Earl Louis Beaudry

I joined up as a mechanical, mechanic. I had taken courses in diesel engineering and that’s what I joined up as, as a mechanic. But in the end, it wound up that about all I did was a lot of driving because all the vehicles we had were brand spanking new and didn’t need anything other than an oil change, and that’s about it. Where we were, I kind of enjoyed it. It was just a change from a country boy from out on the farm, you know. I was in the city now. I wound up for the longest time driving the commanding officer. As long as I kept my shoes shined and my buttons polished and got out of the car, and saluted him, opened the door and all that, like I was like a chauffeur, that’s about the size of it; only there was a lot of military aspect like when I would open the door for him and salute him as he got in and went back, and got behind the driver’s seat and drove to wherever he wanted to go. Yeah, I just, I was like a taxi driver. We were attached to a fighter squadron out there. We were in the southern tip of Alaska which wasn’t really that far from Canada. We lived in tents up there. When I say tents, it sounds awful, but we had a wooden floor and the walls in our tent were up about four feet all around and then the canvas was on the top. And then we had an oil-burning heater in there which was, the Americans looked after filling it, you know, making sure we had oil in it to burn to keep warm and all that. Actually, we never really had that much contact with the Americans. I never really understood the set-up because the American army was based there. Their base camp was about three or four miles from where our camp was; and they, it was their military base, like they had the hangars and the runways, and everything was looked after by the American military, but it was a Canadian air force. We had a fighter and a bomber squadron stationed there, which was actually, I don’t know how many miles north of Prince Rupert, B.C. that we were, it was really the southern tip of Alaska. Anyway, I enjoyed it up there, except for the weather. The weather was always, the winters was wet and very cool.