Iwo Jima battle veteran went on to live ‘such an incredible life’
Iwo Jima, March 10, 1945: Machine gun bullets whizzed through the air. Explosions and screams echoed in the distance. Paul Merriman, a month shy of his 18th birthday, hid behind a rock on the beach, trapped.
He and his fellow Marines started chucking grenades toward the Japanese soldiers, now only a few dozen feet away. “I’m getting out of here,” one of his buddies said, and as soon as he stood, a bullet blew through his head.
A minute later, Merriman heard a thud in the sand and looked down: An enemy soldier must have picked up one of their live grenades and tossed it back. “Oh, I’m dead,” Merriman remembered thinking.
The blast sent his body flying and filled his back with shrapnel — but it did not kill him.
He survived the war, returned to his home in Pennsylvania, got married, raised seven kids, bought a small business in Texas for $1 and turned it into a $200 million company. Along the way, he became an avid runner, logging more than 50,000 miles over five decades and leading some to believe he might never slow down.
He did, though, and on Saturday, less than two months after celebrating his 90th birthday, Merriman died at an assisted living home in Houston.
“He’s one of those people who has lived such an incredible life, it’s hard to believe you actually knew him,” said Rick Arnett,
who spent 20 years working for Merriman at Hisco, the Houston-based industrial supply company he bought in 1970.
Merriman grew up during the Great Depression and remembered his mother sometimes sending him and his siblings out to forage for food. They would return with apples or dandelions cut from neighbors’ yards: “It was the best we could do,” Merriman said in a March interview with The Veterans Project, which collects stories and photos of combat veterans.
Merriman volunteered for the Marine Corps at 17, even as Allied forces had begun to turn the tide in Europe and was soon shipped out to fight in the Pacific. He landed at Iwo Jima with the 5th Marine Division at the start of one of the war’s bloodiest and most iconic battles.
“I wasn’t afraid to die because I knew that was part of our duty,” Merriman told The Veterans Project. “There were times I was absolutely shocked, but I didn’t fear death.”
He came close to it on the 20th day of fighting there, when he was hit with the grenade blast. He remembered reaching back afterward and realizing his back was soaked with blood. He made it off the beach and eventually was evacuated.
A dollar into millions
Back home, he found work and fell in love.
“My wife would often say that God saved me on Iwo Jima just for her,” Merriman said in March. “Like other wives of those times, she kept house, she accepted the scarce finances early on, and ... when I took some business and job risks, she trusted me totally.”
The biggest risk came in 1970. Merriman was working for General Electric in Philadelphia when his boss offered to sell him a company he owned in Houston for $10,000. The business, Houston Industrial Supply Company, was loaded with debt and at risk of failing. Merriman countered by offering $1.
“I walked out of that office with a new company and a dollar less,” Merriman recalled years later, laughing.
Merriman shortened the company’s name to Hisco, and over the next four decades, pulled it out of debt and turned it into a multimillion-dollar business, with 38 branches in three countries. It was among the first businesses in the country to begin offering employees a stock-ownership program in the 1970s.
“It’s hard to believe something like that was done,” said Arnett, who joined the company in the early 1980s and later became a vice president under Merriman. “He took a huge risk taking on all that debt, and he made it work.”
Wife ‘always first’
Merriman was proud of his military service and business success, but he cared for his wife above all else, said Laura Merriman, his fourth child. Her mother, Patricia, used to dress all the children in nice outfits and have them line up to welcome their dad home after business trips.
“My father always went to my mother first and gave her a hug and a kiss,” Laura Merriman said. “My mother always came first in his life.”
He was devastated when she died in 2009 and visited her grave often at Houston National Cemetery, where he will be buried alongside her later this week.
Merriman stayed active after her death, speaking frequently at Memorial Day events and visiting schools to tell children about his war experience — stories Laura and her siblings didn’t hear growing up.
Merriman also gained notoriety as a prodigious runner, a hobby he’d started in 1967 as a way to blow off steam. Amazingly, he tracked every run over the years, and in 2012, while surrounded by all seven children, he broke through a plastic tape at Memorial Park as he eclipsed 50,000 miles.
“I like the quietness, the aloneness, the nonpressure of the open road,” Merriman told a Houston Chronicle reporter that day. “There’s something redeeming about being out running by yourself.”