FARRAGUT STATE PARK — Leonard “Lenny” Metcalf arrived in the summer of 1943 at Farragut Naval Training Station after a long, hot and coal-dust dirty train ride from Los Angeles.

Now 96 and living in the Denver area, Metcalf traveled back to Farragut for the first time in 72 years.

During World War II, Farragut churned out men as fast as possible to fight, and Metcalf was one of them.

He spent several weeks at the station and Lake Pend Oreille for boot camp.

“I wanted to see how it is now,” he said Saturday at a reunion for former boot campers at Farragut State Park. “I didn’t know it was a museum now.”

The buildings — including the hospital, barracks, and mess hall — are gone, although not the brig. That houses the museum today.

It was hard-to-recognize place, he said.

“Wasn’t much here when I came,” he said. “They just had a house with bunks in it, and you go outside and did your training.”

He still has memories of the place, despite the passage of seven decades.

Like the cold nights guarding the door leading to the officers’ barracks.

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