A Half Century of Progress? (Note the same mountains in the background)
When the ancients wrote of the Garden of Eden, they may well have used California’s Santa Clara Valley as their model. “And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food ….” Genesis 2:9. Or so it seemed until an enigma called Silicon Valley took root.
The valley, named after the Spanish Mission Santa Clara, was long known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight for its high concentration of orchards, flowering trees, and plants. Until the 1960s, the Santa Clara Valley, with 39 canneries, was one of the largest fruit-producing and packing regions in the world. That all ended as a new class of urban developers descended like locusts to root the trees and trample the land like a herd of Monterey Wild Boar in a cabbage patch.
Bulldozers uprooted orchards and vineyards. Cookie-cutter housing tracts popped up in their wake. Strip malls, shopping centers, factories, and office buildings sprang up where quaint homesteads and villages once stood. Ever-widening streets and new freeways couldn’t keep up with the demands of ballooning traffic.
Fresh out of the Navy, I hit the Bay Area in 1960, driving a 1958 Chevy Bel Air with payments due and about $200 in my pocket. Nine years later, I had a wife, two kids, a house in the suburbs with a 30-year mortgage, a 1969 Ford Country Squire station wagon with fake wood trim, and a 1963 Austin Healey 3000 sports car. I worked as a scientific computer programmer in the Information Sciences Department of Fairchild Semiconductor International, Inc.—the seat of the new silicon technology. Some would say that I had made it. I was not so sure.
Sitting in my Austin Healey with the top down, awaiting a turn to get on the new 280 freeway, I watched the river of traffic flow by. The smell of horse manure caught my attention as a pickup truck towing a horse trailer rattled down the highway. I was transported back to my youth, growing up on a ranch in Eastern Oregon. The old saying—you can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy—invaded my mind as I joined the throng of indistinguishable commuters on their way to work.
What should I do? Conventional wisdom told me “Stay where you are.” My gut told me “It’s time to move on.”
I compiled a list of every small-town business and institution in the area west of the Rockies I could locate that used a computer. I mailed an unsolicited job resume to each of them. That effort did not involve a lot of resumes at that time in history, but it did result in a job offer from Boise Cascade Corporation in Boise, Idaho.
In the autumn of 1969, amidst much wailing and gnashing of teeth by my in-laws over the tearing away of their only daughter and two grandsons, we watched as the moving van pulled away from our driveway on its way to Idaho. My wife, two sons, and I followed shortly thereafter—on our way to new beginnings. Our lives would be forever changed. My sports car would soon be transformed into a pickup truck. Hard work and clean air would be our future. Silicon Valley would be our past.
The Back to the Land movement of the seventies was just beginning. I don’t know if I was a part of that movement, or if I was simply returning to my roots. But I guess I lived it. How could a country boy know for sure?
Unmerciful sun beat down on the mountainside. A helicopter plucked a sunstroke victim off a shale ledge and flew away. We kept a slow, steady pace. None of us wanted to be the guy on the helicopter.
The Korean War was history. Few Americans had even heard of Vietnam. Peace ruled the land in the late 1950s. But readiness was still the mission of the U.S. Navy.
As a newly minted Naval Aviator with shiny new gold bars on my collar and shiny new gold wings on my chest, I was still getting used to being called “Sir” when new orders read: “Report to Survival School.”
About 30 Navy personnel assembled in a building on North Island Naval Air Station for a short series of lectures on survival and prisoner of war conduct. When the lectures ended, we marched down to the beach.
Guards dressed in uniforms right out of a Hollywood war movie set handed us C-rations and disappeared.
Our senior officer, a Navy Commander, took charge. He divided us into two companies with two squads. With the rank of Ensign, I was assigned to lead one squad of six enlisted men.
As evening approached, we all gathered driftwood and started a bonfire.
An abandoned barrel, half-filled with water from the only tap on the beach, became our cooking vessel. We each donated one can from our C-rations for a hobo stew.
Some citizens were digging for clams and diving for abalone nearby. Trading with the natives seemed within the rules of war. We struck a deal for their catch.
Supposedly stripped of personal property except the clothes on our backs, how a bunch of penniless sailors pooled enough money to cumshaw those illicit crustaceans can only be described as the Navy Way. We threw the catch in the pot. The stew turned out surprisingly well.
Ocean survival drills filled our days. Wrapped up in parachute panels as makeshift sleeping bags, we tried to sleep at night. For the final drill, our captors herded us onto a boat and dumped us overboard in the open sea with nothing but a Mae West for flotation.
After what seemed an eternity, a helicopter hovered over me. It released a sling dangling from a cable. I slid my arms through the sling. They hoisted me aboard. Wet and shivering, I joined my fellow survivalists. The helicopter crew delivered us back to the beach to await our next adventure.
It came in the form of a bus ride over narrow, winding roads to Warner Springs Survival School.
The camp could have passed for the set of the movie, The Bridge on the River Kwai. Guards escorted us from the bus into the chain-link fenced compound and sat us down on long benches. They lectured us on desert survival and laid out the schedule for the next two days.
A mountain hovered over the camp. We were to hike up that mountain to a campsite where C-rations and water would be issued and spend the night there. The next day, we would hike back down that mountain. Marines from Camp Pendleton would try to capture us on the way down. If we reached a flagpole outside the compound without capture, our survival training would be over. If captured, the Marines would return us to the compound for a round of interrogation.
The hike began on a well-worn trail in cool early morning air. As the day wore on, the terrain became steeper and the trail less defined. The temperature soared, and the small canteen of water we carried soon went dry.
My squad of late teens and early twenty-year-olds had by now become a tight little group. We saw little of our company commander. He was a Navy Lieutenant, a seaplane pilot. He hung out with the senior officers most of the time.
At a shale-covered rise near the bottom of a canyon, we stopped for a break. Just ahead, a patch of sand with a few green bushes contrasted sharply with the desert browns and reds around it. We made for the shade of the bushes and sprawled on the ground.
As a country boy not long off the farm, I knew that where there’s green, there’s water. I dug in the sand with my hands and, about a foot down, found moisture. My companions joined in, and we soon had a basin dug with water rising from the bottom. We waited anxiously for the sediment to settle.
The voice of our seldom-seen company commander suddenly demanded. “What are you doing here?”
“Oh, just practicing survival,” I answered dryly.
“What’s that?” he asked, pointing at our spring.
“Looks like water,” I answered.
“What are you going to do with it?” he asked.
“Drink it. Care to join us?” I responded.
“You can’t drink that. Cows might have peed in it.” With that, the Lieutenant sat down, pulled off his boots, and stuck his feet in our pool. “Aah, that feels good,” he said.
I held my tongue, got my squad up, and moved out, leaving the Lieutenant sitting there with his feet in our water.
He soon overtook us and started barking orders, telling us to form up. He must have decided that our little group needed to rejoin the military. We just tightened ranks and hiked on up the hill.
Eventually, the heat and lack of water took their toll on the old seaplane pilot. Out of shape and exhausted, he sat down on a rock, looked up at me, and said, “I can’t go on any farther.”
At that point, rank and privilege ceased to exist. I got him back on his feet and moving. My young, in-shape companions gladly hiked on ahead. My charge became the Lieutenant.
I picked up a stick and prodded him up the hill. We eventually made it to the campsite. He drank some water, seemed to recover from his delirium, and rejoined the senior officers. The breakdown of discipline on the trail was never discussed.
The campsite had trees, and it was cooler. The guards issued C-rations. We ate hungrily. Tents made of parachutes hung from the trees. There was no singing around the campfire that night. Exhausted, we crawled into the tents and slept.
Reveille came early. A quick muster, and we were on our own. I took the evasion part of Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) seriously. I wanted none of the resistance part. We started down the hill. It was every man for himself.
I could see the line of Marines working their way up the mountain and the compound with its flag off in the distance. Some of the evaders took off running down the hill, hurrying to reach the flag. Soon, the pop-pop of M1 blank cartridges filled the air as the Marines captured them.
I decided to take “a path less traveled” and drifted away from the crowd. A barbed wire fence soon blocked my progress. A sign on a fencepost announced, “California Department of Corrections. Keep Out.”
It was decision time. I suspected that what awaited me if captured would not be pleasant. The question was, what would happen if the prison authorities caught me trespassing on their property?
What could they do? They certainly wouldn’t put me through the torture of the interrogation the SERE guards had in mind. What the heck, all’s fair in love and war. I crawled through the barbed wire and pressed on. If caught, I’d just play dumb and say I didn’t see the sign.
I took what cover I could find. Once, I thought a Marine spotted me, but he was busy taking another prisoner and either did not see me or chose to ignore me. Some guys in dungarees with DOC painted on the back of their shirts were sitting in the shade near a barracks. They waved. I waved back.
With the flagpole within sprinting distance, I hunkered down behind a clump of bushes and watched. A couple of Marines delivered a prisoner to the guard at the flagpole. They headed back to the action, and the guard escorted the prisoner to the compound. That was my opportunity. I grabbed a post and vaulted over the minimum security fence, sprinted to the flagpole, wrapped my arms around it, and hung on. The guard came back, spotted me with a surprised look on his face, and pointed me to a door outside the compound.
In a darkened room, my fellow escapees and I observed the compound yard through a one-way mirror. A guard led a captive on his hands and knees around with a leash like a dog. Other guards crammed a captive into a sweat box and slammed the lid down. They pulled a dazed captive from another sweat box, slammed him into a chair, and tied him tight with ropes. A scratchy speaker in the room provided sound from the drama in the yard. An interrogator across the table from the bound man directed him to sign a confession for committing war crimes. This seemed like a joke at first, but as the scene unfolded, it took on an air of reality. The interrogator called the man the son of a whore dog, insulted him and his wife and mother repeatedly, and bore down with insults and accusations until the poor fellow was reduced to tears. He finally signed the confession. These scenes continued until late afternoon.
The nightmare ended with a bus ride back to North Island and a new appreciation life as we live it. Along the way, the bus stopped at a roadside burger joint. The Navy treated us to the best darn hamburger I have ever eaten, bar none.
The end of World War II in 1945 brought many changes to the home front. Germany surrendered in May. In August, the world’s first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japan gave up. Living in the farmlands of the Sacramento Valley, I do not remember a lot about the celebrations that took place. I do remember that shortly thereafter, we were loaded up and off on a new adventure.
Migration from farm to city marked the American experience from the beginning of the Industrial Age. That movement accelerated during WWII. Although he would not have thought of it in exactly those terms, my dad determined to do the exact opposite. He decided to get as far away from city life as he could, own his own piece of land, and farm full-time. With the war over and the government’s control of his movements ended, Dad set about to fulfill his dream.
In short order, he sold our little farm in Chico, California, and quit his job at the air base. He loaded our belongings into the back of a 1937 Chevrolet pickup truck, loaded Mom and the three of us kids into the cab, and headed north. The young hobo of the depression had traded his knapsack in for a truckload of family and possessions. But he was determined to live by his own rules nonetheless.
Dad drove, Mom sat on the right side holding baby sister Deanne. I sat in the middle, straddling the gear shift lever. Little brother Wes variously stood and lay down at Mom’s feet. Our route over the Sierras remains unknown to me. I do remember stopping at a wayside, perhaps around Lake Almanor, for lunch. A cool breeze wafted through towering Ponderosa Pines, a welcome relief from the summer heat of the Sacramento Valley. The scent of the pines, combined with the delicious pan-fried pheasant Aunt Marie had packed in our lunch hamper, remains with me to this day.
We pressed on to Alturas, a small ranching center in the northeast corner of California. We arrived in the late afternoon. The town was in a festive mood with banners stretched across the main street announcing its annual fair and rodeo. Cowboys and cowgirls, afoot and horseback, lined the streets and sidewalks. We found this all very exciting until we discovered that there was no lodging available. The war was over, and it was time to celebrate. People coming out of the hills and valleys surrounding the town had taken every room available.
Lakeview, Oregon, is about 55 miles north of Alturas. It was dark by the time we got there. It too was full up with the overflow crowd from its neighbor.
With the aid of a flashlight, Dad found a dot on the map about 85 miles north of Lakeview called Wagontire. We passed through the dark, starry night until a small sign and darkened buildings announced our destination. A gas pump, a café, and living quarters for the owners made up the entire town. A lighted window in the living quarters indicated that someone was still awake. Dad knocked on the door with the intention of asking if we could camp in their parking lot.
Perhaps it was learned behavior from his hobo days, or perhaps it was just in his makeup. My dad always exuded an air of quiet confidence and honesty. I like to think it was the latter. Anyway, he explained our plight to the man of the house. The man looked us over, invited us in, and put us up for the night. Who knows how often the Wagontire proprietors were called upon to tender such an act of charity along that lonely stretch of highway? I can only attest to this one event. And I have no way of knowing if any money changed hands. I am sure that we patronized their café before we departed.
That’s just the way things were done out in the country, on the home front, in 1945.
The author, w/Beechcraft T-34 Mentor trainer in the background. Naas Saufley Field, 1957.
The Nez Perce tribe called it the Land of Winding Waters. When the late nineteenth-century European immigrants arrived, they dubbed it the American Alps. It is that jumble of scenic mountains and valleys that make up the northeast corner of Oregon.
At the end of World War II, my dad loaded our family of five and all our belongings into a 1937 Chevy pickup and moved us from Chico, California, to one of those scenic little alpine valleys. I started third grade there in a one-room school, with about 20 other kids, grades one through eight.
Pine Valley had managed to survive the first 45 years of the twentieth century without yielding much. Farmers still tilled and harvested with horses, and mounted cowboys moved the livestock around. Dad bought a ranch about eight miles from the main town of Halfway, and that was home until I graduated from high school in 1955.
When I was thirteen or fourteen, we got our first tractor. It was a little Ferguson. I loved that tractor. Unlike a team of horses, you did not have to feed it, harness it, put up with its cantankerous behavior, or scoop its poop. It would not kick you, or bite you, or balk. When you wanted it to go, you simply mounted up, put it in gear, pulled the throttle lever back, released the clutch, and off you roared.
High school was a game for me. It provided welcome relief from the drudgery of ranch work. I played football, participated in Future Farmers of America (FFA), joined the debate team, and tipped over outhouses on Halloween. Even so, I was glad to see it end when our class of seven students finally graduated.
I enrolled at Oregon State College and lasted two quarters until my savings ran out. Working my way through college, washing dishes held little attraction, so I joined the Navy.
Naval Training Center (NTC) boot camp in San Diego was hardly a vacation of sunshine and beaches. But nothing they threw at me could compare to ten hours in the hot summer sun, bucking bales. Besides that, it was finite. I knew it would be over in six weeks.
Toward the end of boot camp, my company, along with several others, was assembled in a large hall and presented with a series of timed tests. The results of the General Classification Test/Arithmetic Reasoning Inventory (GCT/ARI) tests would determine the level of training we qualified for after graduation.
When we reassembled to learn our test results, the announcer started naming the recruits who had qualified for officer training. I was surprised to hear my name called. Those old country schoolmarms must have done something right. I could select either Officer Candidate School (OCS) or Naval Aviation Cadet (NAVCAD) training. I seized on the chance to fulfill a lifelong secret desire to be a pilot. Following an intensive screening process, I reported to the seat of naval aviation, Naval Air Station (NAS) Pensacola, Florida.
Preflight was 16 more weeks of boot camp, only considerably more intensive than anything NTC San Diego had to offer. It finally ended, and I started Primary Flight Training flying the Beechcraft T34 Mentor. I survived the familiarization phase (Riding in the back seat while an instructor pilot performs a full regimen of aerobatic maneuvers) without puking, then learned basic maneuvers and started landing practice. Every day was an exciting new challenge.
During an early session of shooting touch-and-go landings (Landing and taking off without stopping), I entered the final wide of the landing approach path. While trying to figure out how to correct things, I heard the word “power” from my backseat instructor over the intercom (IC). I reacted quickly and pulled the throttle back just like I had on the old Ferguson. The ensuing silence was deafening.
The throttle took on a life of its own and slammed forward. “I’ve got it,” the instructor yelled into the IC as the engine roared back to life. He took over, flew the airport landing pattern, and set us on the ground.
During the long walk to the debriefing room, my rattling on about the difference between a tractor throttle and an airplane throttle fell on deaf ears.
The debrief was very brief. “You could have killed us up there,” the instructor stated as he handed me my first down.
No more needed to be said. The message was clear. This was not a game. What we were doing was real. Few of life’s lessons would ever be so clear. I was 19 years old and growing up fast.
Final note: I completed training and earned my Wings of Gold as a designated Naval Aviator in June of 1958, three months after my twenty-first birthday.
A lot of the social interaction in the novel War No More takes place in and around the Hotel Pend Oreille. The model for the hotel is the historic Hotel Charbonneau, now a National Historic Place.
The Hotel Charbonneau was originally constructed in 1912 by Charles and Dora Charbonneau (architects PJ Young and Charles Charbonneau). During the first half of the 20th century, Priest River and the Hotel Charbonneau, which is located one block away from where the train station used to be, was a popular stopping-off point for people traveling to nearby Spokane, Coeur d’Alene, Sandpoint, and Priest Lake. In 1920, Dora Charbonneau added a brick addition onto the south side of the hotel to accommodate more guests. After the brick addition was built, the Hotel Charbonneau boasted 27 guest rooms with more than half of them having their own private bathrooms; an extravagant luxury at that time.
The Charbonneau operated as a hotel/boarding house until the late 1980s, when it was abandoned and risked being condemned. In 1991, the Priest River Restoration and Revitalization Committee (PRRRC), a local non-profit group composed entirely of volunteers, took control of the Hotel Charbonneau and saved it from complete deterioration. Among the PRRRC’s accomplishments was having the Hotel Charbonneau added to the National Register of Historic Places (11/19/1991), which protects the historic structure for future generations.
You can see the Hotel Charbonneau in the 1914 photo above on the left. The photo was taken before the brick addition was built. https://hotelcharbonneau.com/history.html
The following pictorial shows the hotel and surroundings as they exist today. War No More is available on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/War-No-More-Robert-LaRue-ebook/dp/B0GC9MKK7N free on Kindle Unlimited or $3.99 to buy, $14.99 for the paperback. Check it out. (Photos by the author.)
Hotel Charbonneau (Fictional Hotel Pend Oreille in War No More) as it appears today.
Abandoned filling station (Seaton’s Garage in the novel).
National Register of Historic Places placard at the entrance of the hotel.
The railroad tracks still run by, but the depot is long gone.
But they still saw logs at the mill across the river.
I’ll always remember the summer of ’52, the year we built the dam at Fish Lake. It changed my life forever.
I grew up on a ranch in a small valley at the southern foot of Eastern Oregon’s Wallowa Mountains. We raised cattle and farmed the land to feed them. Except for school, my world was that ranch until the summer of ’52—the year I turned fifteen.
I knew some of the history of my world. The Nez Perce Indians made their home among the peaks and valleys of the Wallowa Mountains until the Nez Perce War of 1877. The Indians put up a ferocious fight, but the U.S. Army ultimately won. Chief Joseph famously declared, “From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever,” and the tribe was shipped off to Oklahoma.
The Nez Perce called their home the Land of Winding Waters. After their removal, Oregon Trail pioneers rushed in and began farming the land. Their crops needed water, so they built dams and ditches to capture every drop they could find in the streams and lakes of the Land of Winding Waters.
They named one of the high-country lakes Fish Lake. In the 1880s, they erected an 800-foot-long earthen dam along with a spillway and headgate made of logs and planks across the lake’s natural outlet. Fish Lake was still supplying irrigation water for our neighbors and us in 1952.
Through the years, this structure was known to fail, flood the canyons below, and leave the irrigated fields dry. An often-repeated story tells of a band of 2,000 sheep drowned during one such dam burst. Fear of another failure, followed by a year without water, loomed over us.
From the time I was about ten, I shouldered a shovel each spring and joined my dad and the other ranchers when we cleaned and repaired the maze of ditches, creeks, and dams that carried the water to our fields. Crawling around on moss-slick logs repairing Fish Lake Dam presented a persistent, dangerous challenge. After one such repair, the assembled ranchers decided they needed a new dam.
U.S Soil Conservation Service engineers designed the new dam and assigned a project engineer. Labor was to be provided by the landowners. My dad volunteered me as our laborer. I jumped at the chance. Any excuse to get off the ranch and try something new was good by me. Armed with some food, a bedroll, a pup tent, and a fishing pole, I became a member of the Fish Lake Dam construction crew.
I joined a small tent camp where the crew stayed. The crew consisted of the SCS project engineer, an equipment owner/operator, his wife, who served as camp cook, their two preteen kids, and two other landowner laborers in their twenties. Other workers came and went as the job progressed. Some stayed, and others commuted from the nearest town, Halfway, 20 miles of dirt roads and almost an hour away.
The crew was clearing overgrowth from the old dam when I got there. The other two laborers felled the bigger trees and bucked them into truck-ready logs using an old Mall two-man chainsaw. My job was choker setter. A choker is a heavy cable you wrap around the butt of a log and hook to a caterpillar tractor that drags it to a log deck. The log can make unpredictable moves and slam you if you don’t pay attention. I paid attention. When the trees were cleared, the equipment operator brought in a bulldozer and pushed the remaining tree stumps, small trees, and underbrush into slash piles for later burning.
I grew up using a variety of hand saws and power saws, but the chainsaw was new to me. Fascinated by its operation. I itched to fire it up and fell some big trees.
Tired of lugging the heavy machine around, it didn’t take much coaxing to get my companions to let me spell them off. The old saw was a noisy, heavy, pulsating beast that blew acrid exhaust in my face. It was not the fun toy I thought it would be, but I loved yelling timber and watching a big tree crash to the ground.
The camp’s alarm clock was the smell of wood smoke from the cook’s black iron cook stove mixed with coffee brewing and bacon frying. We sat on wood stumps and ate our fill of bacon and eggs, fried potatoes, hotcakes, and biscuits. My teenage appetite created the source of much good-natured ribbing. “Leave some for the rest of us,” someone would shout as I slathered butter and honey on yet another biscuit.
Winter comes early in the high country. We raced to complete the job before the snow flew. A big Le Tourneau earth mover scraped up dirt and spread it on the new dam. A rolling device called a sheep’s foot packed it in place. I watched in awe as the sweeping arc of the dam took form.
The hours were long, but no one complained. We were well fed, and each day ended with a sense of accomplishment. At day’s end, the crew gathered around a campfire, drank beer, and told stories.
Too young to drink beer, I would dig some worms, row the project’s boat out on the lake, and fish for trout until I caught about a dozen big enough to keep. Then I would row back in, clean the fish, and turn them over to the cook. We all loved her fresh trout, rolled in cornmeal and fried in bacon grease, added to our breakfast fare.
As the job progressed, I became increasingly accepted by my fellow workers. They would even share a beer with me if I promised not to tell my dad. My duties varied. I held the survey rod and drove stakes for the engineer. I delimbed logs for the logging truck. I continued to dodge logs and set chokers. Near the end of summer, we bulldozed the old spillway and headgate and filled the gap with dirt. A concrete contractor brought in his portable cement mixer. His son Tom, whom I knew from high school, accompanied him. I finally had someone near my age to talk to.
Tom’s dad put us to work building forms and hauling concrete in wheelbarrows for the headgate and spillway. That is how I finished the summer until school started. It was nice to get back home and sleep in a real bed. But after a summer of working with a construction crew and holding down a man’s job, the return to being a schoolboy was a huge letdown. I was forever changed by the summer of ’52.
An old schoolmate recently told me the dam we built that summer is still in use. It made me feel good somehow.
Airmen on the line suffered a terrible toll during Operation Rolling Thunder, a codename for an American bombing campaign during the Vietnam War. Originally slated as an eight-week campaign in spring 1965, it lasted until October 1968. While Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara played war and handpicked targets from the armchair comfort of the White House, an estimated 900 aircraft went down as U.S. forces delivered 643,000 tons of destruction.
One of those downed aircraft was piloted by my friend Al Stafford. I first met Al when we were stationed at NAS Whidbey Island, Washington, in the late 1950s. Whidbey Island was a rather isolated duty station in those days, so the Officers Club served as the primary social outlet for young bachelor officers. There was an old upright piano collecting dust in one corner. Al could play a few chords. Not long after his arrival, he had a bunch of us gathering around the piano, singing old pilots’ favorites like “Torque me into the Runway” and songs remembered from college, such as “The Whiffenpoof Song.” We sang, sipped stingers, and smoked Pall Mall cigarettes into the night. We called ourselves the Sit, Sippin, and Singin Society. For some of us, that camaraderie would last a lifetime.
Al, Jim Turner, Chris Phelps, and I rented a house off base and formed what Naval Aviators call a Snake Ranch—a party pad occupied by bachelor officers. The house had an unfinished basement that we converted into a makeshift bar. For a time, the four of us presided over a version of Party Central until new assignments broke up the party, and we all moved on.
The next time I saw Al was ten years later on television. It was 29 January 1969. I was sitting comfortably in my suburban living room in San Jose, California, idly watching the evening news on NBC, when they showed a clip of two emaciated Vietnam POWs hanging a Merry Christmas sign on a wall. I did a double-take when I realized one was my old Sit, Sippin, and Singin Society buddy, Al Stafford. The other was Dick Stratton, whom I remembered from Chase Field in Texas. Until then, I had largely avoided all the controversy surrounding the war. I had put the military behind me and decided to let Johnson, McNamara, and the generals run the war. Suddenly, the war was right there in my living room. I was struck with a new understanding of why pundits were calling the Vietnam War “the living room war.”
What I didn’t understand at the time was the relentless torture the two men had undergone before agreeing to pose for the North Vietnamese propaganda photos. Nor did I notice Al’s right hand with the middle finger raised, expressing his true feelings about the occasion. However, Al told me later that US Military Intelligence took note, and his subtle message helped set policy at the time.
For most of America, the enormity of the Vietnam POW experience would not be realized until the victims could tell their stories after Operation Homecoming in 1973. While the conflict continued, the Johnson administration kept such information classified. I wrote letters to the Navy Department and State Department, asking how to contact POWs, and was referred to the Red Cross. So much for country boy naivety.
Al was flying an A-4 Skyhawk off the USS Oriskany when he was shot down over Hanoi in 1967. His replacement pilot was a fellow named John McCain, who was shot down a few months later.
In 1990, Al collaborated with author Geoffrey Norman and published a book called “Bouncing Back: How a heroic band of POWs survived Vietnam.” In it, he relates an interesting anecdotal insight into the Stafford-McCain relationship.
The Al Stafford I knew was a bit of a renegade. Incarceration did little to change that. He delighted in pushing his captors’ patience to the limit. Not surprisingly, he was rewarded with more than his fair share of time in solitaire. He was enduring an extended stay in an isolation cell called the Corncrib at the prison called the Plantation when he first encountered John McCain. The following excerpt from Bouncing Back describes that encounter.
“Then, one morning as he [Stafford] stood at the door, watching through the cracks, he saw a POW on crutches being led slowly across the yard by a guard. The man had shockingly white hair, almost as though he had suffered some traumatic fright. Stafford knew that the man had to be John McCain. Nobody else in the Navy had hair like that.
“…As Stafford watched, McCain detoured out of his assigned path and hobbled a painful fifteen or twenty feet on his crutches before the guard could stop him. By then, he was standing directly in front of Stafford’s cell.
“Hey, Al, baby,” he said cheerfully as though they were meeting on the street somewhere. “You hang in there, now. Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”
The Vietnam POWs networked in many ingenious ways. One method was to hide notes for each other in secret stashes. Al found one such note from McCain when he was allowed an infrequent bath. It explained that he [McCain] had been Stafford’s replacement in VA-163 on the Oriskany, and that, like Stafford, he had been shot down, captured, and through the all too familiar interrogation routines the POWs endured, including the torture chamber they called the Green Knobby Room at the Hanoi Hilton. McCain noted that he had also been moved to their present location, the prison they called the Plantation, and ended with these words: “Listen, Al, since I seem to be following you around, I would appreciate it if you didn’t do anything stupid and get us both in real trouble.” John McCain had his share of detractors in later political life, but they didn’t know him when he flew wing during trying circumstances.
Al and I reestablished contact a few years after his release in 1973 and kept in touch, more so with the advent of the internet. In 1999, I received an Email in which he stated that there was an upcoming POW reunion in Wenatchee, Washington. He planned to attend and make it a nationwide road trip from his home in Pensacola, Florida. He planned several stops before he got to my place in Hauser Lake, Idaho, followed by a stop in Spokane to visit fellow POW Jim Shively. From there, he planned to proceed to the reunion and then travel to San Diego to see his daughter before returning home via the southern route. He made the trip, and he and I had a grand reunion of our own.
In 2003, I received a notice from Al’s wife, Sharon, that he had flown west on 28 December 2003 at age 68. They held a memorial service for him at the Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola. He is missed but not forgotten.
L to R 1937 Chev Pickup, Brother Wes, Dad, Mom, Sister Deanne
I don’t recall much about our move from the row of farm workers’ shacks, where Dad milked cows, to our own place. In my memory, it is as if one day we were there and the next we were at our new home.
Our new 20-acre homestead consisted of a house, a barn, a small nut orchard, and a good-sized plot of fertile Sacramento Valley row-crop land. The orchard consisted of almonds (or, as folks around Chico called them, ammonds) and walnuts. The cropland lay fallow. The house was much too small to accommodate two families. Grandma, Grandpa, and Jimmy needed a home of their own.
For Dad and Grandpa, building a house posed no problem. They were both good craftsmen. The problem arose when they tried to get their hands on framing lumber. Like everything else, lumber was in short supply. The war effort now devoured everything but life’s bare necessities. As happened all too often, they were put on a waiting list.
Once more, family came to the rescue. Dad’s uncle David and his family lived in Chico. Uncle David worked at a local sawmill. He knew how to cut through enough red tape to get the needed lumber delivered. Dad and Grandpa went to work.
The house went up rather quickly. I don’t think it was ever completely finished, but it was finished enough that Grandma reluctantly agreed to move in. At times, you just had to learn to make do on the home front.
In the meantime, Grandpa acquired an old horse and enough implements to start farming. Most folks during the war had small victory gardens. We soon had several acres of victory garden. Jimmy and I got our initiation into the meaning of hard work from that garden. At Grandpa’s direction, we learned to hoe around plants and nurture them into production. Lord help the offender who happened to uproot a watermelon seedling instead of a pigweed. Melons made up the main crop, but there were also beans, corn, tomatoes, and more. When each crop was ready, we picked and loaded it into Dad’s 1937 Chevrolet pickup truck and peddled it to stores around the valley. What we didn’t sell, Mom and Grandma canned. We were well fed.
When the nuts were ready in the orchard, we spread tarps on the ground under the trees. We shook the trees by pounding on the trunks with baseball bats padded with pieces of a rubber tire. The nuts fell to the ground, and we gathered them and put them in sacks. The almonds were easy to shake loose, the walnuts more difficult and required a lot of hand-picking on ladders. The whole family participated, even my brother Wes, who was three years my junior.
Dad continued working in the paint shop at the air base. He also continued with the ambulance and accident cleanup crew. In 1944, Chico Air Base switched from basic training to fighter pilot training in P-38 Lightnings. Crashes and deaths doubled from 14 crashes and 8 deaths during the two years of basic training to 35 crashes and 16 deaths during the 16 months of fighter pilot training. That’s more than 2 crashes a month. The ambulance and cleanup crew stayed busy. Dad tried not to show it, but even I could tell that he was under a great deal of stress.
Summers are hot in the Sacramento Valley. Air conditioning was not widely available in the early 1940s. Makeshift evaporative coolers consisting of wet burlap sacks hung from open window frames with fans in front were not very effective. The only real escape from the heat was finding cool water. There was a public swimming pool in Chico, but my parents were afraid of public pools. They believed them to be a likely place to contract the crippling disease polio. So we did not swim there. We did occasionally go down to the Sacramento River to fish, swim, and picnic. We were enjoying an outing with Dad’s friend from work, Les Robbins, and family, when I decided to take an unsupervised dip. I waded out from shore by myself with confidence. Suddenly, the current picked me up, and I bobbed downstream like a waterlogged cork. I remember looking up at a bluff, high above the river, and seeing my dad preparing to dive when I felt the welcome arms of Mrs. Robins envelope me. My movements were severely restricted following that incident.
Nineteen forty-three moved on into 1944. My sister Deanne was born in August. The war continued unabated. I started second grade in September. The world at war, farming the land, P 38’s from the base buzzing overhead, bickering with Uncle Jimmy, Dad shooting a rabid coyote lurking around our chicken coup, Grandpa trying to start his old car with a hand crank because batteries could not be had and his cussing at it and hitting it with the crank, talk that the war would never end; these things all seemed normal to me. As a seven-year-old, they were all I knew. I had no other frame of reference. As Harry Truman famously said, “The only thing new is the history we don’t know.” We of my generation knew no history yet. The canvas remained to be painted.
