LONG ROAD TO CHARLES TOWN

 

 

A Journey Remembered

 

By Roby Bevan Jr.

He who tooteth not his own horn, the same shall not be tooted.

   ---Jeff Dossett

            The title is kind of corny, but I like it.  The subtitle is kind of poetic, but I like it too.

            The journey of which I speak began in Dade County, Florida back in 1926.  I hope and expect it will end in Charles Town, West Virginia -- at a time yet to be revealed. 

Acknowledgement 

            Before proceeding further, I want to acknowledge with love and gratitude the debt I owe to my wife, Mary Lee.  Her support, her sense of organization, her sheer skill at using the computer to move text around and all that computer/word processing magic stuff—and her willingness to do so when I need her help in getting a printed copy to see if it looks okay. 

            Mary Lee and I have spells when we get to talking with one another about our own respective lives.  So she knows pretty well about my past, and she has encouraged me to get it down into a coherent and complete memoir.  Or something.

            Up to now she has helped me to put together a reasonably finished account of my early life, which I plan to call PART ONE, and which covers my life up to age eighteen.  But she has pointedly commented several times that I haven’t even “gotten to the really good stuff, yet.”

            Alright, already!  I’m working on it!  Actually a lot of the “really good stuff” is already written, but is not quite ready for Mary Lee to work her magic on it.

Author’s Note

            This is a true account of my life as I remember it, and commentary on some matters of interest to me.  The events, as told here, are all true, making reasonable allowances for sometimes fuzzy recall.  In such cases, I have tried to capture the spirit and meaning of the moment.

            In telling my story, I have relied on available sources of historical record to check out facts (names, dates, places, etc.).  And I have relied also upon family lore as I remember it (and taking into account that the telling and retelling of such things sometimes improves with age).

            Looking back over the past eighty some odd years, I am struck by the variety of experiences, good and bad, that make up my life—places I have been, people I have known casually or have had animated discussions with, or just recognized when I saw them and/or because they had been key people in the Manhattan Project who had continued to work in the development and testing of thermonuclear weapons.  Most of these people have extensive records of their lives and achievements now to be found on Google or in a number of currently available books, in that they are now iconic figures in their respective fields of endeavor.

            I ask myself if all this really did happen.  As far as I know, it did. 

January 1, 2009

Charles Town, WV

            -- My story begins a long time ago in the small town of Tifton, Georgia.  There lived a little girl, a feisty and lively little Georgia cracker.  Her name was Rosalie Alfriend.  She is important to my story, because she would, in time, become my mother. 

            Rosalie had a “best friend” by the name of Doris Bevan.  Doris had an older brother by the name of Roby.  He would, of course, in time, become my father. 

            Although Rosalie and Doris were best friends (off and on), Rosalie didn’t particularly like Doris’s brother Roby.  It was because Roby would sometimes tease Rosalie.  Roby’s teasing was his childish way of getting her attention without letting on that he had a crush on her.  Maybe Doris told Roby that he wasn’t getting anywhere with his teasing.  In any event, in time, Rosalie got to where she liked Roby, too.  In fact, they got to where they liked each other a whole lot, and they all grew together into their teen years.

            When Roby was age 15, he had to drop out of high school after his father was killed in a railroad accident.  Since Roby was the oldest boy in the family, he became the “man of the family,” and got a full-time job to help support his mother and younger brothers and sisters.  He got a job working with a land survey crew, and began learning surveying.  Roby liked his surveying work and decided he wanted to learn to be a civil engineer.  There was no way he could go to college (he hadn’t even finished high school).  But he began studying civil engineering through an International Correspondence School (ICS) course.

            His surveying job took him to other parts of South Georgia, but he continued to court Rosalie when he could.  They were much in love, and when she was 19 and he was 21, they got married.  This was in 1925, smack in the middle of the “Roaring Twenties,” about which you will hear more.

 

Miami, Florida:  1925-1926

            Among those things that were “roaring” in the twenties, was a “land boom” in Florida.  So after their marriage, Roby and Rosalie moved all their stuff into an apartment in Fort Lauderdale, just north of Miami, where he would be working as a surveyor for a land company.  At that time, in 1925, a lot of people from “up east” saw Florida as a good place to live, or vacation, or even to get rich speculating in land. There was all this wild raw land that could be acquired cheaply, or just by staking and registering a claim on it.  Much of it was swampland.  Large tracts of such land in South Florida were being surveyed (swamp and all), and sold to developers, who would build houses, hotels, vacation and entertainment resorts (think Disney World), gambling casinos, horse racing tracks (think Hialeah), or about anything that people wanted for fun and pleasure.  But what about all that swamp land, and all that wild life—alligators, snakes, turtles, bullfrogs, etc?  No problem.  There was at that time no such thing as environmental concerns and no concern about preservation of wild life for rare and endangered species.  Just kill off the wild life (or put them in zoos)—just get rid of them.  Then drain and fill the swamps and build whatever would sell, and do whatever you think will make you money.   Some people were making a lot of money that way.  The “Roaring Twenties,” you know.

            My (soon-to-be) dad was not getting rich, but the land speculation people he worked for seemed to be doing pretty well. 

            The Florida land boom of the 1920s was much in the spirit of the times, a part of a fascinating and materialistic era of our history, later known as the Roaring Twenties.  It was a period of unparalleled prosperity for many people and a time of rapid industrial growth.  Some have called it “the Second Industrial Revolution.”  It was the time of my parents coming of age, and it was the world into which I was about to be born. 

Here I Come, Ready or Not

            On September 8, 1926, my dad took my mom to a hospital in Miami, where I was born late that night.  I was blessed to be born healthy, to good people, and in the USA. 

            Although my birth was doubtless a “blessed event” to my mom and dad, there was a much bigger and less blessed event in the making, about which my mom and dad didn’t yet know. 

            Far out in the Atlantic Ocean, a tropical storm was rapidly building into a particularly large and ferocious hurricane.  A few days after my birth, that hurricane slammed into the Florida coast at Miami/Fort Lauderdale.  It killed a lot of people (estimated 350-800 people killed or missing) and destroyed a lot of south Florida.  And it would put a huge dent in the Florida land boom. 

            At that time, 1926, there was little in the way news broadcasting, and even less in the way of reliable weather forecasting.  The most common mode of mass communication, other than newspapers, was rumor.  Even before the winds of the hurricane died down, word was out that south Florida was about to be inundated with a tidal wave that would sweep over what was left by the hurricane.

            According to what I heard when I was growing up, my mother took her new little baby and told my dad that she was headed north, at least out of Florida, and hoped he would go with us.  He did.  Not much left in Florida to survey right now. 

            But even without the tidal wave (which never got there), the September 1926 Miami hurricane was said to be the worst natural disaster to hit the US since the San Francisco earthquake in 1906. 

Albany: 1926-1927

            We moved to Albany, Georgia.  There my dad went to work for the Georgia Power Company, surveying rights-of-way for new electrical transmission lines.  The demand for electric power was growing rapidly over all the country, including South Georgia.

            My dad was, along with his surveying work for Georgia Power Company, pursuing his ICS work.  He particularly became interested in the design and construction of bridges and other such structures.  Although my mom and dad both liked living in Albany, my dad wanted a chance to do structural engineering work.  So within a year, they pulled up stakes and left Albany for my dad’s new job as a junior design draftsman at Nashville Bridge Company.  He would work there for the next several years.

Nashville -1927 to 1930

 

Our Life in the “Roaring Twenties”

            My earliest childhood memories are of that time when we lived in a small rented house on Westbrook Avenue in Nashville.  My first sister, Diane, was born in Nashville in November 1928.  My earliest memories are of my mother pushing Diane in a baby carriage as I rode my little yellow tricycle on the sidewalk in front of our house on Westbrook.  I have some pictures of that.

            Another family, the Taylor’s, lived in a bigger house maybe two doors down from us.  Mr. and Mrs. Taylor seemed to be a little older than my parents, but they had two children about the ages of Diane and me, and we played together.  Mrs. Taylor and our mom visited together a lot.  Mr. Taylor was a teacher at Fisk University, a Negro school in Nashville.  The Taylor’s had a “house boy” who lived with them, a young man who was a student at Fisk University.  He had a distinguished sounding name, like Barnabus or Augustine, or something like that.  We always addressed him or referred to him by his full first name, and I understood that I was not to ask about racial matters.  Such were the times. 

            The first big decision I can remember making all on my own was while riding my trike and needing to go “tinkle.”  My mom and Mrs. Taylor were visiting.  I started to go tell my mother—then it occurred to me that I could just go in the house and do it.  I did, and it made me feel like a big boy.

            At some time about then, my dad bought an automobile, a T-Model Ford.  I remember that the engine was started with a hand crank, and I remember watching my dad getting things set to crank it up and get it started.  We would sometimes ride out to Centennial Park on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon with a picnic lunch and play with beanbags my mother had made for us.  Sometimes my dad met a friend to play tennis—he was an avid tennis player.  One of his idols was Bill Tilden, who dominated the tennis world then. 

            One time we were out riding in our car, and I fell out of the car headfirst.  I woke up in a strange place lying on a hard bed.  My mother and some other lady were there hovering over me.  I wondered where we were and what had happened and who was that other lady with my mother.  She said we were at a hospital; I had fallen out of the car, and had broken my collarbone.  The other lady was a nurse.  I lay there thinking:  I thought nursing was when mothers feed their babies.  I thought maybe when you break your collarbone; you are supposed to get nursed.  “When I was a child… I thought as a child.”

            I didn’t get “nursed” but for what seemed like a long time after that, I had a heavy cast on my upper body.  It was uncomfortable, and I was glad when it came off.

            I remember (I was about age three) there was a flood in Nashville.  My dad took me to work with him at the Nashville Bridge Company.  It was located near a bridge over the Cumberland River where it runs through Nashville.  We saw streets that were under water, and people were out in rowboats.  I thought it must be a lot of fun going up and down the street in a rowboat.  But I was glad our street on Westbrook didn’t get flooded, because we didn’t have a rowboat. 

            My dad took me once to a country music program at a theatre in Nashville.  It was called The Grand Ole Opry.  It was a lot of fun.  All that music.  And he took me to a circus where I saw Tom Mix.  He was a wild-west cowboy and one of my idols.  That was fun, too.  All those elephants, and other animals, and clowns, and trapeze people flying and tumbling through the air.

            But probably the biggest thing up to that time was the Christmas that I got my first Lionel electric train.  My dad spent a lot of time showing me how to play with my new electric train.  He had made a tunnel, and a bridge that looked sort of like the bridge that went across the Cumberland River near where he worked.  My dad sure did like showing me all he knew about playing with an electric train. 

            That period of my life was probably the most idyllic time for my family up until I was about four years old.  We had a radio, and Nashville had a radio station (WSM) with a lot of happy music and other programs on it.  My mom and dad would sometimes hum or sing along with the music on the radio.  My mother called me Sonny, and there was a song on the radio called “Sonny Boy.”   I thought the song was about me.  There was another song called “My Diane,” and, of course, that was about my sister Diane.  There were also a lot of love songs and jazzy music and some classical music.  We went to movies (we called them picture shows), with Charlie Chaplin, Jean Harlow, and other movie stars.  I remember the first movie I ever saw—a picture called “Hell’s Angels”—about World War I and the use of airplanes and dirigibles in war. 

            We would often visit with friends of my mom and dad, and Diane and I would play with their children.  My mom and dad would play bridge with their friends, and we children would do our thing together.

            The Nashville Bridge Company, where my dad worked, apparently stayed pretty busy.  An automobile maker by the name of Henry Ford had figured out a way to mass-produce automobiles on an assembly line.  As fast as Ford could make cars, people were gobbling them up at $300 a piece.  Travel by automobile was booming.  So a lot of new paved roads and highways were being built, and bridges were rapidly replacing ferryboats to get cars across rivers.  Bridge builders had plenty to do as automobile had become more popular. 

            The growing availability of electric power promoted the use of all kinds of new electrical gadgets being made and sold to people who wanted them--people like my parents--electric lamps, electric irons, electric fans and heaters, radios, and even electric refrigerators to keep food cold and to make ice.  We didn’t have an electric refrigerator, just an icebox, but we had ice delivered every day or so from the local ice company.  One of my first memories was of one of those new machines for washing clothes.  For some reason it made a sound that scared me when my mother did the wash.  We didn’t have a telephone, but the Taylor’s did and would let us use theirs.  There was a telegraph system called Western Union for sending urgent messages to places far away. 

The End of the Roaring Twenties and the Beginning of the Great Depression

            Although the 1920s brought prosperity to many, there were adverse affects on the farming industry.  Ours was still largely an agrarian society.  As farming became more mechanized (tractors, harvesters, etc.) and fertilizer became more available, farm production became more efficient which caused a slump in the price of produce.  For small farms (40 acres and a mule) the marketing of their produce had to compete with that of the large highly mechanized farms, so the small farmer was hurt also. 

            While most economic indicators pointed to unprecedented prosperity, there were other factors that weren’t seen or were ignored.  In short, the whole of the economy rested upon unstable foundations.  Productive capacity got too far out ahead of demand.   And too large a share of profits went into the pockets of a few “captains of industry” and a few financiers who manipulated market forces to personally enrich themselves. 

            Such private wealth was often invested in blue chip stocks of a few corporations. These stocks were being traded on the New York Stock Exchange.  We are speaking here of corporations like U.S. Steel, General Electric, Anaconda Copper, Radio Corporation of America, General Motors, Dupont, AT&T, Allied Chemical, and perhaps a few other such corporate giants.  We are also speaking of individual captains of industry and finance such as J. P. Morgan, Andrew Mellon, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, and others. 

 

Welcome to Our Great Depression

            Early in the first half of 1929, despite occasional sharp breaks, the stock market was still climbing higher.  A mania for speculation seemed to sweep over the country.  Thousands of small investors poured their savings into common stocks, often purchased on margin.  This means that they paid only a part of the cost of the stocks borrowing the rest through the broker.  By September 1929, stock prices had reached unprecedented heights.

            For several days the market wavered and then began to move downward.  Most analysts, however, contended that the New York Stock Exchange was simply undergoing a “digestion” of the recent previous gains.  A prominent Harvard economist expressed the prevailing view that stocks had reached a permanently high plateau and would resume their advance.

            On October 24 a wave of selling and buying sent prices steeply declining.  A record number of shares were traded that day.  Some bankers and politicians rallied to check the decline, and President Hoover assured the people that “the business of the country is on a sound and prosperous basis.”  But on Tuesday, October 29, (now sometimes referred to as “Black Tuesday”) the bottom dropped out of the market.  There was a panic sell off.

            As thousands of speculators were forced to put up more margin as prices declined, and dumped their holdings in one security to raise money to cover their investments in another, a new record of shares were bought and sold.  Prices continued to plummet, and it was clear that the “long bull market” was a thing of the past.  Welcome to our Great Depression.

            The market having collapsed, virtually all industrial productivity came to a halt.  A national financial paralysis set in.  The Great Depression, as it later came to be known, continued throughout the decade of the 1930s. 

            Although the economy was nowhere near as “globalized” then as it later became, the Depression would have worldwide consequences.  Confidence in the supposedly perfect American system of free market enterprise, capitalism, was all but destroyed both in America and elsewhere in the world.

            It had a profound effect on my family and was a major factor in shaping my own life.

            Many books have been written analyzing the causes of the Great Depression.  As said by John Kenneth Galbreath in his classic work, The Crash of 1929, “…the worst continued to worsen.”  

            As the financial market fell into chaos, and business activity ground to a near halt, banks closed, and things became very cheap.   There was little or no money in circulation with which to buy.  I remember in the early 1930s people coming around in horse-drawn wagons trying to sell homegrown produce.  Watermelons were a nickel apiece.  But who had a nickel to spend on a watermelon?

            Neither President Hoover (who had been in office for only a year after the Crash occurred) nor Congress, nor any other person of influence seemed to know what to do.  Congress passed new legislation (such as the Smoot-Hawley Act), which only made things worse. 

            Since my dad’s work had been in bridge design and construction, the depression had a quick and profound effect upon my dad’s income.   Very quickly in 1930, my dad’s work situation drastically deteriorated.  No more bridge building, and virtually all construction activity stopped.

            Life for my family became a continuing quest for food and shelter.  I had not yet started to school, so I saw up close what was happening to my parents.  The same was true for tens of millions of others in our nation.  There were no relief agencies, food stamps, Social Security.  No hospitalization or health care plans.

            Every family was on its own, and no government aid would be forthcoming.

 

Some Personal Observations of Our Life:  1930-1932

            Since I was just a little kid, I had no clue that anything unusual was happening.  But I do recall much, both good and bad, that happened during those times.  Much of what we did was simply moving from place to place as my parents did whatever was necessary to keep us in food and shelter.  We moved out of our house on Westbrook and moved into the first of a number of small apartments in which we would live off and on for the next few years.  Sometimes it was only an upstairs room and a closet, with access to a bathroom.  I think our first move was into an upstairs apartment in Mrs. Hamilton’s house (still in Nashville).  Mrs. Hamilton was an old widow woman (probably in her 40s) and her daughter, a tall skinny red-haired girl named Ruby.  We lived upstairs in one bedroom and with a bathroom down the hall.

            One significant event I recall when we lived at the Hamilton’s (and of which my mother reminded me in later years):  I was about age four and was playing in the back yard with a little dog that lived next door.  A severe electrical storm came up with crashing thunder and lightning.  My mother came to the backdoor and hollered at me to come in “right now!”  I did so.   Soon after I got inside, a bolt of lightening struck the little dog, and killed him.  My mother reminded me of that several times in my life.

            As far as I know, my dad was still “going to work” somewhere each day; maybe at Nashville Bridge Company.  But he had little or no regular income.  I overheard conversation between my parents about something called scrip, which seemed to be a substitute for money.  It wasn’t clear to my parents how it could be spent.  Would it pay the rent or buy food?  My dad talked about friends who had been laid off from work.   There was no such thing as credit or credit cards.  Food purchases were all made with cash or scrip, which sometimes could be used for money. 

            My dad sometimes bought a pack of chewing gum for a family treat.  He would take out two sticks of gum, break them into two pieces, and each of the four of us would have a half stick.  That made a pretty good treat.  On the whole, I thought life was pretty good, especially when he brought Wrigley’s spearmint, my favorite.  I still had my electric train and my tricycle.

            I noticed that we didn’t do a lot of things we used to do.  We no longer had our car.  We did a lot of walking to places (library, church, store, park).  Skimping became a way of life, seeking out the cheapest of everything--food, housing, clothing, and playthings.  We saved everything for reuse including sheets of paper for drawing on or making paper airplanes.  My mom did family laundry with Octagon soap and saved the wrappers for me to cut out coupons.  Whatever we did, I figured that was what every one else did, too.  We learned to make play things out of oatmeal boxes, matchsticks, scraps of soap, rubber bands, thread spools, and about anything cheap and available.  We used old newspapers for making toy hats, kites, boats, or to be cut into strips to make paper chain links, which were put together with paste made from flour and a little salt.  Diane and I sometimes tried to see how long a paper chain we could make.  Our mom read a lot to us before we could read.  We read all the Booth Tarkington books that were available.  She would set aside a reading time for several different days, and we would read all the way through a book over a period of several days.  Sometimes we had discussions after each reading session.  We memorized children’s poems like Jack and Jill, Humpty Dumpty, and children’s stories like the Three Bears, Little Red Riding Hood, and my favorite, Jack and the Bean Stalk.  I remember having scary dreams about Jack and the Bean Stalk.  I was Jack and the giant was after me.

            There were small free neighborhood libraries (thank you Mr. Carnegie) from which we borrowed books.  A few years ago, Mary Lee ran across a copy of one of my old time favorites I had told her about, and she bought it for me.  She had found a copy of  Miss Minerva and William Green Hill while rummaging through some old books in a local antique shop in Charles Town.  The publication date was coincidentally, 1926, the year I was born.  The copy we had owned when I was a child had, of course, long since been worn to shreds from use.  (My sister Bunny somewhere along the way, memorized and could recite long passages from Miss Minerva, or someone could start reading aloud anywhere in the book and she could quickly tell you the text that followed.)

            Andrew Carnegie, a wealthy philanthropist and steel maker had created a system of small free local lending libraries in various cities including Nashville.  It seemed that there was often one within walking distance from where we were living.  A lot of people, including my mother, read current literature for entertainment.  It was free and available.  Also my dad sometimes brought home copies of the local newspaper, The Nashville Banner.

            My dad had some health problems that oftentimes went untreated.   From early childhood, he had asthma—a condition in which the air passages close up and breathing is difficult.  As far back as I can remember he used an atomizer to spray an expensive medication into his mouth and nose to open up the airways.  He often couldn’t afford to buy it when he needed it.  Our living space was crowded, and often I would hear my dad up at night wheezing trying to breathe.  But he still played tennis sometimes.  There were a few local tennis courts maintained by those who played. 

            We lived in several different small apartments around in Nashville (maybe having to move when we couldn’t pay the rent).   Generally, we went to church somewhere.  My parents weren’t particularly pious people, but going to church on Sunday was standard practice.  It might have been in Sunday school that I heard about making tea out of dried sage grass.  I asked my mom if that was sage grass in the field across the street where my dad and I sometimes flew a kite.  She said it might be sage grass.  Anyway it was tall and dried up.  I gathered up some and brought it home for my mother to make some sage tea.  I don’t remember how that turned out.

            We continued to live in Nashville until I was five years old.  Then there was talk of sending my mother and sister and me to Tifton, GA to live.  My dad just couldn’t make enough money to keep us together, but my grandfather, Daddy Lint, living in Tifton had a secure job as Chief Freight Agent for the Atlantic Coastline Railroad.   Arrangements were made for my mother and Diane and me to live in a room at Mrs. Gilmore’s house near where Daddy Lint and Momma Jo lived.  We would be living in Tifton when I started first grade.

Leaving Nashville:  1931

The Fox, the Box, and the Warehouse

Shortly before our leaving Nashville to move to Tifton, my dad went hunting for game.  He took his twelve-gage shotgun.  My mom said he might bring home some rabbit or squirrel, something that we could eat that night.  He had done that before.  I remember picking lead shot out of game he had killed.   

          Later that day, my dad came home.  He had killed a fox.  No rabbit, or squirrel, or even

 

possum.  My mom was not happy about it.  Why was he bringing home a dead fox?   It wasn’t clear

 

whether we would eat the fox.  Anyway, he skinned it and salted down the pelt and packed it in a bag

 

with a lot of salt, and put it away somewhere.  I don’t know for sure what happened to the carcass,

 

but I think that might have been fox stew we had for supper that night.

 

            Before leaving Nashville my dad built a big wooden box, which came to be known in our family as “the big box.”   As far as I know, all of our earthly stuff went into the big box.  Maybe my dad’s fox skin made it into the big box.  I don’t remember ever seeing it again. 

            In the next day or so, we left our apartment in Nashville, walked to the bus station, and caught a bus to Tifton.   When we got to Tifton that night, Daddy Lint met us at the bus station and took us to his house. 

            The big box got to Tifton by railroad freight some days later.  Some men stored it on the second floor of the freight warehouse where Daddy Lint had his office.  That was where all the damaged freight was usually stored: out of sight out of mind.

           

             That warehouse became for me a special place during my childhood.  It was a huge

 

cavernous gloomy old building that smelled of creosote and stale tobacco and probably the droppings

 

of mice, bats and other small rodents.  On the lower level of the warehouse was generally stored

 

incoming or outgoing freight.  Daddy Lint had a big office on one corner of the first floor.  There was

 

a long loading platform on the rail side for loading and unloading boxcars. During our childhood, my

 

cousin Bobby and I used to roll dollies up and down that platform and play in empty boxcars standing

 

along side the platform.  We used to rummage through broken freight on the second floor just to see

 

what was in there.  Sometimes we looked through the big box, but I don’t remember ever taking

 

anything out of it.  In later childhood years, I looked to see what was still in the big box, but I don’t

 

think anything ever changed. 

 

            As far as I know, that big box might still be sitting on the second floor of the old warehouse.

 

My cousin Bobby, who lived most of his late adult life in Tifton, told me a few years ago that things

 

hadn’t changed much in Tifton.  He hadn’t been in the warehouse for many years, but said it was still

 

there the same as always.  The last time I was in Tifton was when I went there for Daddy Lint’s

 

funeral in 1960.  That was also the last time I saw Bobby alive, although I talked with him several

 

times after that.  Bobby died within a year or so after I last talked with him about 1999. 

 

            The big box became for our family a sort of symbolic repository for accumulated and rarely used stuff.  Through the years, before I left home for the Navy, someone might suggest (factiously) that a lost or misplaced item might be in the big box. 

 

During the time that we lived in Tifton, the Great Depression had pretty much bottomed out, and it would stay that way for several years.  While lived there, we had enough to eat but not much variety.  I got tired of cornflakes with a half a banana or oatmeal for breakfast every morning.  We ate a lot of grits and butter, boiled okra, beans, and rice.  On Sundays we usually had dinner with Daddy Lint and Mamma Jo.  Hattie, their “girl,” usually killed a chicken on Sunday, so we had chicken, beans, and mashed potatoes and gravy along with plenty of biscuits for Sunday dinner. 

How to Kill a Pesky Bat

 Since we (my mother and sister and I) began living at Mrs. Gilmore’s in that small upstairs apartment, my dad would come to Tifton fairly often to visit us.  I don’t know how he traveled between Nashville and Tifton.  He didn’t have a car then, so he probably hitchhiked.   That was fairly common in those days.  I was learning a lot of new things—some useful and some not.  For example:

            While we were living at Mrs. Gilmore’s house, a bat also took up residence in the outside wall of our room.  Mrs. Gilmore and my mother didn’t know how to get rid of the bat, and it flapped around at night and kept us awake.  My dad showed up one day with a tennis racket.  He wasn’t there to play tennis, but he had something in mind.  He took the window out of its casement, and the stupid bat flew out of the wall and into the room instead of flying to the outside.  My dad put the window back in, then got some gasoline in a can.  He chased the bat with his tennis racket as it flew around the room.  Eventually he knocked it down with a good solid overhand serve.  Then he picked up the bat and dropped it into the can of gasoline.  I felt proud that I had just learned how to get rid of an unwelcome bat (i.e., knock it down with a tennis racket and drop it into a can of gasoline).  I don’t recall ever having made use of that knowledge, but it got filed away in my memory bank of useless information to pass along to the coming generations.

Starting First Grade in Tifton: 1932

            A few days before my sixth birthday, I started to school in first grade.  There wasn’t any preschool or kindergarten.  My teacher, Miss Colquitt, was a no-nonsense lady.  More than once I got paddled with a ruler in the palm of my hand.  That seemed to be the standard method of corporal punishment. 

            I took to reading pretty well, but not writing well.  I remember writing my name on the black board (they were black then, not green).  I wrote the “R” or “B” backwards.  When I came back to my seat and looked back at it, I knew that something wasn’t right, but it took me a minute or so to figure out what I had done wrong.

            Although my reading skills were pretty good for first grade, I had a harder time with numbers and arithmetic.  On my first report card, I got a “red 4” in arithmetic.  That was like an F minus.  A few days later, my dad showed up, and we had some long sessions with flash cards, which Miss Colquitt had sent home with me.  I was getting pretty good with numbers before my dad went back to Nashville, or wherever he was working then.

            Since we lived only a few blocks from my school, I always walked to and from school, as most other kids did.  There wasn’t a school cafeteria, so we brought something for lunch.  I usually took an orange.  Once, I got partway to school and remembered I had forgotten my orange.  I ran back home and my mom said I should have just skipped lunch instead of being late for school.  Anyway, I got my orange and rushed back to school, but I was late.  Miss Colquit seemed not very ready to accept my reason for being late.  She said I should bring a note if I was going to be excused for being late.  I told my mother when I got home what Miss Colquit had said.  My mom wrote me a note to take to school the next day.  I don’t know what the note said, but I had the feeling that there was a coolness between my mom and Miss Colquit. 

 

Life in Tifton:  Getting Hit By A Car, Learning to Count to 999, and the Solar Eclipse of  1932

 

            I always walked to and from school in Tifton.  When it rained, I still walked but had a little light rubber raincoat and helmet.  It never seemed to get cold in Tifton.

One day I got hit by a car while crossing Tift Avenue (the only paved road in Tifton, I think) while walking home from school.  I vaguely remember glimpsing the underside of the car as it passed above me.  The lady who was driving the car brought me home.   I think I was unconscious part of the time, because I remember waking up in bed.  A doctor was there.  For the next several days, I was in bed with a big headache and a huge lump on my forehead with a little hole in the middle of it.  (For some years after that when I got hot and sweaty, a big red welt would come up on that part of my forehead.  It gradually went away.)

            After the accident, I spent several days in bed and had a hacking cough which aggravated my hurting head.  Daddy Lint used to come by to check on me and once or twice gave me the standard remedy for cough (a spoonful of whisky with sugar dissolved in it).  While I was in bed, I thought about numbers, and I figured out how to count to a hundred.  I felt real proud that I had figured it out by myself (well almost).  I wondered how to get beyond a hundred.  I asked Daddy Lint if there were any numbers more than a hundred.  He explained it to me and told me that 101 came after 100, and helped me figure out how to get to 200.  Using that new knowledge and newly acquired logic, I figured out how to get to 999.  Then what?  I wasn’t sure if numbers went higher than that.  Maybe since there were only nine numbers, that was as far as you can go.  But I remember lying in my bed thinking about how much you can figure out just by thinking about it and figuring it out. 

            I recall now a thought, or maybe a dream, I had about numbers.  They were all strung out in order on the first floor of the freight warehouse.  The numbers started at the front of the warehouse near Daddy Lint’s office and continued on to far back in a dark corner where you could barely see 999.  I wondered if that meant that was as far as you could go with numbers.  Of course, I didn‘t know anything about mega this and giga that, which are, of course much bigger than 999.  Even way back then in the dark ages.

            After a few days in bed recovering, I got well enough to go back to school, and my mother took me.   There seemed to be some problem between my mother and Miss Colquitt.  I didn’t understand what, but my mother brought me back home even before I had a chance to eat my orange for lunch.  And the next time I went back to school I don’t think I went more than a couple of days before my dad came to Tifton and took us back to Nashville.  I don’t remember how we got back to Nashville.

            Just before leaving Tifton, there was another impressive memory.  There was a solar eclipse in the fall of 1932.  My mother smoked a piece of glass so that I could look at the eclipse of the sun and she explained to me what was happening. 

            Before leaving Tifton for another chaotic period in Nashville, I want to say a little more about my mother’s family.

My Mom and Her Family

 

            My mom, Rosalie Alfriend, was one of two daughters born to Linton Stevens Alfriend and Josephine O’Meara Alfriend.  In my childhood, they were known to me as Daddy Lint and Mama Jo.  My Daddy Lint was of particular importance in my young life.  He was the only grandfather I ever knew--my dad’s father having died accident before I was born.  My dad’s father, like Daddy Lint, had been a railroad man.

            My mother and her sister (my Aunt Nanette) were born in Tifton within a year of each other and were close most of their early adult lives.  My mother and Aunt Nanette were married at about the same time, and each had a first son, born about the same time.  He was named Robert Lee Hargrett, Jr., and I was, of course, Roby Bedell Bevan, Jr.  Bobby and I spent a lot time together during summers as we grew up.  Since neither he nor I had a brother, we were in some ways more like brothers than first cousins.  I could fill a book with “me and Bobby” stories. 

            When I was little, Daddy Lint used to let me ride up in the cab of the local switch engine, a steam-powered locomotive, which operated in and out of the switchyards in Tifton.  Sometimes we would go all the way over to Chula or TyTy to pick up some cars, and “Uncle Charlie Lear,” the engineer, would put me up with him in the cab of the locomotive and have me ringing the bell all the way.   A fireman would shovel the coal into the firebox, I would ring the bell, and Uncle Charlie Lear would handle the throttle and the brake. 

            I don’t remember my Daddy Lint ever calling me by my name or even Sonny as some others called me.  Instead, he called me “my little Jew boy.”  I never knew or asked why.  I always understood from listening to grownup talk that he had some “Jew blood” in his family, and I took “my little Jew boy” as a term of endearment.  I am pretty sure Daddy Lint’s mother was a Jew.  While growing up, I remember my mother referring to the Jewish side of her family and to the Catholic side of her family.  I didn’t know at the time what she meant, but, of course, I learned later (I hope correctly) what she meant.

            Also, once Daddy Lint took me to meet a very old bed-ridden woman whom my mother and Aunt Nanette called Bubby—I think this is a Yiddish term for grandmother.  I met Bubby only that one time when Daddy Lint took me with him to see her where she lived in a small town near Tifton.  Bubby was then very ill with “blood poisoning” when I met her.   Daddy Lint was much distressed when she died a few days later.  So Bubby, as far as I know, would be the only great grandparent I ever met.

            Daddy Lint was a Baptist, and he used to take me with him to the Baptist Church in Tifton when I was little.  That is where I first learned to sing the “Sunbeam Song.” 

            Daddy Lint’s interests, outside of family matters, were limited:  big league baseball, heavy weight boxing, and above all, railroading.  Looking back, I would say that he was something of an eccentric.  He was not a particularly sociable person with most people, but seemed to be highly regarded by the many people in Tifton who knew him.  Some time after Mama Jo died, my mother and Aunt Nannette were visiting there (in Tifton), a painter came over one morning and said that Mr. Alfriend wanted his bedroom painted a bright orange color.  He had the paint, and Mother and Aunt Nanette let him come in and start painting.  They thought it looked hideous, and were worried about what Daddy Lint would think when he saw it.  When Daddy Lint came home and saw it, he said:  “Looks good.” 

            He was, first and foremost, a railroad man.  I remember hearing stories (probably mostly from my mother) about how when they were growing up, he wanted to spend all of his time hanging around the railroad station and switchyards in Tifton.  Railroading was just in his blood.  He had a lot of railroad knowledge stored in his head.  It was a kind of accepted idiosyncrasy of Daddy Lint that at any time, in any social situation, he might pull out his gold Waltham railroad watch and announce that he guessed old number 26 would be pulling out of Orlando in about four more minutes.  Or: “I guess the Palmetto Special ought to be coming into Jacksonville about now.”  He, like Benito Mussolini, wanted the railroads to run on time.

            Daddy Lint liked baseball and was pretty good at playing “catch.”   He and I used to play catch when he would visit us in Knoxville.  Soon after Mama Jo died and he was spending a few days with us in Knoxville, he and I walked down Washington Pike together to the barbershop.  I remember his telling me about a run in he had with a man named Harvey Firestone.  It had something to do with disparaging remarks made by Mr. Firestone about ACL shipping of Firestone tires to southeastern destinations.  Daddy Lint, modest man that he was, told Mr. Firestone where he could get off and to find another shipper.   He was what I would call a quixotic person; we shared several interests, but he sometimes surprised me how much he knew about a few things and how little he new about a lot of other things.        

            Daddy Lint’s wife (my mother’s mother) was Mama Jo.  I understood that Mama Jo’s family had been Yankees and were Catholics.  She had been a rebellious child, and had been sent to a convent in Virginia when she was young.  She ran away from the convent and (I know not how) she wound up marrying Daddy Lint, and lived with him in Tifton until she died

            Mama Jo was something of a recluse, and I rarely saw her even in her own house.  And all the time I spent in Tifton with Daddy Lint, I remember having only one brief conversation with Mama Jo.  I was passing through the living room where she was sitting sipping on a cup of hot water and listening to the radio.  She often sipped on hot water, and I never knew why.  It was part of her chronic illness.  On the radio there was something about an English king (George?) who would be succeeded by Edward.  I paused and asked Mamma Jo if all English kings were named either George or Edward.  She answered, “No.”  I said I thought the king before George had also been named Edward.  She acknowledged that to be true.  

            She was a quiet soft-spoken lady of few words.  I never felt close to her as a grandmother, except in a formal sense.  She died shortly after I last saw her when I was about nine or ten years old.  I have a portrait of Mama Jo taken when she was young, perhaps about age 20.  She looked like a beautiful and elegant Victorian young lady.

            Mama Jo had a sister, Mimi (also Catholic), who lived in Atlanta.  About a year or so after Mama Jo died, Daddy Lint married Mimi and brought her to Tifton to live in the house where he and Mama Jo had lived. My mother and my Aunt Nanette (and Bobby and I) liked Mimi very much.  Mimi was a kindly person and tried hard to make Daddy Lint happy, but he apparently never got over losing Mama Jo.  Mimi once told my mother and Aunt Nanette that Daddy Lint had kept a lock of Mama Jo’s hair in a little bottle in their bathroom.  Sometimes he would lock himself in the bathroom and cry.  Mom and Aunt Nanette felt sorry for Mimi, who just couldn’t replace Mama Jo as Daddy Lint’s wife. 

            Another twist to that story – Mimi became very ill several years after she and Daddy Lint were married, and she eventually died.  Sometime after that Daddy Lint married a third O’Meara sister, (name ?).  I didn’t to know her well, but she didn’t seem to be as pleasant a person as Mimi.  Bobby and I didn’t like her.

            I have no idea how all three Yankee Irish Catholic sisters wound up in Georgia married to Daddy Lint, a part Jewish Southern Baptist.

            One more incident concerning Daddy Lint:  He generally slept with a pistol under his pillow.  One summer when we were visiting at their house, Diane found the pistol, and she fired it and blew a hole in the ceiling of their dining room.  My mother didn’t know whether to be mad at Diane or Daddy Lint, but it was obviously something that shouldn’t have happened.

A Little More About My Mom

            My mother was a strong-willed lady who was fiercely protective of my dad--who was not always easy to live with.  She had a strong streak of both idealism and pragmatism, and had a particular love of reading.  Being a voracious reader, she organized her children in reading sessions in which she would read to us.  When we children learned to read well enough, each of us kids would be called on to read, also.

            She was proud of my dad’s success in overcoming handicaps and adverse circumstances to accomplish what he did in life.  My dad was sometimes hard to get along with, and her stubborn and tenacious nature generally came to the fore in times of stress.  She tried hard to be a good wife and a good mother.  Her passion for reading and learning rubbed off on her children. 

            My mom had taken Latin in high school, and she still remembered a lot of it.  When I later started to high school, she said I should take Latin.  I had not taken any Latin in my first two years.  Before starting my junior year, she more strongly “suggested” that I do take Latin.  I did take two years of Latin (grades 11 and 12), and it turned out to be the only subject in high school in which I came close to making straight A’s for those two years.

            My mom’s passion for reading continued until she went blind (macular degeneration) a few years before she died.  She became somewhat embittered as she slowly lost her sight.  Tape cassette recordings for the blind were just beginning to be made available about then (1980s).  Before she died, I tried to persuade her to listen to recorded books.  She was stubborn and insisted on trying to get glasses that would restore her ability to read.  While I was living in Maryland then, I arranged through Recording for the Blind in Bethesda to have their counterparts in Phoenix to help her.  I eventually went to Phoenix/Sun City where they were living and tried to get her set up with several recorded books that I knew she would like.  But she continued to reject all such efforts.  She died soon after that in about 1985. 

The Second Nashville Period:  1932

Having told of some things that I wanted to be made known about my mother and her family background, my story will now return to our life after our period of living in Tifton.  I was still in first grade when we returned to Nashville, and the country was still deep into the Depression.  I don’t know where my dad was working than, but he used to go to work somewhere.  Maybe it was part time at the Nashville Bridge Company.  I don’t know.  But we still ate a lot of oatmeal and cold storage eggs, because they were cheap and nourishing.  We had an icebox, but sometimes no ice.  When milk would “clabber,” our mom would drain off the thin part and stir up the thick part and add vanilla flavoring and sugar, and we ate it like ice cream (or maybe yogurt, although I had never heard of yogurt until later years).   Not bad, but our second Nashville period in 1932 was fairly short, especially chaotic, and one of the most stressful times of our lives.  Generally we seemed to be hanging on by our teeth. 

            When we got back to Nashville, we seemed to have trouble finding a place to stay.  I was still changing schools a lot.  I remember learning more street names in Nashville as we continued moving in and out of small apartments.  I don’t remember all of them, but I do remember some things I will tell about.  For some reason I went to at least two or three more schools before finishing first grade.    I went to Ross School, maybe Bailey for a day or two, and then to Eastland Elementary in Nashville.  I wasn’t doing well in school.  Things got even more grim during that second Nashville period. 

            For a short time, maybe a week or two, we lived in a duplex house on Belmont Boulevard.  We had no furniture—just boxes and a hot plate, and some blankets to sleep on.  We had taken them from the big box still in Tifton.  It was Easter, and we had no places to hide Easter eggs, as had been our custom.  It was raining outside, so we skipped Easter that year. 

            When I started going to another school near there, I got lost walking home on the first day.  A policeman brought me home.  But the next day, I got lost again coming home, and again was brought home by a policeman.  My dad then walked me to and from the school and said if I got lost again, he was going to spank me.  I didn’t get lost again, because I had now figured out what was happening was that when I went to school, I went in a door at one end of the building.  But when school was out, I came out on the opposite end of the building, so I got headed in the wrong direction.

            Once we lived for a short time at the Beasley’s.  Piggy Beasley was a little bigger than me and was a bully.  Once he hit my sister Diane in the eye with a mud ball.  Maybe it was an accident, but I felt guilty because I didn’t even try to beat him up.  We lived there only a few days and then moved to the Todd’s.  They were nice people. 

            While we were living at the Todd’s, we had a bedroom occupied by my parents, and a large closet, containing a small bed, shared by my sister Diane and me.   She used to wet the bed and get me wet too.  My Dad told her he would spank her if she kept wetting the bed and getting me wet, but it didn’t do any good. 

Cyclone in Nashville 1932—A Memorable Event

            While were living at the Todd’s, late one afternoon, my mother sent my dad to a little grocery store in our neighborhood.  As my dad and I walked to the store and back, one of us commented on how the air felt funny.   The sky appeared to be an ugly yellow.  It was a very hot sultry day and the air was still.  It just felt weird.  

            When we got back from the store, it was nearly dark.  Mom was fixing something to eat and Diane was jumping on the bed.  It was getting darker outside when we began to hear a roaring sound from the open window.  My dad went over to the window.  It had gotten dark, and the roar sounded like a train coming toward us.  He hollered to my mother and grabbed us kids, and we ran into the hallway and to the head of the stairs.  All the lights went out.  The roaring sound grew louder.  We heard the shattering of glass and a loud rumbling sound above us.  It was dark and we were stumbling down the stairs.  The Todd’s were standing in the living room down stairs, and we joined them there. 

            Then everything became very quiet.  All the lights were out, but there was a faint glow of a street lamp down the street.  Mr. Todd and my dad went outside and looked around.  It was dark, but they said they could see the house across the street and it appeared to be destroyed.

            We went back up stairs.  It was still dark—the electricity was still off.  When we got up stairs, my dad felt around to get his big flashlight where he always kept it.  I think he took Diane to the bathroom so maybe she wouldn’t wet the bed. 

            The next morning dawned bright and clear and cold.  My dad didn’t go to work, but he and Mother and Diane and I went walking around that part of Nashville and saw a lot of houses that had been severely damaged.  Some had outside walls that were torn off, and you could see furniture still in the rooms in the house.  We later learned that nine people had been killed by the cyclone in Nashville; many others injured.   In our own back yard, a large tree had been uprooted and was lying on the ground.  I used to play, climbing around on the tree, while we still lived there.

            Within a few days after the cyclone, I returned to Eastland School; but we were now preparing to move again.  This time we would move to Waycross, GA where we would live with Nothermama.  She was my dad’s mother and would be the other important grandparent in my life--maybe the most influential grandparent in my life.               

Living in Waycross:  1933

 

Leaving Nashville Again

            A couple of days after the cyclone excitement died down, I returned to Eastland School before leaving to be sent to Waycross to live with Nothermama.

            Of all the schools I had been to, Eastland was the only one I really liked.  My teacher at Eastland was especially nice, and when she learned that I would be moving away, she planned a going away party for my last day at school.  She invited my mother and my sister Diane to the party.  At the party, we sang some happy “party songs” that we had learned at school.  Diane, of course, had not learned these songs with my class, but she wanted to sing another song, “When They Cut Down the Old Pine Tree.”  It was one of those mournful hillbilly songs she had heard on the radio.  Diane had always been a quick learner, one who easily picked up on everything she heard or read.  I think she learned to read before she started to school. 

            Anyway, most of us didn’t know “When They Cut Down the Old Pine Tree,” so she volunteered to sing it a cappello: 

When they cut down the old pine tree,

And they hauled it away to the mill,

To make a coffin of pine for that old gal of mine,

When they cut down the old pine tree.

            My teacher (I wish I could remember her name) complemented Diane on how well she sang the song.  Diane was pleased, and volunteered to sing the second verse, too.  My mother intervened at that point and told Diane that was enough. 

            In the next day or so, my dad put us on a bus bound for Waycross.

Nothermama in Waycross:  1932-1933

            Waycross was typical of the many small towns in southern Georgia—smaller, I think, than Tifton.  Everything in Waycross seemed to be in easy walking distance.

            As I recall, when we got to the bus station in Waycross, we just walked to Nothermama’s house on Folk street.  She put us up in her two upstairs bedrooms.  We were not crowded.  My mother had one of the rooms, and Diane and I shared an adjoining bedroom.  Nothermama had her bedroom down stairs.

            I was enrolled in the Waycross Grammar School, and the teacher and pupils were nice.  In fact, about everything seemed nice in Waycross, and particularly Nothermama.  She was warm and “grandmotherly” toward Diane and me in a way I had not experienced before. 

            My first or second day at school in Waycross I didn’t know where the boys restroom was, and for some reason I didn’t want to ask, so I “held it” all day.  Walking on my way home from school, I wet my pants.  When I got home, my mom asked why my pants were wet.  I said I guess it was sweat—“it sure is hot out there.”  She didn’t press it even though it was not even a hot day. 

            My memories of Waycross during that period are fond ones.  I had never lived in such a small, self-contained town.  Most streets were tree lined, shaded, with sidewalks along every street.  There were few cars, and people generally walked everywhere. 

            I had an older cousin there, Sandy, who used to ride me on his bike.  Sandy was the son of one of my dad’s most un-favorite older sisters, but he was a nice guy.

            Sandy was in the third or fourth grade, but he was already a hustling entrepreneur.  He used to buy Coca Colas wholesale in a wooden 24-bottle rack, and get a bucket of free ice shavings from the local icehouse.  He would chill some of the Cokes in the ice bucket and take them to the bus station and sell them for a nickel apiece to incoming bus passengers.  He would let me help him sometimes, and would give me a free Coke if business was good that day.  I wasn’t supposed to drink cokes, but I did anyway when he gave me one. 

            When I wasn’t in school, I was pretty much free to roam around all over Waycross, generally barefooted.  Nothermama’s house was only a few blocks from “town” where there were a few stores and a shady grassy park.  One of the stores sold shoes, and they had an x-ray machine that you could put your foot into and see the bones of your foot.  I thought that was pretty neat. 

            Sometimes I would go to town just to see the bones in my foot and would spend some time at the grassy park there and would listen to some guy or another holding forth about the government, and Hoover, and how they never did anything to help the people.  I didn’t know who or what the government, or who Hoover was, but some people seemed to get pretty wound up about it. 

            Sometimes there was a guy there who played a hurdy-gurdy.  And he had a monkey with him on a leash.  He would play music on the hurdy-gurdy, and the monkey would dance.  And the guy would feed the monkey peanuts.  Sometimes people would drop coins into a tin cup he carried around.

            And there was sometimes another guy who had a little steam box on wheels and sold hot tamales.  They were big fat hot tamales, wrapped in corn shucks, and he sold them for a nickel or dime apiece, I don’t remember which.  It seemed like everything then (soft drinks, candy bars, a pack of chewing gum, etc.) cost a nickel.   Those hot tamales were almost as good tasting as the pineapple upside down cakes (the best I’d ever eaten before Mary Lee came along) that Nothermama used to make for me when I asked her to.  Sometimes she would let me do chores for her, like cleaning out the goldfish bowl, or sweeping the kitchen, and she would pay me a nickel, which I usually spent on hot tamales from the hot tamale man.  I still like hot tamales, but they don’t taste quite as good as they did then. 

            Nothermama taught me a lot of practical things like how to load a mousetrap with cheese without getting your fingers mashed.  And how to flush the mouse down the toilet.  She used to keep a loaded mousetrap in a corner of her pantry, and I used to tend to the mousetrap, and she would pay me a nickel when I caught one and flushed it down the toilet.  Sometimes I sat in the corner of the kitchen and watched Nothermama cook and would ask her questions about my dad when he was a little boy.  I remember she told me one time that when my dad was a little boy about my age, he used to say that he bet he could eat a dozen fried eggs (when I was growing up, I noticed that my mother always cooked eggs for my dad for breakfast).  When he kept making that claim about eating a dozen eggs, one morning Nothermama had a dozen eggs and told my dad that she would keep frying eggs as long as he would eat them, but if she fried it, he had better eat it.  She said he ate about seven or eight eggs and said he guessed he had had enough for now. 

            At some time when we were living there, Diane got real sick, and we were afraid she was going to die.  She had diphtheria, which was often fatal.  When she was in a coma, the doctor had gone or sent to Atlanta to get some antitoxin.  He came out to the house and gave her shots, and over time she recovered.  Afterward Mom and Nothermama scrubbed down the walls of the room where Diane had been sick.  I guess to kill all the diphtheria germs that might be still in the room. 

            While Diane was sick, I had been moved to sleep with my mom.  I noticed that she was getting pretty big around the middle, and she had been sick too.  Then I came home from school one day and found that I had a new little baby sister.  She was named Janet Aurelia Bevan, but someone said that she looked like a little bunny rabbit, so we always called her Bunny.  I had been moved back to the other room with Diane, and my mom slept with Baby Bunny.

I awoke one night and heard my mother and Baby Bunny both crying in the other bedroom.  Mother was trying to nurse Bunny and was trying to use a breast pump.  Diane was still asleep soundly in bed with me.  Nothermama was praying long and loudly in her bedroom She was a Nazarene, and was the most “religious” person I had ever know.  Although I really liked living in Waycross, that night was a real low point in my life up to then.  That night, my mother had broken down in a way I had never seen her before, and I felt a sense of despair on my mother’s part.  I got up to see if I could help in any way.  Mother told me to go back to bed and stay there.  I don’t remember much else about that night, except that I was very sad.  I got back in the bed where Diane was still sleeping soundly.  It helped a little that she had not yet wet the bed.

            I have been giving a “little” picture of what our lives were like living in Waycross in 1933, but during that time things were changing in our country that would bring a brighter future for us.  So I will tell something of the bigger picture that was happening on the national political scene during this same 1932-1933 time frame.  And since we are about to all get back together with my dad for good, I want to say a little bit more about my dad and his upbringing.. 

A Little More About My Dad and His Family

            Earlier I told of my dad having worked in Florida as a surveyor, with ambitions of becoming a civil engineer.  He did fulfill his ambition, but he had a lot to overcome in doing it.

            When my dad was born in 1904, he was found to be a severe asthmatic.  His mother (my “Nothermama”) sometimes gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to keep him breathing.  His asthma condition improved somewhat over time, but it was a condition that was with him well into adulthood.

            From my dad’s early childhood, he spoke with a fairly severe stutter--a “clonic blockage”--a speech impediment that persisted in varying degrees of severity throughout his life.  I inherited that trait, and in earlier times of my life, it was a significant factor in my own social and career development.  It rarely bothers me in later years.

            In my dad’s case, he was sent as a child to a special school in Detroit, Michigan for his speech condition.  They were not able to cure him by any means, but they did teach him some techniques that were helpful.  He taught them to me after I began to develop a similar speech impediment in my school days.  My own speech problems were a factor in my young life and well into my adult life.

            My dad was a stubborn and competitive person.  In sports he was a good tennis player.  In Knoxville, to which we would all be moving before long, he was said to be one of the better tennis players in the city.  Still later on in Houston, TX he took up golf and became a real good  golfer.  He played to win.

Dead Reckoning

            When my mom and dad moved from Houston to Mobile, in about 1958, Dad took up boating and deep-sea fishing.  After a couple of years of boating in Mobile Bay and out in the Gulf, he became a student of navigation.  In fact, he wrote a book on navigation for small boat users in the Gulf Coast area.   Apparently, it was a pretty good little book.  I have seen (but do not now have) a copy of the book and don’t know the details of its publication.  But I remember that it did have a forward, or preface, written by the Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard for the Gulf Coast District, extolling the merits of the book.

            While he would at times be petty and unreasonable, he could also be self-deprecating and admit to  his sometimes overblown confidence.  He told me the following story in the presence of my mother, and we all got a good laugh.

            Sometime after his book was published, he took his small out-board cabin cruiser out by himself into Mobile Bay, going out beyond the Dauphin Island Lighthouse, and on past Sand Island, and headed out into the Gulf.  He ran into unexpected foul weather and decided he had better head back to Mobile.  Somehow, his compass or sextant, or something, seemed not to be behaving correctly.  The weather was closing in and he couldn’t see the stars.  His navigation got pretty shaky.  After dark, he sighted a light far ahead off his port bow, which he took to be the Dauphin Island Lighthouse.  He made a course correction that should bring him into Mobile Bay, thence into the harbor.  On through the night, he stayed in sight of the light, making course corrections to compensate for strong crosswinds.  After a while, he could see land, but it didn’t appear to be Dolphin Island.  And it didn’t look like the entrance to Mobile Bay.  I wasn’t.  It wasn’t even Alabama.  He was putting into Pascagoula, Mississippi.   He got his boat tied up to a dock and found a phone and called Mom to come and get him.

 

The Bigger Picture:  USA and Beyond 1932-1933

            Before my digression on my dad, I was telling of the time we were living in Waycross with my dad’s mom Nothermama.  But something had been happening far beyond Waycross during that time that would enable us, my mother and dad and sisters and I, to get back together for a long time, as a stable family unit. 

            While we were living in Waycross, a national election had taken place and a new president elected, with new promises and new ideas of ways to “go forward” and propel us out of the Depression.  For several months, before the new president would be inaugurated in March 1933, voices were being raised questioning the adequacy of our system of government.

            When Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) was elected President in November 1932, our nation was, of course, still deeply mired in the Great Depression.  Although he was elected in November 1932, the new president (Roosevelt) was not inaugurated until March 1933.  During this period, the Depression had worsened, so that by the time Roosevelt was inaugurated (March 1933), things had gotten about as bad as they could, short of a complete breakdown of the government.  There was open talk of anarchy, and a growing advocacy of communism as a better system of government.   Many believed it was working well in Russia, and our democratic form of government had failed to provide answers to our current intolerable situation. 

            Many in our country had been taken in by the wildly distorted reports of Walter Duranty, Moscow Bureau Chief for the New York Times.  He was reporting on the great success of the Soviet system, Communism, and Russia.  He said nothing about the mass starvation in the Ukraine, and other horrible conditions attending Soviet Communist Russia. 

            Some people in our country were advocating our getting rid of our capitalistic, democratic form of government and replacing it with the successful socialistic system in Russia.  I remember once in Waycross when some men (I think one was Sandy’s daddy) were sitting on the front porch of Nothermama’s house talking in pretty strong terms (no cussing, though) about radical changes in our government that needed to be made.  Nothermama came out and told them that she didn’t want to hear that kind of talk on her front porch, and they could go somewhere else for that kind of talk.  They broke up their meeting and left. 

            After his inauguration, March 1933, Roosevelt immediately began putting into place a plethora of new Federal programs designed to bring about economic recovery of the country.  It was, as he had promised, a New Deal.  An important part of the New Deal was the creation of something called the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). The TVA was not only one of the earliest, but was ultimately one of the most successful of all the New Deal programs. 

            The TVA was a public works program that in time became a model world wide for developing natural resources of a geographic area.  For the Tennessee Valley (the river and its tributaries), it was a system of hydroelectric dams to harness “wild” rivers and manage flood control, produce huge amounts of hydroelectric power, and produce large amounts of phosphate fertilizers to increase farming yields from worn out soil.  And it would put a lot of people back to work doing useful things.

            Now, what does all that have to do with us?  A whole lot, as we will soon see.

            While we were still living in Waycross in the fall of 1933, unknown to me at that time, my dad had hitchhiked to LaFollette, Tennessee where this newly created TVA was taking job applications at the Russell Hotel in LaFollette.  There my dad got signed on as a junior design draftsman at $2,000 per annum.  In early November 1933, my dad would come and pick us up and bring us to Lafollette where he had rented a house where we would live until moving on to Knoxville.  Then we would be living in Knoxville for the next twelve years.

            So the TVA was for our family an early passport out of the worst of the depression.  For the country as a whole, however, there would not be anywhere near full employment for another five or six years. The TVA, of course, was only one of a number of New Deal programs designed to put people back to work.  Some worked pretty well, some didn’t work well at all, and some were abolished by the Supreme Court.  You could depend on the Supreme Court to help things along even back then.  By 1939, when WWII began, there would be ramping up of industry and a return of some semblance of prosperity as we began to prepare for the possible coming of another world war. 

 

Back Together Again for a Long Time:  1933-1944

Our Trip from Atlanta to LaFollette, TN

            With my dad’s new job with TVA, there was reason to believe that now things would get better for our family.  And they did.

            In late October 1933, my dad was going to come down to Georgia and pick us up, and we would move into a house in LaFollette where he would be working at his new job at TVA. 

            I don’t know why we left Waycross and went to Atlanta to stay a day or so with my mother’s Aunt Mimi.  But it was Atlanta where my dad came to pick us up to take us to LaFollette to begin our new life as a family.  We loaded everything we had (except what was still in the big box in Tifton) and left Atlanta for LaFollette. 

            The trip from Atlanta to LaFollette was a memorable event in the lore of our family. What would now be an easy four or five hour drive from Atlanta to LaFollette was for us a “long days journey into night,” then another days journey getting to LaFollette.

            When we left Atlanta (it was probably about the first of November 1933) Mom had prepared bottles of formula for baby Bunny.  We stopped somewhere north of Atlanta (probably in Marietta) at a drug store for a sort of celebration party.  Back then most drug stores had a soda fountain.  Diane wanted chocolate milk in a soda glass.  Mom and Dad each ordered a dope (then a commonly used name for Coca Cola).  I wanted a dope, too.  I had never been allowed to drink a dope, but they let me have one with them.  I was feeling the beginnings of a stomachache, but it wasn’t going to dull the joy I felt.  I was still in a euphoric mood (maybe it was the dope) when we left the drug store and continued our journey toward LaFollette. 

            My dad had told me about a big mountain out behind the house where we would be living in LaFollette.  I imagined how much fun that would be sliding down the mountain.  I had always been a little flatlander, and I figured I could just sit on the top of the mountain and slide down on my seat.  That would be some fun!

            As the trip continued, it was growing dark and stormy.  The mood among us began to get a little somber.  My dad had just bought the car (a 1928 Chevrolet) only a few days before.  He said that he’d paid $20 for it.  That sounded like a lot of money to me, so I figured it must be a pretty good car.  As we continued on, it got darker and stormier.  The rain was pouring down, and water was getting in the car.  We found that the overhead lights didn’t work, so my dad couldn’t see the map in the dark, and he couldn’t find his flashlight and his atomizer.  He was wheezing pretty badly and needed that atomizer.   Mother tried searching around for it in the jumble of things in the dark, and we were getting wet and cold.  My stomachache was getting worse.  We seemed to be lost.  Baby Bunny was screaming her little head off, and Mother was trying to feed her, but she kept spitting up and screaming.  My dad was having a bad asthma attack, and couldn’t find his atomizer in the dark.

            I don’t know if we were even on a paved road.  Back then many highways were not paved, and there were few route markers.  We were plainly lost in the dark and the rain.  My dad stopped the car and got out to try to get some air.  It was pouring down rain, and he was standing out there trying to breath.  Diane and I were sitting in the back seat, and I remember murmuring to nobody in particular “I don’t think this is the way to LaFollette or anyplace else.”  Diane suggested that we ought to stop somewhere and get something to eat--she was hungry.  The rain kept pouring and Bunny kept crying.

            When my dad got back in the car, he said that he could see a light up ahead.  We started moving again heading toward the light.  There was a farmhouse up ahead with a porch light on.  I don’t know if we were still on the road or if we were in a field, but we made it up to the farmhouse.  My dad got out and went up onto the porch and knocked on the door.  The man who answered the door could see that we were in distress.  He and his wife took us in and gave us a place to sleep.  When we were all bedded down, Diane said she wanted some supper.   Mother said to be quiet and go to sleep, “We will eat in the morning.”  Bunny had cried herself to sleep.  My stomachache continued, but I got to sleep.

            The next morning was bright and beautiful.  The nice people gave us something to eat, and we proceeded on toward LaFollette.  Baby Bunny was crying again, but wouldn’t eat.  We arrived at LaFollette that afternoon, and my parents immediately took Bunny to a doctor or a pharmacist who suggested another baby formula. 

LaFollette: November, December 1933

            The small house my dad had rented for us was on the highway between LaFollette and Jacksboro.  It was within walking distance of the school that I would be attending for another go at second grade.  Next door to us there was a young lady named Carmen Stout who was a teacher at the school I would be attending.  She had a piano, and wanted to teach my sister Diane to play.  I was surprised at how quickly she learned to play some songs using both hands.  Diane always seemed to have more artistic talent than all the rest of us put together. 

            School in LaFollette was okay, but I had a little trouble understanding East Tennessee hillbilly talk (“far” for “fire,” “poke” for “paper bag,” “take and” added before an action verb).  It was now late November, and we would live there only until the coming Christmas holidays, at which time we would move on to Knoxville.  It was close to Thanksgiving (1933) and we were learning some Thanksgiving songs in school that I had not known before (some of them are now in our Baptist Hymnal). 

            The night before Thanksgiving, we bought a live chicken and put it in a little outbuilding in the back yard.  The next morning, Thanksgiving Day, my dad and I went out back and got the chicken, which we would have for our Thanksgiving dinner.  There was a chopping block out back and a hatchet, and he told me to hold the chicken on the chopping block so that he could chop its head off with the hatchet.  I held the chicken on the block, and Dad came down with the hatchet.  I let go of the chicken too soon, and he missed the chicken, which went running and flapping and squawking across the yard and out to the front yard and across the highway.  My dad went chasing after it.  After a while my dad disappeared chasing after the chicken.  I was standing there wondering what I should be doing to help.  In a little while, he came back without the chicken, and he was pretty mad. 

            My mother cooked dinner with no chicken, and so no chicken gravy.  She made some kind of gravy out of something, I think.  But I put a lot of butter on my rice instead of using the “gravy.”  It tasted pretty good to me.  I had just learned a song that went “I like mountain music, good old mountain music, played by a real hillbilly band.”  I was thinking about that song when I was eating rice and butter.  I made up a song: “I like rice and butter, good old rice and butter, made by a real hillbilly band.”  Nobody seemed to appreciate my humorous song.

 

Coming of Age in Knoxville:  TVA and Other Authority     

            During the Christmas holidays that followed, we moved from LaFollette into a furnished house on Cecil Street in Knoxville.  The TVA headquarters would be located in Knoxville where my dad would be working for the next 12 years.  I enrolled in Brownlow Elementary School for (I think) the fourth time in second grade.  We continued to live on Cecil Street where I finished second grade and started third grade at Brownlow. 

            Soon after we had moved to Knoxville, our 1928 Chevy got stolen.  It wasn’t much of a car anyway, even though it did get us from Atlanta to LaFollette and then to Knoxville.  My dad reported it stolen but then bought an old Plymouth which would need some repair work. 

            Soon after that, one Saturday afternoon, he and I were walking along Market Street in Knoxville.  We saw that Chevy sitting at curbside.  We looked it over and it was indeed our old Chevy.  It still had the door handle off on the rider’s side and other identifying marks.   I asked my dad if he wasn’t going to get it back.  We wanted to get home to hear the Tennessee-Auburn game on the radio.  He said we just leave it here and lets get home and listen to the Auburn game.  Okay by me.  We already had the Plymouth, anyway.  I remember thinking that I hoped that the guy that had stolen the old Chevy had as much trouble with it as we had. 

            I remember the Plymouth had a feature called “free wheeling” which was supposed to save on gas.  I think gas cost about a dime a gallon then.  The free wheeling device never did work right, anyway.  We didn’t have a lot of luck with cars.  Sometime not long after that, a tree fell on the Plymouth and mashed in the top. 

            My dad and I were out one night working on the car.  I was holding the light, and he was wielding a hammer and trying to beat out the bent in top.  He hit his thumb with a hammer, and I think it was the first time I heard him say out loud a “four-letter” word.  I think it was “hell” or “damn.”   Maybe something a little stronger.

            One bright sunny day, my mother walked us kids two blocks down Cecil Street toward Broadway, a highway coming into Knoxville from the north.  A lot of people were gathered there awaiting a big event.  President Roosevelt was going to come along that way on his way to see Norris Dam, then under construction, and to dedicate the newly created Smokey Mountain National Park.  Eventually a motorcade headed by motorcycles came down Broadway toward town.  The entourage included a large black car that President Roosevelt presumably was riding in.  I’m not sure that I saw him, but I did see the car go by.  That was a big deal for me, because I had heard a lot about President Roosevelt from my parent’s conversations and at school.  He had made TVA, and had done a lot of other good things that were getting us out of the Depression. 

            Our house on Cecil Street was located directly across from an orphanage. a large sprawling looking building set back from the street in a wooded area.  We could see the orphanage kids and they could see us.  But looking across the street, between us on one side and the orphans on the other side, seemed like a big barrier.  I wondered why that was so.  I wondered where or if the orphans went to school.  My mother didn’t know, either.

            In our furnished rented house on Cecil Street, we had a wind-up Victrola record player with a lot of 78 RPM records.  I liked to play it and learned some of the songs by listening to the records.  I wanted to take guitar lessons, but my parents said that maybe we could afford it sometime, but not now.   I did get a Daisy BB gun (with admonitions never to point it at anyone).  I was age seven then—maybe eight.  Some older boy took my BB gun away from me.  He was bigger than me, and I didn’t know him.  My dad got angry, but what could I do about it?

            I also got my tonsils removed about that time, and got my first pet, a little black bunny rabbit, for Easter.  Soon after which, I got measles and was confined to a dark room for a few days.  My Dad had built a nice, sheltered pen out in the back yard, but somehow my little black rabbit had gotten out and run away while I was in dark quarantine with measles   I looked all over for my little rabbit, but never saw it again.  Life goes on.

            My dad had a problem with our house on Cecil Street.  It had a hot air coal furnace in the basement with registers in the floors.  The hot air furnace aggravated my dad’s breathing problem (or so he thought).  While I was partway into third grade we moved from Cecil Street to a house on Money Place in Knoxville.  It was only one block from Belle Morris Elementary School, so I transferred from Brownlow to Belle Morris.  I would continue in school there until I finished the sixth grade. 

            Recently, in talking with my sister, Bunny, (now living in Israel) she asked me if I knew why we moved around so much when we were kids.  I said I knew why we were moving before she was born in Waycross, but after getting to Knoxville (by way of Atlanta and LaFollette), I really didn’t know why we kept moving to different houses.  Maybe by then it was just a habit.

            I think we moved to the Money Place house because the rent was cheaper and it did not have a hot air furnace.  (I think it was $20 per month.)  Since we didn’t have central heating--just a coal stove, two fireplaces, and a “coal oil” stove with a small wood burning stove in the kitchen.  It was my job in the winter to take out the ashes and bring in scuttles filled with coal during the winter.  I was also supposed to keep water in a pot on the stove to humidify the air.

            We lived on Money Place for three years.  A lot happened during that time. It was there that we lived across from the Lennon’s with whom we became life long friends.  When my mother died many years later, the Lennon’s (or their grown children) were among those few who my dad phoned to inform them of my mother’s death.

Coming of Age in Knoxville:  Broadening Horizons and New Experiences

            My long-time frequent stomachaches turned out to be chronic appendicitis.  It was not diagnosed until I was in the fourth grade.  I was rushed to a hospital early on a Sunday morning.  Dr. Platt had taken a blood sample Saturday night and found my appendix had ruptured.   I spent a week in Fort Sanders Hospital, followed by a six-weeks period flat on my back in bed (using a bed pan for everything), and with a rubber tube stuck into my stomach to drain the pus.  The pus smelled bad, but I got used to it.  Dr. Platt came out to trim the “proud flesh” from around the healing incision, and eventually to pull the rubber tube out of my stomach.  For six weeks I had nothing to do except read and think and smell that pus.  

            We had an old Philco table radio.  Sometimes my mother would turn it on, but it was mostly hillbilly music, which my mother didn’t like.  But I did, so she would let me listen to it some.  Sometimes there was news on the radio.  I remember hearing a lot about flooding in the Missouri or the Ohio Valley.  I wondered if they had something there like the TVA, which was building dams for flood control (and making hydroelectric power) for the Tennessee Valley region.  

            But mainly, this was the time that I began to get turned on to serious reading.  My dad would bring home books about explorations, discovery of penicillin, digging in the Arctic for a wooly mammoth, all kinds of adventure and heroic stuff.   I also learned to play a harmonica and a Jew’s harp which my dad brought me and which I could play still lying on my back in bed. I learned and thought more about the world and what was going on beyond my limited horizon.

            While I was absent from school during that seven-week period, Mrs. Thompson (my fourth grade teacher) was sending schoolwork home by my sister Diane, who was then in second grade.  Mrs. Thompson also sent home some poems for me to memorize, and other stuff that I would be tested on when I got back to school.  

           

            While I was laid up, Diane came home from school one day, and told my mother that she got

 

tired of people at school asking her about how is Sonny doing, that I just tell them: “It’s none of your

 

business.”  Our mother was properly horrified. 

 

            In addition to homework being brought home from Mrs. Thompson, I got through the mail a

 

card signed by some of my forth grade teachers.  Also through the mail I got a separate little get well

 

letter from a pretty little girl with whom I had been exchanging goo-goo eyes in Mrs. Thompson’s

 

class.  It was the only letter I got from a classmate.  Although her short and rather formal sounding

 

letter mostly described what had been going on in school that day, I took it as a matter of some

 

evidence that maybe she felt about me like I felt about her.  It was signed “Your classmate, Ann

 

Morris.”  I still have her note, found by serendipity while searching through some old files.

 

            I might say here that my mother had been talking up Margie Kimsey.  She was nice, and she

 

was pretty, but the one I really liked was Ann Morris.  Sometime later, another girl who was a friend

 

of Diane and me told me that Ann Morris was stuck on me.  Ann was the first of several girls who

 

over time in my school years caught my attention, but Ann was always special.  I was shy and

 

reluctant to pursue a flirting relationship that ever amounted to anything.  Over the next few years, I

 

think the boldest I ever got was in junior high school when I was walking Ann home one night after

 

we had been to a school party, and I held hands with her.

 

            Until my tenth birthday, I didn’t have a bicycle, but I had a close friend, Bobby Perrin, who had a real nice Silver King bike that he used to let me ride.  But on an especially memorable day of my life, my tenth birthday, a new Elgin bicycle was delivered to my house—completely a surprise.  It had a black frame and bright yellow pin stripes and chrome fenders.  Getting that bike was one of the most liberating experiences of my life.  Few places in Knoxville seemed to be off limits.  Maybe it sounds irresponsible, but that is just the way things were in the 1930s in Knoxville, Tennessee.

            Although Bobby Perrin was about a year older than me, we were in the same grades and at Belle Morris.  During WWII, he was drafted out of high school when he turned 18.  I remember (about the time I went into the Navy) reading in the Knoxville News Sentinel about Bobby Perrin being injured in the invasion of some island in the Pacific Ocean.  I never knew what happened to him after that.  He was a good guy. 

            It was along about that time (1937) that my dad began taking night courses in civil engineering at the University of Tennessee.  In his work at TVA at that time, he became involved in the design of some parts of Norris Dam.  We would load up the family in the car some Sunday afternoons and drive out to see Norris Dam being built.  My dad would point out with pride things that he had been involved with in the design stages. 

            Also about this time, my dad came home from work one evening and wanted to build a setup like a wind tunnel.  He had been working on the design of spillway gates and the optimal placement of the pivots and other characteristics, so that the gates would most easily open and close on demand.  We built and set up a crude wind tunnel testing the behavior of several models of spillway gates of different designs.  Our model spillway gates didn’t behave the way we expected.  He was reading more about the subject in some engineering books.  Between his reading and our experiments, we concluded that the behavior of a model spillway gate with air flowing past it would not be the same as with water, probably because air is highly compressible and water is incompressible.  Aerodynamic behavior is different from hydrodynamic behavior.

            Also about this time, I had gotten interested in building model airplanes, both flying models and scale models of WWI aircraft.  My Dad took an interest in that, too, and in fact he built a flying model that was probably better than any flying model that I had ever built.

            Aviation (along with railroads and big things like dams and bridges) was a big deal in my young life.  I used to daydream about flying and reading about air warfare (dog fights) in WWI.  I spent too much time drawing pictures of Baron Manfred von Richtofen  (the original Red Baron that you hear about in “Peanuts”) engaged in dogfights high above the earth.  I also read about other WWI Aces (five or more kills), such as Billy Bishop and Eddie Rickenbacker and others I can’t remember now.

            The first flights of the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk had taken place only thirty years before the time I am speaking of.  The first movie I ever remember seeing was “Hell’s Angels,” largely about the air war in WWI.  But the biggest aviation event since the Wright brothers’ first flights was that of Charles A. Lindberg, who made his solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean, New York to Paris, in May 1927, only a few months after I was born.  That was a real big deal.   Lindberg, the “Lone Eagle,” was much in the news after that and for a long time thereafter.  

            After Lindberg became famous worldwide, he and his wife had a baby son who was kidnapped and was later found dead.  That made real big news then, as did the swift electrocution of the convicted kidnapper, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a German. 

            My mother used to have a picture of Lindberg hanging on the wall over my bed when I was little. Also one of the first books I read was “Alone,” about Lindburg’s solo flight to Paris.  There were other great flights then also, such as that of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan attempting to circumnavigate the world in 1937.  They were on the last leg of their flight around the world when they went down in the Pacific and were never found.  I used to keep up with all that kind of stuff.

            I remembered much earlier in my life in Nashville seeing a large Zeppelin that flew over my neighborhood.  I was carried away with that sight, and remember exclaiming to myself in exuberance, “What I don’t understand is the Zeppelin of the thing.”  Then in 1936, the Hindenberg, the German Zeppelin, the biggest of them all, exploded and burned while attempting to land at Lakehurst, New Jersey after a transatlantic flight.   In about 1976, Mary Lee and I and our four kids were driving back to Maryland from New Jersey, and we took a little side trip to Lakehurst so I could see where that great airship, the Hindenberg, had perished.

            We take for granted air travel today, but in the 1930’s it was still a big deal, and it certainly was for me.  

 

Mabe’s Plane

            One day when I was about age eleven, my dad came home from work talking about a young engineer coworker who had an airplane, which he kept out at Island Home Airport on the east side of Knoxville.  Mr. Mabe was a young single guy, and he had told Dad that he would be glad to take us up for a flight.  My mother wasn’t too hot on the idea, but some time soon after that, my dad and I went one Saturday morning to the airport where Mr. Mabe was there checking out his plane in preparation for taking us up. 

            I had never met him, but he seemed like a nice young guy.  His plane was an old biplane that looked more like an early model you might see at the Air and Space Museum in Washington or at Dulles than one you might see in the sky today.  I thought later, when I knew more about airplanes than I did then, that Mr. Mabe’s plane might be an old Stearman trainer left over from WWI.  It had two open cockpits, fore and aft, and a fabric-covered wood frame for the body, wings, and tail.  I think it was powered by a Curtiss-Wright radial engine with a two-blade wood propeller.  The controls were in the rear cockpit, so Mr. Mabe put us in the front cockpit.  He got us strapped in.  I sat in my dad’s lap and could see well over the side rim of the cockpit. 

            Mr. Mabe had the engine warming up, and we taxied to the far end of the runway, turned, he opened the throttle, and the engine roared the loudest sustained noise I had ever heard, by far, and in a few seconds we were climbing into the air.  I shouted to my dad in sheer exuberance and couldn’t even hear the sound of my own screaming voice.  We flew back over Knoxville still climbing higher.  He made some steep banks so we could see the city.  Still higher.  Then some steeper banks, diving, turning, zooming around (no upside-down stuff, though) and then finally back to Island Home for an uneventful landing.  I told Mr. Mabe that that was probably the most fun I had ever had—and probably my dad, too.  Driving on the way home, my dad suggested that I not be too descriptive in telling my mom about our flight.

            A few days or weeks later, I saw Mr. Mabe at my dad’s office, and thanked him again.  Later, my dad said something about Mr. Mabe to the effect that he was sometimes a little on the wild side, but he was a darn good engineer.

Moving Right Along – Baseball, Politics, and “The Gathering Storm”

 Baseball

            My dad and I both liked baseball.  We played “catch” a lot, and I still remember every ball and glove, and the one bat (a 31-inch hickory Bill Dickey signature, Louisville Slugger) that I ever owned.  I even had a catcher’s chest protector, which I got by saving up a lot of Wheaties box tops.  I didn’t especially like Wheaties (“the Breakfast of Champions”) all that much, but I consumed a lot of boxes of Wheaties, because they had baseball cards on the backs of the cartons, and you could send away box tops for baseball stuff. 

            My dad and I followed the Knoxville Smokies and major league baseball, too.  It used to be that in the spring, before the regular season began, major league teams would come to play exhibition games with the local minor league team.  One year (it might have been1936) the New York Yankee’s were coming to play the Knoxville Smokies at Caswell Park.  It was an afternoon weekday game, so my dad was going to get off work early and take me to the game.  I would have to get excused from school, so my dad wrote a note to get me excused so we could go to the game. 

            I was so excited by the prospect of seeing the Yankees play the Smokies that I almost blew the whole thing.  I was keyed up, high as a kite, and I got sent to the principal’s office for something I had said or done.  Mr. Johnson, the principal, talked with me and noted my misbehavior.  I wasn’t a very conspicuous student, and I don’t think I had ever been sent to the principal’s office for anything.  I told him that I guess I was too excited about going to see the Yankees (hopefully) play the Smokies that afternoon.  But I still hoped I could be excused from school to go to the game. And, in fact, I hoped to get there early to get seated in the right field bleachers as close to first base as possible.  One of my biggest heroes, Lou Gehrig, would be at first base for the Yankee’s.   (Also, Joe DiMaggio was playing center field, but this was, I think, his first, or maybe second, season with the Yankee’s, so he hadn’t gotten to be the “Yankee Clipper,” yet.)  I knew the names of a lot of players in the Yankee’s lineup.

            When I showed my excuse request to Mr. Johnson, he held it for a while before signing it.  Then he looked at me and said solemnly:  “If you see Red Ruffing, tell him Tom Johnson says hello.”  Then he signed it and sent me along.  I knew that Red Ruffing was a Yankee pitcher.  Mr. Johnson never said how it was that he knew Red Ruffing (Mr. Johnson was not a big talker), and I was reluctant to ask him.  The Yankees beat the Smokies.  I think it was 9-2, but the Yankees could have made it any score that they wanted.

            Looking back on it, it seems that the year 1936 was a year that I really took off.  It was a year that was packed full of events and activity and new knowledge and broadened horizon.   My week in the hospital followed by six weeks recuperating, two good weeks with my cousin Bobby and me in summer, my new bike for my tenth birthday and scarcely inhibited exploration of places in Knoxville where I had never been before, and starting fifth grade with a growing awareness of what was happening in the world around me. 

Politics 

Except for Roosevelt, I was pretty much unaware of politics beyond hearing my parents talk about politics and daily affairs.  I heard talk about Russia and Communists and Hitler and Mussolini, but I didn’t yet “connect all the dots.”  Sometimes we talked about it in school.  I remember Miss Long telling us about something called the “Five Year Plan” in Russia.  And they didn’t believe in God. 

            But my state of political awareness got a shot in the arm during the presidential election in November 1936.  In that 1936 presidential election, FDR was, of course, running for a second term on the Democratic ticket.  At that time, I was in Miss Tate’s fifth grade class.  Our classroom was in clear line of sight to the fire hall, just across the road from our school building.  On Election Day, The fire hall was the polling place for the parents of most of the kids in my school.  All during Election Day we could see the activity of the voting going on at the fire hall.  This gave rise to some discussion of  government and the process by which our country elected its officials. 

          By the end of Election Day, it had become apparent that all of us in Miss Tate’s class were

 

Democrats--with one exception.  To our dismay and consternation, one of our number was not a

 

Democrat.  Jimmie Lusk was a Republican.  He was a quiet kid, liked by all, not outstanding or

 

outspoken, but one of our classmates who everyone liked.  There was an undercurrent of discomfort

 

about Jimmy Lusk’s admitting that his parents were Republicans in this hotbed of Democrats in Miss

 

Tate’s fifth grade class.  I think most of us, though, had an unspoken admiration for his unyielding

 

loyalty to the political party of his parents rather than yielding to the pressure of his peers.  Anyway,

 

we were quick to forgive him for the misguided politics of his parents. 

 

            As for my own parents, they took great satisfaction in the overwhelming reelection of FDR, who carried all but two states, Maine and Vermont.  As my dad noted the next day after the election, Maine and Vermont “stuck out like a sore thumb.”   

            The following Christmas 1936 I got a book, The Story of Our Presidents, which fed my recently acquired awareness of National politics.  I read parts of the new book on presidents several times, and thought about how some presidents seemed to had just filled in their time and some few (particularly Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson) had helped us get through some bad times in history. 

            At that time, of course, I had no idea that I was then living in a special time in the history of this country, that the 1930’s would later be known as the era of the Great Depression, and that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the only president I had ever remembered in my life up to that time, would be seen by many in the future as being a towering figure in our nation’s history.  Not only would FDR bring about great changes in the role of the Federal Government and in the managing of its natural resources, but that he would he would preside over this country as commander in chief in the biggest war in all history, and that I would in time be involved in that war.

“The Gathering Storm”

            By age twelve or so, I was becoming increasingly aware of the growing danger in Europe.  I was hearing and reading more about this madman in Germany, Adolph Hitler, who was building up a military machine and would be soon be using it to create an expanded “Third Reich.”  Hitler successfully led the German people to believe that Germany should fulfill its destiny to build an empire to rule the world.  As had become clear since the end of WWI in 1918, a German myth of Aryan supremacy (Deutschland űber alles). Germany would become a Teutonic ruling culture that would rule the world for 1000 years.  Ridiculous as that might seem now, Hitler was openly pursuing that objective.  In the sixth or seventh grade, I read an English translation of Hitler’s autobiographical work Mein Kampf (My Struggle).  But the world just looked the other way, even as he began to carry out his intent of creating a new super race of people uncontaminated by “inferior races,” particularly the Jews, and establish a new German world empire.

            Pretty dangerous stuff!  But the leaders of other European nations stood by to wring its hands while Nazi Germany would begin, bit by bit, to expand its territory.  Take a little here take a little there, pieces of neighbors or neighboring nations that “by right” ought to be a part of Germany.  Then the world watched the German Wehrmacht boldly overrun its neighbors Austria, Czechoslovakia, and other “disputed territory” in 1938, and the leaders of England and France became concerned enough to request a meeting with Hitler in Munich.  Hitler was gracious enough to grant them that hearing.

            In this 1938 meeting between Hitler, Neville Chamberlain, the English Prime minister, and the French premier, Edouard Daladier, Hitler assured them that he had no further territorial ambitions.  So they went home to their people and reported that there would be “peace in our time.”

            And similarly, in East Asia the Japanese had already invaded and occupied Manchuria and large parts of China.  They announced to the world that they were forming a “Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere.”  But their real objective as it later became clear was to gain control of greater sources of oil, coal, and iron so as to build up a navy that would control all of East Asia and the Pacific Ocean. 

            As an eleven-twelve-year-old, I could see that some big things were going on in the world in Europe and Asia.  But, of course, that was a long way away, and Roosevelt had said that he would keep us out of any “foreign wars.”  So why should I be concerned about what was going on “over there”?  But I continued to read about world events in the newspaper and hear about it on radio, and we talked about it in school.

Mostly Sixth Grade Stuff

            But meanwhile, day-to-day living—school, baseball, girls, and sibling rivalry, vying for elevation in the pecking order of my small world was of more immediate consequence.  Staying out of trouble and keeping on good terms with my parents and teachers I had found made life better and opened more doors.  Baseball, boxing, music, bike riding, exploring, building things, were more my day-to-day fare.  I was into stamp collecting, tree houses, inventing and experimenting.  I was into following U.T. football, the Knoxville Smokies baseball, hero worship of WWI flying aces, and reading about everything that was interesting to me. 

            I tried making some things that I had read about in The Boy Mechanic, a big thick green book in the school library.  Some things I tried worked out and some did not.  For some reason I wanted to try to build an arc lamp as described in The Boy Mechanic.  Arc lamps were used as streetlights in some cities at that time. I decided to make an arc lamp using a rheostat and a transformer from my electric train and two carbon rods taken out of a flashlight battery, and some other stuff.  I put an are lamp together in my living room one weekend afternoon while my dad was listening to a football game on the radio. When I plugged it in and flipped on the switch, I had left the rheostat set to the wide-open position, instead of the zero position, and my contraption blew up and blew fuses in the house and burned a hole in the living room rug.  I was probably in sixth or seventh grade then. 

            Somewhere along in there, too, my parents got me a subscription to “The American Boy,” a magazine that had some real good stuff in it.  I still remember some of the stories. 

Leaving Belle Morris

           At Belle Morris there was among boys a loose pecking order—sort of.  Anyway, I convinced myself that I could hold my own with any guy in school except Charles Erwin and probably Loy Pate.  I say “probably Loy Pate,” because nobody had ever fought him.  He was the biggest guy in the sixth grade   He was also a good natured and gentle guy, and everybody just assumed that he could easily whip anyone in the school--but why would anyone even want to fight Loy?  It was hard to imagine Loy even being in a fight.

            But it was different with Charles Erwin.  He was more like a feisty little “banty rooster.”  He had gotten into it with Charles Schultz and with John Alleman in the fifth grade and had come out on top.  So by sixth grade, he had already established a pretty secure place in the “pecking order.”   Charles Erwin was not big, but he was muscular.  He wore glasses, and had a quiet way about him.  But everybody knew you don’t take on Charles Erwin.  In sixth grade, I don’t think he ever got into a playground fight.  But for some perverse reason, I wanted to test myself against Charles Erwin before leaving sixth grade.  Just to see if I could do it.

            On a sunny, spring day in 1938, a few days before finishing sixth grade, I did one of the stupidest things I had ever done.  At recess out on the playground, I came up behind Charles Erwin and jumped on his back to lock my arm around his neck and try to bring him down.  Stupid move.  The next thing I knew, I was flying over his head or shoulder and landing flat on my back.   Charles Erwin was just standing there looking down at me.  He picked up his glasses, which had fallen to the ground and put them back on.  He didn’t say anything—his look said it all: “Are you trying to get yourself killed?”   What a humiliating way to leave sixth grade and Belle Morris.

            All sixth graders from Belle Morris, along with those from two other elementary schools funneled into Christenberry Junior High School (CJHS).  So, in September 1938, I would start seventh grade at Christenberry.

Two Great Summers—’38 and ’39—Bobby and Me

            For most of the summer of 1938, Bobby and I spent together in Knoxville.  Our big thing that summer was baseball and swimming.  My family had moved into a bigger house out on North Broadway.  There was a big vacant lot out back, and a lot of neighborhood kids would play ball there.  In addition, Bobby and I would walk the mile or so to the swimming pool out at Whittle Springs, and several times that summer we walked over to Caswell Park to see the Smokies play.   Bobby became as familiar with the Smokies lineup as I was. 

            In the big leagues, Johnny Vandermeer, a pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds, set a Major League record that likely will never be broken.  He pitched two consecutive no-hitter games.  That blew our minds.  Bobby was a Chicago Cubs fan and I was a Yankee fan.  But we both decided we would adopt the Cincinnati Reds as a “favorite” team also. 

            As summer of 1938 drew to a close, Bobby went back home in Live Oak, Florida.  The following summer, 1939, would also be a special summer spent together in Tifton.  We went swimming a lot and I would get over my irrational fear of getting my ears stopped up with water. Then I would learn to swim all the way across the pool—even in the deep end. 

            While I was staying with Bobby in Tifton that summer, my parents went to the New York World’s Fair.  When they returned, I proudly showed them how I had learned to swim (all the way across the pool).  They told me about all the wonders that they had seen in New York and especially at the World’s Fair.  It left me especially hankering to get to New York some time and see such a wonderful place. 

            Two years later in late summer 1941, my dad and I would take a trip to New York and Washington, DC, which I’ll tell about later.  It was one of the highlights of my life.

 

Student Years at Christianberry Junior High School:  Fall 1938-Spring 1940

Welcome to Christenberry Junior High School (CJHS) – September 19

On my first day at Christenberry Junior High School (CJHS) in September 1938, all
incoming seventh graders were assembled in the auditorium to meet the principal, Mr. New. 
We had heard that he had a paddle with holes in it.  We had heard that he didn’t often use the
paddle, but it wasn’t just for looks.  (The conventional wisdom was that having holes in a
paddle confers upon it some potency as an instrument of corporal punishment.  It has never been clear to me why that is so.)   

            We recent sixth graders, now brand new seventh graders, were sitting in the auditorium excitedly chattering away, when Mr. New came in and took his place on the stage.  The chattering quickly quieted down to near silence.  Mr. New held up his “good hand” (the one with fingers on it--he had no fingers on the other hand, just a thumb).  He held his hand up for a few seconds, but I could hear someone in the back of me still talking.  It was a boy’s voice.  Mr. New was staring at him.  The boy’s voice stopped.  Mr. New pointed a finger back to where the boy’s voice had been coming from.  As I recall, Mr. New spoke, in a low but distinct voice: “You, boy, come up here.” 

            We didn’t dare look around to see who it was.  A boy came down the right side aisle and up onto the stage.  It was Jimmie Lusk.

            Mr. New disappeared from the other side of the stage leaving Jimmy standing on the stage.  Mr. New then reappeared with his famous paddle.  He said to Jimmy: “Bend over, boy.”   Then with three brisk strokes: whap, whap, whap.  Then Mr. New told Jimmy to go back to his seat.  Dead silence.  All present had learned a valuable lesson.  Welcome to Christenberry Junior High School.

            An added note:  I didn’t experience the benefits of Mr. New’s paddle until shortly before leaving CJHS.  I don’t even remember what my offense was—probably something that happened out on the playground. 

            Many years later, shortly before I was sent on loan from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in Maryland, I happened to see Mr. New at a Howard Johnson’s in Knoxville.  I went over to speak to him.  Although, he was much older then, maybe in his eighties or nineties, he still had that gracious dignified bearing about him.   He didn’t remember me.  But why should he?  I was probably the most vanilla-flavored student he ever had.  But it was definitely Mr. New.  Remember the four missing fingers?

            Soon after starting seventh grade, there occurred on a Sunday evening one of the weirdest things in my life.  It really happened.  I have a recording of it.  On October 30, 1938 (Halloween), my family got caught up in a radio program that is still noted in the history of the Golden Age of Radio.  It was a night I’ll never forget.  This was even more impressive than the Mr. New and Jimmie Lusk thing, which event had taken place some six weeks before the invasion from Mars, as described below. 

The Martian Invasion—October 30, 1938

            That Sunday evening began like most Sunday evenings in our house at that time.  But it began to turn into an experience unlike any other in all the twelve years of my life.   I had finished my homework, so I could listen to the Orson Wells’ “Mercury Theater on the Air,” a regular Sunday night CBS radio drama.  

            Others in my family were involved in their own things, and I had the volume turned down

 

low.  The program began with its signature musical introduction—I think it is the introductory theme

 

of the Tchaichovsky's "Piano Concerto no.1 in B-flat minor."  The music conveyed a dramatic and

 

compelling introduction for what was to follow.   As the music faded, the speaker began painting a

 

word picture as only Wells could do.  It went something like this: 

“We know now that in the third decade of the 20^th Century, Planet Earth was under scrutiny by intelligent beings who were far more advanced than any earth creatures,” and so on…

            After a little more mesmerizing word picture painting, the program seemed to wander off for a couple of minutes into something that seemed to be irrelevant to what had been introduced by the previous words of Orson Wells.  Then an announcer broke into the program to “bring you this news bulletin just handed to me.”  This was followed by other news bulletins coming in, and then live, on to a live broadcast from Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, just “twenty miles south of Princeton, NJ,” where a gigantic meteorite had fallen to earth.   A telephone contact was made with Prof. Richard Pearson, an astronomer at the Mt. Jennings Observatory at Princeton University.  Prof. Pearson had just been observing strange behavior on Mars, great blue jets shooting out from the surface of the planet.  They were unlike anything previously observed.  He was calling other astronomers at other observatories to watch these Martian eruptions. 

            Meanwhile back at Grover’s Mill the gigantic meteorite had begun to open up, and huge robotic creatures were emerging.  This was creating panic, which you could hear, the screams and panic in the background.   Later you could hear the firing of large guns that were brought in to destroy the invaders. 

            My dad had long before pricked up his ears and was listening intently.  He called to my mother who had been in the kitchen making our usual Sunday-night snack.   Mother and my two sisters joined us.   The announcer told of us of great clouds of gas billowing out and drifting out across New York City, and millions of people trying to escape.  An announcer atop the Empire State Building was describing the scenes below.  Fleeing people were clogging the roads out of the Metropolitan New York area.  Reports began to come in from other parts of the country.  State Police and National Guard were trying to bring order out of the chaos.

            My mom said to my dad, “I’m going to call Daddy (my Daddy Lint).”  My dad asked her to hold off for now.  I don’t know whether he sensed that this might be some sort of a hoax, but I think he was as taken in as any of us.  The radio account of events being described told of people succumbing to the poison gas.  After a while the broadcaster began coughing and choking and the line just went dead.  A long wait.  Shock and awe.  Then a voice on the radio said:

“The Mercury Theatre on the Air is bringing you a dramatic presentation based on the

 

novel by H.G. Wells, ‘War of the Worlds.’  He went on to say something like:

 ‘It is our Halloween spoof, and we hope you have been entertained.’”

           

           The reader should keep in mind that this was a live broadcast.  At the end of the program the a

 

announcer said some doubtless unscripted words which would lead the listener to suspect that the

 

CBS broadcast was already getting some feedback that their just-completed program had been taken

 

by many listeners far more seriously than had been intended:  i.e. the program had (intentionally or

 

unintentionally) caused a nationwide stir.  Despite the fact that one of the last things said on the air

 

declared that: “It is our Halloween spoof, and we hope you have been entertained.”

            For several days after that, newspapers over the country told of people’s reactions to the program.  I understand that the now-famous radio program was written about in European and Asian newspapers as well as in the US. 

            Some years later Mary Lee bought me a recording of that famous “War of the Worlds” spoof.  I have listened to it several times in the recent past.  It is striking how much more naive and less skeptical people were seventy years ago if they had “heard it on the radio”.

Grades 7 and 8 – Personal Experience and Academic Performance 

            As previously noted, Mr. New had made it plain on the first day of school that willful

 

disobedience to authority would not be tolerated.  Punishment would be swift.  The use of corporal

 

punishment is currently out of vogue, sort of like “water boarding.”  But whether it is condoned or

 

condemned, its use was effective in establishing respect for authority.  There were, indeed, behavioral

 

problems at CJHS—but lack of respect for authority was not one of them. 

            As for my own personal situation, one factor that diminished my enjoyment of learning was my stuttering.  My friends and teachers at Belle Morris had sort of accepted my speech impediment as just a part of my persona.  But CJHS was a different setting.  But it happened that there was a pretty little girl in the grade ahead of me that also stuttered.  Peggy Pender was cute, smart, and popular.  Although I felt some sense of guilt about it, I took comfort in the thought that Peggy Pender stuttering perhaps ameliorated my own situation.  You might say I let her run interference for me. 

            Another factor that carried over from my previous school experience was the fact that I had always been a poor test taker.  I seemed that no matter how well I was prepared (or thought I was), I just wasn’t able to get it all down in the time allotted, so I handed in a lot of incomplete test papers. 

            But there were some offsetting factors.  By the end of sixth grade, I could pretty much rattle off my multiplication tables without thinking.  Another thing I had going for me was an apparent ability to memorize poetry easily.  I still retain a lot of what I learned in school days—including some fairly long passages of poetry, and other such stuff.

            Another thing—I had always been a good speller.  In 5^th grade at Belle Morris, I had been runner-up spelling bee champion.  I got beat by Morris Archer, a 6^th grader.  I missed on the word “mischievous.”     Anyway, except for the usual A’s in spelling, I got mostly B’s and C’s and some D’s in junior high school.

            A lot of my home activity was (except for sports) reading and listening to music.  And since a lot of what I read was about how to do or build things, I did a lot of doing and building of things I read about. 

A Family Christmas Present - 1939

My junior high school years were fairly unremarkable.  But there was a lot going on in my family and in the world at large.  So far as my own family life, it was (I think) Christmas 1939 that we got a “family Christmas present.”  It was a large console model radio and phonograph record player.  The radio stations were only A.M.; F.M. was not yet in use.   The 78 RPM record player and automatic changer was the big thing.  You could stack records (12 inch) on a spindle, and it would automatically feed the records onto the turntable.  Pretty high-tech stuff, huh?

           We also got a set of records of classical music, some of which I was already familiar with, but

 

much was new to me.  I think all of the records of classical music were Victor recordings of the

 

Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra.  My knowledge of classical music was broadened considerably by

 

this new family possession.  As for the radio part of it, our old Philco table model was performing

 

poorly, and increasingly we relied on radio for news in a world of rapid change and growing

 

instability. 

            That particular radio/record player became a sort of family entertainment center.  We enjoyed, as a family, many evenings of comedy, mystery plays, and other such family entertainment fair during those days, the Golden Age of Radio, all through the late 1930s and the 1940s and the 1950s.  A lot of good clean fun/entertainment and news broadcasts.

 

Diving Experiment—Summer 1940

            When I was about age 13, I read a book called “I Like Diving” by Commander Edward Ellsberg.  After reading it, I was convinced that I would like diving too if I only had the stuff to do it.  So I started looking around for stuff and making plans to build a diving helmet with an air supply.

            (I think that was the summer also that I got the all chemicals together to make some nitroglycerin.  To make a long story short, after I got Carl Parrott roped in on the venture, and we had dug a deep hole to explode it in, we chickened out when we got to the step of mixing nitric acid with some other chemicals that might explode on mixing.  We never pursued that project further.)

            Back to the diving.  Of course, Cmdr. Ellsburg did his diving in a diving suit and with a diving helmet, having an air supply hose and a power driven pump and other special equipment—not to mention knowledge and experience.  I didn’t have any of that stuff, but after a lot of thought and scrounging around I thought I might be able to make a diving helmet that would work.

            Two doors down from where we were living at that time, there were two brothers, Bill and Bob Richardson.  Bill was a year older than me, and Bob was his kid brother a year younger than me.  Anyway, I invited them to go in with me to build a real diving helmet and to test it out.  Bob (the younger) wasn’t interested, but Bill was enthusiastic, so we worked on it together on it. We had found a metal can that had a square cross section, maybe twelve inches on a side and maybe fourteen inches deep—any way, about the right size to invert, put over your head, and have cutouts made on opposite sides to fit over your shoulders with padding (slit garden hose) over the sharp edges of the metal can.  It had a rectangular glass window in the front to see out of.  It would have a harness to strap the helmet under the arms to hold it in place.  On the bottom end of the can (top of the helmet), we cut out a hole and sealed a fitting to a garden hose.  At the other end of the hose, we fitted a bicycle pump to pump air down into the helmet.  There were other practical problems that we somehow found ways to get around.  We worked on it off and on during the summer.  All the sealing needed was done with tar, which I don’t remember where we got it, but we did.  We put hunks of tar in a large tin can and heated and melted it on a hot plate that Mrs. Richardson had unknowingly contributed to our project.

            We somehow got it all put together and built a small flat-bottom barge with wheels on one end of it to tow it behind a bike.  We were going take it to the lake in Fountain City (about 3-4 miles out North Broadway from where we lived).  We tested it out as best we could before hauling it out to the lake, and it seemed like it would work, in principle, at least—sort of.

 

            By this time, Bob (Bill’s younger brother) had gotten interested in what we were doing, so when the time came to take it out to the lake and try it out, Bob wanted to be a part of it.  We let him help. 

            We got on our bikes and got the trailer/barge hooked onto one of our bikes, and we towed it out to the lake.  We took some tools and spare parts along.

            It was probably a good thing that Bob went with us, because Bill and I found that we needed another pair of hands in getting everything set to do a dive.  I was going to go first, and when I got into the water, Bob (in the little flat boat) would do the pumping.  I got into the water with the helmet held in place, and Bill began pumping, and I tried to go under the water with it.  I had weights fastened to my ankles to hold me down, but we needed to get further out toward the center of the lake, because the water was not deep enough where we were.  Then I was standing in mud that was roiling up around us.  We managed to work our way out to deeper water, where I could get it maybe a foot or so under the surface of the water, while Bill was pumping like crazy.  He had to stop pumping now and then and push me down into the water, because when he pumped, I was too buoyant.  The weights on my ankles were not enough to overcome the buoyancy of my helmet when it had enough air in it to keep the water level below my chin.  By the time we had figured out how to make it all work, we decided that we didn’t have enough weights to hold me down in the water.  Then the problem began how to get us and the barge and the helmet back to the shore without capsizing it.  Eventually, we worked our way back over to the edge of the lake and called it a day. 

            Bill and Bob weren’t as enthusiastic as I was, so we never tried it again.  But I was convinced that a diving helmet could be made to work if we tried again.

            About four years later, when I went into the Navy, I was asked if I would be interested in training to be a Navy diver.  I thought about it, but I was already scheduled to go to a Navy electrician school in Bainbridge, MD (which opportunity, in the end, did not materialize).  Anyway, I declined consideration for diver training.  Later on when I learned that the electrician school wasn’t going to happen, I wished that I had gone to diving school, but it was too late by then.  I wound up being a boiler fireman, which, as will be discussed later, can be a little more challenging than you might think.  But right now, back to getting through high school.

Back to the Real World:  WWII Heats Up - 1940-1941

 

Partly because of the gathering storm in Europe and the growing “yellow menace” in the Pacific,

 

there was a lot of talk on the radio to keep up with.  By the end of 1940, Nazi Germany had pretty

 

much overrun and conquered most of Europe.  The Brits (now under Winston Churchill), across the

 

English Channel, stood alone to oppose the Nazi German military might which was now allied with

 

Italy under Benito Mussolini with his formidable war machine. The Brits were continually under air

 

attack from Hitler’s Luftwaffen for all of 1940 and early 1941. 

            Winston Churchill, the British P.M. (and to my mind perhaps the greatest figure of the Twentieth Century), led the Brits through their finest hour in withstanding the punishment being meted out to them, putting up a defense that caused Hitler to equivocate in (and later to abandon) launching Operation Sea Lion his planned invasion of the British homeland.

            During my junior high school days, my geography teacher noted the Japanese military action being taken to implement their stated policy (1936) of creating a “Greater East Asia Co- Prosperity Sphere” in East Asia and the Western Pacific.  This would surely come into conflict with strong military positions held by the United States, particularly in the Philippine Islands.  The Japanese aggression was also impacting on British interests in the Southern Pacific, particularly in New Guinea. 

            As for me and my take on what was happening during 1940-1941, I did not know enough detail to connect all the dots as neatly as indicated here, but I was, from about age 12 forward, increasingly concerned about another world war.  Probably the “Martian Invasion” thing fed that growing concern. 

Teen Years and Washington Pike Methodist Church

            All during my early life our family generally went to a local church when we were together.  But I don’t remember our joining a church until we came to Knoxville. 

            After attending several churches, we joined Washington Pike Methodist Church when I was about age twelve.  It was not far from where we lived, and it was right across the street from my school, Belle Morris.  At about age ten, I had been thinking increasingly about Jesus and God and spiritual things, and I came forward in response to an altar call.  Dr. Duncan had talked with me, and I was ready to make a commitment.  I was then baptized by sprinkling.  I remember when I came forward, being on my knees at the altar and praying to God that I would appreciate it if he could cut me some slack on the matter of playing baseball on Sunday.  My grandmother, Nothermama, had expressed her disapproval of playing baseball on the Lord’s Day, which should be a day of worship.  Of course, as a Nazarene she was strict about such things.  Although I had a high respect for her opinion, I was pretty sure that I would sometimes play baseball on Sunday.  I don’t think I ever reached an entirely comfortable settlement with God on the matter, but life went on, and I continued as a loyal worshiper at Washington Pike Methodist Church—and on occasion played baseball on Sundays with no pang of conscience. 

            But there was a troubling matter that bothered me in my early teens.  As war clouds darkened over Europe (and, of course, did break out in September 1939), there was a strong and growing anti-German sentiment in this country.

            It happened that about 1940 or 1941, my Sunday school teacher was a bright and earnest and likable young man who had been born and raised in Germany.  He spoke English with a strong German accent.  As we heard more and more of the havoc being wreaked by Nazi Germany as it rolled across Europe, that anti-German sentiment became pervasive and compelling.  In my Sunday school class, my teacher’s strong German accent was a constant reminder of his Germanic origins.  There was a growing undercurrent, a growing antipathy, and unwarranted rudeness we boys began to display regarding our German Sunday school teacher.   This uneasy feeling was expressed in some rather bizarre ways. 

            Then one Sunday morning, our teacher didn’t show up at Sunday school class.  We never saw him or heard anything of him.  He just disappeared.  He was quietly replaced by another teacher, but there was never any explanation of what had happened. 

            Our new boys Sunday school teacher started a new Boy Scout troop at Washington Pike Methodist Church.  Charles Schultz and I and several others in our Sunday school class joined the troop.  We regularly met on the second floor of the “log cabin” in the back of the main church building.  We did a lot of boxing (which was popular then among young boys) and all the other Boy Scout activities.  I liked boxing then, and had two sets of boxing gloves and a punching bag which I got for Christmas or a birthday. 

            Our family was still active at Washington Pike Methodist Church when I left home to go to the Navy in 1944.  On leaving home then, the church gave me a small breast pocket New Testament plus Psalms, which I still have. 

One Week in the Summer of 1941

            Two years before, in summer 1939, my parents had taken a trip to the New York World’s Fair.  As already described, that had been one of the best summers that Bobby and I have ever had.

            The trip my parents had taken to New York Worlds Fair in 1939 led to a particularly memorable experience during the summer of 1941, just before I turned age 15. 

            That summer I had been working at Hahn’s Store delivering groceries on my bicycle.  Near the end of the summer, I came home from work on a Saturday night.  The family had already eaten supper, and Mom had fixed me something to eat.  My dad had just brought home a brand new Chevrolet, the first new car we had ever had since the old T-Model Ford back in Nashville.  He sat down at the table with me while I ate supper and asked if I would like to take a trip with him to Washington and New York to “break in” the new car.  Of course, I would. 

            I had told Mr. Hahn that next week would be my last before starting back to school.  Mr. Hahn had two delivery boys working for him.  The other guy was James Fortenberry.  He was a year or two older than me, and Mr. Hahn paid me $3.50 per week, but he paid James $5.00 per week.  But I did more work--James was a sort of goof off.  Anyway, back to the proposed trip.  With my mother’s blessing, Dad decided we (he and I) should take a trip and would leave the first thing the next morning, Sunday, and plan to be back by the following Sunday.  I think my mom called Mr. Hahn to let him know that he would have to do with just James for the coming week—that I would be gone on a trip with my dad.  Mr. Hahn wasn’t too happy about this, because I was a better worker, and he paid James $1.50 more than he paid me. 

            Dad and I left the next morning, heading north on U.S. Route 11.  We had a lot of cheese and crackers, and some boxes of cookies, and cans of Vienna sausage, and candy bars, and maybe some other stuff.  It was planned to be a one-week trip.  We would do and see as much as we could in one week, with Washington, D.C. and New York City as focal points.  I don’t know how much money we had with us.  Credit cards and ATMs had not been invented, so all expenses would be cash transactions along the way and at our two main destinations.  We would sleep in the car.  Gas then cost about 12 cents per gallon.

            We made it to Natural Bridge, VA that night, where we parked off the road, and Dad slept in the back seat and I was in the front.  The next morning we started out again headed for Washington.

            Travel was pretty slow.  U.S. 11 was two-lane.  The war in Europe had already started, and I think there was a national speed limit of 45 miles per hour to conserve gasoline.  Also, it was a new car and wasn’t supposed to be driven over 40 mph for the first 500 miles.  And the closer we got to Washington, the more my dad wanted to stop and soak up all the Civil War stuff along the way—which is plentiful approaching Washington from the southwest as we were. 

            We got into Washington that night and parked at the foot of the Washington Monument and slept in the car.  The next morning we went into the men’s room at the Monument and got cleaned up and spent the rest of the day sightseeing.  We first went to the top of the Monument, and got the 360-degree view.  I don’t remember if the Pentagon was under construction, but the Jefferson Memorial was.  We did the Lincoln Memorial, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and other sights toward the west end of the mall.  By nighttime, we hadn’t gotten up to the east end and it was pouring down rain, so we parked the car again at the foot of the Washington Monument, and again spent the night sleeping in the car.  The next morning (Tuesday) we worked our way up toward the east end, the Smithsonian (Spirit of St. Louis then in the old “castle building”), the Capitol, the Supreme Court, the Library of Congress, and maybe some other things. 

            Then I think we headed to New York City, and things got kind of blurry.  When we got to NYC, my dad spent  $2 for a flophouse room on the lower Ease Side of Manhattan, where we took a bath and slept in a bed—the only bath and bed of the whole trip. 

            While in NYC we did the Empire State Building, Times Square, RCA (first TV seen on a tiny screen), Rockefeller Center, Hayden Planetarium where I got into a set to with some snotty New York woman.  We ate at the Automat, took the subway out to Coney Island, and spent some time there.  They had four roller coasters, and my dad wouldn’t ride the biggest, “most dangerous” one, so I rode it with a little colored boy as my seatmate.  Dad missed out on a good ride.

            Several years before we took that trip, my dad had brought home a large brochure about the SS Normandie, a French ocean liner.  It had some beautiful pictures and descriptive material about the Normandie, which was then the largest ocean luxury liner in the world.  I don’t know how he came by the Normandie brochure, but it really fascinated me.  So on our NYC tour, we went to Manhattan Pier 88 where the Normandie was docked.   It had been docked there since France had, only a few months before, fallen to Germany.  The U.S. had taken possession of the Normandie, and it was being converted to a troop carrier--to be renamed (appropriately) the USS LaFayette.  A few months later, the Normandie caught fire and burned.

            While we were on the west side of Manhattan Island, we rode for a way up the Henry Hudson elevated parkway, which was impressive—an elevated highway all the way from lower Manhattan up toward upper New York State. 

           I could go on and on.  Surely that week was one of the highlights of my life.   My dad and I reminisced about that trip on numerous occasions before he died in 1992.

            By the end of the week, my dad was exhausted and about out of money, so we headed back for Knoxville.  On our way home, my dad was too exhausted to stay awake.  We were only a couple hundred miles from Knoxville, when he told me to take over the driving while he took a snooze.  I had driven before, of course, in limited circumstances.  I took over the wheel, and he dropped off to sleep right away.  After a little while, I got behind a big truck.  We were driving up a hill on a two-lane highway and doing about five miles per hour.  I was almost on his bumper, and we were hardly moving.  Dad was slumped down sleeping, but he momentarily awakened and opened his eyes.  He saw the back end of that huge trailer filling our windshield.   He hollered out and grabbed the wheel and jammed his foot toward the brake.  Scared the pee out of him, but it sure woke him up.  He wasn’t sleepy anymore, and he drove the rest of the way home.

            One more thing here:  This being late August 1941, the war was raging in Eastern Europe.  Even though Hitler had previously a signed a non-aggression pact with Stalin (Russia) in 1939, Germany had by then invaded Russia in June 1941 and was now approaching Leningrad. 

            

              I remember once when my dad and I were reminiscing about that trip, he said he

 

remembered reading on the crawler light news on the New York Times/Times Square building that

 

the German army had advanced to the outskirts of Leningrad.  As a fact check, I recently looked it up

 

in the Collins Atlas of World War II and it told that on August 20, 1941 (right about the date we were

 

at Times Square) the Germans were closing in on Leningrad.  Pretty neat.

A Few More Things About My Dad

            My relationship with my dad varied over our lifetime.  And the same could be said about things he liked or didn’t care for.  During his professional growth period at TVA, he seemed to develop more interest in some of the “finer things of life.”  He read mostly for information, but he had a keen interest in history and more classical things.  Sometime early in my life, he acquired a full set of the Harvard Classics.  They generally occupied a prominent place in our houses in Knoxville.  They were in their own barrister bookcase with glass doors.  When I was in high school, that set of books was always in the hallway at the foot of the stairs going up to my little attic room.  Many were the times when I should have been studying my school work, I was instead reading from Gibbon’s The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire or Milton’s Paradise Lost, or Faraday’s Experiments, or Darwin’s Origin of Species, or some such.  He was a Civil War buff, and he collected a lot of old used Civil War books and would read them in bed.

            He also had a taste for some poetry, particularly Edgar A. Guest (an American poet of the 19^th Century).  He also liked some of Edgar Allen Poe’s weird stories and had copies of two history books by the Dutch historian Henrik Willem Van Loon (good stuff).  He developed a taste for classical music in his later years and collected recordings of speeches by Winston Churchill.  Finally, he had a near complete collection of old Engineering News Record, the official publication of the American Society for Civil Engineers, from the mid 1930s to near the time of his death.  I had a time getting rid of them when he died in 1991.

The Tony Galento Story

            This is a true story, but some of the dialogue is probably not accurate but does convey the sense. 

            During my youth and well into adulthood, I followed professional boxing, as did a lot of other guys.  I generally knew who held titles and who were top contenders in the top two weight classes.  In the late 1930s and through most of the 1940s, the heavy weight title was held by Joe Louis.  He was arguably the classiest heavy weight of all time.  Louis defended his title against a number of worthy contenders, among them was Tony Galento.  They fought in Yankee Stadium in New York in June 1939.  Galento was a beer-barreled 230-pound heavy weight, an almost charismatically colorful figured.  He owned a bar in Orange, New Jersey.  He was a brawler, but when he fought Louis, he had never been knocked off his feet.  Although he was not a classy boxer, he was considered a pretty good contender, although the betting odds were 8-1 against him when he fought Louis. 

            I happened to be in Tifton that summer and Daddy Lint (who also liked boxing) and I heard the Louis/Galento fight on the radio together.  As I remember, Galento staggered Louis in the first round and knocked him down in the third round.  But in the fourth, Louis really went to work on him.  Galento was out on his feet, but he would not go down.  Near the end of the fourth, the referee stopped the fight and declared Louis the winner.  As I remember after the fight, Daddy Lint and I went out and got some ice cream and talked about the fight.

            Now, flash forward about three or four years.  I was in high school, and we were living on Fountain Park Boulevard in Knoxville.  One day in 1942 or 1943, Peter Tsagaris (brother of Marina Tsagaris, about whom you will hear more later) who lived two doors down from me, came over and told me “Guess who I’ve been talking to.  Tony Galento!  He’s over at the Cazana’s.”  The Cazanas lived just across the street from our house.  Mr. Cazana was a fight promoter, and Tony Galento was a houseguest visiting the Cazanas on a promo that week.  Of course, I immediately went over and met and talked with Mr. Galento and told him my grandfather I had heard the radio broadcast of his fight with Joe Louis at Yankee Stadium.  To which he replied:  “Yeah, dey stopped da fight too early.  I wus gonna moida da bum.” 

            A little epilogue:  several years later, when I was living and working at Los Alamos, I saw a movie, On the Water Front, starring Marlon Brando.  Tony Galento had a minor part in the production, and I immediately recognized him on the screen from meeting and talking with him in Knoxville several years before. 

            Tony Galento had minor parts in several other Hollywood movies as well.  He was one of a kind.

My Student Years at Central High School:  1940-1944

Grades 9-12

            When I started at Central High School in September 1940, I don’t remember making any

 

conscious decisions regarding what specific courses I would take.  My mother said I should take at

 

least one year of Latin.  It seemed to be the sensible thing to take all the math and science available,

 

which I did.  English, of course, was required each of the four years (grades 9-12), and Latin and

 

French were the only languages taught other than English.  I would take two years of Latin in my

 

junior and senior years.

            Our principal, Miss Hassie K. Gresham, was not only the principal of Central High School,

 

but was a dedicated and superlative educator.  She was that rarity: a benign autocrat.  I would later

 

learn that her reputation went well beyond Central High School.  During my junior year at Baylor

 

University (several years later), a visiting professor at Baylor was giving an invited lecture in a class I

 

was taking.  In his lecture, he referred to (without naming) a modern-day educator who had made a

 

great difference in the lives of many young people.   Something he said (I can’t remember what)

 

clued me that he just might be talking about Miss Gresham.  After the lecture, I asked him if the

 

person he had referred to might be Miss Hassie K Gresham.  He showed great surprise, and

 

confirmed that it was indeed Miss Gresham. I told him she had been the principal at Central High

 

School in Fountain City, TN when I was there during 1940-1944. 

            Although she was the principal of the school, she also taught each English class one day per

 

week.  All ninth grade English students read and discussed Shakespeare’s play “Julius Caesar” once a

 

week.  All tenth grade English students read and discussed Shakespeare’s play “The Merchant of

 

Venice” once a week.  All in eleventh grade students English read and discussed Shakespeare’s play

 

“Macbeth” once a week.  All twelfth grade English students read and discussed Shakespeare’s play

 

“Hamlet” once a week.  We were required to memorize certain passage from each of these plays,

 

some of which I still remember.  Miss Gresham led her classes in thoughtful and active discussions,

 

and a lot of spirited student participation.

            By the time I graduated from high school in May 1944, I had gotten a pretty good high

 

school education in the sciences and math.  My grades were pretty mediocre for the most part.  I had,

 

in fact, failed plane geometry during my junior year, but had repeated it and passed it, along with

 

passing trigonometry in my senior year. 

            Aside from Miss Gresham’s teaching, I also acquired a good appreciation for American and

 

English literature other than just that of Shakespeare.  Particularly, did I enjoy Jack London’s Call of

 

the Wild and White Fang, Dicken’s A Tale of Two Cities, and Longfellow’s epic poem “Evangeline,”

 

some of which I can still quote at some length.

            Also, of course, I had two years of Latin under my belt (with good grades), and the required

 

year of American History from Miss Nannie Lee Hicks, who was also a particularly good teacher.  So

 

all in all, my grades in high school ranged from A to F.  But I had learned a lot.

 

My New Athletic Record at CHS

            During my first year at CHS, Coach Parry taught my gym class.  He was always on the

 

lookout for new basketball talent.  Early in the year after some “warm up” play, he had us playing

 

dribble/pass/shoot, and then had us line up in no particular order and watched each of us take ten

 

“free throws” from the free-throw foul line.  When it came my turn to take my ten free throw shots, I

 

felt pretty good.  We apparently had a lot of basketball-challenged boys in that gym class.  I think no

 

one had hit more than three or four free throws during their turns.  I knew I could beat that.  I stepped

 

up to the free-throw line and took my ten shots.  After my last shot Coach Parry said something like: 

 

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen that done before.  That might be a new school record.”   I might have set

 

a new school record by missing all ten free throws from the foul line.

Other Notable Athletic Feats in High School 

            My best sports were baseball and tennis, but we didn’t have either of those at CHS.  Since I

 

was a wiry little guy then, I decided to go out for track in my sophomore year.  I wasn’t particularly

 

fast, but I had good stamina.  We didn’t do cross country in competition, but I did enter some meets

 

running mile and half-mile in a couple of meets   I never came in first, but I don’t think I ever came

 

in last, either. 

            But I got interesting in pole-vaulting when I read somewhere along the way a book about the

 

history of the modern Olympic games.  They were then all track and field events—running and

 

jumping, which I found particularly attractive as participating sports.  We also had at CHS a pole-

 

vaulter named John Adair.  That looked like a fun thing to get into, so why not try it.   I also at that

 

time read an article in the Readers Digest about the world’s best pole-vaulter, Cornelius Warmerdam,

 

who had cleared 15 feet many times before anyone else had done it once.  All vaulting poles then

 

were rigid bamboo poles, unlike the flexible fiberglass poles that came into use in the 1960s.  But I

 

had no idea where to get a bamboo pole (except at a big bamboo grove in Tifton). 

            In the summer that followed, I had a paper route and mowed grass and was making a little

 

money.  So, I went over to the Farragut Lumber and bought some pieces of wood.  I had them split an

 

eight-foot 2x4 and brought it home and using a plane rounded one of the 2x2 pieces into a rounded

 

pole.  It weighed about half as much as I did (a little hyperbole there).  There was a small vacant lot

 

next door to where we were living on Fountain Park Boulevard.  There I dug a sawdust pit, made a

 

couple of standards, and practiced pole-vaulting the rest of the summer.  But when I got back to

 

school in September (my junior year), our track coach had been drafted into the military, and we

 

didn’t have a track team my last two years of high school.

            Not only that, the next spring, my dad decided to plow up the vacant lot where I had my

 

vaulting pit and plant a “Victory Garden.”   Since the entry of the U.S. into WWII, there was food

 

rationing, so victory gardens were common and practical, as well as patriotic. 

            Before leaving the subject of pole vaulting, which will come up again later in my life, I once

 

had occasion to talk with the great Cornelius Warmerdam on the telephone when my some of my

 

own kids were introduced to pole vaulting.  Warmerdam was then a track coach at the University of

 

California at Fresno.  I didn’t know if he was still living at that time (ca. 1982).  I called Bob

 

Creamer, editor of Sports Illustrated, who flipped through his Rolodex and came up with a phone

 

number where Warmerdam probably could be reached.  I called and got Warmerdam on the line.  We

 

talked a little about the history of pole-vaulting from the time of the rigid pole to the flexible pole

 

now, and some things regarding rigid pole techniques that he had used.  But he advised me to get my

 

pole-vaulters on fiberglass and have them to learn to bend it.

            Years later, I read (also “Sports Illustrated”) an article by Frank Deford eulogizing Cornelius

 

Warmerdam after he had died in the year 2000.  Among other things written by Deford, he said:  “…

 

he (Warmerdam) ruled his discipline to an extent that no one has ever approached in any sport. 

 

Warmerdam was a pole-vaulter, which is not exactly like being in the main stream, but using the old

 

bamboo pole, he was the first man ever to clear 15 feet, almost got to 16, and for most of the decade

 

of the 1940s, he regularly beat his opposition by more than a foot.”

            More about pole-vaulting later in my story.

My Junior Year in High School:  Summer 1943

            As the end of my third year in high school drew near, I had a mixed feeling of apprehension

 

and anticipation—a curious mix.  First, the anticipation part:  some ten years after my sister Bunny

 

had been born in Waycross, GA, we were now expecting the arrival of a new family member.  Over

 

that ten-year span, our lives had changed enormously.  I had been a proper big brother to my two

 

younger sisters Diane and Bunny, and had never had a thought that another member might be added

 

to our family.  My mother was then age 37—no spring chicken, but she was in good health.  She was

 

socially active, and ran our household smoothly.  My dad, age 39, seemed to be in much better health

 

than ever before.  And we as a family were very pleased at the prospect of having a new family

 

member.  We didn’t know whether it would be a boy or a girl, and I secretly harbored a hope that I

 

would get a new little brother out of this new deal.  But just having the prospect of a new baby in our

 

family was exciting to all of us. 

            On May 4, 1943 my new little baby sister, Myra Gail, was born.  When I first saw her, I

 

thought she was the most beautiful little creature, I had ever seen.  She was far too pretty to be a boy,

 

and I was overwhelmingly glad to have her as my new little baby sister.  How could I have ever

 

wished for a brother!

            My dad was obviously as pleased as I was, and he was still on cloud nine when I informed

 

him of what I had been anxious about.  I brought home my final report card.  He was working in his

 

victory garden when I showed him my report card.  I had failed plane geometry for the year.  He

 

noted the F and didn’t blow up as I was expecting him to.  He was obviously unhappy, but said

 

gruffly “We’ll talk about that later, but go get your work clothes on and come out and help me.”  He

 

did take note of my final grade of A in Latin.

            When we worked and talked, I said I intended to retake and pass plane geometry in the

 

coming year and to stay with my plan to take trigonometry as well to complete the four years of

 

math.  He seemed dubious, but I did what I said I would do in my senior year, and passed them all. 

 

Barely.  But I got another A in 2^nd year Latin.  We had read Caesar’s Gallic Wars:  Et omnes Gallia i

 

in partes tres divisa erat, et cetera.

            I had enjoyed studying Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar during my freshman year at CHS, and

 

reading Caesar’s Gallic Wars was icing on the cake.  It was hard but it was worth the effort.  Maybe I

 

should have been a Roman.

On Driving—Learning and Teaching

            Learning to drive a car and getting your drivers license has been a right of passage for young

 

folks as long as there have been cars.  So it was for me. 

            My first such experience was in Summer 1939.  My family was visiting our Georgia relatives

 

in Tifton.  While we were there, my dad and I drove out to some unpaved and rarely used road on the

 

edge of Tifton.  Then and there he first showed me about using the clutch, accelerator, brake,

 

gearshift, etc.  I don’t know why he chose that time and place to begin teaching me about driving.  I

 

was age 12 almost 13.

            The state of Georgia had pretty lax conditions for a driver’s permit.  Just pay $2 at the nearest

 

State Patrol Office and that was it.  No testing or age requirements.

            We were living in Knoxville at the time.  Over the next three years, I got some instruction and

 

driving experience with my dad and sometimes Clarence Jett (Clarence was married to Mariah

 

Lennon:  they were long-time close friends of my folks).

            When I became age 16, I took and passed my test and got my Tennessee drivers license.  So

 

one day in Summer 1943, the summer my baby sister Myra was born, I got the bright idea of teaching

 

my oldest sister Diane how to drive.  She was almost age 14.  My mom had taken my sister Bunny

 

and baby Myra somewhere, and Diane and I were at the house by ourselves.  The car was sitting in

 

the driveway (a long straight gravel driveway) along side our house.  It seemed like a good time and

 

place to teach Diane about driving (I seem to have this compulsion to teach people things).  Anyway,

 

as I sat beside her, she slowly and carefully drove back and forth on the driveway.  Once as she was

 

backing out slowly and carefully, she was almost out into the street that ran in front of our house.  I

 

told her to stop, and she got flustered and hit the accelerator instead of the brake.  We zoomed out

 

back across the street and hit a fireplug on the other side of the street.  We ended up with the back

 

bumper on top of the fireplug.  There was a little damage to the bumper and the trunk, and the

 

bumper had to be lifted off the top of the fireplug.  We somehow managed to get the car off the

 

fireplug, and I drovc it back into the garage and closed the door.  Diane said it was at least partly her

 

fault, and we should share the blame.  But I knew that wouldn’t cut it with my dad, and it was my

 

problem, not hers.  He was big on personal accountability, and it would be mine.

            I worked a paper route then and it was time to go pick up my bundle of newspapers, so I

 

hopped on my bike and left the scene of the crime and went to deliver newspapers.

            That night when my dad came home from work and we had finished supper, I hadn’t yet told

 

him what had happened.  He was going out to the garage to get his garden tools to work in the victory

 

garden, so I got up and followed him out and began to tell him what had happened.  When he got the

 

garage doors open, and saw the damage, he didn’t react as much as I expected.  Actually, I think all

 

that summer he had been in a softer mood since the arrival of his new little daughter.

            Later, I had the feeling that he had another thing on his mind—the war wasn’t going at all

 

well, and I would in all likelihood be called up for military service after I graduated the coming year. 

 

The Japanese had gained control of all of the Western Pacific.  We had suffered some major losses

 

over the last two years, and had a long way to go, at a high cost of lives, before defeating a

 

determined and tenacious Imperial Japanese Army.

            Anyway, my dad took me up on my offer to pay for the car repairs, which took most of my

 

paper route earnings for the next several months.  Lesson learned: 

·         Doing things you’re not prepared for can be costly.

·         Being a good driver doesn’t equate to being a good driving teacher.

High School, The Navy V-5 Program, 1943-1944

            The United States had entered World War II when the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor on a Sunday morning, December 7, 1941.  That got us into WWII, so my life during the last two and a half years in high school was increasingly colored by the ongoing war in the Pacific, as well as the war in Europe.  The military draft had been instituted (all males 18 or over were subject to draft for service into the military).  War industries were rapidly building up, aircraft, ships, tanks, guns, and all else need to fight the modern war.  There was rationing of food, fuel, and other goods in short supply.  The military needs came first.  The wars in the European, African, Asian, as well as the Pacific theatre, had been raging full tilt during my last two and a half years of high school. 

            During my senior year (1943-1944), I applied to enter the U.S. Navy V-5 program.  It was open to qualified high school graduates.   It involved some college training and, upon successful completion of the flight training program, a commission in the U. S. Navy as a fighter pilot.  After all the necessary paper work and preliminary screening was completed in Knoxville, I was sent to Nashville where I with several others who had similarly been screened and would be further screened and tested.  At the end of the first full day of examinations, testing, and interviewing, all but of two of that small number from Knoxville had washed out.  I was one of the two “still standing.”  More interviews and other tests were scheduled for the next day.  For most of that second day, we two were still in the running.  Late in the day, a psychologist, a Naval officer, was interviewing me and pushing me pretty hard.  He detected my stuttering, which I had managed to hide up to that point.  I got into a little trouble, and he stopped me.  He quietly asked me to relax and just repeat after him the words:  Methodist, Episcopalian.  I knew then I was dead meat.  The interviewer, a Naval officer, was solicitous.  He had some good things to say about my apparent capabilities, but the bottom line was the same.   I was no longer under consideration for the Navy V-5 Program.  I was sent home and intended to enlist in the Navy after my coming graduation from high school.

            A few months later in May 1944, I did graduate.  I remember my last day at school and while getting on the school bus to go home, I told myself that I never intended to go back to school.  I was through with school and just wanted to join the Navy.  I was only 17 but had the required parental permission to join before turning 18.  After age 18, I would likely be drafted into the Army.

            Although my folks wanted me to start college, I had no intention of doing so, but would instead join the Navy. 

            I went to see a Navy recruiter and was found acceptable, but held off making a commitment for now.  So I was through with school and happy to be so.  I had given up my paper route, and had put my bike up for sale.  It was seven years old, but it was still a good bike as I had taken good care of it.  I figured I would have a little fun before I went away to the Navy.  I had plenty of time before turning 18. 

Oak Ridge -- Summer 1944

            After graduation in May 1944, I still had some four months before turning age 18 and thus be subject to the draft.  But I was curious about some secret project going on at a place called Oak Ridge, about 20 miles to the northwest of Knoxville.  There had been a number of want ads in the local newspapers for all kinds of skilled workers.  Most were in the construction trades, but occasionally, there were cryptic-sounding jobs being posted in some of the ads. 

            Before I committed to the local Navy recruiting office, I saw this curiously not-very-informative ad for certain (unspecified) technical aptitudes to be trained for certain (unspecified) technical operations.  I wondered what that was all about.  Although I had already talked with the Navy recruiter, I wanted to check out this (unspecified) technical operations thing.  Just checking it out.  I wasn’t really looking for a job.

            The ad just said if interested, to come to some (given) address on Union Avenue in Knoxville between the hours of (whatever).  No phone number or the name of the company, just a street address.  So the next morning, I hopped on my bike and went to town to check it out.  The place was, as I recall, a dumpy-looking little office building on Union Avenue just off Gay Street, right behind Millers Department Store.  The address was on the door.  I opened it and went in and spoke to the lady sitting at the desk and said I was there in response to a want ad I had seen in the Knoxville News Sentinel.  She said to take a seat and gave me some forms to fill out.  Mr. (whoever) would be with me in a few minutes.  Eventually a man came out of one of the several offices I could see and asked me to come with him.  He read my completed form and asked me some questions.  I told him I planned to join the Navy before early September, my 18^th birthday.  As I recall, he got up and left, then came back with another guy.  They said they were interested and if I wanted to pursue it, to come back in about three or four hours.  Something like that. 

            Anyway, when I returned that afternoon, a man asked me, among other things, if I had ever heard of the Kellex Corporation.  I associated it with something at Oak Ridge.  They talked some among themselves then asked if I would be interested in a job offer that would involve about two weeks of classroom instruction and some period of supervised hands-on training.  It paid 90 cents per hour, and I would get free transportation between my home and where I would be working, and I would sign a statement of understanding that I would not talk with anyone about my job.  Okay?  Yep.

            I would commit to stay on until sometime in August, and if I wanted to stay after that, Kellex could probably get me a deferment as an essential worker.  Okay?  Yep.

            When I got home late that afternoon, my parents were curious, of course, when I told them I had a job and would start work the coming Monday.  I couldn’t tell them any more than that.  While we were talking my friend Walter Matthews, came over to tell me about a book he had started reading.  I think it was an English translation of Das Kapital by Karl Marx, a radical German socialist.  Walter was a geek like me, and we had a number of common interests.  Walter was also a year younger than me and went to Knoxville High School and was in the ROTC.  Of course, he was curious when I told him I had a new job, but I couldn’t tell him any more than I had told my parents.  

            Long-time residents of East Tennessee considered Oak Ridge to be a mysterious, super-secret, place where big important things were going on, but nobody knew just what.  But everyone understood that if you work there, you don’t talk about it.  Some time during my senior year at high school, a new family had moved into our neighborhood.  They had twin boys about Diane’s age with whom I had become acquainted.  I happened to meet their father, who I understood worked at Oak Ridge.  I asked him what he did at Oak Ridge.  His reply was that he painted polka dots on submarines.  I thought that was pretty funny. 

            Anyway—sure enough at the appointed time on Monday morning, an olive drab car bearing U.S. Government license tags showed up in front of my house on Fountain Park Boulevard in Knoxville.  The driver picked me up.  He had another guy he had already picked up.  We headed out west on Kingston Pike.  There was little or no conversation.  After a while, I didn’t know where we were, as I had never been to Oak Ridge. 

            The driver took me to a place in Oak Ridge called K-25.  I was taken into this huge building, the biggest I had ever seen and eventually I was taken to a classroom with equipment that I had no idea what it was.  There were several other guys there apparently for the same reason as I.  I seemed to be the youngest in the small group.  We had several days of intensive instruction about the theory and operation of a helium leak detector.  It would be used to detect leaks in a vacuum system.  We were being taught by a young guy who had on an Army uniform

with Technical Sergeant stripes.  We were instructed and shown how to examine the walls of this huge vacuum system of metal pipes connected with valves and fittings.  We would systematically scan all the surfaces of a system that seemed to go on forever.  We were not told anything about the system or why we were doing what we were doing.  I was given to understand that if any of this huge vacuum system had even the minutest leak, it could be detected by helium gas that would pass through the wall of the pipe.  There was no horsing around—just learning to do your job and do it well.  We were closely supervised to ensure that we followed a procedure that would minimize the chance of missing a leak.

            I liked my work over the summer.  But sometime at the end of July, I decided to go ahead and join the Navy.  As a venturesome 17-year-old, I really wanted to get out and see more of the world. 

            Once the decision was made, things happened fast.  I got sworn in and was sent to Camp Peary, Virginia for boot training.

            My big 18^th birthday came and went unnoticed by the Navy.  I think I spent that day learning how to put out an oil fire in a confined space without getting burned up.  That training would provide some comfort in the coming year if a Kamikaze were to explode and burn below decks.  Such possibility existed in repelling a planned attempt to invade the Japanese Home Islands.  But that will be considered in a coming PART TWO of my story.