By Pam Silverstein

During my nearly three years as his nurse, I always referred to him as Mr. Takatsuka, out of respect for him and others of his generation. But on a warm day last June, hours before he died, I gently called him by his first name, Augie. I’ve remembered him that way ever since.

Now, as I look back, I’m tempted to say he was “my Augie.” But I believe his greatest gift in life was his ability to make everyone feel he was their Augie.

August Takatsuka was born on Vashon Island in 1920 to parents who had emigrated from Japan 10 years earlier. His father was a strawberry farmer, and eventually Augie would be one, too — but not until his return from Europe in the winter of 1945. He had been a combat soldier with the famous 442nd Japanese American Division of the U.S. Army. During his years of fighting in Italy, France and Germany, he developed complications from trench foot — leading eventually to the amputation of his left leg.

In January 2004 the VA Hospital requested I see him. He was 84, his diabetes was poorly controlled, he had recently suffered a heart attack and small stroke, his lungs often filled with fluid from his weakened heart and kidneys, and his left leg stump would sometimes irritate him. That was Augie’s clinical picture, a summary of his medical history that the hospital gave me so that I could begin my work as his visiting nurse. Nothing in his medical history, however, mentioned how wonderful he was.

When I first met Augie he was sitting at his formica-topped kitchen table with newspapers and mail piled on one side and medication bottles stacked in a box in front of him. A plate with one remaining pancake and a half-filled saltshaker sat near the maple syrup. He looked up at me and apologized for not getting up: “I’m still a little tired. I didn’t get much sleep in the hospital.”

I held out my hand and introduced myself, and we shared a smile that was at once shy and familiar. I can sometimes sense during my initial visits with patients whether I’ll eventually have a positive impact on their behavior and help them regain some measure of health.

With Augie I could not have imagined the profound impact he would have on me.

I was his home health nurse for two and a half years, and during that time, we shared a reciprocal respect and affection for each other that I have never experienced with anyone outside of my own family. He came to see me as his guardian angel, and I worked very hard to live up to his expectations. Because as much as Augie wanted to go on living to enjoy the frequent visits of his friends, to look out on his vast farm, to watch the birds appreciate the seeds he provided, to doze off while reading the papers with the cat on his lap and to spend time with his beloved friend and partner Marie Davis, I, too, wanted Augie to live because he enriched my soul.

When his kidneys weakened to the extent that his heart could no longer function efficiently, Augie required emergency dialysis. Thus began a new life for him, spending the weekdays with his niece and nephew near the dialysis center in Seattle and visiting his beloved farm and friends on Vashon on the weekends. I continued to see him weekly to monitor his response to the frequent changes in his medical regimen. His doctors appreciated my assessments. But if anyone had asked me the real reason I was seeing him, it was that I could not imagine my life as a visiting nurse without him in it. 

I can’t remember when I first asked Augie to let me interview him using my ancient Hi8 video camera, but I vividly remember the day I drove up to his Vashon home to begin filming him. I felt nervous. For the first time, I’d be talking with him not as his nurse but as a kind of teenage fan — a shift in our relationship that made me initially uncomfortable. Little did I know how much these interviews — lengthy discussions that would ultimately absorb hours of tape — would deepen and enrich our budding friendship.

There had been real teenagers in his past who interviewed him for school projects related to the war, and I could tell that he was comfortable answering questions about that time in his life. I’ve had the honor of knowing men of his generation who fought in World War II, and I am always struck by the vividness of their memories. But I had never known anyone like Augie, an American hero who spent the start of the war in the Tule Lake internment camp in California, with hundreds of other Japanese-Americans who were forced from their homes. I asked him to explain why he joined the Army. I was struck by the simplicity of his answer.

“Well, you see,” he said, “they handed out these forms, the loyalty oath, and we had to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to some questions, and I guess I said ‘yes’ enough times that I was allowed to leave the camp to work on a farm in Idaho, and when I got there I had to report to the Canyon County draft board, and soon after I was sent to Fort Douglas, Utah, for induction into the Army.”

On and on his memories flowed — freely and without pause except for the times I’d ask for clarification. I watched him describe images that played like a newsreel in his mind. This gentle man had been a fierce and smart soldier. Indeed, he returned to the Italian and German front lines repeatedly after being treated for trench foot, that horrible infection so many soldiers experienced because of endless hours in the trenches wearing wet socks and boots.

When my camera wasn’t rolling and Augie and I were driving back to his niece and nephew’s house in Seattle, he recalled the death of a young soldier.

“Some of us older guys in the company stopped getting to know the new recruits because we didn’t want to get too close to them in case things” — he paused — “went bad.” I could see his eyes turn inward to those haunting images. “There was this young fella who got hit, and I held onto him until he died. I never even knew his name.”

After his third bout with trench foot, Augie was reclassified and sent to work with the horses and mules used to transport supplies over rough terrain. He wound up at a castle in Germany where Gen. Eisenhower and his staff were headquartered. Hidden in a fragile photo album filled with pictures from his Army years was a small snapshot of “Ike” in his dapper riding breeches. On another page I recognized a young Daniel Inouye who would one day become the great senator from Hawaii.

Augie was 25 years old when he returned to Vashon on a cold December night in 1945.

“I remember catching the last ferry at Point Defiance, and this deck hand asked me if I had a ride, and I said no, and he asked me where I lived, and I said I didn’t know exactly ’cause my parents had come back to Vashon when I was in the Army and they were in a rental cabin. There was just one car on the ferry. It was New Year’s Eve, and the deck hand said he’d go over and ask the driver if he’d give me a ride. But I said no don’t bother them ’cause I didn’t want no hassles. But it turned out it was a Japanese-American guy and his wife who worked as caretakers at the Falcon Nest — this fancy lodge — and he knew my parents and drove me right up to their door. I don’t even remember what I said to my folks — just, ‘I’m home.’”

Augie spent nearly three months sitting on his parents’ couch, getting up to eat or to go to bed. “I guess I should have gotten some counseling. I think they called it ‘rehab to acclimate to civilian life’ or something like that. … I know my parents sure were worried about me ’cause I’d wake them up with my nightmares, but during the day I didn’t say or do much of anything.”

One day a friend of his family came over and told him he had to go out and do something — “You can’t just sit here forever.” It was the Army-like order Augie needed to begin to live again. “I guess it was that old Army thing kicking in, where you wait for someone to tell you what to do and you go out and do it.”

Following in his parents’ footsteps, he started growing strawberries on leased land, his only equipment an old crosscut saw someone had given him, a hoe, a potato hook and a pitchfork. “I never worked so hard in my life,” he said. “It wasn’t easy, but after I got my first crop in things got better.”

An old friend, Mrs. Gorsuch, offered to sell him some property — the spread on Bank Road that ultimately became his Christmas tree farm. He told her: “I can’t buy anything, and she said, ‘How much have you got?’ and I said, ‘$50,’ so she said, ‘OK, pay me $50 now and $50 a year, and it’s yours.’” She had been like another mother to him when he was growing up, and she felt terrible when he and his family were taken off Vashon Island at gunpoint at the start of the war.

Augie said she was an amazing lady. She’d been the one to read his report cards from school and tell his folks — who couldn’t read English — if he were doing well academically. She was also the one who, when he had to go back to the VA Hospital for recurrent problems with his leg and eventually for the amputation, wrote to him saying he didn’t need to worry about money — she just wanted him to concentrate on getting better. “I still have that letter,” Augie said. “She even offered me $10,000 interest-free to get me through until I could get back on my feet. I never had to take advantage of her offer, but that’s the kind of person she was.”

I asked Augie if he had only positive memories of his return to Vashon, and he admitted that there were a few times when people had a hard time looking him in the eye, especially those who’d lost a son in the Pacific. He was able to see things from other people’s points of view, and if their point of view made sense to him he didn’t take a snide remark or silent treatment personally.

He never married, and I never asked him why. But he loved his soulmate and partner, Marie Davis, with whom he shared the last 20 years of his life. They both loved working the soil — he on his large farm and she in her beautiful garden.

It was his niece, Sue Yamamoto, who called me last June while I was on vacation to let me know that Augie had been hospitalized and wasn’t doing well. I drove to the hospital that day and saw him in ICU, a place where miracles can sometimes happen. But that day in June Augie looked at me and said, “I may not make it this time, Pam.” Before I broke down, I smiled and said, “You may not, but if you do I’ll be there to visit you back home.”

Augie died later that day. His ICU doctor and nurse made sure he wasn’t in pain and for that I will always be grateful to them.

It’s been nearly six months since he left our world, but I never visit Vashon without feeling Augie’s presence on the Island. When I asked him if he would ever consider living anywhere else in the world, he said, “Well, I saw some pretty nice places when I was over there in Europe, but I always tell people ‘there’s no place like Vashon,’ and that’s how I feel. And besides, this is home.”

Now, as Christmas is near and people stop by Augie’s U-Cut Christmas tree farm, now tended by Marie’s grandson Carl, I hope they’ll smile when they remember the man who lived there for more than 60 years. I cherish the time I spent with Augie. And I will always miss him.

— Pam Silverstein, a West Seattle resident, works for Visiting Nurse Services of the Northwest.