One More Mission: A Journey from Childhood to War

Contents

PREFACE

PART I

THE PETTEYS ARRIVE IN NACOGDOCHES

EARLY MEMORIES

THE SATURDAY MOVIES OR PICTURE SHOW

MOTHER AND LAUNDRY

THE OLD ICE BOX AND CHURNING BUTTER

THE STRENGTH OF A MOTHER

FOUR BOYS AND A MAN

A BABY BROTHER

SCHOOL BEGINS

SOME DARING ADVENTURES

FREDONIA HILL BAPTIST CHURCH

FIRST LOVE

MY FIRST JOB

REVIVALS

LET THE MUSIC BEGIN

THE GREAT DEPRESSION

MILKING COWS

PREPARING FOR A VOCATION

MY FIRST AIR GUN AND HOUDINI

SCHOOL PROBLEMS

MESMERIZED BY JAZZ

LATENT LOVE AND SUNDAY AFTERNOONS

A DRY COUNTY

TOUGH LOVE

MY SHORT ATHLETIC CAREER

THE GREAT EXPEDITION

TWO RUNAWAYS

ANOTHER MIRACLE

EARNING MONEY

A GRUNT IN A SHIPYARD

CLOUDS OF WAR

WORLD WAR II ARRIVES

PART II

THE LIFE OF A CADET

TEXAS A & M

PRE—FLIGHT TRAINING

PRIMARY FLIGHT TRAINING

BASIC FLIGHT TRAINING

THE HEMPSTEAD KID

HURRIED LOVE

ADVANCED TRAINING

GRADUATION AND FIRST ASSIGNMENT

B-24 TRAINING

COMBAT FLIGHT TRAINING

JOURNEY TO WAR

INTRODUCTION TO ITALIAN LIFESTYLE

MISSION #1

MISSION #2

MAKING A HOME

MISSION #3

MISSION #4

TARGET #5

MISSION # 6

MISSION # 7

MISSION # 8

MISSION #9

MISSION # 10

MISSION #11

MISSIONS #12,13, 14, AND 15

MISSION # 16

MISSION # 17

MISSION # 18

MISSION # 19

MISSION #20

MISSION #21

MISSION #22

MISSION #23

MISSION #24

MISSION # 25

MISSION #26

MISSION # 27

MISSION #28

MISSION #29

MISSION #29 (AGAIN!)

MISSION #30

MISSION #31

MISSION #32

MISSION #33

MISSION #34

MY LAST MISSION #35

AFTER COMBAT

FROM TERROR TO THE SERENE THE MEDITERRANEAN ALLIED TRANSPORT SERVICE

ITALIAN MARRIAGE: SOME OBSTACLES AND REWARDS

EPILOGUE

DEDICATION

For editing various sections of this book, my thanks go to daughters Lana and Jan. Also to friends Gloria Caneen and Daniel Montgomery for their suggestions. To other members of my family I wish to acknowledge their encouragement and interest, for without their support, it is unlikely that I would have ever launched this project. I also thank my brother, Gordon, for helping me remember some forgotten events and for editing certain parts of the final draft.

I am grateful to former members of the 461st Bomb Group and to those volunteers who constructed and maintain a large amount of data in the 461st Bomb Group Association Internet Web Site. This information proved to be very useful to me while completing this volume of my autobiography.

I dedicate this autobiography to my wife June, my children Lana, Janet, Carrie, Mike, their spouses, and my grandchildren.

To June, I dedicate my special love and appreciation for her support while working on this book.

PREFACE

FOR SEVERAL YEARS, I had occasionally thought about writing my memoirs for my children, but because I was convinced that my life and my experiences were no more extraordinary than most of my generation had experienced, I procrastinated. As a youth, I had overheard family conversations about the Depression, people jumping to their death from office windows, and lines of hungry people waiting for a bowl of soup, but since I had personally witnessed none of these events, I was largely unaware of the historical events unfolding around me. As a consequence, I assumed that my life had been rather uneventful. Although, older and a bit more mature when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor I registered for the military draft and volunteered for military service. Like other boys of my generation I postponed what I was doing at the time, went to war, returned home after a tour of combat, completed my education, and launched a career. The war had been boring at times, terrible exciting at other times but we who had survived without permanent injury rarely thought that we deserved more than a thanks in the form of a letter from the U.S. Government. Indeed, many even refused the offer to continue school at government expense. What was I to write about? The thought of writing my memoirs was therefore dismissed for many years until one day a daughter startled me by asking, Who will write your life when you are gone?

I began then to contemplate the extraordinary decades in which I had grown into manhood: the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression of the thirties, and World War II of the forties. I thought about my experiences leading up to that fateful day, December 7th, 1941, when Japan attacked the United States, my induction into the military service, my training and preparation for war, and the combat missions I flew as a combat bomber pilot. I finally realized that I had lived through some very pivotal years in world history and this era would no doubt be deemed even more consequential in the future. It was a time that forever changed the American people, the country, and the world, yet I was not yet fully convinced that I might have some interesting stories to tell. I believed that most young men of that time simply served their country in time of war and none were heroes.

While I continued to muse over the events of my life, I also remembered that I had sustained such a childlike belief in the immortality of my parents — that they would live forever — I had unwisely postponed asking them about their past. One day I found that not only had my parents left me, no other family members remained to answer my questions about them. Even as I write this, my generation is disappearing at an astonishing rate. It was a rather disconcerting experience for me to face reality one day and acknowledge that soon none of my generation would remain to tell subsequent generations about the manner in which we lived, our memories of the Great Depression, our World War II experiences, and about other momentous events that occurred during our lifetime. And so at last, I acquiesced and began recording my memoirs.

It is my desire and hope that this narrative will open a small window into the past, vicariously sharing with those who are interested, a glimpse, however small, of living in a small East Texas town during the depression and participating in a deadly world war. In the following pages I have attempted to chronicle some of my memories from birth until the time I was discharged from my World War II combat obligations.

The experiences I write about are engraved in my memory forever, but after many years, the precise words and conversations are mostly forgotten; therefore, the dialogue is founded on my memory of what the characters actually said or what they most likely said. Occasionally, I lapse into a vernacular, which has softened somewhat over the years but is still the colloquial speech used by native East Texans to this day. It is a true story and none of the incidents have been exaggerated or invented.

I am firmly convinced that each life is unique, as different as our fingerprints. Although our lives often merge for brief periods of time, each takes a distinct path throughout life and none observe an identical panorama. This book, then, is about panorama—a panorama I perceived—a view that I surveyed—a voyage that I made through my world as I saw it during my lifetime.

PART I

Growing Up In Nacogdoches, Texas

From our ancestors come our names, but from our virtues Our honors.—Unknown

THE PETTEYS ARRIVE IN NACOGDOCHES

ON SEPTEMBER 24TH, 1850, a group consisting of ten members of the Power family, one slave and several covered wagons departed New Market, Alabama en route to Texas.

Zachary Taylor had died that year, and Vice-President Millard Fillmore completed his term of office as President of the United States. California had been admitted to the Union as a free state allowing the frontier to extend to the Pacific Ocean and The Republic of Texas had been annexed five years earlier as a State of the Union. It would be another four years before the Republican Party would be founded.

The wagon master of the wagon train was a 48-year-old schoolteacher, Baptist Minister, and my great-great grandfather, Holloway L. Power. Accompanying him in the leading wagon was his wife, Elizabeth Meals Power. In another wagon rode my great grandfather, William Howard Pettey, his wife Sarah Power Pettey, daughter of the wagon master, and their three-year-old son, my grandfather, William Holloway Pettey. William Howard and three-yearold William Holloway were direct descendants of Hubert Patey/ Patty/ Petty who immigrated from England to Virginia sometime before 1665 where his name first appeared on a deed for 150 acres in the court records of Lancaster County, Virginia. His son Thomas was born sometime between the late 1670s or the early 1680s. Their descendants later migrated to Alabama by way of North Carolina and eventually to Texas; hence one may find many Petty/Pettey names in these states.

Holloway and Elizabeth Power owned a large comfortable home on their plantation near New Market. The plantation was so large that it was necessary to divide it into smaller parcels to sell it. Why would a successful man sell his home and move his family to Nacogdoches, Texas? To answer that question, one must refer to his prolific diary:

AUGUST 5, 1850, TOOK MORE PILLS LAST NIGHT AND FEEL BETTER TODAY—I DREAMT LAST NIGHT THAT OVER THE LITTLE MISSOURI RIVER WAS THE PLACE TO FIND HEALTH. HOW GLADLY I WOULD GO THITHER FOR THE SAKE OF THAT BEST OF ALL GIFTS.

In 1833, Holloway had received a serious chest injury when he was crushed between a wagon and a cotton gin, a large building where farmers transported their cotton to be weighed, cleaned and pressed into bales. His ribs never mended correctly after the accident, causing him to suffer chest pains and various lung diseases. He became convinced that in order to improve his health, he must move to another part of the country. In letters to his sons, who had settled in Nacogdoches the previous year, he repeatedly inquired about doctors in Texas. After much deliberation, he decided to sell those items that he could not move with him and join his sons in Texas. The family spent the summer preparing for the move and on September 24th they departed New Market, Alabama.

Four days after leaving New Market, Holloway wrote in his diary:

"FELL SICK FROM FATIGUE AND BAD WEATHER.

WEATHER VERY DRY."

A weary Power and Pettey family finally arrived in Nacogdoches 48 days later after sleeping in rain, traveling over rocky hills and flooding streams. They settled and for four generations raised their families and farmed their land around Nacogdoches. It is interesting to note that the Petteys never acquired and owned slaves. Although slaves would not be granted freedom for another 13 years, Holloway Power had already begun to develop an aversion to the practice and perhaps discouraged his family from purchasing additional slaves. He wrote in his diary in l851:

CORRECTED A BLACK MAN FOR DISOBEDIENCE IN RUNNING ABOUT AT NIGHT. I FELT IT MY DUTY TO USE THE ROD, YET I DEPLORE THE NECESSITY, AND HEARTILY WISH ALL SUCH RELATIONS BETWEEN A MASTER AND SLAVE HAD BEEN DISPENSED WITH AT THE EARLY SETTLEMENT OF THE COUNTRY, BUT THE EVIL HAS NOW SPREAD UNTIL THERE IS NO REMEDY WITHIN HUMAN POWER.

For five generations, most of the Petteys and Powers remained in Nacogdoches and were buried at The Old North Church Cemetery north of town, but like other members of my generation, I moved away from Nacogdoches. I am not aware of any Pettey relatives remaining there, although several Powers’ descendants continue to live in the area.

William Holloway Pettey

WILLIAM HOLLOWAY PETTEY

My grandfather, William Holloway Pettey, was born near New Market, Alabama, in 1847, the year that Brigham Young led a group of Mormons to a salt lake in Utah, later named Salt Lake City. James Knox Polk was President of the United States, and the gold rush was underway in California. My grandfather was three years of age when he departed New Market, Alabama, by wagon train in the company of his father and mother, William Howard and Sarah Power Pettey. Seven years after arriving in Nacogdoches, when he was 10 years old, his father died of an apparent heat stroke and was buried at North Church Cemetery. He would always blame his mother for the death of his father because, even after his father had complained of feeling ill, his mother had harried him to return and work in the fields where he collapsed and died a short time later.

William’s resentment grew more intense when Sarah remarried. His dislike of his new stepfather and bitterness over his mother’s remarriage prompted him to leave home and enlist in the Texas Confederate 4th Calvary. Perhaps this resentment, combined with other frustrations, contributed to the failure of his two marriages and separation from his children. He seemed to become more ill natured as he grew older and his family abandoned him. He lived alone in a home for Confederate Soldiers for several years and then in a small house provided by a friend until his death. He never visited our home; consequently I was not acquainted with him and saw him for the first time at his funeral.

From the information I have acquired from family members, it is reasonable to assume that despite my grandfather’s intelligence and self-education, he was emotionally unstable. As a father, he would have been judged a poor role model for his children. According to stories told by them, he would curse his mother and God in their presence, blaming them for his problems. If true, it explains why they were afraid of him. It is remarkable that his children were able to escape serious emotional damage and live normal successful lives. My father and his siblings were apparently motivated at an early age to distance themselves from their father and fervently seek a different life style. Perhaps their negative experiences became a positive force that energized them to seek a better life than my grandfather could offer them. I would like to believe that he brought about some positive influence on their lives.

I have added the section about my grandfather to enable the reader to better understand the magnitude of the adversities my father was compelled to overcome in order to achieve any modest amount of success; however, in fairness to my grandfather, I must state that my information was obtained from his children, who were greatly influenced by my grandmother. As in all relationships, the beholder observes the unique conduct of an individual occurring at certain times and forms an opinion based on that behavior, while others may reach entirely different conclusions based on the activities of the same person occurring at different times. It is notable that his acquaintances and neighbors spoke well of him. Because my grandfather died while I was very young, I never had the opportunity to form my own opinion of his behavior.

Jesse E. Pettey Sr. & Maude Jefferies Pettey

JESSE E. PETTEY, SENIOR

My father was born May 29, 1897, on a farm a few miles west of Nacogdoches. His birth occurred one year after Henry Ford had driven his first automobile, six years before the Wright brothers flew their first airplane and four years before the radio was invented. He and my mother lived in one of the most eventful periods of history. My father grew up in the horse-and-buggy era, yet it was only a few years until the average family in America owned an automobile. He saw the first airplanes, heard the radio announcement of Lindberg’s first non-stop flight across the Atlantic and the sinking of the Titanic. He read about the opening of the Panama Canal and the horrors of the First World War. He saw the first silent movies, witnessed through television the terrible atrocities of the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the blast-off of the first astronauts into space and their walk on the moon. During his lifetime, more advancement was made in civilization than had been made in all man’s existence.

My father was born seventh of eight children. When they were strong enough to work, my grandfather demanded that they labor long hours, constantly reminding them that great riches lay ahead if they would only work harder. Living isolated and working long hours, the children had little time for school. My grandfather hoped, as did most farmers of the day, to keep his family working together as a family enterprise, but he was such a stern taskmaster that he unwittingly drove his family away from the farm when they were old enough to provide for themselves. My grandmother moved away soon after my father departed.

When he was 13, my father and a brother departed to live with an older sister where he completed the sixth grade and worked at odd jobs. Few children living on farms in those days attended school beyond the sixth grade. Later, at age 15, he applied for a job with Bell Telephone Company. By stating on his application that he was eighteen, he was subsequently hired as a lineman to maintain telephone lines. Lacking knowledge about electricity, it is remarkable that my father was not injured, but he learned by watching other linemen, asking questions, and in due course became a competent lineman. It is noteworthy that he not only escaped injury, he completed home-courses in electricity and later worked as an electrical engineer with Texas Power and Light Company. However, it was while working at Bell that he met and married my mother who also worked for Bell as a telephone operator. My father enjoyed saying, When I first saw her; my heart stopped beating because she was so beautiful.

Telephone operators of the 1920s were, for the most part, young and single women who would ultimately leave their jobs when they married. Jobs for women were almost non-existent. Schools and Telephone companies were the largest employers of women and the prevailing belief was that a married female should be dependent upon her husband; that she must forfeit her job to another single and unsupported female. As a result, whenever a single female married, she usually quit or was fired. Every town or city needed switchboard operators to place and receive telephone calls.

The women operators sat facing a huge switchboard covered with many small openings designed to receive the end of a connecting cord when placed there by the operators. One end of the cord was connected to the switchboard while the free end was placed in an aperture connecting the switchboard to a caller that had lifted the cradle of his telephone. When the caller lifted a receiver or earpiece from its cradle, a light flashed over one of the openings signaled the operator that someone wished to call a number. She would then insert a cord into the aperture and say into her speaker, Number please? Some operators developed quite a unique pronunciation of the word please by raising the pitch of their voice so that it became pluezze. The caller responded by telling her the number of the desired connection, usually a three-digit number in small towns. She would then place a connecting cord into an opening of the desired telephone number causing it to ring. Telephone operators wore earphone contraptions over their heads and a microphone mounted on their chests, allowing their hands to be free as they connected numerous cords to the desired openings. They could eavesdrop on any private conversation and were privy to many secrets of small towns. If information was needed about a resident of a city, one could do no better than to ask one of the local telephone operators.

Sometime after my birth, my father began working as a lineman for the Texas Power and Light Company. He wore spurs in order to climb light poles and maintain electric lines. Iron spurs were welded to two iron leg braces and attached with leather strips to the inside of both legs of a lineman. By forcing one sharpened spur at a time into a wooden light pole and holding onto the pole, a lineman could lift himself as if he were climbing a ladder. I recall seeing Dad almost run up a 30 foot pole in this manner. When the lineman was positioned beneath the electric lines, he would fasten a safety belt secured to his waist around the pole then comfortably and safely lean back to work on the lines above him. Occasionally a lineman’s spurs would rip free from the wooden pole, but with his belt securely attached, he would only slide downward until he could again dig his spurs into the pole. On the other hand, most linemen liked to descend swiftly by deliberately dislodging both spurs and sliding down the pole with their safety belt still attached around the pole. Their rapid descent was slowed by digging both spurs into the pole every several feet, much like mountain climber rappelling down a mountainside. A good lineman could rappel down a pole in three or four leaps.

My father once described an event that occurred when he disturbed a nest of hornets located at the top of a light pole. He quickly determined that he could not descend the pole using his spurs before they would attack him; he therefore leaped backward, falling about thirty feet onto the ground. Both feet were broken but he escaped the hornets. His feet bothered him for many years.

While I was still a young boy, Dad was promoted to foreman of the line crew and never climbed poles again. The new job required him to supervise the linemen from the ground rather than climbing poles. It was often a stormy, icy, winter night when he was called to restore disrupted electrical power. Before leaving the house, he would ask me if I wanted to accompany him. I can proudly recall my father, guiding a spotlight mounted on his truck to provide light to the men working above on the power lines as he issued suggestions and instructions. As a young boy, these were exciting occasions and I was proud that my father was the boss, but as I grew older my interest broadened to other activities and I no longer enjoyed accompanying the boss.

These occasions were the few times that we shared together. Because he was a compulsive talker, he seldom encouraged me to talk about my interests, leading me to believe that he did not care about my activities. I now understand that it was not a lack of interest; he concentrated so intently about what he wanted to say that he never listened to me. It seemed that he was unaware of anything or anyone around him when he talked as if he were speaking to himself. It is not surprising, therefore, that I did not learn the art of conversation from him. In my immature judgment, I found it extremely difficult to overlook this fault and to admire his many other favorable characteristics.

While attending a business meeting on the Island of Cyprus many years later, I received a telephone call from a friend who was a doctor in Nacogdoches informing me that my father had broken his hip in an accident. He added that he had also developed pneumonia, and assured me that, at his age, it was critical. I immediately flew to Nacogdoches to care for him, because my stepmother was too elderly and in poor health to be his caretaker. After the death of my mother, my father, at age seventy married Thelma and had enjoyed sixteen years of marriage. A short time after I arrived, she broke her shoulder from a fall and was admitted to a hospital room only a short distance from my father’s room. With no one to care for her at home, her brothers then placed her in a nursing home.

As I continued tending my father’s needs at the hospital, I became aware that I was becoming more devoted to him each day. Perhaps my increasing devotion came about because of his weakened condition and inability to dominate the conversation. We, for the first time, were able to share silence together. Oh, that we could have learned early in life that sharing a moment of silence is often more important than incessant conversation.

On the night of his death, as I reflected over our life together and our inability to converse, it occurred to me how much I had always yearned to be able to communicate with him—to feel comfortable and comforted in his presence. I recorded the following thoughts that night:

I Never Knew Him.

I just know he was a good man.

They all say what a fine person he was.

Everyone seemed to know him;

Everyone but me.

I know he was a devout man,

Many calls for help he answered.

Everyone knew that he gave of himself;

Everyone but me. .  .  .

I know that when called at night,

He left a warm bed to help.

Everyone knew that he was a generous man;

Everyone but me. .  .  .

I know that he was proud of me.

When I returned from war, a young officer with bride.

Everyone knew that he talked of nothing else;

Everyone but me. .  .  .

I know we were separated by a generation of thought,

And lived miles and miles apart;

everyone knew that he understood;

Everyone but me. .  .  .

I know he never wanted it that way.

Maybe he never knew just how to say,

But everyone knew that he loved me;

Everyone but me. .  .  .

I know that tonight he left me,

but somewhere we’ll meet once more,

and I’ll finally get to know him,

as I never knew him before.

November 21, 1983

MAUDE GRAYBILL JEFFRIES PETTEY

My mother was born in Willis, Texas, Montgomery County March 16, 1900. The 1900 U.S. census was taken when she was two months old and reveals that her family lived on a farm near Willis. The family consisted of her mother, father and three older sisters. Her father, William M. Jeffries was a farmer and to date I have been unable to unearth any information about him or my mother’s early childhood. He died shortly after my mother was born, sometime between 1900 and 1902. I have been unable to find a death certificate, deeds, previous census or even where he is buried. The 1910 census reveals that my grandmother had married Albert Moore approximately two years after my mother was born. There was little information, such as birth and marriage certificates, assembled for the public in those days and most records were written in family bibles. Montgomery county was created from several other counties, and maintained few public records before 1900. A fire destroyed the 1890 census. Since so little is known about her from her childhood until my birth, I will write about my mother in future chapters as I remember her.

Author’s birth place, Pillar Street.

JESSE E. PETTEY, JUNIOR

During the early morning of January 29, 1924, a baby boy was delivered to proud parents in an ancient house in Nacogdoches, Texas. The old house, built in the last century, appeared fragile with age and incapable of withstanding any additional ravages of time and perhaps it could not, for it no longer exists. It was located on Pillar Street, just around the corner from the Oak Grove Cemetery, where four signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence are buried: Thomas J. Rusk, Charles S. Taylor, John S. Roberts, and William Clark. The first Secretary of War of the Republic of Texas, a Texas Chief Justice, and two veterans of the Battle of San Jacinto are also interred there. Doctor W.I.M. Smith assisted the birth of the first son of Jesse Pettey Sr., then age twenty-six and Maude Graybill Jeffries Pettey, age twenty-three. It was a momentous time for my parents, and to celebrate my birth, they named me, Jesse E. Pettey Junior, in honor of my father. Many years later, while serving in the Army Air Corps, I never revealing that I was called Junior back home and introduced myself as Jess. I intensely disliked the name, Junior, but it was a frequently used name at that time.

Children born a few years on either side of 1920 became the war generation of World War II. Nearly all lived with ebullience and a disregard for the dangers ahead. Perhaps they understood that because of the war, many would be injured and would not live beyond their teens or early twenties. Helping their parents struggle through the depression, seeing deprivation around them, and later being subjected to military discipline combined to mature this generation at an early age. The depression also instilled an ethos of hard work, generosity, and honesty in them.

The unrestrained economic growth during the 1920s suddenly ended with the stock market crash of 1929, but until then, it was a decade of unparalleled prosperity. Vice-President Calvin Coolidge completed President Hardin’s term of office at his death in 1923, inheriting a corrupt administration, but at the same time inheriting a period of speedy industrial growth, high profits, and a rising stock market. Upon his presidential election in 1924, he began to rid the administration of corruption and adopted a hands off policy of government called, Coolidge Prosperity. The national debt was reduced, taxes were lowered time after time, and high employment from restricted immigration laws contributed to an overall rising standard of living for most Americans. Roads were built; houses equipped with plumbing and electricity; skyscrapers such as the Empire State Building in New York City were built; women gained suffrage with the 19th amendment, but another amendment, banning the sale of alcohol, fueled government corruption and crime in the larger cities. It was also a decade of advancements in aviation beginning with an around-the-world flight sponsored by the U.S. Army in 1924, the year of my birth. The same year Delta Air Lines was born as a crop dusting enterprise and three years later, Lindbergh flew nonstop to Europe in 1927.

Despite the national prosperity of the 1920s, poverty seemed to overcome the five thousand or so people residing in Nacogdoches County. At the time of my birth until the 1940s, Nacogdoches commerce consisted mostly of cotton farming, although some diversified their crops with corn, ribbon cane, watermelons and peanuts. Farmers were forced to sell their products at low prices and to buy their other products at high prices. Their problems only worsened during the next decade with the arrival of the Depression. Indeed, poverty was a way of life in the decades of the 1920s and 1930s in Nacogdoches.

EARLY MEMORIES

MY FIRST AWARENESS began at two years of age. I remember residing with my parents in a large house on West Main Street at the foot of Irion Hill. Main Street in Nacogdoches begins and ends with hills. Irion Hill, named after an early doctor, lies to the west of Nacogdoches, while to the east of the city, Main Street steeply ascends Orton Hill, another precipitous hill named after a former sheriff. The city nestles between the two hills, and, because of its location, the city has witnessed many automobile and truck accidents over the years as drivers, without brakes, plunged headlong into the city from the hills above. In addition to brakes being poorly constructed compared to brakes today, most roads were unpaved and poorly maintained.

My parents owned a Model T Ford with a canvas top. Model Ts were cheap, easy to repair, had only a few simple controls, and were slow. People would say, All you need is a pair of pliers and a piece of bailing wire to keep a model T running. Once, while driving our Model T to a food store at the top of Irion Hill, my mother lost control of the car causing me to hurtle forward onto the dashboard and injure my forehead when the car suddenly stopped in a ditch. There were no safety belts at that time. Somehow, she managed to reach the store and seek help from the owner who wiped the blood from my face, applied a disinfectant, and placed a bandage over the wound. I, like most twoyear-old children, fiercely resisted him screaming and crying until he said,

You look like a grown man with that bandage.

Immediately I ceased my resistance and began to envision a grown man with a bandaged head. I was so proud of the bandage that I would not let my mother remove it for several days—maybe longer. It is said that we have no memories before the age of four unless we experience a traumatic event. This was indeed a traumatic experience and created a vivid memory of an event that occurred when I was two years old. It also provided a permanent scar on my forehead that, to this day, has been a constant reminder of the event.

.  .  .

It was 1927 when my father began constructing a house on an isolated road south of Nacogdoches. It was a short sandy road, replete with thick forests on both sides and a pristine, magical, wondrous road for a young boy to explore. I was free to roam about the countryside with few automobiles and strangers for my mother to worry about. The Locke family lived at the opposite end of the road from our house and had at one time owned all the property along the road. They named the street Jack Locke Street after their only son, Jack who was a few years older than I was. A room in the Locke home was set aside for Jack’s hobbies and was filled with model airplanes he had built—an activity requiring patience and skills that I respected. It was a virtual museum of airplanes. Models were hung from the ceiling and aircraft paintings covering the walls; it attracted every boy within walking distance. Jack was the only child of a middle-aged couple who gave him everything he desired. Even so, he was shy, withdrawn, and alone most of the time until his life was tragically terminated at a young age in a tragic automobile accident.

My father constructed the first house to appear on Jack Locke Street but it was destroyed by fire only a few years after we moved into it. We were forced to move into a rented house located in the same neighborhood and conveniently near the destroyed house so that my father could reconstruct it when he was not carrying out the duties of his job. The house was expanded by adding a separate dining room and upgraded with beautiful hardwood floors. I was proud of the new home and considered it better than any other houses in the neighborhood or the homes of my friends. In the evenings, my musical friends and I would gather in our new home to emulate famous bands of the day by playing our whining, moaning musical instruments. Our unwelcome sounds were significantly amplified on tranquil evenings as they traveled great distances to distant neighbors lounging on their front porches seeking relief from the heat. I am sure most of them were puzzled or maybe even horrified when their calm, peaceful evenings were shattered by such peculair sounds.

It was in this house that I endured difficult pubescent years; yet, I also discovered modest talents and capabilities that would give me much pleasure later in life. The house on Jack Locke Street sheltered me at a time when I was learning the power of choice, of independence, of freedom, the beauty of music, the mysteries of nature and the exhilaration of living. While living there,