Adolf Hitler, the triumphal conqueror, now controlled the bulk of Western Europe-\u2014from the Pyrenees to the Arctic Circle, from the Atlantic to beyond the Vistula.<\/p>\n
Great Britain now stood alone.<\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n
Until the late 1950s, more than half the students at West Coast universities were members of the “Greek” fraternity system. Today, only about 10 percent belong.<\/em><\/p>\n At the University of Oregon in 1940, fraternities and sororities dominated student life on campus. It was the way to go. And one of the two most powerful fraternities at Oregon was the local chapter of Alpha Tau Omega, a curious mix of scholars, athletes, student politicians, ranchers’ sons, California expatriates and cityside kids up from the crowd.<\/p>\n There was nothing snobbish about the ATOs, however, evidenced by their pledging two freshmen from Portland’s lower eastside: Dan Borich and Byron Mayo.<\/p>\n We became ATOs, along with Vic Collin from Grant High School in Portland and “Ox” Wilson from The Dalles. Bob Ballard joined the SAEs.<\/p>\n Set on a knoll overlooking Eugene’s Pioneer Cemetery, the ATO house was an awkward, two-story, Moorish-style structure with a dormitory wing on one side and a warren of small study rooms on the other.<\/p>\n On those groggy, god-awful mornings when I had an eight o’clock ‘class, the cemetery provided a convenient, “forbidden” shortcut to the main campus.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n My first dreaded eight o’clock was 20th<\/sup> Century Literature, in a handsome old building near the millrace, at the far end of the lower campus.<\/p>\n The Dublin-born professor still packed an Irish brogue as he strode up and down, passionately defending the significance of James Joyce\u2019s labyrinthine novel, Ulysses<\/em>\u2014considered by many to be the greatest novel of the twentieth century and considered by many others to be the greatest unread novel of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n I couldn’t get through the thing.<\/p>\n One week before final exams, I skipped to the last episode, mulled over Molly Bloom’s famous stream-of-consciousness monologue, wrote a labored interpretation of her self-confessions, and squeezed through the term with a passing grade.<\/p>\n Because James Joyce had a strong influence on Wilham Faulkner, John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway, I may tussle with Ulysses<\/em> again someday. But then again, life\u00a0is short. And I may not.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n That fall, Joe DiMaggio hit .350 with the New York Yankees and won the American League batting title. At the same time, Germany, Italy and Japan signed a “Tripartite Pact” that officially linked the three Axis powers in a worldwide military alliance. “In order to realize and establish a new order in the world,” is how they\u00a0proclaimed it.<\/p>\n On campus, we paid little heed to the news. But gathering storm clouds appeared on the horizon.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n I was always in desperate need of money. During college, I took every part-time job I could get.<\/p>\n Dan Borich and I worked as “house boys” one term at Oregon\u2019s Delta Delta Delta Sorority house. We would rush from class, don white jackets, set the tables in the dining room, serve luncheons to some forty Tri-Delt coeds, and clear the dishes afterwards.<\/p>\n Back in the kitchen, we would then heap a pile of food on our plates, wolf down a late lunch with fat Betty, the Negro cook, and head out.<\/p>\n It wasn’t a bad job. It provided us with extra money and good lunches. The end came when the beady-eyed house manager decided to expand “house boy” duties.<\/p>\n She wanted, us to vacuum and dust the front den and living room twice a week, with a token increase in pay. We rebelled and refused the deal. The Tri-Delts fired us.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Down in Silicon Valley, Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems is considered a quiet genius and probably the finest computer scientist of his generation. Far different from the Bill Joy I knew in college, who was a simple, uncomplicated crab fisherman’s son from Coos Bay.<\/p>\n For several months that year, Bill Joy and I worked two nights a week at The Eugene Daily News, the floundering number two newspaper in town. I majored in journalism and I’d been scrambling for any kind of job I could get in the newsroom. It was not to be. They put me to work as a “jogger” in the basement press room.<\/p>\n “Take it or leave it.”<\/p>\n I took it.<\/p>\n When the papers came off the press, they slid pell-mell down a metal chute like a little kid on a playground slide. But the thick, weekend sections of the paper never lined up squarely. My job was to lift armfuls of papers from the bottom of the chute and “jog” them up and down sharply on a workbench until the edges were straight and the papers could\u00a0be tied neatly into bundles.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Bill Joy and I alternated jogging bundles of papers, one after another, for three hours two nights a week. At the end of each shift, I would trudge back to the ATO house with aching muscles, a sore back, and filthy with the grime of newsprint.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n The press room gang at The News drank sturdy black coffee\u2014a lot of it. On election night in early November, however, when the paper’s headline trumpeted FDR’s unprecedented, third-term presidential victory, somebody broke out the Blitz-Weinhard Beer.<\/p>\n In that 1940 election, the Democrats had nominated Franklin D. Roosevelt on a non-interventionist platform. Roosevelt had assured voters that American boys would not be sent into any foreign wars.<\/p>\n The Republicans\u00a0nominated Wendell L. Willkie, a rumpled, broad-grinning dark horse from Indiana.<\/p>\n The Socialist Party nominated its ever-ready candidate, Norman Thomas. The Communist Party nominated a fading firebrand, Earl Browder, And on the popular Burns and Allen radio show, George Burns nominated wife Gracie Allen.<\/p>\n “Down with Common Sense. Vote for Gracie.”<\/p>\n As the candidate of “The Surprise Party,” she brought a bit of wit and humor to presidential politics that year. A farcical Friday night “Vote for Gracie” rally on the Oregon campus\u2014a rally I had to miss\u2014drew a mob of singing, chanting students. As I recall it, Indian Summer ran a little late that year.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n We had a popular ATO men’s chorus for awhile, directed by “Ox” Wilson. We probably weren’t very good. But I do recall our pride in one thunderous performance of the Pilgrims’ Chorus<\/em> from the Overture to Wagner’s majestic Tannhauser<\/em>.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n \u00a0The Battle of Britain continued to rage. Hitler hoped the Luftwaffe alone could bring Britain to her knees.<\/p>\n He was wrong.<\/p>\n Short on planes and pilots, the Royal Air Force put up a furious defense in the skies over Britain against daylight attacks by hordes of Messerschmitts and bombers. Goering pushed his Luftwaffe to the hilt, sending as many as a thousand planes a day on the attack. But a few hundred young RAF pilots, flying Spitfires and Hurricanes, tore apart the Luftwaffe, spoiling Hitler’s plans for invasion. This valiant RAF group included volunteers from Czechoslovakia, Poland,\u00a0Canada, Australia, New Zealand and America.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Winston Churchill called the RAF defense against the Luftwaffe, “Britain’s finest hour.”<\/p>\n An enraged Hitler then turned to massive all-night bombing attacks on Britain’s cities. The “blitz.” was underway.<\/p>\n London took a terrible pounding.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n A wave of sympathy for Britain’s dilemma swept across America. “Bundles for Britain” became a popular cause in the cities and in the towns and on college campuses, including the University of Oregon.<\/p>\n FDR pushed a lend-lease agreement through a reluctant congress. American military supplies, food, medicine and clothing began pouring into Britain.<\/p>\n Convoys of loaded American freighters ploughed across the icy Northern Atlantic. U-boats prowled on the attack.<\/p>\n German subs had already sunk one American freighter that year. Two more freighters and a US destroyer were torpedoed by the U-boats in September, killing 100 Americans. Then on the night of October 31, another US destroyer was torpedoed while on convoy duty, with a loss of 111 men including all seven officers. The year ended with an escalation of U-boat attacks.<\/p>\n Pressure mounted for America to\u00a0enter the war.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Wrestling was one of the original Olympic sports. And most Pacific Northwest schools in those days were serious about their wrestling programs. Jim Wyatt, an ATO graduate who coached Freshman Wrestling at Oregon, lured several of us out onto the mats that year. What the hell, I knew I’d never make the varsity. The training was tough and I didn’t take it that serious. Still, the conditioning was good. I learned some nifty moves. And I thought it was a great way to earn mandatory PE credits.<\/p>\n In amateur Olympic wrestling, each match consists of three two-minute periods. You have two ways to win\u2014by pinning or by points. If you pin your opponent’s shoulder blades to the mat for two seconds, you win. Or, if you dominate by takedowns, escapes or reversals without a pin, you can still win by points.<\/p>\n At the start of training, Coach Wyatt made it clear that you don’t have a chance to pin your man or even get any points until you get him off his feet. That’s why he spent extra time drilling us on a dozen or so ways to get a man down from the neutral position. No stalling. No body slams. No choking.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n My fraternity brothers\u00a0wrangled me into entering the annual, week long, inter-mural competitions that year. I wrestled in the 145-pound division.<\/p>\n In the first match, my opponent and I grabbed warily at each other without much success until the start of the second period. That’s when I successfully seized one of his wrists, twisted him off-balance, tripped him to the mat and pinned him, before either one of us quite knew what had happened.<\/p>\n I was startled by my success.<\/p>\n The next afternoon, my second opponent was not as easy. I went up against a guy I knew from the Phi Delt house. It was a close, hard-fought, wrestling match.<\/p>\n In all three of the two-minute periods, both of us went to the mat without a pin. Twice I thought I had him, but he escaped. In the third period he came close to pinning me, but I bridged up on my neck, twisted and turned over\u2014a move I had practiced long and hard under the sharp eyes of the coach. That reversal made the difference. Time ran out and the judges gave me the win on points. My opponent and his Phi Delt supporters were not happy.<\/p>\n With two unexpected wins under my belt, I felt a surge of confidence as I readied for my third match. A boisterous gang from the ATO house turned out to hoot and holler and cheer me on.<\/p>\n What they saw was a one-minute wipeout.<\/p>\n My opponent was a lanky kid about three inches taller than I with his 145 pounds distributed up and down an odd, angular frame. As I dimly remember it, he used his long legs for leverage. He knew what he was doing. He took me down to my knees in a matter of seconds, applied a Half Nelson that pushed\u00a0me over on my back and with one knee jammed into a position that prevented me from bridging, he held my shoulder blades to the mat for two continuous seconds. That was it. The match was over.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n When I met Billie Shaw, only four days remained before final exams and the end of a sunny spring term. We met at an Alpha Phi sorority party on the terrace overlooking the millrace.<\/p>\n She had the short, black, straight hair of a swimmer, As I recall it, she wore a simple white sheath that night, which highlighted the warm glow of her summer-brown skin. We met. We talked. We were intrigued, For the next three or four days, we were together almost constantly. Three or four days that have been locked in my memory far too long.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n One night we listened to\u00a0jazz and country at a smoky roadhouse in nearby Junction City. One afternoon we studied together at the University library. On another afternoon when the skies were clear and blue, we drove up the McKenzie River Highway a few miles to where the flowering Dogwood were in bloom, We spread a blanket in a small clearing next to the rushing waters of the McKenzie. The surrounding underbrush and ferns were thick and very green.<\/p>\n On our last night together, we talked late over coffee at the College Side Inn. My third cup of coffee was as good as the first. In a soft and melodious voice, she described for me life in her beloved islands.<\/p>\n When I asked her what single thing she enjoyed most about living in Hawaii, she looked me in the eye and laughingly replied, “Surfing the Kodak Reef.”<\/p>\n She told me her parents were newly divorced and her mother was now living alone in the family home south of Honolulu, near the foot of Diamond Head. Her mother wanted her to return to Oahu and attend the University of Hawaii. Billie then revealed that she would not be returning to Oregon in the fall.<\/p>\n It was all a sweet but fleeting passage. We had so little time together. When we parted late that night, she wrote out for me her Oahu address. I wondered if we would ever meet again.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n With German U-boats sinking ships in the Atlantic and Japan threatening in the Pacific, a stronger Merchant Marine became essential to America.<\/p>\n It was summer 1941. The business of building ships was picking up a full head of steam. Up and down the West Coast, shipyards sprang up in places like Portland, San Diego, Oakland, Alameda, even Sausalito.<\/p>\n Working around the clock, Henry J. Kaiser’s Swan Island Shipyard in Portland launched a homely cargo ship every sixty days that year. They called these 9,000-ton, prefab freighters Liberty Ships. Several thousand were built on both coasts. Today, only one original, unaltered Liberty Ship still exists\u2014the SS Jeremiah\u00a0O’Brien, berthed at Pier 32 in San Francisco.<\/p>\n The other major shipyard in Portland at that time was the venerable Willamette Iron & Steel Company, which built tough, heavy-plated minelayers for the Navy.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Back in Portland for the summer, I faced the fact that I, too, would not be returning to the University of Oregon in the fall. I was broke.\u00a0I needed a job, fast.<\/p>\n What I wanted was a high-paying job in the shipyards. So did several thousand other workers, pouring in from around the country. Shipyard jobs were closed shop, union jobs. And Tommy Ray, hardheaded boss of the local Boilermakers, ran a tough guy union. Waiting lists were long. At the start of summer, the union wouldn’t take new applications. So I was on the outside, looking in. Then my grandfather asked, “Why don’t you call Andy Hawkins? See if he can help.”<\/p>\n “Andy Hawkins? He’s still alive?”<\/p>\n It turned out that old Andy Hawkins, retired, was not only still alive, he still pulled the strings behind the scenes at the AFL Laborers Union, Local 296. The word on the street, my grandfather said, was that he showed up at his office every day of the week, rain or shine.<\/p>\n “It’s been years since I met Andy Hawkins. He wouldn’t remember me.”<\/p>\n “You’re damned tootin’ he’d remember you. Andy Hawkins remembers everybody he ever met. Go ahead, call him up. Remind him you’re Jim Dewey’s grandson. Go on now, do it.”<\/p>\n To my amazement, Andy Hawkins did remember me. With a roaring laugh on the phone, he said he remembered me as a feisty nine or ten-year-old kid tagging along with his grandpa.<\/p>\n The vigor of his voice after ten years astonished me. The rasp was still there\u2014a voice like a box of rocks.<\/p>\n We had a good talk. He was interested in the fact I had gone on to college. And he said he damned well understood my need for a job. We talked for about ten minutes as I remember it. Then he told me to call him back that afternoon.<\/p>\n When I called back, Hawkins told me to report in at Tommy Ray’s office first thing in the morning, at the Boilermakers’ headquarters.<\/p>\n I never met the man, Tommy Ray, that next morning or any morning. One of his henchmen signed me up and\u2014just like that\u2014I became a card-carrying member of the great International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, Iron Ship Builders and Helpers of America, AFL, Local 72.<\/p>\n Three days later, they put me to work on the swing shift at the Willamette Iron & Steel Company shipyards that sprawled along the North Portland waterfront. I began as a lowly helper. Within two months, however, I gained my license as a journeyman shipfitter, a job that paid almost three times what I’d been making during the year I spent at Meier & Frank’s Department Store.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n In the dry docks, under the hard light of the arc-lights, sat the hulls of three US Navy minelayers under construction. Firmly settled in their keel blocks, these were big, heavy-duty vessels, SF class, 450-feet long with a 60-foot beam. At night, in the light and shadow of scaffolding that rose high around the hulls, it all had the eerie look of some surrealistic stage set. Workers swarmed over the massive hulls, inside and out.<\/p>\n In the floodlit yards around the dry dock were stacked piles of steel, wiring, pipe, cable and other materials. A narrow-gauge railroad hauling sheets of steel plate threaded its way through the yard, past machine shops, electrical shops, carpentry shops and the loft, on its way to the giant fabrication building. In this cavernous structure, the size of a football field with a roof that soared sixty-five feet, steel plate was prepared for cutting, shaping and welding. Overhead cranes that could lift as much as thirty tons rolled ponderously along high tracks set along each side of the building near the interior line of the roof. In the rarified world of the crane operators, high up in their glass enclosed perches, men controlled enormous, dangling plates of three-and-a-half-inch thick steel with the touch of a finger, the twist of a wrist. A skilled operator would slowly and carefully inch the steel downward into position on to a network of broad workbenches at floor level. Kneeling in the middle of the steel plate or working at waist level along each side, with hammers and points, shipfitters prepared the steel for cutting, shaping and welding.<\/p>\n At the other end of the building in the big welding shop, continuous, white-hot flashes from welding torches punctuated the nightly panorama.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Our job was to clamp large, wood templates onto the steel plates, then go to work on the steel like sculptors attacking a block of granite. Using hammers and sharpened, inch-thick points and following the pattern of the templates, we’d pound deep-set dotted lines and curves for the welders and cutters to follow. It was like pounding out a giant jigsaw puzzle.<\/p>\n Usually we worked in pairs, one man on each side of a plate of steel or one on his knees in the middle. My partner was a stubble-bearded drifter from Mobile, Alabama. Lew was his name. He told me he had\u00a0worked in shipyards in Mobile, San Diego and Richmond before coming up to Portland.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n At the outset, I didn’t like Lew. He had thin, rather cruel lips and the squinty, flat blue eyes of a gunner looking for trouble. But he surprised me. He worked hard and he worked fast. And I surprised him when he saw that I could keep up with him.<\/p>\n We never became great friends, but we became known as a pair of\u00a0good, dependable shipfitters.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n On the swing shift, I punched in at four-thirty in the afternoon and worked until eleven-thirty at night. Then the graveyard shift took over. Willamette Iron & Steel was an around-the-clock operation.<\/p>\n Sometimes after work I would join Lew for a couple of midnight beers at Bernie’s Place, a workingman’s tavern within hollering distance of the shipyard’s front gates.<\/p>\n In the back room at Bernie’s, there seemed to be a continuous, poker game underway. The place was a gritty hangout for shipyard workers. When we walked in, sweaty and grimy from hammering steel for seven hours, we were surrounded by guys we knew. And the bartender would shove a bottle of beer in front of me without giving it a second thought.<\/p>\n One night, Lew revealed his age\u2014thirty-one. He told me that he had a wife down in Mobile. But he wasn’t going back.<\/p>\n One time only, I took an open seat in the late night poker game for an hour or two. It was an expensive lesson on when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em.<\/p>\n Damn, that was a long time ago.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n In late summer that year, the dedicated work ethic and ballet beginnings of Mary Bovee paid off for her, and for her supportive parents, at the Pacific Northwest Figure Skating Championships in Seattle. Tiny, delicate and athletic, her tight spins and flawless jumps were a tour de force in the final night’s free style performance. But in the eyes of the five judges, it was her artistry and grace that counted most.<\/p>\n According to the reports, she showed “a quality of expression rarely seen in young teens.”<\/p>\n At the age of fifteen, Mary Bovee was crowned Pacific Northwest Junior Figure Skating Champion.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Although still revered by his people, Japan’s Emperor Hirohito by this time was little more than a figurehead, his role largely ceremonial. General Hideki Tojo and the military cadre were in\u00a0control of the country. And Japan continued its aggressive drive to create a dictatorial “Easing Sun” empire in Asia, linked by pact with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The brutal takeover of Chinese coastal areas continued unabated. Strategic new Japanese military bases were established in the islands of the South Pacific. Then Japan sent its armies down into South Indochina, attacking Malaya and Thailand without warning.<\/p>\n In an effort to halt the aggression, Roosevelt put an embargo on the shipment of US oil to Japan\u2014a serious blow to further Japanese expansion.<\/p>\n In late November, the Japanese Imperial Cabinet sent a special envoy to Washington to negotiate “a peaceful understanding.” Secretly, the Japanese had already decided upon war, So-called negotiations were still underway the first\u00a0week of December.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Off in the distance east of Portland are the hills, green and dark, and beyond the hills is the towering mountain. Snow-capped Mt, Hood, highest and most glorious peak in all of Oregon, dominates the horizon.<\/p>\n While we were still in high school, John Moore and I learned to ski high above the Mt. Hood timberline on a steep, open slope they called the “Magic Mile.” In the beginning, we wore ill-fitting leather boots and we made our way down the mountain on waxed wooden skis, no metal edges. A classmate of ours, Dick Lewis, who was Pacific Northwest junior slalom champion at the time, nursed us through our first snowplows and basic Christies. Then we were on our own.<\/p>\n It wasn’t until a few years later, however, during the year we both worked in the shipyards, that I mastered a fast parallel turn, more or less. Finally, I was able to carve my way down the mountain without breaking my neck, John Moore and Dick Lewis had landed jobs at the Swan Island Shipyards. I still, worked swing shift at Willamette Iron and Steel. During the ski season that year, every Sunday before dawn we would head up to the mountain in the Lewis family Ford V-8.<\/p>\n Somewhere east of Rhododendron, with the snow piled high on each side of the road, we usually stopped to put on chains. Then when we reached Government Camp, just short of the Barlow Pass, we turned sharply to the north up that torturous eight miles of steep trail road to Timberline Lodge.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Built in 1937 as part of Roosevelt’s WPA program, Timberline Lodge was one\u00a0of the grandest and most unique ski lodges in the country. It probably still is. Handmade by careful craftsmen and artisans, the attention to detail was nothing short of stunning.<\/p>\n Depending upon snow conditions, we always gave our skis one final waxing once we reached Timberline. Then we would head out for the “Magic Mile.”<\/p>\n Each of us usually brought along a little hard, cheddar cheese and a candy bar to munch on. But around midday, we would come in out of the cold for a bowl of hot chili in the lodge’s popular Blue Ox Bar.<\/p>\n We followed our usual routine that fateful Sunday, December 7, 1941.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n When we took off our skis, kicked the snow from our boots, and walked into the Blue Ox Bar, missing were the usual babble of voices and blaring of radio music. Skiers sitting at the tables talked in hushed tones and a small gang crowded around the radio at the end of the bar, listening to news reports.<\/p>\n That’s the moment, frozen in my memory, when we heard the news that a fleet of Japanese planes had made a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Stunned, we listened to follow-up newscasts that reported on the near destruction of the US Pacific Fleet.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n In the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, five battleships were sunk. Eight battleships were badly damaged. Eleven cruisers and destroyers were badly damaged. More than two hundred planes were destroyed on the ground, and surrounding facilities were hit at Hickam Field, Kaneohe Airfield and Schofield Barracks. Two thousand three hundred eighty-eight military men and women were killed. Sixty-eight civilians died. More than a thousand other servicemen were badly wounded.<\/em><\/p>\n