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served as a major embarkation point for troops. And at age twenty-nine, Harry Snyder was drafted. On November 23, 1942, he walked into an army recruitment office in Tacoma and signed up for duty.
    Harry was quickly sent to basic training in Northern California at the Fresno County Fairgrounds that had until only recently been used as a crude temporary camp holding 5,344 ethnic Japanese residents. By the time that Harry Snyder arrived, the last of the Japanese had been transferred and the fairgrounds turned over to the Fourth Air Force. Although no less crude than when it was a Japanese internment camp (makeshift tar paper barracks, outhouses, and overhead water pipes with drilled-out holes), the Air Force converted the grounds into a non-flying training facility for signalmen, camouflage specialists, chemical warfare specialists, clerks, cooks, and truck drivers.
    A perforated eardrum disqualified Harry Snyder from the infantry and saved him from certain deployment overseas. Instead, Harry’s service was largely performed behind a desk. Following his basic training in Fresno he was stationed variously in Hastings, Nebraska; Dallas, Texas; and Salt Lake City, Utah. For a time, Harry was sent to Hamilton Field in Novato, California, northeast of San Francisco. It was the headquarters for the First Wing of the Army Air Corps, where he worked in the records department processing B-24s. For extra cash, Harry worked on the side in the Sausalito shipyards, earning an additional seventy dollars a week. Following his tour of duty at Hamilton Field, Harry was sent back to Los Angeles, where he worked as a clerk-typist for the Army Air Corps.
    When the war ended, Harry returned to Seattle. The war years had shuffled people far from their homes and thrown them together in the most unexpected ways. In 1947, Harry was thirty-four years old and working as a caterer selling boxed sandwiches to the cafeteria at Fort Lawton. And one day in 1947, while dropping off his sandwiches at Fort Lawton, Harry met the restaurant’s twenty-seven-year-old manager, a shy woman with a warm, engaging face. Her name was Esther Johnson.
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    The daughter and granddaughter of coal miners, Esther Lavelle Johnson was born on January 7, 1920. She grew up in the tiny village of Sorento among the vast rural plains of coal-rich Shoal Creek Township in southwestern Illinois, the fourth child of Orla and Mabel ( née Molloy) Johnson’s brood of eight.
    When Esther was a young girl, the family lived in a small, one-story wooden frame house with a shingled roof on State Street, across from the United Methodist Church. Sorento was so small that most houses—including the Johnsons’—didn’t have numbers. The cramped house was perhaps not more than one thousand square feet; it had a small front porch and a tiny yard that pressed up to the street. The house was unexceptional, but it was certainly a step up from the miners’ camps where many families in neighboring counties lived.
    A fifth-generation Illinoisan, Esther hailed from a long line of hardy men and women who possessed a spirit of faith and great pluck. On Esther’s paternal line, her great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Christopher Loving was born in Virginia in 1750 and fought in the Revolutionary War as a teenager. A thrifty man who kept scrupulous accounts of his money, Loving owned a hundred-acre farm in Chester County, South Carolina. James Grisham, Esther’s paternal great-great-grandfather was a farmer and a veteran of the great Black Hawk War of 1832. Originally from Dixon County, Tennessee, he was one of the first to settle Montgomery County, Illinois.
    Narrowly escaping the great Irish potato famine, Esther’s maternal grandfather, Brien Molloy, was born on March 1, 1850, in New Orleans, just six weeks after his parents, Patrick and Catherine ( née Monahan), arrived from County Cavan, Ireland. Later, Molloy traveled north to Illinois where he became