Greensboro loses a faithful Marine
The choice would have been difficult for Bill Ditto. Pick a word for his tombstone: orthodontist or Marine.
With Dr. William Ditto's death at 83 Monday, Greensboro lost one of its most gung-ho leathernecks ever. He had departed the corps more than 50 years ago, but as the saying goes, once a Marine, always a Marine.
In 1944, Ditto was a member of the Marine Corps 400, the only officers trained outside the corps' officer training school at Quantico, Va. Quantico was too crowded; Ditto and 399 others did their training at Camp Lejeune.
The 375 who completed the training, including Ditto, shipped out to fight in one of World War II's most brutal battles, the invasion of Okinawa.
Of the group, 48 were killed and 168 wounded, one of the highest casualty rates in U.S. warfare history.
In 2001, writer James Dickerson wrote a book: "We Few: The Marines Corps 400 in the War Against Japan." The cover photo showed a tired, battle-scared Marine smoking a pipe. That was Bill Ditto.
In a 2001 interview upon publication of Dickerson's book, Ditto still subscribed to "Leatherneck Magazine." He decorated his cars with eagle, globe and anchor logos. Until an advanced age, he attended the local Marine Corps birthday ball each November. When he stopped attending, he met with a few Marine buddies for drinks to celebrate the birth of the corps in a Philadelphia tavern in the 18th century.
Each morning for years at his house in Hamilton Lakes, he would in Marine fashion hoist the American flag on his front porch, humming the tune to "Colors." He ended by taking a step backwards and snapping a salute. At a retreat ceremony that night, he took the flag now in similar dignified fashion.
When he was in a bus or train station or airport, "Every time I see a Marine, I have to go speak to him," he said.
He had connections at Headquarters Marine Corps in Washington. His pull was such that Gen. Alfred Gray, then the commandant of the Marine Corps, came to Greensboro in the 1980s to speak to Ditto's Greensboro Kiwanis Club.
Ditto knew his World War II history and that of World War I, in which his father, also a Marine, saw combat. And he collected Civil War artifacts, and gave talks about the War Between the States.
And he was pretty good at straightening teeth. He retired in 1991 after practicing orthodontics for 37 years.
