Response to Rick - Dec. 10, '02

Hi Rick,

I am glad that you enjoyed the photos - the two sites are pretty labor intensive and now that I have undertaken the fossil project I simply don't have time for everything.

Your request for information about Dad's war experiences is a tough assignment. I know that he talked about the war quite a bit, but really not much after I got old enough to understand, or remember, the stories. I really have trouble trying to reconcile Dad's service record - a lot about it was never clear to me so don't be surprise if some of the following isn't totally accurate. One war story will remain with me forever even though it is really a small- world story:

Dad captained a freighter that was sunk on the gulf side of the Panama Canal as he waited his turn to take his ship into the canal. The ship was torpedoed by a submarine and the blast buckled the deck beneath him, which was the major blow for the terrible knee problems that plagued him for the rest of his life. Immediately after the attack, Dad instructed his radio-man to send a distress signal to a U.S. military plane flying overhead. During the war, ships could communicate over at least two radios, one of which was very low power and not requiring messages to be encoded, while another radio was high powered and required all messages to be encoded. Dad's distress signal went out to the overhead plane un-encoded on the low power radio.

Years later, while traveling back to our ranch in La Port from Denver,  we stopped at a bar in Brighton Colo. and while I sat in the car out front Dad joined a bar full of strangers.  Soon the discussion among the good fellows, well met, in the bar turned to war stories. Just as Dad was finishing the above tale of his most memorable war experience, a guy next to him turned and said, "You dirty son-of-a-bitch; because of you, I got 30 days in the brig (or something to that effect). Calmer heads prevailed before the fight broke out and Dad ended up taking turns buying beers with the guy. It seems that Dad's fellow bar fly was the radio man on the plane overhead when Dad's distress signal came through. It might have been the young man's first action because he got excited and forgot to encode Dad's message before re-transmitting it over the high power radio. As a result, the fly-boy got busted because he made it easy for the enemy to confirm the sinking of Dad's ship.

Dad was a "90-day wonder", or at least that was how he and his fellow enlistees where referred to by the old salts of the "regular" navy. Basically Dad enlisted in officer candidates school immediately after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He was commissioned as a Lieutenant JG (Junior Grade) 90 days later and put in command of an LST. If my memory serves me correctly, an LST is a "Landing Ship Transport". Basically it was a rough riding, flat-bottomed ship used to transport the troops and their equipment up to the beach as we have all seen in the movies. But the transport ship also brought the troops back from their tour of duty. Dad made a lot of friends during the war and some of the men he brought back from the Pacific theater left presents for him. That is how we came to own a military MP's sawed-off shotgun and an M-1 Carbine. The rough ride of the ship was the other major cause of his bad knees.

The epitaph of "90 day wonder" was grossly unfair because the Navy gave him plenty of additional schooling. We (Mom, Ann and I) followed him from coast to coast as he attended additional schools. By the end of the war, we had traversed or visited 35 of the then 48 states. Needless to say, I don't remember much, if any, of them. After we moved to California, and while he worked for the 11th Navel District, the Navy had a program which brought different classes of ships to the Broadway wharf for a civilian open house. Dad's old LST was one of the ships used for an open house and I got to go aboard. It did not make much of an impression on me - except that I knew that I would never have wanted to sail on her and he conveyed little, if any, affection for his former commission.

After mom passed away I ended up with a box in which she had kept what is left of Dad's records. I have only given them a cursory glance. They struck me as boring bureaucratic records which do nothing to bring Dad's experiences alive for us to read and understand. Certainly I don't see how they would fit into a history class. If you are interested in looking through them, I will bring them over to you. We need to plan a trip to California in the near future anyway in order to see the younger generation of Olanders before they grow up and move away too.

Love from Phoenix,

Sharon and Rog