Sometimes Dad doesn’t always know best. Burnie Jarvis said he was born to be a mechanic and after serving in the Korean War, he enjoyed a successful career working on helicopters instead of attending college and pursing the professional career planned by his parents.
Working in a service station nights and weekends while in high school in Salt Lake City, where he was born and raised, Jarvis wanted to work on cars despite his Chevrolet mechanic dad’s admonition, “over my dead body.”
After high school, Jarvis, who was born in 1930, got a job overhauling steam locomotives at a railroad yard. Young men were being drafted to serve in the Korean War, so he and a friend enlisted in the Navy reserves for one year planning to serve together but ended up stationed on opposite coasts. After serving his time, Jarvis went back to work at the railroad for a year until he was drafted into the Navy and served for two years on a heavy cruiser, the USS Toledo.
“The ship had 1,500 men,” Jarvis said. “It was like a floating city. We were very safe. I didn’t have to live in a foxhole and had a good place to sleep. Our only close call was when we heard and saw small arms fire once. We dropped anchor and left and came back a week and a half later to get the anchor, and there was nothing left onshore. Everything had been obliterated.”
He explained that the anchor had a buoy above it so they could locate it. “We had two anchors, but you don’t want to lose one,” Jarvis said. “There is no way to get another one.
“I was never on shore in two years. We were used for artillery. We had a look-out on a high spot of land with field glasses and a radio, and he would find targets like railroads or bridges and give us the quadrants. We had big eight-inch guns that could fire 25 miles with great accuracy and would take out the targets.”
Another ship would bring food, ammo and fuel to restock the ship, although there were a few times when they ran low on food. When Jarvis had nighttime guard duty in a gun turret, if a cook was serving with him, they got steak. Marines on board served as the police force, and sometimes North Korean or Chinese prisoners would be brought onboard.
At one point, the ship’s gun barrels wore out, and the ship had to go to Honolulu for repairs before heading back to Korea, but the crew never left the ship. “I was busy with work, and the time went by,” Jarvis said. “I read books from the library, and they showed movies in the fantail. They call us heroes, but we were just doing our job. But if we hadn’t shown up, the South Koreans would have lost their country and freedom.”
After Jarvis left the service and returned to the U.S., he became an aviation mechanic and ended up specializing in helicopters, sometimes working with the famous Igor Sikorsky, a Russian-American aviation pioneer who designed and flew the Vought-Sikorsky VS-300, the first viable American helicopter that utilized the rotor configuration used by most helicopters today.
Jarvis went to work in the overhaul department at Los Angeles Airways, a helicopter airline that offered service between area airports. “We carried airmail and freight to 30 different locations,” Jarvis said. “We had a helicopter dedicated to the President, and I worked on that one.”
He later moved to Oregon to work for Evergreen Helicopters in McMinnville. “It was the mid-’60s, and I had to get out of Southern California,” Jarvis said. “I took a one-third to one-half pay cut. After 10 years, I got laid off.”
Another helicopter company, Erickson Air-Crane in Medford, hired him, and he stayed with them 14 years. When he was ready to retire at 65, the company asked him to stay on and work as much as he wanted, so he stayed on, taking one week off each month.
Jarvis tried to retire for good in 1996 but kept getting calls from companies interested in utilizing his expertise. Today at 93, he is still doing consulting, and his Dad would no doubt be proud of his son’s career.
Jarvis, who has been widowed twice, has lived in Tigard since 1996. Three of his five sons are still alive, and he has 12 grandchildren and too many great-grandchildren spread across the country to keep track of.
He goes to the gym six mornings a week and walks half an hour every day at Washington Square Mall. “My doctor looked at me and looked at my chart and said, ‘You don’t match,’” Jarvis said.
While Jarvis doesn’t expect thanks for his military service, he said when he wears his Korean War Veteran hat, people come up and express their gratitude to him, and two or three years ago, he received the Korean Ambassador Peace Medal.
