Platt Parker has hauled a lot of different freight in his many years as a trucker -- cattle, beer, apples, potatoes-- but he never had a more unusual, and dangerous, cargo than he did the summer he was 17 years old.
"I was just a farm boy; I didn't know enough to be scared," he recalls.
In 1944, the summer before his senior year at White Swan High School, Parker was working on a 200-acre sugar beet farm in Brownstown. He knew he'd be doing a lot of weeding, thinning and irrigating, but what he didn't expect was to become the daily driver for a group of German prisoners of war.
At 5 a.m. each day, he'd drive an old farm truck into Wapato, just south of where the high school now stands. It was the site of a POW camp, Quonset-style huts and wooden barracks, surrounded by razor-topped double fencing.
The Germans had been captured on the battlefields of Europe and shipped to New York, then distributed to POW camps across the country. The Lower Yakima Valley got about 600 of the prisoners, beginning in 1943, to help bring in the nation's crops while local farmers were off fighting for the Allies.
"They sent them out to the fields for two reasons, to keep them busy, and we needed the labor," Parker explains.
So six mornings a week, Parker would back his truck up to the camp's outer fence, along with four similar vehicles, and load the same 17 passengers into the cargo bed, along with a guard from the U.S. Army.
Some prisoners went off to work in a potato warehouse, some to farms to harvest grain and some to the Louie Trudeau acreage where Platt worked.
The men ranged in age from 16 to the late 30s, Parker remembers. He preferred being around the older ones because "they were easier to get along with. They just wanted the war over so they could go home."
But the younger ones, "They were harder because they believed more in Hitler," says Parker.
In many ways, the German labor was a boon to young Parker because it meant less hoeing and watering for him. As it was, he worked side by side with the prisoners, but since he didn't speak German and very few of them spoke English, they didn't converse much.
But when Parker needed to communicate, he found a way.
For instance, early on he realized that the men seemed perpetually hungry.
"They didn't get any breakfast, and all they had to eat all day was one peanut butter and jelly sandwich," notes Parker. "If you had to work on one sandwich, you'd be hungry, too."
So Parker ran food interference. He approached Trudeau and said, "We've got to get them something more to eat."
Trudeau apparently agreed because the next day he appeared with a box of day-old pastries and a 10-gallon pot of coffee. For the rest of the summer, the farmer delivered the same snack each morning.
Not only did the treats always instantly disappear, but the prisoners showed they were plenty grateful, too, remembers Parker. "They thought I was a hero," he smiles.
In fact, at one point that summer he clearly was.
It was a typical late summer day, the sun warming the fields, making everyone drowsy. After lunch seemed a perfect time to snatch a cat nap, which is exactly what the Army guard did. Sitting along the ditch bank, the guard laid down his rifle and closed his eyes.
Noticing that the guard had fallen asleep, one of the prisoners, a lieutenant, lunged for the rifle. Wielding the weapon in front of everyone, including the now-awake guard, he made it clear he intended to escape.
That's when a cooler head prevailed. Dashing over, Parker grabbed a prisoner who spoke English and entreated the lieutenant to reconsider.
"Where are you going to go?" Parker quizzed him. "You don't even speak English."
After several nerve-wracking minutes, the lieutenant was persuaded to relinquish the rifle.
But when the Army guard announced he was going to report the incident to prison authorities, Parker intervened once more.
He pointed out that if the guard turned in the lieutenant, he would be admitting he had fallen asleep on the job.
Eventually, Parker convinced everyone that the episode should go no further, and that's where it ended.
When he looks back upon that tense afternoon more than 60 years later, Parker marvels that he wasn't particularly scared at the time.
"I didn't know any better," he shrugs.
Not long after, Parker's summer in the beet fields with the German soldiers was over, and he was headed back to high school. A year or so later, he was serving in the Navy in the Pacific, but by then the war had ended.
Once the prisoners were transported back to Germany, Parker never thought about them much.
But a high school friend revived the memories about two decades later. Kay Brown was working for the Yakima Chamber of Commerce in the 1960s when one of those former prisoners wrote a letter there, saying he'd like to get in touch with some of the farmers for whom he had worked.
Brown put him in contact with Trudeau, then struck up a correspondence with the former German prisoner herself.
"He had become a dentist after the war ended," she says. "One of my sons went to Germany in the early 1970s and visited him. He was very warmly greeted and entertained."
After trading letters with the dentist for several years, Brown eventually lost contact.
Parker never heard from any of the men he worked alongside that summer. But he has indelible memories of the experience.
"I never really thought of them as the enemy," he says. "They were just people. They just wanted to go home."
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