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Prime Times Weekly publication of the Mail Tribune , Medford, Oregon A story of Love & War AP photo Laura, 81, and Clarence Hartley, 82, served on the remote Butler Butte lookout post for 13 months during World War II. Husband and wife served country together By ERIK ROBINSON The News-Review of Roseburg BUTLER BUTTE, Ore. -- No one gets here by accident. Tucked deep in the forested heart of the Tiller Ranger District, the one-room cabin can be reached only during the summer. It's 24 miles from the ranger station, the last three miles over a winding goat trail of a road that ends 5,500 feet above sea level. Hardly anywhere in the continental United States was more remote or insignificant. But that all changed in 1941. Suddenly Butler Butte stood on the front line of America's defense, and Clarence and Laura Hartley were there to scan the skies for enemy planes -- for 13 long months. "I took this job to do my part for my country," Hartley said. "It'd be a job and we'd be together," his wife said. Clarence and Laura Hartley arrived from Portland in 1938 in search of adventure and a steady paycheck. They fell in love with the back country, and hatched a plan to move to the Yukon Territory. Then the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Clarence, known most of his life as "Shorty," missed the 5-foot-4 cutoff for military service by half an inch. A broken back he suffered in a motorcycle accident years before sealed his fate. "They didn't figure I was fit for service," he said recently. That's when ranger Avery Berry came to the couple with a proposition: Uncle Sam could still use their help, but they would have to sever most of their ties to the outside world for months at a time. Were they interested? Neither hesitated. "I took this job to do my part for my country," Clarence said. "It'd be a job and we'd be together," Laura added. These days, the Forest Service rents out the Hartleys' old outpost to anyone willing to endure the long, bumpy ride and pony up $40 a night. But more than half a century ago, the government preferred no one knew about Butler Butte. The U.S. military was on the defensive, Americans of Japanese descent had been relegated to internment camps and nightly blackouts were imposed throughout the West. The War Department feared the next attack might hit the mainland. "You thought about it every minute, day and night," Laura said. Radar technology hadn't been perfected, so military commanders set up lookouts in strategic locations up and down the West Coast in case enemy planes and balloons crossed the coastline undiscovered. As it happened, the government had a ready string of installations in the forests. Converting fire lookouts to air watch stations was simple enough. At Butler Butte, workers added a new ground house and woodshed to the existing lookout tower so the site could be used in the winter months. The Hartleys received visitors only every six weeks, when a pair of snowshoe-clad Forest Service workers tromped up pulling a toboggan filled with fresh meat, vegetables, supplies and mail. Other than a rifle Clarence kept to scare up a little fresh meat, the couple's war arsenal included a log book, a telephone and several radios to call in danger. The threat was certainly real enough. In an effort to divert manpower from the American war effort, the Japanese had launched balloons designed to set the forests ablaze. Few of the balloons inflicted any damage, though one killed five people near Klamath Falls. Known by radio only as "Roseburg 25," the Hartleys monitored air space spanning eight miles out in all directions. The government tested them by flying U.S. planes out of an Air Force base 40 air miles away in Medford. "We had to recognize German, Japanese, every kind of plane just by a silhouette," Laura said. Clarence, who doubled as a Forest Service firefighter, took the day shift. Laura worked nights, scanning the sky and listening. Years later, Laura still remembers the howl of a wolf piercing the silky night air, the sensuous curves of a snowdrift and the swish-swish sound of an owl gliding through the night. The radio occasionally buzzed with reports of observers who had gone stir-crazy from isolation and loneliness, but Laura and Clarence drank it in -- hardships and all. During the winter, the butte became so choked with snow the couple was forced to dig a tunnel out to the woodshed and punch out a hole for air. In the summer a vicious dry lightning storm crackled the air with electricity as one lightning bolt after another snapped down around them. At one point, Laura recalls, Clarence ventured out of the cabin. "As he walked under the corner cable of the lookout by the door the static electricity was so great in the air that it grabbed all his hair and wrapped it around the cable," she wrote recently. Mostly, though, they had time to think. But the gravity of the wartime situation always loomed in the form of an intriguing brown envelope left for them with a knapsack of government rations. The envelope had been sealed with beeswax. "We could not open up that envelope unless there was Japanese invasion, and that was our instructions," Laura said. The couple puzzled endlessly over what its message might say. Years later they learned the envelope simply contained instructions to evacuate their post and head into the woods. Such drastic measures were never needed, of course. By October of 1943, 13 months after the Hartleys arrived, all Air Watch observers in the Umpqua National Forest received a missive from the forest supervisor saying their service was no longer needed. The war in the Pacific was going better for the United States, and the country had improved its radar technology to watch for attacks. The Hartleys would be going home. At last count, their log recorded 4,488 hours served and 3,093 aircraft reported -- none of them enemy planes. Clarence, now 82, and Laura, 81, stayed in the Tiller area until the timber industry took a nosedive in the early 1960s. A mechanical whiz, Clarence serviced equipment for the Forest Service, ran an auto garage and also worked as a steam engineer for a sawmill. Laura, meanwhile, worked for the Forest Service in various capacities over the years while regularly watching neighbors' kids. "I raised every kid on the river," she said. They moved away in 1962 and now make their home in Paradise, Calif., but for each of the past several years the couple have headed back to Tiller for the ranger district's annual picnic. The picnic gives them a chance to catch up with old-timers and meet new friends. Asked by the Forest Service some 50 years later to jot down some of the couple's experiences at the butte, Laura penned her 82-page manuscript entirely in longhand. The ranger station makes it available for public consumption, but it hasn't been published otherwise. "I didn't have a typewriter, and I'm not a typist," she said. Behind a picnic table, a campfire ring and a barbecue stand, stands a monument to Butler Butte's past affixed to a rock. "A tribute to the individuals from the Tiller Ranger District who served our country in the Aircraft Warning Service," it reads. "They set the example for the dedicated Aircraft Warning Service teams operating throughout the Western United States." But the real story can be found in a conversation with the 61-year newlyweds over a cold beer in Ronk's Mountain Cafe. And it's in Laura's cursive handwriting that flows from one page to the next without so much as a droop, scrawl or squibble. Prime Times front page Mail Tribune front page Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1998, Medford, Oregon USA