DAD

A Memorial Day Tribute

WWII

On the morning of December 7, 1941 at Hickam Field, Dad and other soldiers from his chemical warfare training unit were just rolling out when they heard planes overhead. Dad thought it strange that they would be having maneuvers over the base so early on a Sunday morning (it was around 8:00 a.m.), so he went out to take a look.

He knew immediately that the planes were not U.S. planes. They had a large, red radiating suns painted on the tails. We now know what those soldiers didn’t know then: the Japanese were mounting a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.

The attack killed 2,403 US personnel, including 68 civilians, and destroyed or damaged 19 US Navy ships, including 8 battleships. More than 1,000 were also wounded.

Thankfully, my dad was not among the injured or casualties.

The Japanese strike force consisted of 353 aircraft launched from four heavy carriers.

The planes used in the attack were specifically 131 strong of the Aichi 3A2, Val Type 99, single-engine dive bombers, 79 of the Mitsubishi A6M2 Zeke or Zero Model 11 Carrier-borne fighter, and 143 NakajimaB5N2 Kate Type 97, Model 12 Single-engine torpedo bombers. https://visitpearlharbor.org/japanese-war-machines-pearl-harbor-attack/

Seeing what was going on, Dad ran straight to the armory where the weapons were stored. Since it was locked, they had to break in. Once armed, the men went outside and began firing at the planes as they flew over.

Dad remembers tackling one young Lieutenant who had peed in his pants and was running around in an open field. He got him to safety then resumed firing at the planes.

The next day Dad recounted being on a detail to police the beaches and pick up and bag body parts. It was a gruesome task for a 23-year-old young man. But Dad was never one to shy away from unpleasant duties.

Back to California

After the war, Dad’s unit was sent back to the states. Their ship landed in Seattle where they boarded a train and spent most of the week traveling to Bowling Green, Florida, where Dad was stationed until he mustered out a year later, shortly after VJ Day (August 15, 1945).

Bowling Green is just a few miles north of Wauchula on U.S. 17. That’s important because Wauchula is where my dad met my mom. She was a waitress in a cafe that Dad and his friend Lester often ate at. Mom’s friend Rachel also worked there. Lester married Rachel and Dad married my mother Flora. They were married in a double ring ceremony in Wauchula in April 1944 and remained friends for life. I was born in January 1945.

A year after my birth, Mom and Dad packed up and boarded a train for California and Dad’s hometown, Susanville. They arrived in Susanville in the summer of 1946 with a 1-year-old baby, a steamer trunk and two suitcases containing all of their worldly possessions.

Having no place to live, they moved in with my great aunt Helen, her husband Loren and my great grandmother. Aunt Helen didn’t have any children, so I’m sure having a screaming one-year-old around was a challenge for everyone.

Fruit Growers

Dad got a job at the Fruit Growers Supply Company lumber mill as a lumber piler. He spent his day stacking lumber in the yard where it dried and awaited shipment. It was hard work and Dad earned his pay.

During the winter, he would often feed the green chain. That was the chain conveyor that took logs from the pond to the huge band saws that cut them into boards. It was inside work and Dad was always grateful for that during the winter.

Dad’s dream, though, was to work in the woods. He and another man, Earnest Hopkins, who would remain a life-long friend, got their chance. They bought a 2-man I.E.L. chain saw and went to work falling trees. Dad loved the work and continued to do it throughout his working life.

Stopping for a drink

Like most men who work hard physically, Dad enjoyed stopping at one of the local watering holes for a beer or two (and often more) on his way home. He didn’t do it often, but when he did, he was usually late for dinner, which infuriated my mother. Much of her fury came from worry as there was no way of knowing whether he’d met with an accident or simply stopped to have a few drinks with the guys.

The locations Dad worked at were deep in the woods. It took a good 40 minutes to an hour to drive from the workplace home. Driving on those narrow mountain highways challenged even sober drivers. How Dad did it after having a few too many remains a mystery to me.

Mom didn’t drive, so she had no way to find out if Dad was OK until he walked (or staggered) through the door.

When I was old enough to drive, I’d sometimes be sent out on such occasions to find Dad. By then, I knew most of his watering holes, so it was just a matter of driving around until I saw his pickup, then going in and trying to persuade him it was time to come home.

Hunting and fishing

Despite Dad’s occasional binges, he was a good father and we got along great. Dad loved to hunt and fish and so did I. We’d hunt for deer, grouse, pheasants, ducks, geese, doves, quail, you name it.

Fishing always meant trout fishing in the streams of the northeastern Sierra Nevada mountains. Occasionally we’d go to a local lake and fish for bass and panfish. Dad liked to fly-fish, but I could never get the hang of it.

Prospecting

Dad loved to prospect and hunt for arrowheads. He had quite a collection of arrowheads that he’d found over the years. He had an eye for them and could find them when no one else could.

He’d sometimes pan for gold in the Feather River or search for Quartz Crystals on a mountain we called Crystal Peak. We found some nice crystals, too.

During the 50s, like most of his friends, Dad did some Uranium prospecting. He bought a Geiger counter and a UV light. He never found any rich Uranium, but we did find a few radioactive rocks and many that fluoresced nicely. It was always fun to bring home a pack full of rocks and put them under the UV light to see what we’d found. Some fluoresced bright green, others orange or purple. It was always a thrill when we found something with a nice, rich fluorescent color.

Desert Camping

The prospecting and arrowhead hunting led to desert camping. Our first experience with that came when we went to explore the crash site of a naval jet that had crashed in a mud flat called Smoke Creek Desert.

Dad had borrowed a WWII Weasel from his boss. We used it to drive out to the crash site which was several miles from the nearest road. The Weasel had tracks instead of tires, so it easily stayed on top of the soft mudflat dirt, though it kicked up quite a rooster tail of dust behind. It also would overheat, so we had to stop periodically to let it cool down and refill the radiator.

Crash site

When we got to the crash site, there wasn’t much to see, just a lot of mangled metal half-buried in the ground. We did manage to remove a corroded machine gun with a bent barrel and a few other items. But it was hot, dirty work and hardly worth the effort.

Black Rock Desert

Just down the road from Smoke Creek Desert is Black Rock Desert. Dad and I often camped there and explored the air including some natural hot springs. The area around the hot springs yielded many arrowheads.

Back then we hardly saw another human for days. The roads in and out were rough and poorly maintained. We often drove on the mud flat, which when dry was smooth as a highway.

Today, the Black Rock Desert is famous as the site of the Burning Man Festival which attracts an eclectic group of people from all over the world every September around Labor Day. The thought of that desert filled with people camping and whooping it up would amaze Dad.

Mining

I mentioned that Dad liked to prospect. He found an outcropping of something that he thought worth exploring. The assay came back encouraging, so he decided to do a little “mining”.

To do this, he bought a pneumatic drill and a box of dynamite. We drilled a hole in the rock and filled it with several sticks of dynamite. Handling dynamite made me nervous. I hoped Dad knew what he was doing.

The first charge went off with a tremendous force that shot rocks the size of my head a hundred feet into the air. One headed our way and we scattered. Fortunately, it came down near, but not on, the pickup. We didn’t do a lot of “mining” after that. Dad wisely concluded that it was too dangerous.

Moving a Boulder

Dad was not one to avoid doing dangerous things. When I was kindergarten age, Dad and Mr. Harris, who owned the house we were renting, decided it needed a new drain line for the septic tank. They started digging the ditch to contain the line through the rocky soil. One rock was immovable. By the time they got a perimeter dug around it, the rock had turned into a several-ton boulder.

Undeterred, Dad and the other men used prybars and managed to lift the boulder up enough that Dad could climb into the hole under it and place a jack beneath it. My mother saw him in the hole with the boulder hovering above him and almost had a heart attack. “Oh, Benn, please get out of there before that thing falls on you,” she pleaded. Mom always expected the worst while Dad was an eternal optimist.

Unfazed, Dad just looked at her. “Don’t worry, we’ve got it under control.” They did manage to manhandle the boulder out of the hole, and Dad survived. I think that boulder still sits at the end of the garden.

My first deer

I mentioned we liked to hunt. My first season deer hunting, we headed into the mountains north of town. Just as we got to the tree line, we saw a small herd of deer that included a buck. Dad stopped and we got out, took aim and fired. It was probably 200 yards and my aim was never that good.

When we got to the top of the hill, we saw two men standing over a dead buck. Dad talked to them; then he motioned for me to come tag the deer. It was a huge old buck with a great rack. My first deer. To this day, though, I doubt that it was my shot that brought it down. But if my dad and the other men said it was, I wasn’t going to argue.

Vehicles

Dad had a weakness for vehicles. Most of the time he had a decent pickup for work, but he also got talked into buying an assortment of used junkers. I can’t tell you how many he bought over the years, but he always had a junker in addition to his work vehicle.

One that I remember well was an old Willis pickup. Most of Dad’s cars smelled of gas and oil and this one was no exception. I had to have the window rolled down and my head hanging out of it to keep from getting sick. I’m amazed Dad had the confidence in these old clunkers to drive them into the mountains during hunting season. I don’t recall us ever breaking down, but the potential was always there.

Stuck

We often got stuck. I remember one time in particular. It was afternoon and Dad pulled off the road near Pyramid Lake, Nevada, and onto an old roadbed that hadn’t been used for years.

He said afterward that he knew we were in trouble as soon as he hit the brakes. The tires dug into the soft sand and we were soon buried up to the running boards.

We worked for hours, jacking the truck up, filling in under the tires with rocks and whatever we could find, then backing up, sinking in again and repeating the process, over and over.

Finally, some men in a jeep with a winch on the front stopped and offered us a hand. They hooked up the winch and in no time pulled us free. By then it was after dark, so we headed for home. Mom was beginning to worry as it was after dark when we finally arrived home.

Accident

As I mentioned, Dad loved working in the woods as a timber faller. He fell thousands of trees during his life and got most of them to fall where he wanted them.

One day, I was helping him by carrying his equipment, the gas can, chain oil bottle, shovel, axe and belt of wedges. We were working our way back to the vehicles. There was a slight breeze and we’d had a good day. We’d fell 99 trees. Dad was working on number 100. He was making the final cut when the wind caught the top of the tree pushing it over backward.

It fell in front of my Dad’s partner’s jeep but did not quite miss Dad’s pickup. The tree smashed into the right rear corner and flattening it to the ground. Dad was not a happy camper. Not only did the tree crush the bed of his truck, it also bent the bar on his saw and damaged the sprocket and chain. Fortunately, no one was hurt and the truck was still drivable.

Dad had the bed taken off and replaced it with a wooden bed. It looked pretty cool and was highly functional.

Another accident

Dad had always been careful, but he became even more so after the accident. Still, he was getting old and couldn’t move as fast as he thought he could. One day, while falling a large tree, he made a mistake. The tree kicked back and caught his leg between the trunk and a large sapling. Dad wrecked his knee pulling it free.

After the accident he had constant pain and couldn’t walk much. To his great sadness, he had to retire from woods work.

Last Photo

I don’t have many photos of my Dad. The one below is from his visit to Minnesota in 1981. It is one of the last I have of him. My daughter, standing on the rock, would have been 11 at the time. Our son Bob (not shown) was 8. Dad dearly loved his grandkids.

The End

The inactivity and stress of not being able to do the work he loved aggravated Dad’s heart condition and his health went downhill. After many times in and out of the VA hospital in Reno, Dad finally succumbed on April 23, 1983.

Mom spread Dad’s ashes in Soldier’s Meadow in northeastern Nevada near the Black Rock Desert that Dad so dearly loved. We feel his spirit whenever we visit that area.