FRESHWATER BAY – “I started it and I finished it and I lived to tell about it.”
When Frank Putnam says, “it,” he means World War II in the Pacific.
A Navy medical corpsman, he watched from Pearl Harbor’s hospital while Japanese planes bombed and torpedoed Battleship Row.
When the war ended – even before the Japanese surrender was signed – he was briefly among an occupation force on the island of Honshu, the largest island of Japan.
Today, Putnam doesn’t dwell on the horrors he saw, but recollects those four years as “fascinating” for a young man from Seattle.
He recounted his life Thursday in his home on Freshwater Bay Road.
Born in New York state, he’d moved to Washington with his parents after the Depression wiped out their business.
In Redmond, they built their home of lumber from houses that had been torn down and the wood given away – enough for one home per family.
