He was born in Nebraska on December 10, 1924, but calls Plainfield home today.
Veteran Jim Collins is celebrating his 100th birthday, and looking back, he’s got a story of close calls, serving his country, and trying to change the world.
“I came along in the middle of a storm in Nebraska,” Collins said. “I was born in a farmhouse and the local doctor said, ‘This young man is stubborn; I can’t deliver him.’ So they called for another doctor and he used forceps on me and crushed my right ear – or so that’s the story my mother would tell me.”
He’s the oldest of three boys, and once the Great Depression hit, as well as dust bowls in Nebraska in the early 1930s, the family made the decision to move back to Indiana.
His dad, Elsworth, was a mechanic, and his mom, Mable, ran a three-story boarding house at the corner of Walnut and Illinois in downtown Indianapolis.
Collins remembers his sixth-grade teacher walking the class to the central library, signing up for a library card and checking out a book each week.
“We had to read a book and talk about it in front of the class,” he said. “I loved ’20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’ and really it made me a reader all of my life. Everything I know is because I’ve read about it.”
The Collins family eventually settled in a home just off of Washington Street on the west side, and he began attending Ben Davis High School. His parents purchased the home for $1,100 and used the empty lot next door to create the largest garden in the neighborhood. It was there that Collins had another close call.
“I suffered a ruptured appendix and for two days,” he said. “I was really sick. My mother got the doctor and he said, ‘If you don’t get him to the hospital in the next couple of hours, he’ll die.’ We borrowed a 1939 Buick sedan and went down to Methodist where doctors put me in surgery right away. For three weeks there was no penicillin, no sulfur drugs, just aspirin, and my mother never left my side. The doctor said the only reason I survived was because I was young, heathy and ornery.”
Shortly after, Collins made a decision that would change his life.
He had completed requirements for graduation by the spring of 1943, but there wouldn’t be a ceremony until May. He went down to the draft board and chose to join the Navy.
“On March 8, 1943, I was sworn in with a bunch of yahoos and we went to the Great Lakes north of Chicago for boot camp,” Collins said. “When I returned from boot camp, the following Sunday was my class’s graduation ceremony, so I got to walk in my uniform. Some of the girls wanted to know all about it.”
Back in the service, Collins studied an intensive medical program to become a nurse and eventually passed exams to become a pharmacist third class.
It brought him to a boot camp in Idaho, when an outbreak of scarlet fever needed to be managed, and later he was sent to a remote island in a makeshift hospital off the coast of Japan.
“I got assigned to a base hospital,” he said. “It was a series of tents, connected with wooden walkways and tent tops – a typical ‘M.A.S.H.’ outfit. There was a tent for headquarters, a tent for surgery, a tent for bone fractures, another for infectious diseases and one for venereal diseases. I got assigned to venereal disease.”
One might think that being in charge of a tent full of patients suffering from gonorrhea isn’t where you’d want to be, but for Collins, it put him on a future path he would have never imagined.
At the time, the only treatment they had to give patients was sulfur drugs, attempting to dry up the infection. It didn’t work.
Collins said the only time someone was released from the tent was when mother nature healed them.
Then came a unique opportunity from the six main pharmaceutical companies in the United States, including Eli Lilly.
“Fleming discovered penicillin in 1918 and it did wonders in small batches, but he couldn’t figure out how to mass produce it,” Collins said. “Our pharmaceutical companies figured it out and they shipped it to us overnight.”
The shipment came with instructions for administrators to document dosage, reactions and effectiveness, and to send documentation to Washington immediately.
“I was designated to give all the shots – the first corpsman to administer penicillin, and we had gonorrhea cured in less than a week,” Collins said.
He officially served in the U.S. Navy for three years and one day, before receiving his honorable discharge. For many of the men returning home, that was just the beginning.
“I received $100 every month for three months from the government, and I saw a 1931 Ford Roaster with a rumble seat parked up on blocks across the street,” Collins said. “The tires were bad because you couldn’t get tires during World War II. I bought it for $100 and my dad helped me convert the rims to fit tires we had. Another neighbor offered to paint it a shiny black, and you know the ladies were wanting to go for a ride.”
Eventually he married Lillian Parker and had two sons with her. He earned his degree in biological science and went to work at the state board of health laboratory, which soon led to a position in the food and drug inspection division.
“The first training I had for that job was the Central State Hospital on West Washington Street,” Collins said. “We were there for 30 days and inspected every part of that building. It was a study in everything that could ever go wrong.”
In 1959, he was the man who inspected the largest food poisoning outbreak in the history of Indiana, with more than 1,000 people in Elkhart getting poisoned due to mishandled meat.
Outside of work, Collins was active in his Hendricks County community, having settled down with his family.
In 1989 he and four other men started the Avon Rotary Club, a group he still enjoys visiting today.
He and Lillian divorced and he married two more times, but today he’s single and making beautiful charcoal drawings at his Plainfield home.
“My mother was a painter,” he said. “My wife at the time bought me eight prepaid lessons so I took them at Sketchpad in 2013. The charcoal drawing of the eagle is the best one I’ve ever done.”
It might be genetics that got Collins this far. His father died at 101 years old, and his mother was in her 90s before passing away of cancer. However, it might also be Collins’ interest in always learning something new, and sharing it with others.
He’s passionate about the treatment of others, the rights of minorities, and encouraging others to make a difference.
“I think that’s what does it,” he said. “I’m just trying to change the world.”
