Another reply! Ted is overwhelming me with amazing information--
in a great way!

Dear Friends

Thanks to Margie's e-mail yesterday, I feel like I know a lot more
aboutyoung John F. Seaton, your Uncle Jack, and my colleague as a
junior infantry officer in the part of WW2 that was  fought in Germany
in the spring of 1945.  John and I did not have much time together, as
he took my place as a platoon leader in I Company and I became the
demolition and ammunition officer of Battalion Headquarters  Co.
We would get together briefly from time to time at the officers' mess,
or other off-duty times. I remember talking with him at some length
on the troop ship (The Kungsholm) a passenger liner that was taken
over by the US government during the war and used to carry troops
because it could outrun the German U-Boats.  We crossed the North
Atlantic from Boston in February and it was stormy.  Our training in
naval landing craft had conditioned us to some extent, so we didn't
get too sea sick.  We discovered that we had quite a lot in common,
both of us being from western ranching country, state university
ROTC students, and glad that we were going overseas in a well
trained outfit, and not as replacements.  We landed at LeHavre,
France and walked down the gangplank with our duffle bags, more
or less like regular tourists in peace time.  We were gratefull that
we had missed D-Day and going ashore in the fashion depicted
in the movie, Saving Private Ryan. Our division traveled in the old
Forty and Eight French box cars left over from World War I, to a
point near the German border where we took trucks across the
Rhine and stopped briefly in Cologne before going into combat
in the Ruhr Pocket, as it was called at that  time.  (The French box
cars got their name 40 & 8 because they could carry 40 men or 8
horses.)  The German industrial area along the Ruhr River had been
surounded by American troops before we got there, and it was our
job to liquidate the resistance and take prisoners.  Some of the
German units surrendered when they realized that further
resistance was useless, and others kept shooting at us until they
ran out of ammo.  John's original company commander, Capt.
Kamprath, an ROTC officer from Nebraska, was shot in the neck
by a sniper, but survived after being evacuated to a hospital.
Apparently the shot that hit John was instantly fatal.  John didn't
get to come home, but he did not have to suffer.  As the colonel
who wrote to the family said, John died leading the men of his
platoon in combat. I didn't see it, but talked to men who were
with him.  He was greatly admired by his men and was
greatly missed by all of us who knew him.   I am not sure, but
I think that after Capt. Kamprath was evacuated, John was briefly
in charge of the whole company. We were both 2d Lts. at the
time, but we had considerable responsibility for 22-year olds.
You being a military family will understand this.
       I would appreciate hearing from Ginger.  Perhaps her mom
saved some of John's letters home.  Margie asked whether I was
in Oregon.  My winter home, and official work station, is in
Pasadena, California, where we moved after our four children
were grown, and three of them had moved
to Southern California ahead of us.  My wife, Mary, and I were
married in 1949, while I was in law school in Eugene, Oregon,
and our two boys and two girls were all born there.  The GI Bill,
enacted by Congress during the war to help the service men
and women complete their education after the war put me
through law school.  I began my practice in Eugene, in
1951, and in 1955 the Governor of Oregon appointed me to
fill a vacant circuit judgeship in Eugene and three nearby
counties.  Five years later another governor, Mark Hatfield,
with whom I had worked as a young lawyer on the Eisenhower
presidential campaign, (1952) appointed me as a justice
on the Oregon Supreme Court where I served for nine years. 
In 1969, then Senator Hatfield, caused President Nixon to
appoint me to the federal district court in Portland. Two years
later, President Nixon appointed me to the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers nine states and
Guam and Saipan, islands in the Western Pacific.  I finally got
back to the South Pacific, not as an infantry man but as a
federal judge.
We stayed on in Portland until 1982 when the chief judge of
the circuit prevailed upon me to move to Pasadena which
became the principal office for the busiest part of the circuit,
Southern California.  By that time I knew that sooner or later
I would become Chief Judge of the circuit and would need
to be in either Pasadena or San Francisco.  Because three of
our  four children were already in the LA area, we decided to
do as the chief requested.   We did, however, keep roots in
Oregon and we now spend about half of each year at  our
home in Sisters, which is close to a family tree farm where
our children and grand children are planting Ponderosa
pines and thinning out the lodgepole.  Sisters is also close
to Prineville where I went to high school, and to the tributary
ranch country were I worked as a teenager before going to
college and on into the army via the ROTC.   It took me nearly
 thirty years, divided between Eugene, Salem, and Portland,
to get back to Central Oregon, and later to live there as a
semi-retired judge who has to be close to an airport in order
to take care of the work to which I am assigned.  The court
calls us "senior judge" which means we get to work as much
as we want to, but we get paid whether we work or not. 
I like to hear court cases, and Mary likes to have me out of
the house, so my court work keeps us both happy. Staying
off the elevators and climbing up the stairs to the fifth floor of
the Pasadena courthouse keeps my legs strong enough to get
on and off of a saddle horse.  I still help the neighbors in
Oregon gather and move cattle when the Forest Service tells
them it is time to get the critters out of the timber.  I loved
the pictures Margie sent, and wish I could enclose some of
my own.  But I don't have either the technical know how or the
right computer equipment to send pictures from here.  I will
put one in an envelope to give you an idea what I look like
and why I love Oregon.    We will move back to our house
in Sisters, Oregon, around the first of June.
Best wishes, and I look forward to getting better acquainted.  
Ted Goodwin