To California

Born in Salem on Jan. 21, 1927, Lewis’ family moved to Long Beach, Calif., six months after he was born. His father took a job with Firestone. The family was eating lunch in their split-level home when a 6.4-magnitude earthquake rocked the Southern California city.

“When it happened, I fell back and slid into the front room,” Lewis said.

The family soon returned to Salem and lived on Lewis’ grandfather’s property.

The grandfather maintained an orchard and fruit stand, and Lewis’ parents built a restaurant to go with it.

Lewis’ father planted a victory garden and gas rationing began when the United States entered World War II at the end of 1941. In the fall of 1943, just a few months before he was to turn 18, Lewis bought a train ticket to Portland. He planned to join the Merchant Marines, without his parents’ knowledge.

Once he got off the train, two men approached him and asked him if he was Glenn Lewis. He said yes and they told him to follow them. They went to the police station where his parents eventually met up with him and read him the riot act for taking off.

Lewis told them he just wanted to be a Merchant Marine. They drove him to the enlistment center and the nearly 18-year-old spoke with a recruiter. Despite Lewis’ enthusiasm, the recruiter said the boy was too young to enlist.

“That just dropped the bucket from under me,” Lewis said.

Getting the call

He returned home, turned 18 and finished his junior year at Salem High School. In August 1944, he enlisted with the U.S. Naval Reserve and was called up the next month.

Naval boot camp was in Farragut, Idaho, north of Coeur d’Alene. At the end of it, Lewis hadn’t qualified for any other college or training, so he and many others below him alphabetically in his group were designated Seabees. They trained outside Los Angeles before departing for the Pacific Theater in early 1945.

It took 44 days and 44 nights for Lewis and his fellow Seabees to reach the Phillipines. They went across the Equator and Guadalcanal, where fighting between American and Japanese forces was ongoing.

Lewis also encountered a typhoon.

“That whole ship just shudders. You wonder if you’re going to make it because you think the bolts are popping,” he said.

Lewis was in the Headquarters Company and was in charge of making sure food shipments arrived, were accounted for and made it to the galley. Not directly involved in fighting, he did encounter a few night alerts when bombs dropped near him. And there was the weather.

“Everyday at noon, not a cloud in the sky and it would rain and rain hard. Fifteen minutes later, you didn’t even know it had rained,” he said.

Throughout the late spring and early summer of 1945, all military personnel were on 24-hour notice to ship out. No one knew why but Lewis later learned it was for a potential invasion of Japan. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August brought about the Japanese surrender and the discontinuing of the alert.

Lewis moved on to China after the surrender. His ship went by Okinawa, where a typhoon had washed dozens of troop ships onto the shore.

The ship eventually landed at a city Lewis called Tsingtao. After the war, he was never able to locate the city on a map. One of his sons eventually noticed that Tsingtao is the name of a Chinese beer, and Lewis remembered the city had a brewery.

Boy guards

The Seabees stayed in what may have been a warehouse. Chinese boys guarded the building with guns as long as their bodies. One day the young guards were playing with a Chinese grenade made from bamboo. They activated it and threw it into a field but it didn’t detonate.

“They went over and picked it up and brought it back. You should have seen us, we were like ants,” Lewis said.

In early 1946, Lewis had the opportunity to go on leave to Peking, now named Beijing. It was supposed to only be a three-day trip, but snow began falling in the city once Lewis’ plane landed, delaying him for seven days in the massive Chinese city.

Memories of Peking

A seven-course meal in celebration of the Chinese New Year and touring sites such as the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square are among Lewis’ memories.

Now retired, Lewis has thought about returning to China and seeing some of those attractions again and ones he didn’t get to see, such as the Great Wall. Ill health prevented him from making the trip with one of his sons two years ago, but the Asian nation isn’t far from his thoughts.

“Every time I see something about China, I always look for Beijing because every place they show I’ve seen,” he said.