Seventy Years Ago, My Father Was At Fort Lewis

Seventy years ago, my parents met when my father was at Fort Lewis and went to Tacoma for a Scandinavian dance, in March 1943.  She had been writing v-mail letters already to her brothers.  According to tapes my father left with stories about the army, "Nineteen forty-two, July..., I enlisted in the Army Medical Department at Fort Lewis...And I believe it was in April 1943 I was detached from the Fort Lewis Hospital Complement and shipped to the 318th Station Hospital at Camp White near Medford, Oregon. 

 

There I served, while I was there sometimes in the station hospital, sometimes we were marching, training out in the field, marching, packing, then back to the hospital again.  This went on until about November, when we were taken by train directly to Camp Miles Standish near the city of Boston, Massachusetts, and stationed there about a week.

 

The day before New Year's I believe it was, or shortly before, we were taken by train to the dock in Boston and put aboard a transport, which sailed the next day for Liverpool, England."

 

He had worked his way through pharmacy school at the University of Washington in the 1920s, and since then had worked as a pharmacist.  In the service he was a pharmacist.  After he retired from pharmacy, in the 1970s he did some paintings - this is a painting he did of transports in a convoy.

 

Painting by Theodore Jensen, of
transports in a convoy