Lettie Pierce Gilbert

photo by Michael K. Umphrey	photo courtesy of Lettie Gilbert
Lettie Pierce Gilbert has seen a lifetime of trouble. The years 1944-1946 were particularly difficult. She got through it by taking care of others.	From 1941-1944, Lettie Pierce lived at Fort Missoula in Missoula, Mont., where Italians, Japanese and Japanese-Americans were interned during World War II. Lettie is standing at right, holding her youngest child.

When life throws a curve, get busy

by Katherine Mitchell
Veterans History Project

When a fire gutted part of the house where she and her five children lived in 1944, Lettie Pierce Gilbert cut boards and hammered nails to rebuild it. When doctors had to remove her left eye, she moved on with life. When her husband died in an accident, she accepted it and continued to live. Lettie has had a lot of trouble and her way of handling it is to choke it off, deal with it, and move on.

“I’ve always been accepting of life’s curves,” said the 88 year-old great-great-grandmother. “I couldn’t let the bad situations get to me. There was too much to do.”

photo by Michael L. Umphrey

Lettie Pierce Gilbert was prepared for her interview. She had sorted through hundreds of photos to find just the right ones. Here, she shows reporter Katherine Mitchell her collection.

In early 1941, Lettie was a 24-year-old mother of five. Her husband, Nate Pierce, had just been hired as a guard for the Immigration Service. They sold their ranch north of St. Ignatius, Mont., to move to Fort Missoula, where Nate would begin his job of transporting and guarding Italian merchant seamen and luxury ship employees who were detained in U.S. harbors after the beginning of the war. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he would also guard Japanese and Japanese-Americans sent to the fort as enemy aliens or for merely being leaders in their Japanese-American communities.

When Lettie and Nate moved their family to Fort Missoula, they found fort life very different from ranch life. In many ways, her life was blessed compared to life in St. Ignatius. She lived in a spacious four-bedroom apartment and was free to do what she wanted. She also had free child care, weekly entertainment and occasional Italian meals.

Lettie had time to ride her horse, shop or visit with friends — her babysitter was an Italian detainee she could call on almost whenever she needed him. Her lawn was maintained by Japanese internees who also worked in the fort gardens.

Another benefit of fort life was the Italian culture. Half of the Italian detainees came from the luxury liner Conte Biancamano, and many of them were musicians and entertainers.

"The Italians were allowed to bring their instruments to Fort Missoula,” Lettie said. “They had a beautiful orchestra and we used to go to concerts all the time. And they put on plays. The men dressed up like women for the women’s parts, and you couldn’t tell they weren’t women.”

Along with musicians and entertainers, the luxury liner also provided chefs. According to the documentary film “Bella Vista,” two of the chefs worked at the Florence Hotel in Missoula, but they also cooked at the fort. Everyone, from the detainees to the Immigration Service personnel and their families, was able to enjoy the Italian cuisine.

Lettie said she never had a close relationship with any of the internees — that was forbidden — but she had cordial relations with all of them. Many worked in western Montana and Lettie guessed that the internees didn’t always experience cordiality outside of the gates. Sources vary on the number of people interned at Fort Missoula — as many as 1,500 Italians and 1,000 Japanese — but all agree that internees provided cheap labor for firefighting, beet topping, and even mine work in Butte.

Nathan Pierce's duty record from Fort Missoula from Sept. 4, 1942 to Oct. 21, 1942. Nathan was a guard at the fort from 1941-1944. (Click on photo for larger image.)

Though the war was never far from mind, in some ways it seemed an almost idyllic life.

And then everything changed. To avoid being drafted, Nate enlisted in the Navy in 1944. He went to Farragut Naval Training Station in Idaho while she and the children returned to St. Ignatius. The family separation was the beginning of difficult times.

“I got a telegram from [Nate’s] commanding officer,” Lettie said, “telling me that I should probably come” to the hospital in Idaho. Nate had scarlet fever and wasn’t expected to live.

She wanted to rush off to the hospital immediately, but couldn’t. Those were the days of gas and tire (rubber) rationing. Though Lettie wasn’t comfortable confronting authority, she was determined to get to her husband. She went to the chairman of the ration board in St. Ignatius and pleaded her case. She got the stamps for gasoline and a coupon for tires.

When she arrived at the hospital, she found Nate better than she had expected. “He was surprised I was there,” she said.

Shortly after Lettie returned from Farragut, she received another scare. Two of her children became ill with what the doctors thought was polio. After several days of tests and worrying, both children recovered and went home. Then Lettie got sick. She was hospitalized with what she called “knots in her intestines.” She had barely recovered from that when a childhood eye injury flared up. This time she lost her left eye.

And then there was the fire.

After varnishing her piano and the wainscoting on her living room walls, Lettie went outside for a breath of fresh air. Shortly afterwards, “the whole front room just exploded,” she said. She was outside, but the children were still in the house. She rushed back in and got them out, but her troubles weren’t over.

“When the fire was going real bad, I remembered that I had just gotten my Navy check and it was in my coat on my bed,” she said. “So I went through the window, grabbed my coat, and got my check out. Everyone just screamed, ‘You can’t go in there! You can’t go in there!’ But I did or I would have been broke. No money, no nothing.”

photo courtesy of Lettie Pierce Gilbert

Nate Pierce and his horse stand in front of the house that burned while he was away during World War II. His wife Lettie rebuilt the house herself.

Lettie quickly rebuilt the house, with the help of her father-in-law. Doing the work herself seemed the only sensible thing to do. “You couldn’t hire laborers because there was no one to hire,” she pointed out.

She worried about her husband and listened to the news whenever she could. She wrote to Nate every day. In light of what was going on at home, she was glad that he sometimes received her letters six months after she sent them. If he had gotten them quickly, he might have gone crazy wanting to get back, she said.

Life was no picnic for him either. After he left Idaho, he had further training in Syracuse, N.Y., and then was assigned to a destroyer in the Pacific. He wrote as often as she did, and his news gave her more to worry about.

“His ship was shot out from under him,” she said. “There was a 25-foot hole in the fantail and they had to abandon ship.”

People shouldn’t dwell on problems, Lettie believes. Instead, she tries to help other people solve theirs. One of the best ways of coping with illnesses, injuries, fire, and worry, she said, is to stay busy.

After she returned to St. Ignatius, Lettie volunteered for the Ground Observer Corps, whose mission was to spot enemy planes. Her assignment was to report every airplane that flew over the Mission Valley, night or day, and describe it as best she could.

How many planes did she count? “More than you wanted!” she said. “Every time you were doing something, there’d go a plane.”

She also worked for the Ursuline Sisters’ school after one of the nuns came by to ask a favor.

“Here she was on my porch,” Lettie said. “She said, ‘Lettie, we need your help.’ I said, ‘What do you need?’ and she said, ‘We need a cook.’ I said, ‘I have five kids!’ and she said, ‘That doesn’t make any difference. We’ve got 2,500!’”

While the Ursulines didn’t actually have 2,500 students, Lettie got the point. She cooked for the school for several months. While she was there she saw that a cook wasn’t the only thing they needed; she also became the girls basketball coach.

Lettie taught Sunday School and organized dances and day trips for local youth. She collected clothing for people less fortunate than her family. She helped at both the Ursuline School and the public school, substitute teaching, cooking, coaching, and volunteering with clubs and associations. She even had time to cheer for the football team.

After Nate came home in 1946, he and Lettie had 25 more years of what she described as the “happy, simple life” of store owners, horse breeders and trainers, and ranchers. Nate was killed in 1971 when a horse reared over backward on top of him, causing internal injuries.

How did she persevere in spite of sickness, worry, and heartache? “I don’t know,” she said. “I think things happen, and you have to just accept them and you go on.…The world turns same as ever.”

This World War II ration book was issued to Nathan Pierce, Lettie's husband. It still has stamps in it. Lettie said that the worst thing about rationing was "keeping track of the darned stamps." She thought this book may have been for green beans because she hated green beans and it would probably be the only book with stamps left in it.

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