Proud of my Dad today (on Veteran's Day) and always, for being such a great man! Here's an article about him.
A Veteran recalls Kodiak Experience - published on November 12, 2012 in the Kodiak Mirror
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| Jack is second from the right playing the saxophone |
Spring 1944 promised a surprise for both the civilian and military personnel of Naval Operating Base Kodiak. A press release announced that an all-girl dance band would arrive to perform for the whole community. Enticing ads appeared in the military newsletter and the Kodiak Daily Mirror. Flyers flew around town and anticipation grew. There were few enough women in Alaska, especially during the war years. The Navy had a local dance band on the island, but they were all men. This would be something different.
The band’s sax and clarinet player knew it would be more than just different. It would be a complete surprise.
The evening of the show, the naval auditorium filled with military and civilians. But it was mostly military men, anxious to get an eyeful of this all-girl band. With the curtain closed, and the band set up behind it, the lights dimmed and the sax and clarinet player placed his instrument to his lips and waited for the conductor’s signal.
Soon Glenn Miller style big band music filled the theater and the audience waited anxiously. As the curtain crept opened, the applause and cheers and hoots grew to a crescendo. Then, as the band came into full view, the sax and clarinet player recalled, dead silence ensued. Anyone who has performed on stage knows this can be frightening — audience reaction can turn in many directions. In the stillness, the band could feel the audience studying them, observing the dresses and wigs and makeup and high heel shoes.
Suddenly, the awkward silence turned to bursts of laughter and applause as the audience recognized the male members of the naval band and orchestra dressed in drag.
The sax and clarinet player was 21-year-old Jack Cooper. This summer, I met him and his daughter, Janine Cooper-Ayres, while I worked my way through Southeast Alaska as the naturalist aboard the cruise ship Sea Princess. This was his third cruise to Southeast Alaska. I asked his daughter if her father had any photographs and was willing to share his memories. Back home, Janine rounded up several of Cooper’s photographs from the period, interviewed him about his experiences during the war, and sent me the photos and the transcript. I thank her for help in writing this story. (Janine is a singer, songwriter and artist in her own right. Google her name to check out her work.)
Cooper was born in Plymouth, Penn. in 1923. His father was a professional musician who had a dance band, and Cooper grew up playing sax and clarinet at dances, theatrical events and on weekends. The family moved to Detroit, where Cooper graduated from high school. For a while, he worked at WXYZ-AM as the music librarian.
That’s where Cooper was, in the radio station’s newsroom, when Pearl Harbor was bombed. He was one of the first people in Detroit to learn of that event. A co-worker ripped the story off the Teletype and handed it to Cooper to take to the announcer. He and two of his buddies enlisted right away. Cooper went as a rated musician, since he felt that was the best way he could serve his country. He was 19 years old. He trained for six weeks at the Great Lakes Naval Training Facility in Illinois as a musician 2nd class. He also played drums , did shore patrol duty, and was assigned to the bugle corps. From there he went to Bremerton, Wash. before his assignment at Kodiak.
Cooper had never flown before, and he recalls the pilot making three attempts to land amid Kodiak’s steep mountains in the heavy fog and rain. It was autumn, and with the mild weather the landscape was still green. Kodiak was a frontier town to Cooper, with its muddy unpaved streets and its wooden sidewalks.
Rehearsals with the small band and occasionally with the larger 16-piece orchestra during the day kept him busy as well as the performances at night along with one or weekly radio broadcasts. His band played at many local dances and Cooper recalls the residents of Kodiak being very hospitable toward the military. His unit had other duties and chores, including keeping the recreation hall in good shape. On his days off, he fished for salmon and trout and viewed eagles, bear and other wildlife.
In addition to the all girl band program, Cooper recalls helping put on the largest stage production on Kodiak up to that time. They called it “This is the Navy.” Military personnel from all the branches of the service participated with the music, songs, costumes, stage scenery and lyrics. Many local civilians also took part. The show ran for several nights and got great reviews in the local newspaper.
After 10 months in Kodiak, Jack Cooper’s unit was sent back to the States, but Cooper hadn’t fulfilled his overseas duty, so he was transferred to Adak. He spent some time in Dutch Harbor awaiting transport, keeping busy on guard duty along the docks — four hours on, eight off — around the clock. The memory of the darkness and the cold, foggy and wet weather remains with him today.
Finally, he got a flight to Adak. It’s not so bad there, he was told — there’s a girl behind every tree. Of course, there were no trees on Adak and hardly a bush. (Today, a tiny grove of trees is ironically called the Adak National Forest). Cooper spent a year on Adak playing for dances with a seven piece jazz band. But he also trained to operate 20- millimeter anti-air craft guns, and was assigned to a bunker during general alarm alerts.
Among Cooper’s memories of Adak were its limited food supply, and the rare event of a beer shipment allowing every man two bottles. He recalls the erratic weather — listening to the hard rain on his Quonset hut roof while playing poker with friends. Then silence, and when the soldiers looked out there was nearly a foot of snow. By morning it had turned to rain and the snow was gone. Rain, snow, fog, ice, hurricane-force winds called williwaws, and crashing waves, especially on the Bering Sea side of the island. That was life on Adak.
Sunny days were so rare that, when they finally got one, the base commander declared it a holiday and gave everyone the day off. Cooper recalls the dark days of winter and the light days of summer — and a summer baseball game played at midnight.
While he was on Adak, President Roosevelt visited the island, the last military base he visited before his death. Cooper and the Navy band stood in the rain for an hour waiting for the President’s arrival. The band eventually greeted and saluted him as his motorcade drove by.
By December 1944, his time was up and he returned to Bremerton via a captured German luxury liner that had been converted to a troop ship. He recalls 20-foot to 30-foot seas and no one allowed on deck. Nearly half the troops on board became sick, and Cooper lost nearly 15 pounds on the 11-day voyage.
“When I walked off that ship,” he says, “I was carrying my duffle bag and alongside that was a diddy bag containing my personal effects plus my saxophone and clarinet cases. I was pretty weak, but I was so thrilled and happy to be back on land … I could’ve carried a two-ton elephant.”
When Cooper arrived in Washington, D.C., the war was still on. A two-week leave brought him back to Detroit, then to a music school in Virginia. Finally, he got an assignment as an armed guard at Camp Shelton in Norfolk, VA. There he recalls talking with many German prisoners of war. “We were in the base when the information came in,” he recalls. “The bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Two days later the Japanese surrendered.
“Thanks, but no thanks,” was his response to joining the Naval Reserve. With his honorable discharge, he returned to Detroit and got a B.S. in Business Administration from Lawrence Institute of Technology under the G.I. Bill, working odd jobs, including band gigs, to supplement his income.
During this time he met and married his wife, Irene. Together they raised four daughters. Today Cooper is 89-years-old, and lives in Grass Valley, CA with Irene.
Most of us know a little about World War II in Alaska — about the coastal defense forts, the bombing of Dutch Harbor and the war in the Aleutian Islands. But we know little about the personal lives of the thousands of individual soldiers stationed here. Their photographs and letters and stories are still in family hands.
Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower once said: “I know nothing which so improves the morale of the soldier as to see his unit, or his name, in print — just once.” Let his be a tribute in print to one veteran stationed in Alaska during World War II, and to the sacrifices he made — a small sampling of one soldier’s story.
Doug Capra is a writer who lives in Seward. This article was first printed in the Seward Journal.
