Tombstone shootout; 'plastic straws suck'; Nazi documents in old bus
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Odd and interesting news from around the West.
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RENO, Nev. (AP) — A coalition of faith-based and human services groups is trying to raise money and find suitable land to build a village of tiny houses for the homeless in Reno.
Pat Cashell, a regional director of Volunteers for America, and Sharon Chamberlain, CEO of Northern Nevada HOPES, presented their plan for the village to the Reno City Council on Wednesday. They want to construct 40 bare-bone houses in order provide shelter for the chronically homeless, the Reno Gazette-Journal reported .
Fashioned after similar projects in Oregon and Washington state, the minimalistic houses would not have bathrooms or kitchens inside. The houses would surround a central structure that would contain the cooking and bathroom facilities.
Each house would cost about $3,800, and the project would rely on community support for supplies and labor, Cashell said.
The project would need a $270,000 operating budget to support a manager and case workers who would work on connecting residents to other social services and permanent housing, Chamberlain said.
Because the structures would not meet city zoning and building code requirements, the project would require exemptions.
"We have to figure out a way how we weave this type of housing into our array of housing choices that is not contrary to the codes we have set for our other forms of housing," Assistant City Manager Bill Thomas said.
Other communities have exempted religious organizations from zoning requirements and have created ordinances to allow for such encampments, Thomas said. But the city would need to vet those options before selecting this route, he said.
Councilwoman Neoma Jardon said she has been pushing for a tiny-home project and would like to see something happen in 90 days. "The homeless shelter is full, and the overflow shelter is overflowing," Jardon said.
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Information from: Reno Gazette-Journal, http://www.rgj.com
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EUGENE, Ore. (AP) — A Sutherlin woman is suing the University of Oregon after she was hit by what she called a "flying metal plate" during a 2015 Ducks game.
The Register-Guard reports that Debra Anderson says she suffered back and hip damage when the object struck her as she stood below skyboxes on the stadium's north end.
Her suit asks for $160,000. It claims UO negligence led to her injuries.
University spokesman Tobin Klinger said the object that struck Anderson was a stadium roof plate. He says UO's roofing contractor has checked out other plates to confirm they're secure.
Klinger declined additional comment and said officials are still reviewing Anderson's lawsuit, which was filed Oct. 3 in Lane County Circuit Court.
Anderson's lawyer, Derek Snelling of Eugene, declined comment on the case.
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Information from: The Register-Guard, http://www.registerguard.com
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PHOENIX (AP) — The light rail system that serves Phoenix is planning on implementing new security rules and a code of conduct in response to unruly passenger behavior that has prompted many people to avoid using the mass transit system.
Valley Metro's new rules would give security guards more flexibility to remove disruptive riders as it would more broadly define what disorderly conduct is prohibited, The Arizona Republic reported on Thursday.
Transit system officials said that an increase of bad behavior on the train has caused other passengers to feel unsafe or uncomfortable, which CEO Scott Smith said has caused harm to the system's public image.
"The perception of light rail as a safe transportation has suffered. And we hear it a lot," Smith said.
Under the current code of conduct, if a rider who has a paid fare shouts obscenities or provokes other passengers, security guards cannot remove that person. The guards can only remove that person if he or she becomes violent.
With the new rules, the guards can remove riders for loud or obnoxious antics.
"Under this new rule, we can ban that person, not because of what they said but how they said it and the fact that they made people feel threatened," Smith said.
Valley Metro will also prohibit people from riding the train all day without exiting. Security guards will be able to remove people who purchase an all-day pass just to sleep on the train, Smith said.
The new rules will be put into place in the next three months if the board of directors gives approval next week.
"I believe that by having a more defined policy on acceptable behaviors it will help to ensure a safe and positive rider experience for everyone," Valley Metro Board Chairman Chris Glover said.
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Information from: The Arizona Republic, http://www.azcentral.com
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TOMBSTONE, Ariz. (AP) — Arizona authorities say a saloon shooting in the Old West town of Tombstone put one man in the hospital with a leg wound and another in jail.
The Cochise County Sheriff's Office says the shooting occurred in Doc Holliday's Saloon when the two men struggled following a verbal altercation that also involved a woman and a third man.
Sheriff's spokeswoman Carol Capas says 47-year-old James Edward Roberson remains jailed on suspicion of aggravated assaulted and other crimes.
Capas says Roberson and his female companion surrendered their handguns to the bartender when they entered the saloon Friday evening and that the struggle and shooting occurred after the couple retrieved their guns early Saturday morning.
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SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Authorities in the Salt Lake City area are trying to identify a woman who stole a credit card from the wallet of a convenience store clerk as he was having a seizure.
The Unified Police Department says the woman walked around the counter as the clerk was having a seizure on the floor and took his wallet from his pocket on Oct. 4 at a 7-Eleven store.
Surveillance video shows the woman taking a credit card from the man's wallet, putting it under her arm and walking out of the store, and police say the card was then used to make an online purchase.
The woman reportedly has a tattoo on her right arm and she was described as a regular customer at the store at 6852 S. State St.
- By ERIN UDELL Coloradoan
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FORT COLLINS, Colo. (AP) — Standing in a boulder field last week with 74-year-old mangled twists of plane wreckage at my feet, I wondered about the wind.
It could be the reason all this was here, after all. The scattered engines, the rusted wheel struts, the metal scraps as small as Tic Tacs and as big as car hoods.
It all used to be a plane, a Boeing B-17C.
But on Oct. 18, 1943, the flying fortress found itself in Larimer County's "Bermuda Triangle" — an area of tremendous wind patterns and fickle weather — on a nighttime training mission from its base in Rapid City, South Dakota.
Just before 11 p.m. that night, it crashed, violently slamming into the solid rock hogback of Stormy Peaks on the northeast end of Northern Colorado's Mummy Range mountains.
All eight members of its crew were killed instantly as the plane exploded on impact just 40 miles west of Fort Collins, in an area that's now part of Colorado State University's Pingree Park.
And three miles up Pingree Park's Stormy Peaks trail, past Twin Lakes Reservoir, an irrigation canal and several sneaky twists and turns, the wreckage of the B-17 can still be reached on foot.
The men it had carried were as young as 22. Their hometowns stretched from Seattle to Brooklyn — others came from tiny communities, a college town and one sprawling southern city in between.
The sole Colorado crew member was Sgt. Philip M. Doddridge, a 24-year-old Yuma County farm boy and right waist gunner aboard that ill-fated October flight.
That plane was one of three B-17s to crash near Fort Collins and Loveland over a 13-month span in 1943 and 1944. Why was the area so dangerous to fly in? Wind.
You could try to understand what exactly went wrong the night of that flight, but sometimes it just comes down to one well-known fact.
"The weather in Colorado can be damn freaky," Dennis Showalter said.
THE ODDS
Showalter, a longtime history professor at Colorado College, can trace his interest in World War II — and the instruments used in it, like B-17s — to his earliest memory: a bonfire in his small Minnesota hometown to celebrate V-J Day, the end of World War II.
Chasing an interest in war, he's studied military history for 45 years and counting. And, besides Colorado's freaky weather, he can somewhat explain why training missions like the one on Oct. 18, 1943 ended in flames.
"In the military, it's said that the greatest general of all is General Murphy," Showalter rasped over the phone from Colorado Springs on Tuesday. "You know, Murphy's Law ."
Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
Couple that with the fact that B-17s were complicated instruments piloted by inexperienced trainees and it's not hard to believe Showalter when he says training crashes on U.S. soil were "routine" during World War II.
"The three (crashes) in your neck of the woods were all solo training flights," Showalter said. "The idea being you had to learn to fly under any conditions. You had to learn to fly at night. You had to learn to fly in bad weather."
"The expectation," he added, "was that you were going to lose people."
Between 1941 and 1944, approximately 410 lives were lost in nearly 130 fatal training crashes investigated by the U.S. military, according to the Colorado Springs Gazette.
Northern Colorado's most well-known World War II-era crash sites include the Oct. 18 flight on Stormy Peaks and another B-17 that crashed just six miles away on June 13, 1944.
That B-17, off course after a navigational error, crashed into a mountainside a quarter mile from the Old Flowers Trail in Roosevelt National Forest. Four of the flight's 10 crew members died in the training flight crash.
Another B-17 bomber crashed 25 miles west of Fort Collins, and eight miles north of Masonville on May 13, 1943, according to newspaper reports from that time. The crash killed two men.
"Some (airmen) never lasted past a mission and others would fly through the whole war and never get a scratch," Showalter added. "If you ask me why that happened, I would say that's one of those questions that, if I make it into heaven, I'm going to be asking God or St. Peter."
THE HIKE
After you round the reservoir, there's a steep climb that feels endless. Rocks stacked in the shape of arrows point you up different forks in the trail.
And after a leveled-out stroll along a skinny irrigation ditch, followed by a short climb through a lush swath of forest, you'll see the metal.
It's jarring at first to see an engine resting on a rocky mountainside. Then, as you approach it, you see more.
The wheel struts are still there and so is the plane's tail or wing assembly. Rusted wires coil around what look like metal spools and, at each turn, you can find something else — a mess of gears, a welded metal frame.
All this and no survivors.
"It's a gravesite in some respect," said Seth Webb, assistant director of Colorado State University's Mountain Campus, which is situated in Pingree Park. "We want to make sure people know why they're hiking there and what it meant."
People have been hiking to the Stormy Peaks crash site since likely the early 1950s, according to Mountain Campus director Pat Rastall.
It's a popular fall hike. And the university leads fifth- and sixth-graders on it twice a week every week during the season as part of a youth environmental and outdoors program.
Interested hikers are asked to look at the wreckage as a history lesson, instead of tourist destination. You should only leave footprints and only take photographs away from the hallowed site.
"From a hiking aesthetic, it's not a great hike," Webb said. "There aren't great views or anything."
"For me and for a lot of people," he added, "it's the historical interest. And it's a really somber experience."
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Information from: Fort Collins Coloradoan, http://www.coloradoan.com
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SAN DIEGO (AP) — One hundred San Diego County restaurants are pledging to cut down on plastic waste by eliminating plastic straws.
The San Diego Union-Tribune reports that the eateries are taking part in a campaign called "Plastic Straws Suck." Through Dec. 31, they will eliminate plastic straws or only provide them on request.
The San Diego County chapter of the Surfrider Foundation enlisted the restaurants as part of its effort to reduce plastic waste that washes up on beaches and poses a hazard to sea life.
Surfrider hopes that eventually, the restaurants will abandon plastic straws permanently or switch to paper straws.
According to the National Park Service, Americans use 500 million straws every day.
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COEUR D'ALENE, Idaho (AP) — The Attorney General's Office says a northern Idaho sheriff's office did not violate any laws when it concealed records to unsuccessfully hide an ongoing murder investigation.
The Bonner County Daily Bee reports that the Idaho Press Club filed a public corruption complaint with the Attorney General's Office earlier this year after the newspaper reported county officials attempted to scrub references to a killing from public dispatch records.
Deputy Attorney General Paul Panther said in an October 10 letter that Sheriff Daryl Wheeler called for certain records to be removed from public view but did not destroy the original record.
"Our investigation determined that dispatch call records relating to the April 2017 homicide were initially available to the public," Panther wrote. "Sheriff Wheeler thereafter directed that those records be removed from the website, but the original dispatch call records were unaffected and remained intact."
Idaho law prohibits officers from destroying, stealing or altering official governmental records.
The newspaper found the scrubbed records using a cached version of earlier web pages.
The sheriff has since demanded removal of the reporter who broke the story.
"As the president of the Idaho Press Club, it still seems to me to be wrong for a public official to hide public records from the public — particularly records that could be critical to the public's safety, such as the news that there's been a murder and the perpetrator is on the loose," said Betsy Russell, who is also a reporter for the Spokesman-Review, in an email response to the AG's office.
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Information from: Bonner County (Idaho) Daily Bee, http://www.bonnercountydailybee.com
- By CHRISTIAN WIHTOL The Register-Guard
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EUGENE, Ore. (AP) — Longtime Eugene tow-truck driver Ron Post is no World War II history buff. So when, inside a cluttered old bus he recently bought, he found a sheaf of yellowed papers in German with signatures such as "H. Himmler," ''Ribbentrop" and "Kaltenbrunner," he didn't know what to make of them.
But he was intrigued by a greeting card with "Adolf Hitler" and a Nazi eagle and swastika embossed in the upper left-hand corner, and a quirky, hard-to-decipher signature in the lower right-hand corner.
That card, dated Christmas Eve 1941, may contain an authentic Hitler signature, probably imprinted by a signature stamp or automatic signing machine that Hitler reportedly used for much of his correspondence.
Post — going on the assumption that the card is genuine — says he is stunned that he found such a morbid document, and in such an odd way.
"I'm still in awe that I have Hitler's autograph," Post, 59, said.
On the card is typed a message in German offering an unnamed individual a small package of coffee from a larger shipment Hitler has received from abroad, and wishing the recipient a merry Christmas and happy New Year.
The card appears similar to other cards signed or stamped by Hitler and for sale on websites that market Nazi paraphernalia. The signature on Post's card appears identical to Hitler's signature or stamp on archived historical documents viewable on the Internet.
Post — who says he found the stash of papers late last month — hasn't had the documents examined or authenticated by an expert. If genuine, it's possible they were taken as legitimate war booty by a U.S. soldier in Europe in 1945. American soldiers brought back many Nazi mementos and documents, said Randeen Cummings, a Eugene antiques and estates appraiser.
Signed documents from the massive Nazi bureaucracy turn up often, said Gary Piattoni, an appraiser who evaluates items on the popular PBS program "Antiques Roadshow." Based on reviewing scanned copies provided by The Register-Guard, he said the documents appear authentic, but he would need to examine them in person to be sure.
David Luebke, a history professor at the University of Oregon who examined copies of the documents, said the names of so many high-level Nazis suggests a collector was signature-hunting through Nazi files.
Post's documents contain the signatures of Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS, who orchestrated the mass murder of Jews and others; Ernst Kaltenbrunner, a leader in the mass murders, chief of the Nazi security police, and a general of the Waffen SS; Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler's foreign minister and negotiator of Germany's 1939 nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union, which gave Hitler time to invade Poland and Western Europe; and Ernst Rohm, an early Nazi leader and Hitler rival whose arrest and execution Hitler ordered in 1934 to solidify his hold on the movement.
The documents don't appear to contain anything historically significant.
They are "sort of the minutiae of administrative traffic," Luebke said.
Aside from the Hitler card, Post's papers include 13 pages of letters or notes of varying length, dated between 1933 and 1945, one telegram either to or from Himmler, one photograph of Hitler, two stamped postcards of Hitler apparently franked in 1937, and four business cards from Nazi leaders — including Himmler and Ribbentrop. Plus, there's what appears to be a business card — possibly from 1929 — announcing that Hitler has moved to a new apartment in Munich.
Post isn't sure what he'll do with the documents. He said he needs to have them authenticated and that selling them is an option.
PROSPECTOR'S GOOD FORTUNE
Post said he bought the junk-filled bus — a blue 1985 Ford Econoline — last month at auction, began cleaning it out and on Sept. 24 found the documents in an old suitcase. It's unclear how they came to be in the bus — which itself has a colorful history.
The Douglas County Sheriff's Office seized it and another vehicle in Eugene in early August in the process of recovering firearms stolen by a group of Douglas County residents. In the bus, authorities found 18 rifles stolen from a Yoncalla home, the sheriff's office said at the time. The bus was impounded, held at Post's employer, A + Towing in Eugene, then, after no one claimed it, sold at auction by A + to Post, said A + manager Kelly Reed.
A + doesn't search impounded vehicles before selling them, he said. "Typically, when they buy the vehicle, they get whatever's in it," Reed said. The vehicles often contain unusual items, he added, "but I don't think there's ever been anything like this" at A +.
The sheriff's office said it did not immediately have information about the history of the bus.
Post said he paid several hundred dollars for the vehicle.
"I wanted to make it into a prospecting rig. I like to prospect for gold," the River Road area resident said.
NAZI DOCUMENTS ABOUND
Many authenticated examples of Hitler's signature exist, as well as those of Himmler, Ribbentrop and Kaltenbrunner. Himmler committed suicide after the end of World War II. Ribbentrop and Kaltenbrunner were convicted at the Nuremberg war crimes trials and executed.
The signatures on Post's documents appear very similar to original documents signed by Himmler, Ribbentrop and Kaltenbrunner that can be viewed on historical sites on the Internet.
But news reports warn that forged Nazi documents are abundant. One of the biggest forgeries was Hitler's purported diary, bought by Stern magazine in Germany in 1983 for $3.7 million, then declared the work of a German petty criminal.
While there's a market for Nazi paraphernalia, it's hard to know what items such as those Post found are worth. People who sell or collect such items sometimes face criticism from Jewish and other groups who accuse them of glorifying, humanizing and profiting from Hitler and his murderous regime.
Greeting cards with Hitler's signature, written or stamped, have been offered for sale on the Internet for a few thousand dollars to up to about $20,000. An autographed copy of Hitler's book "Mein Kampf" made headlines in 2014 when it sold at auction for $64,850.
TESTAMENT TO BANALITY
Post's documents mostly deal with mundane matters.
One document, dated Dec. 21, 1941, is a brief greeting from Himmler, possibly on an anniversary, to an unnamed person, according to a translation provided by Bethel School District German teacher Ewa Lancaster, who holds a master's degree in German and is a native of Poland.
Another, dated Dec. 6, 1944, is a typed note from Kaltenbrunner to Karl Hermann Frank, the Nazi chief of Bohemia and Moravia, who organized mass murders of Czech civilians. In the note, Kaltenbrunner — who had been promoted on Dec. 1 by Hitler to a general of the Waffen-SS — thanks Frank for previously congratulating him, according to a translation by Lancaster. Frank was later tried and convicted by a court in Prague and executed in 1946.
One handwritten three-page document appears to be a note from Ribbentrop to Himmler while Ribbentrop was in London before Britain and Germany went to war. The note is on the stationery of the historic Brown's Hotel in London. In the note, Ribbentrop states he is very happy at having just been accepted into the "glorious" SS as a colonel, Lancaster said. That would date the note to 1933, Lancaster estimated. Ribbentrop promises to carry the acceptance letter "with pride (and wear it like a robe of honor)," according to Lancaster's translation.
And there's the business card in which Hitler announces he has a new address: 16/11 Prinzregentenplatz in Munich. Hitler moved to that large apartment in 1929 as his political star was rising.
HIDDEN TROVE DISCOVERED
Included in the papers is a photocopy of a 1945 Zanesville, Ohio, newspaper article about a local soldier serving in Europe who had sent home Nazi items, such as knives, swastika emblems and Nazi stationery. It's possible that soldier also sent the documents Post has found.
Post said he bought the bus on Sept. 18. He took it home several days later and began cleaning it.
"We started just bagging stuff up," he said. "We were finding needles and crap like that." He also found Newsweek magazines from the 1940s.
"Then I lifted up a seat cushion, and there was a chest kind of thing, and inside it there is this box with a bunch of papers in it. This is the stuff I kept. When I saw the card (from Hitler's office), I felt the corner of it and realized it was embossed."
Uncertain how to proceed, he said, he came to The Register-Guard office.
A Lane County resident since age 5, Post said he has worked for 23 years as a tow-truck driver, and before that for a dozen or so years on the production lines at a plywood and lumber mill.
He said he's "all beat up" from his physical labor and looking forward to retiring at 62. He says his newfound collection may help pave the way.
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Information from: The Register-Guard, http://www.registerguard.com
- By HAL BERNTON Seattle Times
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SEATTLE (AP) — Gunter Grawe spent three years as a German prisoner of war in western Washington, a World War II incarceration he recalls not with rancor but gratitude for the chance to "live and learn in America."
Grawe always thought about returning to the state to say thank you.
In early October, the rail-thin veteran, now 91, did just that during a brief visit to this base, where guard towers and barbed-wire fences are long gone but some of the two-story wooden barracks that once housed German prisoners still stand.
He declared his capture by the Americans at the age of 18 "his luckiest day," and reminisced about camp life that included English, French and Spanish classes organized by other POWs and a commissary stocked with chocolate, ice cream and Coca-Cola.
"I never had anything to complain about," Grawe said. "No guard called us nasty names. I had a better life as a prisoner than my mother and sister back home in Germany."
In a global conflict that resulted in the deaths of more than 60?million people — including 6?million Jewish Holocaust victims — Grawe was indeed fortunate to live to an old age denied so many others. Grawe was filled with patriotism as he went to serve in the German army but now denounces Adolf Hitler as "one arrogant, hypocritical dammed liar" who led his nation into disaster and shame.
Grawe's trip to Joint Base Lewis-McChord was arranged with the help of HistoryLink.org, a Seattle-based online encyclopedia that chronicles the state's past. He also was vetted by JBLM, which had a historian look through records to verify that he was indeed a prisoner, and not one of the POWs who were fervent Nazis and staged a sit-down protest on Hitler's birthday.
"We have a list of those who were pro-Nazi, and he was not on it," said Duane Denfield, a historian who works as a JBLM contractor.
AMPLE MEALS, FARM WORK
Grawe's military career started in Latvia, where he went through training for what appeared to be an assignment to the Eastern Front to fight a resurgent Russian army. If Josef Stalin's forces had captured him, he likely would have been sent to a labor camp, where harsh conditions killed many.
But then Allied forces invaded France, and the Germans scrambled to try to slow their advance toward Paris with fresh reinforcements.
Grawe was transferred to Normandy, where he served in a tank unit that was quickly overwhelmed by the U.S. and British armies in clashes he said killed most of the young soldiers he arrived with from Latvia.
"It was a terrible fight in Normandy — it wasn't what we expected, and we were young and inexperienced," Grawe said.
A grenade hit his tank, and Grawe scrambled out amid volleys of gunfire.
He suffered only a small wound to his foot, and several days later became an American prisoner as U.S. soldiers overran the hospital tent camp where he was recuperating.
Grawe said he realized how well things had turned out as he was put on the ocean liner Queen Mary for the voyage to America. He had comfortable quarters and most important — ample meals — served on metal trays.
Next, he took a train ride across America to what was then Fort Lewis. At the Army post south of Tacoma, barracks vacated by U.S. troops were turned into prison quarters for some 4,000 German POWs at five locations.
Fort Lewis (now part of the joint base) was part of a much broader POW prison-camp network of some 500 sites across the country that held 400,000 Germans. Overall, historians say these prisoners were treated well. Some Germans even referred to their camp as a "golden cage," according to Michael Farquhar, who wrote a 1997 article about the POWs for The Washington Post.
The POWs' relative comfort angered some wartime Americans who had lost their loved ones to German troops. But they did have to work, providing labor at a time when the massive troop mobilization made it hard to find enough people to bring in the nation's crops.
Grawe traveled by truck from Fort Lewis to help in apple, sugar-beet and potato harvests. Later, he was transferred to Arizona to bring in cotton. He recalled his farm labor as a real adventure that earned him an 80-cents-a-day salary to buy things at the commissary.
CRISIS OF FAITH
Through his years as a prisoner, Grawe says he came to love America.
But his first loyalties were to Germany. As a boy, he participated in Hitler Youth. He joined the army as what he calls a "young idealistic soldier" who thought it "right to fight for an honest and upright fatherland" just like his father, a plumber turned soldier who died in the war in 1940.
Grawe says he first learned of the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps while a prisoner in America. He initially brushed off the news as propaganda because it was conveyed by a U.S. officer. When he wrote home to his mother and sister, they replied it was true.
In 1947, two years after Germany's unconditional surrender, Grawe was released.
In a crisis of faith, he left his church, where he says the pastors prayed for their own people rather than trying to stop the Nazis.
In the postwar era, as the German economy surged, Grawe prospered.
He got married, had two sons and opened a successful import business bringing in merchandise from Asia. Through the decades, he returned to the U.S. several times to vacation. But only after his wife died in 2016 did he make up his mind to return to Washington state.
Searching online, Grawe found an article on the camp on HistoryLink.org. In July of last year, he wrote a letter to propose a visit that finally unfolded this fall with stops in California and then Washington.
Grawe, a passionate cyclist, had planned to ride his electric bike all the way up the West Coast to Seattle. But when he sought the advice of California police, they counseled against it.
So he put his bike on a northbound train, and once he arrived in Seattle reached out to HistoryLink staff for help.
"We weren't expecting him just then," Marie McCaffrey, HistoryLink's executive director, whose staff reached out the base to help arrange the visit. "But we're a public information utility, and if there is something we can do to help, we try to do it."
A HUG AND A CASSEROLE
On Oct. 3, a brilliant fall day, Grawe arrived at JBLM. He brought his electric bike, determined to ride the final distance — a little over a mile — to the old camp site. On each side of his bike's rear wheel hung a sign: "USA, the country and its people, you are my first and final love!"
At the blacktop by the barracks, he looked around somewhat uncertainly. He recalled a barren site. This place was full of fir trees that had grown up in the seven decades since the prisoners had gone home.
He was greeted by the base's deputy joint commander, Col. William Percival, who offered a handshake, and later a hug inside a building now empty and bare of furniture.
"You remind us that . how you treat somebody defines who we are," Percival said. "There are times, even today, when we may want to forget that. And you let us know that's a lesson not to be forgotten."
Grawe then went for lunch at a base dining hall.
He piled his plate full of a noodle casserole, and sat down to eat one more ample meal served up by the U.S. Army. This time, as a free man.
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Information from: The Seattle Times, http://www.seattletimes.com
- By LISA PEMBERTON The Olympian
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OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) — First-time parents Brandon Thomas and Kaitlin Yoder of Tumwater weren't expecting to have their twins until January.
But babies Kora and Cullen began their entrance into the world earlier this month at Capital Medical Center in Olympia. They were born 16 weeks early by C-section and transferred to the neonatal intensive care unit at MultiCare Tacoma General Hospital in Tacoma.
Cullen, who weighed 1 pound, 8 ounces at birth, suffered a bilateral brain bleed, and lived for 46 hours.
"If he had survived, he would have had severe cognitive and development issues, probably in a wheelchair and unable to speak or eat on his own," Thomas told The Olympian.
But his sister, Kora, born weighing 1 pound, 4 ounces, is thriving more than anyone expected.
"She's the strongest person I think I've yet to meet," Thomas said. "All of the nurses are surprised with how much she moves. . She is extremely feisty."
Brad Thomas of Tumwater described his new granddaughter as "about the size of your hand, maybe slightly larger. Very tiny."
She opened one of her eyes for the first time last Thursday.
"She's doing good," the grandpa said. "They're putting some milk on a Q-tip and she sucks it off a Q-tip. They were thinking today (Friday) they might be able to take the breathing tube out and she might be able to breathe on her own."
Brad Thomas has begun an online fundraiser to collect donations for the family's medical and transportation expenses. Kora will likely spend the next four months at Tacoma General, family members said.
Brandon Thomas, who has a temporary job at the state Department of Fish & Wildlife that ends in November, said they plan to use some of the donations for Cullen's memorial service and burial costs.
They haven't had a chance to hold Kora yet. Cullen died in his mom's arms.
"I was just cradling his head and we were just comforting him the best we could," Thomas recalls.
Even though he's had a tough first week of parenthood, Brandon Thomas, who grew up in Lacey and graduated from Timberline High School, said it's been an incredible experience. He said he's so proud of his son and daughter.
"As soon as I saw them . so much love and happiness washed over me, and they were the two most beautiful things I've seen in my life," he said. "I just kind of instantly want to cry when I talk about it."
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Information from: The Olympian, http://www.theolympian.com
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RENO, Nev. (AP) — A coalition of faith-based and human services groups is trying to raise money and find suitable land to build a village of tiny houses for the homeless in Reno.
Pat Cashell, a regional director of Volunteers for America, and Sharon Chamberlain, CEO of Northern Nevada HOPES, presented their plan for the village to the Reno City Council on Wednesday. They want to construct 40 bare-bone houses in order provide shelter for the chronically homeless, the Reno Gazette-Journal reported .
Fashioned after similar projects in Oregon and Washington state, the minimalistic houses would not have bathrooms or kitchens inside. The houses would surround a central structure that would contain the cooking and bathroom facilities.
Each house would cost about $3,800, and the project would rely on community support for supplies and labor, Cashell said.
The project would need a $270,000 operating budget to support a manager and case workers who would work on connecting residents to other social services and permanent housing, Chamberlain said.
Because the structures would not meet city zoning and building code requirements, the project would require exemptions.
"We have to figure out a way how we weave this type of housing into our array of housing choices that is not contrary to the codes we have set for our other forms of housing," Assistant City Manager Bill Thomas said.
Other communities have exempted religious organizations from zoning requirements and have created ordinances to allow for such encampments, Thomas said. But the city would need to vet those options before selecting this route, he said.
Councilwoman Neoma Jardon said she has been pushing for a tiny-home project and would like to see something happen in 90 days. "The homeless shelter is full, and the overflow shelter is overflowing," Jardon said.
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Information from: Reno Gazette-Journal, http://www.rgj.com
EUGENE, Ore. (AP) — A Sutherlin woman is suing the University of Oregon after she was hit by what she called a "flying metal plate" during a 2015 Ducks game.
The Register-Guard reports that Debra Anderson says she suffered back and hip damage when the object struck her as she stood below skyboxes on the stadium's north end.
Her suit asks for $160,000. It claims UO negligence led to her injuries.
University spokesman Tobin Klinger said the object that struck Anderson was a stadium roof plate. He says UO's roofing contractor has checked out other plates to confirm they're secure.
Klinger declined additional comment and said officials are still reviewing Anderson's lawsuit, which was filed Oct. 3 in Lane County Circuit Court.
Anderson's lawyer, Derek Snelling of Eugene, declined comment on the case.
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Information from: The Register-Guard, http://www.registerguard.com
PHOENIX (AP) — The light rail system that serves Phoenix is planning on implementing new security rules and a code of conduct in response to unruly passenger behavior that has prompted many people to avoid using the mass transit system.
Valley Metro's new rules would give security guards more flexibility to remove disruptive riders as it would more broadly define what disorderly conduct is prohibited, The Arizona Republic reported on Thursday.
Transit system officials said that an increase of bad behavior on the train has caused other passengers to feel unsafe or uncomfortable, which CEO Scott Smith said has caused harm to the system's public image.
"The perception of light rail as a safe transportation has suffered. And we hear it a lot," Smith said.
Under the current code of conduct, if a rider who has a paid fare shouts obscenities or provokes other passengers, security guards cannot remove that person. The guards can only remove that person if he or she becomes violent.
With the new rules, the guards can remove riders for loud or obnoxious antics.
"Under this new rule, we can ban that person, not because of what they said but how they said it and the fact that they made people feel threatened," Smith said.
Valley Metro will also prohibit people from riding the train all day without exiting. Security guards will be able to remove people who purchase an all-day pass just to sleep on the train, Smith said.
The new rules will be put into place in the next three months if the board of directors gives approval next week.
"I believe that by having a more defined policy on acceptable behaviors it will help to ensure a safe and positive rider experience for everyone," Valley Metro Board Chairman Chris Glover said.
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Information from: The Arizona Republic, http://www.azcentral.com
TOMBSTONE, Ariz. (AP) — Arizona authorities say a saloon shooting in the Old West town of Tombstone put one man in the hospital with a leg wound and another in jail.
The Cochise County Sheriff's Office says the shooting occurred in Doc Holliday's Saloon when the two men struggled following a verbal altercation that also involved a woman and a third man.
Sheriff's spokeswoman Carol Capas says 47-year-old James Edward Roberson remains jailed on suspicion of aggravated assaulted and other crimes.
Capas says Roberson and his female companion surrendered their handguns to the bartender when they entered the saloon Friday evening and that the struggle and shooting occurred after the couple retrieved their guns early Saturday morning.
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Authorities in the Salt Lake City area are trying to identify a woman who stole a credit card from the wallet of a convenience store clerk as he was having a seizure.
The Unified Police Department says the woman walked around the counter as the clerk was having a seizure on the floor and took his wallet from his pocket on Oct. 4 at a 7-Eleven store.
Surveillance video shows the woman taking a credit card from the man's wallet, putting it under her arm and walking out of the store, and police say the card was then used to make an online purchase.
The woman reportedly has a tattoo on her right arm and she was described as a regular customer at the store at 6852 S. State St.
- By ERIN UDELL Coloradoan
FORT COLLINS, Colo. (AP) — Standing in a boulder field last week with 74-year-old mangled twists of plane wreckage at my feet, I wondered about the wind.
It could be the reason all this was here, after all. The scattered engines, the rusted wheel struts, the metal scraps as small as Tic Tacs and as big as car hoods.
It all used to be a plane, a Boeing B-17C.
But on Oct. 18, 1943, the flying fortress found itself in Larimer County's "Bermuda Triangle" — an area of tremendous wind patterns and fickle weather — on a nighttime training mission from its base in Rapid City, South Dakota.
Just before 11 p.m. that night, it crashed, violently slamming into the solid rock hogback of Stormy Peaks on the northeast end of Northern Colorado's Mummy Range mountains.
All eight members of its crew were killed instantly as the plane exploded on impact just 40 miles west of Fort Collins, in an area that's now part of Colorado State University's Pingree Park.
And three miles up Pingree Park's Stormy Peaks trail, past Twin Lakes Reservoir, an irrigation canal and several sneaky twists and turns, the wreckage of the B-17 can still be reached on foot.
The men it had carried were as young as 22. Their hometowns stretched from Seattle to Brooklyn — others came from tiny communities, a college town and one sprawling southern city in between.
The sole Colorado crew member was Sgt. Philip M. Doddridge, a 24-year-old Yuma County farm boy and right waist gunner aboard that ill-fated October flight.
That plane was one of three B-17s to crash near Fort Collins and Loveland over a 13-month span in 1943 and 1944. Why was the area so dangerous to fly in? Wind.
You could try to understand what exactly went wrong the night of that flight, but sometimes it just comes down to one well-known fact.
"The weather in Colorado can be damn freaky," Dennis Showalter said.
THE ODDS
Showalter, a longtime history professor at Colorado College, can trace his interest in World War II — and the instruments used in it, like B-17s — to his earliest memory: a bonfire in his small Minnesota hometown to celebrate V-J Day, the end of World War II.
Chasing an interest in war, he's studied military history for 45 years and counting. And, besides Colorado's freaky weather, he can somewhat explain why training missions like the one on Oct. 18, 1943 ended in flames.
"In the military, it's said that the greatest general of all is General Murphy," Showalter rasped over the phone from Colorado Springs on Tuesday. "You know, Murphy's Law ."
Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
Couple that with the fact that B-17s were complicated instruments piloted by inexperienced trainees and it's not hard to believe Showalter when he says training crashes on U.S. soil were "routine" during World War II.
"The three (crashes) in your neck of the woods were all solo training flights," Showalter said. "The idea being you had to learn to fly under any conditions. You had to learn to fly at night. You had to learn to fly in bad weather."
"The expectation," he added, "was that you were going to lose people."
Between 1941 and 1944, approximately 410 lives were lost in nearly 130 fatal training crashes investigated by the U.S. military, according to the Colorado Springs Gazette.
Northern Colorado's most well-known World War II-era crash sites include the Oct. 18 flight on Stormy Peaks and another B-17 that crashed just six miles away on June 13, 1944.
That B-17, off course after a navigational error, crashed into a mountainside a quarter mile from the Old Flowers Trail in Roosevelt National Forest. Four of the flight's 10 crew members died in the training flight crash.
Another B-17 bomber crashed 25 miles west of Fort Collins, and eight miles north of Masonville on May 13, 1943, according to newspaper reports from that time. The crash killed two men.
"Some (airmen) never lasted past a mission and others would fly through the whole war and never get a scratch," Showalter added. "If you ask me why that happened, I would say that's one of those questions that, if I make it into heaven, I'm going to be asking God or St. Peter."
THE HIKE
After you round the reservoir, there's a steep climb that feels endless. Rocks stacked in the shape of arrows point you up different forks in the trail.
And after a leveled-out stroll along a skinny irrigation ditch, followed by a short climb through a lush swath of forest, you'll see the metal.
It's jarring at first to see an engine resting on a rocky mountainside. Then, as you approach it, you see more.
The wheel struts are still there and so is the plane's tail or wing assembly. Rusted wires coil around what look like metal spools and, at each turn, you can find something else — a mess of gears, a welded metal frame.
All this and no survivors.
"It's a gravesite in some respect," said Seth Webb, assistant director of Colorado State University's Mountain Campus, which is situated in Pingree Park. "We want to make sure people know why they're hiking there and what it meant."
People have been hiking to the Stormy Peaks crash site since likely the early 1950s, according to Mountain Campus director Pat Rastall.
It's a popular fall hike. And the university leads fifth- and sixth-graders on it twice a week every week during the season as part of a youth environmental and outdoors program.
Interested hikers are asked to look at the wreckage as a history lesson, instead of tourist destination. You should only leave footprints and only take photographs away from the hallowed site.
"From a hiking aesthetic, it's not a great hike," Webb said. "There aren't great views or anything."
"For me and for a lot of people," he added, "it's the historical interest. And it's a really somber experience."
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Information from: Fort Collins Coloradoan, http://www.coloradoan.com
SAN DIEGO (AP) — One hundred San Diego County restaurants are pledging to cut down on plastic waste by eliminating plastic straws.
The San Diego Union-Tribune reports that the eateries are taking part in a campaign called "Plastic Straws Suck." Through Dec. 31, they will eliminate plastic straws or only provide them on request.
The San Diego County chapter of the Surfrider Foundation enlisted the restaurants as part of its effort to reduce plastic waste that washes up on beaches and poses a hazard to sea life.
Surfrider hopes that eventually, the restaurants will abandon plastic straws permanently or switch to paper straws.
According to the National Park Service, Americans use 500 million straws every day.
COEUR D'ALENE, Idaho (AP) — The Attorney General's Office says a northern Idaho sheriff's office did not violate any laws when it concealed records to unsuccessfully hide an ongoing murder investigation.
The Bonner County Daily Bee reports that the Idaho Press Club filed a public corruption complaint with the Attorney General's Office earlier this year after the newspaper reported county officials attempted to scrub references to a killing from public dispatch records.
Deputy Attorney General Paul Panther said in an October 10 letter that Sheriff Daryl Wheeler called for certain records to be removed from public view but did not destroy the original record.
"Our investigation determined that dispatch call records relating to the April 2017 homicide were initially available to the public," Panther wrote. "Sheriff Wheeler thereafter directed that those records be removed from the website, but the original dispatch call records were unaffected and remained intact."
Idaho law prohibits officers from destroying, stealing or altering official governmental records.
The newspaper found the scrubbed records using a cached version of earlier web pages.
The sheriff has since demanded removal of the reporter who broke the story.
"As the president of the Idaho Press Club, it still seems to me to be wrong for a public official to hide public records from the public — particularly records that could be critical to the public's safety, such as the news that there's been a murder and the perpetrator is on the loose," said Betsy Russell, who is also a reporter for the Spokesman-Review, in an email response to the AG's office.
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Information from: Bonner County (Idaho) Daily Bee, http://www.bonnercountydailybee.com
- By CHRISTIAN WIHTOL The Register-Guard
EUGENE, Ore. (AP) — Longtime Eugene tow-truck driver Ron Post is no World War II history buff. So when, inside a cluttered old bus he recently bought, he found a sheaf of yellowed papers in German with signatures such as "H. Himmler," ''Ribbentrop" and "Kaltenbrunner," he didn't know what to make of them.
But he was intrigued by a greeting card with "Adolf Hitler" and a Nazi eagle and swastika embossed in the upper left-hand corner, and a quirky, hard-to-decipher signature in the lower right-hand corner.
That card, dated Christmas Eve 1941, may contain an authentic Hitler signature, probably imprinted by a signature stamp or automatic signing machine that Hitler reportedly used for much of his correspondence.
Post — going on the assumption that the card is genuine — says he is stunned that he found such a morbid document, and in such an odd way.
"I'm still in awe that I have Hitler's autograph," Post, 59, said.
On the card is typed a message in German offering an unnamed individual a small package of coffee from a larger shipment Hitler has received from abroad, and wishing the recipient a merry Christmas and happy New Year.
The card appears similar to other cards signed or stamped by Hitler and for sale on websites that market Nazi paraphernalia. The signature on Post's card appears identical to Hitler's signature or stamp on archived historical documents viewable on the Internet.
Post — who says he found the stash of papers late last month — hasn't had the documents examined or authenticated by an expert. If genuine, it's possible they were taken as legitimate war booty by a U.S. soldier in Europe in 1945. American soldiers brought back many Nazi mementos and documents, said Randeen Cummings, a Eugene antiques and estates appraiser.
Signed documents from the massive Nazi bureaucracy turn up often, said Gary Piattoni, an appraiser who evaluates items on the popular PBS program "Antiques Roadshow." Based on reviewing scanned copies provided by The Register-Guard, he said the documents appear authentic, but he would need to examine them in person to be sure.
David Luebke, a history professor at the University of Oregon who examined copies of the documents, said the names of so many high-level Nazis suggests a collector was signature-hunting through Nazi files.
Post's documents contain the signatures of Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS, who orchestrated the mass murder of Jews and others; Ernst Kaltenbrunner, a leader in the mass murders, chief of the Nazi security police, and a general of the Waffen SS; Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler's foreign minister and negotiator of Germany's 1939 nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union, which gave Hitler time to invade Poland and Western Europe; and Ernst Rohm, an early Nazi leader and Hitler rival whose arrest and execution Hitler ordered in 1934 to solidify his hold on the movement.
The documents don't appear to contain anything historically significant.
They are "sort of the minutiae of administrative traffic," Luebke said.
Aside from the Hitler card, Post's papers include 13 pages of letters or notes of varying length, dated between 1933 and 1945, one telegram either to or from Himmler, one photograph of Hitler, two stamped postcards of Hitler apparently franked in 1937, and four business cards from Nazi leaders — including Himmler and Ribbentrop. Plus, there's what appears to be a business card — possibly from 1929 — announcing that Hitler has moved to a new apartment in Munich.
Post isn't sure what he'll do with the documents. He said he needs to have them authenticated and that selling them is an option.
PROSPECTOR'S GOOD FORTUNE
Post said he bought the junk-filled bus — a blue 1985 Ford Econoline — last month at auction, began cleaning it out and on Sept. 24 found the documents in an old suitcase. It's unclear how they came to be in the bus — which itself has a colorful history.
The Douglas County Sheriff's Office seized it and another vehicle in Eugene in early August in the process of recovering firearms stolen by a group of Douglas County residents. In the bus, authorities found 18 rifles stolen from a Yoncalla home, the sheriff's office said at the time. The bus was impounded, held at Post's employer, A + Towing in Eugene, then, after no one claimed it, sold at auction by A + to Post, said A + manager Kelly Reed.
A + doesn't search impounded vehicles before selling them, he said. "Typically, when they buy the vehicle, they get whatever's in it," Reed said. The vehicles often contain unusual items, he added, "but I don't think there's ever been anything like this" at A +.
The sheriff's office said it did not immediately have information about the history of the bus.
Post said he paid several hundred dollars for the vehicle.
"I wanted to make it into a prospecting rig. I like to prospect for gold," the River Road area resident said.
NAZI DOCUMENTS ABOUND
Many authenticated examples of Hitler's signature exist, as well as those of Himmler, Ribbentrop and Kaltenbrunner. Himmler committed suicide after the end of World War II. Ribbentrop and Kaltenbrunner were convicted at the Nuremberg war crimes trials and executed.
The signatures on Post's documents appear very similar to original documents signed by Himmler, Ribbentrop and Kaltenbrunner that can be viewed on historical sites on the Internet.
But news reports warn that forged Nazi documents are abundant. One of the biggest forgeries was Hitler's purported diary, bought by Stern magazine in Germany in 1983 for $3.7 million, then declared the work of a German petty criminal.
While there's a market for Nazi paraphernalia, it's hard to know what items such as those Post found are worth. People who sell or collect such items sometimes face criticism from Jewish and other groups who accuse them of glorifying, humanizing and profiting from Hitler and his murderous regime.
Greeting cards with Hitler's signature, written or stamped, have been offered for sale on the Internet for a few thousand dollars to up to about $20,000. An autographed copy of Hitler's book "Mein Kampf" made headlines in 2014 when it sold at auction for $64,850.
TESTAMENT TO BANALITY
Post's documents mostly deal with mundane matters.
One document, dated Dec. 21, 1941, is a brief greeting from Himmler, possibly on an anniversary, to an unnamed person, according to a translation provided by Bethel School District German teacher Ewa Lancaster, who holds a master's degree in German and is a native of Poland.
Another, dated Dec. 6, 1944, is a typed note from Kaltenbrunner to Karl Hermann Frank, the Nazi chief of Bohemia and Moravia, who organized mass murders of Czech civilians. In the note, Kaltenbrunner — who had been promoted on Dec. 1 by Hitler to a general of the Waffen-SS — thanks Frank for previously congratulating him, according to a translation by Lancaster. Frank was later tried and convicted by a court in Prague and executed in 1946.
One handwritten three-page document appears to be a note from Ribbentrop to Himmler while Ribbentrop was in London before Britain and Germany went to war. The note is on the stationery of the historic Brown's Hotel in London. In the note, Ribbentrop states he is very happy at having just been accepted into the "glorious" SS as a colonel, Lancaster said. That would date the note to 1933, Lancaster estimated. Ribbentrop promises to carry the acceptance letter "with pride (and wear it like a robe of honor)," according to Lancaster's translation.
And there's the business card in which Hitler announces he has a new address: 16/11 Prinzregentenplatz in Munich. Hitler moved to that large apartment in 1929 as his political star was rising.
HIDDEN TROVE DISCOVERED
Included in the papers is a photocopy of a 1945 Zanesville, Ohio, newspaper article about a local soldier serving in Europe who had sent home Nazi items, such as knives, swastika emblems and Nazi stationery. It's possible that soldier also sent the documents Post has found.
Post said he bought the bus on Sept. 18. He took it home several days later and began cleaning it.
"We started just bagging stuff up," he said. "We were finding needles and crap like that." He also found Newsweek magazines from the 1940s.
"Then I lifted up a seat cushion, and there was a chest kind of thing, and inside it there is this box with a bunch of papers in it. This is the stuff I kept. When I saw the card (from Hitler's office), I felt the corner of it and realized it was embossed."
Uncertain how to proceed, he said, he came to The Register-Guard office.
A Lane County resident since age 5, Post said he has worked for 23 years as a tow-truck driver, and before that for a dozen or so years on the production lines at a plywood and lumber mill.
He said he's "all beat up" from his physical labor and looking forward to retiring at 62. He says his newfound collection may help pave the way.
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Information from: The Register-Guard, http://www.registerguard.com
- By HAL BERNTON Seattle Times
SEATTLE (AP) — Gunter Grawe spent three years as a German prisoner of war in western Washington, a World War II incarceration he recalls not with rancor but gratitude for the chance to "live and learn in America."
Grawe always thought about returning to the state to say thank you.
In early October, the rail-thin veteran, now 91, did just that during a brief visit to this base, where guard towers and barbed-wire fences are long gone but some of the two-story wooden barracks that once housed German prisoners still stand.
He declared his capture by the Americans at the age of 18 "his luckiest day," and reminisced about camp life that included English, French and Spanish classes organized by other POWs and a commissary stocked with chocolate, ice cream and Coca-Cola.
"I never had anything to complain about," Grawe said. "No guard called us nasty names. I had a better life as a prisoner than my mother and sister back home in Germany."
In a global conflict that resulted in the deaths of more than 60?million people — including 6?million Jewish Holocaust victims — Grawe was indeed fortunate to live to an old age denied so many others. Grawe was filled with patriotism as he went to serve in the German army but now denounces Adolf Hitler as "one arrogant, hypocritical dammed liar" who led his nation into disaster and shame.
Grawe's trip to Joint Base Lewis-McChord was arranged with the help of HistoryLink.org, a Seattle-based online encyclopedia that chronicles the state's past. He also was vetted by JBLM, which had a historian look through records to verify that he was indeed a prisoner, and not one of the POWs who were fervent Nazis and staged a sit-down protest on Hitler's birthday.
"We have a list of those who were pro-Nazi, and he was not on it," said Duane Denfield, a historian who works as a JBLM contractor.
AMPLE MEALS, FARM WORK
Grawe's military career started in Latvia, where he went through training for what appeared to be an assignment to the Eastern Front to fight a resurgent Russian army. If Josef Stalin's forces had captured him, he likely would have been sent to a labor camp, where harsh conditions killed many.
But then Allied forces invaded France, and the Germans scrambled to try to slow their advance toward Paris with fresh reinforcements.
Grawe was transferred to Normandy, where he served in a tank unit that was quickly overwhelmed by the U.S. and British armies in clashes he said killed most of the young soldiers he arrived with from Latvia.
"It was a terrible fight in Normandy — it wasn't what we expected, and we were young and inexperienced," Grawe said.
A grenade hit his tank, and Grawe scrambled out amid volleys of gunfire.
He suffered only a small wound to his foot, and several days later became an American prisoner as U.S. soldiers overran the hospital tent camp where he was recuperating.
Grawe said he realized how well things had turned out as he was put on the ocean liner Queen Mary for the voyage to America. He had comfortable quarters and most important — ample meals — served on metal trays.
Next, he took a train ride across America to what was then Fort Lewis. At the Army post south of Tacoma, barracks vacated by U.S. troops were turned into prison quarters for some 4,000 German POWs at five locations.
Fort Lewis (now part of the joint base) was part of a much broader POW prison-camp network of some 500 sites across the country that held 400,000 Germans. Overall, historians say these prisoners were treated well. Some Germans even referred to their camp as a "golden cage," according to Michael Farquhar, who wrote a 1997 article about the POWs for The Washington Post.
The POWs' relative comfort angered some wartime Americans who had lost their loved ones to German troops. But they did have to work, providing labor at a time when the massive troop mobilization made it hard to find enough people to bring in the nation's crops.
Grawe traveled by truck from Fort Lewis to help in apple, sugar-beet and potato harvests. Later, he was transferred to Arizona to bring in cotton. He recalled his farm labor as a real adventure that earned him an 80-cents-a-day salary to buy things at the commissary.
CRISIS OF FAITH
Through his years as a prisoner, Grawe says he came to love America.
But his first loyalties were to Germany. As a boy, he participated in Hitler Youth. He joined the army as what he calls a "young idealistic soldier" who thought it "right to fight for an honest and upright fatherland" just like his father, a plumber turned soldier who died in the war in 1940.
Grawe says he first learned of the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps while a prisoner in America. He initially brushed off the news as propaganda because it was conveyed by a U.S. officer. When he wrote home to his mother and sister, they replied it was true.
In 1947, two years after Germany's unconditional surrender, Grawe was released.
In a crisis of faith, he left his church, where he says the pastors prayed for their own people rather than trying to stop the Nazis.
In the postwar era, as the German economy surged, Grawe prospered.
He got married, had two sons and opened a successful import business bringing in merchandise from Asia. Through the decades, he returned to the U.S. several times to vacation. But only after his wife died in 2016 did he make up his mind to return to Washington state.
Searching online, Grawe found an article on the camp on HistoryLink.org. In July of last year, he wrote a letter to propose a visit that finally unfolded this fall with stops in California and then Washington.
Grawe, a passionate cyclist, had planned to ride his electric bike all the way up the West Coast to Seattle. But when he sought the advice of California police, they counseled against it.
So he put his bike on a northbound train, and once he arrived in Seattle reached out to HistoryLink staff for help.
"We weren't expecting him just then," Marie McCaffrey, HistoryLink's executive director, whose staff reached out the base to help arrange the visit. "But we're a public information utility, and if there is something we can do to help, we try to do it."
A HUG AND A CASSEROLE
On Oct. 3, a brilliant fall day, Grawe arrived at JBLM. He brought his electric bike, determined to ride the final distance — a little over a mile — to the old camp site. On each side of his bike's rear wheel hung a sign: "USA, the country and its people, you are my first and final love!"
At the blacktop by the barracks, he looked around somewhat uncertainly. He recalled a barren site. This place was full of fir trees that had grown up in the seven decades since the prisoners had gone home.
He was greeted by the base's deputy joint commander, Col. William Percival, who offered a handshake, and later a hug inside a building now empty and bare of furniture.
"You remind us that . how you treat somebody defines who we are," Percival said. "There are times, even today, when we may want to forget that. And you let us know that's a lesson not to be forgotten."
Grawe then went for lunch at a base dining hall.
He piled his plate full of a noodle casserole, and sat down to eat one more ample meal served up by the U.S. Army. This time, as a free man.
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Information from: The Seattle Times, http://www.seattletimes.com
- By LISA PEMBERTON The Olympian
OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) — First-time parents Brandon Thomas and Kaitlin Yoder of Tumwater weren't expecting to have their twins until January.
But babies Kora and Cullen began their entrance into the world earlier this month at Capital Medical Center in Olympia. They were born 16 weeks early by C-section and transferred to the neonatal intensive care unit at MultiCare Tacoma General Hospital in Tacoma.
Cullen, who weighed 1 pound, 8 ounces at birth, suffered a bilateral brain bleed, and lived for 46 hours.
"If he had survived, he would have had severe cognitive and development issues, probably in a wheelchair and unable to speak or eat on his own," Thomas told The Olympian.
But his sister, Kora, born weighing 1 pound, 4 ounces, is thriving more than anyone expected.
"She's the strongest person I think I've yet to meet," Thomas said. "All of the nurses are surprised with how much she moves. . She is extremely feisty."
Brad Thomas of Tumwater described his new granddaughter as "about the size of your hand, maybe slightly larger. Very tiny."
She opened one of her eyes for the first time last Thursday.
"She's doing good," the grandpa said. "They're putting some milk on a Q-tip and she sucks it off a Q-tip. They were thinking today (Friday) they might be able to take the breathing tube out and she might be able to breathe on her own."
Brad Thomas has begun an online fundraiser to collect donations for the family's medical and transportation expenses. Kora will likely spend the next four months at Tacoma General, family members said.
Brandon Thomas, who has a temporary job at the state Department of Fish & Wildlife that ends in November, said they plan to use some of the donations for Cullen's memorial service and burial costs.
They haven't had a chance to hold Kora yet. Cullen died in his mom's arms.
"I was just cradling his head and we were just comforting him the best we could," Thomas recalls.
Even though he's had a tough first week of parenthood, Brandon Thomas, who grew up in Lacey and graduated from Timberline High School, said it's been an incredible experience. He said he's so proud of his son and daughter.
"As soon as I saw them . so much love and happiness washed over me, and they were the two most beautiful things I've seen in my life," he said. "I just kind of instantly want to cry when I talk about it."
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Information from: The Olympian, http://www.theolympian.com
Vacant Tucson stores could transform into new housing
