Halsten recalls wartime Coast Guard

The U.S Coast Guard is one of the most overlooked service branches of our military, but its impact in numerous homeland arenas of World War II can never be ignored. Sisters' Gordon "Spud" Halsten was a proud member of the Coast Guard from 1941-45 and fondly remembers his time as a radio operator and harbor captain, policing vessel traffic in key ports along the West Coast.

"When I first entered the Coast Guard in June, 1941, there were only about 18,000 in it," Halsten recalled. "At the height of World War II that number was up to 250,000. I was raised in Portland and working at a grocery store making 12 bucks a week, and I felt I could do better than that. Our neighbors were in the Coast Guard and they looked like they were doing pretty well, so when they opened the new recruiting office in Portland, I was one of the first three that signed up."

Halsten went through boot camp at Port Townsend, Washington, then went aboard a small cutter in San Pedro, California.

"We stood security on two French ships under protective custody. After that I became a radio striker in Palos Verdes at the Point Vicente lighthouse. One day we were eating lunch leaning against the building and saw a ship get blown up by a Japanese torpedo, with water shooting hundreds of feet in the air. It was an American ship loaded with lumber, so it couldn't sink. Those subs were just seven or eight miles out."

Being in the Coast Guard meant constant travel. From California, Halsten went to New London, Connecticut, to finish radio school in June of 1942.

"At that time the Eastern Seaboard was full of German subs," he said. "They sank hundreds of our ships off the East Coast, the oil covered the beaches from New England to Florida. Those subs just sat off shore and the American ships were silhouetted against the city lights at night. There were no mandatory blackouts yet. You couldn't be in the station more than a minute before you heard an SOS distress call or an SSS, which meant a submarine was sighted. It went on all day and night."

From New London, Halsten was sent back west to Hidden Inlet at the salmon cannery on Portland Canal near Ketchikan, Alaska.

"I was just a 19-year-old kid and I was the immigration and customs officer, acting naval intelligence officer and captain of the port. They give you a lot of responsibility and expected you to live up to it. I checked out all the waterfront personnel, fishing boats and steamships using the waterways. It was a 24-hour-a-day job. There were a lot of Canadians there, and the Coast Guard wanted me to wear a .45 pistol as a badge of authority, and everybody thought I was a little god."

In Craig, Alaska, on Prince of Wales Island, the second largest island in the United States, Halsten was part of the West Coast radio guard for the amphibious naval patrol planes that flew out of Annette Island.

"I remember lots of rain, and the Indians there treated us royally. There was a big Libby Foods salmon cannery there, and so you had about 600-700 people in town."

In 1944 he was dispatched to a San Francisco radio station as a watch supervisor just south of the Golden Gate Bridge. 

"It's where they gave positioning reports and conditions for merchant ships or military vessels coming into or through the Golden Gate," said Halsten. "San Francisco was busy back then, movie theaters ran continuously, lots of them showing newsreels 24 hours a day and they were always packed. Wherever you went nobody would ever let you pay for a drink.

"Towards the end of the war I was back and forth on the train, getting more advanced training. High frequency direction finding was just coming into use at that time, allowing positioning reports many times further than low frequency signals."

Halsten was honorably discharged from the Coast Guard on November 12, 1945 in Seattle. Following his term in the service, he became an aircraft communicator and airport manager handling aeronautical traffic in Alaska for the Civil Aeronautics Administration, which eventually became the FAA. This led to his long career as an air traffic controller out of Anchorage for nearly 30 years.

Halsten and his high-school sweetheart wife, Dorothy, retired to Sisters over 20 years ago. 

"We got married in July, 1945," he said. "She was a cadet nurse at the University of Oregon, and she traveled everywhere with me. She passed away in 1998 after many good years. Since moving to Sisters it's the longest I've ever been any one place in my life."

Halsten enjoys life in Sisters with his many friends, and visits often with his three daughters, Deborah, Christine and Kathleen. Deborah is a history teacher at Sisters Christian Academy.

Looking back, "Spud" is thankful for the good trade he learned in the Coast Guard and feels fortunate he was never in actual combat.

"Everybody in the United States went to war, whether you were in the service or not," he said. "They worked in the ship yards, building airplanes, cars and trucks. My wife was a riveter on Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses before she went into nursing school. When the war was done I was in Atlantic City and heard the first news about the atomic bomb. We laughed because we thought it was propaganda."

He looks back at his service with good memories:

"I loved doing what I did and can truthfully say I was never bored."