They had been clearing sugar cane all day. It was exhausting work, and they had come down to the beach to wash away the sweat and grime that covered them. It was a routine they performed each day at around 5 p.m. But this day — Oct. 5, 1944 — would be different.

The men in the Army Air Force’s 498th Bomb Group bathed in the ocean because the Japanese military had poisoned all of the sources of fresh water. They were based on Saipan, a small but strategically important island located about 1,500 miles south of Tokyo. Nineteen-year-old Private First Class Steve Zeece had joined more than 100 other G.I.’s down at the beach when something caught his attention.

“A fellow soldier got caught in the undertow of the ocean and all you could see was his head bobbing up and down. Someone hollered that there was a guy out in the ocean and that he was going to drown. I jumped in the ocean with my shoes on (but I kicked them off in order to swim more efficiently) and swam out to him. His head was face down so I grabbed his hair to pull his head up, but he had a crew cut. I was scared as hell that he would grab and drag me down and both of us would drown. I put my arm around him, but he was so big I couldn’t do anything with him. I was scared and tired, but I got behind him and started pushing him toward shore. I finally got him to shore. Someone had gotten the medics to the beach, and they had pumped the water out of him. As I stepped out of the water I noticed that the bottoms of my feet were bleeding badly, having stepped on the coral,” Zeece recalls.

Today, at age 79, it’s clear that this heroic story is as clear to him now as the day it happened. Zeece would learn that the man he saved, a young corporal named George Chapin, would later get married, have six children, and eventually eight grandchildren. But Zeece, who lives in Roseville with his wife of 60 years, Trottie, is not one to revel in his glory. Just as George
Chapin would later express his gratitude to the man who saved his life, Zeece also knows to give credit when credit is due.

It was a few years before he would join the military. Zeece and his family were living near Marion Street and Charles Avenue in Frogtown. After school, he would sell copies of the Saint Paul Dispatch for 3 cents a copy at the corner of Rice Street and University Avenue. One day, he and some buddies heard some news that sounded too good to be true.

“We heard that there was a place where you could take a bath and have a swim for five cents!” he recalls. “We had to fight to have a chance to use the bathtub at home, so this place sounded like a godsend.”

That place was the Wilder Baths. Zeece and his friends would soon go to the baths nearly every other day. [The Baths were located near Eagle Street and West Seventh and provided bathing facilities for the many Saint Paul residents who didn’t have indoor plumbing at the time. The Baths closed in 1974 when they were no longer needed.] In addition to making sure they were spotless before going in the pool, the lifeguard on duty also made sure of something else — that they all learned to swim.

“If the back of your hands were dirty, or behind the ears, you went right back to the shower. He was strict, but that was a good thing,” Zeece says. “Once we were in the pool, he would have us grab the side and kick our legs. By the eighth or ninth time we went there, we were swimming. It was so much fun.”

Zeece says that if it weren’t for the Wilder Baths — and the strict lifeguards — he likely would have never learned to swim. As fate would have it, he did learn, and that would make all the difference in the world for a young corporal named George Chapin — and a young private named Steve Zeece.