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Col. Thomas H. Monroe, Sr. will mark his 95th birthday on April 28. Those many years have special meaning to a man who spent the prime of his life away from home but never lost touch with his deep roots in Humboldt County.

His devotion to the nation spanned the two major wars and service under Generals John J. Pershing and Douglas MacArthur. This same spirit of service was devoted to civic projects in his home community after retirement from the military.

He traces his Humboldt County heritage back to the Albee family, early settlers who came overland from the Midwest. His great-grandfather, Joseph Albee, settled on a ranch in the Redwood Creek area in 1852 and was killed by Indians in 1862. Joseph Albee’s daughter, Ann, married Col. Monroe’s grandfather, Welton Alanzo Monroe. The Colonel’s father, Alanzo Judson Monroe, was born at Hydesville in 1858 and his mother, Lucretia Huntington, was born at Rockford, Ill.

The Albee name was ever present in Col. Monroe’s youth. George Albee, his great uncle, taught him chemistry at Eureka High School. George later became superintendent of schools and the high school’s Albee Stadium was named in his honor.

Col. Monroe likes to tell a story involving his grandfather, Charles A. Huntington, who was a Congregational Church minister. While serving as an Indian Agent and teacher at Neah Bay, Wash., Huntington told a group of Native Americans about the Biblical account of the flood brought on by 40 days and 40 nights of rain. One of his listeners replied, “It rains here 90 days and 90 nights and we’re not flooded out.”

The Monroe name carries with it the traditions of longevity and military service. Col. Monroe’s brother was Brig. General Hammond McDougal Monroe, who died on Jan. 25, 1985 at the age of 91. The Colonel’s two sons are Col. Thomas H. Monroe, Jr., who lives in Eureka, and Col. Putnam Waldner Monroe of Austin, Texas. All four men graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

Col. Monroe was born in Eureka on April 28, 1890 in a cottage at Del Norte and E streets, the site of the present First Baptist Church. He remembers that the one-story cottage had the distinction of being a “highrise” with a number of steps leading to the entrance.

This was because the house was built over huge redwood stumps and blasting talent had not been available for their removal prior to construction.

Growing up in early-day Eureka left him with a number of other vivid childhood memories:

Like the time, at age 4, when something came over the backyard fence while he was in the yard with his mother. The family bulldog picked up the object before he could get to it. It was food laced with strychnine and the dog died.

Or the time when Henry Way, pond tender for the Occidental Mill, fished out a large octopus.

Then there was the organ concert at church when, at age 14, he was charged with the responsibility of pumping the leather bellows. At a point in a selection when all stops were open, the bellows broke. At first the organist thought he had “goofed off,” and it was all pretty tense until the truth emerged.

His first taste of schooling came as a 5-year-old when he attended a kindergarten school operated at D and 6th streets by Mrs. Henry Way, wife of the Occidental Mill pond tender.

From there he attended elementary grades at the one-room Lincoln School, Grant School, Brown School and Pioneer School. He recalls that some teachers were strict on discipline and “if you got a licking at school you would get a licking at home.” In one of the more exciting schoolroom incidents at Pioneer School, a male teacher lost his patience and started to pull young Monroe out the door. The student clung to a desk and finally both boy and desk went tumbling outside. The colonel recalls that this incident led to a request that he apologize to the teacher and apologize he did.

He was sent to a preparatory school at Portland, Oregon, for a year in 1906 and returned to get his high school education at Winship School. He graduated from Winship, Eureka’s first high school, in 1909.

He was elected student body president at the high school and played on the football team. “In those days we used a donated football and furnished our own playing equipment.”

Memories of high school include the building of a tennis court with a wood surface, membership in the Sequoia Yacht Club, where students could swim in a pool built of timbers and caulked like a ship’s hull, and summer work experiences.

During the summer of 1907, he worked in a sash-and-door factory at Samoa. The next summer he joined two friends on a pack trip into the Klamath River country, and in the summer of 1909 he got a job with a relocation survey crew working in the Eel River canyon for the Northwestern Pacific Railroad.

In December of 1909, he took a competitive examination for West Point at University of California at Berkeley. An entrance test followed in January, and he entered West Point in the class of 1914 on March 1. His sponsor was Congressman Englebright of Grass Valley.

A memorable event in his cadet years was being in attendance at the inauguration of President Woodrow Wilson following his election in 1913. The ceremony gave him an unexpected glimpse of a dashing second lieutenant in the cavalry who had graduated from West Point in 1909 and was to become General George S. Patton. At the inauguration, Patton, on horseback, had words with an unauthorized man who had taken over the speaker’s podium. The man wouldn’t move until Patton finally threatened him at close range with his saber.

After graduating from West Point, Col. Monroe’s first assignment as a second lieutenant in the infantry was at El Paso, Texas, with General John J. Pershing. It was here, at Camp Cotton, that Pershing was assembling troops and material for the much publicized punitive expedition against the notorious Francisco (Pancho) Villa, Mexican bandit and revolutionary. The action was ordered by President Wilson after Villa’s band raided Columbia, New Mexico in 1916 and killed a number of American citizens.

It was at El Paso that Col. Monroe asked General Pershing for a month’s leave to marry his fiancee, Clara Waldner, in Eureka. The general said “no,” but allowed a three-day leave. The bride-to-be hurriedly traveled by train to El Paso, and the wedding took place on March 27, 1915.

The bride soon returned home and the groom went on to Columbia, New Mexico and the jumping off base for the expedition into Mexico. Col. Monroe was made adjutant of a motor truck battalion of 1,100 vehicles. It was the battalion’s job to supply the troops engaged in the pursuit of Villa.

President Wilson had ordered that Villa be captured dead or alive, and the expedition trailed the renegade for 11 months from March, 1916 to February, 1917, but failed in its objective. World War I was at hand, and in this same year Pershing was appointed commander in chief of the American Expeditionary Force in France.

Col. Monroe returned to the Sixth Infantry Regiment at El Paso and was then assigned to an officers’ training camp in Tennessee. His regiment became part of the 54th Infantry, and he became a battalion commander. He was sent overseas from New York in July, 1918, and landed at Liverpool, England. From there, his outfit went on to Winchester, England and Le Havre, France.

He recalls, “We were known as the ‘Sightseeing Sixth’ because we marched all over France and never got into a serious battle.”

But it wasn’t all that easy. There is the memory of battling large rats in the trenches, being hospitalized with dysentery and viewing the Verdun battlefields where reminders of the recent dead lay all about. It was at Verdun that a million men died in the bloodiest battle of World War I.

After the Armistice and his return to New York, Col. Monroe came home to Eureka on leave before reporting for a two-year assignment with the ROTC at the Georgia Military Academy. Then came a one-year stint at Georgia Tech, followed by one year of duty as head of the ROTC in the Fourth Corps Area in Atlanta.

Other assignments included the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, temporary duty with the Chemical Warfare Corps at Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland, organizer of the Chemical Welfare Board for the Army and service as secretary of the board for three years.

In 1929, Col. Monroe was transferred back to the infantry and assigned the Philippine Command at Fort McKinley. It was here that he became acquainted with General Douglas MacArthur. After knowing and working with a number of generals. Col. Monroe rates MacArthur the “greatest general of modern times.”

In 1930, Gen. MacArthur put Col. Monroe in command of Camp Baguio, a Philippine resort of 250 rooms for Army and Navy personnel. A year later, the colonel was sent to the Army War College in Washington, D.C., for more study.

In 1932, Gen. MacArthur ordered him to Fort Benning, but that order was canceled. Instead, Col. Monroe was assigned to the War Department’s general staff under Gen. MacArthur to work in the British Empire Section G2 (intelligence).

Col. Monroe in 1941.

In 1936, he was sent to Oakland as an instructor for the California National Guard, a duty he remembers as “pleasant with a lot of good friends.” World War II brought him the assignment of antitank officer with the Sixth Army in June of 1942. In September of that year he took command of the 15th Infantry, a part of the Third Division at Fort Lewis, Washington. From Fort Lewis he went to Fort Ord near Monterey, to Camp Prickett, Virginia, and then to North Africa on November 7, 1942, where he served in an area from Casablanca to Tunis.

In July, 1943, he was ordered back to the U.S. to serve as instructor at the Army-Navy Staff School, Washington, D.C., where he headed the Intelligence Section.

After his retirement from the Army on May 1,1946, Col. Monroe returned to Eureka and devoted his time and talent to civic affairs. He served as public relations director for the Eureka Chamber of Commerce and Civil Defense director for the county. He received a state appointment as director of civil defense for the entire North Coast District. He has always shown a keen interest in community history and is a member and past president of the Humboldt County Historical Society.

The Colonel has four grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. His wife died in 1976.

His home is in a scenic wooded section of Monroe Lane in the Redmond Road area of Eureka. He retains a lively interest in the community, in reading and in corresponding with his many friends. Two hobbies in his retirement years have been fishing and gardening. He says, “I can’t do much of that anymore, but I still have a martini every night at five.”