOTOS: http://tinyurl.com/4xclq5b