George J. Noakes (part one)

This is my father I'm guessing around December of 1945, as a senior class-man in Milwaukee (Oregon) High School.  He was about to turn eighteen. 

He was busy working while going through high school, which was not at all unusual even today.  What was unusual was that because of the manpower shortage stateside he had one job  working at the shipyards in the Port of  Portland, as a 16-year old helper, or "rivet boy" supplying hot rivets to the iron workers making Liberty ships for duty in the Pacific War. 

One summer he got a job in the US Forest Service, being trained and then working on fire-lines for major blazes that afflicted  the Warm Springs Indian Reservation every dry central Oregon Summer.

My dad was told the fires he and the other young men in the crews fought ( often with shovels and primative backpack units that squirted water on blazes) had their genesis with Japanese submarines off-shore.  The enemy subs would apparently surface and launch balloons filled with flammable liquid that the Japanese Navy hoped would set forests ablaze in the Pacific Northwest and tie down troops.  Only one case of this has actually been documented, because several people died and the remnants of the bomb were analyzed.   While at Warm Springs, my dad also accidentally walked into the path of a black bear while alone one afternoon walking along a fire trail.  He was careful to back away slowly and make himself look as big as possible.   The bear did not pursue him but I imagine that was all the noble beasties of nature he wanted to see that day.    

Somehow, with these and other jobs he had to help out at home, Dad manged enough time to play offensive end (a position now called wide receiver) on the Milwaukee High School Varsity Football Team.  He was  also in his high school's branch of the local Future Farmers of America.  He had to raise a pig and then take an ax to it as part of an assignment.  After doing the deed, and feeling pangs of remorse over his erstwhile "pet", my dad swore off any possibility of becoming a farmer.         

 

World War II had ended a few months after the senior class photographs were taken.  Four years earlier my dad had been a 14 year old kid playing basketball one Sunday morning in early December with his older brother, Melvin, and a cousin (Randall), along with a few other guys.  That was where my dad was when he found out that Pearl Harbor had been attacked.

In 1945, Melvin Noakes (nine years older than my father) , was just back from the US Army after four years in active service. Uncle Mel, as I called him, had previously been in the Oregon National Guard before the Pearl Harbor attack.  My dad spoke very little about my uncle after he died in 1972 ( I was 12 then, and had seen my uncle only a few times on trips from San Jose up to Portland.) It was painful for my dad to talk about Uncle Mel. He told me his older brother had been in New Guinea during part of the war, in the fight the Americans and the Australians/New Zealanders had to keep the Japanese forces from getting a major hold on the southern part of the island.  My Uncle survived whatever he faced, but his already-genetically weakened heart was not helped by the tropical climate and the diseases that abounded there.  ( I remember my Uncle as a sickly-thin man who loved to fish on his boat in the Willamette River and play cards.  He looked more like my Dad's father than brother.)   

Dad did say that one of Uncle Mels' jobs had been to help build a stone walkway for the American Commander, Douglas MacArthur, for his Headquarters in Port Moresby.  I gathered MacArthur's HQ was rather palatial, and my uncle personally thought MacArthur was a bit pompous.  (Many of the "dog-face" GI's called their supreme commander "Dugout Doug" when no officers were about, and there were songs along those lines as well the GIs sang.  )  Years later, when I read more about MacArthur's massive ego and his pretensions to imperial trappings, my dad assured me I was NOT named after the general.         

Randall Townsley, just a few years older than my dad, was not coming home after the war. He was a soldier killed in combat earlier that year fighting in the Philippines. My father kept the letters "Rand" sent him from overseas, the last one of which told him not to worry, that the war would probably be over soon and he hoped my dad  wouldn't be sent overseas, and that he looked forward to coming home and chatting and smoking with my dad.   It was the last letter his cousin Randall sent before was killed.

 Thirty years later, my dad took me to the National Cemetery in Portland where his relative had been laid to rest long ago. My father was not one to shed tears, but I could tell he was deeply moved. Of course, there were many millions of others who lost loved ones. Needless to say if my father had been a couple years older you might not  be reading this now.    

My dad didn't go to war.  His time in the service as a Marine  was one of those all-too short periods where the USA wasn't at war and sending men a long, long way from home.         

In the next blog I'll include  my father's writings on his growing up .     

Below--Here's my dad in the back row (center, number 18) on the Milwaukee High football squad.