Tiny came home Wednesday, three-quarters of a century after he left, bearing the same grin that made him a darling of Palm Beach High's Class of 1941 and filled with ardor to save the world — or die trying.

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Which is what U.S. Army Sgt. Richard Gordon Sowell did, fighting in the Pacific in 1944.

With the military unable to make a firm identification of his shattered remains, they laid him in a numbered grave with those of others until authorities used 21st-century technology to make a match. And finally send him home.

He will be buried at 11 a.m. Friday— the day before Veterans Day — in a family plot at Woodlawn Cemetery in West Palm Beach.

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Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth, among others, will no longer be considered fee-free days at U.S. National Parks. While the MLK National Historic Park in Atlanta doesn't charge admission, the new schedule will affect such metro Atlanta sites as Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park. (Miguel Martinez/AJC)

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