Hayes Otoupalik never knew John Babcock, but something drew him over snowy Lookout Pass to the funeral.
Born in Ontario, Babcock was the last Canadian veteran of World War I when he died an American citizen in Spokane on Feb. 18, 2010. He was 109.
That left Frank Buckles of West Virginia as the lone American survivor of the “war to end all wars” that ended in 1918. Buckles passed away a year later at age 110.
“I figured I’m probably not going to get to Frank Buckles’ funeral when he passes, but 200 miles is no big deal,” Otoupalik said last week. “I’ll get to see how a country handles the services of its last veteran, and in that sense I can look into the window of how all countries might handle their last veterans of a war.”
Otoupalik is one of the Pacific Northwest’s foremost private collectors and dealers of military memorabilia. He has been intrigued with the first World War since his boyhood days in Orchard Homes. His grandfather died in 1954, he said, and as 6-year-olds Hayes and his twin brother Joe discovered among his things a couple of army helmets and “a big old atlas of the Great War.”
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They were enthralled. In those days you’d see doughboy helmets nailed on wooden fence posts to keep the rain off, he said.
“There was a neighbor guy who had a bunch of helmets on the fencepost," Otoupalik said. "My brother and I talked him out of them.”
More than 60 years later, and 55 after his brother Joe died in a tragic car wreck, Otoupalik has received a bit of unsolicited recognition for his expertise.
Earlier this month he got a letter from military historian Robert Dalessandro, a retired U.S. Army colonel who chairs the United State World War One Centennial Commission that kicked into high gear this year to mark the 100th year of America’s entrance into the war.
Dalessandro invited Otoupalik to join with the commission as a special military historical advisor with an emphasis on military material culture of the World War I era. Otoupalik said he was honored to accept.
“It’s more like a consultant appointment for them to get information from me,” he said. “That’s how I would look at it. In other words, my job is to help sort out any lost knowledge and help preserve the knowledge of military weapons and equipment from World War I. It comes with no pay, but I’m happy to do it. I’ve been at it all my life.”
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The Centennial Commission, established by Congress in 2013, is charged with developing and executing projects and activities to commemorate a war that dominated the news 100 years ago. Later conflicts, especially WWII, pushed the Great War onto the back stage of history, though Otoupalik said if you want to talk about America’s truly forgotten war, look no further than the early 1950s and Korea.
He wasn’t yet in his teens in the early 1960s when Otoupalik first rode the wave of the Civil War centennial craze. Later in the decade, for his 19th birthday, he received a complete set — all 128 books — of the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion.
So many historical researchers turn to the internet these days, he said, “but I believe in the power of books.”
Studying all the Civil War publications in the '60s, Otoupalik realized that so many of the writers he admired were historians who’d been at it for half a century.
“I got to thinking, you know, if I start doing my research about the Great War in the 1960s, half a century would flip by and I’d be in the same position those men were in,” he said.
Otoupalik doesn’t consider himself a student of battles but rather a "three-dimensional historian."
Central to his collection is the World War I armored tank, one of 950 American tanks manufactured and one of the 940 that never made it overseas. A Hollywood movie studio acquired it from the California National Guard in 1920 and had it until the late 1960s, when John Furrer bought it his World War I museum in Arizona.
The museum grew for almost 20 years before Furrer lost it in a dispute with the state. Otoupalik bought the tank and brought it to Missoula in 1985.
It’s been an eye-catcher in once-a-decade appearances at the Rocky Mountain Museum of Military History at Fort Missoula, where Otoupalik will take it for the fourth time this Fourth of July to help commemorate World War I.
In 1993 Otoupalik featured the tank in a professionally produced video, “America’s First Battle Tank,” that is still shown at the National World War I Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, and can be purchased on Otoupalik's website.
In 2009 he drove the tank to a field across Highway 93 from his home at the bottom of Evaro Hill, where it played a starring and firing role in a History Channel episode of “Locked and Loaded” with R. Lee Ermey, aka “The Gunny.”
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The tank contrasts sharply with another of Otoupalik’s most prized World War I possessions. He paid $100 for a paper file box full of letters that Montana Rep. Jeannette Rankin received in the aftermath of the vote she cast in April 1917 against the U.S. entrance into the war.
“She’s got all these letters from other people in the women’s movement in the U.S., people telling her she made the worst mistake of her life or that she was their hero,” said Otoupalik. “Given my interest in World War I, I’ll never get rid of it. I still think it was one of my greatest finds.”
Otoupalik said he was surprised, and disappointed, when he got to Spokane in 2010 for Babcock's service.
"Knowing military people all through the years and having been to a lot of historical events in Seattle and Spokane, I thought I might see a familiar face. But I didn't see anybody I knew," he said. "Regardless, I did what I knew I had to do in my heart."
As the nation focuses, if tentatively, on the centennial year of the "Great War," Otoupalik is resolved to help out.
"Nothing's forgotten," he said, "until we forget it."