Memorial Day: The Story of Eddie, Bobby, and Al

By Hans Zeiger

Puyallup Rotary

May 26, 2010

 

With Memorial Day weekend coming up, I wanted to share with you a story that I have been learning over the course of the past few years. It’s a story about three farmkids who grew up near the intersection of Fruitland and Pioneer more than 70 years ago, and as young men, made tremendous sacrifices so that you and I can live in a free land. Their names were Albert Tresch, Eddie Myers, and Bobby Bigelow.

 

Al Tresch was the son of a Swiss immigrant dairy farmer, a hard worker who saved up money from odd jobs in Tacoma to buy a big dairy farm in the valley. Their farm ran from Pioneer on the south to 17^th on the east and the Experiment Station on the west to the railroad tracks on the north. Now of course you’ll find some of the nicer homes in the valley there. The Tresch family’s little modest farmhouse sat where the Methodist Church stands today. There were three brothers, Albert, Robert, and Jim. Albert was the mischievous one in the family, and I’ll say more on that in a minute…

 

Bobby Bigelow grew up in a wonderful house on ten wooded acres across Pioneer from the Tresches, and across Fruitland from the Washington State College Experiment Station. His father was a farmer at the Station. He was a well-educated farmer, because he had a full bachelor of arts from Carroll College in Iowa. The Bigelows were a prominent family in the community. Bobby’s Aunt Tot was for many years the personal secretary to the great berry entrepreneur, Fair executive, and politician William Paulhamus, as well as Fair treasurer and city treasurer.

 

And Eddie grew up on the grounds of the Experiment Station, where his father worked as the foreman. His mother had two daughters from a previous marriage, one who was much older and the other, Marian, who was five or six years older than Eddie. Next door to the Myerses were the Kinseys. Essey Kinsey and Eddie were the same age, so they grew up together. Since there were no boys in the Kinsey family, Essey told me that “Eddie was like a brother.” In the evenings after school at Maplewood Elementary, Essey and Eddie, along with Ruthie and Bobby Bigelow and a few other neighborhood kids, played games in the fields.

         

And in their generation growing up in this little community, each of these kids from the corner of Fruitland and Pioneer had a distinct role to play. Eddie was the most popular kid in school. Everybody liked him because he had a way of making everybody feel welcome. He wasn’t a genius, and he repeated the first grade at Maplewood. But people liked him because he was the most joyful and the most caring guy you could find.

 

In the summers, Eddie went to YMCA camp on an island in Lake Tapps, in the days before Lake Tapps was surrounded by homes. In his first year at camp, Eddie was assigned to the same cabin with Frank Hanawalt and six others who were all slightly older. Despite Eddie’s junior status, Hanawalt told me, “He was the person that added life to our cabin. He was so funny.”

 

A few years later, Hanawalt would sit in the stands at Viking Field, surrounded by his classmates and most of the town, as Eddie Myers grabbed hold of the punts from fourth down. “I remember the determination with which he would grab that punt and tuck it away and take off.” Eddie was only 145 pounds, but as his teammate and friend Don Henderson told me, “Eddie Myers was fearless.”

 

Most mornings, Eddie walked along Pioneer to Puyallup High School, and most afternoons he walked home. On the mornings when Eddie didn’t walk, he and Essey met at the bus stop and sat together on the ride up Pioneer to the high school. Essey and Eddie shared their deepest secrets and consulted each other about their boyfriends and girlfriends.

 

When Manford Hogman moved with his family from Illinois to join the Puyallup Class of 1940 in its sophomore year, it was Eddie, along with Ray Glaser who later died in a wartime plane crash, and Glenn Todd, who made him feel welcome. The Class voted Eddie “Friendliest Guy” (Essey was “Friendliest Girl”).

 

Bobby was a quiet kid who spent much of his childhood exploring the DeCoursey woods and learning the local trees and flowers. He joined Boy Scout troop 65 in 1933. He loved to be outdoors. Not many people remember Bobby, because he was just so quiet. He kept to himself. But he was a good and loving brother to his two sisters, one who was older and one who was younger. I talked with both sisters about their brother. The younger sister, Ruth, told me that one early memory defines her brother. She was out in the big yard one day playing dolls and she called to her older sister to come out and play. Hector, the older one, was a tomboy, and she refused. And then Bobby came out and he said, “I’ll play with you.” And that small childhood gesture, which was repeated in other ways as they grew up, has stuck with her down through the years.

 

As for Al, he is well-remembered for all the wrong reasons. He was the dropout, the troubled teen, the overweight kid, the town bully. He dropped out of the fifth grade at Maplewood Elementary in the 1930s and became the town bully. If you talk to the old-timers around here, they’ll tell you that Al Tresch was a terror in town. He weighed over 300 pounds by the time he should have been in high school. They called him “Fat Tresch.”

 

Don Henderson, who passed away last month, was the greatest storyteller of his generation in Puyallup, and he shared with me his memories of Fat Tresch. “My father in law, Fred DeBon, had a vegetable market called the Queen City Market. My father in law was a guy who had everything perfect. I used to work on Sunday mornings and Fat Tresch would come in there and pull an orange out of the bottom. When you do that the whole pile falls. I’d had enough. I picked up a tomato and let it fly. He was madder than a hornet. He chased me into the alley and fell down. I sat on him and when I sat on him he couldn’t get up. My friend Rudvelt came by and I asked him to sit on him while I got the police. Everybody was afraid of him.”

 

Jim Riley, PHS class of 1936, shared a Fat Tresch story as well. Jim was working as a ticket-taker at the Liberty Theater, and he was a little guy and frail from serious asthma. One night, Fat Tresch walked into the theater lobby. He demanded to get in without a ticket. He said that he always got in free. Jim says, “Not with me you don’t.” “Oh yeah?” Al says, “Well I’ll beat you up.” And Jim looked at him right in the groin and said, “I’ll get in one blow before you do.” And as Jim told it, “He walked away and never came back.”

 

Eddie graduated 70 years ago in June of 1940 and left for Washington State College. He was a couple years into his education when he entered the Army. He began officer training in 1943, moving on for infantry training at Fort Benning, Georgia. Eddie was a natural leader, and he personified the motto of the infantry—“Follow me.” Assigned to the 417^th Infantry Regiment, 76^th Division, Lt. Myers met up with his men at Camp McCoy, Wisconsin. He was made a rifle platoon leader, which meant that he led a rifle squad of nine men, alongside two other rifle squads and a weapons squad. Through the spring and summer and into the fall of 1944, the 417^th trained for the liberation of Europe.

 

Lt. Howard Randall from Texas joined the 76^th as a rifle platoon leader in June. Since he was new to the platoon, he was at a disadvantage in relating to the men, but he quickly observed that Lt. Myers had won them over. Eddie made himself available to the GIs to assist them with personal troubles or to reassure them about the stresses of war. As he had done on the island in Lake Tapps as a kid, he made camp life humane. He was a counselor and friend. Some men in the platoon were illiterate, so Eddie took time to transcribe their letters home. I interviewed Howard Randall, and he told me this: “He was better than the rest of us lieutenants. The rest of us went to town and had beers. Whenever we went into town he stayed back with his platoon.”

 

On Thanksgiving Day, 1944, the 76^th boarded the troop transport USS Brazil out of Boston. The ship docked at Southampton a week and a half later, then the 76^th marched through the New Forest to Bournemouth on the southern coast. As Christmas approached, Eddie was like a father, helping the illiterate men to write letters home and entertaining them with his wit. As at Camp McCoy, there were opportunities to go out with the officers. But as Randall recalls, “Even when some regimental girls in England put on a dance, he stayed back.”

 

Just before Christmas, the troops at Bournemouth learned that the Germans had gone back on the offensive at the Ardennes Forest on the Western Front. The 76^th was ordered to meet up with General Patton’s Third Army as it fought to keep its ground. They would rendezvous in Luxembourg, between France and Germany.

 

It was the middle of January when the 76^th embarked for France in armada. Snow was falling on Bournemouth as a hundred troop transports pushed out. The boats plied the waves at about 11 knots per hour because of the U-boat danger.

 

Across the channel, the 76^th marched from Limesy to Luxembourg in less than two weeks through the snow, arriving in Junglinster on January 26. Even without the impending crossfire, the winter was deadly. Snow blanketed the ground. Inadequately booted and clothed, the men struggled to survive.

 

In the Luxembourg winter of 1945, Lt. Myers was almost, as his football teammate Don Henderson had known him at Viking Field in the good years, “fearless.” But as Howard Randall remembers, “We were all afraid that we were going to get killed or wounded in combat. After seeing the figures from Omaha Beach, we knew that it was pretty bad. We also knew that their tanks were better, and their 88-mm gun was better. They were a veteran-trained army, most had been fighting for five or six years, and we were brand new. We hadn’t been in combat at all.”

 

Infantrymen were a minority of servicemen and a majority of casualties. The rifle infantry accounted for 83 percent of casualties. By war’s end, three of six officers in Eddie’s company had been killed. The other three were wounded. One wounded officer became mentally unstable. 

 

The first officer in Eddie’s company to be severely wounded in the Battle of the Bulge was the company commander. Then the executive officer was killed. With no time to mourn the dead, Eddie took over as company commander.

 

In mid-February, several hundred men of the 76^th penetrated the Ziegfried Line. They crossed the Zauer River through German-occupied territory. On the other side, Lt. Myers led his men as they climbed about 450 feet up a mine-laden escarpment. At the top was an obstacle course like no other. Stretching 1,000 yards across and three and a half miles into the distance were 144 German pillboxes. Inch by inch, pillbox by pillbox, the infantrymen made their way through. Despite their insufficient clothing and shoes, the 76^th had a fighting advantage over the Germans, whose force had been weakened by Russian assaults on the Eastern front.

 

It was after two days of rest beyond the Ziegfried line that the 76^th began an assault on the town of Welshbillag. Two-hundred fifty men charged into the town.

 

Two German tanks fired rounds of 88-mm rifle shells into the advancing Americans. Some men were killed instantly. A shell landed beside Lt. Randall; it was a dud. Lt. Myers was hit in the stomach. He was losing blood quickly. Some of his men helped him into a barn. Most of the platoon continued on, fighting through the night. Eddy sat up in the barn in agonizing pain. Eddie was 21. 

 

That same month that Eddie was killed, Bobby was in hard combat in the Philippines.

 

After high school, Bobby went off to Oregon State to study forestry. And it was there that Bobby was drafted for the Army. He went to Basic Training in Texas. In basic training, he formed a strong friendship with a quiet young Japanese-American man named Frank Yano. They had similar personalities, similar interests. After boot camp, Bobby went on for cavalry training at Fort Bliss, Kansas with the 1^st Cavalry, 5^th Regiment. Frank was assigned to the segregated all-Japanese American 442^nd Infantry Regiment, training at Camp Shelby in Mississippi.

 

And before Frank was to depart for service in Europe unit, he asked Bobby to be the best man in his wedding.

 

By the summer of 1944, Frank was in Europe, where he and his two brothers in the 442^nd saw some of the toughest fighting in Europe. Frank earned the Bronze Star for helping to rescue wounded comrades. Bobby was with the 1^st Cavalry as they took back the Admiralty Islands, and then they waited there for the invasion of the Phillipines.

 

Bobby was in the fifth assault wave into the Philippines. “I guess by now you have read all about us in the paper,” he wrote home to his mother on November 6. “It’s quite a place, we traded stuff and got chickens several times so have had fried chicken. Lots of sweet potatoes and corn too. The people here are sure glad to see us come and are a great help to us.” On Thanksgiving Day, as the Army fought its way through the Philippines, a dinner of roast turkey and three fresh eggs was sent out to the men on the lines. 

 

From a foxhole, he wrote to his mother on December 4. The Army, he said, was “doing a swell job” as it pushed its way to Manila. “Right now I’ve got three inches growth of whiskers and haven’t washed in just about that length of time.”

 

But the road to Manila was hard. They fought at Leyte and Luzon. Bobby’s high school classmate Del Martinson was in the infantry, and he described for me the nightmare of a Japanese ambush in the Philippines, dropping to the ground and laying there absolutely helpless with bullets whizzing just above his head. And he described the sensation of wanting to get up and run away but somehow being unable to move. I remember how he put it: “The Lord was pushing me down.” Martinson’s squad leader was killed in that ambush.

 

And in the midst of things like this, Bobby provided medical aid to countless men along the way. By the first week of February, the 1^st Cavalry was in Manila. They participated in the liberation of 3,000 civilian POWs at the University of Santo Tomas. And then in combat on the Jones Bridge over the Pasig River, Bobby went out to aid a wounded soldier. And as he bent down to help, he too was shot. He died shortly after that. And so, when I see the Veteran’s Memorial in Pioneer Park, with the soldier bending down and reaching out to help, I think first of Pvt. Robert Bigelow.

 

Somebody else who thought first of Bobby was his best friend Frank Yano. And a few months before he was killed, Bobby learned by letter that Frank’s wife had given birth to a girl. And in honor of Bobby, the girl’s name was Roberta.

 

Well, what about Albert Tresch, the town bully? He ran away and joined the Army in 1939. He was in the Philippines by 1941, and then he was fighting to defend Coreggidor as the Japanese took over more and more of the island. And in the final days there, Albert Tresch and another young soldier put their lives at risk. There was a Japanese machine gun nest that got in the way of the soldiers, and Albert volunteered to go around with a grenade to take out the nest. Well, they succeeded, and for that he was awarded the Silver Star.

 

But it would be years before Albert Tresch saw Puyallup again. As you know, Coreggidor fell, and the survivors of that battle were taken prisoner by Japan. For the next four years, Albert struggled to survive, first along the trail that became known as the Bataan Death March, and then in a hellish place called Fukuoka not far from Nagasaki, where he spent those dark days trying to survive. Most of the men in those camps, and along that Death March, never made it.

 

Most of what I know about the Bataan Death March comes from a survivor I knew named Bryce Lilly, who grew up in Tacoma and just passed away last year. Mr. Lilly told about the horrors of Coreggidor, where he was shot in the head, bandaged up, and fought on. He recalled being fed nothing but a handful of rice and a cup of water as they marched 70 miles in 100 degree heat. He recalled being packed into a transport ship with dead and dying men. In Japan, he worked as a slave laborer in a steel mill. Before the war, Mr. Lilly was 175 pounds. When the war was over, he was down to 70 pounds.

 

Like Bryce Lilly, Albert Tresch struggled to survive. He knew that freedom was waiting on the other side.

 

To him, home meant something special. To Pvt. Albert Tresch, freedom was a place called Puyallup, Washington.

 

And he finally made it home that fall of 1945. Not long after Albert had stepped through the farmhouse door at the dairy farm on Pioneer, he asked his brother Jim to take him up for an airplane ride. Jim had just gotten out of the Army Air Corps, and Albert had never been in an airplane before. After years of confinement, he longed to see Puyallup from the sky. Jim and Albert drove across town to the little airfield beside the river. Jim arranged to rent a plane for the afternoon, and in a few minutes the brothers were airborne.

 

Below them, returned soldiers made their catch. Little cars drove along the Levee Road, and up and down Meridian, bearing neighbors on their way back to the hope of a normal life.

 

But after all the hardships of what Al had experienced, there must be some indestructible playfulness about the human spirit, to do what Jim and Al did there in the sky that fall afternoon. 

 

Jim came in low over downtown, over Pioneer Park, over Puyallup High School, and then they flew low over Pioneer Street, disturbing more than a few residents unaccustomed to an airplane among the local traffic. A few dutiful citizens, conditioned by an era of blackouts and night watches, phoned the police.

 

But the Tresch brothers had taken to the airspace of their parents’ dairy farm, circling round the cows as they grazed in the pasture, startling them into a desperate trot. Near the fleeing cows stood their strong old Swiss dairyman father, his fist raised to the heavens as the plane swooped up to avoid the old growth cedar tree in the middle of the pasture. But they were too close, for the wing clipped off the top of the tree, and as the cedar boughs came in for a landing amid the riled bovines, mother Tresch was out on the back porch, hands on hips, rejoicing silently in the homecoming of her sons, also hoping that they would come home alive for dinner. Al was completely thrilled. That, to Al Tresch, the hero of Bataan, was freedom.

 

By the time they landed at the airstrip, every police car in town was waiting at the end of the runway. Out stepped the daredevil flier and the prodigal town bully. Jim rolled up his sleeve to present the cops with his ruptured duck tattoo. They let him off. Obeying the speed limits, Jim and Al drove home for dinner.

 

In the years after the war, life moved on, and many in that generation tried to forget the pain of the war. When somebody asked Al if he would share his experiences about the war at the Puyallup Kiwanis, he declined. Al died a number of years ago, and Jim Tresch passed away earlier this month.

 

Frank Yano became a postal carrier but he said little about the war. In the 1960s, Roberta Yano made a weeklong visit to Puyallup to meet Bobby Bigelow’s family, and she and her father kept in touch with them over the years. Bobby’s best friend Frank Yano died in 2008.

 

And about 20 years ago, Howard Randall traveled with Bill Moyers of PBS to visit a Luxembourg cemetery, the cemetery in which General George Patton is buried. Randall guided Moyers to a special part of the cemetery. Randall stopped in front of a white cross and pointed at the name: Edward J. Myers. And finally through tears he told of the man he and many others came to love. He recalled how he was a good man, how he was like a father to his men, and how Eddie hailed from a place called Puyallup, Washington. 

 

Next month will mark the 70^th Puyallup High School commencement after Eddie Myers’ class of 1940 graduated. Few of that generation are with us any longer. But we can honor those who sacrificed by learning and telling the story of that greatest generation. I hope that my story about Bobby, Eddie, and Al does some justice to their memory. Thanks for letting me share it with you. 

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