Clayton Seifried poses for a photo on his first night in Times Square, New York City, after arriving home from Europe in 1945.
Submitted photo

The first thing Clayton Arthur "Sy" Seifried wants people to know is that he's no hero.

Many people disagree about that, including his family and the folks at Dayton High School who awarded him an honorary diploma last week. But Seifried is convinced he's right.

"If that was true, if I was a hero just because I fought in World War II, there'd be a heck of a lot of heroes in the U.S., wouldn't there?" he said.

Although he won't claim the title for himself, Seifried doesn't doubt the heroism of many of his fellow soldiers, both those who died in action and those who came home.

"The U.S. actually saved the world, you know," he said. "If the U.S. hadn't come into the war, where would we be right now?"

That's an important concept - one that Seifried and other veterans tried to pass along to high school students last week at living history programs in Dayton and McMinnville. Veterans from WWII, Korea, Vietnam and other wars, right up through the current Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, told teens about the efforts they had made to defend freedom.

At Dayton High, Seifried asked a student to read a poem he'd found, "Just a Common Soldier." It talks about respect and recognition that should be granted to veterans, but too often is not.

"I thought that was just a great poem," he said. So did the crowd at the living history event, who applauded at length after the poem was read.

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Seifried joined the Army when he turned 18. He would've been drafted otherwise.

"I knew it was coming," he said. "I got antsy."

After basic training, his unit went to Pennsylvania to await orders.

Seifried was eager to get going. So he went to his superiors and volunteered for duty overseas.

He was turned down. But just two days later, his unit was activated.

He crossed the Atlantic on a troop ship, landing first in Gibraltar, then at a base in Africa. From there, his unit - the 2nd Chemical Mortar Battalion - headed for Italy.

Sicily had already been captured by the Allied Forces. The 2nd Battalion's job was to advance up the Italian countryside.

During the next nine months, the Americans slowly made their way to Rome, then to Naples.

"Italy was rough country," Seifried recalled. "It took forever and a day to move a mile.

"The Germans had been there a long time to get prepared with devices set up to stop us."

Next, he said, his unit was ordered to prepare for the invasion of France.

A Jeep driver, he was charged with preparing his vehicle for a drop into the surf as the Allies attempted to reach the beach. He had to waterproof every part of the engine.

"They said the Jeep was to go 10 feet under the water," he recalled. "I was wondering who would be driving it when it was down there."

As it turned out, neither the driver nor the jeep landed in the water at all. "We just drove right up on dry ground," Seifried said.

After he removed all the waterproofing, he and his unit pushed on across France and then Germany.

He had just reached Austria when the war ended. His job then became picking up German troops and transporting them to a base for questioning.

"That was kind of interesting," he said.

"I'd get three or four in the Jeep, then I'd see another on the road and get out to chase him. While I was chasing him, one of the ones in the Jeep would run off, and I'd have to chase him, too."

After he was discharged, Seifried returned to Dayton. It wasn't long before he met the girl of his dreams at a dance in Carlton.

The girl, Elsie, will tell you it took him a while to convince her he was also her dream man, but he eventually succeeded.

They married in 1947 and settled in Dayton. They relocated to McMinnville in 1980.

Coincidentally, both Seifried and his wife were born in South Dakota.

Seifried arrived in Oregon around 1932, which would have made him 7. His family, weary of the Depression in the Upper Midwest, decided to see if things were any better out West.

"My uncle was a Portland police detective," he recalled. "He said, 'Come out here. It's great.'"

Young Seifried climbed into the back of his family's 1928 Chevrolet, joining his grandmother and three siblings. Another brother, the baby, lay on his mother's lap in the front seat. His father and an uncle also sat up front.

Seifried doesn't remember much of the trip, but he does remember stopping at an apple orchard in Hood River. His uncle jumped the fence to pick some fruit, but it turned out to be too green to eat.

Oregon seemed prosperous by comparison to South Dakota. But by the time they had returned to South Dakota, sold everything and headed west for good, the Depression had moved west, too.

"We had no money, no food, nothing," Seifried said. He said his family subsisted on cans of government-issued food, which came without labels.

His father finally got a job laying water line into Dayton. His uncle found a place to farm near the junction of highways 18 and 99W, but it wasn't productive.

The uncle bought a cow and a calf for the farm, but they weren't a match, so there was no milk to be had. "My uncle wasn't any kind of farmer," Seifried said.

One thing the farm did have was prune trees.

Seifried picked fruit with his mother. He also found a job as a paper boy, rising at 4 a.m. to make his rounds.

After six years on the farm property, the family moved into Dayton.

Seifried went to Unity School, located near the junction, before the move. Afterward, he started attending a big, four-story school in Dayton.

"Mom never fixed us lunch to take to school," he said. "We had to come home. I ran the six blocks, ate, watered the cow, then ran back so I could play ball."

The current Dayton High School facility was built shortly after the family move. In fact, his father was part of the construction team.

Later, the American Legion came into possession of the old school. Eventually, the Legion had to tear it down, as it was too big and dilapidated to maintain.

A Legion member, Seifried helped with the demolition. The site now is an empty field where youngsters play ball.

While Seifried was still in high school, his father died. That left his mother with four children to support.

Seifried decided to quit school and help out. At 15, he fibbed about his age and found work helping grade runways at the McMinnville Airport.

He rode beside the grader operator. As the grader pushed gravel over stakes marking the correct depths, the teen dug them back out and re-set them.

"It was summer, it was warm and he'd go to sleep," Seifried said of the grader man. "So I'd run the machine.

"One Monday morning, the guy didn't show up. The contractor called me in and said, 'You run it.'"

Still too young to get a driver's license, Seifried finished grading the rest of the airport. "I must've done OK," he said, "'cause the airport's still there."

He later took flying lessons on those very runways.

For his work on the airport, Seifried worked 12 hours a day for $1 an hour. He was taking home a princely sum, he said, considering other kids his age were mostly working eight hours a day for 25 cents an hour.

Seifried gave his mother $2 of his earnings every day. And he still feels bad about that.

"I should've paid her eight dollars a day, or 10 dollars a day," he said. "I'm sorry about that to this day. If I could go back and do it again, I would."

It's one of many lessons Seifried has learned over the years."There are two ways of getting an education, and I've learned a lot through experience," he said.

He learned a lot in the Army, he said. And he continued learning during the years that followed, as he did road work, then settled into a career in hazelnut and cherry processing.

He never expected to get a diploma, and he was fine with that. But he was pleased, nonetheless, to receive the honorary diploma from his old school.

The presentation came as a total surprise. "It embarrassed me when they called me up there," he said, "but I appreciated it."

He particularly appreciated the way Dayton High School students paid attention to the veterans who visited their school that day.

"I thought we were done, and then we walked out of the gym and here were all the kids, lined up in the halls, all clapping for us," he said. "That was nice.

"But I'm still thinking I shouldn't really have been there, because I'm not a hero."

Starla Pointer, who is convinced everyone has an interesting story to tell, has been writing the weekly "Stopping By" column since 1996. She's always looking for suggestions. Contact her at 503-883-6263 or spointer@news register.com.