We Who Are Alive and Remain (31 page)

I worked for the lumberyard until 1961. Then we moved up to Oregon and I worked for a prison, manufacturing furniture. A couple hundred men under you—it takes some doing to keep a couple hundred men heading in the right direction, and if they’re inmates, it takes something more. Right away I ran into snags. They had a six-week training period. They kept getting off the subject—they wanted you to learn about the forest camps in the summer and when women prisoners take showers. I knew I wasn’t going to get to watch them take showers, and I made it known that I didn’t give a damn about that. ’Course, they disagreed with me and asked me questions about that in the final exam. I didn’t bother answering them. But I got the job anyway. I found that mostly you needed to be a bully and be threatening the inmates all the time. That builds resentment more than character. So I only stayed there for about four months, then told them they could take their bureaucracy and shove it.

Then I had a year of tough going. People in Oregon thought at the time that if you came from California you didn’t know anything. I got a job at a big cabinet shop, part of the paper mill in Salem. I ran into a lot of situations where I did things differently. Where I had to, I changed to their way. At the same time I built myself a shop and got all the equipment. It took about five years to really get going. Then I worked for myself and operated a cabinet shop. In addition to the shop, for twenty years I did property maintenance for a real estate company. Now I’m retired and I still work in my shop. I’m eighty-six and I still do things like make special moldings for antique houses and for people who are restoring stuff. I’m not as nimble in the fingers as I used to be, but I can hold a hammer, and I do what I want, when I want to. I enjoy it. I just can’t see myself not doing anything.

When the war was over I went back to Marquette University. I met Monna, the girl of my dreams, two nights before we started classes in September 1946. We dated off and on all the way through college. She was in nursing. I went back to engineering. For some years it was all homework and lab courses. We graduated from Marquette University in June 1950 and were married that October. We had nine kids and fifteen grandkids. Seven of our kids went to college, and one started his own business at eighteen. We lost our oldest son from complications due to cancer in August 2007.

I worked in the industrial and technical marketing field. I had a bent toward sales and marketing more than technical engineering. For about ten years I worked for GE and learned a lot there, then was in a number of different fields. I ended up as general manager of a large, privately held industrial laundry.

Reentry to civilian life was good for the most part. I was still enjoying the libations we got from the Eagle’s Nest. Drinking grew into more of a habit for me as time went on. But for a job I did pretty well. I became a factory representative for a division of the Norton Company, a supplier of sandpaper, sanding belts, polishing products—stuff like that. I had a territory and was with them for a few years. Then I went to California and got into the collections business. I had a friend in the industry, and for a while had my own agency in Dallas, Texas. I did okay.

I was married three times, once for thirty years, but none worked out. Maybe it’s because I went to Texas A&M. At the time I went it was all-male, all-military—maybe that’s why I’ve never been too good with women [laughs].

I drank pretty heavily until I was about forty years old. Then enough was enough already. I’ve got forty-five years of sobriety coming up this year. I don’t blame war as contributing to my alcoholism. My father was an alcoholic, and I think heredity has something to do with it. But I think the availability during the last part of the war sure helped. I’m not blaming it on Hitler or his hideout, but we had pretty good access to booze for a while there. Then when I came home in ’46 I hit it pretty good. I went through Alcoholics Anonymous and quit drinking in 1963. AA was a vital part of my recovery. I still go to meetings today. I’m not as gung ho about AA as I was at one time, but it was a great help. I live in the Bible Belt, and AA is a religious organization in many ways. I used to say I was an agnostic and tiptoe around about that, but here again at age eighty-six I’d say I don’t really believe. I’m an atheist. I’m not vehement about it, but it’s the truth. I think we’re here as long as we’re here and that’s okay.

I didn’t have any dreams or nightmares about the war. In all honesty, my war was not as traumatic as some—the guys who really went through the whole bit. Looking back, my days in the service were an experience that I treasure. I’m not sure if that’s the right word, but those experiences are something that I’ll always remember.

I came back home January 18, 1946, and just went fishing and trapping for about a month. I finally got enough, and went back to my old job in the Insulite mill, but in a different department than I’d been in before. I had a hard time adjusting to civilian life. Everything seemed common and stale. Everybody looked old and everything was too quiet. In the summer I took guiding jobs on my hours off from the mill. I took tourists out fishing on Rainy Lake. I also took extra jobs building houses in town. Then I paired up with a friend and started a construction firm.

The military was bringing back the bodies of boys who had been killed overseas and had been in temporary graves. I helped unload the caskets at the depot at the end of our Main Street. They’d have to be loaded in a hearse and taken to the mortuary or sometimes to their parents’ homes. It wasn’t a very pleasant task, but I did what I could for all my fallen comrades. Three or four caskets would arrive at a time for quite a while before they were all home. All the small towns around us had their sons shipped to International Falls, and we took care of them as well. I was also involved in the funerals as honor guard and pallbearer. I marched in every parade in International Falls for many years.

I’ve had numerous exciting experiences while trapping in the north woods. Once I had a pack of timber wolves chase me up a deer hunting tree-stand with my snowshoes on. That was an extremely difficult feat, but I accomplished it in a hurry with the wolves snarling under me.

Another time I was walking the length of a long fallen tree near my hunting shack when I jumped down and landed on the hibernating bear sleeping at the base of the roots. After being rudely awakened, he came up fast, with me on his back. I came off his back and started running in midair. My third and last shot took him down. He was 475 pounds, and his hide made a nice addition to my living room floor for many years.

I also rode a moose that was swimming in the lake when I was out fishing one day. He sunk out of sight with my weight on his back, so I had to swim back to the boat.

During one of my beaver trapping trips I was chopping down a drowning pole and my ax hit a knot, slipped off, and went into my leg on the side of my knee. I cut the leg of my winter underwear off and made a tourniquet. I walked a mile and a half on snowshoes back to my shack, periodically loosening the tourniquet to allow blood flow. The blood spurted over my head each time I loosened it. When I finally got to the shack, I tried putting flour, salt, and baking soda on the wound. Nothing worked, so I grabbed a leather needle and some fishing line, sewed it up with the baseball stitch, and applied duct tape over the stitches. That slowed down the bleeding enough so I could start out for home. I rode out of the swamp four miles on my snowmobile to my pickup, then drove forty-four miles to town to the doctor.

Once I bagged a large deer. It was getting late, so when I got home I stuffed him down the coal chute and stopped in the kitchen to have a quick cup of coffee. I finished my coffee and headed down to the basement to process the stag. As I was walking down the steps I heard a strange ripping sound. There he was, standing at the water heater, ripping off the insulation. He bolted and ran around the furnace in the middle of the basement. I grabbed a two-bitted ax, headed him off, and hit him high across his nose just below his eyes. That knocked him down and finished him off. His horns won third place in the Boone and Crockett contest.

I did some flying over the north woods of Minnesota with a hunting and trapping partner, a bush pilot who owned his own plane. In the winter he put skis on the plane, and we could land anywhere on the ice. Once when we were landing we broke off one ski. The plane spun around in a circle several times before coming to a halt. We fashioned a new ski out of a tree pole and headed home.

Today I have forty acres of leased remote property, a choice hunting ground. Every small game season and later deer season I enjoy hunting on my private grounds.

Shortly after returning home, and during all of the above adventures, I was married for twenty-five years to my first wife, Bertha. We raised four boys and a girl. I built a lake cabin and took the kids hunting, fishing, three-wheeling, snowmobiling, and camping as they were growing up. Two sons, Patrick and Mike, and my daughter, Susie, became teachers. One son, Tim, is a registered nurse, works at a hospital, and owns rental units in the Twin Cities, and the other son, Allen, runs a body shop out West. Susie is married to a colonel, Steve Bolint, general inspector in the 32nd Medical Brigade at Brooks Hospital in San Antonio, Texas. They have one daughter, Jennifer, and one son, Andrew, now attending the Air Force Academy in Colorado. So that makes three generations of military in this family. Tim and his wife, Kathy, have two daughters, Nicole and Alexis. So, I now have four grandchildren from my first wife.

Later, I married a second time. Renee and I have had a wonderful thirty-five years together. We’ve traveled to just about every state in the Union.

I am a retired shipping inspector from Boise Cascade Paper Company. After retiring I became involved in a new company starting up named Tri-Wood, Inc. I was elected to be on the Board of Directors as adviser for shipping, warehousing, and marketing. I had experience and qualifications from a lifetime of harvesting forest products converted into lumber and paper products.

I came home, reenlisted into the 82nd Airborne, and spent eighteen months with them at Fort Bragg. Then I returned to civilian life in June 1947. I couldn’t wait to get home. I had had enough of war. It wasn’t all easy, though, when I got back. I got a job at Phelps Dodge Copper Products and worked a lot of overtime. I was making a hundred a week. I gave it to my dad, and he gave me five dollars per week out of all that money. That’s the way it was. It was all about him.

I was dating a girl, Millie; I liked her a lot. I went down to her house all the time. Her folks gave me meals—they were more like a mother and father to me than my father was. One day my dad and I got into an argument. He told me to give her up. I said, “Give her up? Like hell I will.” He came at me with his fists. I said, “Go ahead, take a swing—you’ll be picking your teeth up off the floor.” Then he backed off. I couldn’t take my father any longer. I packed my clothing up, moved out, and got a room.

Millie and I married February 10, 1951. We’ve been married ever since. Today we have three children (a son and two daughters) and eight grandchildren. That’s been the best thing in my life—meeting my wife and marrying her and the family we have together.

When we were first married, Millie and I rented an apartment for a while. We didn’t have enough money to buy our own place. I was working at Phelps Dodge, but it was government contract work so they kept laying people off. There were a lot of promises of good things to come that never materialized. I picked up odd jobs to keep us going. Finally a friend of Millie’s got me a job at Weston Electric. Shortly after that I got another job, with M&M/Mars, the candy company. I worked for them for several months, and Phelps Dodge called me back. This time they promised more money—more than twice as much as I was making at M&M. I didn’t know what to do, so I asked my wife. She asked me where I was happiest. I chose M&M.

Turns out it was the right decision. M&M treated us royally. Old man Mars—he ran the place—if it wasn’t for him we wouldn’t be where we are today. He was my boss, a real gentleman. He owned it. God bless him. He treated his workers really well. It was a nonunion shop, and they always tried to stay one step ahead of the union, so the benefits were far superior to anyplace else. I retired from there in 1987 after thirty-three years of service.

Our son went to North Carolina State University because of their excellent chemistry department. We came down to see him one time when he was working at Southport. I fell in love with North Carolina and said I wanted to retire here. So that’s where we live today.

I’ve been back to Europe five times since the war. The first trip back was in 1976, when I just wanted to see the area. In 1994 I went with an airborne group in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of D-day. That time I was overwhelmed with the reception we all received from the people in the towns over there. I did not expect to be welcomed as a hero. In 2001 I went with the HBO group for the premiere showing of
Band of Brothers
. Several years later I went again with my older daughter and her two children. They were interested in where I was during the war. This time, with the help of some locals, I was able to find my foxhole near Bastogne. The last time I visited the area was in June 2005, with a small group. During this visit I was able to piece together many things that in previous visits I was unable to do.

When I returned to the States, I was quite lucky to meet a young student at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington, where I transferred. She and I both graduated as certified teachers. We were married in 1950 and soon found our way to Alaska. We taught at a village school on an island in southeastern Alaska for two years. We had a complement of 4 teachers and some 150 students in grades one to eight. My wife, Donelle, obtained a master’s degree in order to teach special education children. I taught in the elementary schools and later became principal of several grade schools in southeastern Alaska. In 1960 we moved to Anchorage with our four children, bought a house, which we still live in today, and began to enjoy the better weather conditions in that city. Each year we enjoyed the three summer months off from teaching and pursued more college courses, traveled, fished, and gardened. In 1975, with our four kids in tow, we flew to Amsterdam and traveled in a rented Volkswagen bus through Holland, Sweden, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, France, England, and northern Scotland, where we visited relatives.