CARIBOU, Maine — Local World War II veteran Chester “Chet” Milton, 97, served in several countries while in the U.S. Army, returning home to begin a family and two longtime careers.
Chester Milton was born Nov. 21, 1923, and grew up in Woodland. The Milton family lived on what is now called the McIntyre Road and worked on the Whit Stevens potato farm, on which sit the present-day Woodland Consolidated School and town office property.
Milton remembers growing up with his brothers Maynard and Keith and older sister Winnifred during the 1920s and 1930s, when horses were still used on the farm. Winnifred contracted polio and missed two years of school, so she ended up graduating from high school with Chester in 1940.
He said the only sports on the radio that he could listen to at his house was New York Giants football, and that was only on a clear night. He remains an avid Giants fan today.
During the first two years of high school, Milton walked the five miles to and from Caribou High School, but in his final two years he lived in with a local family.
“I stayed with the Violette family on North Main Street in Caribou during the school week,” Milton said. “I did not have any kitchen privileges. Dad would come to town on Monday with a team of horses delivering potatoes. He would bring me a box of sandwiches to eat during the school week. On Friday, I would walk home to Woodland after school.”
Some of Milton’s early memories of Caribou in the 1920s and ‘30s were the train cars loaded with horses that would arrive each spring at the B&A railroad station for the annual horse trade. Other memories include horse races on the frozen Aroostook River and at horse tracks in the area.
“On Sundays, everybody went to the Caribou airport to watch George Shaw and his airplane,” Milton said, adding that Shaw would perform tricks such as walking out on the wing of the airplane or flying under the Aroostook River bridge.
In 1943, Chester was drafted into the Army.
“I turned 20 on the North Atlantic on the way to England,” he said. “We left New York, fifteen hundred GIs on a wooden tub British ship, and it took two weeks to cross the Atlantic. The German U-boats were attacking our convoy and the swells were so big the props would come out of the water and shake the whole boat.”
The group arrived in Liverpool Harbor and, because sunken ships prevented their ship from navigating the harbor, traveled to shore via landing crafts. Milton was assigned as a medic with the 447th Bomber group in Rattlesden, England, with 16 B -17 aircraft.
“We lost 10 planes in one day, 10 men to a plane. That’s a lot of men. We saw and experienced things that no young man should,” said Milton, whose brothers also served during World War II. He spent time in England, Belgium, France and Germany during the war.
“One morning we woke up and all the planes were painted with stripes,” he said, which was in preparation for D-Day. “We came back to the United States in a luxury passenger ship, and it only took four days.”
Two weeks after his return home, Milton went to work on the Lombard farm, where he worked for 26 years. While working for the Lombard family, he went to oil burner school in Massachusetts.
“The Lombard family was very good to me,” Milton said.
Eventually, he started his own heating technician business.
On October 31, 1948, Milton married his wife, Mary. They have three children, Steven, Brenda and Sharon. They were married for over 55 years until her passing in 2004.
Milton retired from the heating business at the age of 79 and still lives at home in Caribou, enjoying his hobbies of puzzles and reading many books.
