LEST WE FORGET 251 Patricia Bay had RCAF facilities on one side of the base plus a seaplane base, and on the other was RAF. The East and West bases both held dances and movies most weeks, and Billie and the others often went to Victoria in “time off”. “We did have a fantastic men’s basketball team that played often with teams from Washington State,” she remembered. “There was a small lake not far away to swim in, and sometimes we’d swim at Pat Bay beach – whenever the hole in the fence wasn’t discovered!” For some unknow reason, Billie says the air base was the site of an emergency food depot of dried foods. They recycled them fairly often, by feeding the dried eggs, potatoes, onions and other veggies to the military personnel in the Airmen’s Mess. “Butter was mixed with gelatin and egg whites – luckily, we had no fridge on the mountains and couldn’t keep it, so had real butter for the breakfasts we made in summer,” she recalled. “Other meals were delivered to us in syrup pails. The Sergeants and Officers Mess Halls fared better – much better.” After ‘VJ Day’, Fighter Operations was shut down and all but the officers ended up working in the release office filling out papers for those going home. Billie says she and a friend, Fern, were getting tired of watching so many going home, so one day they made their own papers and threw them in the middle of the stack of the day’s papers, hoping that the officer in charge wouldn’t notice them. The next morning when they arrived at work they were called in by an officer. “Looking quite innocent we approached his desk to see him holding up two rather familiar papers,” said Billie. “The officer said, ‘Fern can leave anytime because she is married – her husband was stationed at remote RCAF Telephone Site in the Caribou – but what excuse do you have?’” Thinking in an awful hurry I said, “I have to go home and find my horse who is ‘running out’ and buy feed for him.” Billie says a look of disbelief passed across the officer’s face, before he threw both papers across the desk and said, ‘I’ve heard everything, get going!’ “So that’s what we did – we got going,” she stated. “We headed for Victoria and the Caribou (to visit with former Shaunavon resident Edna Durham) – within an hour.” Billie got her final discharge in Regina after she returned from BC in October of 1945. “I, Fern and others from Fighter Operations get together every few years in Victoria and we have written at Christmas for more than 60 years. We have many memories to share.” Billie Sharp Keturakis passed away on December 13, 2019 in Shaunavon. She had kept in contact with many of those she had served with until the last few years when dementia had set in. Her husband, George Keturakis, also served. He passed away in 1980. Both were Legion members. Source: unknown news publication KETURAKIS (SHARP), Geraldine Jesamine “Billie” (continued)
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