Yesteryear

A Coronado Liberty Boy

by Kimball Worcester Coronado sent its fair share of soldiers, sailors, and flyers “over there” to fight in the Great War, including a French grocer’s son, Emil Fousse, Jr. Emil embarked for France on USS Leviathan from New York in December 1917, having crossed the continent after training in Washington. The American boy with a French father served with distinction as a private in the 18th Infantry, 1st Division, twice wounded and cited for bravery. The Fousse family arrived in Coronado in 1906 from San Francisco just after the Great Earthquake, when Emil, Jr., was around ten years old. The 1910 San Diego County Directory shows the family grocery store at 1110 Orange Avenue. By 1912 the Fousses had built a new store just up the street, at 933 Orange Avenue. The Fousse business expanded with Crown Garage, which Emil, Sr., built in 1914.

A map of the 18th at their Soissons position in the Second Battle of the Marne, July 18-22, 1918. Photo courtesy of the Coronado Historical Association.

18th U.S. Infantry, 1st Division, at the U.S. Capitol, Washington, D.C., September 17th 1919. Photo Courtesy of the National WWI Museum and Memorial

A scant four years later young Emil was writing home from “somewhere in France.” The Coronado Strand reports on March 16, 1918 that Emil had “spent one stretch in the trenches, had his rest period, and was about to go back again when he wrote.” The paper adds that “Emil is the first Coronado boy we have heard of to get into the trenches.” The trenches—and more—that Emil experienced in France took him and the 18th Infantry through American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) campaigns that helped define the 20th-century U.S. Army: Cantigny, St. Mihiel, Second Marne, and Meuse-Argonne. Emil’s regiment had its line “further advanced into hostile territory than any other regiment on its right or left.” It is for

An ad in the Coronado Strand for Emil’s store, Dunbar’s Grocery Store, Aug. 9, 1919. Photo courtesy of the Coronado Historical Association. The house at 756 Orange Avenue, the home where Emil and his wife finally settled. Photo courtesy of the Coronado Historical Association.

this engagement that Emil was cited “for these qualities which have kept the 18th Infantry ever to the fore.” It was not until November 1918 that Emil’s hometown newspaper published this accolade. Emil himself merely said in a letter home, “I was one of the guys in the 18th to receive a citation for work in the Marne battle.” Emil came home to Coronado in 1919 bloodied, but unbowed and promptly bought back the grocery business his father had sold in 1917. For a few years he and his wife and daughter (the future Elaine Rooney) lived with his parents at 933 Orange Avenue, but by 1934 the Journal reports their new residence as 756 Orange Avenue, where the family remained until Emil’s death in 1964. The island boy turned Liberty Boy weathered two separate wounds in the front lines and saw the war through to the Armistice. Having sailed the Atlantic twice (returning on the USS Iowan) his Coronado roots stretched far, but held fast.