Ever since Harry Kone survived wounds at Guadalcanal that reduced him to one working lung, he’s chalked up his long life to a simple philosophy:
“I never worry about tomorrow.”
It’s a mindset that served him well in 40 years as a public school teacher in Chicago, in raising three children and in staying involved with veterans groups and his church since his retirement.
In 1995, Kone and his late wife Marjorie moved to a senior-living community in East Cobb, off Johnson Ferry Road, to be closer to two of their children.
These days, one of those children, his daughter Sue Lind, is his in-home caregiver, and in recent weeks she’s been busy preparing for a very different birthday celebration for him.
It’s not just that Kone will turn 100 years old on Aug. 16. In the time of COVID-19, he’ll finally be able to see family members he hasn’t seen since the outbreak in March.
But they’ll be doing it incrementally, one family at a time.
“Everybody’s coming on a different day,” Sue explains about the need to keep gatherings small, and she notes, less hectic.
Kone’s friends from the Squire “Skip” Wells Marine Corps League also will be wishing him a happy birthday, via conference call.
Kone accepts the reality of the health restrictions.
“I feel great,” he says.
He’s met with some of his Marine League buddies in his garage, all of them sitting socially distanced.
“His social life has been more robust than mine,” says Sue, a human resources consultant who sold her home in Buckhead four years ago to look after her father. “His life is here.”
Kone also has been active at the Unity North Atlanta Church on Sandy Plains Road, where the minister is planning a special video message for his birthday.
His resilience was shaped by his younger years. The only child of a Baltimore railway clerk and a homemaker, Kone was an avid reader, the habit instilled by his mother.
In 1939, he had moved to Milwaukee to work as a welder, and attended a branch of the University of Wisconsin on scholarship to help develop children’s programming in the very early days of televison.
He was living in a boarding house there when he met the young woman to whom he would be married for 65 years.
After Pearl Harbor, Kone volunteered for the U.S. Marine Corps, and served as a machine gunner in the South Pacific.
It was at Guadalcanal that he recalls a conversation he and some of his fellow Marines had, during a lull in the combat.
“We were talking about what we were going to do when we got back home,” Kone said.
Not long after that, the Japanese began a bombardment attack, and many of those young men never made it home.
“You never know what’s going to happen the next day,” he said, explaining how he wanted to return to service after getting wounded in that engagement.
As it turned out, his injuries were too severe, and he was honorably discharged in 1945. A bout with tuberculosis kept him in a Veterans Administration hospital for two years.
But Kone persisted with his aim of becoming a teacher, and earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from Northwestern University. He and Marjorie raised their family on the west side of Chicago, and lived there for 50 years. Kone later taught at the college level and made appearances as a public speaker.
After moving to East Cobb, Kone hooked up with the local Marine Corps League, which has met at the veteran-owned Semper Fi Bar & Grill in Woodstock. Marjorie Kone died nine years ago, at the age of 90.
Last year, for his 99th birthday, he was honored by the Cobb Board of Commissioners.
“He always used to say that every day was a holiday,” Sue says.
Kone also stays engaged with books. Sue says he’s always reading something related to current affairs. On a coffee table in his living room is his current book, “So You Want To Talk About Race?” by Ijeoma Oluo.
Kone has some big plans for the near future. His grandson, who lives in London, is getting married to a British woman next summer, and he wants to make the trip for the wedding at St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Kone says he understands the anxiety many people are facing today, given the circumstances, and harkens back to memories of what he endured during World War II.
“From then on, I never worried about much. I had plans, but I didn’t worry about what I’m going to do tomorrow,” he said.
“This is what worries a lot of people,” Kone said, but “if I’m dead tomorrow, I don’t have to worry.”
He lets out a bit of a laugh and a big smile, and then offers up what he claims is the real secret to a good, long life.
“The three ‘S’s,” he said. “[Get] lots of sleep. [Do] lots of stuff. [Have] lots of sex.
“If you have that, you’ll live to be 100.”
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