Twins reflect on 90 years of faith, service

Identical twin brothers celebrated their 90th birthday in September, marking a shared life of religion, family and patriotism.

Ralph Henderson was born Sept. 6, 1918, in Arimo, Idaho, preceded by his twin brother, Boyd, who came an hour and a half earlier.

"The doctor thought I was a tumor," Ralph said. "But the tumor had legs and arms."

The brothers are identical not only in appearance, but also in work ethic — a trait forged while tending a subsistence garden and their father's feed store, which opened a year after they moved to Pocatello, Idaho, in 1933.

After the twins graduated from Pocatello High School and attended a year of college, they registered to serve one year in the Army. Boyd said Ralph's draft number was pulled out of a giant fish bowl in Washington, D.C., around the time they were going to talk to their bishop about serving a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

"The whole family was surprised because it happened so soon," Boyd said. "I voluntarily joined him because I wanted us to be together."

The twins began training in February 1941 at Fort Warren in Cheyenne, Wyo. Toward the end of the year, Boyd took a three-day leave to marry Ethel Chilton in the Salt Lake Temple. With only a few months left to complete his service, Ralph planned to begin a married life with his high school sweetheart, Lena Rawlins. But the bombing of Pearl Harbor changed everything.

"I knew I couldn't get out of the Army," Ralph said. "I didn't know where I was going."

Ralph joined a convoy headed to defend the West Coast in anticipation of further attacks. Along the way, the convoy stopped to refuel in Pocatello, where Ralph exchanged wedding vows with Lena.

"I only had time to kiss her twice and got back on the truck," Ralph said. "I cried myself to sleep."

The war catapulted the small-town twins into the large, enraged world of North Africa and Europe.

"These were terrible times," Ralph wrote in a leather-bound journal he kept during his service in the U.S. 5th Army. "We were afraid of getting killed all the time."

The campaign in Italy was one of those times.

"When our battalion landed on Anzio, we were told it would take seven days to capture Rome," Boyd said. "That was a great blunder. We grossly underestimated the Germans. It took 4 1/2 months to capture Rome. "

Wrote Ralph: "I was nothing but a pack of nerves most of the night."