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SF: Maybe you could tell us a little bit about how you did meet your wife and under what circumstances.

JF: Yeah. I graduated from Officer Candidate School early in February. I think it was February 13th. I think that was the date. We graduated and became officers. And there were sixteen new second lieutenants all on orders to come to Sea-, to train to Seattle, Washington. None of us knew where Seattle was. We hadn't heard of it. This is early in 1943, before the, before the Boeing B-17 became so famous, and of course before our sports teams put Seattle on the map. So we, we really didn't know where it was.

So we were assigned to the Alaska Communication System, ACS, which was a civilian-owned organization providing communications between Alaska and the mainland, Seattle, based in Seattle. And they were at that time in the Federal Building. I don't know whether they always had been or not. But any rate, the army just took them over lock, stock, and barrel. So we had people who at one day were a civil servant then the next day was a captain in the Signal Corps. And they didn't have uniforms. They provided their own housing just like they had always lived in the civilian population. There were no barracks with ACS on them or anything like that. So when we came here, well, we didn't know that, of course, but we got here. And they said, "Well, you have to find your own living quarters." Well, we had, seven of us had kind of cliqued together. And we got off the train, and there was a couple, couple ladies representing hous-, military housing, and we asked them, "Where do we stay?" They said, "You have to find your own place." We said, "Do you have anything?" And she said, "No, not really." So we figured well, we, going to put up in a hotel or something. Then this other lady said, "You know that Mrs. Knox? Well, she's just, she had three or four soldiers in her house, and I think they moved out, either yesterday or the day before or something." And she said, "If you fellows wouldn't mind being a little bit crowded, I'll call her." So she called.

And then Mrs. Knox, who was always a, looked at both sides of a dollar, said, "Sure, I'll take them all. I'll take seven of them." So we got in cabs and went up to her house. And she lived in a big house on 30th Avenue South, just off Jackson Street, its just up the street here a ways. And I first met my wife, I was, it was, it's an old house, built in 1893, I think it is. And it has a spiral staircase going up. And I was about four steps up the spiral staircase, wondering, going up to look at some rooms, and this young woman came out in the front room, carrying a vacuum cleaner, with a pretty angry look on her face. And I introduced myself, and that was Harriette. She was, I thought she was an impressive-looking woman, and decided it'd be a good idea to get her, get to know her better, which I did. So at any rate, that's the way I remember, that's the way we met. She was angry because she was, she had just gotten rid of all these, three or four soldiers, and she was going to get her own room back. She was sleeping in the same room with her mother. She was going to get her own room back. And she was going to start traveling to Chicago, I think it was, to visit some relatives. And all of a sudden, why, her mother turns her life upside-down again. So she was pretty angry with her, with her mother, and it kind of reflected on us for awhile. But that's how we met.

Then, the seven of us, Harriette and her mother, after about a week or so of us living there, one of Harriette's girlfriends decided to have a party. And she, Harriette and her mother picked out gals for the -- one fellow was married. And four of us married the Seattle gals that we met through this, through Harriette and her mother. I married Harriette. We were the last ones to get married. I was the best man for two of the weddings. One, one couple eloped. They got married in a little church about, actually about two blocks from her parents' house. We walked in her parents' house, and said that we just got married, and shocked her parents no end. And the other couple got married up in Anchorage, where I was stationed with one of the fellows.

SF: Wasn't that kind of scary for everybody, to know that you guys were going to ship out and go to a war, then get married?

JF: We were taking a chance, yeah.

SF: Yeah. What was working there, I mean...

JF: I don't know. It seemed to me it was a pretty unusual story. I've told it about a thousand times. But it all worked out. I mean, we, we got there sometime late March, I would think. I mean, we knew what we were, all of us knew what we were facing, and we decided anyway, I was not going to leave Harriette pregnant. That was for sure. And I didn't, but, and neither did any of the other fellows. But we were all, we were all married until death took two of the fellows away. One of them died in '81, and the other fellow -- I was the best man at his wedding, he was the one who eloped -- he died in '81. And the other friend who lived back in Alexandria, Virginia, lived, died in '98. But this other couple that lived in Visalia, California, and they were just up here, we saw them a couple of times, and then, we travel together and things. We go back fifty-seven years. So other than for the incident of death, we'd all, we'd still all be married, which is kind of unusual, considering the fact that we had such very little time to get to know the gals that we married because all of us, all of us were, went overseas. In fact, my friend from California who left Tuesday morning, yesterday morning, he was in France and Germany with an infantry signal outfit, and after all that he came back and his youngest son was not even walking yet, and he was reassigned by the army to Korea. And he spent a year in Korea after all the time he had spent in France. It was a, it was very hectic time for us. His wife lived in -- he found her an apartment on the big complex on Mercer Island. Freeway goes right by, I can't remember the name of it. Not sure. Some apartments over there. So I looked out for her and took pictures of the kids and things like that until Don finally came back home. But she was a, she was a nurse in the Air Force during World War II.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.