Welcome to the Fort Worden Oral History Program Blog

Posted on 01/21/2012 by

The Fort Worden Oral History Program began as a part of the Fort’s centennial celebration in 2002 as a project of the Friends of Fort Worden, a non-profit organization dedicated to enhancing the visitors’ experience. It was organized by Laurie Medlicott, former member of the Port Townsend City Council, with help from several volunteers. Fort Worden partnered with the Library of Congress American Folklife Center’s Veterans History Project, which is building a nationwide database of information about people who have served in America’s wars. When the centennial ended, the corps of volunteers kept the program alive.

In 2003, Patience Rogge took over running the program. Its objective is to collect oral histories to be taped, transcribed, archived, and made available for students, genealogists, writers, and historians. The entire collection tells of the real life experiences of those who served at Fort Worden during the military era; who worked or lived here during the Juvenile Diagnostic and Treatment Center days; or have visited, participated in activities, or worked at the fort since it became a state park conference center. A volunteer undertook the huge task of archiving the interviews and photos, manuscripts and other memorabilia that people donated using the State Parks’ Past Perfect program. A retired secretary offered to transcribe all the military interviews, which at that time numbered about 80. In 2007, another volunteer offered to transcribe, catalog and index the entire collection. We have mailed out hundreds of information packets, scheduled scores of interviews, and collected more than 300 oral histories. In addition to in-person interviews, we conduct telephone interviews, so people all over the world are within our reach.

In 2007, the program issued its first publication “Conversations With the 369th”, a catalog of interviews with members of the U.S. Army 369th Engineer Amphibious Support Regiment who served at Fort Worden during the Korean War era. Their stories are especially interesting, since many of the soldiers participated in the building of the US airbase at Thule, Greenland while others were sent to Camp Desert Rock, NV to take part in early atomic tests or to Rochefort, France as part of a NATO exercise.

This blog is an on-going, ever growing collection of excerpts from the collection.  We search for interesting, amusing, and informative “snippets” in the interview transcripts to share with the public. Complete transcripts and CDs of the interviews are available at a nominal cost to cover duplicating and mailing.  

Please send your inquiries to:
Fort Worden History Center
200 Battery Way
Port Townsend, WA 98368
Phone: 360.344.4481
Email: info@fwfriends.org

Or select a cataloged list of interviews from the links below (updated 2/2013):
Comprehensive Interview List [PDF]
Comprehensive Interview List [WORD]

Posted in General

Interview With Deb Johnson

Posted on 05/17/2013 by

From the interview with Deb Johnson of Port Townsend, WA conducted by Patience Rogge on October 28, 2004 at the Fort Worden History Center. Ms. Johnson was Dean of Jefferson Educational Services for Peninsula College. The Peninsula Community College District serves Jefferson and Clallam Counties on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula.  Its main campus is in Port Angeles.  At the time of the interview, the college had recently moved its Jefferson County site to the former Schoolhouse Building on the Fort Worden campus. Here she traces the development of the Jefferson County site:

“Peninsula College in the past ten years has grown significantly, and as we started to grow, we realized that we needed an alternative site in Jefferson County,i.e. Port Townsend as it turned out.  We moved from one end of Water Street to the other, and we stayed in the Waterman Katz Building on Water Street for six years.  We outgrew that place immediately, so we started a couple of years ago looking around at other places.  I always had Fort Worden in my head, as did Wally Sigmar, our since deceased president.  When they looked at it originally, to bring the building up to code and the infrastructure and the wiring for all the computers was going to be cost prohibitive.  But during the past six years the computers have taken a different turn, we were able to move into the building as of last week.

When we started, we had about 70 or 72 Full Time Equivalent students, I believe it was, and that was in 1995.  Right now we’re up to 150 FTEs, so we/ve just about doubled. The first seven years in this position, I saw a ten per cent increase every year, we’ve since leveled off.  We’re expecting now that we’re at Fort Worden we’re going to see another jump in our enrollment. With some of the new programs that we’re talking about adding in the next one or two years, we expect more enrollment.”

Talking about how it feels to be in the new facility, which was the post hospital during the Fort’s military era and became the schoolhouse when it was the state juvenile corrections facility:

“People are so excited.  They’re walking into this building, and even with boxes and tables still waiting to be unpacked, the students are excited, the faculty is excited.  We have space, we have windows, we have materials and chalkboards, white boards, everything we need.  It’s a whole new feeling of excitement and positive energy.

(Even though the building wasn’t built to be an educational facility) We’re actually making it work.  The classrooms, the big ones and the smaller ones, are workable. The funniest thing that we came across when we were trying to put something in storage in the basement last week was the old morgue.  The work study students got a big kick out of that, but nobody wanted to lie on the table. (On being informed that the top floor was the psycho ward) Hopefully that won’t come in handy for us.”

 

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Interview with Karl Dehmer

Posted on 04/01/2013 by

From the interview with Karl Dehmer of Sammamish, WA conducted at the Fort Worden HistoryCenter on July, 13, 2002 by Cynthia Walker. Mr. Dehmer spent his early childhood at Fort Worden, where his father was employed at the Juvenile Diagnostic and Treatment Center. His family, which included seven children, lived in Quarters 4 East on Officers Row. Here he recounts some memories:

(His parents had warned him to stay away from the older kids at the Center) “I would sneak over to the canteen in the back that sold ice cream bars and some candy. …I remember trying to sneak over in my older years when I was here, probably around five, six, or seven, sneak to the canteen to get an ice cream bar. That was a tough thing to do because you got a big wide open field, so you couldn’t walk straight to it. You had to kind of go along the edge or go down to the beach and then come up the side. I had a sweet tooth and I still do, so that was an adventure.

…Going down to the beach, there were no stairs when we lived here. So instead you would kind of have to navigate this big cable that was standing on its own because the hillside had eroded some, and you worked down the path, going all the way down. It was always neat because the ants walked across that cable.

…I remember the beaches. You found a lot more things, you found a lot more sand glass, more interesting rocks, because now there are so many people here. But before no one ever came through there. I remember at low tide I even found a double ax head and I thought that was totally cool. Up in the hill where the sand cliffs are, I remember going up there and finding some trails that weren’t from people, they were from animals traveling along there. I remember finding a deer antler. There were some neat things to discover, versus now it’s pretty well cleaned out.

…The bunkers were from my perspective very interesting but very scary, because I don’t know how stories got into my head, but as a kid you either make them up or you think about (things). We thought some monsters live in there and stuff. I remember going into the lower bunkers, but I never went up on the hill bunkers because that was too wooded and too isolated. I remember hearing stories from my brothers about the open doors that led to caves and they were off limits that you shouldn’t go into. So we’d go to the lower ones and play on those, but the upper ones I never touched because I just wasn’t ready for those. I remember also the obstacle course in the back woods,there’s still a little remnant of part of it. …I also remember my brothers working back in that area where they were digging up old bottles. I think there were some antique bottles that I’m sure are either buried or gone now.

(I mostly played on the beach or under the pier) You’d hang from those bars under the pier and they’d swing down and you’d walk out on them to look into the water and things like that. I wasn’t at the age where I was gutsy enough to jump into the water, and it was still pretty cold.”

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Interview with Gerrit Nieuwsma

Posted on 03/31/2013 by

From the interview with Gerrit Nieuwsma of Hague, ND conducted by phone on June 30, 2005 by Eleanor Rigby from the Fort Worden History Center. Mr. Nieuwsma served in the US Army at Fort Worden from 1951 to 1953. Here he relates some of his experiences:

“We got there in the end of February, the first week of March we got a foot of snow. They said it was unusual,’You never get snow out here.’ We marched around in the snow and your boots would get soaked. It was about 30 above. It lasted just about two weeks it seemed. Then the next day you’d put your dry boots on again. But then a lot of the men got pneumonia and the chow line looked like it was bloody from the people who spit their blood out. Some of us didn’t have sweaters and some didn’t have field jackets, we didn’t have so much stuff at first.

…They were going to train us for the LCM landing in North Korea…Those are the most miserable things there are in the world to ride. …I was in about four or five months and they asked for butchers one day, so I volunteered for butcher.

They said,’Well, you know where you’re going to go?’ I said I didn’t. They said, ’They’re going to send you to the morgue.’ I said I didn’t care, ‘Anything is better than those boats.’

They sent me to the butcher shop and then after about two months I got transferred into 6008 Post Operating Company and all we did was cut meat for the troops.

…The butcher shop was a good place. …In the morning, when we’d come in we had a coffee pot that was hid and we had a hot plate. We had civilian friends who worked in the warehouse and they stocked food and stuff. They would come in and have a hamburger and they would give us coffee in exchange. Before we went to work everyone usually had coffee, and no other place on camp could do that.
…(There was) one pretty interesting fellow who lived in Port Townsend, he was Lieutenant Colonel Fred W. McIlroy. In the morning before anybody got up, at five o’clock, he’d be running around the parade ground. For physical training he would take us and run us around the parade ground for three quarters of an hour without stopping. One day he was showing this one company and he said, ‘You can’t even make an about face.’ The poor fellow was going to make an about face and he fell flat on his face, and that was the end of that.

He was 69 years old and drove a little MG. The reason I got to know him pretty good (was that) he’d come to the butcher shop. We’d cut T-bone steaks or something like that and get a lot of meat shavings. He’d get them (the shavings) for his dog. “

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Interview With John W. Singhose

Posted on 03/11/2013 by

From the interview with John W. Singhose of Port Angeles, WA conducted by Rick Martinez on May 10, 2002 at the Fort Worden History Center. Mr. Singhose served in the 369th Boat and Shore Regiment, later called the Engineer Amphibious Support Regiment, at Fort Worden during the Korean War era. He was Staff Sergeant Singhose when he led his squad at the Fort. Here he recalls his early Army days:
“I joined the 369th very shortly after entering the Army. We were sent to Fort Lewis, WA for processing and whatever and to get our gear, clothing and all that. We were scheduled to get on a train and go to Fort Riley, KS for infantry training. They needed infantry in Korea real badly. They were real shot of infantry in Korea.
In the meantime, there was a flash flood in Montana and part of a railroad bridge had washed out and was damaged, so they couldn’t run trains over it. So they held us up for a few days. In the meantime, the 369th EBSR was activated and they had some reservists who were training here at Fort Worden and they were looking for some people. So they sent a little over a hundred of us over here to fill those ranks. We took our boot camp right here.
(Fort Worden) was a classic small Army post. We didn’t even have a guard on the gate. People came and went on their own, there was no check in, no check out. I had the same car I had before I was drafted. They gave you a little oval deal to put on your license plate, it was reflectorizd. My number was 207. After we did get a guard on the gate, the MPs would look at your little red deal and,’Hey, come on through folks, you must be okay.’
We had a wonderful firing range over at Cape George (on Discovery Bay). There were no homes there at that time. There had been an old sawmill there, and kind of like a little logging camp. There were still a few old cabins around. …I think that maybe it might have been the Second ESB that had gone down there and built some berms and stuff there, it was a pretty goood facility. Only thing of it was that the wind came right off the water, right to where we were firing there.
Captain Gibbs was our company commander at that time. It was cold and we were trying to fire and our hands were numb, regular combat conditions. He said, ‘Why don’t you fellows build some fires?’ In those days everybody carried a jack knife. We whittled some shavings and got some fires going. That was the best thing that could have happened to us. Very considerate person, Captain Gibbs.”
When asked if the troops had the standard targets with the big target cloth frames that were lifted, Mr. Singhose replied:
“We had people down there at the butts. They raised and lowered those. If you missed the target completely, they had a red flag called Maggie’s drawers that they waved back and forth. …I also remember if there was a boat that came in kind of close to shore, we had to stop firing. The bullets would go off the bluff into the water. There wasn’t much shipping in those days, but we had a fellow on either side of the range, it was their job to see if there was anybody coming. We were equipped with binoculars and all that.”

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Interview With Virginia H. Walter

Posted on 03/03/2013 by

From the interview with Virginia Hartman Walter conducted at the Fort Worden History Center on October 16, 2002 by Rick Martinez. Ms. Walter was the daughter of Major Hartman of the Coast Artillery stationed at Fort Worden in the late 1930’s. The family’s quarters were an apartment in Building 16 on Officers Row. Here she discusses life as an Army brat:
“Dad had been stationed in Panama and then was sent here…My mother, sister and I came from Panama to be here in September because it was my last year in high school and Mother didn’t want me to miss any school. Dad arrived just a few months later and we moved out to the base from town. We had been assigned quarters since Dad came. Mother didn’t want to live in the big houses like we’d always been living in, and they requested an apartment in the brick building right across from the tennis courts, right next door to the Bachelor Officers Quarters, which was very convenient.
(Making new friends in a new school)was no problem. I loved it. They accepted me and I joined them, but I still liked being around the military. I love traveling and meeting new people, and then the thing about it, you usually run into them all through your life somewhere. (Being in new situations all the time helps you to) handle things because you’re used to having to.
There was a bus available to take us to school, but I got to ride in a convertible most of the time, being next door to the BOQ. I was only at Port Townsend High that one year, then I went to the University of Washington.”
When asked about life at Fort Worden compared to other posts:
“Anything seemed good, because we’d been stationed in Panama before and we didn’t like it there. I figured I’d wasted two years of my life there, because we were in Fort Sherman on the Atlantic side and you had to be ferried across to Fort De Lesseps to take the bus there to go to Christobal High School. The CO cut the ferries off at six o’clock, so the morale was pretty bad at Fort Sherman. The soldiers didn’t like that. They wanted to go over to Colon to the cabarets and everything. But I had a real good friend who lived in Colon. Her father was the captain of the ferry; and so, when any school activities were going on I could stay with them.
It was so good to get away from Panama. Nine months of rain out of the year. I didn’t even notice the rain here.”

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Interview With William F. Gurley

Posted on 03/01/2013 by

From the interview with William F. Gurley of Kingston, WA conducted by Ken Brink at the Fort Worden History Center on July 2, 2002. Mr. Gurley’s father, Captain Franklin Chris Gurley of the U.S. Army Coast Artillery Corps, commanded A Battery at Fort Worden from 1937 to 1940. The Gurley family lived on Officers Row in Quarters Six West during their time at Fort Worden. Here Mr. Gurley talks about what it was like to be living on the post in the years before World War II:
“It was a hell of a fine place to be a kid. We had the parade ground to play football on, had the gym to play basketball in, everything was here. In those days, of course, if you had five guys to play football with, two on one side and three on the other. We didn’t have uniforms and that kind of stuff. We just played ball to have fun.
…There was no guard at the gate or anything like that. Anybody who wanted to come on post, came on post… The only time there were any restrictions was when they were having a service practice and firing the weapons, then you couldn’t go up on the hill. (That didn’t happen very often because) they didn’t have enough money to shoot it very often back before the war.
…We were just kids like everyone else (in town)…If somebody saw you misbehaving, it was a pretty small town and it didn’t take long for it to get back to your folks; so, if the person who saw you didn’t straighten you out very shortly, when you got home your father would.”
Describing his father’s job at Fort Worden commanding A Battery:
“It was full time, leading these people, having them and seeing that they were trained properly on the weapons they had to use up on Artillery Hill. Oh, all the military courtesy, and the marching and the drilling, and all of that business. He had to oversee that and make sure it happened. Of course, let’s face it, the first sergeant did most of the actual doing; but the officer was responsible.”
When asked about memorable characters:
“Colonel and Mrs. Pace; the commanding officer, Colonel Cunningham. Charlie Meyers, Major Meyers. Chuck Meyers was his son. Chuck was going to go to the Military Academy, but a bunch of us were up on Artillery Hill one day and we were climbing down that real steep escarpment that you can see from the lighthouse. Chuck slipped, fell all the way down to the beach and dislocated his hip, fractured his leg. We got him out of there, but that was the end of his hopes for the Military Academy. He had one leg that was shorter than the other after that. I don’t know what happened to him. I don’t know what he did.”

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Interview With Harold P. Aden

Posted on 02/17/2013 by

From the interview with Harold P. Aden of West St. Paul, MN conducted by phone from the Fort Worden History Center on November 4, 2004 by John Clise. Mr. Aden served in the US Army 369th Engineers as a truck driver in the motor pool during the Korean War. Most of his time was spent at Fort Flagler on Marrowstone Island and at Camp Desert Rock, NV. Here he discusses his time in the Army:

“We stayed on Fort Flagler on the island. We got there in about March 1951, we stayed there til about November of 1951. Then we went down to Camp Desert Rock in Nevada where they had the bomb testing sites. We stayed down there til June of ’52, then they shipped us back to Fort Flagler and we stayed there the rest of my two years in the service. …We did go down to Coronado in San Diego for a month, maneuvers, before we got out of the service. …At one time we did take a bunch of men down to Yakima, Washington, for a machine gun range they had down there. I didn’t participate in the machine gun firing or anything. I just drove the truck down there and then we just kind of goofed off all day for two weeks. I had it pretty easy in the motor pool.

…I think the only stress we had was the morning we were in Camp Desert Rock in the foxhole waiting for the atomic bomb to go off. It was kind of scary. We didn’t (have any special glasses), we just kept our heads down in the foxhole. I forget how it was, but first you hear the noise and then you feel the shock and then the lights. It was quite a spectacular thing.

We were down there putting up Butler buildings and so forth because we were in the Engineers. About every month they would ship in a bunch of new service people to watch these atomic bombs.

At Fort Flagler, I just kind of went up to the motor pool and I think we were always done at 3:30 or 4:000 in the afternoon and then we’d go back to the barracks and have our chow. We had our movie theater there and the beer hall, of course. There was a USO Club across the parade ground. Occasionally we went on pass. We’d go to Port Townsend, and if we got a three day pass we might go to Port Angeles. One time we went up to Vancouver, Canada….Our main way of getting over to Port Townsend and back was riding the M-boats.”

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