By Kat Bryant
Grays Harbor News Group
Arnold Samuels died Aug. 17 at the Brookdale Assisted Living Center in Ocean Shores. He was 96.
“Arnold Samuels was Mr. Ocean Shores. He was a member of the Eagles, the Elks, the Lions, the VFW — you name it, he was a member,” said longtime friend Betsy Seidel, a retired Hoquiam teacher. “I’m happy that he got to die peacefully in his sleep in his beloved Ocean Shores.”
Samuels had a rich and exciting history before he adopted Ocean Shores as his home.
Born into a Jewish family in Bavaria in 1923 as Kurt Samuel, he grew up playing with children of both Jewish and Christian faiths. That changed abruptly when he was 10 and Adolf Hitler became chancellor.
In 1937, Samuels’ family escaped Nazi Germany and fled to New York. He attended the prestigious Stuyvesant High School, where he discovered his passion for radio technology — and met his future wife, Phyllis. He graduated with honors in 1941 and began studying electronics in night school. But then he decided to join the American war effort against the Nazis.
Samuels returned to Germany as part of the 3rd Infantry Division. There, on May Day 1945, he helped liberate the concentration camp at Dachau — the site of what he called “un-understandable” acts against humanity. What he saw there chilled him to the core: bodies stacked like wood, an ash-filled silo, emaciated inmates clinging to life.
After World War II ended, Samuels became a sergeant and served in the Counter Intelligence Corps as the Allies established a new government and hunted Nazi war criminals. He worked there with 22-year-old Sgt. Henry Kissinger, who had grown up two hours south of Samuels’ childhood home.
He married Phyllis while on furlough in 1946, but was unable to take her to Germany with him. So, the following year, he received his discharge from the CIC so he could return to America and start a family. He became a radio technology professional, and their first of three sons was born in 1950.
The ensuing 30 years took them to the Philippines and Hawaii with Voice of America, which Samuels called “America’s propaganda machine” in the Cold War; and then to Wake Island in the mid-Pacific as a defense contractor. A typhoon sent him and his family back to Hawaii, where he became a civilian quality control officer for the Air Force. He retired in 1980 at a pay grade equivalent to lieutenant colonel.
Through a contact in Wake Island, the family had invested in a parcel in Ocean Shores sight-unseen. After Samuels’ retirement, they visited the town and decided to move there permanently.
They became active in the community and made hundreds of friends. Betsy Seidel learned of Samuels’ war experience and invited him to speak to her eighth-grade English class at Hoquiam Middle School when they read “The Diary of Anne Frank.” After that, she had him as a guest speaker every year.
“The students were mesmerized and learned so much from living history,” she said. “Arnold would bring in his photo albums, he’d answer their questions. He’d tell them about his experiences being a German Jew and coming to the United States and serving time in the U.S. Army.”
Over the years, Seidel and Samuels become dear friends. Later, when she retired from teaching, she often chauffeured him to speaking engagements all around the Harbor.
In 2000, after cancer took his wife of 54 years, Samuels won a seat on the Ocean Shores City Council as a write-in candidate and served for four years.
“He definitely loved Ocean Shores and did not want to leave. As his health declined, there was talk about ‘Oh no, where will Arnold go?’” she said. In January 2017, after he took a fall and was no longer able to live alone, he moved into Brookdale. Seidel said the staff loved him and took excellent care of him.
Even after that move, Samuels continued to drive to the Ocean Shores Senior Center to have lunch every day, she said; and later, when he was no longer able to drive, people would go to visit him at Brookdale.
“This pandemic was very, very hard on Arnold because he could not have any in-person visitors,” said Seidel, who still drove to Brookdale every week to see him. “I was fortunate that I could talk to him through his window!”
Seidel was deeply affected by Samuels’ death.
“The thing I appreciate so much about Arnold is that he made a difference in my students’ lives — to learn to be good people, accepting of others, and don’t let history repeat itself,” she said. “I will definitely miss him, but I am very happy that he’s now with his beloved Phyllis.”
In 2016, when Samuels was almost 93, he gave a complete oral history to John Hughes, the state’s lead historian and former publisher and editor of The Daily World. Much of the information for this article was gleaned from the resulting publication.
“In 55 years as a writer, Arnold’s is the most extraordinary story I’ve ever told,” Hughes told The Daily World. “In the beginning I thought he might be exaggerating some of his exploits — his work with the Counter Intelligence Corps, his friendship with Henry Kissinger and the liberation of Dachau. But as we talked, he’d reach into a mound of documents and retrieve photos and ephemera that substantiated everything he was saying.”
“No regrets. I’ve had a good life,” Samuels told him. “I don’t feel that I’ve done anybody any harm. I helped a lot of people. I donated a lot of money to a lot of causes. I feel I’ve done my thing for God, country and Ocean Shores!”
No local memorial service can be planned yet because of the coronavirus, according to Seidel. But she says Samuels is being cremated and will be taken to New York to be interred next to his wife. Coleman Mortuary in Hoquiam is handling the arrangements, she said.
Photo courtesy John Hughes Arnold Samuels, wearing a 3rd Infantry Division patch as a private first class, holds a stray dog in Germany.
Photo courtesy Betsy Seidel “This was the last year Arnold was able to ring the bell for Salvation Army at Ocean Shores IGA,” said longtime friend Betsy Seidel, pictured here with Arnold Samuels in 2018. “He did that for 15 years!”
Arnold Samuels holds a mermaid doll he received during his surprise 95th birthday party at the Ocean Shores Senior Center last year. “He’s always loved mermaids,” said longtime friend Betsy Seidel. (Photo courtesy Betsy Seidel)
