While he may have grown up with asthma, Glenn Swearingen was able to hide his diagnosis from U.S. Army doctors and, together with all of the other boys in his Pe Ell High School graduating class, was drafted to help in the war effort during World War II.
Though, ultimately, his asthma was discovered, he still served for two and a half years before being medically separated from the service.
Originally born in Doty on March 29, 1925, Swearingen is now getting ready to celebrate his 100th birthday Saturday, March 29, in a private party with family, close friends and caregivers at his residence at Centralia Point Assisted Living & Memory Care.
The Chronicle visited Swearingen on Monday, March 24, to learn more about his time in service and some of the other things he’s accomplished during his other 97 and a half years of life.
Swearingen was the youngest of 11 children, and despite growing up during the Great Depression, he never felt like he was part of a poor family or community.
“We didn’t know we were poor because everybody was poor,” he said.
In order to catch rides into town, he would get a ride with the Marigold milk delivery truck. In fact, it wasn’t until he was in the 11th grade, just before graduating and joining the Army, that he first used a telephone.
“I should never have been drafted in the first place. But I didn’t want to be home. If I was home, I’d still be trying to fight. I wanted to go. So I doctored myself using my own method called Asthmador,” Swearingen said.
Prior to the introduction of rescue inhalers for asthma attacks, Asthmador was a non-prescription medicinal powder that, when burned, produced smoke that a patient could inhale to help them breathe better.
Swearingen was one of 12 boys in his graduating class of 1943, and he said was going to be “damned” if he was the only one who didn’t go off to serve.
“You put some of the powder into the lid, light it, hover over it and breathe the smoke. So I faked it and doctored myself and stayed in the Army for two and a half years using Asthmador,” he said.
During his time in the Army, he worked artillery and was stationed at Camp McQuaide, a former Army base located near Capitola, California. While there, he was treated to a tour of the famous San Quentin Rehabilitation Center north of San Francisco, California.
“I’m probably one of the few that has ever toured the gas chamber at San Quentin … It’s got two chairs in there so they could do double duty,” Swearingen said jokingly. “They gave us the whole procedure of when they executed somebody, dropping the cyanide pill into the acid.”
While the artillery unit he was a part of did deploy to the European theatre during WWII — going on to fight in Italy — Swearingen was selected to stay behind to assist a colonel serving with the Army’s Judge Advocate General (JAG) division.
Extra assistance was needed for JAG during WWII as Camp McQuaide became a prison for both military prisoners of war and Army deserters during the war.
After the artillery regiment left for Italy, Army officials decided to remove a pair of remaining 150 mm artillery cannons left behind in an emplacement at Camp McQuaide.
Before removing them, though, they invited some of the local elected officials for a demonstration of the cannons. Unfortunately, the demonstration didn’t go as planned.
“All the dignitaries from the nearby cities and towns, county commissioners, were there all standing around, to actually fire off these weapons. They fired 95-pound projectiles,” Swearingen said. “Now, I trained how to position the gun on an eight-man (team) that fired this weapon. When we fired them, the concussion was so great, it knocked everybody down, knocked the cotton out of my ears, knocked a wooden cabinet down behind me … The muzzle burst set everything nearby on fire, and my face was numb for the rest of the day. Nobody figured in the concussion factor firing these weapons off in their emplacement.”
Following the end of his service in the Army, Swearingen returned to the Lewis County area, first working in forestry like his father, Robert Lee Swearingen.
He didn’t stay in the logging industry for long, as his bosses quickly recognized his skills with handling information and calculations after seeing him work in an office following a hernia.
“That was the beginning of my office career,” he added.
Swearingen ended up spending nearly the next four decades as a certified public accountant for the Yergen and Meyer law firm in Portland.
“I’m probably the only person to work for 38 years at a firm with (only) a high school education,” Swearingen said.
He stayed involved working with local logging companies before finally retiring.
Swearingen was married to Louise Swearingen for 72 years, and he spent more than 20 years with her following his retirement traveling with her before she passed away in 2021 at the age of 91.
Together, the couple had two daughters, Cynthia Silva and Gayle Collins, along with four grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
