Roger Rupp Is August Veteran Of The Month
By Doug Kapke
Roger D. Rupp was honored as Jefferson County’s Veteran of the Month for August on Tuesday. Rupp was also presented with a Quilt of Valor and a patriotic wall-hanging by Marley Rosener.
Rupp was born in October 4, 1956, in Canon City, Colorado. His dad was a heavy equipment operator and the family moved locally several times. Consequently, he attended three different grade schools during his six years in grade school in Jefferson County.
In 1962 the family purchased a home in Wheat Ridge, Colorado. Sadly, his mother died in 1963. Rupp attended three years of junior high at Wheat Ridge. His dad remarried in 1966 and the new family consisted of his dad, stepmother, brother, sister and stepbrother.
At age 14 Rupp began working part time at Hillcrest Family Market as a stocker, bag boy and finally as a checker while completing his three years of general course work at Wheat Ridge High School in 1975.
Rupp joined the Marine Corps under the delayed entry program while still a senior in high school. He was promised he would become a “Heavy Equipment Mechanic.” This delayed program allowed him to have some time off after graduation. He worked as a dish washer throughout most of the summer and in August, 1975, Rupp spent a month visiting his grandmother in Oxford. He also visited an uncle in Hebron and had his first visit to Fairbury.
Private Rupp spent his boot camp at San Diego, California, from September, 1975, to December, 1975. He next was trained as a “Heavy Equipment Operator” at Fort Leonard Missouri. In March, 1976 he was assigned to the Marine Corps Air Station El Toro in Orange County, California and was attached to the Heavy Equipment Section Headquarters Squadron as a forklift operator. His duties consisted of loading and unloading military equipment onto and off of military trucks. Sometime later, Rupp recalls being deployed to Twentynine Palms in the Mojave Desert in southern California for night air field support.
Another deployment consisted of going to Big Bear, California, in the spring of 1977 to build an earthen platform for a future radar station using a scoop loader. As is sometimes the case in the military, equipment is not always operational ready. This contributed to a scoop loader roll over without injury to anyone. Due to the high elevation, nights in tents required multiple sleeping bags for warmth.
In December, 1977, Corporal Rupp was reassigned to Camp Garcia Vieques, on an island in southeast Puerto Rico. This was considered overseas duty and their mission was to close a Marine base that had previously been used for amphibious landings. The work consisted mostly of repairing roads and digging pits for trash removal and dozer work to cover trash before it was turned over to the Navy.
In 1978, Corporal Rupp was sent to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. One of his deployments was a two month assignment to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba where his unit provided engineering support for Marine barracks, maintained roads and built a grenade range.
On September 1, 1979 Lance Corporal Rupp was honorably discharged from the Marine Corps. He moved back to Colorado where over the years he worked various union construction jobs. One of the most interesting jobs consisted of disassembling a dredge associated with a gold mining operation and building boxes to ship the dredge to Columbia to a tin mining operation. He has also worked as a welder’s helper, rigger, carpenter, material hoist operator and tower crane operator in the destruction and construction of large buildings in Colorado.
In 1996, Rupp met his partner Debbie, and they moved to Fairbury in 1998. Since moving to Fairbury, Rupp worked several years for Apace when it was called Region 5 and worked several years for the Beatrice State Developmental Center. In retirement, Rupp is a care giver for Debbie and utilizes and appreciates the services provided to veterans through Jefferson County Veteran Service Office.
