On August 15, 1941, my father, Turner “Timber” Timberlake and Ted Laputka, brand new 2nd Lieutenants, found themselves assigned to Company D of the 1307th Quartermaster Unit at Camp Lee, Virginia. They became best friends.
Ted was dating Audrey “Mac” McNiff, a coed at Jackson College in Boston. Mac visited Ted frequently at Camp Lee. In the confusion of early 1942, Ted and Mac, now married, wound up at Camp Claiborne, Louisiana. Timber landed at Camp Livingston, Louisiana. The two camps were only 30 miles apart and they visited frequently, but their proximity ended pretty quickly when Ted moved to Ft. Lewis Washington and Timber went with the 93rd Engineers to the Yukon.
One day Timber was talking with a Colonel at the Northern Sector Headquarters in Whitehorse when Ted walked into the office! Ted’s unit, 141st Quartermaster Truck Company, had also been assigned to the Yukon – the 18th regiment – and Mac followed him.
Ted and Mac were frequent characters in the letters from my father to my mother and the photos she saved. I was overjoyed when I managed to make contact with their son Don, two years ago. Ted, like my father, was gone. But Mac was alive and well.
I shared one of my favorite photos of the three of them with Don and he promised to show it to her. He cautioned me, though, that she was quite old and might not recognize it. I’ll never forget how I felt when he told me that she looked at it for just a moment and then exclaimed. “That’s Timber, our ole army buddy!”
On our blog site during our trip along the Alaska Highway, my husband took my photo in front of the train depot where pregnant Mac had been photographed so very long ago. I never met that brave beautiful girl, but her memory resonates through the thoughts and emotions that inspired everything this website means to me.
Audrey Laputka left to join her husband on April 16, 2014. Wherever they are, I hope they found Timber.