World War II Vet, Native American Trail Blazer Jesse Oxendine ’55

We almost missed him. There were a lot of averted close calls before “I am MUSC pharmacy” could apply to Jesse Oxendine ’55, a hero of World War II who helped liberate a concentration camp and became the first Native American to be a registered pharmacist in North Carolina.

A Lumbee Indian, his MUSC pharmacy future stood at many crossroads:

• almost getting cut down by a machine gun in Euskirchen
• tangling with drunk Russians in post-war Berlin
• taking glider flights behind enemy lines in the 82nd Airborne
• getting handed the booklet, “Pharmacy: A Fading Profession”

At any step of the way, Jesse E. Oxendine might have ended up as a name on some memorial or as a railroad accountant or as a Pembroke pharmacist with a degree from elsewhere. But things played out as they did, and now Oxendine is a proud and esteemed member of the MUSC pharmacy family.

Born and raised in Pembroke, N.C., the tribal seat of the Lumbee Indian Tribe, Oxendine’s life traces a fascinating arc through American history. His house is filled with memorabilia, any piece of which is the door to a rich anecdote. The phone rings a handful of times during a conversation and you overhear him conducting business, you watch him traipse up and down stairs, you listen to the expertly woven web of his of stories, and glance at the book in your hands, the one he wrote and published a few months earlier, and you think, “This man is 90 years old?”

His book, “Memories of Pembroke, N.C.” offers occasional reminders of the world into which Oxendine was born. He remembers the popularity of aviator glasses in the wake of Charles Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic, watching with wonder as someone talked on one of Pembroke’s two phones, getting their first theater and its segregated seating for blacks.

He now has four grandchildren - Riley, Rachel, Carson, and Coleton - who will grow up in a world where it will be unthinkable to live without a phone and for whom an African-American president is old news. Oxendine also has two living children (Mark and Jenny) and he and his wife Jewell have lost two children, Michelle as an adult and Pam as a child. Jewell, whom he nursed through Alzheimer’s, passed away in 2013.

His memories of World War II are intense. The machine gun incident was near-death by friendly fire. The drunk Russians was near-death by former allies in a volatile 1946 Berlin, where a Russian or American would be found dead most nights (the flip side of the coin landing a night or two later). But the most chilling reminiscence is of his regiment’s liberation of Wobblein.

This 5,000-inmate camp was liberated May 2, 1945 and allies found 1,000 dead inmates littering the facility, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

“We were in northern Germany across the Elbe River,” Oxendine said. “We were supposed to take a town and we ran into a concentration camp. I had never heard of a concentration camp up to then, no one did. We saw these funny-looking people, they were so thin... How’d they live long enough to lose that much weight? I remember thinking how much they all looked alike, with their shaved heads and pajamas. I went in one building and there was a dirt floor with dead babies all over.

“I started out the back door, had to shove it open because there were bodies stacked four, five feet high. I looked around and saw at least three furnaces and I wondered “What are they going to heat all this water for?” Somebody said “They think they’re Jews.” I asked, “What’s with the Jews? They’re just like everybody else. I’d never heard of anti-Semitism.”

He began his pharmacy career at Bizzell Pharmacy in 1955 before moving to Kiser Drugs. He and partner Shorty Hemby bought the store and renamed it King Drugs. Oxendine became sole owner after Hemby died, eventually expanding to multiple stores.

The MUSC College of Pharmacy became part of his future in 1946, when he applied to a number of schools. The end of the war had brought a glut of students. UNC wasn’t accepting Indians and the others wouldn’t accept out-of-staters.

“I got a job at a railroad,” he said. Two years later, he thought about pharmacy again and called MUSC. He remembers talking with a Mrs. Muellers in admissions. “She put me on hold and I started thinking maybe I didn’t want to do this. It turned out they had my application on file and about a week later I got accepted. So I couldn’t back out.”