Interview with Anne Unbedacht

Posted on 05/15/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Anne Unbedacht of Port Townsend conducted by Patience Rogge at the Fort Worden History Center on August 21, 2008.  Here she describes her former job in catering for the defunct Community Enterprises at Fort Worden, especially the weddings she helped plan:

“Actually the best and the worst one was the same one.  The kids getting married were in their 20’s and had careers.  One was working in Seattle and the other was finishing up a job in San Francisco and moving to Seattle, so they weren’t around to plan their wedding.  The mother of the bride, who lived in Atlanta was planning it, and the groom’s parents who lived in Seattle were planning a huge rehearsal dinner.  The mother in Atlanta was not sure how we were going to do this.  I assured her that I’d send the menus, set up a time to plan an hour to talk on the phone, that I did this for a living, it is painless, don’t worry. She was a wonderful treat to work with, we talked on the phone a lot.  On the other hand, the parents of the groom were not so much fun to deal with.  They were making a bigger deal out of the rehearsal dinner that they were throwing for a hundred and some people.  They were very pushy, the mom assigned the husband some things.  When I checked my email I’d have two or three from both of them.  They didn’t coordinate.  The kids had booked all the accommodations here, and they had booked the Kitchen Shelter for the rehearsal dinner.  When the mom first saw it, she almost had a heart attack.  While the kids were looking for a little more casual, she was looking for a little ritzier than you can do here at Fort Worden.  Most people don’t realize that you can actually make the Kitchen Shelter kind of pretty.  You can put linen down and if you get silverware and crystal on the tables and string lights, it can be very pretty.  I showed her pictures and tried to calm her down and she ended up being very happy but I lost a lot of sleep that weekend.

The weddings were a lot of fun.  A lot of receptions started out with a prayer and a unity candle lighting.  They’d usually try to light the candles up on Battery Tolles in the wind, but would give up when they couldn’t.  Those are some of my fun memories.”

Posted in Washington State Parks | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Interview with Anne Unbedacht

Interview with Ryan J. Thomson

Posted on 05/15/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Ryan J. Thomson of Newmarket, NH conducted by Rae Tennyson at the Fort Worden History Center on July 6, 2002.  Mr. Thomson described himself as “a full time folk musician” and here he tells how, in 1977, he discovered Centrum’s  The Festival of American Fiddle Tunes and Port Townsend:

“I was in Weiser, Idaho at the National Fiddle Contest when some friends told me that there was a lot of fiddling going on out in the Seattle area and in Port Townsend. I finished up the contest and drove straight to Port Townsend and, sure enough there was a lot of people playing fiddles all over. It was a very comfortable feeling.  I had my fiddle in my car and my sleeping bag and my tent, and I met a lot of other people who were similar and they were all here to make music together. It’s a beautiful location, an exotic place.  I didn’t realize at the time that Fiddle Tunes was an organized event that you signed up for and took classes.  I just showed up, parked my car and got up and played music.  I put my tent up in the woods and just stayed in it.   I met some people from Seattle and stayed in Seattle for a week with other musicians.  I kept in contact with people involved in Fiddle Tunes, I met Bertram Levy and Frank Ferrell.

The way I met Frank –I’m really interested in archaeology, so I found it incredibly fascinating to hike through the old gun emplacements.  I discovered that you can go into some of them that were open and that there are wonderful caverns and echoes, so I got my fiddle to play inside one of those bunkers.  This time, I was playing in a big bunker and I could hear fiddle music coming out of another one.  They are very dark inside and I couldn’t see anyone, but I walked in with my fiddle.  We played together in the total darkness for a while.”

At the time of the interview, Mr. Thomson had been attending Fiddle Tunes for 25 years.  He noted changes in the event that made it more organized and attracted new people, but went on to state:

“This festival has a really good reputation nationally.  I think it is one of the best general fiddle camps that there is anywhere.”

Posted in Washington State Parks | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Interview with Ryan J. Thomson

Interview With Gordon D. Trafton

Posted on 04/23/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview With Gordon D. Trafton conducted by Oran DeBois at the Fort Worden History Center on June 16, 2005.  Mr. Trafton worked at Fort Worden from 1960 to 1971, first as a custodian and then as a carpenter.  He was the foreman on the carpenter crew for seven years.  Mr. Trafton died in 2007 at the age of 87.  Here he discusses some of the residents of the Juvenile Diagnostic and Treatment Center that he encountered:

“Some of the kids didn’t work out well in the academic program.  They didn’t want anything to do with schooling.  They’d send these guys over to me and I’d put them with a carpenter or painter, or maybe put two or three guys riding on the garbage truck with the driver.  They would work out well there.  I had one kid working with Keith Baldwin, who was a carpenter.  Keith was watching after this boy, who said he was going to take off and run away.  Keith knew that the kid was just trying to get to him, so he said ‘Well, I’ll tell you what I’ll do.  I’ll give you a package of cigarettes and a five dollar bill and get you out of the farm as far as the main gate if you’re ready—anytime.’ That shut the kid up and he didn’t say anymore.  Another kid ran and came back after a couple of days.  He said, ’Did you miss me?’  ‘Were you gone?’ we asked.  He never ran again.  Another kid put a billiard ball in a sock and clobbered the man who was on night duty, knocked him out cold.”

Posted in Juvenile Diagnostic & Treatment Center | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Interview With Gordon D. Trafton

Interview With Timothy Schmidt

Posted on 04/18/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Timothy Schmidt of Easton, WA conducted by Patience Rogge on January 4, 2007 by phone from the Fort Worden History Center. Mr. Schmidt, who was born and grew up in Port Townsend, worked as a Park Aide at Fort Worden during the summers of 1973 to 1976.  At the time of the interview, Ranger Schmidt was the park manager at Lake Easton State Park in eastern Washington.  Here he relates the story of a scary episode during his early days at Fort Worden:

“I was probably about 20 at the time.  I had come back from college and was asked if I’d work the graveyard shift, from ten o’clock at night to six in the morning to replace the regular night watchman, an older gentleman whose wife was ill. The job was to make sure the park was closed up, that everybody was out of the park, to get the gates closed.  Then you went down to the beach to clean the restrooms, and then back up to check a list of buildings.  The buildings were all empty then—all the barracks and houses.  Every night there were certain ones that you had to make sure were locked up and secure.  There was some electrical construction going on, if I remember right, in the band building. It was one of those nights when the wind was blowing like crazy, and it was about two in the morning. The trees’ leaves were rustling in the wind, the moon was out but the clouds were running across the moon, kind of eerie with the wind whistling.  I had been given an old flashlight to use when checking the buildings.  I went up to the band building and the front door was open.  It wasn’t supposed to be like that, I thought, so I went inside with this dim flashlight that was getting dimmer by the minute while I was trying to look and make sure nobody was in there.  I got to the middle of the building, there were no lights inside.  Suddenly I heard this SLAM!! behind the building. I went running out of there, got in the truck, went down to the office and sat until daybreak.  It scared the what out of me.  Now I know that it was because I’d opened the front door enough that it caused a draft and the back door slammed shut.  But in the dark with no flashlight and no other light, as a young buck by myself in this great big park and a great big building, it was pretty traumatic.  It must have made an impression because I can still remember it 30 years later.”

Posted in Washington State Parks | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Interview With Timothy Schmidt

Interview With Bruce Reid

Posted on 04/13/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Bruce Reid of Port Townsend conducted by John Clise at the Fort Worden History Center on January 13, 2003.  Mr. Reid was one of the first teachers hired by the Port Townsend School District #50 to teach at the new Juvenile Diagnostic and Treatment Center in 1958.  He taught history, English and physical education during the years he worked at Fort Worden. Here he discusses the challenges of the job, and how he felt about the overall program:

“I don’t think it was exceedingly stressful.  I think that there were responsibilities that you had that were sometimes difficult, including making assessments of the kids we worked with that were accurate and meaningful.  We wanted to contribute to the overall purpose of working with  these kids, and that was the diagnostic purpose—to assess what kind of kid, what kind of problem, and what kind of situation would be best for them.  I drew some conclusions during the years that I was here: the treatment end of it had one element that had questionable success, when the kids were being treated for their behavior problems.  They were being treated in situation, right here at Fort Worden.  When you sent them back into the community they came from, that was a different situation.  Sometimes I felt we were treating them to adjust well while they were here at Fort Worden but that didn’t take too well when they got back to their communities.  That led to fairly high recidivism.  Eventually the state drew similar conclusions.  Treatment facilities like Fort Worden where the kids lived were discontinued after a time.  The state decided that it was better to work with the kids in group homes in a community setting rather than sending them to an isolated artificial situation like the Fort Worden Treatment Center.  Those are the feelings I developed during the course of the nine years I worked here.”

Posted in Juvenile Diagnostic & Treatment Center | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Interview With Bruce Reid

Interview With JonLee Joseph

Posted on 04/12/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with JonLee Joseph of New York, NY conducted by Patience Rogge at the Fort Worden History Center on January 25, 2008.  Ms. Joseph taught English at the Juvenile Diagnostic and Treatment Center from 1966 to 1968.  Here she describes coming to Fort Worden and beginning her teaching career:

“There was a placement center for teaching positions at Western Washington University. I have always loved the ocean, there were two positions on the ocean, one was in Ilwaco and the other was in Port Townsend.  I chose Port Townsend and made an appointment and came up for an interview.  I was given the teaching post and a name of someone who had a house on the beach on Discovery Bay who only wanted to rent to teachers. I was very fortunate to have this house on the north side of Discovery Bay.  There were long steps going down to the beach.  I began my teaching career here and thought it was a pretty ideal situation.  The classes were small, eight, nine maybe 10 students.  They led such structured lives with cottage staff and counselors–24-hour care by guardians, and then school.  What I found about the students at that time was that the girls were generally in for running away from home, and the boys were in for burglary and stealing cars.  They were pretty honest about their lives and about what they thought they wanted and needed.  As a teacher, I was interested in using literature and poetry and ideas. We put out a newsletter that was filled with haiku poetry that I taught them.  I also taught drama.  We did ‘The Monkey’s Paw,’ a play based on a horror story, in the little theater.  School was rather hard, but I was enchanted because some of the students had never read a book in their lives, but under those conditions and at that time, they did.  It was just a revelation to them and to me.  I used a lot of John Steinbeck.  I considered it all triumphal.”

Posted in Juvenile Diagnostic & Treatment Center | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Interview With JonLee Joseph

Interview With Jean Dunbar

Posted on 04/12/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Jean Dunbar of Port Townsend conducted by Sandra Lizut on December 7, 2004 at the Fort Worden History Center.  Ms. Dunbar serves as the volunteer coordinator for Fort Worden State Park.  She has volunteered at the park for more than 30 years, and one of the meeting rooms in the Headquarters building is named in her honor.  Here she discusses the future of the Fort as it becomes the Lifelong Learning Center and challenges the park faces:

“I think it is going to become more business oriented.  I think we’re going to grow carefully but steadily.  That’s the whole goal the Parks Commission has, and it is Kate Burke’s plan.  She has watched the plan carefully.  We want to retain what we have.  We’re going to have to take everything within the historic context of this facility because it is on the National Historic Registry.  That’s one of the problems with restoring the buildings.  They have to have slate roofs, that’s expensive.  When the pillars go out on one of these buildings, they have to be replaced with exact replicas.  Craftsmanship is a problem, craftspeople aren’t trained like that anymore.  Our top maintenance man is Joe Benson, whose father was in the maintenance department here for many years.  He trained young Joe well, but that is an exception.  Ultimately, we want to restore Building 125, and provide hotel-style accommodations. Elder Hostel has finally said that they’ve had it with our facilities.  They don’t want dorms.  The people in Elder Hostels want private rooms, they don’t want two to four to a room.  I’ve attended quite a few Elder Hostels and I can understand, I’ve had all types and it doesn’t really bother me.  But plumbing down the hall for a whole floor isn’t appealing.  We lost the Elder Hostel crowd, too, because they weren’t getting the food they wanted . The food was inconsistent and there were problems with the kitchen  in the old Army mess hall.“

In answer to a question about the construction of a new building on the campus, the Nora Porter Commons:

“The Commons building was a good 20 years in the making.  Anything built on state property, particularly an historic property, takes that long to get through the hoops that it has to go through.  But this was part of the concept when Fort Worden became a conference center, because the old Army mess hall just wasn’t cutting it.  It wasn’t meeting health standards, it wasn’t meeting fire standards.  It had to be brought up to standard, otherwise this couldn’t become a conference center, so the design went through all the historic commissions and passed their requirements plus the health and safety codes.  I think the design fits in very well with the other buildings.”

Posted in Washington State Parks | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Interview With Jean Dunbar

Interview With Jack Bilan

Posted on 04/05/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Jack Bilan of Port Townsend conducted by Wendy Los at the Fort Worden History Center on July 1, 2003.  Mr. Bilan taught mathematics at the Juvenile Diagnostic and Treatment Center from 1968 until the Center closed in 1971.  Here he describes his work:

“I was teaching mathematics.  We had a maximum of 12 kids in a classroom, although usually it was four to eight kids per class.  I’d say two-thirds boys and one-third girls.  There were four girls cottages and eight boys cottages.  They were very interesting kids.  They were all pretty wild.  At that time, you could be incarcerated for anything from running away from home to murder.  We had kids from that entire range here all thrown together.  We had a couple of murderers, a couple of arsonists—I could think of hundreds of examples of different kids.  Our main job was not to just teach the subject, that was secondary.  The main job was to establish some sort of rapport as a professional school teacher because you were an authority figure.  Almost without exception, these kids had trouble with any kind of authority figure, whether it was police or parents or teachers.  First, you established that you were fair and consistent, then you had to do a good job making them feel good about school.  If that is all you did, and taught them something about the subject matter too, that was fine. I was able to teach quite a bit of subject matter.  I had to individualize my program for each student because kids were coming in and going out all the time.  Some would be here for two weeks, some for a year, some for longer.  There was turn over all the time.  About every two or three weeks, one would leave and someone else would come in; they’d parole kids out and bring new kids in.  You couldn’t teach a normal class in the sense of a lecture, so you had to individualize your instruction.  I had all the kids working on their own assignments.  Some of them were doing arithmetic  and some were doing algebra.”

Posted in Juvenile Diagnostic & Treatment Center | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Interview With Jack Bilan

Interview With George H. Woods

Posted on 03/30/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with George H. Woods of Renton, WA conducted by Henry West at the Fort Worden History Center on July 11, 2002.  Mr. Woods served in the U.S. Army Company B, 532 Engineer Boat and Shore Regiment, 2nd Engineer Special Brigade from 1947 through 1949 at Fort Worden.  Here he describes his unit’s mission and activities:

“The mission was being able to take troops  and material into shore.  I was sent from Fort Flagler to Fort Worden to go to radio school, and then assigned to a small tugboat, the T5, which was here at Fort Worden.  The T5 was used to ferry troops to Fort Casey or Fort Flagler, it was a 65-foot with a crew of four moored right out on the pier.  The skipper was master sergeant James Conrad, Bill Handley was the chief engineer, Donald G. Barton was the boatswain mate and I was the radio operator.  We spent quite a bit of time living on the T5.  We did maneuvers down the Washington coast, up the Columbia River.  We went out through the Straits with a small boat.  There were three other vessels assigned here at the time, the Y64, a tanker vessel; a tugboat called the LT130, and a freight ship, the FS211.  They were assigned to go with us down the coast.  If one of the LCMs (Landing Craft Medium) would break down, the LT130 would put it in tow and the Y64 could refuel it off the coast.  I remember five or six vessels in tow that had broken down.  One time one of the LCMs got water in the bearing shaft and we had to sink it because it turned over from the weight of the engine.  The first trip with that group, we went all the way up the Columbia to The Dalles, OR.  With the next group, we just went into the Bonneville Dam.  On one of those trips on the Columbia, the tanker ran aground on a sandbar  and we had to get a tow boat to pull her off.  There was a lot of seasickness going out the Strait of Juan de Fuca, going across the bar into Grays Harbor and across the bar into the Columbia River. It was quite an experience for a land based soldier to go out in rough weather.  The whole reason for the training was to be able to exist in those conditions.

Later the opportunity to go to marine radar school at Treasure Island, CA came up and I was picked to go for six months. Because we were a marine group, we needed people to operate marine radar. Initially I had enlisted for 18 months, so I had to extend my enlistment to three years.  So, there I was, a GI down there with the Marines and Navy.  The Navy was really receptive, but the Marines weren’t too happy seeing a bunch of doggies, as we were called in those days, going to school.  After the six months, I returned to Fort Worden, my main base.  I was never out of Company B, 532nd .”

Posted in Military | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Interview With George H. Woods

Interview With James E. Wells

Posted on 03/30/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with World War II veteran, James E. Wells of Quincy, WA conducted by John Croghan on July 1, 2004 by phone from the Fort Worden History Center.  Mr. Wells was drafted in 1944 and assigned to the 14th Coast Artillery at Fort Worden.  He was subsequently reassigned to the U.S. Army Co. G-355th Infantry Regiment-89th Division-3rd Army, which took him to France and Germany under General George S. Patton.  He saw action in the Battle of the Bulge; later he was stationed in Belgium and discharged in 1946.  Here he tells of firing the big guns at Fort Worden:

“We had one shoot on the 16 inch guns.  I got in a little bit of trouble with that.  We had grandstands built for a demonstration for generals from all over, even lots of officers from Canada.  There were refreshments made and everything.  A target was towed up the Straits and we were supposed to fire over it and then fire under it and then zero in on it.  I was given the readings for it, and I guess I kind of messed up a little bit, because the first shot blew the thing clear out of the water.  Nobody even got to sit down or have a sandwich and it was all over.”

More about the guns:

“Those things shot a 250 pound projectile with 200 pounds of powder.  About every third shot they had to saw the riflings out of the barrel because they would protrude out of the end of the barrel. They were very expensive guns to fire.  When we were cleaning and maintaining them, we’d put a fatigue hat, the old type that were round with a bill, in the breech.  After they were fired, they had that blast of air come through to clean out all the debris and prevent misfiring.  You could put a fatigue hat in there and close and lock it and turn the air on, it could blow that hat for about a quarter of a mile.  That was big sport to see how far you could blow your hat.  When they fired the guns, the evergreen trees on the hills would lie right down.  When the trees snapped back up, the branches would fly.  You didn’t really hear the muzzle blast, but you could feel it where I was underground when the gun was fired.  They had powered carts to drive the projectile around, to ram it in.  The projectile was all handled by machine.  The only thing handled by manpower was the powder bag.”

His tour of duty in Europe:

“I joined Patton at the Maginot Line in France.  We travelled fast.  It was a pretty cold winter and we dug in.  I kept an extra pair of socks against my stomach so I’d always have a dry pair.  I slept in the ground quite a few nights.  I sustained one accidental wound that put me in the hospital in Nuremburg for about a month, then I was in a convalescence camp when Patton died.  After I healed, I went with what was left of our outfit to Ghent, Belgium just outside Antwerp.  We built one of the camps where they reprocessed men before they  sent them home, they were all named after cigarettes—Philip Morris, Pall Mall.  It is a little island that you have to go underwater through a tunnel to get to.  It was just sand, so we took landing mats and made roads and everything with them.  We also built a stockade for German prisoners, using their labor.  We were supposed to work them eight hours a day and feed them three times a day, but we wanted to get the thing built so we worked them 12 hours a day and fed them twice a day.  Somebody got to the Red Cross.  They kicked us out of there for inhuman treatment.  They put an Air Force detachment in there to take our place and sent us into Antwerp.  We lived in an old abandoned diamond factory and were the traffic control and the police for the city of Antwerp.  I got transferred into the military police for a short while. It was good duty, we were right in the heart of Antwerp near the central station.”

He describes his return trip to the United States:

“We came back on the Wasp, an aircraft carrier.  They had the bunks on the hangar decks down underneath the flight deck.  Those bunks were up so high you almost needed oxygen.  We hit a hurricane on the way home.  We were supposed to be in New York in four days.  We had rations for about five days.  We were out there for eight days, eating baloney sandwiches.  The ship rolled 40 feet, there was water over the flight deck and all the forward rooms flooded.  All the Naval officers were back there sleeping with us in the hangar decks.  The ship had four propellers.  By the time we got to New York, there was one operational.  It was pretty hard to try to stand up and eat at one of those tables when the ship was jumping up and down and going sideways.  A lot of people got sick and couldn’t eat.  But I’ve got an iron stomach, so I gained a little weight on the way home because I was using everybody’s meal tickets who couldn’t eat.”

Posted in Military | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Interview With James E. Wells