WWII experiences shaped local Catholic architect
SALT LAKE CITY — A chance comment in a mess hall during World War II led William Wing Louie to an architectural career that shaped numerous public buildings, including St. Ann Catholic Church, the first in Utah to be designed according to the directives of the Second Vatican Council.
Louie was born in Ogden in 1923 to parents who immigrated from Canton, China. He attended Ogden High School, where he particularly enjoyed his art and civil engineering classes, he said.
After graduation, he enrolled in a civil service aircraft instrument repair class, then went to work at Hill Air Force Base, working on an instrument called a gyro (or artificial) horizon.
“It was a good job for me; otherwise I’d be a clerk or a restaurant worker if I wasn’t there, so I think that opportunity of working at the air base was a pivotal point in my life because it directed me to aviation,” Louie said in a video interview that is now part of the Boxted Airfield Museum collection. It is also available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/_6-SoFPru6g.
The video was made as part of the 75th anniversary of Boxted Airfield and premiered at the Boxted-Airfield Museum on May 27, 2018.
With the World War II draft looming, Louie signed up at the Army Air Corps recruiting depot at Hill AFB; his brothers also served in the military during the war.
At the age of 19, Louie found himself at Hamilton Field, Calif., assigned to the 354 Fighter Group as an instrument mechanic, a career field given to him by the Army because of his work at Hill AFB.
“But when I got to the 354th that experience didn’t help me at all because I’d never worked on a plane in my life; I’d just worked on the [one] instrument,” he said.
As a result, he was re-assigned to paint the planes, “which I enjoyed,” he said; his job required painting code numbers and spinner colors on the planes, and repainting when the aircraft were damaged.
After Hamilton Field his squadron went to Tonapah, Nev. for gunnery training in the Bell P-39 fighter plane, which was known to be hard to fly because “when they got into a spin they were hard to get out of,” Louie said.
At Tonapah, their squadron commander, Capt. Johnson was testing a new plane and “he got into a spin and didn’t get out of it. We were on the ground at that time and we could see him coming straight down into the ground. He was about 10 miles away from us. He was our first loss, ” Louie said.
Following additional training, they took a train to New York, where they boarded a ship and spent two weeks in a convoy crossing the Atlantic.
“I heard later there were submarines around,” Louie said.
Arriving in Newbury, England, they were assigned the P-51 Mustang – a long-range fighter that was used by the U.S. Army Air Force to escort bombers in raids over Germany.
“We were the first group to have the P-51 Mustang in Europe,” Louie said. “We were the first planes ever escorting the bombers to Berlin and back.”
The first P-51 the group received was painted olive drab.
“For some reason the squadron guys wanted all the paint off of it. … It was a long endeavor to take the paint off of that thing – paint remover and scraping it and buffing it and then putting the symbols back on. It was the first metallic P-51 in our group,” Louie said, explaining that he and another guy did the repainting work.
Their group was assigned to the Ninth Air Force to support the Allied invasion of Europe. Before D Day, they were based in England and had their own mess hall at Boxted Airfield in Essex. One day Louie was painting aircraft on the mess hall walls “and somebody came up to me and said that, ‘You should be an architect in the future,’ and I didn’t know what he was talking about because I never even thought about architecture at the time,” he said. “That’s why I became an architect. I didn’t even know what an architect was at that time.”
During WWII, Louie had two hobbies that later gained him historical renown: He painted nose art on fighter planes and took photographs that, because he kept them with him, were never censored.
Pilots and crew chiefs would ask Louie to paint decorations on their aircraft’s fuselage. Perhaps the most famous that Louie painted was that of Major (later General) James H. Howard, who commanded the 356th Fighter Squadron in the 354th Fighter Group. Howard was the only fighter pilot in the European Theater to receive the Medal of Honor, the highest U.S. military decoration. Louie painted swastikas, indicating the German planes Howard had downed, on the major’s P-51, and also painted the name, the Ding Hao!
Having begun photography as a hobby in high school, Louie and an Army buddy built a portable darkroom that the brass didn’t know about. With film and chemicals purchased from shops in England, they took photos and developed them. Louie brought home with him a couple of hundred negatives that showed damaged planes and other uncensored scenes that now can be found in scholarly books about World War II.
Louie’s best friend from Salt Lake City, Arthur Chinn, was shot down on Aug. 27, 1944 – two days after his 23 birthday – while doing reconnaissance. After the war, Chinn’s remains were returned to Utah.
“He’s here in Salt Lake City, so I still take flowers to him on Memorial Day, and Christmas, his birthday,” Louie said. “That’s been going on since they brought him back after the war.”
With the Allied invasion, the 354th Fighter Group was assigned to support Patton’s Third Army as it trekked across France and Germany. From England they crossed the Channel and got off at Omaha Beach, then walked up the cliffs “that they fought so hard to get up. … You just can’t imagine how they did it,” Louie said.
By the end of the war, the 354th Fighter Group was credited with destroying a record 701 enemy aircraft in the air.
“I feel fortunate to be part of that group,” Louie said. “I don’t know how I could have been in a better group. … Well, I sure don’t feel like I did a big part of it. It’s the guys who didn’t come back. We lost a couple of hundred pilots.”
After the war, having reached the rank of sergeant, Louie returned to Utah. He attended the University of Utah on the GI Bill, and, recalling the suggestion of the man in the mess hall, he became a member of the first class of the School of Architecture in 1952. He met his wife, Merrie Okamura; the couple were married in the Cathedral of the Madeleine in 1951 and had seven children. One of his grandsons attended the Air Force Academy and is now a major. Merrie died in 2006.
Louie and two associates formed Scott Louie & Browning Architects and Engineers, at which he was principal in charge and design architect. They specialized in institutional architecture, mostly schools and churches, he said, although one of their award-winning projects was for the Utah State Retirement Board Office building in 1979.
Among their projects were the Catholic Church St. Vincent de Paul School and convent in Salt Lake City, St. Therese of the Child Jesus Catholic Church in Midvale, Ascension Priory for the Order of St. Benedict in Jerome, ID., and the Diocese of Salt Lake City’s Pastoral Center.
Louie says his favorite of the churches that his firm designed is St. Ann Catholic Church in Salt Lake City, which now is his home parish. “For 50 years I’ve been going there” he said; until recently, he served regularly as a Communion minister at Sunday and daily Masses at the parish.
Having converted to Catholicism after meeting his wife, Louie incorporates the faith in some of the paintings he has done after taking up art as a hobby since retiring in 1980. He started painting with oils but switched to watercolors because “it’s more spontaneous and I find it easier to use,” he said.
He has painted aircraft, cityscapes, self-portraiture and nature scenes, and has won three Best of Show awards at the Utah State Fair, among other awards.
About 15 years ago he began making Christmas cards from some of his paintings. The subjects for the cards include people entering St. Ann Catholic Church for midnight Mass, the Christmas star over Delicate Arch, and the Holy Family under the viaduct at 600 South in Salt Lake City.
“This was one that, when he sent it out, everyone wanted the original,” said Louie’s daughter Lisa.
In 2009, Louie was presented with the AIA Utah Lifetime Achievement Award. Now 95, he said he has stopped painting. “I just don’t have the initiative to start anything now,” he said, although he is looking for inspiration for this year’s Christmas card.
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