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Co op board - By Charles Sasser


“It doesn’t take a man long to live a life,” says Dale Shaw, who has done a lot of living in his 88 years. He stands in the summer sun of his spread in Buffalo Valley and gazes thoughtfully out over the pastureland where cattle graze. All he ever wanted to be was a cowboy. Instead, like fellow longtime board members serving in one of Oklahoma’s rural electric cooperatives, Robert Williams and Clinton Nesmith, he took time out from cowboying to go to war when “the Greatest Generation” broke the Axis assault on the world.


Shaw and his wife Mildred grew up on neighboring ranches in the mountains of southcentral Oklahoma, riding together saddle to saddle before the free range closed. He was on the streets of nearby Hartshorne when he heard about Pearl Harbor. Seven months later, he was at the barn milking one evening when neigh- bor Dub Fite rode up on his gelding.


“I’m joining the army, Dale. If you’ll go with me, we’ll stay together.” A number of other Latimer County men were also enlisting. Willard Griffi n would lose both legs in battle; Bud Frye would die in Europe. Like most country boys, Shaw had learned to shoot almost as soon as he could walk, often venturing into the bottoms during the Great Depression to shoot a squirrel for breakfast.


“Don’t let them know how good you can shoot,” his dad counseled. “You don’t want the infantry.”


Shaw did exactly what his dad told him not to do. In boot camp qualifi cations, he shot a near-perfect score with the heavy-kicking Springfi eld ’03. Somehow, the


army overlooked his marksmanship and sent him and Dub Fite to work the mo- tor pool on Guadalcanal with the 958th HAM (Heavy Automotive Maintenance Company). The two boyhood friends remained together throughout the war. The Japanese had evacuated Guadalcanal earlier that year of 1943 after major land, naval and air battles. Stray enemy soldiers still haunted the island, occa- sionally ambushing a lone American and, once, blowing up a U.S. ammo depot. In August 1944, the 3rd Marines and the Army’s 77th Infantry liberated Guam after three weeks of heavy fi ghting. A month after most of the fi ghting ceased on this largest island of the Mariana chain, the 958th HAM transferred to Guam where Shaw and Fite helped build another large maintenance shop. As on Gua- dalcanal, stray Japanese soldiers continued to hold out in the hills and caves. Shoichi Yokoi was the last soldier to surrender after he was discovered living alone in a cave in January 1972, 27 years after the war ended. Navy Seabees constructed fi ve airfi elds on Guam, from which Aircraft B-29s struck targets in the Western Pacifi c and on mainland Japan. Shaw heard the


Dale Shaw volunteered for the army and was sent to the South Pacifi c in 1944. Today in Buffalo Valley. Shaw has served at the Kiamichi Electric Co-op board for nearly 40 years.


16 OKLAHOMA LIVING


U.S. Navy Minemine Clinton Nesmith (L) helped offl oad the atomic bombs from the USS Indianapolis prior to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Today, Nesmith is a board member of Harmon Electric Association.


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