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HONORING OUR VETERANS
Halligan From 12
will probably be delayed 30 days,” the Tribune wrote Sept. 24. Not until Oct. 12 — a month before the Ger- mans sued for peace — did Company E board ships for France, Rolfe wrote his fa- ther in a letter published in the Oct. 15 Tribune. Their regiment had been redesignated the 134th at Camp Cody. But in France, its members were scattered among other U.S. regiments to replace killed or wounded soldiers. Rolfe Halligan was or- dered to take command of a company of the 5th Divi- sion, engaged in front-line action since May. He arrived at the front on Nov. 11, 1918 — the very day the Germans signed the armistice. Company E’s members started arriving home in February 1919. But P.R., assigned as officer in charge of civil affairs in an occupied area of Germany, didn’t re-
turn to North Platte with his wife until Jan. 18, 1920. “Capt. Halligan is looking fine and feels as good as he looks,” the Tribune wrote. A short postwar They were only visiting. Rolfe and Kathleen Halligan settled in Lincoln, where he started working for Ne- braska Adjutant General Herbert Paul — the one- time colonel who had wired him about organizing North Platte’s Guard unit in 1916. He was promoted to major in 1921, the year his daughter Nancy was born. A Nebraska Liquor Control Commission member from 1993 to 1999, she married then-future Lt. Gov. Don McGinley of Ogallala in 1977. Nancy died in 2009. P.R. eventually practiced law in Lincoln with father- in-law Thomas J. Doyle, whose actor grandson Da- vid played Bosley on ABC’s 1970s “Charlie’s Angels”
series. And Rolfe joined the two veterans organizations born from the Great War: the Veterans of Foreign Wars, in which P.R. was Lincoln post commander, and the American Legion, which had organized Post 163 in North Platte in May 1919 with Victor Halligan as its first commander. Rolfe managed the 1922 gubernatorial campaign of Adam McMullen of Bea- trice, who would win in 1924 and 1926. He joined his Company E comrades for a North Platte reunion in June 1922. He was invited to the 1923 reunion but didn’t make it. T.J. Doyle had died of heart trouble that March 22. Less than five months later, so did P.R. North Platte’s Legion Hall has a framed June 6, 1923, letter from Rolfe to Harold Langford, who had writ- ten him May 15 about the
reunion. “I have been laid up most of the spring,” P.R. wrote. “I have been thinking about the old gang a great number of times & hoping I might be able to get out there but find it is impossible. … I expect to get away from here as soon as possible.” He left for San Diego July 2, where he spent time in St. Joseph Hospital. He had hoped to organize a new Lincoln law firm that September, a Lincoln State Journal obituary said Aug. 4. But “he had caught a cold on his trip to the west,” though “it had not been believed as serious … and hopes were entertained for his recovery.” In later years, North Platte newspapers twice reported that Rolfe’s death was a delayed result of his World War I service. When John J. Halligan died of a heart attack on July
3, 1930, his Telegraph obitu- ary said P.R. “died from ef- fects of the World War.” An Aug. 14, 1941, Daily Bulletin item on North Platte’s Legion post said he “died as a result of service in France.” Some World War I veter- ans exposed to poison gas attacks died a few years af- ter the war. But Rolfe Hal- ligan had barely arrived on the front when the guns went silent on Nov. 11, 1918. If he had contracted the Spanish flu that delayed Company E’s departure for France, that could have weakened him. But P.R.’s Lincoln obituary offers a possible genetic hint: “‘Ath- lete’s heart’ precluded his taking an outstanding part in college athletics” when Rolfe had attended NU. John J. Halligan lived to be 72, twice as old as his son, but he too would die of a sudden heart attack on July 3, 1930.
Victor Halligan, now also a lawyer, left in May 1917 for officers’ training at Fort Snelling, Minnesota. Trained as an artillery of- ficer, he also became a cap- tain. But he never crossed the ocean. Rolfe resigned as county attorney in August, and Company E shipped out Sept. 14, 1917, joining many other Nebraska Guardsmen at Camp Cody at Deming, New Mexico. But a year later, with Gen. John J. Pershing’s American Expeditionary Force about to launch the war’s climac- tic Meuse-Argonne offen- sive, P.R. and his men were still statewide. “Captain P.R. Halligan writes that owing to the prevalence of the Span- ish influenza in the eastern camps, his going overseas
Everyone at Eustis Body Shop would like to thank all Americans who have bravely defended our country. On this Veterans Day, we would encourage all Nebraskans to take a moment to think about those who have served and thank them for their sacrifice. FOR YOUR SERVICE
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