Charlie DeTemple came home from the Army in 1946 and went to work on the family farm.
Almost 70 years later, he’s still on the job.
As DeTemple was feeding his cattle on a recent morning, the familiar sound of his tractor drew the herd from across the pasture to the spot where he was slicing twine and breaking up the bales.
That wasn’t the only treat he brought. Several of the cattle walked up to get one of the ears of corn DeTemple had picked from the garden near his farmhouse.
“He was born in that house,” Richard Landis noted as he watched the cattle enjoy their breakfast.
Landis has known DeTemple for a long time. “He’s been my (hay) baler for 30 years,” said Landis, one of several neighbors and friends who check in on DeTemple regularly.
Feeding the cattle is a morning ritual the 90-year-old farmer has repeated thousands of times since returning home after World War II. Actually, DeTemple has worked on the farm a lot longer than that.
“I was helping my dad since I was 5,” he said.
And earlier this month, 69 years after he came back from Europe, DeTemple’s military service was celebrated through a medal program initiated by France. Over the past few years, the French government has been trying to honor living American veterans who served in France.
Landis and Chuck Kreider, another one of DeTemple’s friends, heard about the Legion of Honor program and contacted the French embassy in San Francisco in March. Eventually, the French consulate in Portland scheduled a Sept. 18 ceremony at the Marshall House along Vancouver’s Officers Row.
The 18-year-old DeTemple was drafted after graduating from Camas High School in 1943. His Army hitch marked the only significant period of time DeTemple has been away from the Fern Prairie farm that his parents bought in 1922.
DeTemple served with the 70th Infantry Division in an artillery battalion that arrived in France on Jan. 18, 1945. Infantrymen who’d been transported earlier “got caught up in the Battle of the Bulge,” DeTemple said. “Some never made it off their trucks.”
DeTemple was part of a communications unit. His job included stringing the telephone wire that linked the fire-control officers back at the battery with the forward observers who called in artillery strikes.
“We were up there pretty close,” he said.
They also made sure the phone lines were in working order, which could be a challenge with explosive shells flying around.
“If a line went out, I wouldn’t try to repair it. With 50 or 60 lines, it’s too hard to sort them out,” he said. So his team would reel out a new length of replacement wire.
“Sometimes we’d have to pull it a long way,” he said.
After the war, he spent a year with the occupation forces in Germany. That gave him a chance to spend some time with his older brother. Frank DeTemple had entered Army a year and a day ahead of Charlie. Frank served in the Air Corps in England, repairing runways that were damaged when planes made emergency landings.
When they came home, Frank worked at the Camas paper mill for 40 years. “I kept the farm going,” Charlie said.
The two bachelors eventually purchased the farm and worked it together until Frank’s death at age 92 on Jan. 11, 2013.
DeTemple does make one concession to his years, and to a farming accident that put him in the hospital 15 years ago. As he walked around the pasture, DeTemple often would have a shovel in his hand. He doesn’t use a cane while he’s working, so that garden tool — it’s a medically approved shovel, DeTemple joked — does double duty as a walking stick.
DeTemple took a break from the chores a few days ago when the French government’s representative in Portland awarded him the Legion of Honor.
Honorary consul Fran?oise Aylmer thanked DeTemple and all his fellow soldiers for their participation in the liberation of Europe.
Because of them, “People of my generation were allowed to grow up in a free country,” she said.
After Aylmer pinned the award to his jacket, she held DeTemple’s arm as he blinked back some tears. He was accepting the award, DeTemple said, “for all the soldiers who were over there.”
