Roger Wayne Wallace, Ph.D.Father, Teacher, Friend - Page 3 1919 -2011 Roger’s first wife, and the mother of his children, Isabelle Ruth Chadwick, attended Stanford as an undergraduate. In her senior year, money became tight and Roger offered to pay for Isabelle’s senior year at Stanford. Such an offer, according to Wallace Chadwick, her father, required marriage. This was during WW2. Roger traveled by train to California, married, and then returned to the east coast. The photos of the nuptials were taken the day before he arrived, so he is not in any of the wedding photos. Roger encouraged Isabelle to study either engineering or medicine, but her father stated that the only appropriate professions for a woman were teacher or nurse. Isabelle became a history teacher. The winter after his marriage, during WW2, Roger was sent to officer’s training school on Long Island, NY. His dislike of exercise in the snow made this an especially memorable time. He long remembered that the class did worse on the physical testing after officer’s training school than they did on admission. He learned to fire a machine gun and to use the muzzle flash to find targets. He learned how to enter and clear a room. He learned how to use explosives to fell a tree and how to convert a Colt 45 pistol to fully automatic. They were told that the .45 was a completely useless weapon, so one should break off a small tab of metal, fire the clip, and while everyone was ducking, thinking it was a machine gun, run away. Seems like useful advice, but I have never seen it used in a movie. He was in New York City at a show when an army bomber ran into the Empire State Building. They all went down to see the damage. The next adventure was blimp school! In the immortal words of Roger’s commanding officer, “Blimps are dumb.” Roger was sent to England and then on to Paris where he had an office on the Champs-Élysées across from the Arc de Triomphe. His time in Paris was spent going to the opera, shows, and working. Ultimately, he was assigned a jeep and a driver and given the task of searching southern Germany for nuclear weapons, rockets, and scientists. He captured a train full of artillery pieces, which he said was a giant problem because who do you give a train to? He saw the insides of many German factories with their slave cages and he liberated a German factory that was testing focused explosives on prisoners. He took lots of pictures, none of which showed any war damage. When asked he said, “Why would I want a picture of broken stuff?” He said that no building in Germany was more than waist high and he spent six months outside, which did not make him a fan of camping. Download Memorial as .pdf here Back to Plumsite Memorials - Plumsite |