‘Papa Jake' Larson, D-day veteran and TikTok star, dies aged 102
An animated speaker who charmed strangers young and old with his quick smile and generous hugs, the self-described country boy from Minnesota was 'cracking jokes til the end,'' his granddaughter wrote in announcing his death.
Tributes to him quickly filled his Story Time with Papa Jake TikTok account from across the United States, where he had been living in Lafayette, California. Towns around Normandy, still grateful to Allied forces who helped defeat the occupying Nazis in the second world war, paid homage too.
'Our beloved Papa Jake has passed away on July 17th at 102 years young,' granddaughter McKaela Larson posted on his social media accounts. 'He went peacefully.'
'As Papa would say, love you all the mostest,' she wrote.
Born on 20 December 1922, in Owatonna, Minnesota, Larson enlisted in the National Guard in 1938, lying about his age as he was only 15 at the time. In 1942, he was sent overseas and was stationed in Northern Ireland. He became operations sergeant and assembled the planning books for the invasion of Normandy.
He was among the nearly 160,000 Allied troops who stormed the Normandy shore on D-day, 6 June 1944, surviving machine-gun fire when he landed on Omaha Beach. He made it unhurt to the bluffs that overlook the beach, which were studded with German gun emplacements that killed many soldiers.
'We are the lucky ones,' Larson told the Associated Press at the 81st anniversary of D-day in June, speaking among the graves at the American cemetery overlooking Omaha Beach.
'We are their family. We have the responsibility to honour these guys who gave us a chance to be alive.'
He went on to fight through the Battle of the Bulge, a gruelling month-long fight in Belgium and Luxembourg that was one of the defining moments of the war and of Hitler's defeat. His service earned him a Bronze Star and a French Legion of Honour award.
In recent years, Larson made repeated trips to Normandy for D-day commemorations.
In his TikTok posts and interviews, Larson combined humorous anecdotes with somber reminders about the horrors of war.
Speaking to AP on the three years he was in Europe, Larson said he is 'no hero.' Speaking in 2024, he also had a message to world leaders: 'Make peace not war.'
He often called himself 'the luckiest man in the world,' and expressed awe at all the attention he was getting. 'I'm just a country boy. Now I'm a star on TikTok,' he told AP in 2023. 'I'm a legend! I didn't plan this, it came about.'
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'It's important to understand that these are lived experiences,' said associate curator of history Dania Talley, who curated the exhibition. In the adjacent hall are three pieces from community collaborators that tell the story of continued displacement in the Bay Area, as well as resistance and hope for the community's future. Particularly striking is the full-scale replica of the East Oakland house that activists with the housing justice organization Moms 4 Housing occupied for nearly two months in 2019. For Carolle Fife, an Oakland councilmember who participated in the 2019 occupation, there is a clear through-line between the forced displacement of Russell City residents in the 1960s and the inaccessibility of housing — especially for people of color — nationwide today. 'This is something historically Black folks have been going through in every urban center, and now even rural spaces throughout this country, because of systemic racism,' Fife said on opening night of the exhibition. Brandi Summers, an Oakland-born sociologist and associate professor at Columbia University, said the severity of the cost-of-living crisis in Oakland has once again forced displacement upon the city's Black residents, who are today moving to more distant suburbs and exurbs, or out of the state entirely. 'A lot of Black people actually don't feel comfortable in Oakland any more, regardless of whether we can actually live here,' said Summers, who also leads the scholar and artist collective Archive of Urban Futures, one of the groups that collaborated on the exhibition. Against the backdrop of that crisis, California has in recent years emerged as a national leader when it comes to acknowledging past harms perpetrated against Black communities. In 2020, the state legislature established a nine-person reparations taskforce. And in 2024, Governor Gavin Newsom allocated $12m to racial justice initiatives and issued a formal apology for California's role in slavery. Individual localities have also engaged with the issue. San Francisco established its own advisory committee, which recommended in 2023 that the city issue individual reparations payments of $5m to qualifying individuals. And last week, Alameda county approved $750,000 in redress funds for former residents of Russell City. Hayward, which in 2021 issued a formal apology for its role in the community's destruction, earmarked an additional $250,000 for the fund. But many activists and community members have expressed disappointment at what they see as insufficient progress, especially after bills that would have issued direct cash payments and enabled those displaced through eminent domain to reclaim lost land failed to pass through the legislature last summer. And for former residents of Russell City, the $1m redress fund is woefully inadequate. 'It is pennies on the dollar for the value of the land that you took,' said Johnson. 'That's just a slap in the face.' AUP's Summers worries that public interest and political favor are turning away from issues of Black equity – especially as the current federal administration targets institutions, such as the National Museum of African American History and Culture, that study and elevate the often-sidelined histories of Black Americans. It is for these reasons, Summers says, that shedding light on the legacies of Black Americans' past experiences of displacement, while still possible, is so critical. 'As funding for the arts and humanities goes, stories that are less known will disappear,' she said. For museum director Fogarty, the fact that Omca is telling histories of Black displacement at this moment is in itself a form of resistance. 'Look at what's happening. There is an overt governmental attack on these kinds of stories,' she said. 'There are many places in this country that this show could not be presented right now.'
