Rev. William Tollas survives World War II and COVID to reach 100 years

From his family's 40-acre farm in Baroda, Michigan, it took William Tollas 3 ½ miles — there and back — to walk to school each day. And he had to do just that — hoof it — because in the early 1930s, there weren't too many other methods of transportation for the son of a Midwestern farmer.

That trek was made a little faster when Tollas started high school. While he was seeing more and more cars populate the dirt and concrete strips of road in and around Baroda — and even one fellow student driving to class — Tollas made do with his own method of transportation: an old pair of roller skates.

Tollas, who turned 100 on Nov. 2, has been through quite a lot in his century on this planet. In 1945, as a member of the U.S. Army's 3008 Grave Registration Company, he spent a year in Okinawa, Japan, supervising the burials of fallen American soldiers.

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Tollas' company passed through the Hawaiian Islands on their way to Okinawa. There he saw the wreckages of ships and tankers still floating in the water in the wake of Japan's 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor.

It's a memory that's lasted his entire life.

"It just shocked us so much," Tollas said.

Daughter Chris Linville saw the reverberations of that shock 50 years later.

"When the movie (2001's "Pearl Harbor") came out, we took Mom and Dad, I didn't think twice about," Chris said. "They were both in tears before it was over. You could hear a pin drop in that theater."

After Tollas left the service, he and his wife, Marie, traveled to Eden Theological Seminary in Webster Groves, Missouri, so Tollas could fulfill a promise he'd made to God: If he stayed safe during his military service, he'd join the Christian ministry.

Over the next 50 years, Tollas served as a pastor at a multitude of places across the Midwest. His family grew along the way.

There was the first stop, in 1950, at the Troy-Moscow Mills Parish in Lincoln County, Missouri. There, he and Marie adopted a daughter, whom they named Christine. Then came another adopted daughter, Linda, and then Marie got pregnant with their third kid, a girl they named DeeAnn.

Then, in 1957, the family moved to Evansville so William could become the pastor at St. Mark's Lutheran Church. A fourth child, Rick, was born at Welborn Hospital. After St. Mark's, the family moved to Batesville, Kentucky, and then, in 1969, to St. John Church in Buckskin, Indiana.

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The Tollas family would spend 15 years in Buckskin before returning to Evansville, where William became chaplain at Good Samaritan Home. In 1987, at the age of 65, William retired. Briefly. He was back working as a pastor in Lynnville in 1991, where he'd remain until retiring — for real this time — in 2000 at 80 years old.

Tollas said he's seen shifts in younger generations' interest in church.

"I think now, churches aren't as active as they once were," Tollas said. "The younger generations that I worked with, they were more receptive to the message of the church than they are today."

After 50 years in the ministry, a year on the typhoon-swept beaches of Okinawa and an unknowable amount of time trudging up and down dirt roads in Baroda, Tollas had one other big hurdle on the path to 100: COVID-19.

He contracted the virus in October, just a few months after a nasty fall in the elevator at his nursing home left him with a broken cervical bone that doctors call the "hanged man's fracture." He spent three months in a neck cast.

Three weeks after getting the cast off, he got COVID. For people in Tollas' age group, COVID has a much higher chance to be a death sentence.

He spent two nights in the hospital. Daughter DeeAnn Moore, wasn't surprised at his resiliency.

"It's really zapped his energy," she said. "But we're praising God that it wasn't any worse than it was and that he's doing well."

Tollas is a bit surprised at his run of good health.

"Rick was just calculating how many times my heart beat in the last 100 years," Tollas said. "Millions, millions of times, and for one heart to keep beating that long, it's just amazing."

This article originally appeared on Evansville Courier & Press: Rev. William Tollas, World War II veteran, survives COVID to reach 100