Milt Mapou

Mike Harden: You wonder whether anyone is listening

Friday, July 13, 2001

Mike Harden
Dispatch Columnist

Doral Chenoweth III / Dispatch

Milt and Helen Mapou are making ends meet despite the loss of her hearing aids while she was hospitalized.

When Helen Mapou learned that the twin hearing aids she needed cost $2,200 each, she had to make a tough choice.

She could buy them if she spread the payments over five years.

She recalled saying to herself, "I'm 83 years old and I have heart trouble. Am I going to live five years?"

She was afraid she might die before she could pay off the debt.

"When you get to that age, you get to thinking that way," Mapou said.

"We're not living high on the hog," Helen's husband, Milt, said of the couple's finances.

Still, he insisted that his wife have the hearing aids. They'd find a way to scrape up the $111-a-month payments.

They have almost paid off their mobile home in Enchanted Acres, off Parsons Avenue. They live frugally. It would work out.

Milt is the one who noticed Helen's right hearing aid was missing during her stay at Grant Medical Center in May.

Helen thinks she might have brushed it from her ear while she was napping. A few minutes after that nap, she was whisked off to X-ray.
The housekeeping staff made her bed while she was away.

She fears the hearing aid was inadvertently rolled up with the old bedclothes and thrown in a hamper.

Milt searched the room with no luck. When he explained the loss to a nurse, he said she responded, "You don't need to worry. We're insured for those things."

"She told me to call risk management," he continued. He was relieved, though only briefly.

"They're not going to pay for it," he said Wednesday.
"They said they were not going to do anything about it because the hearing aids should have been turned in to the nurses for safekeeping."

"If she had turned them over to the nurses, she wouldn't have been able to hear a thing."

In a perfect world, folks like Milt and Helen Mapou -- the so-called "Greatest Generation" --
wouldn't be fretting over money or buying hearing aids on five-year installment plans.

Milt hadn't intended it that way. When he joined the Navy in 1940, he was looking toward making it a career.
He could retire after 20 years, get another job, then eventually retire with two pensions.

He was at Pearl Harbor aboard the cruiser USS Detroit when the Japanese attacked. A torpedo missed the cruiser.

Later in the war, while he was manning the guns on the USS Pringle, a kamikaze pilot crashed his plane into the destroyer.
The ship sank in minutes. Milt's leg was shattered.

He was shipped home with two Purple Hearts and a handful of battle stars. The hope of a military retirement pension vanished.

He worked a variety of jobs in civilian life, though routinely was hospitalized when bone shards from the break caused episodic bouts with osteomyelitis.

The coveted pension eluded him. He has his disability check and Social Security. He and Helen watch their money.

They hadn't planned on buying a third hearing aid. Milt thinks Grant should have done that.

"We're not reimbursing her for it," Grant spokesman Mark Hopkins said. "We feel for her loss . . . . We didn't have any direct connection to its loss."

Let's make one thing clear. Mark Hopkins and Grant's risk managers aren't responsible for the cards life dealt Milt and Helen Mapou.

The hearing-aid story serves merely to remind us that the "Greatest Generation" didn't come to be called that because of its wealth.

Amid the recent groundswell of public gratitude for that generation, we ought not forget that praise won't pay the mortgage and accolades won't buy hearing aids.

Mike Harden is an Accent columnist.

mharden@dispatch.com