Alaska Highway. 97th Headquarters. Veteran WW1 and WW2.
Born: 27 June 1889, Arcadia Valley County, Nebraska. Died: 3 May 1976. Fresno, CA.
WW1: Discharged 6 March 1919, 2nd Lt. Engineers, Captain October 29, 1918. Army Serial Number 31738759.
WW2: Enlisted: 9 April 1942 and discharged 21 December 1945. Retired 30 June 1949 from the military.
As a civilian construction engineer, in 1923 Waite spent seven months in Alaska for the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads building a railway. He was also employed in road construction in Oregon and Washington before he moved to Fresno in 1933 to take a job in the local district office of the California Division of Highways.
He arrived on the Alaska Highway in August 1942. He was a Major with headquarters of the 97th Engineers who built the northern section of the Highway. He was promoted to Lt. Colonel in December 1942.
In The Fresno Bee The Republican, November 1945, Colonel Waite describes building the Alcan. “…building through solid ice and across muskeg involved a very different technique in road construction. Up there we had to forget most of the things we knew about road building here. Ordinarily we would dig out swampy places until we reached a solid foundation and fill with gravel. But removing the top layer of vegetation in a muskeg flat merely exposes another layer which thaws and becomes swampy [mud]. Our method was to cover the muskeg with gravel and insulate the ground…keep it frozen. Our assignment was two miles of 24 foot wide highway a day. “
He also served as portage zone commander at Ft. Smith with the Canol Project. “At Fort Smith we hauled barges weighing as much as 200 tons around the rapids on trailers. The Canol pipeline extends from the oil fields on the McKenzie River to Fairbanks.”
Following his return to the states, Colonel Waite was the executive officer at Ft. Devons for a German POW camp. His last duty in the military was to escort a contingent of prisoners back to Europe.
His father was Elmer Ellsworth Waite (1866-1944) and his mother was Gertrude Viola Bodey (1873-1957). He married Rhea Eleanor Walker, a clerk in a department store in New York, on 30 June 1923 on Douglas Island, Alaska.
Serial #O-139656