Clifton Woolf, 92, has led a life that has included success in real estate development, raising a family, and extensive charitable giving. One of the aspects of his story that he is most proud of, though, is the more than four decades he spent in the military.

Woolf served a total of 41 years, 1 month and 13 days in the U.S. armed forces. Although he retired from the Army in 1994, his military career started out in the Navy, when he was drafted in 1953.

“I was only in the Navy for about four years,” Woolf says, although he had some memorable experiences in that time.

“I was put on a ship in Pearl Harbor, and right across from where the ship I was on docked was where the USS Arizona was sunk, and still there. The Marines came over every day and raised the flag, and they’d come back over in the afternoon and take it down,” he says. “Now, they’ve built a platform over it.”

The ship Woolf was on was a gasoline tanker. “We ran fuel up through the Pacific Ocean,” he says.

Once, they were passing Enewetak Atoll when the ship captain was notified that an atomic test was about to happen, so they stopped and waited to watch the detonation. Woolf was far enough away that he could barely hear the sound of the bomb exploding, he recalls, but he saw the mushroom cloud.

“We were far enough out that we didn’t feel the heat of the blast,” he says.

When Woolf completed his active duty, he was considering joining the Navy Reserve, but the closest place to Missouri where he could have gone would have been Memphis, Tennessee.

“So at that time I joined the Missouri Army National Guard,” Woolf says. “And I was in the Missouri Army National Guard for a total of 35 years. And during that time, I started out in the National Guard in St. Louis, and was transferred to the 35th Infantry Division in Kansas City.”

While serving with the National Guard in Kansas City, Woolf met former Harry Truman four times, including once when he delivered memorabilia to the Truman Presidential Library & Museum and had the opportunity to talk with the former president for 10 or 15 minutes.

Perhaps the most memorable time he met Truman, though, was when he and another guardsman were assigned to pick up the former president and his cousin Ralph Truman, who had once been division commander for the 35th Infantry Division, to bring them to a division reunion in Kansas City.

While they were driving, they passed a road that had recently been renamed after Truman, so they asked him what he thought of the name change.

Truman said he thought it was a great idea, but he would have liked for them to wait to rename the street after him until after he was dead. Woolf and the other guardsman asked him why.

“And he says, ‘Well, before I got into national politics, I was in local politics.’ And he was the county judge of Jackson County, which includes Kansas City and Independence. And he says, ‘When I was the judge, they had built a new school and they put the superintendent’s name in the cornerstone,’” Woolf recalls of the conversation with Truman.

“‘Then, about a year later, this superintendent gets in trouble with one of the girls out there.’ And he says, ‘I had to send the guy out there with a chisel and a hammer to get his name out of that cornerstone.’ And he says, ‘I can just see them taking those signs down when they find out some of the s*** I’ve done.’”

Woolf’s time in the Guard in Kansas City also included being deployed for riot control following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., which happened just over a week before Easter in 1968.

“The thing about it that I recall is, we were staying in East High School there in Kansas City, and when I woke up Sunday morning, my helmet was filled with Easter eggs” that had been placed there by a fellow guardsman, he says.

Woolf’s service in the Guard involved some international travel, including a few brief trips to Germany.

“Some of that active duty, when they had the problem down in Panama with Noriega, after everything settled down, they sent the National Guard down to fix roads and do that kind of stuff to get back in good graces with the Panamanians, and I was the command sergeant major in charge of that detail,” he also noted.

Woolf’s primary responsibility, however, for the majority of his military career — 22 years — was running the National Guard Armory in Warrenton, where his job title was administrative and supply technician.

“I was never in a combat zone, because there were years and years and years — the peace years, they called them — where there were no combat zones,” Woolf says.

During the Vietnam War, his unit was designated as a Selected Reserve force that was trained and ready for deployment, though it was never sent overseas.

“But, looking back on it, it was a good thing to miss that little outing over there, because when you listen to these folks that were there, it was tough. It was rough. But I never got involved in that kind of a situation,” he says.

Noting that he stayed in the military for as long as he was allowed to, Woolf says that looking back on it, his service was rewarding.

“I’ve got a granddaughter that graduated from high school here in Warrenton. She had a top-secret clearance the day she graduated from high school,” and went on active duty working in intelligence, Woolf says, adding that at the end of her tour, her college education was paid for through the GI Bill.

“She went to work at a company that required a top-secret clearance,” he says. “They would have gotten it for her, but she already had one. So, I guess what I’m saying is there’s a lot of advantages, and military experience opens a lot of doors for you.”