Texas veteran continues to add to massive list of Legionnaires he has signed up.
Walter Geraghty Jr. of San Antonio, Texas, has done a lot of American Legion recruiting over the decades. He was worn many caps in the organization, from the post to national level, which is good. He needs them to display all the pins and other awards he has received for signing up hundreds of members a year.
He serves on the national Membership & Post Activities Committee and is generally considered a titan of new-Legionnaire acquisition, a perennial Gold Brigade award (50 new members or more in a given membership year) winner who estimates he has signed up nearly 5,000 Legionnaires singlehandedly in his life.
One post he revitalized went from 12 members to 1,006 in less than 10 years. “The most I ever signed up in one day was 17, which was a good day … It’s very easy to sign up people, if you’re positive.”
No sales effort, however, compares to his performance following a Sept. 19, 2021, cardiac event that put him in the hospital and left him unconscious for 52 continuous hours.
Geraghty Jr. had eaten a steak, baked potato and salad for dinner at a restaurant that night.
“After eating, I fell out of the booth and landed on the floor, and I died for 26 minutes,” he explains. “They revived me, put me in the ambulance, and I died a second time for between four and six minutes … My cardiologist, she said, the odds of living were about 2-6%. So, I am a walking miracle. I am either a ghost or an angel.”
He was unconscious from Sunday to Tuesday that week. And when he came to, Geraghty Jr. did what he usually does. He signed up three new members, including one of his nurses, before he was discharged.
In the nearly two years since the incident, Geraghty’s recruitment numbers have slowed down from his usual pace of more than 100 per year – he has lost some of his balance and now uses a walker to get around – but his passion for membership remains unchanged. He recently staffed a membership booth at a restaurant where he quickly sold two veterans on the organization, and his booth mates observed, “‘Well, you haven’t lost the touch.’”
Geraghty, a Vietnam War draftee, has been involved with The American Legion since boyhood in the mid-1950s when he was on a championship American Legion junior drum and bugle corps in Florida. After serving in the Air Force in the early 1970s, he was elected commander of two different posts a total of 15 times; he was also a district and division vice commander in Texas.
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