Interview with William Koester, Navy veteran, Part 1 of 3

William Koester was born in 1923, in Pasadena, California, eldest of 4, married for 66 years, and has 3 sons. He says his father was in the army in 1918, but does not consider himself from a military family. In 1942 at age 18 he joined the Navy in the Reserve Officer Training program. The Navy sent him to college in St. Paul, Minnesota from 1943-1944, then to Midshipman school. He was first stationed in Norfolk, Virginia and assigned to a Destroyer, then sent to gunnery school. He went to Gulfport, Mississippi to be a Recognition Officer and commissioned to the USS Floyd B. Parks, a destroyer. He was sent to Guantánamo Bay to test the ship and train the crew and was afraid the ship would be a part of the Japanese invasion, but was glad that the war had ended just about that time so he did not need to be deployed.