While stationed at a remote outpost during World War II, William Goff, of Eudora, got to have lunch with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. While FDR was touring the Pacific Fleet, he stopped in for a visit on the Aleutian island of Adak.

It isn’t every day that someone gets a chance to eat lunch while sitting next to the president of the United States.

But that’s what happened to a Eudora man 62 years ago, and he has the pictures to prove it.

The pictures show a young, curly-haired American Marine sitting next to President Franklin D. Roosevelt at a table. They were taken on an August day in 1944 on the Aleutian island of Adak, Alaska, where William Goff and other military personnel were stationed.

World War II was at its height and the president was touring the Pacific Fleet.

“I just sat there and kept my mouth shut,” Goff said recently as he recalled that day.

Goff, then a 19-year-old private first class from Batesville, Ark., was part of a Marine honor guard that escorted the president when he arrived at Adak Island. They went to a mess hall where a man with the president called over Goff, an Army soldier and a Navy sailor.

Goff earned that right by winning a coin flip.

There wasn’t a lot of talking during the lunch, Goff said. The meal included ham, mashed potatoes, green beans, stewed tomatoes and chocolate pudding. The president, who was disabled from polio, was carried into the mess hall by a soldier.

“He didn’t seem embarrassed about it,” Goff said of the president.

The president asked Goff what he missed most while being in the service of his country, and Goff responded he and the other soldiers all missed their wives and girlfriends.

The next day, thousands of miles away in Washington, D.C., Goff’s girlfriend from high school, Helen Staggs, was stunned to open a newspaper and see a photograph of her future husband sitting next to the president.

“We didn’t know where he was. He couldn’t tell us,” Helen Goff said recently. “Now I knew he was all right.”

William Goff, of Eudora, left, sits next to President Franklin D. Roosevelt during a lunch in Adak, Alaska. Goff was a Marine stationed at the Aleutian Island outpost when the commander in chief stopped for a visit while on a tour of the Pacific Fleet. By the toss of a coin Goff won the right to sit next to FDR.

Helen Goff worked for the FBI in Washington. She was not an agent, but she worked in a special section of the law enforcement agency. She still won’t talk about what her duties were.

“We were just taught not to say anything,” she said. “That’s the way it was back then.”

She also lived near the White House, and sometimes saw Roosevelt riding by in a car. Friends encouraged her to pay a visit to the president and tell him that she was the girlfriend of the Marine who ate lunch with him at Adak.

“They told me to go see him, but I never did,” she said.

Roosevelt died April 12, 1945, shortly before the war in Europe ended. The Goffs remember that as being a particularly sad day.

“We hated to lose our leader,” William Goff said.

During the lunch on Adak, Goff had been promised an autographed photo of the president. Roosevelt signed the picture before he died, but it wasn’t mailed to Goff until after Roosevelt’s death.

The Goffs were married after the war and moved to Eudora in 1951. William Goff worked 26 years at the DuPont plant in Tecumseh before retiring. He still has the Roosevelt pictures.

– Some information in this article came from Associated Press reports.