West Bend, WI – It’s just the cutest thing. Korean War veteran Norbert Carter set up one table on S. Main Street and Decorah Road. The sign with an arrow reads Farmer Market. It’s like a little kid lemonade stand, only Carter is 94.
“I have cucumbers, tomatoes, onion, green beans, pickles, kohlrabi, radishes, and fresh dill,” Carter said over the noisy Main Street traffic.
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An ambulance and several squad cars pull into the strip mall parking lot behind him. The rubberneckers have to look past Carter’s little farm stand to see the excitement… but that’s ok, he was looking too.
“Hope everyone’s ok,” he said.
Carter has a big garden and gumption. Pull up a chair and he’ll tell you about it.
At 20 years old he got married and in 1951, a couple years after tying the knot, he was drafted into the Army.
Carter is good at multi-tasking. He reaches into the trunk of his vehicle and pulls out a crumply stash of plastic bags to fill an order for fresh green beans. He has them stored in a small cooler at his feet. The order also takes the softball-size purple onion off the table too.
“I never got to go to high school,” said Carter. “I was put on the farm to help my uncle because he couldn’t get a hired man during the war.”
Carter was one of seven boys in the family; four of his siblings were also in the service.
“My dad was in World War I; my oldest brother was in the Navy during Pearl Harbor. Two of my brothers were in Germany, two of us were in Korea and my youngest son was in Desert Storm.”
For years Carter was part of the Wednesday Farmers’ Market on Sand Drive by the VFW. That market saw a severe downturn in business as Sand Drive was closed the past month for construction.
You will find Carter set up on the east side of S. Main Street on Wednesday’s from around 8 a.m. to noon. Stop in and buy direct from this little local farmer.
The rest of Carter’s military story is below.
Carter went to Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania for basic training. That was followed by a stint in Washington and later he spent 17 days on a ship to Japan.
“We spent one night in Japan, got back on the boat and I spent the next 15 months and 22 days in Korea,” Carter said.
Immediately stationed on the front line, Carter recalls his orders.
“We were on night patrol and walked up to one area and were handed a steel vest and they said ‘put it on — this is the area where you need it’ and we walked some more and pretty soon we were up on Old Baldy,” he said referencing the site of five engagements during a 10-month span of the Korean War.
“For 32 days I helped build bridges while we were under fire,” Carter said. “There were some Army tanks on a couple of mountains up there and we had to get them back for service work.
“The biggest bridge we had was 280 feet long and it was all steel Treadway. We couldn’t work during the day because the enemy could see us and every day for the first five days the bridge was knocked out by artillery, so each day we had to tear it out and start over.”
Carter was discharged in 1953 as a staff sergeant, Section B, in the Second Division Combat Engineers. Carter is well known in the local military circle; he is chairman of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in West Bend and had been commander for over 18 years.
