I was thinking about one of my heroes from Arroyo Grande’s past, Staff Sgt. Art Youman, a member of the 101st Airborne’s Easy Company in World War II. This closeup of Youman, taken in training in South Carolina, shows what just might be a boxer’s nose. That’s Jerry Quarry (his little brother Mike, a light heavyweight, lived in San Luis Obispo County for a time) in the right-hand photo, having his nose adjusted by Muhammad Ali. Quarry, always a contender but never a champion in the heavyweight division, was a man of enormous courage. Youman shared that quality.
Well, my hunch was right. This item from a fall 1940 San Luis Obispo Telegram-Tribune, when boxing was big in Pismo Beach:
You wince at the “slugging Negro” reference—in a similar fashion, Filipino fighters were identified by their homeland—but “Kentucky Youman” won his bout via a TKO (Technical Knockout.) Why was an Arroyo Grande fighter named “Kentucky?” Ancestry.com provided the explanation from Youman’s August 1942 enlistment record.
My grandfather was a Kentuckian, too. Youman’s his draft card yielded a little more information:
I knew that Youman was a firefighter in San Luis Obispo, but I didn’t know it was for the Camp San Luis Obispo fire department (absorbed after the war by what is today CAL FIRE). I’d assumed that he worked for the City of San Luis Obispo. This new information was even better, because, thanks to my two military history experts and friends, Erik Brun and Dan Sebby, I found this photo yesterday that they’d posted late last year:
The California National Guard acquired this 1942 Seagrave fire engine in 2022 and the Guard’s history division hopes to restore it. It was, in fact, assigned to Camp San Luis Obispo in 1942, and since Art Youman didn’t enlist until August, there’s a chance that he rode on or even drove this engine. So this is, in a way, Easy Company’s fire engine, too.
Youman’s life accelerated quickly the next two years, with the tough training that shaped paratroopers and with combat.
He parachuted into Normandy on D-Day.
Later, in the fall during Operation Market Garden, Youman had led a small patrol to this Dutch crossroads when he and his men encountered a German patrol. A flurry of hand grenades came down on the paratroopers, which they returned—one of Youman’s men threw his entire consignment of six grenades. They returned to Easy Company mostly intact except for the shrapnel splinters. October 8 marks the 79th anniversary of that encounter.
It was in Holland where the Arroyo Grande fighter with the boxer’s nose was promoted to staff sergeant by Capt. Dick Winters, portrayed by British actor Damien Lewis (at left; Winters at right) in HBO’s Band of Brothers, based on the Stephen Ambrose book.
Eight weeks later, on either his 23rd or 24th birthday—the records differ—Art Youman marched into Bastogne with the 101st Airborne, a Belgian town my students and I visited in 2010. Their resistance there, during the coldest winter in Europe in thirty years, did much to foil the great German counteroffensive in the Battle of the Bulge. Art Youman’s combat career lasted about six and a half harrowing months, interrupted only briefly by a furlough in England. That career ended in the Battle of the Bulge and his hospital record is a testament to both the power of German artillery and the punishment of that winter’s cold.
Youman was only 54 when he died, but he has family still in San Luis Obispo County, in Paso and in Nipomo. I’ve met a few of them, and they are warm people, nice people, proud of Art. They have every right to be.
A Work in Progress 