Polk County News
Polk County Itemizer-Observer • November 11, 2015 7A
Blessed: Cagle enjoyed his 27-year teaching career
Continued from 1A
“My mother had confidence …
she never conveyed any worry at
all,” Cagle said. “My brother and I
were two happy little boys. Even
though hiding in the jungle, we
knew we were safe where we
were.”
After a couple years, the war
started changing. Cagle noticed
different planes flying overhead,
American planes.
“It was a good sign for us,” Cagle
said.
On Feb. 3, 1945, the family’s life
changed again, this time for the
better. That was the day U.S. forces
liberated Santo Tomas during the
decisive Battle of Manila.
In March, Virginia learned that
the camp had been liberated and
went back to find out if her hus-
band had survived. It had been
close to three years since they
had seen him, and Cagle said his
father, who stood 6 foot, 1 inch
and weighed 250 pounds, had
lost 100 pounds. As the war
trudged on, conditions in the
camp deteriorated and many
prisoners starved.
“(He was) not in good health,
but he had survived the war,”
Cagle said of his father.
After liberation, all American in-
ternees were given a choice to stay
or return to the U.S.
“My dad chose for us to come to
the United States because he felt
we had a better chance of growing
up in the U.S. than we did in the
Philippines,” Cagle said.
In April, they boarded a ship for
a long, zigzagging trip across the
Pacific Ocean. The war wasn’t quite
over, so the ship had to take a com-
plicated route to avoid attack.
They arrived in the United
States, landing in California.
Cagle’s father decided to settle in
Oregon and started a new life with
his family.
“This was a brand new country,”
Cagle said.
JOLENE GUZMAN/Itemizer-Observer
Jesse Cagle talks about his children pictured with their mother, Joyce, in a newspaper article from 1971.
flood. Cagle hadn’t attended
school since before the war start-
ed, so he entered first grade as a
10-year-old.
He advanced quickly and was
placed in fourth grade the next
fall. Shortly after that, when
Cagle was 12, his mother died
during surgery.
Following his mother’s death,
the family moved to Tualatin
where the boys grew up and made
many close friends. At 17, Cagle
decided he wanted to give back to
his country and enlisted in the U.S.
Marines on Feb. 1, 1952, during his
freshman year in high school. He
was deployed to Korea, but didn’t
see much action.
“I was there in the latter part of
the war,” Cagle said. “I arrived
there right after the cease fire and
served 14 month right there on the
A new life
The family moved to Vanport
City — a town later destroyed by a
DMZ (Demilitarized Zone).”
He was a “forward observer” at-
tached to a rifle company and
monitored the DMZ as part of a
three-man crew.
“It was just the three of us and
we alternated in manning the
bunker, for 14 months,” Cagle
said. “Looking across the DMZ, we
could see the North Koreans and
Mongolians manning their side of
the DMZ.”
Needless to say, the job was te-
dious, but he said he enjoyed his
three years of military service.
“I got to see a lot of the world,
other than Korea,” Cagle said.
Originally an optician, Joyce
convinced him he should be a
teacher. He went back to school for
A blessed life
He was discharged in 1955, and
later married his first wife and had
a son and a daughter. In 1965, he
married Joyce McConnell.
JESSE CAGLE/ for the Itemizer-Observer
Jesse Cagle, left, and his brother, Lonnie , spent the early years of
their childhood in the Philippines, during Word War II.
Explosive: Cannonball was viable
Continued from 1A
After that, Boatwright
placed the potentially dan-
gerous explosive on the
kitchen table in their Dallas
home and didn’t touch it
again until calling in the
Oregon State Police bomb
squad.
“It was stable. It’s pretty
safe, like a gun shell,”
Boatwright explained. “It
wasn’t going to go off unless
it had some encourage-
ment.”
When he made the call, a
Polk County deputy re-
sponded to take a photo of it
and sent it to OSP for identi-
fication.
“That’s when everything
got crazy,” Boatwright said,
adding he put the cannon-
ball in a box and took it out-
side to make it easier for the
squad to work with.
The bomb squad was at
the home for four hours
testing and examining the
cannonball. Boatwright said
they concluded it was in
good condition and viable.
T h a t ’s
unusual,
Boatwright said. Why?
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the career change.
He taught third grade and later
special education at Oakdale
Heights Elementary School and
Morrison for 27 years.
“Teaching was a marvelous ex-
perience,” Cagle said. “I think (it’s)
the fact that the children I worked
with, to me, in my eyes, were jew-
els. They were just precious peo-
ple.”
Cagle said he hadn’t shared his
story publicly before last year,
when he spoke of his childhood for
the students at Salem Academy
Christian School in Salem. Always
a teacher, Cagle had the children
participate, telling the story in
chronological order and having
the children stand who were the
same age he was at each milestone
in his journey.
Cagle said the students were at-
tentive and respectful to him and
the other veterans at the presenta-
tion, so much so that Cagle en-
couraged the audience to give
them a round of applause.
“It was cool,” Cagle said. “It was
impressive.”
Cagle will continue to tell his
story, but it seems he will always
come back to the same point:
“Both Joyce and I are very fortu-
nate,” Cagle said. “Monetarily, we
have never been rich … but we’ve
been blessed.”
Because it was likely
made in the 1860s to 1890s,
perhaps from the Civil War.
An uncommon find,
Boatwright asked if he could
have it back after the testing
and was given a firm “no.”
Not only was it viable, but
designed to explode into
tiny pieces, causing enor-
mous damage. He said the
b o m b s q u a d c a re f u l l y
loaded it in a containment
chamber and took it to safe-
ly blow it up elsewhere.
Trey, Schultz, and Dun-
mire consider themselves
lucky that it didn’t explode
while they were playing with
it. The thought gave Dun-
mire a panic attack once she
found out what it was.
“Some bad things could
have happened when I was
holding it,” she said.
The group of teenagers
can only speculate as to why
it was in the middle of the
street.
“That’s the story we all
want to know,” Dunmire
said. “How did it get there?”
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