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Veteran Learned Service about More than Fighting the Japanese
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Sunday, November 12, 2017
 

STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

Fred Naumann joined the Navy because, as a landlubber from Minnesota, he’d never seen the ocean.

He had no idea when he enlisted that the ocean would become his biggest enemy as he carried out his duties during World War II.

“What made my tour of duty scary was the typhoons. They rolled us around and one sank our ship. We had a typhoon that lasted a week between Guam and Okinawa, and the waves were 55 feet high—they came up to the top of our bridge and ripped the lifeboats off our ship.”

He paused.

“I didn’t know I could get seasick before I went in.”

Naumann, who has lived in Hailey since 1970, was among more than a hundred veterans and family members who took part Saturday in the third annual Veterans Day appreciation lunch held by Higher Ground Sun Valley and The Senior Connection.

“Veterans wrote a blank check made payable to the United States of America,” Senior Connection Director Teresa Beahen Lipman told listeners as they munched on cranberry-stuffed ham and bread pudding served up by Senior Connection Chef Erik Olson. “We are the home of the free because of the brave in this room.”

Higher Ground Director Kate Weihe concurred: “To see so many veterans gathered together and getting a chance to pay tribute to them is very special for all of us.”

Naumann took his seat at a table with his fellow WWII veterans Tommy Farr and Bill Brandt as they kidded Navy man Tom Perry that he’d joined the Navy because he couldn’t get into the Air Force.

Naumann enlisted as soon as he got out of high school at age 18. He was sent to Farragut Naval Training Station at the south end of Lake Pend Oreille in North Idaho for boot camp.

There, where the Navy had a submarine test facility, the freshly shorn Naumann attended quarter master school, learned about navigation and signaling and practiced rowing on the lake.

He also helped put out forest fires that started during his tenure there.

He met his crew on an island off California where they loaded up and headed for the South Pacific. The ship spent the next several months dodging submarines as it went to the Caroline Islands, then to Guam, Okinawa and Lady Island in the Philippines.

“It took a long time at 12 knots an hour, which is about 1.5 miles an hour,” he recalled.

Naumann’s boat was a cargo boat carrying ammunition.

“It scared me when they loaded because they’d swing a crate full of bomb shells out, then bring it back in and drop it about five feet into the hold,” he recalled.

Naumann got out of the service in late 1946 and returned to Minnesota where he earned a degree in chemical engineering at the University of Minnesota. He made aircraft and destroyers, then moved west to ski Sun Valley when he got tired of the cold, grey Minnesota winters.

Now 91, he has spent the past several years asking Alexa questions, running the amateur radio club in the valley and attending lunch at The Senior Connection.

“I come here for the companionship—and Chef Erik’s turkey dinners. He’s quite the chef whereas my specialty is anything that comes out of a microwave.”

The day before the Veterans Day lunch, several Marines got together at the Senior Connection to eat birthday cake served up by Christina Cernansky, whose father is a retired Marine.

The celebration was held in honor of the Marine Corps’ 242nd anniversary.

Others started the celebration that morning at Starbucks and finished it off at Pioneer Saloon that evening, said Hayward Sawyer, a retired Marine captain from the Vietnam era.

“We cannot celebrate Veterans Day without thinking about those who paid the ultimate price,” he told listeners at lunch. “As Ronald Regan said, ‘They didn’t just lose one life. They lost two lives. They lost the life they were living and they lost the life they never got to live.”

There are about 1,200 veterans living in the valley, said Weihe.

Higher Ground, which provided 1,600 ski lessons last year, plans to debut a new program this winter called Mountain Marauders, in which the therapeutic recreation organization will organize weekly ski days for vets. (Call Monty Heath at 208-726-9298 for more information).

Higher Ground will also hold four week-long programs for veterans during the upcoming winter.

“We just want to try to get them out exercising,” said Jeff Burley, Higher Ground’s director of adaptive sports.

DID YOU KNOW?

Idaho’s Farragut Naval Training Station had 55,000 people at its peak in 1942, making it the largest city in Idaho. It was the second largest training center in the world behind Naval Station Great Lakes near Chicago at the time.

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