Interview With Joan Thomsen

Posted on 10/26/2013 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Joan Thomsen conducted by Clio Ward on January 22, 2013 at Ms. Thomsen’s home in Kala Point, near Port Townsend. Ms. Thomsen and her husband George led the Heritage Group, the organization responsible for managing the Commanding Officers Quarters in Fort Worden, for nine years. Here she recounts the story of how the group acquired authentic reproductions of period costumes.

Edited transcripts and verbatim recordings of this and all interviews conducted for the Fort Worden Oral History Program are available at a nominal fee to cover duplicating and shipping. Inquire at info@fwfriends.org or 360.344.4481 for details.

“ There were women doing all of the work in the house. Women do their special thing, they keep things. We had a lot of period dresses available. We got forms and they were all visible in rooms and upstairs. George said one day, “There is no evidence of a man in this house and this is the Commanding Officers House, we’ve got to do something. Let’s see if we can find an officer’s uniform.” Well, men don’t keep them. They were worn from 1902 to 1911, which was the period we wanted to use in the house. Anyhow, we tried to find a uniform and the only thing we found was a moth eaten wreck, and we only brought it home because it had the buttons, the original buttons on it. That started it. George said, “Do you think you could make one?” I took tailoring courses years ago in New York from a wonderful woman. I said, “Well, let’s give it a try.” That’s what happened. That’s how the uniform came about. I was just wearing a skirt and a blouse and all of a sudden we got very active with all of this. We got active with the Victorian group, the Victorian festival, we were on the original committee and all of this happened. We never expected it. The thing with George’s uniform was interesting. We were just going to hang it on a hanger in the office because the office has an outside door. I was making the uniform and Betty Kuller said to me, “What are you doing that for? Why don’t you just make it so it fits.” and that’s how it came about.

I got a connection with a company that reproduced historic old patterns. I picked out a pattern from 1898. It was a walking suit. Actually I picked up the catalog in the Jefferson County historical museum, found the catalog of all the dresses they wore then. I got the pattern which is just pieces of paper. It’s a dandy to work on. I made this 1898 walking suit and I copied things. I lined it with silk and did all that stuff. I still have it. I still wear it.

I have two hats. One’s a winter hat and the other is a summer hat. The summer hat I made. I copied that from the old catalog. It had flowers all over it. The winter hat is very interesting because it was in the movie “The Titanic”. I found it over in Seattle at a company on the second floor of the Pacific building. The company comes out of Kentucky. They reproduced a lot of old costumes, like for “Out of Africa” and for“The Titanic.” My daughter and I went over there. We tried all the dresses and had a ball. We brought friends over there to see the place, because they had furniture and chairs and everything that were original to “The Titanic.”
But anyhow, they had this hat, it’s felt and it has all kinds of feathers all over it. It’s absolutely stunning. It was stuffed back in a corner where no one could see it, but I could. I looked at it, it was in “The Titanic” exhibit and its original cost was $325. When I saw it there it was $29.95. I got it and ran out of the store. I’ve worn it constantly. It is stunning.

The thing that we did for the docents was we had a couple of people make skirts. We bought reams and we cut them out of fabric. There were black skirts and then we had colored tops. We fitted them in outfits, basically skirts and tops and pins, all the things that would go with it like jewelry,belts, gloves and slips. We made it for them so that they could dress and be comfortable. We got a lot of people going on that and we made whole bunches so that whoever came to work at the house could fit their size. Everything is up in the master bedroom closest which is very large. So that’s how we fitted the docents out, and they loved doing it.”

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Interview With William G. Trafton

Posted on 09/28/2013 by fwohp4481

From the interview with William G. Trafton of Port Ludlow, WA conducted at the Fort Worden History Center on August 13, 2013 by Clio Ward. Mr. Trafton is the son of Gordon Trafton, who was the maintenance supervisor at Fort Worden during the Juvenile Diagnostic Center days and the early part of the State Parks era. Here he describes some of the high jinx of his adolescence:

“I used to have a Model A roadster. We lived in the second house up the hill outside the gate. Late one night Richard Stapf and I were working on that car in the barn. We decided to sneak out and take the car down through the Fort in the dark. We drove through the area behind the girls’ dorms.

They had a clothesline in the back where all their clothes were hanging. As we drove through there, some of their clothes came off the line. The girls were standing in the windows waving at us. We were laughing and just having fun in this old hot rod. The Fort had police cars that were station wagons, and they chased us around the area. I drove across the Parade Ground and jumped the curb, went across, made a shortcut to the gate and snuck out of there. The police had to drive around the road,so they couldn’t catch up.

My mother (Ethel June Beatty Trafton) realized that we were gone. She was standing out in the middle of the street in her bathrobe, waving us into the barn, ‘You get that car into the barn right now!’.

Another adventure with his pal Richard:

“On the other side of town, out at North Beach there was another military installation that had railroad tracks that went around the edge, so I built a car that would run on railroad tracks. I was just a teenager, but I loved to read Popular Mechanics. I figured out how to make this little car with an old lawnmower motor that would run on the tracks, the car in the book was not made to go on tracks but mine did. I made this little dome-looking car with aluminum and plywood and some old springs off a car, and I took some rims and removed the tires so the wheels would ride on the tracks.

We only did this once. We put it on there and rode. We thought no trains ever went there, but we found out that actually a train did run there. We got scared that we’d meet a train, so we took the little car and dismantled it.”

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Interview With Ed Edwards

Posted on 09/05/2013 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Ed Edwards of Port Townsend conducted by Teddy Clark at the Fort Worden History Center on March 6, 2003. Mr. Edwards’ parents worked at the Fort Worden Juvenile Diagnostic and Treatment Center as Cottage Parents. The family lived at the Fort from the time Mr. Edwards was in 4th grade until the Center closed.

Edited transcripts and verbatim recordings of this and all interviews conducted for the Fort Worden Oral History Program are available at a nominal fee to cover duplicating and shipping. Inquire at info@fwfriends.org or 360.344.4481 for details.

About his parents’ duties as Cottage Parents:
“ I believe that they would just go in and just supervise the kids in their daytime activities– to have a supervisor there to make sure that there were no fights, that their rooms got cleaned, that they made it to the meals, went to school, that type of stuff.”

About interaction with the residents:
“ We played some sports against them but not to the point where we would know them individually. Eventually, kids would leave the Fort and go to school in Port Townsend. Not a bunch of them but some of them would end up finding homes in town and stay. Eventually I met a couple of them, played ball against some kids who would move from Fort Worden up to Port Angeles or Sequim and then we would end up competing with them but no, the kids who were here for treatment were separated from us other than for organized activities.”

About what it was like to move to Fort Worden and what kids did for fun:
“ We moved from a rural setting. We lived in Toledo and my dad worked in the woods and my mom didn’t work. A very small house, we had an outhouse. We moved all of a sudden into a big two story house with two bathrooms and four bedrooms– a lot of room. I mean that alone was a big change. Where we had lived before it was mainly just cousins and other families that lived on the same row and then moving into a close setting like this where there were 30 or 40 kids who lived on our block, it was a big change and it was a lot of fun. There were buildings on every flat spot here on the Fort. I would guess that now there are probably only a third to a quarter of the buildings remaining. Almost all of these buildings were vacant and of course they had to be explored, and a number of windows I’m sure got broken. In the woods down behind the camping spots there were still bayonet dummies and ropes in the trees and all the obstacle course. The entire obstacle course was still down there. For a ten year old boy and all of his buddies, we spent hundreds and hundreds of hours playing war and exploring buildings that were off limits. The Navy base on top of the hill where the radar stuff was was strictly off limits but that got explored also.
… there were no hazards other than falling off of some platform or rope rigging, so it was pretty safe. Fox holes were still dug in the brush. In fact, my dad, later on when he was in security, was chasing a runaway and fell in a fox hole and tore up his knee pretty badly and ended up having surgery. The whole hillside down through the woods was where they had combat training and so there were fox holes, bayonet dummies, all the things that a boy would like to have.
… You would get into a building that maybe you weren’t supposed to and you would find that when the military moved they left stuff behind — Army patches, not a bunch, but telegraph keys, my brother found a gas mask. I’m sure there are probably a lot of chemicals lying around too that we were probably exposed to…. asbestos, all the pipes were wrapped with asbestos and at that point when you’re playing you just grab a handful, pull some off the pipe and throw it and it would explode and make this nice puff. It was exposure to asbestos and stuff like that. But I don’t think that was really all that uncommon anywhere back in the 50s and early 60s. People weren’t aware of the danger.
… there’s North Beach and so we would go there. We could pretty much play on North Beach back in towards town. Saturday morning there’d be a group of guys either on bicycles or with BB guns or just headed out to the beach to go do something. We were building forts or having BB gun fights or bicycle racing or sneaking into places we weren’t supposed to be. We’d be gone all day, get back dinner time and then that’s when somebody’d spend the night or go spend the night somewhere else and be up and do it again Sunday morning and hopefully get the homework done on the weekend. It was freedom and I think a lot of my son’s big complaint is there’s no time to play. He is a very busy kid, organized basketball, organized soccer, all kinds of organized sports. His big complaint has always been, I don’t have time to play. When kids are unorganized they will be creative. We had a lot of that because there weren’t that many organized sports. There you had little league football and baseball but there wasn’t the structure that there is now. We would just go play, play at doing nothing.
… On the big hills alongside the cottages, the grass would get really dry. We had cardboard boxes and we’d slide down those hills onto the street when there was no traffic. There used to be a siren tower over by the USO building, it was a big tower right next to the maintenance building where they had a big crank siren when we first moved here. We got up there a couple times, set off the siren and then got out of there before we got caught. The balloon hangar (Mc Curdy Pavilion) had a metal ladder up the side and the big thing was to be brave enough to climb to the top of the sliding doors.”

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Interview With Arthur E. David

Posted on 08/25/2013 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Arthur E. David of Fort Wayne, IN conducted by phone from the Fort Worden History Center on June 30, 2005 by Clio Ward. Mr. David served in the 369th EASR from 1951 to 1953. He was stationed at Fort Worden, Thule Airbase in Greenland, San Diego, CA, and Panama.

Complete transcripts and recordings of this and all interviews conducted for the Fort Worden Oral History Program are available at a nominal fee to cover duplicating and shipping. Inquire at info@fwfriends.org or 360.344.4481 for details.

Here Mr. David discusses his Greenland experience:

“ We left Fort Worden in April. We had got there in February and we took our basic training. Then we were sent down to Fort MacArthur at San Pedro, California, and we were there for more training. We left from there in May took a troop train from Fort MacArthur to Norfolk, Virginia. We left for Greenland in the latter part of May, first of June.

It wasn’t bad weather. It was summertime. It got up to 30 above and we had 24 hours of daylight. We had trouble getting there though. We were on the USS Deuel APA- 160. They carried landing craft. We got frozen in by the ice.

A Coast Guard Icebreaker, the West Wind came in and broke us loose, got the ship loose, but it damaged the propeller shaft on the Navy ship so they had transferred us to another ship. It was a big 5000 man troop ship and then that’s what we stayed on while we worked in Greenland building this airbase, Thule, Greenland.

We unloaded supplies. Supplies were brought into shore and we unloaded all the supplies being taken there for the Air Force base.

If you fall in the water up there, you’ve got about five minutes. We lost five men out of our company section. There was a major and the captain, a sergeant major, a couple lieutenants, another sergeant. They fell, over the July 4th weekend they were traveling in these Army weasels and they fell through a glacier lake. They never got out.”

In answer to how he stayed in touch with his family, and what happened when he didn’t during his time in Panama:

“ I would just write letters and let them know where I was going. There was nothing top secret, so I just would let them know. When I was out on Gatun Lake I hadn’t written a letter for a while. A J-boat came out to get me off my boat and said, ‘You got an emergency call from Fort Wayne.’ I got a little concerned. I thought maybe my mom or dad, something was wrong. They took me back to the Gatun Dam where an Army truck picked me up and took me back to the barracks and the company clerk told me I had this message from home. I was supposed to call. I said, ‘Can I use the phone here?’ And they said, ‘No, you have to go into town.’ I had to change clothes and get on the ferry and go across to Colon and I got that phone. I had to reverse the charges, call collect. I talked to Mother. I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ And she goes, ‘Oh we were just worried about you and we thought we’d try and find out how you were.’ And I said, ‘Mom, you don’t know what I had to go through to get here to call you.’ After I talked to them and told them everything was fine, that there just wasn’t time for me to write, working out in Gatun Lake. Then I had to go back to the base, change my clothes, get on the truck and go back to Gatun Dam and the J-boat picked me up and took me back to my landing craft.

When asked about entertainment in Panama:

“ We went to a lot of the shops. Everybody had something to sell and things were pretty cheap. We went to the Manhattan Bar on 10th Street cause it was real nice atmosphere, it wasn’t a dump. We’d just go in there and have a few drinks and visit and listen to the music. So that’s about all we could do. You had to stay within the Canal Zone. There were off limit places– you didn’t go to off limit places, if you valued your life, let me put it that way.”

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Interview With James D. Farmer

Posted on 08/15/2013 by fwohp4481

From the interview with James D. Farmer of Acme, WA conducted by Clio Ward by phone from the Fort Worden History Center on July 30, 2013. Mr. Farmer was the Fort Worden State Park Conference Center Manager from 1991 to 2003.

Complete transcripts and recordings of this and all interviews conducted for the Fort Worden Oral History Program are available at a nominal fee to cover duplicating and shipping. Inquire at info@fwfriends.org or 360.344.4481 for details.

When asked about some of the memorable people that he knew while working at Fort Worden, besides Joe Wheeler:

“ Well I can start on it. There are so many that it would be a long, long list. But at the top of the list would be Dan Harpole. He really was my connection with Centrum all the time. One of the things that I did in cooperation with Dan and Joe– Dan was kind of Joe’s assistant there in 1991–was that we implemented weekly meetings. We set a specific time and that’s when we planned to meet every single week to go over whatever may have been on our mind. Our whole purpose there, theirs and mine, was to not let things build up, to just have good communication from day one and make sure that we all understood one another. I had some specific requirements as did they, and we worked through them by doing that. Dan was a great partner in all of that and a great friend during my whole time in Port Townsend. He encouraged me to be a part of much of what he was doing. There was a group of guys that were playing morning basketball at the gym a couple days a week. I joined them and just enjoyed the friendships and the participation in that. Centrum had a softball team. I played on that a little bit. Dan was just more than a colleague and a work associate. He was definitely a friend. We all miss him.

There were folks over there, Peter McCracken and those people. I mean, just great folks. I really enjoyed my relationship with those folks. Peter Badame at the Marine Science Center at that time, and of course Anne Murphy was there as well. Peter and I had a great relationship. We went to baseball games together over at the Mariners, things like that. The list goes on and on and on. Sue Sidle with the Advisory Committee just was such a tremendous help in helping me understand. She seemed to have a very broad view of the community and of Fort Worden and the various players there. She provided great perspective for me and remained a friend during the whole time I was there. I know I’ll leave some out. A lady who worked for me who really was a friend the whole time as well and connected to Port Townsend in different ways was Nancy Fitch. Nancy was there when I came to Fort Worden and had worked there while I was there and had been a good friend while I was there. After she left, she left before I did, we remained good friends. I still talk to her once in a while. Sam Hamill, the poet. Sam is a golfer and I’m a golfer and somehow we connected on that level. We started in about 1993 golfing once a week. When I came over here, he came over a few times and golfed. About three years or four ago he moved to Anacortes, since that time we’re golfing once a week again. He’s an interesting person, but our relationship is about 99% golf.

George and Joan Thomsen of the Heritage Group that ran the Commanding Officers Quarters were such wonderful people. I just couldn’t think of almost anyone I wouldn’t say that about, but there are some more than others. George and Joan were very, very special, no question, consummate lady and gentleman. I enjoyed them a great deal. We always, always really felt warm and comfortable around them.

Nora Porter was wonderful, She stuck with me. She asked me one time, was I going to stick with that dining hall project, and because it was floundering. She wanted to make sure that I was going to fight too. I told her, ‘Yes, we need to keep going on this.’ She was a wonderful help before she came on our Advisory Committee. Part of my committee participation was that occasionally I got invited to be at Tuesday morning reading group and Nora was a part of that. I’d met her early on when she was still working for State Representative Lynn Kessler and I really and thoroughly enjoyed Nora. When she was no longer working for Lynn Kessler then we got her on the Advisory Committee which was also a big help.”

In answer to the question about his role in the Fort Worden Centennial Celebration in 2002-03:

“I had talked about that for several years actually. Even to the point that as many of five or six years before, we had done research to determine exactly when the Centennial would be and because we weren’t sure, we knew when construction started and all of that kind of stuff. So we finally got a date certain from the military as to what they would consider the actual date, it was when real soldiers arrived versus engineers and construction workers, so that established the date. We’d started well ahead of that. I’d been talking with the Advisory Committee–anybody I could talk to, quite frankly– to see if, can we do something, can we do something special? Here was an incredible opportunity, and we had been already somewhat successful in bringing money to Fort Worden. My whole career I was pretty successful at money following me around. I think it’s because we got things done. The money got spent well. At any rate, at Fort Worden that had continued and I’d found lots of sources for money while I was there. The Centennial was both an opportunity for community celebration and to really highlight the importance of the park to the community and the importance to the State Parks system and as a vehicle to target some major renovations and get some money, because all those things can come along with that. Most people were enthusiastic, but it takes real people to do real work to make those things happen. Along the way one of the things we did was we got money from the lodging tax group. We got money from as many places as we could find money, including a pretty good sized grant from State Parks. So I was able to hire an employee, recruit more volunteers, spend money on publicity, all of that. That’s what really kicked it off –we actually started getting some money. We pretty well had to lay out a plan in preparation for that but our plan was still pretty conceptual. So getting the money was the kicker and the community joined in. We had some wonderful, wonderful help there. Laurie Medlicott, I remember really well the effort that she put in. Just good stuff that happened associated with all of that I believe. I think all of the events that I’ve said… It didn’t draw huge crowds but it was just fine.

There’s a lot of wonderful things that I got the see the beginnings of there. Some of them were associated with the Centennial. Certainly the Oral History Program is a wonderful one. The Friends group, there was no Friends group when I arrived. I remember going downtown and I’d go around talking to folks and with the handmade posters that we had made and hanging those posters all over town to draw people to a meeting at the old dining hall to begin to create a Friends group. We had a really wonderful turnout, great people, some towns fathers and some creative environmental folks and just a real cross section of the community that wanted to be involved. And that was really the start of it. It has taken off. Part of the master plan had been the development of the Guard House. The original plan had been in the master plan. The management plan I was working on was going to be that the Guard House was going to be more of a museum. That’s where we were going to maybe move the Coast Artillery Museum. There just wasn’t room for all that and we needed some restrooms. Those restrooms at the Guard House were my idea. I mean everybody agreed but I said, this is the place. We can put some restrooms in here without changing the outside of the building. We’ll have restrooms down here on the day use level of the park, which we really didn’t have any if the office was closed. We turned the Guard House into the Friends store. We worked that idea with the Friends group. The Advisory Committee agreed, and the State Parks agreed. And lo and behold they’re still there.”

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Interview With Patricia Johnson Monroe

Posted on 08/02/2013 by fwohp4481

An excerpt from the interview with Patricia Johnson Monroe of Lacey, WA conducted at the Fort Worden History Center on February 8, 2003 by MonaLou Stefflre. Mrs. Monroe led the effort of the Heritage Group to furnish the Commanding Officers Quarters at Fort Worden and develop it as a museum that would reflect the lives of the military families who lived in the house during the early years of the 20th century. She served in the organization from 1978 to 1990. Her mother, Mary Johnson, was responsible for the renaissance of Port Townsend by sparking interest in historic restoration of the city’s Victorian buildings and establishing the Summer School of the Arts, the forerunner of the Centrum Foundation.

Complete transcripts and recordings of this and all interviews conducted for the Fort Worden Oral History Program are available at a nominal fee to cover duplicating and shipping. Inquire at info@fwfriends.org or 360.344.4481 for details.

“The committee that had been advising the furnishing of Officers Row called me and said,’Would you like to start the museum at Fort Worden?’ The Commanding Officer’s Quarters had been restored back to its original state and needed furnishing. I was quite flattered by the whole idea, but I think they felt because I was Mary Johnson’s daughter, maybe I had a gift or something. It was a good time for me to pick up and become better acquainted with the community and gave me a project. So I formed a committee and the state gave us $14,000.00 to begin. The light fixtures and the paint and all of that had already been done, so we were just furnishing. Lucy Vane was my colorist and my best friend. Lucy and I did a lot of shopping together in Seattle and Oregon and all around. We had great fun doing it. We would laugh and tease people about giving up their precious items. Tom Fisher was our treasurer, then Jean Fee took over the job. Her sister Evelyn Allen was our secretary. Gerri Glockle, Jean Dunbar and so many wonderful people–Amy Rickets worked in the yard and many of my friends from the Garden Club joined us. We formed a club called the Heritage Group.

…With the $14,000.00 we bought the dining room set, the master bedroom set, the carpeting and some of the draperies. All of the curtains and original draperies were made by us or by a friend of Lucy’s in Seattle, who made all the valences. Out of our homes we began to bring a few things that looked like they would fit in. At the same time, my late grandparents’ home was closed. Just about the time that the museum was started, my Aunt Hilda and my Aunt Tracy passed away and I was helping to settle those two houses. I picked out some of the kitchen things that dated way back to the time they settled in Tacoma; for instance the Kitchen Queen, a lot of jars, and the ice cream mixer in the pantry. Some of the pictures upstairs came out of those residences. The two portraits in the master bedroom are my grandmother and grandfather’s wedding pictures, Nels and Betsy Johnson, my father’s parents who came over from Sweden at the turn of the century. We gradually began to put things in and we called for volunteer help to keep the house open, but it wasn’t open for another year and a half until we felt that we had enough furnishings to make it interesting for the public.”

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Interview With Darrel R. “Gus” Gustafson

Posted on 07/23/2013 by fwohp4481

An excerpt from the interview with Darrel R. “Gus” Gustafson of Edgewood, WA conducted by phone from the Fort Worden History Center on September 25, 2012 by Clio Ward. Mr. Gustafson worked at Fort Worden from April 1973 until December 1982 as Conference Center Administrative Assistant. His work involved getting the park up and running as a conference center.

Complete transcripts and recordings of this and all interviews conducted for the Fort Worden Oral History Program are available at a nominal fee to cover duplicating and shipping. Inquire at info@fwfriends.org or 360.344.4481 for details.

“ We had a great day or weekend when we did the park dedication back in 1973. That was a memorable experience and that kind of kicked things off there. From time to time we’d open up new buildings and get them renovated. For instance that big barracks down there near the water, which we called at the time Building 225, was a big project. When we finally got the fire protection and sprinkler system in there and we could actually invite large groups to come and use the facility there, that was a big kickoff for us and expansion of our services. Prior to that we used it for some summer camps that had already kind of been existing there like the ballet camp, Pacific Northwest Ballet. They had had nighttime security people who had to stay up all night in lieu of the fire protection system that was finally installed there. So we could open it up to more of the public.

A ballet company from New York came out for the five weeks or four weeks of instruction. Then they coupled with the Centrum Foundation and then later sponsored when the Centrum Foundation set up their offices there at Fort Worden.

We went through a number of different experiences over there at the dining hall. I remember one story that’s kind of interesting. The director of the dance camp, the ballet camp, came over and said, ‘We’re just not getting the food that we want or need over there and we’ve been talking to the cook at the dining hall.; I said, ‘Well, I’ll go talk to him and see what the problem is.’ They were looking a little more variety and whole wheat things and yogurt that he just didn’t really plan. He was a fairly new cook at the time and he had been an old Navy cook. When I went over and talked to him, his first reaction before we got into a long conversation was, ‘If SOS is good enough for the Navy it’s good enough for these girls.’

Dancers do eat a lot and they really expect to have some healthy food to eat. Our whole structure was built on a fairly economically based menu because that attracted more groups. They had to keep the price of the meals down. As time went on, but that year we had to make do, in years to come we negotiated another dollar or two a day for meals so that the cook could actually add some of the special requests that the dancers were having for their menu items. That was kind of an interesting experience in dealing with a special menu. As Centrum grew, our summer venues grew too and when we opened up they had a big circus tent there and had Fiddle Tunes workshops and performances. When the big hangar opened up, the performance hangar, that was a big change for us as well.”

Another memorable experience:
“Let me tell you a little bit about one of the big events that I was involved in there. That was the film that was filmed up there, “An Officer and a Gentleman.” I recall Glen Bellerud was the manager at the time and he told me there were some people coming in from the state film office. The state at that time had a one person film office that was his responsibility. Art was his first name. I can’t remember his last. His responsibility was to try to attract movie makers to the state of Washington. They came in a helicopter and landed on the parade ground in February, I think the three day weekend in February, President’s weekend. They said that they looked around Port Townsend, they looked around the park and they said, “We need to get a film in the can by June. We have a strike coming up and we’ve got like three months to do this and we like your facility. We’ll be back in touch with you.” It was not like a day or two that passed and they were calling and saying, “Hey we want to be there, we want to be there next month and we’re going to get this film made if everything goes well.” It just happened to work out for all of us because we told them that they had to be out of there by our summer season because we were already too booked and too busy in the summer to really accommodate a Hollywood movie being made. That Spring we could accommodate it and everything worked out pretty well. It was a big event. It was a lot of fun to be involved in that.

The filmmakers did benefit the park. They made improvements to several of our facilities. They went in and did some renovation and some painting and that sort of thing. There was a report that I wrote up afterwards and I can’t remember the details of that. Of course this was in around 1980 and it was a substantial, besides the rent for the buildings and the facilities, I think the report included somewhere in the neighborhood of $30,000 or $40,000 worth of improvements that they’d done to the park and rented the buildings they were using the whole time as well. So it benefitted, and I’ll tell you for five to ten years after that, I think there was a lot of people that stopped in at Fort Worden State Park and asked is this where the movie was, can we walk around and look and see where those shots were. There were a lot of tourists that came to Port Townsend as a follow up to that movie being filmed up there.

The stars, Richard Gere,Debra Winger, and Lou Gossett didn’t stay on the base and they were pretty busy, kind of kept to themselves. I mean I met them, was introduced to them, but probably the people that I dealt with the most were like the business manager for the movie company and the art director who always was looking for a different room or a different scene that he had to create and the facility that would help create that scene for him.”

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Interview With April N. Miller

Posted on 07/02/2013 by fwohp4481

Excerpts from the interview with April N. Miller of New York, NY conducted by phone from the Fort Worden History Center on February 7, 2012 by Eleanor Rigby. Ms. Miller is the daughter of Marshall Earl Miller and Muriel Smock Miller Severns. Her father was the chaplain at the Fort Worden Juvenile Diagnostic and Treatment Center from 1962 until it closed in 1971.
Her mother was a teacher in the Port Townsend school district. She had a choir that was composed of the Fort residents. Here Ms. Miller describes growing up at the Fort.

Complete transcripts and recordings of this and all interviews conducted for the Fort Worden Oral History Program are available at a nominal fee to cover duplicating and shipping. Inquire at info@fwfriends.org or 360.344.4481 for details.

“ We didn’t have a TV for a while. It seemed like everyone else had a TV but us for a long time, so we watched TV at other kids’ houses. But TV wasn’t such a central aspect of our lives like it seems to be with people’s lives nowadays.We played a lot outside. In those days,you could leave the house and be gone for hours and hours and hours. Our parents weren’t really sure where we were and what we were doing at all.

We used to play in the evenings on the parade field and the baseball diamonds. So when the Fort residents weren’t playing there, we would play on a different diamond. We weren’t allowed to play on the tennis court. We’d ride our bikes around all over the Fort.

When I was 10, my father bought me a large pony. We bought a piece of property that is across the street from the military cemetery. It was a big overgrown piece of land. My dad fenced it in with barbed wire and we cleared the brush out. We kept my pony there across from the cemetery. I spent a lot of time running around on my horse. There were other kids on the Fort who also had horses. We’d go out on the weekends, just be gone for hours and hours. We didn’t run around with our horses around the Fort because we really weren’t supposed to do that. On the hill up behind Officers Row we used to tie our horses up to some of the trees back there and put them on a long rope and they’d graze up there.Sometimes I’d keep my horse there for a couple of days and I’d throw her hay and bring her water. The Fort let us do that. The horse didn’t live there but they didn’t seem to mind if we would do that here and there every once in a while.

My younger brothers weren’t allowed to go to the other bunkers up on the top of Artillery Hill at the Fort. That was all fenced off, but my brothers would sneak up there all the time and play and hide from the security guys who would come up checking things out. They did that all the time. We’d go to the beach and play, go to the beach and make bonfires. We’d go looking for beach glass and little pieces of driftwood and stuff like that, just kind of hang out and have fun. We went into those houses on Officers Row a lot and played together, different houses.

It was very fun because there was always someone to play with. I did a huge amount of babysitting in middle school and in high school. I was always babysitting younger kids on the block. I belonged to 4-H, so I’d go to 4-H meetings. I rode in the pet parade with my horse. My family, my brothers and sisters, we were in the kiddie parade for many years with different ribbons for our costumes. With my 4-H group I rode my horse in the Rhody Parade with all of us on our horses. I did that a number of years in a row. I took my horse and was at the Jefferson County Fair, and I won ribbons on my horse there.

For a couple of years there was, I think he was either a house parent or a social worker, but his name was Jody Stewart. He had been part of the mounted Army years ago. On Saturdays, he taught a group of us dressage work with our horses at the fairgrounds for free. I and some other kids who were in 4-H wanted to learn about riding would go there on Saturday mornings and he would work with us with our horses. I was just a kid when he did that. I was really young. The other girls were older than I was and they also had better horses. I just had a pony. That was a connection with the Fort somehow that happened with another adult. For me all this horsey stuff went on, he taught us how to jump our horses and stuff. That was a really big deal to me, because at that time the only horse stuff going on out there was western riding. This was very different, doing dressage work and equitation work. It was a great experience for me to have. It was great.”

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Interview With John L. Johnson

Posted on 06/30/2013 by fwohp4481

Excerpts from the interview with John L. Johnson of Portland, OR conducted by Tim Caldwell at the Fort Worden History Center on October 17, 2002. Mr. Johnson is the son of Major Ralph L. Johnson (1883-1966), who was Harbor Defense Puget Sound Commander in the early 1940’s. The Johnson family lived in Quarters 10W on Officers Row at Fort Worden.

Complete transcripts and recordings of this and all interviews conducted for the Fort Worden Oral History Program are available at a nominal fee to cover duplicating and shipping. Inquire at info@fwfriends.org or 360.344.4481 for details.

About going to school:

“We went to school in town. At that time, the MPs had a canvas Army truck with wooden benches down the middle, and two more wooden benches on the outside. They would go around through all the sergeants’ quarters and all the officers’ quarters. They would come up behind the houses on Officers Row and stop at each one that had kids. There was a guy named Fred Testo who was a corporal who was an armed guard, he had a sidearm, a .45. He would stand out there holding on to the handrails that lined the stairway going into the back of the truck to try to keep order in the truck. These were all high school kids and grade school kids together, we all went to Port Townsend.”

About going to the movies:

“We used to go to the movies over here (now the Wheeler Theater), it used to cost a dime. It was just for military and their families and you could bring a friend, but you had to be with them for them to get in. The officers’ seats were all covered with white slipcovers, and no one except officers and their families and guests was allowed to sit in those seats.

I refused to sit there. I used to sit in the front row with my feet up on the stage because it was real close. Or else, I’d sit with my feet under me and I’d curl up in the corner. I was a little kid. A lot of times I would fall asleep in my seat and they would close the place down and I’d wake up and everybody’s gone.

When my sister and mom would go to the show, they would sit up there in the white seats and make me sit up there but I didn’t want to.”

About a bit of history not often discussed:

“(My father) was one of the first people who started closing down the fort. He was given orders by what later became the Pentagon, the Army headquarters..to take everything in the fort that was not on paper and ‘dispose of it’. It was supposed to be destroyed if it wasn’t on paper, it didn’t exist. They didn’t want anything here that there wasn’t a record of, so part of what he had to do was take things like ammunition that wasn’t on paper. I know that they jettisoned like 400 rounds of coast artillery ammunition. … He took it out in the deepest trench he could find and they just sank the boat.

They had several boats that were not on paper and that was one of the things they did was sink them. They had some fun firing on some of them, a couple of them. Usually they just sank them.

…When he started closing the fort, it was after the war, the war ended in ’45. They say that it wasn’t until ’52 or ’53, but that isn’t true. …The only people who later came, when the engineers were here, came here for the Korean War. Apparently they reopened it and they filled the place up again. But by that time, it had already been closed, and my dad closed it down.”

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Interview With Richard L. French

Posted on 06/19/2013 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Richard L. French of Port Angeles, WA conducted by John Croghan at the Fort Worden History Center on October 14, 2004. Mr. French served in the US Navy in World War II and later in the US Army Second Engineer Special Brigade at Fort Worden and Korea. Here he relates some of his experiences:

“I joined the Army in 1948 in Elmira, NY, went to Fort Dix for processing, and was only there a couple of days when I was transferred. to the 532nd Engineer Regiment, Company B. I was sent to Fort Worden, WA by myself. Took the train out and I landed in Seattle. I told the MPs I was going to Fort Worden and they said, ‘Where’s that?’

I thought I was at the end of the world when I was coming out on the Peninsula after taking a couple of ferries and a bus. I landed at Point Hudson, and I didn’t want to stay in the boat, so I asked to be transferred, so I bid for a job as a courier in headquarters in Headquarters Company. I carried correspondence to the different offices on the Fort for two years. General D.A.D. Ogden was the commanding officer, later Colonel Alexander took over. Then when we left for Korea, Colonel Joseph J. Twitty was the commanding officer. He became a brigadier general in Korea.

…The highlight (of his time at Fort Worden) was the football team. We won 14 to nothing against Fort Lewis and we beat Camp Stoneman 27 to 0, and won the Sixth Army championship. Col. Alexander was the guardian angel of the football team. They didn’t do much KP, I’ll tell you.I saw my first organized football game in Fort Worden. Got my first car, and got my first driver’s license in Port Townsend, and I saw the Officers Club burn.

…I got married on June the 24th of 1950 in the post chapel. …On August 3rd, they alerted our company …they loaded the whole Second ESB on a troop transport right off the dock, but they had the barges out because the troop transport couldn’t tie up at the dock.

…We landed in Pusan and then we went to Camp McGill in Japan, then our outfit landed in Inchon. I boarded a Swedish freighter in Yokohama and took some LCMs to Wonsan in North Korea. Then I was in on the evacuation of North Korea and we rode an LSD back to Pusan, went up to Inchon again and back to Japan. …I stayed with the Second ESB until December of 1951 when I was transferred back to the States and discharged at Camp McCoy, WI.”

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