Fort Worden State Park
Oral History Program

From the interview with LKF of Chattaroy, WA conducted by Patience Rogge by phone from the Fort Worden History Center on January 29, 2008. LKF was a resident of the Fort Worden Juvenile Diagnostic and Treatment Center in 1957-58, when he was 14 years old. Here he describes life at the Center, where he lived in what is now the Coast Artillery Museum building:

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“We would go upstairs and we’d play cards. We had a pool table and a ping pong table. I played a lot of ping pong, I was real good at it. I learned how to play pool. Then when we had dinner, breakfast and dinner, they’d take us downstairs and we would go into the kitchen and walk past with our trays and they’d give us our food and we’d sit down and eat. When we were done, we’d dump our trays and go back upstairs. They would bring us our lunch upstairs. It was just cold sandwiches and stuff like that.

I remember kids smoking and they would take aspirins and grind them up and put them in cigarettes to get high. I tried that one time, that made me sicker than s---. There were always bullies and you had to stay away from them. I never had any major bad experiences or anything like that.

I actually thought Fort Worden was a good place. I made a home out of it. I enjoyed it because I didn’t have a home life and I didn’t have association with other kids that were on the same level with me and I enjoyed that working there.

I vaguely remember that I got to go home for Christmas and I had to come back. I rode a Greyhound bus all the way home (to Spokane). They took me to Seattle and put me on the Greyhound. When I came back I had to meet the station wagon that brought me back to the Fort. My stay, looking back on it, was pretty pleasurable.”

From the interview with James Deen of Port Townsend, WA conducted by Mona Lou Stefflre at the Fort Worden History Center on May 15, 2003. Mr. Deen served in the US Army at the early warning radar site atop Artillery Hill in Fort Worden from 1959 to 1961, when he was reassigned to Site 93 Nike Hercules in Kingston, WA for three years. Here he describes an incident that occurred during his time in Kingston

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“Fort Worden was a dream, but you went from a dream to a nightmare there. There was a battery commander, Captain J.F.C., who was just absolutely terrible. Kingston was considered Stalag 93. We were on a missile site and we had 24 hours on and 24 hours off, but you got a lot more on than off.

I was a buck sergeant. One time, I was getting ready to leave shift in the morning and take my crew with me. There had been a hail storm with a tremendous amount of hail. The platoon leader, Lieutenant Butler let me know that before I could leave, the Captain had said that there was white stuff all over his lawn and we had to get rid of it. So we got these big old street brooms and we were out sweeping the damn hail off the grass because this idiot didn’t want white stuff on his grass. That’s just an example of the kind of person we were dealing with there.”

Excerpt from an interview with Robert W. Klum of King City, OR conducted by phone by Patience Rogge on December 4, 2008 from the Fort Worden History Center. Mr. Klum served in the U.S. Army 369th Engineer Boat and Shore Regiment from 1951 to 1953 at Fort Worden. Here he describes an incident that proved rather embarrassing for his commanding officer:

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“The master boat must have been probably 80 feet long. It was kind of like a PT boat, very fast, the colonel who was the head of our group rode on it. They called it a Q boat. The colonel got himself in big trouble one time. All the companies (you can imagine how many boats we had) and the Q boat left Fort Worden at 3:00 AM and headed for the San Juan Islands. I had no idea what we were going to do when we got there, but we went off to Blaine, WA, and anchored the boats just outside Blaine. You could see the beaches of Canada at night. We had a little fun sending light messages in Morse code, talking to sailors who were on the beach. When we woke up the next morning, it was foggy, very foggy. The Q boat went around and told us which way we were going to go, and then we would all follow.

We were underway about two hours, thinking we were heading toward the San Juan Islands. All of a sudden, a big Canadian destroyer pulled up alongside us, honking his horn and telling everybody to shut off their engines; that we were in Canadian waters and we didn’t have permission to be in Canadian waters and we were all under arrest. The colonel who was on the Q boat that was leading us was very embarrassed and spent quite a bit of time talking to the commander of the Canadian destroyer. He admitted he’d made a mistake and wanted help to try to find his way back home.”

Mr. Klum also shared his experiences in a slideshow he created. It has been converted to a PDF for easier download or viewing in your browser.

One Soldier Remembers Fort Worden (1.3MB)