A Toledo school pulled a 1967 transcript, found a student who was one semester short, and handed his brother and sister a diploma at halftime of a football game
Thomas Eugene Novak stopped showing up to class in the spring of 1967. He did not tell his friends. He was a senior at Central Catholic High School in Toledo, a football player, and then one Monday he simply was not there.
He had enlisted in the Marine Corps at 17, with his parents’ signature. Twenty months later he was dead in Vietnam. On Friday night his brother and sister walked to the 50 yard line of the school stadium to collect the diploma he never earned.
A red folder at midfield, and a family that came back
The ceremony happened at halftime of the Central Catholic game against crosstown rival St. John’s Jesuit, on Sept. 18, at Gallagher Stadium. The Irish led 31 to 0 at the break and won 45 to 14.
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A school official read the line over the public address system: “It is our privilege to recognize Thomas Eugene Novak as a graduate of Central Catholic High School.” Novak’s surviving siblings stood on the field holding a maroon diploma case while the stands applauded.
“It’s an honor,” his brother Michael Novak told WTOL 11 in Toledo. “I feel very grateful.”
The promise his mother asked for before he signed
His sister, Terri Simpson, was Terri Novak then. She described her brother to the station in plain words. “He was a fun guy to be around. He played football at Central. He was a go-getter. Big guy. Very gentle though.”
She also called him a protector. “If there was any trouble, he was always there to protect me,” she said. Their mother agreed to sign the enlistment papers on one condition, and Terri repeated it word for word.
“Her one thing that Mom asked him to do is, ‘If you leave school, you have to get your GED.’ So that’s what he did,” she said. He took the test, passed it, and shipped out to train as a Marine.
Aircraft electrician, 136 days in country, Panel W36
The public casualty record fills in what the family story leaves out. Novak was born Oct. 5, 1949. He reached Vietnam on Aug. 7, 1968, and was dead 136 days later.
He was a lance corporal, pay grade E-3, and his military occupational specialty was 6241, aircraft electrical systems technician. He served with VMFA-115, the Silver Eagles, part of Marine Aircraft Group 13, 1st Marine Aircraft Wing, III Marine Amphibious Force.
That squadron flew F-4B Phantoms out of Chu Lai, the air base in what was then Quang Tin Province. His record on The Virtual Wall lists him as a ground casualty in that same province, hostile, killed by artillery, rocket or mortar, body recovered.
His name is cut into the black granite in Washington at Panel W36, Line 58. He was awarded the Purple Heart, the National Defense Service Medal, the Vietnam Service Medal, the Vietnam Campaign Medal and the Combat Action Ribbon.
Two Swanton Marines died that day, and they never met
The family kept the clipping. The Toledo Blade ran it under the headline “Two Swanton Marines Killed,” with a second line that read “Die Monday In Same Vietnam Province.”
The other man was Staff Sgt. Robert C. Drewicz, 31. The casualty file puts him with MABS-13, the base squadron of the same Marine air group, dead the same day in the same province. His name sits on Panel W36, Line 56, two lines above Novak’s.
The Blade wrote that Drewicz was killed by enemy rocket fire and that Novak, 19, son of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Novak of Rt. 5, Swanton, died of mortar fragment wounds. Under a subhead reading “Not Acquainted,” the paper reported the two were in different units and, as far as their families knew, had never met.
The same clipping carries a photo caption that the school would read again 58 years later: “CPL. THOMAS NOVAK, attended Central Catholic.”
The transcript that sat in a school file since 1967
Nobody at Central Catholic went looking for this. The question came from a lunch table. Classmates from the Class of 1967 still meet, and one day someone asked whether Tom had ever received his diploma.
Months later one of those classmates, James King, was on the phone with Cory Lehman, the school’s director of institutional advancement. “And I almost just said, thank you and goodbye,” King told WTOL. “And at the last minute, I thought about Tom Novak.”
Lehman went into the files. “We went and pulled his transcript and looked at it,” he said. “He’s only a semester away.” The school decided to close the gap itself.
The classmates who kept counting the years
King described what almost six decades of ordinary life look like from the other side of that gap, and he did it as a list rather than a speech.
“My marriage, my career, my three daughters, my five grandchildren,” he said. “All the wonderful things that I’ve had throughout my life and so many of my friends have had, and how his life was cut short.”
He also remembered the week Tom vanished from the hallway. “We didn’t know right away that he had dropped out of school because he didn’t tell anybody. And it was like, you know, ‘Where’s Tom?'”
His name was already on a wall inside the building
Central Catholic did not forget him. A bronze plaque inside the school lists its war dead in alphabetical order, and NOVAK, THOMAS E. is engraved between NEUHOFF, RONALD and OVERBERG, JOHN.
What the school did not have was paperwork. A memorial plaque is a name. A diploma is a record, and for 59 years the record said he left.
Ohio has had a route for this on the books since 2003
Ohio law already allows exactly what happened at Gallagher Stadium. Section 3313.616 of the Revised Code, in force since 2003, lets a school board or the governing authority of a chartered nonpublic school grant a high school diploma to a veteran who left before graduating.
The statute covers World War II, Korea and Vietnam, and it says the diploma may be awarded posthumously and handed to a living relative. The rule that implements it, written by the Ohio Department of Veterans Services, fixes the Vietnam window at Aug. 5, 1964 through May 7, 1975.
Novak fits the text on every point. He left school to enlist, he served inside the window, and he was an Ohio resident who had been enrolled in an Ohio high school. Central Catholic presented the award as an honorary diploma from the school.
How a family asks for a posthumous diploma
The path is short and it costs nothing. A veteran, or a relative of a veteran who has died, starts at the county veterans service office, which keeps the application form and helps fill it out.
The applicant attaches a certified copy of the discharge or other proof of honorable service, usually the DD-214. The office forwards the file to the school district, the chartered nonpublic school or the county educational service center that would have granted the diploma.
There is no exam and no coursework to make up. The rule was last updated on Jan. 23, 2023, and earlier versions date to 2004, 2006 and 2012. More than 3,100 names from Ohio are listed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and each of those families is eligible to ask.
What the Class of 1967 finally got to do
Terri Simpson still remembers the knock. “I do remember the Sergeant Major and the other officer that came to the door,” she said. “It was a shock.”
The date on the telegram was Dec. 21, 1968. It was also her birthday.
Fifty nine years after he walked out of the building, the class he never graduated with stood up in the bleachers while his brother and sister carried his name off the field. The full report by Chase Bachman is on WTOL 11 and its sister stations.
