Nearly 80 years passed before schoolmates realized they shared war experiences, too

Sep. 2—One day, they were just three gangly teenagers, trying to earn diplomas and make their mark at Kern County Union High School, the historic mid-city campus whose name would later be changed to Bakersfield High.

Then — it seemed like it was overnight — high school was over and they were on their way to basic training like millions of other young Americans who served in the armed forces during World War II.

Civilization needed saving in the 1940s, and they were part of a generation that answered the call.

"What happened to us is, you grow up quicker," said Walter Grainger, now 96, who graduated from Kern County Union in May 1944 and was a swabbie in the U.S. Navy by the following July.

Grainger was joined Thursday morning at the Honor Flight Kern County breakfast by Bob Fowler, also 96 and a member of the class of '44, and Robert Lechtreck, who was a year ahead of the others at KCUHS.

"Honor Flight is what brought us all together," Lechtreck said Thursday. That and the men's loyal support to the Kern County World War II Veterans Memorial, a nonprofit effort now under construction at Jastro Park in downtown Bakersfield.

The campus was a big one, even in those days, and the trio of high school boys barely knew one another. It wasn't until nearly eight decades later that the three Drillers would form a deeper connection built on common experience and the fact that they get a chance to see one another and shake hands once a month at the breakfasts held on the first Thursday of every month at the Elks Club in downtown Bakersfield.

"It means a lot," Lechtreck said of the friendship and connection that has blossomed in these men in the winter of their lives.

"It's great to reconnect," he added. "For 77 years, I never saw them. Now all of a sudden, I see them every month."

Fowler, the third in the trio, was still 17 when he joined the Army Air Corps. And after enduring weeks of boot camp in Biloxi, Miss. in the Deep South, the recruit headed north to his duty station in Fairbanks, Alaska.

"I went to Alaska as part of a B-29 group," he said, referring to the Boeing B-29 Superfortress, a four-engine, propeller-driven bomber that extended the strike range of American air power during the war.

As part of the ground crew, Fowler helped keep the planes in the air.

After the war, he went to work in maintenance and operations for the Kern High School District, where he worked for more than three decades.

His wife, Beverly, his closest companion for 68 years, died in 2017.

Like anyone at such an advanced age, time takes its toll — one's hearing is not as sharp, one's memory not as nimble, one's legs not as strong.

But there's a sense of satisfaction in Fowler's manner, and an eagerness to share his story.

"Life has been good to me," he said.

Lechtreck also shipped out, aboard the USS Rowe, a destroyer based out of Seattle. The ship was involved in the Allies' island-hopping campaign designed to break the back of the Imperial Japanese Navy and its early domination of the Pacific Theater.

"We were involved in the bombardment of the islands," he remembered.

"We dealt with Kamikazes in Okinawa," he said of the infamous Japanese aviators who flew suicide missions against Allied naval vessels in the latter days of the Pacific war.

Lechtreck was a diesel mechanic, but in battle he was stationed on a 5-inch gun, meaning it fired a projectile 5 inches in diameter.

It was effective both as an anti-aircraft gun and a ship-to-surface weapon, he said.

Grainger was also stationed aboard ship during the war, the USS Crenshaw, an attack transport that had Higgins boats, amphibious landing craft that could carry three dozen ground troops from the ship to a beach landing.

"As a coxswain, that's what I drove," Grainger remembered.

When he returned from military service, Grainger became an industrial arts teacher in the Kern High School District, with much of his career spent at North High.

"I was in the classroom for 36 years," he said. "I worked as a consultant for 22 more."

After the war, he married the former Joan Spawn. They raised one daughter and were blessed with one grandchild.

"I met her in Sunday school," he said of Joan. "In my mother's Sunday school class at the First Methodist Church."

Grainger still lives an independent life, doesn't use a walker and shot nine holes of golf on a recent weekday.

"She was the best wife I ever had," he quipped, still thinking about the love of his life.

Then he paused, and grew more serious as he considered just how lucky he was.

"She was the best wife," he said, "anybody ever had."

Reporter Steven Mayer can be reached at 661-395-7353. Follow him on Facebook and on Twitter: @semayerTBC.