War hero’s remains come home to Kansas City — 74 years later
Through all the years that the family spoke of him, Franklyn Hall Stratton — “Hall” as everyone knew him — was mythic.
A Navy and Marine fighter pilot in World War II and Korea, he was tall and handsome. His eyes, hazel. His hair, light brown. A joking University of Missouri college man, a fraternity brother. Girls wanted to date him. Guys wanted to be his best pal.
So when, on June 16, 1951, Capt. Hall Stratton, at age 26 — a hero who had already been presented with the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal with two gold stars — went down in combat, having parachuted over North Korea and been dragged away by the enemy, his parents and younger brother, Bill, in Kansas City would mourn him the rest of their lives.
“It was devastating,” his now 70-year-old nephew and namesake, Hall Stratton of Oak View, California, said Thursday in Kansas City.
The Marine Corps declared Stratton killed in action in 1954. His nephew said that, for decades, his grandparents had kept alive a faint hope that maybe their hero son had just been captured and would one day come gamboling through the front door to the family’s Brookside home.
But as years passed, that hope turned into quiet acceptance.
“He was the favorite son,” Stratton said.
But now Capt. Hall Stratton has returned home.
WWII and Korean War hero
On Friday at 1 p.m., the warrior’s remains — having been identified after 74 years — will be interred at Forest Hill Cemetery, 6901 Troost Ave., in a ceremony expected to include full military honors: a bugler’s taps, an honor guard and rifle salute, and the presentation of the American flag. A military flyover had been scheduled, but was canceled due to the government shutdown.
When Hall’s casket is lowered, it will be into a family plot, alongside his parents, and beneath a headstone that was put there more than 50 years ago and which has waited for him since.
“We’re just glad that this is finally happening,” Stratton, the nephew, said, his voice choking. “The mystery has been solved after all these years.”
“This is a deeply, moving time for our family, to celebrate this homecoming,” neice Sheryl Stratton, said.
The Strattons and their siblings grew up with tales of their “Uncle Hall,” a man they never met. All of them, with their spouses and children, have traveled to attend the funeral: Stratton from Oak View, sister Anna Stratton from Washington, D.C., Sheryl Stratton from Arlington, Virginia, Shelby Stratton, a retired U.S. Navy Captain, from Wielerbach, Germany.
In June, when Hall Stratton received a call from the military saying that his uncle’s remains had been identified, “I thought it was a scam,” he said.
Remains were ‘unknown’ for 74 years
The Korean War lasted from 1950 to July 27, 1953. In 1954, under an effort known as Operation Glory, the remains of some 4,000 soldiers, most belonging to Americans, were recovered and repatriated to the United States. Of that number, some 400 remains were interred as “unknown” at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, Hawaii.
From 1990 on, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, under the motto “Fulfilling our nation’s promise,” has continued the effort to identify those remains. Stratton’s, the agency’s website shows, was identified on May 29, 2025.
American Airlines flew Stratton’s flag-draped casket from Hawaii to Dallas. Hall Stratton and his sister, Sheryl Stratton, met the plane there. They accompanied the casket to the Kansas City International Airport, where it was met with an honor guard. Emergency pumper trucks greeted the aircraft with an arching shower of water known as a water salute.
“It was beautiful,” Sheryl Stratton said. “When we landed in KC and looked out the window and saw all the police cars, Marines, and the rest of our family all lined up, it was breathtaking. It was so awe-inspiring.”
Franklyn Hall Stratton was born on Sept. 30, 1924, to Al F. Stratton and Delta Hall Stratton. He graduated from Southwest High School and attended the University of Missouri before enlisting in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve on March 1, 1944.
His younger brother, William Robert Stratton, also served in Korea. When his brother was killed, he was placed in a non-combat unit. For all these years, the Strattons said, it was their father who kept their uncle’s legacy alive.
“You know,” Sheryl Stratton said, “it would have meant so much to my dad to be here. Wishing he could have seen it. It would have been life-changing. Just all the angst for my dad, all those years just wondering.”
This story was originally published October 10, 2025 at 10:52 AM.
