Quincy farmer lived a full life of service before being hit by the coronavirus

MOSES LAKE — Robert Hammond, a World War II veteran, a devotee of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and a member of the Grant County community since 1955, died June 11 in Moses Lake at the Summer Wood Alzheimer’s Special Care Center.

He was 96 years old, and according to his death certificate, he died from complications due to an infection of the coronavirus, just a couple of weeks after first receiving his diagnosis and being placed on hospice care.

Robert was born in Providence, Utah, in 1923 to his father, Levi, and mother, Annie, who died during childbirth. Due to economic pressures during the Great Depression, Robert went to live with his aunt Ina until he was five, when he moved back home with his grandfather and five siblings.

He attended high school at South Cache High School, though he was more interested in horses than schoolwork or sports, and would often later reminisce about winters spent plowing the roads from the back of a horse. As soon as he graduated high school, he enlisted in the armed forces, hoping to join the war in the Pacific as the U.S. surrounded and prepared to potentially invade Japan.

“He was very patriotic, but I think partly he just wanted to get out of his small town,” said David Hammond, one of Robert’s four sons.

Robert had wanted to become a sailor in the Navy, but as he stood with his fellow recruits waiting to get flown in, an officer told the assembled men that nine volunteers were needed to join the Marine Corps.

None volunteered. Becoming a Marine didn’t carry the same prestige then that it might now, and particularly in the Pacific Theater it was likely to be a bloody and miserable task. The officer began pulling names out of a hat. By the eighth pull, Robert breathed a sigh of relief.

But his name was the ninth.

A life of service

Later, as a father, Robert wouldn’t talk much to his children about his time in combat. He was stationed in Saipan and later Okinawa, sites of some of the worst conflicts and the heaviest casualties among both Japanese and Allied troops. David would later learn from Robert’s military records that he had been a machine gunner, and in his later years Robert only once mentioned time spent in a foxhole where he watched comrades die.

But what Robert was always happy about was the chapel he helped build in Saipan, where many of the other churches had been leveled during the invasion. Though he and many of the fellow Marines who spent their time off-duty building the chapel were Latter-day Saints, the chapel they built out of lumber scavenged — and occasionally “requisitioned” when senior officers weren’t looking — was nondenominational.

Robert expected to be among one of the first few waves of units to invade Japan when the time came. Instead, he was one of the first to land in Nagasaki after the bomb was dropped — and while his children rarely heard stories of Robert’s time in combat, they heard just as little of his time picking up the pieces of a city that had been destroyed in an instant.

By the time Robert returned home in 1946, most of the massive nationwide celebrations and parades had come and gone. After joining the war at least in part to get out of his small town, he returned to the Cache Valley in Utah.

“He was more than happy, after he saw the world, to go back home,” David said.

It didn’t take long before that urge to see more of the country returned to Robert, though, and it was not long after leaving the Marine Corps that he decided to serve a mission for his church in the North Central States Mission, making his way to Red Lodge, Montana.

It was there that Robert met his future wife, Vivian Ward, a war widow and a school teacher, and her young son Max. Shortly after he was released from his mission, Robert and Vivian were married in Logan, Utah, and moved to Robert’s dairy farm in Lewiston, Utah. There, the couple had two sons, Lance and David.

In the early ’50s, Robert was looking at buying a ranch back in Montana but decided to check out Central Washington to see what was going on with the Columbia Basin Project, where the federal government was making the desert bloom and selling land on the cheap. He left Vivian and the children to make an exploratory trip and returned with the news that he had decided, on the spot, to buy a farm.

In 1955, the Hammonds moved to Quincy, where Robert would build the family home on the farm.

Though much of their income would come from the potatoes that they began growing after the Lamb Weston plant came to Quincy in the early ’60s, Robert’s first and longest love was for raising cattle. The day would eventually come when the bank told Robert that he was spreading himself too thin and advised that he sell the herd. It broke Robert’s heart, but he made the decision regardless.

“My dad was a decisive man, so when he decided he would make a change, he didn’t do it gradually,” David said.

Staying active

Robert’s life revolved around family, work and church, David said, and he was a member of the Quincy Hospital and school boards. After Vivian died 20 years ago, he moved to the Tri-Cities and worked at a church storehouse and church farm, volunteering his time.

Even as he entered his seventh and eighth decades, he loved to be outdoors and was very active, until old age and palsy finally began to narrow what he could do safely.

But Robert wasn’t the kind of man to sit still, regularly taking a tricycle up and down Badger Mountain to visit his grandchildren. He eventually had a bad fall and was housed in an assisted-living facility, but would often be found doing laps up and down the stairs with a crutch in one hand and a cane in the other, against the stern advice of his nurses and family.

About five years ago, he moved into a Moses Lake facility, before a heart attack three years ago and Parkinson’s disease-related dementia meant he needed to move to Summer Wood, where he could receive more specialized care.

Not long after the beginning of the year, a flu outbreak swept through the facility, closing it down to all outside visitors. Robert escaped that virus unscathed, but not long after the outbreak was over, a new virus began cropping up throughout the state and then the country, posing a risk to patients who were elderly.

In response, facilities across the county and country began closing their doors to all guests and family members, trying to minimize the risk of the virus making its way inside.

But around three months after the lockdowns began, a worker tested positive for the novel coronavirus. State and county health officials came in, performing tests on every patient and employee.

Robert’s test came back positive. He was hospitalized but appeared to be recovering, his symptoms receding enough for him to be discharged back to Summer Wood.

“He was 96, yeah,” David said. “But we were thinking he was going to pull through.”

He didn’t. Around two weeks after testing positive, it was clear that Robert was on his deathbed. David was given a rare opportunity during the pandemic, and was able to don a hazmat suit and enter Robert’s room as his wife and sister-in-law watched from the window. Hours later, Robert passed away, becoming the fifth Grant County resident to die after contracting the coronavirus.

Saying good-bye

Robert loved a good funeral, David said, and had made arrangements for how he wanted his own to go, including the songs he wanted his family to sing. While that’s all been put on hold due to ongoing restrictions for funerals during the pandemic, David said the family still intends to honor his wishes once the restrictions are lifted.

His 15 grandchildren, 32 great-grandchildren and three great-great-grandchildren are to sing “I Am a Child of God,” and the service is to begin with the hymn “The Spirit of God Like a Fire is Burning.”

And, always a family man, Robert requested that the final song sung at the funeral be “When There’s Love at Home.”

Emry Dinman can be reached via email at edinman@columbiabasinherald.com.