West left the Navy as an ensign in 1946 and embarked on a remarkable career in the ministry. During the summer of 1945, he worked as a chaplain’s intern at Bellevue Hospital in New York City and joined the crush of people in Times Square on V-J Day celebrating the end of the war that August. Still in the Navy, West earned his master’s degree from Colgate Rochester Divinity School in New York and studied at the University of Chicago. After a semester in medical school, he was able to change course. He began to question whether medical missions were his true calling and realized he wanted to serve in the Chaplains Training Program. In the meantime, he worked at the Naval hospital in New Orleans, entering the service as an apprentice seaman and managing the blood bank. Because of the war and the pressing need for doctors, medical schools offered first-year classes starting in September and January. By the time he graduated in May 1943, West had been accepted into the Navy’s V-12 program for medical training with plans to attend Duke University. He majored in chemistry and minored in biology, planning to become a medical missionary. He sang in the University Men’s Glee Club and, during his senior year, served on the Honor Council. He carried 20 hours for all but the last semester, making the Dean’s List. His senior year, he became the headwaiter, supervising 18 student workers. His first year, he worked three nights a week shelving books in the library and also waited tables. Just as he had at Cumberland, West worked his way through Richmond College. West, who turned 100 in October, was a transfer student from Cumberland Junior College in Williamsburg, Kentucky, about 150 miles from his hometown of May’s Lick in the Bluegrass State. “It was the focal point that made it inevitable to get into World War II.” West, a junior at Richmond College, stood outside the Refectory listening with a few hundred students.Įighty-one years later, Pearl Harbor “symbolizes the shock of the strike and the tragedy of the ships that were sunk and the hundreds of servicemen who were killed,” said West, a 1943 grad, in a recent interview from his home in Chesterfield County. Roosevelt’s declaration of war on Imperial Japan. The next day, a radio speaker positioned over the front door of the University’s men’s dining hall broadcast President Franklin D. Japanese military aircraft struck the U.S. will never forget the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
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