American Legacies Organization, Inc.

The whole time that we were on the front it rained, day and night. So, I suppose that did not make it any easier. They told us that it would probably rain for at least two more months. I was wet and scared, dug into a little three foot fox hole, and seeing my first action of the war. One of the two other boys whom I came into this outfit with were wounded on the front. He was only a few yards away from me when he was hit. It was just an arm wound, so he was all right, but it definitely indoctrinated us into the combat life.

In 1950, Elizabeth McCaughen was 23 years old, a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, where she earned her Bachelors in Psychology in 1948, and was currently enrolled in the Masters program at the same University. 29-year-old Harry Blagbrough was working for the Fish and Wildlife Service. Little did these two young people know that their paths were about to cross, and that neither of their lives was ever going to be the same again.

There were six of the black, eight week old pups in the cardboard box when we looked inside. All the pups looked fat and healthy except one. For some odd reason, his tail was only a stub and he was clearly the runt of the litter. He apparently didn’t realize he was small as he bulled his way right up to the front of the box, so he could get his fair share of our attention.

Hello, Miss Thuerk, he said with a smile. If you’d like a ride home, Ill be getting off work in five minutes. That’s my car across the street. He nodded toward his blue convertible, a 1934 blue Buick Roadster. Go ahead and sit in the car. Thank you. Adeline climbed in and admired the car while she waited. Johnny Sundblad drove her home without much conversation, but a week later he came into the Royal Blue and asked Charlie Thuerk if he could take his daughter to a movie theater that night.

In the 30s young men and women courted by seeing each other in church, or attending a church singing, or it might be dinner on the ground after a revival, but always in public, never going somewhere alone. Young men living in the country had to walk everywhere, their family’s mule had to rest so as to be strong for plowing the next day.

Ruth Stauffer was born in 1922, in a small farm town outside of Zurich Switzerland. She has known her husband Ed, since she was two years old she met him at her neighbors house. They married after Ed finished college, and some time later - in 1954, they moved to the United States.

We landed in Papua New Guinea on August 16th, and I got my first glimpse of the jungle, and jungle life. The natives there were, in our Western eyes, uncivilized. These people looked exactly like exotic pictures that I had seen when in school. They wore very few clothes and always carried bamboo knives. The jungle was thick like pea soup and hilly, and there was grass that grew eight feet tall!

This is the Army

As I listened to some of the stories this gentle man was telling, I decided to ask him if he would mind giving me a private audience, so I could write down some of his stories and pass them along to others. This is the story of that mild mannered gentleman named Cliff W. Olson.

From the time I was an 8-year-old tad in 1933 living with an aunt - my moms sister - in University City, Mo., - to 1965 when I was 40 and living here in Moreno Valley, Ca., I always wanted to be some kind of writer... Its really not a long story, well not THAT long of a story.