Joe McDonald and a case of mistaken identity
Joe F. McDonald Jr. kept his options open during his studies at the University of Nevada, dividing his attention between engineering and the family business, journalism. Joe Sr. was editor of the Nevada State Journal, so the younger McDonald knew the business.
Upon graduating in 1941, he chose engineering, taking a job with Morrison-Knudsen on Wake Island in the Pacific. He was in San Francisco that June, preparing to ship out, when his father suggested they drop by the United Press bureau and see if Joe could be of use as a stringer for the wire service.
They suggested Joe look up UP Honolulu bureau chief Frank Tremaine during his stopover in Hawaii and offer his services. He did, setting in motion a sequence of events that would help solve a tragic case of mistaken identity.
On Christmas Eve, McDonald's parents received word from the Navy Department that Joe Jr. had been killed earlier that month in the Japanese attack on Wake Island. Six days later, a requiem mass was celebrated at St. Thomas Aquinas Cathedral in Reno.
Life went on for the McDonalds after that, until Joe Sr. got a stunning phone call on Feb. 20, 1942. The UP bureau in Honolulu had just received a dispatch signed by Joe Jr. that was dated Dec. 20. It had been flown from Wake to Midway that day but did not reach Hawaii until two months later.
As it turned out, also among the approximately 1,200 civilians working on Wake at the time of the attacks was a Joseph T. McDonald of Cody, Wyoming. In early March, the Navy informed that man's wife that it appeared her husband had been killed, saying the "information had been unavoidably delayed due to two McDonalds on Wake Island."
On Sept. 20, 1942, the McDonalds received a letter from their son, written from a prison camp in Shanghai and dated May 29, their first indication he was alive.
“The camp, the Japanese and everything have been okay so far,” McDonald wrote his family, according to an excerpt printed in the Reno Gazette-Journal. “It was bitter cold when we arrived here, but now it is summer and I could almost learn to like the place, except for being confined.”
Unfortunately, Joe Jr. would get accustomed to that feeling, as he would spend 44 months as a POW before being released at the end of the war.
Upon returning home, he married Mary Gene Christianson and went to law school. He later went into construction, opening his own firm and serving as president of the Builders Association of Northern Nevada .
Joe Jr. and Mary Gene welcomed four children and five grandchildren before Joe died in December 1984 at age 68.
then who was the McDonald killed on Wake Island ?