03/25/2026
World War II Navy veteran celebrates 99th birthday at Deer Valley East Village
Ted Crittenden has been a milkman, artist, comedian, taxidermist and more
Tuesday marked 99 years since Heber City resident Ted Crittenden was delivered into the world in his grandmother’s Hoytsville home. There weren’t any hospitals nearby at the time, he explained.
The soon-to-be centenarian celebrated the milestone by riding the Deer Valley East Village’s 10-passenger gondola with a handful of his five children, 36 grandchildren, 95 great-grandchildren and five great-great-grandchildren.
The 142-cabin gondola opened last autumn. Each of its 40 towers was flown in by a Chinook helicopter. It rises 2,570 feet over the course of the nearly 3-mile journey at 1,400 feet per minute.
Ted was impressed.
“It’s an absolute miracle of engineering. To get all those poles and all those cables? I can’t believe it,” he gushed.
The gondola ride was facilitated through Ted’s son, Kendall.
Kendall is a Wasatch County Councilor and works regularly with representatives from the Military Installation Development Authority (MIDA), which has a foothold on development in the Deer Valley area. MIDA representatives came up with the idea because Ted is a World War II Navy veteran.
Ted was a 14-year-old student at North Summit High School during the attack on Pearl Harbor and signed up for the draft with several classmates three years later.
After turning 18, he joined the Navy and was shipped off to a boot camp in San Diego. That was in March 1945, six months before the war ended.
When they arrived at the boot camp, Ted got quite a hoot out of the city boys’ gorgeous locks being shaved off.
“They wasn’t careful about it. These long curls would drop in their lap. It was quite funny,” he laughed.
After intensive training, Ted was loaded onto his first ship with an estimated 1,500 other soldiers.
As the ship traveled under the Golden Gate Bridge and into the Pacific Ocean, seasick crewmates were “puking everywhere.” Ted was unfazed.
About 18 days later, the ship made it to a U.S. base on the island of Guam, which had been recaptured from Japan the year prior.
That was where Ted was stationed when the United States dropped its first atomic bomb on Japan in Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945.
“All we heard was that there was a terrible explosion. We had no idea the magnitude of it,” he said.
At the time, he simply couldn’t believe that one bomb had destroyed an entire city.
After Japan surrendered to the Allied Forces in September, ending the war, Ted stayed in Guam for 17 months, working his way up to a third-class petty officer.
Following that, he was stationed on the destroyer USS Allen M. Sumner (DD-692), which embarked on a goodwill tour in February 1947 that began in Australia.
“Oh, they did a hoorah there. They had a big paper that says, ‘The fleet’s in. Ladies, make the most of it,’” Ted recalled.
The food in Australia was a marked improvement from the Navy diet of potatoes, beans and Spam. Ted and his crewmates also found weevils wriggling around in the bread they were served on multiple occasions.
“We used to hold it up at the light and pick them out, but pretty soon, we didn’t give a crap. Protein,” he joked. “A little cream or butter or something on them, and they went down just fine.”
Navy life was anything but glamorous. That was best exemplified by the hazing seasoned soldiers put rookies through the first time they crossed the International Date Line.
Ted was forced to crawl through a garbage chute. Then, the onboard dentist “sprayed a bunch of crap in (his) mouth,” and his crewmates dunked him in a tub of water suspended on the side of the ship.
There were elements of Navy life that were more breathtaking: watching flying fish gliding alongside the bulkhead using their batlike wings, and ginormous jellyfish dancing in a bay in China.
Ted’s service also took him to the Philippines and Japan before he left the Navy in January 1948.
Afterwards, he moved back to Hoytsville and quickly fell in love with his first wife, Pauline Brown, who later died following health complications related to a respiratory disease in 1983.
Ted irrigated land for Pauline’s father, who was a Holstein cow breeder, and met her when they were both actors in a community play held by their Latter-day Saints ward.
That thespian spirit never quite left Ted. He also acted in live performances as a Salt Lake Temple ordinance worker for 16 years. He knew almost all the parts of the performance — “even Satan” — which has since been replaced by a video.
Ted calls himself a jack of all trades, with a career and hobbies that have taken him on all sorts of adventures in Summit County. He lived in Hoytsville and Kamas most of his life until moving into Spring Gardens Senior Living in Heber City in January, where he lives with his second wife, JoAnn.
He worked for Mountain Fuel, the predecessor of Enbridge Gas, and was the head custodian at the Summit County Courthouse, roles he held for about a decade each.
He was also a small-time bobcat trapper and taxidermist. He even de-scented two skunks for his children to keep as pets.
Fly fishing is his passion, and he even wrote a few articles with fishing advice for The Park Record.
He’s always been an artist, as evidenced by the doodles on postcards he sent his mother while he was in the Navy. He also got into photography in recent years and crafts his own frames from barn wood.
He was a milkman for 17 years and stumbled in the role of first responder several times while walking his route. For example, when a car went off the side of a hill, killing two parents and leaving their two children injured, he was the first on the scene, performing first aid.
Another time, a muscular man fell out of the top story of a bar, splatting on the ground. His friends remarked that he wasn’t much of a bouncer. That’s right, Ted is also an amateur comedian if he can find an audience that will endure his jokes.
His advice to younger people is simple: “Don’t have calluses on your ass. Get up and do something.”
Kendall’s suspicion is that his father has made it to 99 because he’s always been physically and mentally busy.
Ted’s daughter, DeAnn Witt, said her father would always do three miles of his milk route at the crack of dawn before coming home for breakfast.
His mantra was, “You don’t get breakfast until you’ve earned it.”
