A young Second Lieutenant walked into the repo-depo, looking for thirty men to augment his ambulance company, their AGCT scores and their prowess as softball players being his chief criteria.

“There’s a guy still in the hospital who’s a pretty good ball player,” he was told.

The officer went to the hospital and there met Corporal Frederick John Patterson.  The two talked for a while.  Fred had been through hell—and looked it.  The officer had seen plenty of battle fatigue casualties, but Fred was, in his words “The worst case of battle fatigue I had ever seen.”

Yet he saw something in Fred and decided to take him.  Corporal Patterson became an ambulance driver for the 599^th Ambulance Company.  At first, some of the other men were afraid of him.  He still had that “one thousand yard stare” that men who had been in heavy combat possessed.  He had killed people.  But when Fred showed leadership ability, the officer made him a squad leader, in charge of six ambulances.

Perhaps it was the confidence the Lieutenant had placed in Fred that one day prompted him to approach his commanding officer with a photograph.  In the picture was a beautiful young woman standing in front of a fence post.

“Who is this?” inquired the officer.

“This is my sister Peggy,” Corporal Patterson replied.

“May I have her address?”

At the time Peggy was working at a munitions factory, doing her part for the war effort and corresponding with half the men of the 1941 Homer City High School senior class, who were off to the war.  Every day she would return from her job and find a stack of mail from lonely servicemen all over the world.  In addition to the Homer Highers, Fred had given out her address to several of his buddies.

“Don’t give out my address to any more GIs,” Peggy wrote to him.  Fred wrote her back.

“All right, I won’t.  But I really think you should answer Lieutenant Ward’s letter.”  Thus began a correspondence from which came my branch of the Ward family.  My parents were married on January 30, 1946, just twenty-five days after they first met face to face.  Their marriage lasted fifty-seven years, until my father passed away on April 29, 2002 of a sudden heart attack.  My mother lived on three and one half years, until she was claimed by cancer on October 16, 2005.

I will here relate one more incident in Fred’s relationship with my father that took place while they were together in France, in route with the rest of the American army to Germany.  One of the best, most versatile vehicles produced for our military during World War Two was the jeep.  Both the Ford and Willys companies produced them.  Willys produced the more jeeps, but the Fords were faster and better all around.  My father had his own personal Ford, which he closely guarded.

One night, Fred imbibed in a little too much chocolate milk and decided to see what my father’s jeep could do.  A little cross-country mountain climbing through brush and boulders satisfied his curiosity as to the jeep’s capabilities.  In other words, he wrecked the engine.  Now what was he going to do?

Fred coaxed an ambulance driver to tell Lieutenant Ward that his ambulance had broken down.  Fred had been forced to borrow the officer’s jeep because it was the only one that could tow the ambulance up and over a steep mountain road.  He was sorry about the jeep, but the ambulance had been saved.  My father saw through the story, but let the incident slide.

Fred stayed with my father all the way to the end of the war.  Because he had accumulated so many points, he was one of the first to be sent home.  He sailed to New York and there underwent a physical examination at Fort Hamilton, prior to his army discharge.  It was discovered that he had been born with a defective heart and should have never been accepted into the army.  One doctor wanted to do more tests and perhaps fix his problem, but Fred wanted to go home.  And so he was discharged.

Fred became a barber and worked in various shops in downtown San Diego, where he made his home.  Periodically, he would come over to our home while I was growing up.  I remember once getting into a verbal brawl with my parents.  Afterwards Fred beckoned me to come to him.  “You’re a bad boy,” he told me.  And then, almost in the same breath, he opened his wallet and gave me a dollar.  I think the dollar was intended to encourage me to be respectful of my parents—not a reward for having been otherwise.  I also remember sitting in a chair in the back patio of our home at 1269 Santa Barbara Street while Fred cut my hair.

Fred, who seemed lethargic most of the time, would come alive when my father played his jazz.  He always requested Erskine Hawkin’s 1945 hit “Tippin’ In” whenever he came to our house.

Fred’s defective heart finally caught up with him.  He died alone from a heart attack in his downtown San Diego hotel room on January 13, 1961.  He was buried at the Fort Rosecrans National Military Cemetery in Point Loma.  He never married and left no children.