Dale Lester Hetherington
T/5 in Signal Co, Special
Military occupational specialty: 14 (automotive mechanic, second echelon)
ASN#39316778
Born 1907 in OK, Died 1961
County of residence at enlistment: Polk County, OR
Other residence(s): Walnut, OK; Perry, OK; Oceanlake, OR; Dallas, OR; Grants Pass, OR; Chubbuck, ID
United States Army, European Theatre of Operations
Occupation before the war: unskilled lumbermen, raftsmen, and woodchoppers
Dale Hetherington was born on April 18, 1907 on a farm near Perry, OK, the second of six children. His father was a farmer; his father and grandfather were Perry area pioneers who had come and claimed a homestead in the 1893 land run.*
Dale left school after the 8th grade; he was an experienced farmhand by the time he was 18 when he took off with a friend to work the harvest in Kansas, and then head on to Canada for more seasonal work.
During the late 1920s he went back and forth to Canada several times for long periods, sometimes stopping for a while in Kansas and then heading up into Canada, probably mostly to Alberta, to thresh and haul wheat. In the 1920s Alberta was a booming province—they were rich in natural resources, rapidly developing their infrastructure, and the recipients of a substantial amount of American investment. One of Dale's brothers had also settled in Alberta, at least for a time.
In 1932, Dale married Ruth Lucille Perkins in Oklahoma, and they settled on the family farm for a while. The couple became the parents of three children born in the 1930s: Donna, Patsy, and Marvin. Newspaper articles from the period show him working on street graveling projects and bailing hay for neighbors.
But by 1938 the couple was divorced and not long after that Dale headed for Oregon, apparently inflicted with the same wanderlust that had brought his father's family to Perry in 1893. By 1940 he was working as a logger and living in Oceanlake, OR with a new wife, Wilma, and her daughter from a previous relationship.
He registered for the draft on October 16, 1940 and enlisted on September 5, 1942 giving his marital status as "divorced, without dependents." He was eventually assigned to the Signal Company Special, and saw service in Europe with the unit during the war. In January, 1945, he mailed home to his children in Oklahoma a package which they received that April. According to the local paper, the package contained, in a "wooden ammunition box taken from the Germans . . . more than 150 Nazi medals, practically all different, a rosary, a man’s gold watch chain, a silver watch chain, a German billfold, a German officer’s cap and field glasses, hammered silver jewelry box, silver-plated slipper, cigarette case, swastika arm band, and many other articles.”
Dale was discharged from the Army with the rank of T/5 on September 2, 1945. He had spent a 30-day furlough that summer in Perry, visiting his children and his grandfather.
He settled once more in Oregon where he married Hazel Holmes on January 9, 1946; they were divorced two years later. He seems to have returned to Oklahoma after that, since the early 1950s find him in a relationship with an Otoe Indian woman by the name of Mary Robedeaux. She was characterized in the local newspapers as "wealthy," since she owned four producing oil wells. Mary died in July, 1951 after a car accident. Six people, including Mary, and Dale, who was driving, were in the car when it got stuck in the mud in the dark. The passengers helped to push the car onto the road but there was a 10-foot ditch next to the road, and Mary fell into it and broke her neck. As her common law husband, Dale became administrator of the estate and went to court in early 1952 to have himself declared heir to her wealth. The resolution of that case is not known.
Dale's whereabouts through the rest of the 1950s are not clear; he was probably back and forth from Perry to other parts of the country. In 1961, he worked for six months as a farm laborer in Pocatello, ID and was helping to harvest the potato crop there when he died of a heart attack on November 4, 1961.
He is buried at Grace Hill Cemetery in Perry, OK.
*Dale's father was 13 when he participated with his father in the opening of the Cherokee Outlet. This was a 60-mile-wide strip of land just east of the Oklahoma panhandle (along the border with Kansas) that had been granted in 1836 to the Cherokee Nation as an access route to the west from their eastern Oklahoma tribal lands. The Cherokee sold off the land in the early 1890s for $8.6 million, which was not paid by the US government until 1964. The 1893 land run was the last major land run in the west, and comprised 6 million acres—40,000 150-acre homesteads.
Sources:
1910 census
1920 census
1925 article in The Perry Journal (OK) about his work
https://www.newspapers.com/image/30428154/?match=1&terms=dale%20hetherington
1927 article in The Perry Journal (OK) about his going to Canada
https://www.newspapers.com/image/603748569/?match=1&terms=dale%20hetherington
1929 border crossings from US to Canada
https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/1344/records/2759267?tid=6470675&pid=-1283502875&ssrc=pt
1930 census
1930 border crossings from Canada to US
1932 marriage record
1932 article in The Perry Daily Journal and the Perry Republican and the Noble County Sentinel (OK) about his work
https://www.newspapers.com/image/904954169/?match=1&terms=dale%20hetherington
1932 article in The Perry Daily Journal and the Perry Republican and the Noble County Sentinel (OK) about his farm work
https://www.newspapers.com/image/904951953/?match=1&terms=dale%20hetherington
1938 divorce decree noted in The Perry Daily Journal and the Perry Republican and the Noble County Sentinel (OK)
https://www.newspapers.com/image/905196155/?match=1&terms=dale%20hetherington
1940 draft card
https://www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/2238/images/44032_03_00005-04379?pId=36549803
1940 census
1942 enlistment record
1945 article in The Perry Daily Journal and the Perry Republican and the Noble County Sentinel (OK) about a box of souvenirs he sent home from Germany
https://www.newspapers.com/image/905233749/?match=1&terms=dale%20hetherington
1945 article in The Perry Daily Journal and the Perry Republican and the Noble County Sentinel (OK) about his military service
https://www.newspapers.com/image/905210931/?match=1&terms=dale%20hetherington
1946 marriage record
https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/61677/records/26019?tid=6470675&pid=-1283502875&ssrc=pt
1948 divorce record
1952 article in Woodward Daily News (OK) about an accident he was involved in
https://www.newspapers.com/image/903542981/?match=1&terms=dale%20hetherington
1952 article in The Perry Daily Journal (OK) about a legal settlement he was pursuing
https://www.newspapers.com/image/904869830/?match=1&terms=dale%20hetherington
1961 obituary in The Enid Morning News (OK)
https://www.newspapers.com/image/902770693/?match=1&terms=dale%20hetherington
1961 Idaho death record
1961 US headstone applications for military veterans
1961 Find a Grave record
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/38409855/dale-lester-hetherington