Wayne was assigned to the 5th Division as a gun crew member of a 5” 51 caliber broadside gun. The battleship would be his home for the next seven years. They put me on lifeboat watch… didn’t even know what that was.” The USS California awaited Wayne in Puget Sound. “We hit big sea swells, up and down, up and down, my first taste of seasickness. His CCC job was 20 miles from Chickasha.Īfter basic Wayne packed his hammock and sea bag, boarded a tanker to Long Beach, another ship to San Francisco Bay, then went aboard a cruiser destined for Puget Sound. “I thought they’d send me to new places,” Wayne said. “Plus I walked 4 miles each way to school every day.” After high school, Wayne joined the government’s Civilian Conservation Corps in 1933. “It was hard work, a hard living,” he said. World War II had caught our Pacific Fleet sound asleep at a shallow anchorage called Pearl Harbor.īorn in 1915, Newton County resident and centenarian Wayne Shelnutt picked cotton, tended garden, and cultivated crops on an 80-acre family farm near Chickasha, OK. One hundred crewmembers would die and 62 others would be wounded. General quarters sounded and startled sailors ran to their battle stations. A plane with a big red ball painted on the fuselage passed over the California then dropped a bomb on Ford Island. Wayne Shelnutt was nursing a hot cup of coffee after breakfast when someone screamed, “What is that airplane doing up there?” Wayne walked a few steps to the door and looked up. This is his story.Īboard the battleship USS California, Dec. Wayne Shelnutt celebrates his 100th birthday this year at a special ceremony at the American Legion Post 77 Hall in Rockdale County on August 15.

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