PART FIVE
Colfax
Military and Civilians
Working Together to Win the War
At this point I had twenty-three more folders to sort out
and put in some kind of order. I went
through them and pulled out nine that were either about people who now live in
the
I need to say once again how difficult it is to capture oral
history on paper. For one thing, the
person you are listening to knows what they are talking about. They know it cold. These people who were looking back sixty
years or so knew their stories amazingly well.
Their recall of detail was incredible.
Once they started talking I didn't want to interrupt, and at times found
myself watching and listening and not writing.
I had to rely heavily on the people I listened to to edit my drafts and
to get dates correct and sequences in the right order. What I really got was the overall picture, a
sense of what they were telling me, and a clear understanding of how the war
affected their lives.
I found myself in a fascinating, consuming, ongoing history
class in which I was the only student, and I was being taught by experts in
their field. What a fascinating journey
I took! Let me share with you what I was
able to get on paper, stories edited by each of the kind men and women who let
me dig around in their past so the rest of us could learn from their
experiences.
The first story, oddly enough, I heard from a man who was not in World War II, but certainly had connections, experiences, and input that helped us set the context for Part Five, our segment on Colfax. When I sat down to talk with LeRoy and Wilma, he had a list of notes and was ready to go. Let's listen.
I really like this next story for several reasons. One, it came back with absolutely no corrections
on it whatsoever. That likely was
because Inez is a dear friend and I'm thinking she would rather suffer error
than point out my mistakes! Beyond that,
this story relates a part of World War II that few people know about, that is
the extent to which the government was willing to go to cover all bases both at
home and abroad. This is not only Inez
Broweleit's story, but
During our interview, Bob Clegg mentioned that when he was injured
he spent time in the 20th
Another nice man is the main character of this next
story. I often asked the men and women I
interviewed "what happened then?" kinds of questions. When I asked John, "What happened when
you got to
Whenever I asked anyone in Colfax who we should interview,
they all said, "Talk to Harry Fries.
He was at
Leonard Guptill is one of those men who grew up in
Colfax just in time to see war break out in
Don Hart loaned me a really good book titled Target of Opportunity, written by a man
who was one of his roommates in
Coming up in this next story is some information that may
come as a surprise to younger Whitman County residents who didn't know the
Japanese had laid siege to Washington's West Coast during the early years of
World War II. So many things have been
purged from our history texts books, but the ones who were there can tell us
about it, as Merle Hutchens did.
One day when I was in the Council on Aging office, two women came in selling Friends
of The Library Cookbooks. As we talked I
mentioned the book we were putting together and one of them suggested I talk to
her father-in-law, Harold Kirkpatrick.
From Harold I learned about CASU units and gained more appreciation for
the tremendous part supply divisions played in the war and what it took to keep
the entire operation running.
This next story has a story within it that will tug at the
toughest of heart strings. It again
reminds me that we can go about our daily life, see people on the streets, in
stores, at the bank or post office, and have no idea what has gone on in their
lives. It is good to know people like
Johnny, people who survived not just the war, but life itself.
The following story is only a tiny fraction of the
information Merle Merry shared with me.
He also loaned me a book published by his Battalion. What was unique about that book, called The
Saga, was that it contained photographs Merle had taken while he was in
combat. Some of his work is included in TRIBUTE too. Thanks, Merle, for all your good suggestions
and punch lines.
Here is a saga out of the China-India-Burma Theater of
War. I spent a lot of time looking at
maps and discussing geography with Richard Stravens. He went completely around the world while in
the military and he used to have a world map with all his travels marked on it, but it has
disappeared temporarily, so we had to go to an old 1940s Atlas to get all the
names right. He even double-checked with
Bob Clegg to make sure the
There are two more stories I want to add to the Colfax
section. They are both about local
people who didn't come home, Dorothy Mildred Stanke and Howard Scholz.
When I started looking for a military nurse to interview, I
drew a total blank until I talked to Leroy Utke. He recalled a nurse, a local woman he knew
about, but she had been killed in action.
About all he remembered of her is in his story earlier in Part
Five. So I started asking questions in
earnest. I went to my expert people
finders, Peggy Welch and Donna VanTine, Council on Aging's time-share
receptionists, and Vicky Cochran, Chanda Reynolds, and Sharon Doramus, a trio
of COAST employees, all of whom seem to know EVERYONE in town, and set them
thinking about a nurse. Care Managers
Sue Hallett, Muriel Jordan, Scott Nelson, and Charles Klaudt, our Registry
Manager Deb McKay, and our Financial Officer Cindy Zaring got in on the game
and one of these good people came up with the name Sally Krom. I found her in the phone book, only to find
out when I called her that she was the wrong Krom (one m). Sally suggested I call Ellen Kromm (two ms),
who, to confuse the issue,
has been called Susie all her life. I called Susie Ellen Kromm and she indeed had
been a nurse, but not in the military.
However, she told me she did have an old scrap book given to
her by a woman she had taken care of years ago, one Grace Ellis Stapleton, who,
incidentally, was the first woman, according to the scrap book, ever to be
elected to a city office in the history of Colfax. I met with Susie who generously loaned me the
scrap book, pointing out several articles in it about Dorothy Stanke. Stanke's heart-wrenching story, gleaned from
those decades-old articles, is published here in tribute to her and all the
Whitman County nurses who served at home and abroad during World War II.
Lois Scholz, a member of Council on Aging & Human
Services' Board of Directors, offered the following set of correspondence as a
tribute to her husband Bert's brother, Howard Scholz, a Marine who was killed
in action and buried at sea. The first
document is the text from a