Jim Moody’s job during the Korean War included gathering intelligence.
Gathering clothes for orphans? That was his mom’s job.
Moody was among those at Thursday’s dedication of the Korean War mural on Vancouver’s Remembrance Wall.
The Air Force veteran was in such a specialized job that he had to go to Yale before he could go to war. To be precise, it was Yale’s Institute of Far Eastern Languages, which provided intensive instruction in Korean and Chinese to Air Force personnel.
Moody spent 13 months on an island, Paengyong-do.
“Our job was radio interception, listening in on the Chinese air force,” he said. “We all were multilingual.
“I did my job, but there was lots of extra time,” he said, so he explored a village and found an orphanage sheltering about 60 children.
“I realized how desperately poor they were. They had to borrow pants and a shirt if they wanted to go outside,” he said.
“My mother was a big club woman in San Francisco. I sent her a letter and she enlisted all the club ladies: bridge club, Eastern Star. They started collecting children’s clothes and shipped them.”
The first time those boxes arrived, “It was pandemonium. They started to open boxes and when those kids saw the clothes, they went crazy.”
Style was not a factor.
“They had no idea about boys’ clothes and girls’ clothes. Boys were wearing girls’ pedal-pushers,” Moody said. “Eventually, we clothed the orphanage.”
A lot of GIs helped orphans during and after the war, he said.
“In the midst of that, it was wonderful to get into an environment that was compassionate,” he said.
Moody could gauge the results of his outreach than most GIs. He understood Korean, after all … but the orphans weren’t supposed to know that.
“The irony is, because of secrecy, I was not allowed to speak Korean in Korea,” said Moody, who earned a doctorate in Oriental languages after the war.
“I cheated and spoke pidgin Korean, and a little extra. And for my troubles, one of my buddies turned me in.”
Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story or just tell a story.
