Interview With Kay W. Wilson

Posted on 12/30/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Kay W. Wilson of Silverdale, WA conducted by Henry West at the Fort Worden History Center on July 7, 2002. At the time, Ms. Wilson, a former resident of Port Townsend, was attending the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes. She had been participating in the event for 25 years. Here she relates the early days of Centrum and the festival before the former balloon hangar was converted into McCurdy Pavilion:

“They had to get a bigger tent at one point because the crowds were getting too big. When they got the biggest tent they put it back in the stable area and it had a hard surface, old blacktop even. They would hold dances there. The whole community was invited to come and I can remember people dancing wall to wall in this tent, the tent just vibrating. The tents were cold, they had these flaps. There was one time when it was raining so hard that the roof of the tent leaked and the water came down and hit somebody’s instrument while they were playing. The tent was billowing and the wind was howling and everybody was sitting in there hoping this tent wasn’t going to fall down around them.

Even the big tents became too small. It was about that time somebody had this idea of restoring the balloon hangar. In a way I was really sad to see the Pavilion built because it ruined the blimp hangar as an artifact, but, on the other hand, it is a wonderful space and it’s better than having just let it rot and fall down in a heap.”

About the evolution of Fiddle Tunes:

“When Bertram Levy started it, his concept was to bring in these old southern Appalachian people because their music was dying out. Nobody, none of the young people wanted to learn it and these guys were getting old. He didn’t want these tunes to die because they weren’t written down anywhere. Since nobody wanted to learn them back home, his idea was to bring them out here and maybe keep this music alive and that’s exactly what happened. Every year it seemed like the circle spread larger, they brought in more and more traditions. At first it wouldn’t have been allowed to bring someone from Mexico or Ireland or Scotland, because that wasn’t American. This was set up around the 4th of July and American Fiddle Tunes. So it has been wonderful over the years to keep discovering what is American music. People came here from all over the world and they brought their music with them, so it’s German, it’s Polish, it’s Irish and it’s Scottish, Cajun and Mexican.”

About being exposed to a new cultural experience:

“…They started bringing Cape Breton fiddlers out here who brought their own piano players with them. For the first years they didn’t really offer any piano classes but I guess there was a demand. People every year fill out an evaluation and this Cape Breton style of music is so incredibly rich that everybody wanted to learn to play the piano (their way). You couldn’t figure out how did they do that. It wasn’t just the old accompaniment style that is just boomchuck, boomchuck, boomchuck, and it is pretty boring stuff. It’s just like a drum, it’s just a rhythm instrument. But the Cape Breton piano players were throwing in all these wonderful chords and chord progressions and they were all over the keyboard. (Instead of)just sitting there within one or two octaves, the Cape Breton people are way down here and way up here and they’re all over in between and they’re doing jazz runs. A whole lot of us wanted to learn that. So, over the years, they’ve built up a pretty strong piano teaching program.”

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Interview With Raymond A. Buell

Posted on 12/29/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Raymond A. Buell of Helena, MT conducted by Tim Caldwell by phone from the Fort Worden History Center on November 4, 2004. Mr. Buell served in the US Army 369th Engineer Amphibious Support Regiment, Boat Battalion at Fort Worden and Fort Flagler during the Korean War era. Here he describes his experiences at Camp Desert Rock, NV during the atomic bomb tests:

“About the latter part of December 1951 or the first part of January 1952, was when we all shipped out and went to Camp Desert Rock, Nevada. It’s pretty hard to describe an atomic explosion. In Camp Desert Rock there were no permanent buildings. It was all just tents and that, so we started building the permanent camp and some were working on that. I was working on a rock crusher, because we had to build roads. Sometimes we would go up into the forward areas into what was known as Frenchman’s Flats and Yucca Flats where the bombs were detonated. We dug the trenches and then we got in the trenches and then they’d blast the bomb. There’s been arguments about how close we were to the bomb. I thought we were around 3000 meters, close to a couple of miles away from the bomb, something like that. Some people say it was 2000 meters and some say more, so I don’t really know. All I know it was, when it went off, you were too close.

I’ve told this to many people, I’m not the only one to say it, everybody that’s been there practically has. When the bomb would go off, you’re down in the trenches with your back to the bomb and your arms up over your head, covering your eyes. It’s usually a pre-dawn blast, so it’s pitch black. And the light is so great that, in for a millisecond you can see the bones in your arm. I know it sounds so weird, but you can. Then after, they told us to keep our eyes, goggles on–the people that had goggles–and not to look at the bomb for a few seconds and then you could turn around and look. Then you could see the shock waves coming across the desert and it would just be a little wall of dust coming at you at hundreds of miles an hour it seemed like. Then when it hit you, it could just about knock you over. The heat, the heat would hit you then. It was just like if you opened up a–you’re standing in front of a great big old furnace and opened up a door, when the heat…

We detonated eight bombs that year. There were some of the tests that we were right in the area, and then there were some where we were much farther back, clear back on Newford’s Knob, which is about seven or eight miles back. I was in three of them right up close. One of the things that we did was to position equipment around where the bomb was going to go off, big trucks and airplanes and tanks and jeeps and dummies and things like that with clothes on. Then after the bomb would go off, we would have to go back in and we would kind of make an evaluation of what happened to the equipment, to the exhibits that we had, things like that.”

When asked about what kind of gear they wore for that:

“They didn’t give us anything. We just wore our regular fatigues, We got no respirators or anything like that. We just wore our regular clothing. To decontaminate yourself, you would just take a broom and you would sweep your friend down and then he would sweep you down.”

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Interview With SMM

Posted on 12/29/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with SMM of Lynnwood, WA conducted by Patience Rogge at the Fort Worden History Center on July 31, 2007.  SMM was a resident at the Juvenile Diagnostic and Treatment Center in Cascadia Cottage, Building 201 (now the Coast Artillery Museum), arriving at age 12 and staying two terms.  Although he had suppressed many memories of his time here, he did recall some details of life at the facility:

“When you first came in, you were dropped off right here in front.  You came in the administration building and you went down to the basement and got clothes.  They gave you a couple pairs of pants and shorts and socks and t-shirts and shirts and a jacket. Then off to the cottage you were already preassigned to go to. So, when you got here they already knew where you were going.

I played baseball…(About school) You got the basic math, English Classes. Everything was like it was on the outside, I mean we went to different classes for different reasons.  We were allowed to go down to the beach and swim during the summer.  In fact, they had a ski boat and we water skied. You could go to the gym in the afternoon and at night.  You could also go to the place behind Cascadia and Olympia Cottages where  you could attend pottery, sewing, art classes.  There was a small wood class where you could make models.

I worked in the house kitchen all the time I was there.  There was a main kitchen back here and everything came on carts, and inside the cottages they had kitchens.  Everything was prepared,  In the morning we made toast, set everything up ‘cause at night the tables were all stripped of everything. We’d put salt and pepper out, just the basic stuff that you’d prepare for every meal.”

When asked about how the residents treated each other:

“There were a lot of fights.  There was a lot of abuse.  I never participated in any blanket parties,(The punishment inflicted on any resident who informed on his peers.  A blanket would be thrown over the informer and the boys would beat him with bars of soap inside socks.) I knew of them, there were a lot of them.  The cottage parents never saw it happen.  There was one guy on duty at night. He had to go to the bathroom sometime or go eat. That’s when the blanket parties happened….I had the respect of everybody in the cottage. I wasn’t the Duke (the informal boss of the Cottage)  I was just another inmate.  But, I guess that if you respect everybody around you, they respect you, and I was always upfront with everybody.  I never ran with those guys (the Council was the name given to a group of boys who unofficially ran each cottage) but there was never anybody who came against me. It’s like, ‘I’m here doing my time, if you want to play games, go play your own games,okay.’

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Interview With Patricia S. Simpson

Posted on 12/22/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Patricia S. Simpson of Port Townsend conducted at the Fort Worden History Center by Patience Rogge on March 6, 2008. Ms. Simpson worked as a secretary at the Juvenile Diagnostic and Treatment Center for two years, then operated a gift shop in Port Townsend, worked for Mary Johnson during the days of Port Townsend’s emergence as a arts community, and later spent several years working as Development Director for Centrum. After her retirement, she joined the Friends of Fort Worden and acted as secretary in addition to editing the Friends’ newsletter. Among the many stories she shared, here are some of her anecdotes about working at the Juvenile facility:

“In those days, we’re talking ’59 to ’61, you reached Port Townsend by calling 582. Every phone call coming into Fort Worden was the 582 and it went to a switchboard that is now the Park entry office. In front was an upright console, the receptacles where you could push in the cords and a headset attached to the cords. Dora was the one who took care of the switchboard. She’d be trying to route calls coming in and going out, pushing them here and pushing them there, and another phone rings, et cetera, et cetera. I happened to come in the hall door one morning and she was at the switchboard going like that. I stood there, she didn’t see me. She just ran her arm behind all of her cords and yanked them all out and said, ’There, let’s just start all over again.’

…I remember another time when we all went down to Gus Lindquist’s office (the Superintendent) because his secretary had gotten a new typewriter that we all wanted to see. We were just amazed because it was one where all of the letters were on a little ball and every time we typed a key it would twirl to the right letter. We just couldn’t believe that was happening. That was a modern thing–high tech at that point.

…This was also the time of the very beginning of running. Dr. Bill Shire was the first person in town who got into running. In the mornings about 6:30, he would run from Chetzemoka Park on the beach to Fort Worden and back. There were a lot of times when he got back to Chetzemoka,where the police would be waiting for him because someone had reported a runaway from Fort Worden.

…Fort Worden wasn’t used a whole lot by local people at that point. I remember when I would eat my lunch, I would go out here on the other side of Building 201 and that was the fartherest I went on the Fort Worden campus. There weren’t very many people here, especially up on Artillery Hill. There were a lot more animals here then–owls, coyotes and foxes. One of our god friends who worked here at night just to make sure everything was okay swore he saw a bear.”

Another, rather related story that took place in the early days of Centrum:

“…I had followed Bill Shire’s advice and become a runner. By that time I was not afraid to be at Fort Worden and run by myself. I would come out early in the morning and run over the top of Artillery Hill and back, sometimes with someone else. I didn’t work here but I had heard about the Fiddle Tunes festival in particular and how the people were just crazy about music and how they kept on playing all night long. Sometimes even they would go on top of Artillery Hill and play and so I’d see all these musicians along the way. One day when I was running early in the morning, I took the trail to the cemetery, then up the steep trail to the top. As I was going up the steep trail a fox jumped out in front of me. The fox continued running up the trail and I continued running behind the fox. Just behind the top of the trail, here was this young man stretched out across the trail, sound asleep with his arm over his fiddle case. The fox jumped over him and then I just jumped over him and we both kept on running and the guy never knew.”

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Interview With Alexander C. Page

Posted on 12/21/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Colonel Alexander C. Page, U.S. Army ret., of Mesa, AZ conducted by phone by John Clise from the Fort Worden History Center on May 20, 2004. Col. Page served in the Corps of Engineers Brigade 532nd ES&B at Fort Worden. His military career spanned the years 1945 to1975. He earned a Bronze Star and the Legion of Merit for his service in Korea and Viet Nam. Here he describes life at Fort Worden, with some help from his wife, Betty, and some of his other experiences:

“We arrived at Fort Worden in March of 1948. The weather was good. We were very well received by the people who were there in the brigade, most of the brigade was overseas in Eniwetok at the time…They gave me responsibility for all the equipment that was sitting down in the motor pool, there was a lot of it. I was supposed to make sure it was kept up to operating condition and accounted for. I was a Second Lieutenant at the time. After about four months, the rest of the brigade returned and I became a platoon leader in one of the shore companies.”

Mrs. Page: “…We lived down on Water Street on the third floor of a building owned by Mr. Aldrich. He had turned two floors into apartments and there were about ten of us lieutenants and families that lived down on Water Street….It was just so much fun. First of all, we were all there and were all young. When they had a parade we’d just kind of look out the window and watch it go by. The people downtown were very friendly. …None of us had very much money, so we would get together and play cards and have iced tea and coffee. Everything took place at the Officers Club out at Fort Worden, we would go out there and dance and what have you.”

Col. Page: “Then we moved to a housing project in town, where the golf course is now. That housing project was all wood, just one story with a piece of plywood between your set of places where you had a two bedroom unit and the next family’s two bedroom unit. You could hear one family to the next family to the next family all the way through the whole place. …We were then in Doctor Chris’ house over his garage. We also went to Fort Casey, where we did basic training for the 5th Army. They’d send trainees there and we’d train them over on Whidbey Island. We had a house over there that had 21 rooms in it. We’d invite a whole bunch of people from Fort Worden to come over for a weekend and we’d fill it up. It was fun, and we had our own boats at the time so you could go back and forth.

One time we pulled out of Fort Worden, went out to the Pacific Ocean, down the Columbia River, all the way up the Columbia to The Dalles…. On this particular trip, we lost one of the LCM’s (Landing Craft Medium) It just split open and that was due, I reckon, to the failure of the seam. These were World War II amphibious boats and LCM’s. We didn’t lose anybody on that boat.

…Another time, we went on a mission all the way through the Panama Canal to the East Coast with our boats. Then we had to go by ship to do an operation with the Marines down to Vieques Island. Our boats were carried by ship. They came and picked us up and we became kind of the lieutenants on the boats by being deck officers. They put us through the course on being a deck officer before we left. We were gone about six months.

…In July 1950, we picked up the whole brigade and went to Korea. We made the landing at Inchon with Marines and the Army. We were part of the amphibious operation. Then we took the 7th Division and went all the way up around and landed at Iwon, which is above Hungnam, up there at the Chosin reservoir close by. Then, when the Army was pushed back, we went to Hungnam and did the evacuation of everything we could out of Korea back south through Hungnam … we went down south,back to Pusan, to Seoul, to Inchon . The we pulled out and went back to Japan.”

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Interview With Adeline H. Biedermann

Posted on 12/09/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Adeline Hensche Biedermann of Albert Lea, MN conducted by phone on July 17, 2008 by Patience Rogge from the Fort Worden History Center. Mrs. Biedermann and her husband, Col. Arnold Biedermann lived near the post in Port Townsend from 1951 t0 1953. Here she describes what it was like to come here as a newly wed and the job she had at the Fort:

“We were married two weeks before Arnie went into the service,he went to Fort Worden in February and I came in July. We had a one room apartment on Cherry Street, and there was a cherry tree, which, when we opened up our window upstairs, we could climb right out into the cherry tree. So, I climbed out and ate cherries out of the tree. We were just so happy to be together, I hadn’t seen Arnie in five months. I came with just one suitcase expecting to stay two weeks and I stayed almost two years.

…We didn’t have a car, so I walked back and forth to the Fort. I worked at the PX snack bar for about five months. …When we came to work we had to get everything ready for the day. We got all our sandwich spreads ready–tuna, egg salad, and made our hamburger patties. We had the cheese and all this ready. We had to cut the buns and get everything all lined up. After everything was all prepared, we got to sit down and have hot chocolate or a roll or coffee, whatever we wanted. Then we opened up and the soldiers poured in, especially on pay day.

Oh my goodness, what a day! They would line up and we’d take orders, never wrote anything down. We had to go and prepare our hamburgers, our sandwiches, our sundaes and malts, and whatever. We had to prepare that all and then serve it and just calculate up all that money, all in our heads and put the money in the cash register. If the government was short, nobody knew. That’s the way it was.

We did get to know a lot of soldiers.There was one guy, he had brown beady eyes. He looked at me and the first time, he said, ‘I would like to have a double chocolate malt.’ He explained to me, ‘It’s made with chocolate malt, chocolate ice cream, and chocolate milk.’ He kept coming back. I just never forgot that guy, that was one soldier I never did forget, but there were others too. At the time we were so busy, so busy. We had to wash all these dishes, and then at the end of the day, nobody left the area until the floor was swabbied down, and there was garbage.

But there were slack days. One time it was so slack that I said, ‘Well, I can see these shelves in the back room certainly need cleaning.’ So I went home and put on my jeans and came back and I was climbing all over the back room and cleaning shelves. I hose cleaned the back room.”

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Interview With Benedict O. Williamson

Posted on 12/01/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Benedict O. Williamson of Louisville, KY conducted by phone on May 27, 2004 by Patience Rogge from the Fort Worden History Center. Mr. Williamson served in the U.S. Army at Fort Worden in 1951. He had enlisted at Minton Harbor, MI and did his basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, MO before being sent to Fort Worden, where his secret was uncovered:

“As soon as I saw Fort Worden I knew it was too pretty to be an Army camp. There wasn’t anybody there from the part of the country that I was from. I was from Kentucky and I’d gone to Michigan to try to find work and I joined the Army there. So I went in with a bunch of people who were from the east instead of the south. They all kind of laughed about my accent, because I had an accent from the south and nobody else did.

I was a Jeep driver and I had to report to the motor pool. I was standing down there one morning and they were talking about this boy who was 15 years old, this soldier who was 15 years old. They were going to put him out of the service. I acted very surprised like I didn’t know who they were talking about, but I knew it was me. I drove a Captain around and passed some troops in an area I wasn’t supposed to. Colonel Stack, the post commander, saw the Jeep and wanted to know who was driving it. He took my driver’s license away from me. The Captain said I’d done nothing wrong and that he’d get my license back if I wanted, but I never did get it back. I guess I got discharged too soon…

When I got to Fort Worden I was 15, but a few days later I had a birthday. I enjoyed being there, but I was a little bit homesick, just being 16. My brother John, who was in the Army, wrote and told Captain Buckley how old I was. Captain Buckley called me into his office and said, ‘I hear you just had a birthday.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I just turned 18.’ He said, ‘Well, your brother John says you just turned 16.’ So I had to laugh. I knew I was caught.

Captain Buckley said, ‘But I tell you what. I came into the Army when I was too young and I’m going to give you a choice. If you want to stay, you can stay, if you want to go, you can go.’ I think that under the circumstances I was homesick anyway, so I took the discharge.

…When I turned 17 and a half, I went back in and went to Indiantown Gap, PA. I didn’t have to take basic training over.”

Note: Mr. Williamson was sent to Korea where he served in the 25th Infantry Division. He was a tank recovery chief and attained the rank of Staff Sergeant.

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Interview with Bill E. Walker

Posted on 11/30/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Bill E. Walker of Lake Stevens, WA conducted by phone from the Fort Worden History Center on January 24,2008 by Patience Rogge. Mr. Walker served in the US Army at Fort Worden from 1948 to 1950. Here he describes how the local townspeople related to soldiers at the time:

“They didn’t like the servicemen. They did everything they could to make them unhappy. I mean, for instance, one winter we had a bad winter. Streets froze up. They got melted and started getting mushy, so the city closed one. One of the local people went down through there and they slapped him on the wrist. A serviceman went through there and they slapped him with a big fine. It was made public. One time they paid all of us off in silver just so that the downtown could see where their money was coming from. …They made it quite obvious that they didn’t care for us.”

When asked about his job at Fort Worden:

“I was a driver for the company commander and drove a Jeep. When he wasn’t needing me, I would go out on other jobs. We were an engineer outfit and we had some heavy equipment. In order to get it serviced, heavy duty work done on it, we had to take them down to Mount Rainier ordnance down by Fort Lewis. On three different occasions, I took an officer and two guys in this big ten ton truck, with one guy in a Jeep following. Twice we loaded Caterpillars onto a big trailer and took off about four o’clock in the morning and headed for Mount Rainier. We met and had breakfast and they got the truck all ready to go and we went down there and offloaded. Sometimes we had something to bring back, sometimes we didn’t. We’d stop at Hoodsport and an officer would buy us a beautiful dinner. We’d get home about ten o’clock that night. Those were the other jobs when I wasn’t driving for the company commander.”

 

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Interview With Leo E. Campbell

Posted on 11/30/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Leo E. Campbell of Redding, CA conducted by Sandra Lizut by phone from the Fort Worden History Center on October 28,Mr. Campbell served at Fort Worden in the 369th EASR Boat Battalion in 1951. Here he relates how he acquired an unusual nickname that followed him throughout his Army days:

“When we got to Fort Lewis there was no coal in our barracks. They had two big heaters and they were full of ashes. We didn’t have any hot water because that stove out there was full of ashes. So I took all the ashes out and I went around to other areas and stole their coal in this big bucket. I kept our barracks and our hot water going. Then they nicknamed me ‘Coal Bucket’ because every time they saw me I had a coal bucket looking for coal.

After Fort Lewis, they sent me on a bus to Fort Worden. I got off the bus in front of the barracks and was looking around when this one guy came out on the upper porch and hollered back into the room, ‘Hey, guys! It’s Coal Bucket.’ And everybody came out to greet me.

…When I got discharged in ’53 from Camp San Luis Obispo, I was in San Francisco in the bus station and I heard a guy holler, ‘Coal Bucket.’ It was a guy from my unit, we palled around and had a few drinks and then he took off for Salt Lake and I went back to Redding.”

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Interview with Roy E. Johnson

Posted on 11/26/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Roy E. Johnson of Camano Island, WA conducted by phone from 696 Woodland Drive in Port Townsend on January 16, 2007 by Patience Rogge. Mr. Johnson was employed by Washington State Parks in several capacities beginning in 1975 until his retirement as a Park Ranger in 2007. In his early career, he worked at Fort Worden and was here at the time of the filming of “An Officer and a Gentleman”. During the interview, he recalled that experience:

“I got Lou Gossett’s autograph, Richard Gere didn’t impress me too much. He kept calling me ‘Sir’ though, so I said ‘Thank you.’ I almost got David Keith’s and Debra Winger’s autographs on speeding tickets, but I let them go. Actually, Debra Winger got out of the park before I could get to her. David Keith said he would keep it down from then on. It was interesting, but I realized I didn’t want to be a movie star, though.

It didn’t seem to be a big disruption to me. There were times when they were filming down in the campground–there’s that one clip when Richard Gere’s doing leg lifts down on top of Battery Kinzie and you can see a couple campers in the background. But by and large, there wasn’t really any big interference with the public using the park. They’d have to go a different way down to the beach if they were filming over by the theater.

I only made $574.00 out of it. I just provided security to keep people from walking through where they were going to be filming. It really upset me because some of the city police and deputies got between $7,000.00 and $10,000.00. They had asked me if I wanted to make $3.25 an hour, and I said, ’No, my time’s worth more than $3.25 an hour,’ so they said, ‘Okay, we’ll find someone else.’ So, they were paying $10.00 an hour for the first eight and then $15.00 up to 12 hours and then anything over 12 hours was $20.00 an hour. The filming was in the area of about two and a half months. I could have made a little more money on them.”

 

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