“Are you talking to the newspaper?”
That’s how a smiling Jack Talan greeted his friend Wallace Grove midway through Grove’s interview with The Desert Sun at the Brookdale Mirage Inn on Monday.
The senior living facility off Country Club Drive in Rancho Mirage is where the two men currently live, got to know each other and eventually discovered an unlikely commonality: They both served on the island of Morotai, which is now part of Indonesia, during World War II although they would only meet in Rancho Mirage several decades later…