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WWII service launched vet into active life

Scott Swanson

Keith James sits in his living room in a rented apartment in Sweet Home, telling about his life.

Nearby, a display case is full of medals and framed documents – a letter of thanks from President Harry Truman, a discharge certificate from the Coast Guard. There’s a photo of Keith with a giant marlin he landed in a billfish tournament in Hawaii in 1972.

Nearby is a photo of Keith operating a giant 4000 Manitowoc crane in Hawaii, where he cleared rocks to build the Punakau boat harbor, and worked on the construction of Kona International Airport at Keahole and two big observatories on Mauna Kea.

“I’ve been busy,” he says, with a grin.

Keith’s adult life started with a one-year stint in the Merchant Marines at the end of World War II.

He joined in May 1944, right after he turned 16.

“My mom signed for me,” he said.

He spent that year on ships running supplies to the South Pacific – “the Carolines, Iwo Jima, Saipan, Tinian – all of them, just about.”

“We were running out of supplies because the Japanese were sinking lot of merchant ships,” Keith said. “It was still going pretty good. A lot of those islands, they didn’t get a lot of those islands cleaned out until ’47 because there were still a lot of Japs fighting. They wouldn’t give up, in caves and that stuff.

“There were planes coming over and shooting at us.”

The Liberty ships were armed with 5- and 3-inch, and 20-millimeter guns, with Navy crew members to operate them.

“We never did get seriously hit or anything like that,” said Keith, adding that he did take a piece of shrapnel in the ankle. “But they sunk a lot of ships. Submarines and stuff like that.”

Nonetheless, he saw “a lot of the world” in a year at sea.

After his discharge, following the war’s official end in 1945, Keith move on to sign on for two more years in the Army Air Corps, aiming to become a pilot.

“But the war was so close to end, they didn’t want to spend money to do it, so I just got out,” Keith said. “They just gave up.”

He spent his entire Army career in Texas, most of it at Shepherd Field, near Wichita Falls.

“I spent so much time in Texas, I called my mom ‘Ma’am’ when I got out,” he joked.

Keith returned to his hometown of Santa Paula, Calif., a citrus-growing town just south of Ventura, where he got into heavy construction as an operating engineer.

He went to Hawaii as a crane operator, and stayed for 18 years.

“I worked in Alaska, South America, every darned place. I like construction.”

Later, he operated two real estate offices.

Keith wound up in Sweet Home two years ago when he moved here from Mountain Home, Ark., to aid his daughter, who is disabled after a severe car crash, he said.

He’s still active.

A reporter who stopped by recently found Keith busily polishing his car windows with a bottle of cleaner.

He’d returned not long before from a trip to southern Oregon, where he’d taken a friend to see a home he built in Shady Cove in the early 1980s and to Crater Lake.

He used to visit Steelhead Strength and Fitness every other day, but after injuring his neck in a fall earlier this year in a fall, he now rides a stationary bike in his apartment, while he watches TV.

“I pushed it pretty hard for my age,” he said. “Most people don’t believe I’m 92.”

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