S. Mendel, 104, Oldest Veteran; Enlisted at 17

S. Leroy Mendel, whose mother agreed to let him go off to the Spanish-American War even though he was only 17 but whose regulations-conscious superiors didn’t and forced him to spend that long-ago conflict in a Texas Army camp, is dead.

The former private and the nation’s oldest veteran was 104 when he died in his sleep Wednesday in Galva, Ill.

The Ft. Worth, Tex., native was only 14 when the U.S. battleship Maine was sunk on June 23, 1898, in Havana Harbor, Cuba, then a Spanish port. But he was unable to enlist in the Army until after the Spanish-American war officially ended.

He enlisted in 1901 at age 17, hoping to join in fighting that continued for several years thereafter in Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines.

“I wanted to go to the Philippines to fight,” Mendel said in a 1983 interview. “But they said I was too young . . . had to be at least 20. It was one of the biggest disappointments in my life.”

Instead of going onto the field of battle, Mendel spent his three-year military career on the fields of sport, carrying a football and throwing a baseball at Ft. Sam Houston. In 1902 he was cited as the best athlete in the U.S. Army.

He was a professional baseball player when Ty Cobb was still in his teens and later in life became a minister, a singer and a violinist. His participation in sports extended to his 90th year when he finally had to give up sandlot baseball.

He retired in 1952 after moving to Galva, a town of 3,200 people.

And although he never officially served in the Spanish American conflict, he became commander in chief of the Spanish-American War Veteran’s Assn. in 1979.

One of his last official acts was to travel to Anaheim in 1980 for the 76th national convention of the Spanish war vets. Of the more than 250,000 men who volunteered to fight in that war, only about 135 were alive at that time and only two, Mendel and Herman Miller, were well enough to make the trip.

In an interview in Anaheim, Mendel said the war he wanted so badly to fight “was a war for freedom, for liberty, a war against injustice. . . .”

With his death, the last known veteran of the Spanish-American War era is Nathan E. Cook, 102, of Tempe, Ariz., a Navy veteran with 44 years of military service.

Mendel became the oldest living veteran when Jasper Garrison died June 5, 1987, at age 107.