On Feb. 18, 1925, Clarence Piper was born in the Puyallup Valley. He was one of seven children of Francis “Frank” and Stella Piper, who lived on a small farm near Orting.
A century later, on Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2025, Clarence celebrated his 100th birthday with four generations of his family visiting from across the country at the Village Concepts of Chehalis Woodland Village assisted living facility.
“Now that I’m 100, I’m just going to take it day by day,” Clarence said. “I spent 30 years working at Boeing … I retired from Boeing in 1986, so I’ve been retired longer than I worked now.”
Clarence isn’t the first centenarian in his family, either, as his mother, Stella, was only three weeks shy of her 101st birthday when she died in 1984, and his older sister, Dorothy, lived to be 101.
Aside from a long career as a quality control metallurgist specializing in manufacturing processes for Boeing, Clarence is also a World War II veteran. He was previously featured in a pair of commentaries by Chronicle columnist Julie McDonald in 2023.
When the Imperial Japanese launched their surprise attack against the U.S. Navy ships in port at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, Clarence was still a Sumner High School student.
Upon graduating in 1943, he received a draft notice. When he reported, he was selected to serve in the famous Seabees battalions — the Navy’s construction unit responsible for building and maintaining bridges, roads, airstrips and sometimes entire bases.
As part of the 135th Naval Construction Battalion, his first duty station in 1944 was the Island of Tinian, where Clarence helped build Quonset huts and an airstrip that would become a runway for B-29 pilots launching bombing raids on Tokyo, Japan, some 1,500 miles away.
And though he didn’t know it at the time, his unit also assisted with the B-29 Enola Gay’s mission of dropping the first atomic bomb, called “Little Boy,” on Hiroshima, Japan.
It was on July 26, 1945, when Clarence observed the Navy’s Portland-class heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis make a stop at the small 40-square mile Island of Tinian. The reason for the stop was to secretly deliver critical parts for “Little Boy.”
“Little Boy” was such a big bomb that in order to load it on a B-29, the Seabees had to dig a trench to lower it in, which allowed the Enola Gay to be towed above it and for “Little Boy” to be hoisted up into the aircraft’s bomb bay.
“I never made the connection, to be honest with you,” Clarence said in 2023. “It’s only when I read a book about the Indianapolis that I realized what happened in that period. Everything was secret.”
Following the end of WWII, he used his GI Bill and attended Washington State College in Pullman studying plant pathology.
“I couldn’t wait to get out to be honest, but it paid for my education. That’s really a great thing, the GI Bill,” Clarence said Tuesday.
Having grown up in a rural farming family during the Great Depression, the Piper family didn’t have the means to send their kids to a university at the time.
“I would’ve never gone to college if it weren’t for that,” he added.
After graduating, Clarence did spend a short stint working for the Department of Agriculture and then as a beehive inspector for Washington state before eventually being hired by Boeing.
“They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse,” he said.
As for what his plans are now that he’s 100, Clarence is just “taking things day by day” now.
To learn more about Clarence and his service during WWII, read The Chronicle’s 2023 two-part feature on him at https://tinyurl.com/y2hhvtut and https://tinyurl.com/dm6urcnu.
