Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
War ended one month after Davenport local finished training
World War II veteran and long-time Davenport local Joe Lilje remembers his service and his career as the owner of Davenport Auto.
DAVENPORT – Joe Lilje had completed his Naval flight training and was ready to serve in the Pacific flying planes onto aircraft carriers in 1945. A month later, however, Japan surrendered after the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the war was over.
That's not the story Lilje prefers to tell, however.
"My story is that the enemy got word that I was ready to join the fleet and they surrendered," Lilje said.
The 98-year-old Davenport local who has lived here since 1951 was born in Newport, WA in 1923. His father was a rural mail carrier, and his mother was a secretary. He graduated from Newport High School in 1941.
He decided to attend Washington State College and was standing in freshman dormitory Stimson Hall on December 7 when he heard shocking news.
"Somebody came out and said the (Japanese) bombed Pearl Harbor," Lilje said.
Lilje enlisted in the Reserve Corps and was allowed to finish his first year of college before being subject to being called up in the Army. Until then, he was free to enlist in any other branch of the military he wanted. He wanted to learn to fly, so he joined the Navy and signed up for the V-5 Naval Aviation Cadet program.
He wasn't called to training until he and 15 men were summoned to Seattle, then to a naval air station in Pasco for over two months. He was finally shipped to Monmouth, Illinois, where he took classes in physics, airmanship and flight.
"We spent a lot of time in the Midwest learning how to fly airplanes," Lilje said. "That's where the Navy does all their flying."
He then learned to fly heavy, single-engine aircraft in Corpus Christi, Texas, then finally went to Pensacola, Florida, to finish training. His training was complete in summer of 1945. But, after Japan's surrender, he was never called overseas.
"When you're training for something, you want to do it," Lilje said. "You learn all this stuff, and you feel like you can contribute, so that was kind of sad and glad at the same time. My family and my girlfriend, they were delighted."
Lilje elected not to fly again after the war ended. Instead, he went back to finish college and married his girlfriend, Davenport native Viola Raugust. The two wed in December 1945 and were married until Raugust's 2018 passing.
Lilje finished school with a bachelor's degree in business administration and economics.
"Part of our honeymoon was looking for a place to live in Pullman," Lilje said. "We finally found a place in someone's basement apartment...It was on North Monroe, I remember that."
The Lilje's moved to Davenport in 1951, and Lilje owned Western Auto until 1984. He helped form Wheatland Bank, assisted in liquidating the old grain supply, and worked on a federal job training project that helped people with difficulty getting jobs get trained in vocational skills. He also was influential in bringing the Davenport Retirement Village, where he now resides, to town over 30 years ago.
He won the prestigious Melvin Jones Award from the Lions Club in 2018. The award now hangs on his wall in his apartment at the retirement village, along with gobs of photos of children, grandchildren and WSU sports memorabilia.
He and Viola had four children, eight grandchildren and one great-grandson. His oldest son, James Lilje, was also in the naval flight program.
Looking back, Lilje is glad he was able to serve his country during the largest conflict in global history.
"I signed up, and I went through it, and I'm glad I did," Lilje said. "I had a lot of interesting experiences (and) met some really good people. Not many are around anymore, but I kept track of a lot of them for quite a while."
Drew Lawson is the editor of the Davenport Times. He is a graduate of Eastern Washington University.
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