Sailor to Environmentalist: Memoirs of Charles R. Anderson by Charles R. Anderson

“My main focus in life was the natural environment. So what was I doing as a metalsmith on a destroyer? Ask the Navy! Just because I had two years of metal and wood working in school, the Navy made me a metalsmith – they did not have a position for a landscape man on a destroyer. However, the many things I saw, learned, and did while in the Navy helped me later in life. I was in numerous large cities and buildings in Europe, saw and walked on the beautiful countryside of England and Ireland, and observed the eroded mountains of Crete. My World War II stint in the Navy showed me the enormous pollution in China and the poorest people in the world. In South Korea, I saw how the Japanese “war machine” had devastated a rich, fertile country. Most likely all this helped frame my mind about promoting the environment of our country, the good old USA.” What began as telling war stories to his children and grandchildren about the Great Depression, joining the US Navy at 17, being in Tokyo Bay at the signing of the Peace Treaty ending WWII, transporting Korean and Japanese prisoners, the "secret room" on the USS Willard Keith DD775, supporting and seeing Captain Carlsen run across the smokestack of the sinking Flying Enterprise, and his world travels, turned into written memoirs by Charles Anderson assisted thru letters written to his wartime sweetheart. Numerous photos taken by Charles are included. His true legacy lies in being a pioneer in land conservation and concern to protect the environment. Through his landscaping skills working on New Jersey’s Garden State Parkway, as Chief of the Bureau of Landscape Architecture for the Maryland State Highways, and his active participation on several national committees from the 1950s through the 1980s, he demonstrated how to construct interstate highways while preserving the natural beauty, wildlife, and clean waterways. “What makes a 90-year-old environmentalist, who is now completely deaf, happy? To walk with my cane across a pedestrian bridge with one of my children, a grandchild, or great grandchild, and look at a stream of water below that is clean and crystal clear surrounded by nature – natural beauty. In looking, I say to myself, just maybe, many years ago, I played a little part in preserving the water quality of this stream in all its natural beauty.”