In the front yard of the old Owen County Courthouse at the corner of West Seminary and North Thomas streets near a large tree in the quiet community of Owenton stands Kentucky historical marker No. 2521. It honors an Owen County native whose worldwide accomplishments might have faded from public memory had it not been, in large part, for a group of middle-school students whose teacher had read a newspaper story about little-known Willis Augustus “Mose” Lee Jr., one of Kentucky’s greatest veterans.
Many Kentuckians had never heard of the man who won the highest number of Olympic medals from the Bluegrass State, served on two destroyers during World War I, and commanded American battleships during the pivotal Battle of Guadalcanal in the South Pacific during World War II.
A native of the Owen County community of Natlee on Eagle Creek, about 13 miles southeast of Owenton, Lee grew up in the small town (the population today is 1,754) and became a vice admiral in the United States Navy. He was so successful that he was lauded by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. A few years after the war, the Navy thought so highly of him that it named a destroyer in his honor. The USS Willis A. Lee participated in the blockade in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the most intense nuclear confrontation this world has ever seen.
But Lee’s name mostly remained shrouded in obscurity until a few years ago.
In July 2016, the Lexington Herald-Leader published a story about Lee, highlighting his military career and his winning seven medals (five gold, one silver, and one bronze) for marksmanship at the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp, Belgium, as a member of the U.S. rifle team, even though he wore thick glasses after black powder blew up in his face as a boy.
The story had been suggested to the newspaper by David Fleenor, a Lexington attorney and general counsel for the Kentucky Senate who had graduated with a bachelor’s degree in history from the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1979.
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The newspaper article attracted the attention of Denise Humphries, then a language arts teacher at Maurice Bowling Middle School in Owen County. She designed for her seventh graders a series of activities through which they researched Lee’s background and contributions to state and national history.
“It’s amazing what happened,” said Humphries, who now is retired from teaching and is bookmobile librarian for the Owen County Public Library.
The students approached their Lee assignments with enthusiasm. One student delivered remarks about Lee to the local Rotary Club. The school’s entire seventh grade visited the Kentucky History Center in Frankfort to see Lee’s Olympic medals. The students participated in the application that eventually landed Lee in the Kentucky Sports Hall of Fame in August 2019.
The culmination of the students’ work was raising $2,500 to install the Lee marker at the old courthouse. A dedication ceremony for the marker on Sept. 16, 2017, featured Humphries, her students and some descendants of Lee. The Navy officer and his wife, Mabelle, never had children.
Some of Lee’s relatives donated several of his personal letters to and from his mother and wife, along with other memorabilia, to the county historical society.
A handwritten letter from his mother to Lee before he had garnered worldwide attention with his rifle team at the Olympics read, “My Dear Boy, Am sending your cake today. Look for it. Have you had your exams yet—do you get on the rifle team. Write and tell me.”
Bonnie Strassell, a planner for the Owen County Historical Society and a county library employee, said the society never would have gotten the Lee materials if the young students “had not told us more about this great man.”
“Until Denise and her students started their work on Lee, most of us in Owen County didn’t know much about him,” she said.
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Paul Stillwell, an independent historian and retired naval officer from Arnold, Maryland, wrote a book last year about Lee called Battleship Commander: The Life of Vice Admiral Willis A. Lee Jr. He started working on it in 1975 but did not finish it until 2021. “Twelve other books got in the way,” Stillwell said.
“I have heard about the work of Denise Humphries and the young people in Owen County to research and educate people more about the importance of Lee,” Stillwell said. “I think that is marvelous.”
There are several reasons why Lee is not that well-known, said Stillwell: “He shunned publicity. Unlike some other World War II greats, he wrote no memoirs and did not leave behind official papers. He was hesitant to be in the public eye. He was laconic in interviews.
“His wife inherited his possessions, but she died four years after he did and left them to family members.”
Lee should be remembered for his military accomplishments, said Stillwell. “He was a pioneer in radar, gunnery and developing combat information centers,” he explained. A combat information center is a room in a warship used as a tactical area and provides processed information for command and control of the nearby battle space or area of operations. Lee made good use of the centers as a battleship commander.
Stillwell said that, in writing the book, he conducted many interviews of people from Owen County and those who worked with Lee and his relatives “to flesh him out as human being.”
“Lee was not an assertive man, but he knew how to command,” said the author.
When asked what he would ask Lee if he had a chance to interview him, Stillwell replied, “Oh, I would want to hear his accounts of all the military events he was involved in.”
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Lee’s childhood nickname of “Mose” originated from his mother, who was fishing at Eagle Creek but had to be rushed to her family home in Natlee to deliver her son. She joked later that she might name her son Mose because she had taken him away from the water, as Pharaoh’s daughter had rescued the biblical Moses.
Lee graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1908. Following graduation, Lee excelled on rifle teams, and from October 1908-May 1909, he served on a battleship. He later served on a cruiser and a gunboat. During World War I, Lee served on two destroyers.
During the 1930s and early ’40s, Lee served several assignments in the Fleet Training Division. In early 1942, following his promotion to rear admiral, Lee became assistant chief of staff to the Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet.
When his vessel fought a Japanese battleship on the night of Nov. 14, 1942, in the waters of Guadalcanal, he became naval history’s first battleship commander to conduct a “gunfight” primarily by radar. He received the Navy Cross for his actions in a battle that was a turning point for the Allied forces in World War II.
In 1944, Lee was promoted to vice admiral and placed in charge of the Pacific Fleet’s fast battleships. In May 1945, he was sent to the Atlantic to command a special unit researching defenses against the threat of Japanese kamikaze aircraft.
While serving in that position in Casco Bay, Maine, on the morning of Aug. 25, 1945, Lee walked 15 minutes from a boarding house where he had had breakfast with his wife to a small boat for a trip out to his office on Great Diamond Island. Moments after the boat pulled away from the landing, Lee began choking. He slumped over his seat. The boat crew rushed to help him and tried to get him to the nearest ship for help.
Lee died of a coronary thrombosis at 66. His death came 10 days after the surrender of Japan. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C.
“The man of huge ships died in a boat,” Stillwell wrote in his book. “The splendid warrior died with the coming of peace.”
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Teacher Humphries said there were two major takeaways from the experiences of her students, now out of high school learning about Lee. “First, they realized a person from a small town like Owenton can do great things, as Lee did,” she said, “and they also realized that, no matter how small a person’s voice is, he or she can make things happen. They did.
“I think the great man would have been as proud of them as they are of him.”