PART SIX
Born and Raised in Wheat Country
Scattered Abroad in Foreign Lands
Council on Aging & Human Services nominated Phyllis
VanTine from Colfax to be Senior Services of Washington's Volunteer of the Year
for 2001. SSOW selected her over a field
of candidates from all across the state as winner of their prestigious
award. The day I talked to Phyllis about
the nomination and the volunteer work she's done in
I already had done the story on Dorothy Stanke, but on a
whim I asked Phyllis if she knew anyone in Colfax who had been a military
Nurse. She thought a half-moment, and,
always the ready volunteer, picked up the phone and called Zennie Darnold, and
asked her if she would talk to me. She
would, and did. I asked Zennie if she
had served in a foreign land, and she nodded seriously. "Which one?"
I asked, my pen ready to make note.
"
Here is Zennie's story including her foreign service and a
little
Zennie's cousin, Andy, sat still for an interview, then sat
still at a typewriter and submitted the following detailed story that takes us
on an extended trip with an Auxiliary Tug Rescue unit assigned in the Pacific.
Allen McSweeney, another
One of the reasons I decided not to run these Part Six
stories in alphabetical order is that
would have put Norm Zorb last once again. With a name like Yettick, I think
about things like that. Norm loaned me a
book about the USS Washington and
told me, "I went where she went."
Here is where they went.
John Gordon has the distinction of being the only one of our
World War II generation people who graduated from
I've always liked the song "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy From Company B" and so was very pleased to meet Clink,
a real live Bugler from Company E! He
saw a lot of action too and was willing to tell us about it. Here's a
This next story is about a man who traveled clear around the
globe, then came back to
The first time I sat down with Bryant he had a pile of
papers in front of him, mostly typed, some hand written. He said he had been working on his memoirs
since about 1944, the year he started a diary while in a prisoner of war camp,
and he wasn't quite finished yet. Turns
out Bryant is quite a writer, which I discovered over the next couple of months
as he, his wife Marjorie, and I wrestled his manuscript through to completion,
photos included, so his family now has a published record of his life in the "Wild Blue
Yonder."
The Smicks told me I was welcome to use any of his work I
wanted to in TRIBUTE. I worked it down to either of two missions, then decided to include them both. The first mission won Smick's crew a Silver
Star. The second one won him almost a
year in a German POW camp. The diary he
wrote while in prison is included in its entirety in Part Seven. Here, in his own words, are two of Bryant
Smick's memorable missions.
I knew I had to stop sometime, somewhere. Someone had to be my last interview. I thought I was through. Then I was visiting Herb Bacon who handles
the Council on Aging & Human Services' commodity distribution in
I was sure glad I listened.
Charlie and Doreen had a great story with which to close our series of
stories.
Well, that is the last of the stories told by