When Vernon Staley was born on Wednesday, March 26, 1924, no one could have known what the next 100 years might hold. All that was clear on that day was that Vernon – the first of the five children born to Edward and Josephine Staley of Prineville, Oregon – was loved.
“My dad was a prospector, miner and shoemaker,” Staley said, recalling that, though his father started out as a mercury miner, working in the Mother Lode Mine, he eventually changed careers, purchasing a shoe store.
“After [WWII] came along all mining shut down,” Staley said of the historical event, which not only prompted father’s change in vocation but also his own transformation into a newly drafted soldier. “I’d just graduated from high school.”
Originally sent to an Army boot camp known as Camp Adair in August 1943, Staley was later transferred to Denver and then to Missouri for the specialized medical training he needed to become a Combat Medic.
“We were looked down on,” Staley said of those months. “They called us pill peddlers and pill pushers because we didn’t carry a gun.”
But all that badgering ended when, on Dec. 1, 1944, Staley’s company – the 70th Infantry Division known as “The Trailblazers” – left Boston on a ship headed for Marseille, France.
“When we were going overseas some of [the men] came to me and said, ‘If I get shot, would you patch me up?’ I said, ‘Of course,’” Staley recalled. That ten-day trip – the last days of peace he and his fellow soldiers would know for some time.
“The Battle of the Bulge broke out six days later and they put us on the front lines – Christmas Eve, 1944.”
“Many, many, many skirmishes and battles” followed, according to Staley who, though he had once quaked at the sight of blood, spent the next four months doing everything he could to save his comrades and friends.
“If [soldiers] got wounded, we patched them up,” he said. “It was terrifying at times, because of the conditions. You were living with the constant threat of being wounded or put away.”
But Staley was never wounded, a fact he marvels at to this day.
“The only thing I got figured out is the man upstairs had bigger and better things, so he kept me around,” Staley mused.
Initially stationed in Germany for the first year of the post-war occupation, Staley returned to Prineville in March 1946, where he reconnected with childhood acquaintance Shirley Krog, who on June 11, 1949, became his wife.
“We had a lot of good times,” Staley said. Their marriage lasted almost 54 years and included the birth of three children – Anton, William and Victoria – whom he supported by working as a machinist.
“When you work on a machine it doesn’t complain,” Staley said of his choice to leave medicine behind. “Also, I would have been ten to 12 years in school.”
Starting out at a machine shop in Prineville, Staley moved the family to Stayton in 1956.
“I was a machinist at a plywood mill in Aumsville,” Staley said. Then he worked in Salem and Portland before retiring in 1991.
“After I retired, every August we went to Memaloose State Park and were camp hosts,” Staley recalled. “The last year was 2002.” Then on May 26, 2003, Shirley died due to complications from a surgery.
Newly widowed, Staley continued to host, switching to Silver Falls State Park in 2010.
“I have a 30-foot travel trailer… and I did 20 years of camp hosting,” Staley said of his tenure. “Camp hosting was always wonderful.”
Hosting hasn’t been the only way Staley has given back. Over the years he has also planned annual reunions for the Crook County High School class of 1943 and for the western states division of the Trailblazers.
“I also volunteer with the Knights of Columbus,” Staley said. Explaining, “I can’t just sit around and grow moss.”
Now, with his one hundredth birthday fast approaching, Staley has a new project, a celebration of his life – the past, present and the future – scheduled for March 23 at St. Mary Catholic Church in Shaw.
“We’re going to have a lot of people,” Staley said, listing family members and friends from all eras of his life including an estimated 35 members of the Trailblazers and two French WWII reenactors who he met while touring WWII cemeteries in France.
“And I’ll have my girlfriend here,” he added, referencing Dr. Tamara Haygood, a radiologist at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. They met via the phone in 2006 when she called to interview him about his experience as a Medic.
“MD Anderson was interested in how the wounded were treated during the war,” Staley explained. “We were on the phone for two hours!”
Avid travelers, the couple have explored Europe and the United States, visiting WWII cemeteries and monuments including one in Nancy, France where Staley placed flowers on the graves of many friends.
“I had some real dear buddies,” Staley recalled. “Unfortunately, they’re gone.”
Which makes his upcoming birthday even more significant. “I’m still here,” Staley said with a smile, “about to start my second hundred years.”
