Bountiful: the Memoirs of Charles E. McNeil

Bountiful: the Memoirs of Charles E. McNeil

by Charles E. McNeil
with Eugene LeVert

 

Chapter One

 

Eighty miles northeast of Mobile, in the cotton country of Monroe County, there was a little settlement where a Baptist minister named James Jones built a home and a sawmill in 1888.  From his sawmill came the lumber that built a few homes and the first store of the hamlet known as Jones Mill.  When the FriscoRailroad came through, a station-stop was built beside the mill and the little hamlet began to grow into a town they called Frisco City.

Frisco City was essentially one main street in 1921, the year I was born.  That street was an unpaved road lined with stores built of wood or brick, one block from the railroad station.  One of those stores bore the sign O. McNeil’s General Merchandise and Plantation Supplies.  “O” was for “Oscar,” my father’s first name.  This was his store.  In it he stocked everything the town needed: food, clothing, shoes, hardware, tin, roofing, fencing, pliers, rope.  Everything.

Daddy was a real, real fine merchant and a fine gentleman.  He had beautiful skin, almost pink it was so pretty.  I never recall him leaving the house to go to work without a vest and coat and tie — and a hat on.  Every time he left home he was completely dressed.  He was that way his whole life.  Daddy didn’t do anything but work.  He just worked all time.  His father had been a farmer.  From him he learned how to work hard, how to save, no matter what.  Daddy had only a third-grade education.

During the Great Depression, friends or farmers would come into the store, needing food or clothing or supplies, which they’d have to charge, and some would run up big debts.  Sometimes Daddy would take mortgages on their places.  He gave these back when folks couldn’t pay them off.  He always said that if they didn’t have any means to pay a mortgage, they didn’t have any means to make a living, so he couldn’t take their property.  After the Depression, he ended up with books that held thousands and thousands of dollars in debts he simply canceled.  More often, though, he found a way to work things out.

My father was a very good businessman.  With the profit he made fromhis store, he put together three parcels of land amounting to 150 acres.  He would furnish the seed and the fertilizer.  He would let sharecroppers furnish the labor.  They’d raise cotton and corn and share the proceeds.  Profits from this allowed Daddy to build and rent out two other stores in Frisco City.  That’s how he supported a wife and five children.  That’s how he put us children through college.

My mother ran the household, of course.  She oversaw meals with the help of a cook named Mamie Smith, who lived right back of our house.  Mama also had a servant named Lucy Green who helped her with the washing and cleaning.  Mama was an excellent seamstress.  She had a sewing machine, and made button-up shirts for us boys and all of my sister’s dresses.  In those days, little girls wore dresses cut below the knee with a big ribbon around the waist.  Mama would get patterns and material from Daddy’s store and make every kind of dress you could imagine.  She tied ribbons in my sister’s wavy hair.

I was the youngest of four boys, born October 2, 1921.  My oldest brother, Leighton, was about ten years older than I was.  The next oldest, Felix, was three or four years younger than Leighton.  Then came John Albert, three or four years younger than Felix.  My sister, Margaret, was two years younger than I.  She was petite and very pretty.  We all called her “Sister.”  She and I were very close.  We did everything together, growing up.  When we were older, Mama wouldn’t let Sister go on a date unless I went along.  On Sunday afternoons, Sister and I would drive in the car, visiting her friends or my friends, but we’d always be together.  On Sunday afternoons, we’d drive over to the picture show in Monroeville, five miles away.  But I’m getting ahead of myself — I’ll come back to this later.

I don’t remember my father’s father.  Although we’ve traced the McNeil family all the way back to Scotland, to a castle called “Barra,” and we thought we know the American McNeils came down out of the Carolinas, I never knew my granddaddy McNeil.  I suppose he had died by the time I came along.  I do remember going to visit my mother’s father, though.  His name was John White.  He traded mules and horses at what they called “The Ridge,” up in the northern part of Monroe County, between Monroeville and Peterman.  He had a pomegranate tree in his front yard.  When we’d go visit, my sister and I would pick pomegranates from that tree and get red juice all over us.

If you go through Frisco City today, you’ll find it’s about the same size that it was eighty years ago.  The stores along the main street have changed, and that street is paved, but it’s still a small town surrounded by cotton fields and corn fields and pasture land.  At the edge of town on Highway 21, headed toward Monroeville, is what used to be Lawyer McGinney’s house.  Next to that is the old McWilliams place.  J. J. McWilliams and his wife were my parents’ closest friends when I was growing up.  We children called Mr. McWilliams “Cousin J. J.” and his wife “Cousin Maude,” though of course they weren’t our cousins.  Before my father built his own store, he and Mr. McWilliams had owned a store together.  They built it in the early 1900s, a big two-story wooden structure that later burned.  Once a week, the McWilliams would come over to our house and play Rook.  Cousin J. J. and Daddy played against Cousin Maude and Mama.  They had some spirited games.

We lived next door to the McWilliamses.  My father told me that he contracted to have our house and picket fence built for eleven hundred dollars, complete.  The original house had three bedrooms, a living room, dining room, kitchen, and front and back porches.  Later on he added a bathroom and two sleeping porches.  On the back of the house was the boys’ sleeping porch.  It had sixteen windows in it, and one of its walls adjoined my mother’s and father’s sleeping porch, which was located on the side of the house.  Their porch had twelve windows in it.  These windows kept us cool in the long summers and warm autumns.  There was a grove of oak trees in front of the house, and oak trees and pecan trees around the house for shade.  There were rose bushes and shrubs in the yard.  Later, Daddy added a concrete walkway from the front porch steps to the street.

In the days when I was a child, we didn’t have a big green lawn.  The yard was packed dirt, like all yards at that time.  The leaves were swept out with a broom made from the branches of a mulberry bush.  Years later, after they’d developed grasses that would grow under trees, such as zoysia grass, my father went to buy some at Auburn University.  He planted it in the side yard under some pecan trees and it grew beautifully.

We used the sleeping porches year round.  We had open fireplaces for heat.  In the morning, Daddy would knock on the sleeping porch wall to wake me up.  My job was to get up and build the fire.  That’s the way the mornings would start, just before daylight:  knocking on the side of the wall, “Charlie Boy, get up!”  I’d get up and go in the sitting room to build a fire in the fireplace.  The sitting room was right beside my parents’ sleeping porch.  We used coal for heating in those days.  The coal would come in big lumps.  I’d go outside to the coal pile, take an axe and use the blunt end to break the pieces up, then put the coal in a pail and take it in.  I’d use ‘fat’ wood, heart of pine — “lighter” we called it — to start the fire.

Mamie would have some coffee going shortly.  For breakfast she usually fixed us biscuits and grits and eggs.  And sausage.  We killed hogs for the sausage, stored it in a smokehouse in the yard.  Usually it was patty sausage, hand-ground.  The patties were stored in a clay urn, layer on layer, precooked, with grease poured over them to seal them and preserve them.  You could keep sausages this way for months.  In the morning Mamie would dip those sausages out and reheat them.  The house smelled so good.

I think I was Daddy’s favorite.  I was just real close to him. Until I was twelve years old and moved to the boys’ sleeping porch, I slept with him.  At the table, he would seat me at the head, and he would sit to my right.  The rest of my brothers would sit around the table on the side.  Mama and Sister would usually serve the food.  After the men had been served, they would sit down to eat.  That was the custom in those days.  It was also the custom to refer to the meals of the day as breakfast, dinner, and supper — not breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

I sat beside my father in church, the First Baptist Church.  His favorite hymn was “The Old Rugged Cross.”  He didn’t have the best voice in the world, but he loved to sing that hymn and I think he did it quite well.  He taught me to sing it along with him.  My family always went to Sunday school and church.  On Wednesday nights we attended the prayer meeting.  My brothers and sister and I belonged to the Baptist Young People’s Christian Union.  The church, the faith, was just central to our family life.  And we were a very, very close family.

Daddy and Mr. McWilliams were both very active in the building of the First Baptist Church of Frisco City.  For as long as I can remember, Daddy served as a deacon, as did Mr. McWilliams.  In the old days, a preacher often needed another job besides his ministry to support himself.  On Mondays, Daddy would walk on one side of the street and Mr. McWilliams would walk on the other side, and they’d collect from all the businesses fifty cents, or a dollar, or two dollars — whatever they could collect —  to pay the preacher.  Whatever church expenses there were beyond the collection, Daddy and Mr. McWilliams would make up the difference.

The main congregations in town were Baptist and Methodist.  Mrs. McWilliams, incidentally, belonged to the Methodist Church.  I don’t recall any Catholic families.  There was one Jewish family named Lewis.  Mr. Lewis was a merchant who rented one of my father’s stores.  I forget what his business was, but I recall a lot of hats in his store.  Anyway, the Lewis family attended the First Baptist Church.  They were members of our church.

For dinner on Sundays Mamie would fix fried chicken and mashed potatoes and fresh vegetables.  We had a large garden.  Daddy saw to the planting of it and Mamie’s husband, I think, helped tend it.  We grew corn, okra, tomatoes, purple hull peas, climbing beans, butter beans.  We kept our own chickens, too.  The coop was out behind the house.  A lot of times it was my chore to catch the chicken and wring its neck.  You had to be careful after you’d wrung the hen’s neck because, when you flung her down on the ground, she’d flop around spewing blood and it could get all over you.  Doesn’t sound pleasant, does it?  I’d give the hen to Mamie, who would  dip her in some hot water, then begin picking the feathers off.

I loved fried chicken and mashed potatoes.  But I did not eat okra.  I did not eat okra because my father didn’t eat okra.  If he didn’t eat anything, I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to eat it.  But the rest of the family liked it.  Daddy just didn’t and I didn’t either.

For dessert, Mamie often made pies with lots of meringue.  Or we’d have vanilla ice cream that she had hand-cranked.  When we didn’t have desserts, there were always sweets on the table.  There were delicious preserves because we had pear trees and fig trees.  When I remember Mama sitting on the back porch, peeling pears for preserves, I recall how she’d wrap her finger with a little piece of cloth to keep it from blistering.  There was honey and syrup on the table.  We also had blackberry or mayhaw jelly.  When the mayhaw berries were ripe, we’d gather them by spreading a sheet beneath the tree and shaking the berries down onto the sheet.

After Sunday dinner, I’d run out with the boys my age to play in the woods below Frisco City.  I’d call a couple of the Sims boys who lived across the street — Jack, or Johnny Mack — and off we’d go. We’d play cowboys and Indians, or we’d build a fort and defend it by throwing dirt clods.  There was a lot of sandy clay in those beautiful woods.  We had the run of them.  In the springs and summers and way into fall we ran barefooted. We never gave a second thought to snakes or anything else.  There was nothing much to worry about.

In the 1920s, the world was vastly different from today.  Remember Mr. Jones’s mill?  I think our town grew up around it because there you could gin cotton, mill corn, and saw timber.  Those were essential things for trade, for food, for building — essential things for the life of any Southern town.  And until the railway went by that mill, Frisco City was an island of self-sufficiency, as were most towns in America back then.

When I was a boy, the mill still ran on steam, the same thing that ran the first trains across the nation, rolling north and south, connecting east and west.  Mr. Jones had an old boiler in one corner of the mill yard, fed by an open fire.  The boiler piped steam to a piston engine nearby.  I suppose this simple design let him keep any trouble with the boiler from spreading to the engine.  You wouldn’t want both of them blowing up!  On the engine was a flywheel.  Mr. Jones would run a canvas-reinforced rubber belt from that flywheel to his three operations in the several corners of the yard.  He would hook that belt to the cotton gin if he was ginning.  He’d hook it to the sawblade if he was cutting wood.  He’d hook it to the gristmill if he was grinding corn.

At the gristmill, I remember, you would pour corn into a big hopper at the top and it would flow down to these big stone wheels that went grinding ‘round and ‘round against each other and flow on down into sacks at the bottom.  There was a rig that let you calibrate some fraction of an inch between those wheels to get the grind you wanted on your corn — wider would make grits, closer would make meal.  The wheels would heat up with the corn they were grinding.  I remember how good that corn smelled as it was being ground, so warm and so fresh!

This is the world I was born into.  It was a simple world, a simple time.  It happened that the train that shipped cotton and hardware into my father’s store would eventually ship me off to the Midwest to train as a pilot.  I would go to war.  And I would be lucky enough to come home to a woman who loved me and raise a family.

It is hard to think of so many things at once but my life has been blessed.  I want to think about a few things at a time in these pages.  When things are simple, their outlines plain, you can see them very clearly.

 

Chapter Two

 

Let me tell you about Christmas to show how simple those times were.  Before electricity came to town, I recall the stores of Frisco City decorated with bows.  I do not remember Christmas trees or Christmas stockings at home.  On Christmas Eve, Mama and Daddy would put a crate beside the fireplace — an orange crate or an apple crate — for Santa to put our presents in.  Christmas morning we’d wake to find that Santa had brought us an orange or an apple and maybe some walnuts.  Also an item of clothing.  And a toy.  Not toys, mind you: a toy.

For clothing, you might get a cap or overalls.  In those days boys wore overalls and caps all the time.  Railroad caps were popular.  They were made of heavy striped canvas.  As for the toy, I think Santa might have given me my first pocketknife.

Boys always carried a pocketknife.  We liked to whittle.  One of the best whittlers I knew was my cousin Louis Mason.  On the way to school in the morning, he’d cut a limb off a bush, a limb maybe an inch in diameter.  He’d work on that limb during the day, sitting in class, and when we’d walk home in the afternoon, he would hand it to me.  It would be a wooden chain.  And inside each of the little links of that chain would be a tiny ball that he’d whittled out.

We whittled our own tops.  You would take a small block of wood and drive a nail into the center of it to make the pivot.  Then you’d start whittling around on it and when you got it the right size, you’d start rounding it off, tapering it down toward the pivot.  This would take a day or two.  Then you’d make a notch at the top of the cone, where you anchored the string, so that the top would have a quick release when you threw it.  You’d tie a knot in one end of your string, to go into that notch, and you’d tie a washer on the other end, to slip between your fingers, to anchor the string in your hand.  Then you could let ‘er rip.

When we  played tops, we’d find a patch of hard-packed dirt and draw a ring on the ground.  That’s where you and your opponent fought it out.  The winner would be the one whose top spun longest inside that circle.  But there was some strategy to the game.  When you threw your top, you tried to throw it so that it would bust a piece off your opponent’s top, or even split it.  I often played a boy named Earl Sawyer who busted my tops all the time.  He was good!

I remember my brothers getting in a fight one time over tops.  One of them had busted the other’s top and made him angry.   Felix wound up swinging the washer-end of his string at John Albert and hitting him in the forehead.  It cut him quite severely.  Blood went splattering all over his face.  I recall being scared when I saw all that blood.  I vividly remember that — it was just a horrible thing for me.  Well, Mama got John Albert quieted down, and Mamie cleaned the wound with kerosene.  She tore up a clean rag and tied it for a bandage around John Albert’s head.  He wore a cap over it for a couple of days.

As long as the weather was warm we went barefoot.  From the spring into the fall.  Except for Sundays, of course.  Dress shoes on Sundays.  We got our dress shoes from Daddy’s store.  The best pairs went for $4.50 or $5.00 a pair, I think.  We also got our everyday shoes from the store.  They were high-tops with thick soles, called brogans.  Daddy carried a line of them called Red Star made by the International Shoe Company.

When I was little, I had a little shoeshine stand outside Daddy’s store.  Mama gave me a cloth and Daddy gave me a brush, a can of black polish, a can of brown polish, and I’d shine shoes on Saturdays — a nickel a shine.  I think I bought candy with the money I made.  I liked jawbreakers.

At the first cold snap of winter, it was hog killing time.  Your neighbors would come by on hog killing days because butchering took a few hands.  The hogs had been fattened up.  They were quite large.  Somebody would shoot the hog through the ear with a small-caliber rifle, or knock it in the head with the blunt end of an axe.  Then the men would dip it down in a big barrel of scalding hot water to loosen the hair.  Once the hog was strung up, head down on a big wooden frame, they’d cut the throat and bleed the hog into a big bucket and scrape the hair off.  The lard was going to be cooked out of the skin, you see.  You also made cracklins out of the skin, so you’d have to scrape the hair off with a scraper and a stiff brush.  Next they would gut the hog.  They would take the intestines and run water through them with a hose to clean them out.  Then they would turn these entrails inside out before cutting them up to make chitlins.  Some of  the intestines they used as casings for link sausage.  They would cook those in cast-iron washpots out in the yard.  They would cut hams and hang them in the smokehouse.  Slabs of bacon too.  We didn’t save many pork chops.  We usually ground them up — the loins too, I think.  I believe all of that went into sausage.  You can imagine how rich that sausage was.

The smokehouse was very, very small.  It was vented on the sides and on the top.   Inside it had hooks to hang the bacon and ham.  In the middle was a metal bin where they put the hickory or pecan wood to cure the meat.  Once they started the fire, it would smolder twenty-four hours a day.  They just closed the door, went off and left it.  Some of the help tended the fire.  Once the meat was cured, we’d keep it in the smokehouse through the winter.  That’s where we stored the urns of patty sausage too.

One of the wintertime chores I did not like was milking the cow.  We kept our own cow for milk and cream, of course.  I think Daddy was the first man in that part of the world to buy a good-blooded milk cow that would produce enough milk so that we could sell some.  It was a fine animal.  It made all the butter and all the milk you could ever need.  But I didn’t like  milking that cow in the wintertime.  Your hands got very cold because you had to wash the udder off and dry it before you milked.  I suppose the cold water was hard on the old cow, too!  You’d sit on a stool with the pail positioned between your legs and under the udder.  You would catch a teat with your thumb crooked down, catch it between your four fingers and your thumb.  Then you’d run your hand down the teat.  All you were doing was just squeezing between your forefingers and your thumb, squeezing the milk out, and it went into the pail,  zoo, zoo, zoo….   Slow, patient work with cold hands in the winter time.

You had to strain the milk after you finished.  You were milking in a barn, and the cow was always swooshing her tail around, sometimes stamping her feet, so things would get into the bucket with the milk.  You strained the milk through a cloth when you poured it into pitchers.  It was beautiful milk, silky, pearly white.  You’d let the milk sit in the pitchers and the cream would rise to the top.  You would skim that off into a churn for making buttermilk.  The clots of buttermilk you’d put into a press to squeeze into cakes of butter.  When the older milk turned to clabber, you could pour the clabber into a cheesecloth and hang it on the clothesline to drip.  That’s how you made cream cheese.  It was delicious to put sugar and sweet cream over fresh cream cheese!  Another snack I loved was to take fresh cream and pour it in a plate with some syrup and put a piece of fresh bread in it: that was good.

We kept the milk and cream in an icebox — the non-electric kind where you put ice in the top of it yourself.  It was a big block, twenty-five or more pounds.  Daddy would get it from the icehouse down the street.  I think they used a diesel engine to power the icehouse.

We didn’t keep meat in the summertime.  Without electricity there was no way.  We had one man in town who would butcher beef.  He would butcher a calf and put it on a wagon that was screened to keep the flies off.  Since there was no refrigeration, he had to sell all the meat that morning, right after he butchered it.  He’d start at one end of the street and go all the way to the other end, passing by the houses, ringing a bell.  You’d come out to see what you wanted and bargain for it.

I remember Mama asking Daddy for some money for meat one day.  “How much?” he said.  She said, “I need thirty-five cents to buy,” and he said, “I don’t have thirty-five cents.”  “Well, I’ve got to have some meat,” she said, because she had seven of us to feed, plus our two servants.  Thirty-five cents would buy a lot of meat in those days.

Before noon that day, the meat was in a big pot stewing with potatoes.  I don’t know where Mama got the money, but she got it.

Another thing sold off the street in those days was aluminum cookware.  The vendors would come by and ask to hold a cooking session in your kitchen to demonstrate their pots and pans.  They’d ask the lady of the house to invite her neighbors for a big cooking demonstration.  I think I still have a piece of aluminum that I must have gotten from my mama after one of those cooking sessions.  A heavy, heavy aluminum pan, deep and wide and long.

We hunted game to put on the table.  In those days, hunting was for food, not sport.  My brother Felix hunted squirrels all the time.  He had a little feist-dog he used for squirrel hunting.  He loved to go squirrel hunting.  He would go out by himself and he’d come back with eighteen or twenty squirrels.  Mamie would brown them, then put them in a pot of water to simmer, cook down.  She’d add flour to make gravy and serve the squirrels with grits.

I suppose I was seven or eight years old when I learned to hunt.  I started hunting rabbits with an air rifle.  I’d go with one of the boys in the neighborhood and we’d walk through the fields till we scared up a rabbit.  When I was a little older, Felix taught me more serious hunting.  He taught me more than Daddy did because Daddy was always working.  Besides squirrels or rabbits, we hunted quail and dove.  There were an awful lot of doves.  The Middletons had a big field right back of us and we’d take a number-three sized wash tub out there and we’d shoot so many we could fill up that tub. Mama would have Mamie fry up the breasts and serve them smothered in gravy.

We ate a lot of chicken and fish in the summertime.  I remember going down to the Alabama River with Daddy.  Sometimes there would be Sunday afternoon fish fries right on the riverbanks near Claiborne.  They’d have a big pot of grease boiling on a fire.  They’d have wooden tables spread out on sawhorses looked like as far as you could see.  Bottles of ketchup and light bread on every table.  It looked like the whole countryside would be there, people from town and all over.  They would have these long, round nets, big as a room, that they’d stretch out in the river.  And they’d haul them up on the banks with these big ropes, and the nets would be full of catfish four or five feet long.  Big ol’ catfish.  They’d cut them up and fry them in the pot with hushpuppies.  I was quite small then.  I was interested in running around, playing with all the other children.  When we stopped to eat, we had all we could eat.  You’d put the fresh-fried catfish on light bread with some ketchup — delicious sandwiches!

We didn’t swim in the river.  It was too fast, too dangerous.  I learned to swim, to dog-paddle, in Escambia Creek.  It was clear and cold.  In one spot along the clay banks where there was a tangle of tree roots, you’d sometimes see water moccasins, but I don’t remember ever having any trouble with them.  Boys and girls didn’t swim together there because you just dropped your overalls and jumped in — went skinny dipping.  If some mean boy was standing on the bank, you yelled at him, called him a “bank walker,” and he would try to throw mud on you.  When you were done swimming, you just put your overalls back on.  By the time you got home, you were dry.

When we were children we were always sure to be home before dark.  One time, though, I wasn’t.  That was the one time I remember my father whipping me.  I must’ve been eight or nine years old.  It was during the late summer because we were through picking and ginning the cotton and the bales were stacked down by the tracks at the railroad station.  My friends and I had been playing hide and seek, or catch, or tag around the cotton bales.  I played a little too long.  Daddy’s instructions were to be home before dark.  I had played till after dark.  When I realized how late it was, I ran all the way home — down the dirt road, barefooted, maybe a quarter of a mile.  When I ran in the front door, I knew I was in trouble.  There was my father, walking up and down the living room, waiting for me.  He said, “Do you realize what time it is?”  Then he wore me out real good — strapping me with a belt, holding onto one arm, and spanking me with the other.  It wasn’t cruel.  Just to remind me that I made a mistake.  He just said, “You worried me and you worried your mother and don’t you ever do this again.”   I was never late again either.

I never recall my father getting angry or raising his voice.  Never.  He had a younger brother named Gus, a strong man.  I think he left all the roughness to his brother Gus.  He loved us children.  He did not show his emotions in an overly demonstrative way, but he loved us children more than anything in the world.

When electricity came, Daddy bought a radio.  After he closed up the store in the evening, he would come home, and we would gather around the radio to listen to two programs: Fu Manchu and Death Valley Days.  Fu Manchu was a mystery program with a Chinese character.  It was scary sometimes.  “The Twenty-Mule Team Borax Show” had stories with a Western theme.  We looked forward to Daddy coming home and gathering around the radio for those two programs.

We had music in the house before radio, though.  Daddy liked music so he bought a player piano.  It came with cartons and cartons of rolled-up music.  You put the music into the piano and pedaled it and it played.  We took turns pedaling it.  We played that piano constantly.

My sister took piano lessons.  Mama wanted me to, but I thought that would be a sissy thing to do.  In those days men didn’t play the piano.  My mother didn’t insist on piano lessons for me, but she wanted me to play some sort of musical instrument, so I tried playing the trumpet.  I was about eight or nine years old, I guess, when Mama and Daddy ordered me this trumpet.  It was quite a fine instrument, but I never got the hang of it.  Blowing it hurt my lips.  I suppose I was not musically inclined.

In the fall there would be square dances in Frisco City.  The crops would be in, the air cool, and everyone was feeling festive.  The whole town would turn out.  People from around the countryside would come.  They’d have a caller and three or four fiddlers.  They’d gather to dance in one of the vacant buildings downtown.  I remember they would sprinkle cornmeal on the wooden floor to make it slide better because people liked to shuffle their feet when they danced.  The caller would call out “do-si-do,” and “swing your partner,” and with everyone dancing, the hall would get cloudy with corn dust.  It was fun to watch Mama and Daddy and all the adults dancing.

Vaudeville shows would also visit town from time to time.  They would set up a big tent that would hold a hundred people or more.  Inside there would be a wooden stage for the performers and rows of benches for the audience.  They’d charge probably ten or fifteen cents for admission.  I don’t remember the shows, but I remember the popcorn!

When the Ringling Brothers Circus came to Monroe Park in Mobile, Mama and Daddy would take us to see it.  That was quite an occasion. The circus was beautiful!  I remember watching the elephants pull up the enormous big-top tent.  I suppose it was the biggest structure I had ever seen.  There were wagons with iron-barred sides that held lions and tigers.  When the big show began, the elephants paraded into the tent holding each other’s tails.  We had a marvelous time at the circus.

When I began school, the early grades would meet two to a class — first and second grade together, third and fourth grade together.  The grammar school and high school were in one wooden building: grammar school on one side, high school on the other, connected by a big, long hall.  Between them was an auditorium where we would assemble to watch plays or participate in other programs.  There was a school band — not very big and not very good, I guess.

School was not far from our house — maybe three-quarters of a mile — so we walked there.  When Sister was school-aged, we’d walk together every day.  We carried our books in a canvas bag that would sling over the shoulder.  We’d run home to eat lunch.  The children who lived out from town would bring their lunches — biscuits, sausage, sweet potatoes, things like that.  There was no cafeteria.  No snacks.

If there was a discipline problem, the teacher would use a paddle to straighten it out.  Paddling for unruly behavior was a common practice in those days.  I never got into any trouble at school, though.  As the old saying goes, “If you got into trouble at school, you’d have more trouble at home.”  Daddy would not tolerate disruptive behavior.  Neither would Mama.

The only teacher I remember from grammar school was my fifth-grade schoolteacher, Mrs. Rutherford.  She was a strict disciplinarian and a very good teacher.  I liked being in her class.  She was a direct descendant of the Indian Rutherfords.  There was a famous chief in their family who jumped off the cliff into the Alabama River down at Perdue Hill in Claiborne.

I liked to read, although I wasn’t an A student.  I guess I made more C’s than anything else.  But I liked to read.  Some afternoons I’d come home and read rather than go out to play.  I liked histories and novels.  I liked Western stories, Zane Grey’s books.  Mama and Daddy bought a lot of books for the house.  I remember Daddy buying the Encyclopaedia Britannica to help us with our studies. It was a beautiful, extensive set of books.  Quite expensive too, as I recall.

I had a dog named Bozo who met me everyday when I’d come home from school.  He’d greet me and jump all over me.  He was brown and white, a beautiful dog.  I’d had him from as early as I could remember.  One afternoon, as I was about to walk across the road into our yard, Bozo ran right in front of Mr. Galloway’s truck.  Mr. Galloway owned the Nehi bottling company in town.  He was coming back from Monroeville and he ran over Bozo and killed him.  It happened right in front of me.  I remember crying, picking Bozo up out of the road, carrying him into the yard and calling for Mama.  She came out, tried to comfort me.  I guess Mamie took Bozo away from me, took him off to be buried.  I was maybe ten years old.  I was just devastated.  I was real upset and real sad for a long number of days.

The worst part about it, the thing I will never forget, is that Mr. Galloway never stopped.  He never stopped.  Until this day I will never forgive him.  He had a son named George Galloway.  And just because he was Mr. Galloway’s son, I didn’t like him.  I didn’t like anything to do with the Galloways from then on.

I never had another dog.

I got sick that summer. When I was little, sick with a cold or a bad congestion, Daddy used to fix me a hot toddy.  He made it with hot water, sugar, and whiskey — just a little bit of whiskey, maybe a third or fourth cup.  He didn’t buy “shinny” — boot-leg, white-lightning type stuff.  He kept bottled bourbon for medicinal purposes.  He kept it up over the top of the door in the closet.  But my problem that summer wasn’t something a hot toddy would fix.

Mama and Daddy noticed that my jaws and neck and face had become persistently swollen, so they took me to Mobile to find out what was wrong.  After the second trip, the doctors diagnosed my illness as Bright’s disease, a degenerative condition of the kidney.  They told my mother and father that they had no cure for it.  They said that I might as well go home to die.

Through some friends of his, Daddy called the two leading hospitals of the time — Johns Hopkins and the Mayo Clinic.  They confirmed the diagnosis made in Mobile.  They also confirmed that there was no known cure for this disease.  It was always fatal.  The prognosis was that my kidneys would deteriorate to the point that they would cause me to go into convulsions, then into a coma from which I would never wake up.

Now during the time that I was sick, everyone in Frisco City knew.  When I became bedridden, they closed the highway in front of the house.  They diverted traffic around the house, through some fields around some section lines, to keep the cars and trucks from making any noise going past.  Once I was bedridden and it became clear how sick I was, the little town of Frisco City would close up, every day at 11:00 a.m.  Every day.  The whole town.  The towns- people would go to the First Baptist Church and hold a prayer service for me.  I think that’s probably the reason I’m still here.  Later in the afternoon, they’d open businesses back up.

I don’t recall any pain.  I remember being puffed up, swollen.  When I did go into convulsions, Daddy didn’t know what else to do but let Doctor McMillan give me a mustard plaster.  McMillanwas an old doctor in Frisco City whose medical training dated from the reading he did during the Civil War.  I don’t know that he had a medical degree, but people called him doctor.  He told Daddy that he didn’t know anything else to do.  Modern medicine had no cure.  Doctor Stallworth, the main doctor in Frisco City, didn’t know what to do.  Doctor Segrist, one of the first urologists in Mobile, didn’t know what to do.  Perhaps a mustard plaster would help.  So they took a big ol’ wool blanket — an army blanket, World War I issue — and they put it in a washpot out back of the house.  When it got real hot and steamy, they put dry mustard on it, then rolled me in it and put me in the bed.

I remember being on Mama’s and Daddy’s sleeping porch, trying to look out the window, and asking Mama, “You see that bird going up on the curtain?  There it goes, up the curtain.  See it going up the curtain and down?”  She knew what was happening.  It was my sight going.  I went blind.

I don’t remember being afraid.  I had no knowledge of death.  Mama and Daddy were always there.  I don’t remember falling into a coma, but they said I was in a coma for three days. Mama said I just woke up one morning and told her I was hungry.  She knew then I was going to come through.  And I did.  I started coming back.  From then on, Dr. Segrist drove up from Mobile to see me.  He couldn’t explain it, but he did everything he could to help me recover.  He knew what he had diagnosed was right because the other medical institutions had the same information and they all diagnosed my illness as Bright’s disease.  Nobody had ever heard of a case ending as mine did.  The doctors had told my family exactly how the disease would progress.  Everything had happened as they said.  Exactly as they expected.  Only I wasn’t supposed to wake up and say, “I’m hungry.”

This was a miracle.  I’ve known several of them in my lifetime.

 

Chapter Three

 

As I’ve said, Daddy worked all the time.  But he would take off occasionally to take us to the beach, or sometimes to go fishing.  I recall our family taking a trip to Pensacola Beach when I was about five.  We stopped at a filling station to get gas and soft drinks and the family — six of the family, anyway —  got back in the car and left.  I don’t know if I was wandering around the store or what.  Why Mama and Daddy didn’t count heads, I don’t know.  But they pulled off and drove out of sight.  They left me.  Well, when I realized what had happened, I started hollering and screaming and trying to run after them.  One of the young men at the filling station grabbed a bicycle, put me on with him, and started pedaling as fast as he could, trying to catch up with the car.  My family met us coming on the bicycle. They hadn’t gone far before they missed me and turned around.  But they’d driven out of sight.  That scared me.

When I was older, Daddy would take us deep sea fishing down at Gulf Shores.  In those days, the blacktop ended at Foley and a dirt road ran the rest of the way to the Gulf.  You crossed a floating bridge at the intracoastal canal.  We’d leave very early in the morning, drive down, and charter a boat.  I recall one trip when we caught just an awful lot of Spanish mackerel — lots and lots and lots of Spanish.  We caught so much that I remember Daddy taking the back seat out of the car and strapping it to the top.  He put canvas down on the floorboard, covered that with pine straw, and laid the catch out on the pine straw and covered it with croaker sacks.  On the way home, we stopped in Foley and bought cracked ice to pour over the fish for the long drive back to Frisco City.  When we arrived, I remember Daddy parking the car in front of the store and walking up and down the street, telling people to come get them a mess of fish.  There was no way to keep all of it.  We had to give it away.

When I was twelve years old, I made my first trip out of the South.  I went up to Detroit, Michigan, with my father and Mr. Shivers.  Mr. Shivers owned the Plymouth-Chrysler-DeSoto dealership in Frisco City, right next to my father’s store.  He didn’t sell many Chryslers.  He sold some DeSotos.  Mostly he sold Plymouths.  This was during Depression when cars cost hundreds of dollars and came in one color — black.

We drove up there to buy cars with two other men.  In those days they didn’t have trucks that hauled cars to auto dealers.  So Mr. Shivers put us all in his car to drive straight through to Detroit, to buy the new cars at the factory.  We drove five cars back, convoy-fashion.  I drove right behind Daddy.

The roads were two-lane all the way north.  There was not much traffic.  We drove practically all day and most of the night.  I think we stopped one time to rest.  We did the same thing coming back.  I don’t remember much of Detroit.  Just that it was large and busy.  I don’t think I saw much of the city driving out because I was concentrating on staying behind my father.

You might be surprised — a twelve-year-old boy driving from Detroit to Frisco City.  But there were no driver’s licenses in those days.  And I had been driving since I was eight or nine.  My job was to wash the car and change the oil in it when Daddy told me to.  That’s when I would get in the car to drive it.  I would start it, put it in gear, and let the clutch out — we didn’t have automatic transmissions back then.  I’d let the clutch out real easy, then just let the car go on its own momentum.  I’d back the car out of the car house, wash or service it, then drive it back in. That’s how I learned to drive.

            Now I don’t remember if we took that trip to Detroit because of a cigarette, but we might have, because the story I’m about to relate happened around the same time as that trip with Mr. Shivers — 1932 or 1933.

            Daddy had promised me one evening in the early summer that he would take me fishing the next day.  I was really excited about that.  I believe we were going to drive down to the Alabama River.  Well, we’d gotten all our gear ready to go the night before.  The big morning came, and somebody started knocking on the sleeping porch door, calling for Daddy to wake up quick.  This woke me up too.  Excited voices outside.  I looked out to see smoke streaming from the car house — that’s what we called our garage.  Daddy went running out there and when he opened the door to the car house, that let in enough fresh air to cause the smoldering car to burst into flames.  My fishing trip went up in smoke right then.

Leighton had been out driving on a date the previous evening.  Someone had been smoking in the car, apparently, and had left a cigarette burning on the wool seat.  Leighton hadn’t noticed when he got home.  He put the car up in the car house and closed the door.

The car was a total loss, of course.  So was my fishing trip.

Later on in the thirties, Daddy would take us to vacation at Hot Springs, Arkansas.  We would go up for three weeks in June or July.  The trip would take us two days, going and coming.  We’d stay overnight at what was called a tourist court somewhere up in Mississippi or Louisiana.  Tourist courts were the motels of the time — a group of little cabins beside the highway.  The cabins were very sparsely furnished, two beds and a bathroom, no amenities.

In Hot Springs we would rent a house on the side of one of the mountains.  There was normally a twenty-one day series of baths at one of the big bathhouses, what we’d call “spas” today.  Mama suffered from arthritis.  Daddy thought the steam and the hot baths would do them both good.  On several occasions I took the baths with Daddy.  They put me in a big tub.  The water would come in real hot.

Usually though, when my mother and father were taking the baths, my brothers and sister and I would go to movies, or sit in on auctions at one of the many auction houses that lined the main street.  It was fun to watch people bidding on antique furniture, porcelain, silver, or jewelry.  Sometimes my mother and father would take us out to Lake Hamilton to go swimming with the other kids.

We’d return to Frisco City by August when the cotton was starting to get high.  In late August, early September, my brothers and I would head out to the fields to help pick it.  We didn’t have tractors or mechanical pickers in those days.  The adults did what they called “carry two rows at a time” — picking rows on either side as they walked, cotton bag over the shoulder.  I’d carry one row when I was a boy.  I got paid fifty cents a hundred pounds.  When you filled your sack, you carried it over to weigh it at the cotton house at the side of the field.  The cotton house was a shed with a tin roof, sided by rough-hewn lumber.  There were scales out front.  You’d weigh your cotton and somebody would note the weight on a tablet, then you dumped your cotton inside to keep it out of the weather.  From the cotton house they would load it on a mule-drawn wagon for transfer to the gin.

In those days Daddy kept mules for farming.  They were very docile animals.  Some of them were very well trained.  When you’d plow with them, you’d throw the reins over your shoulder while you were guiding the plow, and call “gee” to get the mule to move to the right, or “haw” to get him to go left.  If you were putting in crop, you had to keep the rows straight.  The trick to that was to lay down your first row just right, then plow the rest of them parallel.  Corn rows would be a little closer together than cotton rows.

As I got older, I worked every Saturday in the warehouse of my father’s store, where I’d help unload wagons of inventory for the store, or supplies that farmers had purchased.

My older brothers worked in the store until they went off to Marion Military Institute, then the University of Alabama.  Marion Institute — MI — was a very strict private military school, where Daddy sent Leighton and Felix and John Albert and me for our first two years of college.  Daddy was concerned that a high school education alone would not be enough to let you make it later on.  Felix could have gone on to college, but he wanted to stay and work in the store with Daddy.  And he wanted to hunt and fish when he wasn’t working.

My older brothers played football in high school.  I did, too.  I played guard on offense, and tackle on defense, but I was not first-string by any means.  I weighed only a hundred twenty-six pounds.  But our team was excellent.  They were called the Frisco City Whippets and still are, to this day.  The coach at that time was Coach Fisher.  A number of his varsity players received football scholarships.  I don’t recall cheerleaders.  We didn’t have stands at the field for games.  Fans and parents lined up on opposite sides of the field with their teams and followed the play up and down the sidelines. We’d take school buses to out-of-town games.  We played Jackson, Alabama, which was a long trip.  And Excel.  We played Uriah.  Once in awhile we played Atmore, which was also a long way — it was twenty-five miles.  I suppose Monroeville was our main rival.  They were the big town compared to ours.  I think the record between our teams was pretty even.

I wasn’t much for baseball because I wasn’t that good at catching.  I went out for baseball on the school team one time.  We were at practice, and this fellow was swinging a bat, walking along, swinging, and he hit me in the back of the head.  I thought, “That’s enough of that.”  There went my baseball career.

I didn’t do any serious dating in high school.  I recall dating a girl from Atmore and a girl from Monroeville.  When Sister and I would go out socializing on Sunday evening, we’d usually drive over to Monroeville, about five miles away, because that’s where the movie house was. We’d go to a drugstore that had a soda fountain.  I don’t recall any jukebox.  Later on, we’d go down below Uriah to the state park and go swimming there in the lake.

Now Sister met the man she would marry on one of our summer trips to Hot Springs, Arkansas.  This was before I went to MI.  In the summer of ’35 or ’36 our family became friends with the McLemore family.  They were from Louisiana.  They had two sons.  Both of them fell in love with my sister when they met her.  We had a home up on the side of the mountain and they had a home just below us and we could hear the boys arguing over who was going to have a date with my sister.  I suppose they must have taken turns dating her while we were on vacation.  When it came time to leave Hot Springs, the McLemores invited my family to come through Louisiana on our way home, to a little town called Winnsboro where they lived.  So we did.  We went through there and stayed with them.  The McLemores owned a hotel and quite a bit of land, about three thousand acres, including a hunting preserve.  They also owned the Piggly-Wiggly chain of stores in Louisiana, up in Winnsboro and Monroe.  They owned a wholesale grocery company also.  After that visit, the brother named Quentin was the one who proved he was really in love with my sister.  He would drive from Louisiana to Alabama to court her on a regular basis.  He was determined he was going to marry my sister just as soon as she got out of high school.  And he did.

Their wedding was in June of 1942 at the First Baptist Church in Frisco City.  I was home from the University of Alabama.  We all doted on Sister and though we were very happy for her, we were a little sad that she was going to move all the way to Louisiana to live on the McLemore farm.

She and Quentin raised six children in their beautiful lakeside home.  Margaret looked after her family just as she had looked after all of us.  She waited on them as she had waited on us.  She was very religious.  She took an active part in church work.  She was a very precious, saintly woman.  She was so well loved and doing so much good.  Why did she have to die so young?  She was in her mid-forties when she passed away.  The cause was some kind of complication associated with a surgical procedure.  You don’t ever question God, but I don’t know why she had to die so young.

Chapter Four

 

In the late summer of 1939 Mama and Daddy drove me and a big trunk to Marion Military Institute.  Packed in that trunk were the uniforms that were going to be my daily dress from then on.  I was going to begin my freshman year of college as a cadet a hundred and twelve miles from home.

MI was highly regarded as a junior college.  Since its founding in 1887, several generations of young men had been educated there before winning appointments to West Point or Annapolis, or going on to university elsewhere.  As I mentioned, my brothers had gone to school there before me.  Now it was my turn.

I was excited because my world was about to get bigger.  My graduating class at Frisco City High was twenty-six people.  Now I was going to join several hundred young men in the corps of cadets.  I was excited, but I was also a little anxious because I had never been apart from my family before.

I remember checking in at the administration office where I got my room assignment in South Barracks.  I remember Daddy helping me carry my trunk upstairs to put it at the foot of my bunk.  I remember going back downstairs and Mama and Daddy telling me goodbye.  And the whole time this awareness was coming over me that they were really going to get in the car and drive away.  I wouldn’t see them for a long time.

Suddenly my parents were driving off and I was standing there alone.  I watched them drive past the chapel and the administrative building.  I watched them head out the long drive past the drill field at the front of the campus.  I watched them turn and drive slowly along the main street.  I watched them through tears that just wouldn’t stop.

I knew they were going to have to make one more turn and pass back by South Barracks before they took the highway to Frisco City.  So I ran.  Crying the whole time, I ran around the barracks to wave to them as they drove out of sight.  Mama waved, but Daddy didn’t.  He didn’t look right or left.  I suppose it was as hard on him as it was on me.

In a little while I collected myself and went up to my room.  Most rooms accommodated only two cadets, but the rooms at either end of the barracks were big enough for three cadets.  I was lucky enough to have one of these.  I believe it was the same room my older brothers had been assigned.  I put on my uniform and waited for my roommates to arrive.  They were Jack Robertson from Bay Minette and Ugi Jernigan from Brewton.  Ugi’s real name was John.  He would become our company commander.  They had older brothers who had attended MI before them, too.

In a little while a bugle sounded from the quadrangle between the North and South Barracks.  We formed into companies and were given instructions to live by: what time reveille was in the morning, taps in the evening; how many minutes you’d have to get up, dress-out for exercise; how long you’d exercise; how much time you’d have to get back to barracks for a shower, get dressed, fall out for breakfast.  You marched to meals, you marched to classes, you marched everywhere you went.  Everything was scheduled.  Classes began at eight and ran till three.  In the afternoons you had athletics or drill.  In the evenings there were study hours, patrolled by upper classmen.  Before taps was blown in the evening for lights out, there was a bugle blown for “pee call” that let you take a study break to go to the latrine.  I didn’t mind the regimentation.  In fact, I enjoyed it.  The training proved valuable to me later on.

I went out for football during my first semester.  My mother and father came up for the Homecoming festivities, which included a big game, I think with Livingston State.  Now I hadn’t told them that I was playing football.  I don’t remember how I’d got around telling them.  Earlier in the day, they’d seen me pass in review with the corps of cadets in a big ceremony on the drill field.  There were other Homecoming-related events besides the football game.  I forget why it was they attended the game without expecting me to sit with them.  Maybe it was because all of the cadets were supposed to be sitting together in separate stands.

Anyway, I got knocked out in the first quarter of the football game.  I tried to tackle this big old boy who put a knee into my head.  In those days we wore leather helmets that weren’t really much protection.  This boy stunned me on the tackle.  I had to be carted off the field.  Well, Mama and Daddy were studying the situation, and Mama kept looking, and said, “ I believe that’s Charlie they just carried off.”  That’s how they learned I was playing football.  We had a little conversation after the game.  I was told that I was at MI to study, not to play football.  And that was the end of my football career.

I majored in biology.  I got a tuition stipend for working in the lab, keeping it cleaned up.  I think I got thirty dollars a month for helping out.  I enjoyed the lab work — preparing slides, using the microscope, doing dissections.  I remember dissecting a frog.  I think we put him to sleep with ether, then we took a scalpel and opened the abdomen very carefully.  The teacher inserted a small glass slide into the cavity to hold the tissue apart and it was like a little window that looked into where the heart was beating.

When the Thanksgiving holiday came, I got a ride south as far as Grove Hill with a classmate, Joe McCorquodale.  My mother drove up there to meet me.  Other times when I went home for holidays, I think I hitchhiked.  In those days you could get out on the highway and catch a ride real easy.  It was safe.  Many people did it.  Somebody would come along, stop, pick you up, and say, “Where do you want to get off?” and they would take you.

Yes, I missed my family that first year at MI.  We stayed in touch by mail.  Telephones were just beginning to come into our part of the country, but there weren’t any lines running between my barracks up in Marion and my home in Frisco City.  Despite homesickness, I made friends and adapted to life as a cadet.  I’d had a taste of a bigger world, and I was thinking I’d like to move on directly to the University of Alabama for my sophomore year.

Late in the summer of 1940, my roommate, Jack Robertson, borrowed his family’s car and drove over from Bay Minette to pick me up in Frisco City.  Then we went on to Brewton to pick up Ugi.  We were going down to Fort Walton for a little weekend holiday before going back to school.  I told them, “I’m thinking about going to the University of Alabama.”  They said, “No, no, you don’t want to do that.”   I remember arguing about that on the drive down to Fort Walton.

It was August.  Man, it was hot.  We crossed over the bridge from Pensacola to Santa Rosa Island and it looked like the road would melt.  There was nothing on Santa Rosa Island back then — only a two lane road, so thin and bumpy it seemed like the asphalt was poured on sand.  The car jumped around, going down the highway.  When we got to Fort Walton, the road just stopped.  They hadn’t built the bridge over to Destin back then.  We stayed at a little tourist court beside the pass — $2.50 a night for a cabin without screens in the windows.  When we got there, we put on our swimming shorts immediately, it was so hot.  I think we spent most of the time swimming that weekend.

“I’m going to go to the University,” I said.

“Oh no,” they said.  Back and forth like that, all weekend.

We had a good time.  Robertson liked beer and he bought some.  I don’t remember what brand.  I didn’t care for it.  Didn’t like the taste.  Still don’t.  Made me all woozy and uncomfortable.

“I’m still going to the University,” I said.

“Hell no!” said Robertson.

Well, we came back and I discussed my plans with Daddy and he told me, “Son, I think it would be best for you to return to MI.”  Actually, I think what he said was, “Son, you will return to MI.”  So you know what: I was on campus and back in the room before Robertson and Ugi returned to Marion.  I beat them back.

The thing is, Daddy wanted me to be a doctor.  That was why I was majoring in biology at MI.  My oldest brother, Leighton, had returned to Frisco City to work in the store.  John Albert and Felix had taken jobs with the Armour Packing Company, hauling beef and pork in Louisiana — Albert in New Orleans, Felix in Baton Rouge, both making thirty dollars a month.  Daddy had helped them get jobs with that company through contacts he had buying Armour products for the store.  He wanted something better for me, I guess, and he thought I could do it, and he didn’t want me to quit.  He knew I was the last boy in the family to have the opportunity to study medicine, and he wanted me well prepared before I went to the university.  He wanted me to be a doctor.  So that’s what I planned to do.

But I also liked military science, a course where we studied tactics and strategy.  My senior year at MI, I joined the precision drill team they would later call the White Knights.   There were about sixteen boys in our squad.  We did precision marching and rifle handling, twirling and flipping these heavy World War I–issue rifles.  It was tricky business handling those weapons, wearing white gloves.  We did it for show.  I liked it.  I did well in military studies, too.  I was hoping to win an appointment to West Point.  I’ll come to “why” in a moment, but Daddy supported my desire to go to West Point when he saw how much it meant to me.  During my senior year, he contacted Frank Boykin, our congressman, to see if he could help me win an appointment, but Mr. Boykin gave the first appointment to a boy from Atmore.  I got an alternate appointment, with my chance dependent on the Atmore boy’s decision to go.  It turned out that he did go to West Point.  It also turned out that he flunked out of West Point.  But that happened after I had made my peace with this disappointment and had gone on to the University of Alabama.

I went up to Tuscaloosa in the summer of 1941.  I went to summer school and roomed in a boardinghouse.  But I didn’t take a course in biology or chemistry, even though I knew Daddy wanted me to be a doctor.  And even though Daddy knew the pre-med curriculum would come in the fall, he let me take two summer school courses unrelated to a medical major: one course in aeronautical engineering and one in mechanical drawing.  The mechanical drawing course was required for the engineering school.

You see, I had wanted to go to West Point to be an airman, not a soldier.  The Air Force was still part of the Army in those days.  It was called the Army Air Corps.  If you wanted to fly, West Point was where you went to get in line for training.  And I knew, I knew, I wanted to fly.

When I was a little boy, barnstormers would come into Frisco City in the late summer or late winter, when the fields were fallow.  It was not unusual.  You’d hear a noise in the sky.  You’d look up and see a biplane circling.  The pilot would pick out a little town, locate a field, and land.  He’d come down, his wheels bumping the dirt, running along the rows, raising all kinds of dust and noise.  And it was magical.  Of course, a crowd would gather around the plane as soon as it was on the ground.  Remember, we’re talking about a world where there were not that many cars — this was the late twenties, the early thirties.  So an airplane was about like a rocket ship.  If it was late in the day, the pilot would sleep out in the field, under the plane, and all of the children would be right back there the next morning.  Because, of course, he had come to take people riding.  He’d contact the owner of the field, offering to take him or his family up for free, or offering some of the proceeds from the rides in exchange for using the field.  Maybe he only wanted money for fuel, just enough to take his plane to the next town.  That’s what barnstormers did in those days.  But the thing was, you could go up in that plane.

Well, one of those barnstormers landed in one of Daddy’s cotton fields when I was a little boy.  You could see that field from the house.  We still have that field.  I can still see that plane.  And that pilot came to talk to my father.

Sure, I went up.  The plane had an open cockpit big enough for two people.  You just got in, got down behind a little windshield, and took off.  The plane bounced along, shedding the  rows — seemed like it would hook the trees at the edge of the field before it caught up and lifted — but it caught up and went.  I imagine top speed on those old planes was about seventy-five miles an hour, if that much, but it was as fast as I had ever been, and it shook off the earth.  It took off and soared.  You’d look down from six hundred feet and see everything — fields in checkerboard patches,  trees like little shrubs, houses like little toys, and you were making way, making time.  It was great.  It was powerful.  And I thought, man, this is good, I like this.  And I always wanted to fly after that.  I never, never forgot it.

So that was in the back of my mind when I wanted to go to West Point.  That was in the back of my mind when I went up to summer school in 1941 at the university.  That was why I was thinking about the army and engineering: flying.

When the fall of 1941 came around, however, it was time to think about the pre-med curriculum again.  Daddy had let me take my engineering courses, but he still wanted me to be a doctor.  He was pushing me to do that.  I was also talking with my next-oldest brother, John Albert, about what fraternity to join.  Membership in a fraternity was an important part of the campus community in Tuscaloosa, to making your way up there.

John Albert had been a member of Pi Delta Theta.  My oldest brother, Leighton, had been Sigma Alpha Epsilon, years before him.  I remember looking around the big SAE fraternity house at the university.  It was distinguished by its parking lot — more cars, I guess, than anywhere else on Greek Row.  Remember, we’re talking about a time when the country was pulling out of the Depression.  College boys with their own cars were not that common.  So here was the SAE house with this huge parking lot that looked like an auto dealership.  These boys were obviously well off.  But were they going to have to focus on their studies?  I needed to be with boys who wanted to get into medical school, who had “brothers” admitted to medical school, “brothers” who’d gone on to be doctors.  These questions were in my mind when I thought about what fraternity I wanted to join that fall.

I went through rush.  I narrowed my choices down to two fraternities: Pi Kappa Alpha (“Pikes” as they were called) and Pi Delta Theta, where John Albert had been a member.  The boys at Pi Delta remembered John Albert.  Everybody had liked him.  Because I was his brother, they were very interested in me.  They gave me a pin and told me that when I got ready to join the best fraternity up there, just put the pin on and call them.  During one rush party, they even called John Albert to get him to convince me to pledge.  They put me on the phone with him.  In the course of the conversation, he said, “Let me tell you something.  When I was there, I enjoyed the members of that fraternity.  They were good men.  I enjoyed their company.  But I don’t know who’s there now, or who’s running it.  You make the decision where you want to be.  You decide where you want to associate — not because I was a member there.”

Well, the boys at Pi Delta were not real interested in pre-med, whereas the boys at the Pike house impressed me as being very interested in it.  Some of them were already in med school.  I decided if I was going to be a success in medicine, I better get with the ones who were going to med school.  So I chose the “Pikes.”  Of course I wound up having good friends throughout the Greek system.

One of the things that the fraternity did was arrange dates for new members.  There were always social events surrounding the football games.  Often you’d have two dates arranged back-to-back, one for the game and one after the game.  It was on one of those football weekend dates, the first week of my first semester, that I met Evelyn Bell from Mobile.  She was a “KD,” a member of the Kappa Delta sorority.  Evelyn was a sophomore.  She’d spent her freshman year at Randolph Macon in Virginia.  I don’t remember much about that football game — who was playing, what the score was — but I remember enjoying Evelyn’s company.  I also remember being a little disappointed when we had to leave the game early because she had another date and I did, too.

Not much time passed before we went out again.  I called her.  We were soon going to dances whenever they’d have big bands at the auditorium.  Or we’d get together to dance to the   radio at the Pike house.  We danced all the popular dances: the jitterbug, the fox trot, even the conga line, which was a new dance at the time.  We’d meet at the soup store at the student union.   We’d study together at night at the library.  On Sundays we’d go to church together.  I liked her very much.  We were very comfortable together.  In fact, when I was trying to decide which fraternity to pledge, I asked her whether she’d prefer a Pi Delt pin or a Pike pin.  She said it didn’t matter as long as it came from me.

One weekend in December we went to the picture show.  It was a Sunday matinee, Sergeant York, starring Gary Cooper — about this country boy sharpshooter in World War I, how he won the Medal of Honor by single-handedly wiping out a German machine gun nest and capturing a bunch of German soldiers.  Suddenly they stopped the movie.  They drew the curtain across the screen.  The lights came up.  A man walked out on stage.  He announced that Pearl Harbor had been bombed that morning.  America had declared war on Japan.

It was unthinkable.  We’d been aware of the war in Europe, of course, but that had seemed like Europe’s problem, not ours.  We weren’t aware of the atrocities Hitler was committing against the Jews.  Nobody had any earthly idea.  And now Japan had tried to destroy our Navy in Hawaii?  We were at war?  It was just unthinkable.  It was like what happened on  September 11, 2001, in New York, only more traumatic.  The world changed just like that for all of us.

We left the theatre and walked back to the Pike House.  Everybody was talking about what had happened.  But the more pressing questions were about what was going to happen next.  All the young men knew that their lives were going to change.  It wasn’t going to be just classes and graduation. We left school for the Christmas holidays with a lot on our minds.

The holidays were pleasant, though of course my parents were worried about what the war would mean for my brothers and me.  John Albert was leaving his job with Armour to join the Air Corps.  Felix was going to enlist in the infantry.  Leighton was going to sign up, too.  I learned later that he had failed the physical exam, whether because of his eyesight or what, I don’t know.  He was in his thirties and married, so that may have had something to do with it.  He would get a job on the railroad, running ammunition from Mobile over to New Orleans.

What was I going to do?  I knew that Daddy wanted me to continue my pre-med classes, graduate and go on to medical school.  But the war was going to change that.  I wanted to be a pilot.  I intended to enlist in the Army Air Corps when I returned to the university.  I never figured that the road back to Tuscaloosa would have a nasty swerve in it.

When the Christmas holidays were over, I got a call from one of my roommates who lived in Brewton.  The fall of my first semester, before I joined the fraternity, I had been sharing an apartment in Tuscaloosa with two other boys from south Alabama whom I’d known at MI, Bob Johnston and Nick Stallworth.  It was a garage apartment.  We called this place “the Purity Palace,” for reasons that might be best left to the imagination.  We had a good time there.  Anyway, when Bob called after New Year’s, he told me that Nick would be coming over to pick him up, then they’d come on over to Frisco City to get me for the drive back to Tuscaloosa.

Nick had a four-door Chevy, a 1940 model, I believe.  His family was in the timber business and in the summers he drove a logging truck.  He had taken a big horn off that logging truck and hooked it up to the manifold of this four-door Chevy his family had given him.  The horn was hidden under the hood.  He liked to pull up to crosswalks on streets around campus and wait till students were passing right in front of him, then blow that horn.  It was the loudest damn thing you ever heard.  People would jump and their books would go flying all over the place.  So this was Nick.

When he picked me up, it was a cold, rainy, misty day in January.  We drove as far as Greensboro, where we stopped at the Green Roof Lounge for a hamburger.  Bob loved to have a beer.  So he had one.  Then he ran into one of our instructors from Marion Institute, who was also having a beer.  Well, Bob went over and sat down with him and that turned into more beers.  Nick didn’t drink and I didn’t like beer.  So we finished our meal and waited.  After a while, I said to Nick, “I think we need to get on out of here, because this rain is turning colder, and we might get into trouble if we stay too long.”  The road from there to Tuscaloosa was hilly and curvy around all these gullies.  Bob said he wasn’t ready to go.  He wanted another beer.  So I said, “Well, if you don’t want to go, then you’re going to stay.”  So Nick and I went out and got in the car and left.

We hadn’t got many miles down the road when Nick reached down and blew that horn for no reason.  He said, “McNeil, I’m going to be a race car driver one day!”  And he started speeding.  This worried me.  I said, “Not tonight, Nick.”  We were going down a hill with a sharp left turn at the bottom.  He was going too fast.  I said, “Nick, slow down now.  We don’t have to be in a hurry.”

At the bottom of the hill the car went into a skid off a wet streak in the road.  Suddenly my side of the car was the front of the car — we were sliding sideways out of the turn, my right shoulder in the line of motion.  We skidded right out of the road, across a dirt yard, past somebody’s front porch, missing it by about three feet, headed toward a small embankment that marked the top of a gully at the edge of the yard.  You could see trees peaking over the embankment.  When the car skipped over this ridge, it rolled us just enough so that my side of the roof hit the trees first.

The car hit those trees, I hit the door, it popped open.  The last thing I remember was Nick’s side of the car raised up on my left as we went into those trees — about midway up the side of them because the gully was about  twelve feet deep.  When I came to, I heard Nick scrambling around, saying “Mack, are you hurt?”  I said, “I don’t know, come pull me up out of this mud over here.”

In a minute we heard somebody climbing down into the gully to help us.  He was the man who lived in the house whose porch we’d missed.  He got us out of there, and took us into his house, where his wife gave us a pan of water to wash ourselves off.  My face was bruised, my back was hurting, and I had a hematoma on my right leg, where I had been thrown into the car door.  I remember it was cold in their house because they had no doors, just blankets hung against the outside.  They were poor, obviously, but they were wonderfully kind.  They stoked the fire back up, and offered me their bed for the night.  Not only that, but they put bricks in the fireplace, and when they were hot, they wrapped those bricks in towels, then put them in their bed to keep me warm and to ease the soreness in my body.  The next day they fed us breakfast and helped us get a ride into town.  They were wonderful to us.

We called somebody in Tuscaloosa who came to pick us up.  When I got to the university, I called my father to tell him what had happened.  Nick called Evelyn.  They were both upset, but I was all right, just sore.  Daddy drove up to see how I was doing.  On the way, he stopped outside of Greensboro to look at Nick’s car.  It was totaled: the roof smashed down where it went against the trees, the chassis and body bent from the drop down the gully.  How Nick and I survived this wreck I don’t know.  It was a close call.  I’d face a few more of them in the next couple of years.

That winter I moved into the Pike House.  As soon as I was a Pike, I pinned Evelyn.  We were going steady.

Along Fraternity Row, the boys built mock ant-aircraft gun emplacements in the yards in front of the houses.  They’d use plywood and cardboard.  The gun barrels would be mop handles or broom handles.  Sometimes they’d surround them with real sandbags.  The war was on everybody’s mind.  It was daily news.

I continued with my pre-med coursework.  I remember taking a course in advanced biology that was taught by Dr. Smith, an older teacher, who sat me in front of a hundred and fifty other students, right in front of her lectern.  She chewed on me all the time, but I guess I was kind of a pet.  She’d say, “Mr. McNeil, you’ll never be a doctor if you don’t learn how to spell.  Now just listen to the pronunciation and write the words exactly like they sound.”

Besides going to class, I was in advanced ROTC — Reserve Officers’ Training Corps.  I had been in ROTC since my graduation from  MI.  As the war intensified, I knew that it was only a matter of time before I would be called for duty.  My ROTC affiliation meant that I could expect a  commission in the infantry.  I didn’t want to fight the war on the ground.  It was time to make my own plans before the Army made them for me.  So in February I caught a ride to the airfield in Tuscaloosa and enlisted in the Air Corps.  I was going to be a pilot.

During the spring of that semester I got a call from John Albert, who was in Officer Candidate School with the Army Air Corps over in Meridian, Mississippi.  I went over to spend the weekend with him.  He was going up in an airplane, testing parachutes. He said, “Put on this jumpsuit and come on, go with me,” so I put on a jumpsuit and got on the plane with him. The pilot took us up.  In the back of the plane were twelve to fifteen dummies, each with a parachute buckled on, their ripcords attached to a track that ran up to a release beside the cabin door.  Once we reached fifteen hundred feet, John Albert slid open the door and started kicking these dummies out.  I helped him.  The dummies weighed maybe a hundred and fifty pounds.  The wind snatched them out and their parachutes began to unfurl over the green land below.  The plane we were flying in was a C47.  I couldn’t know it, but this was the plane I’d be piloting over England and France a year later.

Shortly before the end of the semester, I received instructions to go to Montgomery to swear the oath to defend my country.  The office was in the basement of a federal building.  There were six or eight other boys ready to swear in.  I’m sure there was some additional paperwork we signed, but what I remember was this: standing before an army officer and an American flag, raising my right hand, and pledging to faithfully serve my country.  I swore that oath on May 20, 1942.

 

Chapter Five

 

The summer of 1942 passed quickly.  I visited my family in Frisco City.  I visited Evelyn and her family at their vacation place at Gulf Shores, then returned to Tuscaloosa for summer school.  Summer school turned into fall semester, fall into winter.  I hoped I might graduate.

Three months before commencement, I was ordered to report.  The army sent a letter in early February.  Marked “RESTRICTED” and bearing the seal of Headquarters Fourth Service Command, it read:

Pursuant to telephonic instructions February 4, 1943, from The Adjutant General,

each of  the following named Air Corps Enlisted Reservists having been found qualified for Aviation Cadet appointment is ordered to active duty in grade of private, effective February 21, 1943, and will proceed from the address shown after his name to Army Air Forces Basic Training Center No. 4, Miami Beach, Florida, reporting on February 22,1943, for Pre-Aviation Cadet Basic Training.…

 

And there, down the list, among boys mostly from North Carolina, was my name and my home: Charles E. McNeil, Frisco City, Alabama.  The letter assigned an item to each of us: the serial number that would be hammered into our dog tags.

We had a going-away party at the Pike House.  The sense of adventure made it a happy time.  Evelyn came over that evening and we had supper together.  We didn’t get teary-eyed because we expected everything would work out for the best.

I remember giving my friend, Tom Rast, a tweed suit that my father had given me my first fall semester at the university.  We wore the same size clothes.  I gave him some dress shirts and khakis too.  I wouldn’t be wearing civilian clothes for a few years.  I packed what I had left and moved home.

Since the train from Frisco City didn’t run to Miami Beach, my parents drove me over to the station at Atmore, about forty miles away.  The army had my ticket waiting.  I was instructed not to pack much, so I didn’t.  I do remember taking with me a new pair of shoes from the store.  They were good-looking tan dress shoes that retailed for $5.50.  I remember this because, when I arrived in Miami Beach, there was a big barrel outside the place where we were given our uniforms, and over that barrel was a sign: “Donate Your Shoes!”  What was I going to do, take those dress shoes to Europe?  Wear them when?  With what?  I tied that pretty pair of shoes together with their strings and put them in the barrel.

The army had taken over Miami Beach.  Every hotel was requisitioned to house new recruits.  During the next two weeks, while we got a series of vaccinations, we were quarantined in a nice place, right on the shore.  Of course we also trained during that time.  There were daily calisthenics, daily drills.  After quarantine we practiced marksmanship and learned the nomenclature of the rifle and how to care for it, how to put it together, take it apart.  There was marching and more marching.  We marched down the center of Collins Avenue — now one of the most expensive stretches of real estate you can find, but back then hardly built-up.

It may have been winter back home, but it was hot down in Florida.  We got whipped into shape and we got sunburned.  It seemed like you couldn’t get away from grit and sand.  On the firing range, every time you spent a round, the rifle would kick sand in your face.

A nice thing happened after my quarantine period.  John Albert had been through Miami Beach before me.  He’d gotten to know a girl down there whose family was in the dry-cleaning business.   He called me and said, “When you can get out of that hotel, let me know and I’ll introduce you to a family who can take you out for a nice meal.”  So I did, as soon as I could arrange an evening’s leave.

Next afternoon comes this pretty girl, swinging into the hotel driveway in a sleek convertible.  She was Italian.  She drove up like she owned the place, her dark hair flying in the breeze.  Man, talk about the whooping and hollering all over the hotel when that girl pulled up in her sports car!  We couldn’t get out of there fast enough for all the wolf-whistling.  I spent a very pleasant evening with her and her family.

Although I was a private, I had had nearly four years of military training, thanks to M.I. and ROTC, so I was put in charge of a company of cadets right from the beginning.  I knew how to march, how to drill.  I could make a company fall in, dress right, dress left, move forward and back.  I had learned at M.I. that the idea of marching is to move a large number of men in an orderly fashion.  If you told a bunch of guys, “Let’s meet at the mess hall,” hell, they’d be all day getting there, then waste all kinds of time getting inside, getting seated.  But if you taught them to move in formation, no problem.  You let one squad go in, then let another squad peel off, go in, and if you moved them like that, everyone was present and accounted for.  Marching was the only way to do it.

Now marching was one thing, but mess hall definitely another.  In the army, they don’t call it “mess” for nothing.  Let me tell you a story about that.

I had brought my company to mess during the middle of a very hot day.  I lined them all up, they went in by squads, I brought up the rear.  There was a big, big sign that said, “Take all you can eat, but eat all you take.”  Normally that wasn’t a problem.  On that particular day, however, as I walked in, I smelled something that just didn’t smell right.  I have a very sensitive nose.  Something was not right at all.  As I passed down the mess line, I discovered what it was. They put this meat on my platter.  It was mutton, but definitely not lamb chops.  It was an old boar sheep and it stank to high heaven.  Now your mess platter was a stainless steel thing, separated by little ridges, so that foods didn’t run together, so that hot things didn’t mix with cold things.  The last item they served you in the mess line was a scoop of ice cream.  Well, hell, ice cream on warm stainless steel?  Melts in a snap!  You hit it with a spoon, it’s juice.  So by the time I sat down, my ice cream had melted and it was the only thing I wanted to eat that day.  That meat?  I thought about trying to take a bite of it, but I just couldn’t.  I knew that if  I ate it  I would get sick.  I said to myself, “I cannot eat this.  I will not eat this.”

Before you leave the mess hall, you dump the scraps off your platter, you rinse it in a big barrel of hot water, then you stack it nearby.  And as you do all this, you pass before this big staff sergeant sitting up on a high stool.  Well, I carried right past him the whole platter of food that I was going to dump.

He said, “What are you doing, soldier?”

I said, “I’m fixing to go to my room.”

He said “You’re not going anywhere.  Did you read that sign?”

I said, “Yeah, but I can’t eat this.  This is rotten.  It stinks.  Can’t you smell it?”

“You took it, you eat it,” he ordered.

“I’m not gonna do it,” I said and looked him in the eye.  “You can shoot me, but I’m not gonna eat it.”

And I scraped it off in the garbage, took care of the platter, and walked out.  I guess that sergeant didn’t want to get off his stool.  He didn’t say anything else.  I might have been a buck private, but I was still a company commander and I had too much to do to get sick.  Anyway, for the rest of the day, I lived off a big old Hershey chocolate bar.  You could buy them at the PX for practically nothing.

Basic training in Miami Beach lasted about six weeks.  It was unremarkable except for the heat, the hurry-up-let’s-go feeling of the place, with hundreds and hundreds of young men in government-requisitioned hotels, anxious to get into a later stage of training where they could distinguish themselves.  They worked us all day.  There wasn’t time for a nap.

In early April of 1943 we were issued wool uniforms, so we knew we were going somewhere colder.  It turned out to be Raleigh, North Carolina.  I was made commander of the troop train that transported us.  My job was to see that five hundred soldiers, along with their files, arrived at the Cadet Training Detachment located on the campus of North Carolina State University.  I was to deliver men and files to the commanding officer there.

The train didn’t have sleeping cars, just passenger coaches, each with a potbelly stove situated in the center for heat.  All the coaches were crowded, mine with stacks of file boxes as well as soldiers.  The only place you could be by yourself was in the little restroom — not that you wanted to be by yourself, but I usually had always been by myself when I said my prayers at night.  And I recall going into this little room with the train going clickety-clack and kneeling down in that little restroom and saying my prayers for the night.

As a child I’d been taught to kneel beside my bed every night to say the Lord’s Prayer, and to ask God to take care of my family, to keep them all safe.  And again in the morning.  I can’t remember a time when I didn’t do this.  It was part of life.  Even today I usually begin my prayers with the Lord’s Prayer.  Then I remember specifics and people that I feel honored to pray for, from a prayer list I keep mentally or write down.

There was never a question of changing this habit, even in the army.  I could have knelt in public.  That would have been respected, but prayer was a private thing with me.  The millions of servicemen facing combat, I’m sure they drew strength from prayer.  I know I did.  But everything I did, I did without hesitation because I just accepted it as what I was supposed to do.  I don’t know how exactly to put it, but I didn’t stop when I was given an order.  I didn’t question it.  When I went down to the ready room, and the commanding officer said, “This is the mission for today,” I never asked “Why?”  You do what you must.

 

Chapter Six

 

Now Evelyn and I had not lost touch.  Far from it.  We wrote each other regularly.  We talked on the phone.  When I learned that I was going to N.C. State for cadet training, I told her, and she decided to enroll in summer school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which was only about twenty-five miles from Raleigh.  She planned to room with friends she had met during her freshman year at Randolph-Macon.  But I had plans for us that went beyond the summer.

I had fallen in love with Evelyn the moment I met her at that football game in Tuscaloosa.  Over the time we’d known each other, our love had grown.  I wanted her to be my wife.  I called my mother and asked her to find me a diamond ring.

On a weekend in June I asked Evelyn to dinner.  She caught a bus to come over to the base on a Friday evening.  When she arrived on campus, my unit, Squadron H, Flight 1, formally presented themselves to her, marching past her in review.  I think she was very pleased by the VIP treatment.  Over dinner, I proposed.

“I asked Mama to send me this,” I said, offering her the ring and my hand forever.

This moment of happiness came with a chuckle.  When I had asked Mama to send me a size four-and-a-half band, she said, “Charlie, Evelyn’s finger can’t be that small!”  So she sent a size six.  It really was too big.  But Evelyn wore it that night.  She wrapped it with string so it would fit.

That one memorable evening was all that we had in North Carolina.  Evelyn got sick with a kidney infection and had to return to Mobile.  I knew she was going to be OK but I worried about her.  The base newspaper had this to say about it:

Now that Student Captain McNeil’s girl is in the hospital for a little while, he

wanders around like a lost soul.  Sunday he spent most of his evening in town

holding up a lamp standard on Fayetteville Street.  Here’s hoping his girl recovers

quickly and Charlie is once again his usual self.

 

I don’t remember anything about holding up that lamppost, but I was enough of my usual self to command my company.  I had good help doing that from a young man I had come to know.  We had bunked together since my arrival in Raleigh.  In the evenings, he knelt to say his prayers the same as I did.  He was a fine Christian boy and an all-state athlete from Memphis, Tennessee.  When I was appointed squadron commander, he was appointed group supply officer.  His name was Johnny McMaster.  He became my best friend.

Another friend I made was Bobby Thompson from Yazoo City, Mississippi.  I met him at a pool, swimming laps.  I noticed he wore a Pike ring, so we struck up a conversation over our fraternity.  Not only did we have the fraternity in common, but he also had a girlfriend he had proposed to in June.  We talked about when we were going to get married.

From April through July we pursued our cadet training in Raleigh.  They worked us from daylight to dusk.  We’d just flop in bed at night.  A lot of it was classwork, technical instruction.  I suppose they were also testing mental aptitude for pre-flight training.

One day I got notification to report to the commanding officer of the Cadet Training Detachment.  The C.O. sat me down and gave me a highly confidential assignment.  He told me to be on the lookout for any type of conversation or activity that might indicate that anyone was trying to infiltrate any military unit, or was passing information about the military to any organization.  I was to write a weekly letter reporting my observations — that of said date I had, or had not, seen or known of such activity.  I was to address the letter to the ACME Insurance Company, P.O. Box such and such.

The assignment was for counterintelligence.  I was gratified by the C.O.’s confidence in me and more than a little surprised that such responsibility should be given to a young cadet.  This responsibility followed me throughout my tour of duty, wherever I was assigned.  I wrote those letters every week.  I never noticed any subversive activity, but I kept my eyes and ears open.  I suppose the ACME Insurance Company heard from me nearly as often as Evelyn.

At the end of July I received orders to report to Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery for pre-flight training.  It was a big base with beautiful old brick and stone homes for the officers.  The planes based there were for the high command.  They’d fly them all over the world from Maxwell.  My good friend, Johnny McMaster, transferred with me.  He would become second-in-command in my company.  Bobby Thompson came along, too.  We agreed that August might be a good time to marry our girls  — I guess we thought the girls might agree, too.  Except for a brief period in Nashville, I would continue training in Montgomery until October.

At Maxwell I was a company commander in charge of three squadrons, each composed of about eighteen men.  When new boys assigned to my company arrived on the troop train, I had Johnny fall ’em in, meaning: get ’em out, rack ’em up, ten-hut, no talking, don’t bat a damn eye.  Then I’d walk up in parade dress — cap, gloves, saber, Sam Brown belt – and inspect them.

One morning Johnny said to me, “You won’t guess who’s coming in on the troop train!”

I said, “Who?”

He said, “Bob Boykin.”

I said, “He’s in this damn outfit coming in?  Well, take me to that S.O.B.!”

Bob was actually a good friend of mine.  He was Congressman Frank Boykin’s son.  I’d met him in Mobile through Evelyn.  He’d dated her in high school.  I’d known him in Tuscaloosa, too.  I was going to have some fun, hazing old Bob.

So Johnny had the new men all assembled and I strode up to inspect them.  I stopped right in front of Boykin and glared at him.

When he recognized me, delighted to see a familiar face, he blurted out, “Hey, man!”

I shot back, “Shut up!  Don’t you open your damn mouth.”

He looked at me, stunned.

I said, “Don’t you dare talk to me!”  Then I turned to McMaster and said, “Write this guy up and have him come by my room.”

When he came by later, sort of sheepish, I said, “You got surprised, didn’t you?”  We had a laugh about it.  He followed me through training at Maxwell along with my other men.  I set him up to be an officer and he thanked me all the way through.  He busted out of flight school, though.  I think he went on to navigator or bombardier school, but I heard he washed out there too.

Training at Maxwell was mental as well as physical.  The classroom work included fundamentals of aeronautical engineering, the physics of flight, basic navigation, radio routines.  The instructors were also measuring our athletic ability, our reflexes, our ability to respond quickly under pressure.  Everybody wanted to be a pilot, of course.  But not everyone could be.  By the end of July we were being sorted into classes: those who’d continue training as pilots, those who’d train as navigators or bombardiers.  We were notified to transfer to the Army Air Center in Nashville, Tennessee, to await our slots.

Evelyn had visited me in Montgomery during the summer.  She had driven up from Frisco City with my mother to plan our wedding.  We had hoped to have it in Mobile, but with the news of my posting to Tennessee, we knew that wouldn’t be possible.  I didn’t know where I’d be transferred next.  Evelyn had an aunt and cousins in Franklin, not far from Nashville, so we decided that with them, along with my parents and her parents, we could have a nice family gathering for the service.  We set a date for Nashville.

On August 19, 1943, Evelyn and I stood before an army chaplain and exchanged vows in the small base chapel surrounded by our family.  My outfit attended in parade dress and crossed swords above us as we came from the chapel, man and wife.  We had a fine reception downtown in the Hermitage Hotel.  Then we left in a rented car for our honeymoon in Chattanooga.

I didn’t know that the army was having maneuvers in the mountains between Nashville and Chattanooga.  The C.O. had given me a six-day pass for my honeymoon, but he didn’t say anything about army exercises going on, tying up the roads.  Well, as we headed east into the mountains, it seemed like every turn we’d make, there would be a big old army tank blocking the way.  Rolling up into the hills we couldn’t make more than three miles an hour, waving at everybody, moving past roadblocks, and though I was only a cadet captain, my uniform looked like an officer’s, so the boys would salute me, wave us on.

We got to Chattanooga sometime that night.  Our destination was the Lookout Mountain Hotel, an exclusive place with terrific views of the surrounding country.  It was a fine resort with well-appointed rooms.  The dining room had tall chairs and beautiful linens and beautiful crystal.

We were expecting to meet Bobby Thompson and his new wife there the next day.  They were driving up from Mississippi.  But we met somebody else first.

Getting on the elevator the next morning, we encountered Herbert Baum and his wife.  Mr. Baum worked with Evelyn’s father at Protective Life Insurance Company.  They were colleagues.  Evelyn’s father and mother were friends with the Baums.  Evelyn had known them since she was a little girl.  The Baums, however, did not know me.

Mr. Baum looked startled.  He was more surprised than Evelyn.  He looked at her.  She had my hand.  And he looked at her.  And he tried not to look at me.  He finally said, “Evelyn?!  Does your father know you’re here?”

I thought to myself, “You stupid old bastard, how can you imagine — ?” while Evelyn got tongue-tied and turned red as Superman’s cape.  Of course, she finally made introductions and explained.

When the Thompsons arrived, we told them what happened and had a big laugh over it.  We toured Chattanooga together for the next week.  Evelyn and Bobby’s wife, Mary, became a good friends.

In early November I was transferred to the first of a series of bases in the Midwest where I would undertake flight training.  The first stop was Cairo, Illinois, about 150 miles northwest of Nashville.  Cairo was big town situated where the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers come together.  It was corn and cotton country.  Over that flat prairie land I learned to fly the PT-13 — PT for “Primary Trainer.”  This aircraft was recognized as probably the best primary trainer there was.  The Navy used them exclusively.  It was a bi-wing job with maybe a 225-horsepower engine that required a crew chief to hand-crank the prop.  The controls were simple, just a stick and pedals.  Instrumentation was also basic.  There was an oil pressure gauge, an air speed indicator, and a needle ball.  The needle ball showed your airborne orientation.  There were two open cockpits, one behind the other.  The instructor sat in the rear.  He’d talk to you over a little tube that ran between the cockpits and plugged into your ear.

I don’t remember my civilian instructor’s name, but he was fantastic.  He probably started out barnstorming.  He could make that plane do anything.  He could put it into a stall and walk it down using just the foot pedals.  The first couple of times I went up with him I got airsick.  My cockpit was a mess.  I had to clean it out myself.  After the second time he told me, “I’m sorry, Mr. McNeil, but if you get sick again, I’ll have to put you on a check-ride and you’ll probably wash out.”

Well, I didn’t eat anything the rest of the day.  I didn’t eat anything that night.  I didn’t eat anything for breakfast the next morning.  When we went up again, I got sick, but I didn’t throw up — there was nothing to throw up — so he didn’t know anything about it.  From then on, I got used to the motion.  I never got sick again.

Now the autumn is cold up in Illinois.  Cold on the ground and colder thirty-five hundred feet up, flying eighty miles an hour.  But I was dressed for it: fleece-lined pants and heavy boots; fleece-lined leather jacket with a big turn-up collar; scarf, gloves, and, of course, a leather helmet and goggles.  It was actually warm in the cockpit because I had a control that fed heat into it from the engine.  I wore a parachute, too — folded it myself.  When I strapped into the cockpit, I sat on it.

I’d fly mornings and afternoons.  I’d go through takeoff procedure, climb, get out of the pattern and fly over to an auxiliary field where I’d circle, land, taxi, then take off again.  Landing was a little tricky.  The trainer’s front wheels were only about four or five feet apart and there was a little wheel on the tail, so you had to set it down just so.  It would ground-loop if I wasn’t careful. A lot of times I’d go up and find a cloud and practice landing on that cloud.

I practiced aerobatic flying: how to do rolls and loops.  The carburetors in those planes weren’t pressurized they way they are now, so at certain angles and speeds, the G-force would drain the gasoline out of the carburetor and the engine would cut off.  What to do?  Put the plane into a dive until the wind speed would crank the prop, kick the engine on again.  I learned how to stall the plane and recover control.  I learned how to put it into a spin and pull it out.  I learned to turn that PT-13 every which-a-way.  The first couple of times I might have been a little nervous during these maneuvers, but I had complete confidence in my instructor.  He taught me to fly.

I was the first in my squadron to solo.  That was a big day in November.  When I got down, the boys in my squadron surrounded me, picked me up, and carried me over to this little wastewater pond, and heaved me into it.  It was a little ceremony of initiation.  One of my buddies shot a picture of it: I’m up in the air, spread-eagled, mouth wide open, staring at this film of ice on the water I’m about to drop face-down into.  In the background you can see my friends — friends, hell, they had just pitched me into this freezing mud hole!  There was Cecil Peacock, whose wife, Robbie, was rooming with Evelyn.  There was Gordon Reese, a short fellow, so short you wondered how he’d see out of the cockpit — always talking fast in this high voice, pip, pip, pip, sounded like a  bird, so we called him “Chirpy.”  There was Roy Patterson, we called “Pay,” and Dave Rackly, “the Noise,” and Joe Parrish and Harland Page.  And there was my dear friend, Johnny McMaster, “Mac,” my number two.  I was “Mac” also, but they sometimes called me “B.B.,” short for “B.B. Eyes,” a nickname I’d earned because of the way I looked at them hard.  I was their cadet commander.  Some respect!

As the fall turned into winter, I continued primary training in Camp McBride, Missouri, seventy miles up the Mississippi River from Cairo.  Across the river from the airbase was the little town of Chester, Illinois, where Evelyn came to share an apartment with Robbie Peacock, the wife of one of my squadron buddies, Cecil.  When I flew solo, I’d go over the house in Chester and chuggle the throttle and Evelyn would come out and wave at me.

We had our first Christmas together at that apartment, 318 Riverview Boulevard.  It was a white Christmas, snow on the ground, so cold the river had frozen.  Robbie and Evelyn fixed a turkey and all the trimmings, and we all got together with other airmen and wives.  It was a special time because food like that was hard to come by.  Everything was rationed.  There wasn’t a lot in the stores.  What you could buy, you had to have ration stamps for.  I think Evelyn ate pancakes with peanut butter for breakfast most of the time.

The girls would visit the base in this old Model T jalopy they called “Odessa.”  They’d have to wrap up in their coats for the drive because the car had no windows, just a fold-up canvas roof, like a jeep.  It was cold going over the river on that high bridge with nothing to break the wind.

Speaking of jeeps reminds me of another story.  The jeep was a brand-new kind of vehicle in 1944.  It was four-wheel drive, of course, made to go anywhere, a general purpose, or GP, vehicle.  That’s why we started calling them jeeps.  Only the military had them, so people wanted to see them.  Well, our major at the base sent McMaster and me to a public school over in Chester to show off this jeep.  It was publicity for the war effort.  We drove over to a middle school and presented ourselves in our uniforms and the kids went crazy over this jeep we were driving.  I guess the major made a speech.  There was a minister who showed up and said something.  I don’t remember making any speech, but I do remember doing chin-ups, showing the kids how fit we were.  What they wanted to do was ride on the jeep, though.  There’s a photo of them climbing all over it, chasing us as we drove it around.

The last day of primary training we had what we called “the gitch ride.”  You could tell the instructor to do anything you wanted.  It didn’t matter what it was, acrobatics or whatever, because that was the last ride.  I remember sitting in the front cockpit,  flying along, wondering what I wanted to do, when I felt somebody tapping me on the shoulder.  It startled me.  How could that be?  You couldn’t reach from one cockpit to the other.  We were up a couple of thousand feet, tooling along.  I jerked my head around and there he was, standing on the wing, saying, “What do you want me to do?”

I said, “Whatever you want if you’ll get back in that cockpit.”

In that flat country, you could see for miles.  There were railroad lines radiating out from  the river depot of Cairo, connecting it to all that Midwestern farmland.  Down below us was a long train.  My instructor put the plane into a shallow dive, chasing the train as it rolled through the fields, slowing us until our speed only slightly exceeded the speed of the boxcars.  Then he proceeded to gently bounce us from one boxcar to the next, our forward landing gear lightly touching each one.

In February of 1944, my squadron and I were transferred to Malden, Missouri, for Basic Flight Training.  Malden was some ninety miles south of McBride, near the Arkansas state line.  My friend Bobby Thompson rejoined me on that post.  He hadn’t done his primary training with us in Cairo or McBride.  Malden was a very small town.  There wasn’t much there but the base.  Bobby’s wife, Mary, shared rooms with Evelyn way out in the country in a big house owned by a farming family.

At Malden we trained in the BT-15 —  BT  for “Basic Trainer.”  It was a mono-wing made by the Vulty Aircraft Corporation.  We called it “the Vulty Vibrator.”  The Vulty had a 650-horsepower engine, very strong, very powerful, and you felt it throbbing all the way through the airframe.  It flew well over a hundred miles an hour.  I think it cruised around 140.  The cockpit had a bubble canopy that slid closed over you and the instructor who sat right behind you.  My instructor was a commissioned officer named Caffego, Lieutenant Caffego.  He had played football at the University of Tennessee.  He’d been a running back.  They called him, “Can-he-go-Caffego.”

Unlike the PT-13, there were a compass and radio on the Vulty, so we learned to navigate by instruments.  We learned to fly in low visibility — to fly in bad weather, to fly at night.  On the ground, the radio beacons would send up a cone-shaped signal.  You’d set your way-points at one “cone” for the next one, fly on  and find it, establish voice contact, get new coordinates, then repeat the procedure.  You’d establish a landing pattern based on instrument readings.  If you were lucky and knew what you were doing, you’d be lined up with the runway when you broke out of the bad weather.

For night flying the airspace around the base would be demarcated into four quadrants.  Four or five planes would take off and stack in one quadrant, then another group would take off and stack in the next quadrant, and so on.  Planes would circle in their quadrants as the other quadrants were stacked.  You could be up there a while circling before they’d radio your group to come down.  It could get monotonous.   Well, one night I happened to be the first plane up.  Our quadrant would be the last called back down.  Mine was to be the last plane to land.  It was a cold night, but the cockpit was warm, and  I was quite comfortable in my flight suit.  I had taken a couple of Hershey bars with me to nibble on while I was waiting.  I tuned in a radio station in St. Louis, Missouri, I remember, and I started listening to some good music by Guy Lombardo.  It was going to be an hour or so before they called me down.  So I’m sitting up there, circling, brrr rrrr rrrr rrrr rrrr, and I’ve trimmed the plane so it would hold the pattern and I’m eating my Hershey bars and I’ve got my legs stretched out, listening to Guy Lombardo’s orchestra.  And I fall asleep.  Sound asleep.

I had my plane trimmed so it wasn’t going down.  But it leveled out and started making wider and wider circles.  While I was asleep.  I’m talking about miles.  Next thing I know there’s a plane blowing past me with his landing lights on.  They’d sent a weather plane out to get me.  He dived by pretty close because it was loud.  And I thought, what the devil’s going on?  They had tried to get me on the radio, of course, but I was tuned in to St. Louis.  Hell, I was listening to Guy Lombardo, not the tower.  I was pretty startled when I woke up.  I radioed in.  They chewed me out good, said, “Where the devil are you?”  I said, “I’m not real sure but I’ll find out.”

When I made my approach to the airfield everybody else was already in.  There was ground fog over the strip, eight to ten feet above the runway.  With my landing lights on, it looked like the runway, but it wasn’t.  So I came in to land about ten feet higher than I ought to have landed.  I dropped through the fog and bounced pretty hard on the tarmac.  I was thankful to be on the ground and alive.  They chewed on me some more, then told me to taxi on and go to bed.  When I got to the barracks, McMaster and everyone else was sound asleep.  We were all dead tired.  We’d been flying all day, then late that night.

I believe it was fatigue from night flying that contributed to the tragedy that happened the next day.  I was scheduled to go up on an acrobatic exercise with my instructor, Lt. Caffego, following a flight where I was checked out for instruments.  The flight with Caffego had been assigned to me, but when I got back from the instrument flight, McMaster had taken my place.   He had started ahead of me.  As I was taxiing in, I radioed that I’d be ready shortly, but I was told that Caffego and McMaster were heading out.

I never saw them alive again.

I was sitting in the rec room with the other cadets when the P.A. announced there’d been a crash.  We were stunned and worried.  Then came the news: it was Caffego and Johnny.  And it made me sick, heartsick and weak.  Caffego was bad enough — but Johnny?  The shock of grief was like losing a brother.  I would experience some terrible things in the coming war, but nothing like this.  He was “Mac,” my best friend, my right arm.  Why did this happen?  This was a fine boy, an all-state football player.  He was deeply religious, kind, gentle, tough, strong, good.  He would have made a terrific pilot, a fantastic citizen.  I’m sure he would’ve been a tremendous success in life — and a dear, dear friend through the years.  Gone, just like that.

Why it happened nobody can know.  How it happened I’ve thought about many times.  Since you can’t know why, you think about how.  The plane went down right after takeoff.  It had climbed maybe eight hundred feet.  This we found out.  What I think happened was this.  Often after takeoff, the instructor would chop the throttle without warning and say, “Forced landing.”  You’d go into an emergency procedure.  That’s what he was testing for.  Without power, you immediately rolled-on the trim tab in order to keep the nose up while you maneuvered to pick out a landing spot.  The Vulty was a heavy aircraft.  You needed the trim tab to keep the nose up, keep the elevators set for maximum lift.  It was too heavy to hold by pedal or stick.  So you’d respond to the forced landing emergency by immediately rolling-on the trim tab to maintain lift, survey the ground, and tell your instructor where you were going to put the plane down.  He’d say “Fine, let’s go,” then you’d re-power the aircraft by easing on the throttle.  But you’d take the trim tab off first.  That’s the important thing.  Otherwise the plane would nose up too fast, lose lift and fall.  I think the crash occurred because of pilot error.  Johnny powered up too fast without rolling-off the trim tab.  I think he did that because of fatigue.  His plane was too low to recover.  It just stood on its tail and fell out of the sky.

I was ordered to accompany his body home for burial in Memphis.  But first I was escorted by a lieutenant to the morgue to identify the remains.  I did so.  They were unspeakable.  What went into the casket was not the man I had known.

Sometime later that afternoon, Evelyn arrived, alerted that there had been a crash.  She knew that I had been assigned to the flight, that my plane had gone down.  Beyond that, the communication was confused.  Who was dead?  What had happened?  When we met we fell into each other’s arms, so grateful to have each other.

The next day I was posted to Memphis on a train with Johnny’s casket.   This was hard, strange duty.  I signed the casket out of the morgue, saw it transported to the train and registered for shipment, then took my seat.  I was sort of numb.  I know by reports and newspaper articles that Chirpy Reese went with me down to Memphis, but I don’t actually remember Chirpy being along at all.  My grief was too profound.  The papers I carried would be signed by Johnny’s family when I delivered the casket to them.

Meeting Johnny’s family at the station was tough.  I had met his father and mother and a sister before, in happier times.  Now, watching his family greet his casket as it came off the train was almost more than I could bear.  We could hardly speak.

That evening, Johnny’s family put out a cot for me in their little dining room, next to the living room where the casket was placed.  I lay down in my uniform, exhausted.  In the middle of the night, I was awakened by one of Johnny’s sisters, urging me to get up and help.  Their mother was downstairs, crying, trying to open Johnny’s casket to say goodbye.

I had to get up and calm her.  I told her she mustn’t open the casket — that there was nothing to see but Johnny’s cap and uniform on top of a sealed bag.  I told her she needed to rest for the funeral tomorrow.  I didn’t tell her what I had told his sisters: that the mangled body bore no likeness to the boy we had known.

I don’t remember much about the service at the church or the trip to the cemetery.  What I do remember is riding that train back to Missouri and promising God that I would not be close like that to anyone else again  — to no man in wartime.  I would not open myself to that kind of loss.  I prayed I would always have Evelyn.  I prayed for my family.  I prayed for her family.  But I would not risk anything more.  I would not face such bereavement again.

Chapter Seven

 

I was glad to move on to advanced training at another airfield in April.  I wanted to leave Malden and its tragedy behind.  The cold spring found Evelyn and me at George Field in Lawrenceville, Illinois.  George Field was about a hundred and thirty miles northeast of Camp McBride, where I’d begun my primary training only five months ago — short months, so much had happened.  Evelyn lived off base, of course, but we’d bought a Plymouth for her to get around in.  I borrowed the money from my father.  It was ’41 four-door model, solid black.  It cost eleven hundred dollars.

For two months I trained at George Field, flying the AT-10.  It was a twin-engine aircraft that cruised at about a hundred and sixty miles per hour.  The instrumentation was more sophisticated than the Vulty’s, so we refined our techniques of navigation and radio work.  The AT-10 wasn’t a difficult plane to fly.  I enjoyed learning to handle it.  I logged a lot of time flying time it, too — almost three hundred hours.  That was about twice the time I had spent flying both the PT-17 and the BT-13.  As with the previous planes, you learned how to deal with various emergency conditions.  You had to keep the engines synchronized.  If one should go out, you learned to feather the prop — align the blades so there’d be no wind resistance — and bring up the power on the other engine, compensating for the torque with the rudder, till you could get into a landing pattern to come down.

The time passed quickly.  Graduation was around the corner.  There would be a formal review of the cadet corps on the parade grounds, followed by the colonel’s presentation of wings at the post theater.  My mother and father came up by train to join Evelyn for the graduation exercise.  On May 23, 1944, I received my wings and my commission as a second lieutenant in the Army Air Force.  I was proud and happy to have Evelyn and my parents there.  At the conclusion of the ceremony, the Army Band played the National Anthem, then “Auld Lang Syne.”  All the troops sang together.  I thought of my friends, all the men I had trained with.  We’d all be going our separate ways.  Bobby Thompson had already left our group.  He had gone through advanced training, I believe, down in Stuttgart, Arkansas.  I thought of Bobby and Chirpy.  And of course I thought of Johnny McMaster.

My next assignment was to Randolph Field in San Antonio, Texas.  Now that I was an officer, Evelyn and I could live together.  We found a nice apartment in a Spanish Mission-style home in an old section of the town: our first place together.  It was a lovely place with a tiled roof, and white stucco walls.  It was good to live off base with my wife.

Randolph Field was known as “the West Point of the Air,” so big was that base, so many pilots going through there.  I was there for a little more than a month to learn how to be a flight instructor.  I was going to teach other pilots to fly AT-10s.  Following this course of training, I was assigned to Shaw Field in Sumter, South Carolina.

In mid-July Evelyn and I drove from San Antonio to Mobile en route to my new base.  I had some leave time.  Evelyn was expecting our first child.  I left her to visit her family in Mobile and drove on to Frisco City to visit mine.

John Albert called while I was home.  He was stationed at McDill Air Force Base down in Tampa.  When I told him I’d be driving on to South Carolina, he said, “Well, how about coming by down here?” and I said, “I can’t, that’s too far down,” and he said, “Well, I’ll fly up to Tallahassee and meet you there.”  So we arranged to go to Tallahassee.

Well, when I met John Albert, he said, “I’ve got a plane.  Come on.  Let’s fly back to McDill down in Tampa.”  So we flew back down to Tampa.  We looked around the base, then we went back to John Albert’s apartment to relax.

“Did I tell you we’re going out to dinner tonight?” he said.  He had a date with a young lady that was with Eastern Airlines.  Dinner turned into a party.  We had a good time.

It got quite late and I had left my car, of course, in Tallahassee, and I said, “I’ve get to get back and get some mileage on me to get to Shaw Field tomorrow.”  Since we’d been drinking some, we couldn’t fly.  “That’s no problem,” said John Albert, “We’ll get you on a commercial flight.”  So we went out to the airport and started looking around and the planes were all full.  But his date said,  “I think we can handle this.”  When the next Eastern flight landed, she went aboard.  Some minutes passed.  Then this fellow in uniform comes off the plane and I recall very distinctly that he was a high-ranking officer, much higher than I, a full colonel, I think, and he kept arguing that he was not supposed to be taken off of that flight.  How John Albert’s girlfriend worked that, I don’t know and don’t care.  I walked on, got in my seat — I suppose it had been his — and we took off and went to Tallahassee.

It was about 11:00 or 11:30 that night when I got on the road in that ’41 Plymouth.  Nothing but two-lane highways in those days.  Somewhere along the way I remember driving through the middle of a swamp and all of a sudden in the headlights I could see a bunch of cows lying in the roadway.  Somehow I got around them without hitting them.  Eventually I came to a sign that said “Waycross,” so I knew I was in Georgia.  In the center of the town there was a little square.  As I drove around the square, I looked up and saw a sign that said, “Hotel.”  Just a plain old sign, just one word, “Hotel,” with single light shining on it.  I was pretty tired and my car had started giving me trouble.  Just as I pulled in, the headlights went out, the car died.  I  took my shaving kit out of the flight bag in the back seat, walked in, and rang the bell on the counter.  This guy came in.  I told him I needed a room.  He handed me the keys and said, “Upstairs, first door on your right.”  And I gave him the keys to the Plymouth and said, “There’s something wrong with my car.  Would you please get it fixed for me as soon as you can?  I’ve got to be on base in South Carolina tomorrow.”  Then I went on upstairs and went to sleep.

When I got up the next morning and shaved and went downstairs, the same man was there at the counter.  He gave me the keys to my car and said it was ready to go.  I said, “How much do I owe you?”  He said, “Nothing.”  He didn’t charge me anything for the room or the car.  The generator had gone out on it and he’d gotten another one, made the repair, and filled the car up with gas.  I don’t think such kindness was unusual in that day and time.

I got to Sumter, South Carolina, late Sunday afternoon.  I knew it was Sunday because I could see a lot of the cadets on leave walking around town.  When I got out toward the base, my tire went flat.  I pulled over to the side of the road.  There were some cadets walking along and as I got out to fix the flat, they walked up and said, “Lieutenant, can we help you?”  I said, “You sure can.”  So they put my spare on for me and I drove on to the base, reported in, and went to work the next day.

I was at Shaw Field from July through September.  As I said, I was an instructor for the AT-10, though I did some teaching in the BT-13 too.  I had four or five students a day.  Some of them were Free French cadets.  I didn’t have to speak any French, thank goodness.  Their English was pretty good.  They were all business.  They listened very attentively.

Evelyn came up and we rented a house.  I remember going squirrel hunting that summer.  I believe that was Evelyn’s first experience with squirrels.  I don’t think she liked them.  I had to cook them.  She didn’t want to eat them — she didn’t eat them, either.

My tour at Shaw Field passed without incident.  Except for an ingrown toenail.  My big toe got to throbbing so bad that it hurt to use the pedals on the plane.  It swelled way up.  Since it was interfering with my duties, I had to go to the infirmary.  When the doctor came in to examine me, I  said, “Don’t touch my toe.  I can’t stand it.  It’s hurting too bad.”  He said, “I understand.  Sit down.  Take your boot off.”  He put my leg in a thing that had a cutout in it for my foot, and he put a board over that, and he sat down with his back to me, straddling my leg, sitting on that board.  And I said, “Now, I told you, don’t touch —”  but before I could finish, he had taken this big scalpel, and cut down on the edge of my toe, the inside edge of my big toe, right on through the swelling, right out the other end of it.  And for an instant, it was agonizing pain.  Then complete relief.  He knew exactly what he was doing.  Then he reached in there with tweezers and pulled loose a long piece of toenail that he clipped off.  He bandaged me up, and sent me back to barracks with some anti-bacterial tablets to keep the infection down.  I dissolved these in water to soak my foot.   I was all right the next day.  It’s a good thing he didn’t tell me what he was going to do, though, because I think I would have killed him.

At the end of September I was ordered to report to the Army Air Force Overseas Replacement Depot in Greensboro, North Carolina.  They issued winter clothes, so I knew I was going somewhere cold.  The order quickly followed: from Greensboro, we’d post to Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, the port of embarkation for Europe.

It was recommended that we execute a last will and testament before this transfer.  I guess I didn’t think much about it — just more paperwork.  “I leave all to Maude, signed, Claude” is pretty much the form of these things.  What did I have?  A ten thousand-dollar national service life insurance policy.  A ’41 Plymouth (and I’d borrowed the money from Daddy for that).  That was pretty much “all.”  Of course, “Maude”  was Evelyn.

Evelyn had moved back to Mobile when we learned my tour at Shaw Field was about to end.  I got a ten-day leave to visit her and my family one last time.  It was a happy occasion, but it got more solemn as the time for departure grew closer.  At the L&N Railroad Station we stood outside the Pullman sleeper that was going to carry me north.  There was Mama and Daddy and Leighton and Evelyn and her family.  There wasn’t any crying that I remember, just lots of hugs and kisses goodbye.  Then they blew the whistle and I got aboard.

Somewhere south of Atmore, I looked out the window and there was our car — Leighton driving Mama and Daddy up Highway 31 that ran parallel to the tracks.  We waved to each other.  When the train stopped in Atmore, they did too.  Leighton ran up and knocked on my sleeper window.  I went down the corridor to see him and my folks.  One last time.

We were two days getting to Stelton, New Jersey, where Camp Kilmer was located.  It was a tremendous place — big, big, big.  All these men and materiel massing for transport across the sea.  I remember reporting in, getting an assignment for BOQ — Bachelor Officers’ Quarters — and asking where the officers’ mess was.  “Across the parade ground,” they said.  I remember walking across that parade ground on this huge base with the ground frozen solid as it could be.  I went over to the officers’ mess and had dinner.  I’m sure I talked to some of the fellows there.  When I got through, I walked alone back across that frozen parade ground to my room at the BOQ.  I recall it vividly.  A crystal-clear, cold, cold night, the moon almost full.  And I remember going back across the empty parade ground, saying my prayers, and in my prayers I asked God to take care of my wife and for me to return.

I had a good feeling that everything was going to be fine.

 

Chapter Eight

 

            The evening ofNovember 15, 1944, we sailed out of lower New York Bay, bound for Europe aboard the troop carrier Isle de France.  I think it was the second-largest ship in the service at that time.  It carried four thousand officers and ten thousand enlisted men.  Thank goodness, officers were in staterooms up top.  We were four to six men to a room, I believe, whereas below decks, the troops were stacked in canvas bunks six men deep.  And there were six or seven deck levels on the ship.  It was just packed!

The enlisted men were confined to their bunk areas for most of the voyage.  With such a large human cargo, the ship required that they stay put in order to maintain an even distribution of weight.  Anyway, there wasn’t room for a lot of wandering around.  They got out for mess, of course, but in rotation.  I recall lifeboat drills, too.  Nobody spent much time on deck because the weather was cold, rainy, and blustery.  The ocean was pretty rough at that time of year.  My flight experience kept me from getting seasick, but a lot of the troops weren’t so lucky.  The smell down below got pretty bad from the sickness and the latrines.  You see, the enlisted men had open latrines — just troughs in the wall is all they were.  When the ship would roll, they’d overflow.  Talk about a horrible stench!  I had to pull guard duty below deck one night, which was not a pleasant experience.  Officers were stationed at the top and the bottom of each stairway connecting the decks.  Our job was to make sure the men remained on the levels where they were assigned.

The ship didn’t run in convoy because it was pretty fast and it took a zigzag course across the Atlantic to avoid U-boats.  After three days’ transit, we arrived in Glasgow, Scotland, in the heaviest fog I’ve ever seen.  It was daytime, but the fog was so thick it was just like looking at nothing.  As we were preparing to disembark, we were told to hold onto our gear with one hand and get hold of the man in front with the other hand and not let go.  If you did let go, you might walk off overboard or get lost.  In that fog nobody would find you.

I flew south from Glasgow aboard a C-47, the plane I’d be piloting shortly.  Our destination was the little town of Aldermaston, England, about forty-five miles southwest of London.  I remember looking down over the rugged, rocky landscape of Scotland and watching it gradually change into the rolling, green countryside of England.  Here was my ancestral homeland.  It was beautiful.

Aldermaston was the headquarters for the 434^th Troop Carrier Group where I was assigned to the 71^st Squadron, 53^rd Wing of the 9^th Army Air Force.  I bunked in the kitchen of what had been a women’s school. The showers and latrine were outside.  You wore your boots to the shower because of the mud and snow on the ground.  Walk out, take ’em off, shower quick, then get dried fast and get back inside.  There was a coal-fired, potbelly stove for heat.  It was completely inefficient.  For bedding they issued what they called “biscuits”— hard, hemp-stuffed mattresses several inches thick.  I had two or three of them I laid over boards.  Sleeping bag on top of that.  That was my bed.  I slept in my flight jacket because it was down-filled with a big ol’ beaver hood on it: get rolled up in that and you could sleep pretty good.

As soon as I got to Aldermaston, I met the C.O. of my group.  He told me he’d be flying with me the next morning, checking me out in the C-47.  C-47 was the military designation of the DC-3, the twin-engine craft you see Bogart put Ingrid Bergman on at the end of Casablanca.  I think it was the finest plane ever made.  The old Eastern Airlines built its reputation on this plane, and there are quite a few of them still flying around the world.  A lot of people said you could just put it on a runway, throttle it up, sit back, and it would fly itself.  This was almost true.  I loved flying the C-47.

On a cold November morning, I sat beside my C.O. in the cockpit.  I had the copilot’s seat.  We took off, went around, landed.  Then he said, “Switch seats.”  I took off, came back, landed, and he said, “Fine.  Take off again and I’ll show you how to get out of the pattern and out of the country.”  We flew out over the English Channel.  I wrote down the coordinates to fly, the radio contact to use leaving the field, what the next contact would be, where we’d leave England and so on.  The procedure was to fly out following one radio frequency and return following a different frequency.  It was important to have the right frequencies, going and coming, because there was so much air traffic.  As I looked around at the number of planes in the air, I began to get a sense of the magnitude of what was going on across the Channel.

Remember, the Allied Invasion of Normandy had taken place in June, when I was at Randolph Field in Texas.  Throughout the summer and fall, American and British forces had been fighting the Germans in France, Holland, and Belgium.  They’d pretty much rolled them back to the German border by the time I arrived.  Keeping the advancing Allied Armies supplied was the job of my Troop Carrier Group.

Through the end of November I trained aboard the C-47, flying as copilot.  When I wasn’t training, I liked to watch the fighters that operated at our base.  In addition to the C-47s operated by the Troop Carrier Group, Aldermaston also supported a squadron of Spitfires.  They were beautiful little planes with broad, elegantly designed wings.  They made a very distinctive sound, like a bunch of wasps, and their sporty young pilots could really handle them.  I liked to watch them come in for refueling.  The pilots would drop them down and whirl them around on their end of the grass field.  While the ground crew was taking care of the plane, the pilots would jump out, run off, and do whatever they had to do.  Soon as the plane was refueled and reloaded with ammo, they’d come running back, jump in, and buzz off.

Even more impressive were the bombers when they formed up for missions.  All over our part of England there were bomber bases supporting B-24s and B-17s.  For big missions, hundreds of them would fill the sky over Aldermaston.  They’d take off one at a time and begin circling.  The droning would start.  They’d stack up, circling higher and higher, as plane was added to plane, the squadrons put into formation, and the droning would build.  The morning might start out clear, but by the time the squadrons were assembled, the sky would be cloudy and thick with their contrails, and there’d be this tremendous rumbling overhead, the sky thick with planes and clouds.  Then they’d begin peeling off, east, and you’d watch this immense armada drift away.  The fighter escorts would leave a little later to join them because they were faster and didn’t carry as much fuel.  It was a powerful sight.

Even though we were in England, we celebrated Thanksgiving that November.  Somebody arranged to rent this big reception hall in town for the air nurses and officers — that is, the pilots, copilots, and navigators.  I was appointed to be in charge of the convoy taking everyone into town and back.  I remember it was very cold, snow piled along the roads, but inside the banquet hall was this big fireplace with a roaring fire.  There was music from a radio or record player playing holiday songs, Christmas songs.  It was very cheerful.  The tables were all set.  And in front of each plate was a big army-issue aluminum cup and a bottle of champagne.  At that time we had missions going in and out of Rheims, the heart of champagne country, so we were well supplied with wine and champagne.  We also had whiskey and scotch and vodka.  Good scotch, like Johnny Walker Black Label, was about a dollar twenty-five a bottle.  The best vodka you could get was eighty or ninety cents a bottle.  The government issued spirits to flight crews on a regular basis, and we had elected to pool all of that for our celebration.  Anyway, I was learning how to drink scotch and there was plenty to drink.

When we sat down to eat, everybody opened a bottle of champagne.  I had read about this stuff,  but I had never had any before.  I was ready to try some.  I poured my aluminum cup full.  I had never tasted anything so good in my life as that bubbly wine.  It was really easy to drink too much.  Oh man, it was a lovely party.  When it was time to leave, I said, “Convoy’s forming, going back to base, load up!”  There were seventy-five or eighty of us so this took a little time.  We were all wobbly, trying to do the best we could.  I rode in the front truck, heading out.  These were big four-by-four trucks, open in the back, where the men sat on benches.  It was about a ten-mile ride back to base, I think.  On both sides of the road, dirty snow piled up high in big drifts.  About halfway back, I told the sergeant, “Stop the truck.”  He said, “There’s no way to pull over to the side, Lieutenant.”  I said, “Just stop this damn truck.”  So he stopped, and I climbed over the snow drift and fell over in the ditch, sick as I’ve ever been in my life.  All the men in the back of the truck started hollering at me, “Let’s go!  Let’s go!” because they were freezing to death.  I didn’t care.  I was the one who was dying.  And I promised God, if he would let me live, I would never drink champagne again.  And I haven’t to this day.  I don’t remember if we flew the following morning, but if we did it became a dangerous mission, considering how hung over we all were.

Most of my missions consisted of taking supplies over to France and bringing back wounded men.  I’d take over medical supplies, building supplies, fuel, ammunition, whatever was needed.  I’d bring back soldiers.  The boys who were conscious would speak or wave to you, but there wasn’t much time to visit.  If they were in bad shape, flight nurses would take care of them.  The inside of my plane was configured to hold up to twenty stretchers.

On the French side, most all the landing strips for my missions were temporary.  We’d fly over a countryside of fields and small towns to land in the rear of the Allied lines.  The landing strips were made of steel mats laid down in sections — altogether maybe two thousand feet long by thirty feet wide, just metal strips laid down on the French countryside.  From Aldermaston we’d get the coordinates to the strip in France and the radio frequency for contact.  When we’d get close to our objective, the strip’s radio control would talk us in.  We’d make one flight a day.  When we got back to base, we’d write up a report.

Sometime in early December we went on a mission that took us near Paris. We radioed some excuse back to Aldermaston as to why we couldn’t return that evening.  A lot of planes whose missions took them close to Paris got engine trouble, so I suppose ours did, too.  Anyway we reported that we’d have to spend the night.  We had a delightful evening down by the Seine.  We had a wonderful meal, the best in months.  We walked those boulevards, wide and beautiful.

The first combat-related mission I flew was around Christmastime during the Battle of the Bulge.  The Germans had tried to break through the Allied lines in Belgium and had almost succeeded.  The bulge they created in the lines is what gave the battle its name.  It was the last German offensive in the west.  The enemy was trying to divide the British and American armies and retake the seaport at Antwerp.  General Eisenhower had sent the 101^st Airborne Division to a little town called Bastogne in southeast Belgium, near the borders of France and Germany.  It was a key crossroads.  The 101^st had been ordered to hold Bastogne at all costs.  Our boys had been surrounded, outnumbered.  You might remember that when the Germans sent an ultimatum to surrender, the American general in command of the town sent back his famous one-word reply, “Nuts!”

The 101^st was running out of ammunition, food, medical supplies, you name it.  So we were going to re-supply them by air.  I flew two of those missions on December 23^rd and 24^th.  They were five-hour flights.  From Aldermaston to Bastogne was a little over six hundred miles, roundtrip.  The first flight was in rainy and foggy weather on the British side.  I thought the mission was going to be canceled, but the fog broke and we got out.  The second flight was in perfect weather, crystal-clear.  We left England early in the morning.  By about 10 a.m.. we crossed the German lines.  We started taking flak — black explosions in the air, shrapnel flying out of it.  When shrapnel hit the skin of the plane it sounded like somebody throwing rocks.  We stayed in formation, descending to about a thousand feet to make our drops.  We started taking small-arm fire from the Germans, but there wasn’t time to get nervous.  We were trying to stay in formation, follow the lead plane.  Besides, those C-47s could take a lot of abuse before they went down.  They were remarkable aircraft.

We were in the first group to go in.  You could see the countryside very clearly.  The fields and trees were white with snow.  When we got over the drop zone, the crew in the back had the cargo door already pulled open in order to push out supplies as fast as they could.  Ahead of me, another plane was dropping cargo.  And ahead of him.  There must have been close to three hundred planes on that particular mission. As soon as a crate cleared the plane, its parachute would ripple open, blossom out in canopy twenty-feet wide.  All the parachutes were color-coded to designate fuel, ammo, medicine, whatever — yellow, green, red, purple, blue parachutes.  They were beautiful.  There they went, going down over this white landscape, trees the color of balloons.  It was one of the most impressive sights I’ve ever seen.  The soldiers came running out, retrieving the supplies.  You could see them scrambling around like ants on mushrooms.  I later had a friend in Mobile who told me he was at that drop, an artilleryman, named Ezra Trice.  He said he was mighty glad to see us.  The 101^st Division hung on at Bastogne.  Patton’s Third Army fought through and relieved them the day after Christmas.  Even though we lost some planes, our operation was a success.  The German advance had been stopped.

With the arrival of the New Year, a great thing happened back home.  My daughter, Millie, was born January 4, 1945.  Evelyn sent me the news and their picture.  We’d nicknamed her “Charlyn” for “Charlie” and “Evelyn.”  Here’s the letter I wrote her in early February:

 

 

Dear Charlyn,

 

Well, I guess you think you’re pretty young to be getting mail already.  Anyway, I thought perhaps you’ve been wondering where your daddy has been since you’ve been here.  Well, I’m here in England trying to end a little business that I didn’t want in the first place.  But you can bet everything in that piggybank of yours that I’ll be home as soon as it’s possible.  I received my first pictures of you today and I think that you are a mighty sweet and pretty girl (you take after your mother).  The main reason for this letter is to tell you what a wonderful mother you have.  No doubt, you already have found out for yourself how sweet and good your mother is.  I love her more than anything on earth and I know that you will feel the same way when you get a little older.  Are you being a good girl?  Your mother tells me that you are the best little girl ever.  I know you are and I can hardly wait till I get home and meet you. Do you know what I am going to do with the picture of you and your cute mother?   I’m going to put it in my airplane and look at it all the time.  Well, I’ve got to go now.  You be a real good little girl and always do what your mother tells you to do.  Goodnight.  I know your mother will teach you to say your prayers when you get a little older, but by that time, I’ll be there.  I love you and think about you every minute.

 

Your daddy, Charlie

 

P.S. Coots, do you think our daughter will understand this when you read it to her?   — Me.

 

“Coots” was my nickname for Evelyn.  On the control panel in my plane I kept their picture: Coots and Charlyn, my black-haired, blue-eyed, dimple-cheeked child.

In February my squadron was selected to fly “weather ships” in support of bombing missions.  We flew our C-47s to a temporary field in France where we were based about ten days.  There was snow.  We slept in tents with small stoves for heat.  Our job was to take off at three in the morning, fly into Germany, and monitor weather conditions over the proposed target areas as daylight came.  We radioed this information back so the bombers could optimize their target list when they took off from England later that morning.  We took some German flak on these missions, but nothing serious.  I do remember that the weather was particularly bad on return one morning. They had no radio tower at the French base — just a portable radio unit in a jeep.  Even though they talked us in close, it was hard to make visual contact with the strip, the jeep, anything.  Everything was white.  I had to circle several times before I could make out where I was supposed to land.

In the third week of March, we were transferred from Aldermaston to a base outside of Rheims, France.  We were now part of the 437^th Troop Carrier Group, 84^th Squadron.  Allied supply lines were now well established inside France.  That didn’t mean we had hot water, though.  Not on my part of the base.  We tried to rig something up.  We took an old fuel tank, coiled tubing around it, and raised the whole contraption up on legs so that we could build a fire under it.  Thing is, we could never get enough water pressure to keep the water flowing in the tubes.  They just melted in the heat.  We had a heck of a time trying to make hot water.

It turned out hot water was the least of our worries.  Shortly after arriving in Rheims, I got orders to report to another base nearby for a briefing.  There, the C.O. told me that I had been selected to pilot a glider behind enemy lines.  My mission was to transport twelve spies to a drop zone some ten miles northeast of the Rhine River, beyond the town of Wesel, Germany.   The spies were German civilians and their mission was not divulged.  They’d be in German uniform, so I assumed it was infiltration of the German army.  The copilot and I were shown an aerial photograph of the field where we were to land.  We were told that we’d also carry a jeep aboard the glider.  After we had off loaded the spies, we were to hold our position overnight, then return to Wesel, where British forces were supposed to have captured the town and established a bridgehead for the road back to Antwerp.

I had never flown a glider before.  I asked about training.  I was told there was no problem: the controls were basic, we were pilots, we could fly it.  We were told the takeoff speed and the landing speed, that’s all we needed to know.  Oh yes, keep your feet off the floor when landing: the undercarriage of the glider had been known to collapse if you exceeded your landing speed — it could mess you up below the knees.  No other plans.  No contingencies.  Weapons issued for holding our position: a carbine and a .45 pistol.  Also a Thompson submachine gun, stored on the jeep.

When I returned to quarters, I talked the mission over with other pilots who had similar orders.  Most of the other glider pilots were carrying soldiers, ammunition, and equipment.  Under the Articles of War, we were not supposed to go into combat in aircraft we did not have training in.  What were we going to do?  To refuse would be cowardly, disgraceful.  To refuse would invite court-martial.  There was a tent in the camp where they conducted field court- martial.  You could say, “No, not going,” then walk over there for your ticket to Leavenworth Prison or wherever they sent you.  I guess some pilots took that walk and got cashiered that afternoon.  But I didn’t know them.  The officers I knew took their orders.  I took mine.

And a lot of us, I mean a lot, were going on this mission, officers and enlisted.  The big picture was this.  After the Battle of the Bulge, the Allied armies had been massing for a final assault across the Rhine into the German homeland.  They were waiting for the winter weather to break.  Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces, had his headquarters in Rheims and that’s where this massive attack was being planned.  Turns out we’d been burning chemical smoke pots along a seventy-mile long strip of the northern Rhine for the last month, throwing up a smoke screen that obscured what was happening on our side of the river.

The British Field Marshal Montgomery, I believe, was the architect of our end of this thing.  It would be called “Operation Plunder,” with the air component of the assault called “Operation Varsity.”  Montgomery’s 2^nd Army along with the American 9^th Army was supposed to begin fording the Rhine at 3 a.m. on the morning of March 24^th.  The airborne assault was to follow after daylight.  All these forces were supposed to link up by midafternoon.  We were going to take the Ruhr Valley away from the German war machine.  Without the Ruhr and its coal and steel and chemicals, that machine was finished.

You can look back at the records.  “Operation Varsity” was the largest air armada in history.  The column of planes we put together was two and a half hours long — fifteen hundred airplanes and gliders from the 9^th  U.S. Army Air Force and twelve hundred more from the Royal Air Force, plus some nine hundred U.S. and R.A.F. fighters flying support.  It was like the Normandy invasion by air.  And just like the Normandy beaches, where we were going was well defended.  I don’t know how many German divisions were deployed in the area, how many troops, tanks, anti-aircraft guns, whatever, but we were going straight into them in broad daylight.

Of course, on March 23^rd, the day before the mission, we didn’t know all the particulars.  We just knew what our individual missions were.  Everybody was keyed up.  There were a lot of boys in and out of my tent that evening.  We told jokes and laughed until we cried.  One of them was a Rhode Islander named Sharanock who had been on the Olympic team competing in Tokyo before the war.  As I recall, he was the boy who’d be driving the jeep for us.

When things quieted down that night, I tipped up a box for a desk, put a candle on it, and wrote Evelyn:

                                                                                                            France

March 23^rd 1945

Friday

 

My darling wife and daughter,

 

I’ve been really busy today darling — doing just lots of different things.  I haven’t been telling you much about what I’ve been doing since I was transferred but I can’t say much.  Perhaps you can guess but I’d rather you would just forget everything about the war and think about us being together real soon or as soon as I can get back.  I pray every day and night that I can soon be with you.

Coots, I’ll probably be unable to write you for the next several days — but when I do write next I’ll write a V-mail besides the regular letter.  In that way I’ll sorta make up for the days I miss.  How is Charlyn doing?  It’s been so long since I received any mail that when I do get it there will be so many letters from you that I’ll spend a whole week just reading them.  I haven’t heard from anyone in so long.

You should see our tent.  Cutie, you would be ashamed of me because it’s not neat and clean like I would like for it to be.  We don’t have a floor in it and we have K—ration boxes all over the ground so you can imagine how terrible it looks.  I think one of the things I’ve missed most is being able to live orderly with everything in its right place.  But the one and most important thing I miss is you.

How are Mama and Dad getting along?  I’ll write them a letter tonight.  The weather here is real pretty during the day, but at night it turns pretty cold.  I guess the weather there at home is getting good and warm and that Charlyn and you are getting plenty of sunlight.

It’s been several days since I’ve had plenty of time to catch up on how the war news is looking.  From what I’ve heard it’s doing O.K. and we’re still winning so everything is alright.  I don’t think the war over here will last much longer.

Good night darling — I pray every day and night that God will keep you healthy and well and that I can soon be with you.  Say your prayers every night and don’t worry.  I love you both more than anything on earth and I’ll always be —

 

Your devoted husband,

Charlie

P.S.  I miss you darling

 

I probably didn’t sleep too well that night.  I suppose I said to myself, “Well, I’ve got another job to do.”  I prayed that I’d be able to carry out my duties and that I’d be protected.  I trusted everything to God.

When daylight came, we reported for briefing. There was a huge convoy formed on our airstrip, as there was, I guess, on every airstrip in France.  C-47s lined up one behind the other and to the left and right of each tail, two CG4-A gliders hooked to the towplane by nylon cords.  Now the CG-4A was not a sophisticated piece of engineering.  It looked like a flying crate: long, rectangular fuselage shaped by a tubular framework, covered by canvas.  No separation between cockpit and cargo area.  The flooring was plywood.  For controls there was a joystick and pedals, for instrumentation, an airspeed indicator.  The briefing was directed by towing personnel — how we’d get airborne, how we’d form up, how we’d head out.  Then we started boarding.  With so many men and so many planes and gliders it took a while.

I remember that the German spies were quiet.  They just didn’t talk.  Had they been soldiers, there would have been laughing and joking, but they just sat there, facing each other from benches that ran along the canvas walls of the cargo area.  The jeep sat between them, its grill right behind the cockpit.  A cable ran from the back of the jeep to a pulley at the rear of the glider, then out and up over the fuselage, back to the glider’s nose.  The front section of the glider was hinged so that when the jeep drove forward it would pull up the nose, open it for the jeep to exit.

I had left all my personal property in my locker as ordered — except for two bottles of Johnny Walker Black Label scotch and two cartons of cigarettes.  I knew there was a hot black market in Antwerp and I meant to sell them there before I worked my way back to join my outfit.  They’d bring a fabulous price.  The whisky I stowed in the pack that hung on the back of my seat.  The cigarettes I zipped into the leg pockets of my flight suit.

We took off sometime after 7 a.m..  The glider had a large wingspan, so it was flying before the towplane left the tarmac.  Remember, there were two of these gliders behind each plane, so you had to keep your glider trimmed to stay out of the other man’s way.  Once the towplane was airborne, we had to get into formation.  There was a lot of traffic in the sky.  Minding our air space kept us too busy to worry about what lay ahead of us.

We crossed the Rhine around 10 a.m.  I remember approaching it and seeing this huge, dark wall rising from the ground.  It was spring fog mixed with smoke from Montgomery’s chemical pots.  We climbed to clear it, but we were still going in low.  The mission called for our gliders to release around eight hundred feet in order to get to the ground as quickly as possible.  We couldn’t have been flying much higher than fifteen hundred feet when we flew over the river.

As soon as we crossed, all hell broke loose.  The flak was nearly as thick as the fogbank.  There was also a lot of ground fire ripping up into the convoy.  The C-47s could take a lot of this punishment, but not the gliders.  Once punctured, the canvas would start tearing under air pressure.  Whole sections would begin peeling off, the aerodynamics would fail, and the gliders would just disintegrate, dumping their men from the sky.  I saw that happening all around me, soldiers tumbling, arms and legs flailing, dropping to their death.  Even worse, some of the towplanes that had released ahead of us were turning, trying to gain altitude, and in the process, some were clipping the towropes or wings of the incoming gliders, causing more havoc.  It was horrible.  We’d gone from a convoy in clear skies into smoke and chaos.  Nothing had prepared me for what I saw.

What do you do?  We were pushing on another ten miles, another few minutes.  My mindset was, I’m going to do what I have to do.  I focused on the lights at the tail of my towplane: red meant “wait,” yellow meant “ready,” green meant “go,” — you hit a lever that dropped the towrope and got the devil down.  And if you didn’t yank loose, the towplane would cut you loose.  I wasn’t going to be surprised.  I knew my landing speed was a hundred and five miles an hour.  I knew that I was carrying so much weight that my glider would stall out and fall if I didn’t get into a landing pattern fast.  I was going to be ready.  I was going to take us down right.

I hit the release bar the moment that light flashed green.  I was concentrating very hard.  The din of the towplane’s engines faded.  We were on our own.  It seemed almost quiet for a moment.  Since we were under a thousand feet, the landing procedure required a 360-degree turn to slow down, and survey the ground for approach.  I banked the glider.  Before I was out of the turn, ground fire tore up into my right wing.  It was from what we called a burp gun.  They made a loud belch and spit hundreds of rounds a minute.  The fire had clipped the wing, cutting away a six-foot section, making the aileron useless.  The glider was falling into a spin, and I was struggling to pull it out.  I was also intensely aware of the sound of gunfire below us.  The Germans were marking us.  Just as I gained a little control, another burst of ground fire tore into the glider.  It sounded like a buzz saw flicked on and off.  The cockpit floor splintered.  My copilot went limp — his hands dropped into his lap, and he slumped, gone, turned away from me.  Something had gone through the side of his face.  My left thigh and hip were burning.  My left hand was numb and bloody.  My eyes were stinging.  My nose was bleeding.  All I could do was haul back on the stick, fighting us out of the spin.  The glider was shivering.  There was all this noise coming up from the ground.

I wasn’t afraid.  I was trying to do what I had to.  I was kind of angry.  I  said under my breath, “They can’t do this to Charlie McNeil of Frisco City.”   I focused on a patch of field, and  I kept thinking, I’ve got to get down there.  I am going to land there.  I got the spin under control, started my approach, but my right wing was heavy, and I knew it was going to give me trouble as I went in.  Sure enough, as I started to touch down, the right wing dipped.  It ploughed the ground, and popped the glider’s nose into the dirt.  I lost consciousness on impact.

When I came to, I was still buckled to my seat.  But I wasn’t inside the cockpit.  The dragging wing had caused the glider to cartwheel.  It had tumbled, tail over nose over tail, and had come to rest on its right side, left wing cocked up intothe sky.  When I woke up, that’s what I saw, that wing going up in flames.  The jerry cans of fuel we had carried for the jeep had exploded.  The glider was burning.  The cockpit had torn open, and I’d been pitched out next to it.  I unstrapped my seat and tried to crawl away from the fire.  I remember my flak vest being very heavy.  It was hot and I couldn’t crawl fast enough.  I realized the dirt under me had been recently ploughed.  It was tilled soil, like back home in springtime.

I heard someone inside the glider holler.  I looked, and a body staggered out in flames, only to be immediately cut down by machine gun fire.  More machine gun fire hit the dirt around me.  I lay still.  I watched.  Nobody else came out.

I lay there a long time.  There was a lot of noise, a lot of noise — aircraft engines roaring overhead, enemy fire rattling everywhere.  I was stunned.  About a hundred feet away, at the edge of the field, I could see a farmhouse, and behind it a twenty millimeter anti-aircraft gun emplacement, right between the house and the barn.  The gun crew was raking the sky.  The noise intensified, and I remember looking up to see what looked like this huge B-24 bomber coming across the field.  It couldn’t have been two hundred feet off the deck, dropping supplies.  I could see an airman standing just inside the cargo doorway when the whole thing blew up in a big orange ball.

How long did I lie out there?  Half an hour?  The glider finished burning.  It didn’t take long, canvas and plywood.  I felt a gun barrel punch me in the back.  A young German lieutenant stood over me, holding a rifle.  I guess he had walked out from the gun emplacement to check for survivors.  I said, “Comrade.”  “Nein,” he said, then motioned with the rifle to get up.  I looked at him.  I looked at his rifle.  I guess I was so glad to be alive I didn’t know what else to do, so I got up.  I’m sure I was in shock.  I wouldn’t be able to walk again for weeks, but I hobbled before him to the gun emplacement at the farm house.  The adrenaline must have masked the pain in my thigh and hip and hand.  I dropped down against the sandbags while the crew continued firing.

Now it seems unusual, but the first things the Germans asked me for were cigarettes and whiskey.  I managed to unzip my flight suit pockets and hand over the cigarettes.  I also handed over my .45 pistol.  What was I going to do with it?  I told the young officer about the Johnny Walker strapped to the back of my cockpit seat.  He went out to the field for it.  He returned holding the sealed tops of two broken bottles.

After a while, they put me in the barn.  I guess they figured I wasn’t going anywhere.  I lay on some bales of hay behind three Clydesdale horses.  The gunfire outside made them shivery, very nervous.  Explosions made them toss their heads and stamp their big hooves.  I remember thinking, if they get those feet out of their tethers, they’re going to stomp all over me.

There was also a little Polish boy in the barn.  He had a bad leg.  How he’d come to be there, I don’t know, but I had the impression he was tending to something for the German soldiers.  Maybe me?  At one point he came over to me and said something like, “Me have guns.”  He indicated a tool chest.  The guns were in there?  He pointed to me and to himself and mimed shooting motions, suggesting, I guess, that we shoot our way out.  I told him, “I can’t walk.”  After a while he left.  I saw no more of him.

Later in the afternoon, when the noise of anti-aircraft guns and artillery had died down, a side door opened and into the barn came this tall lady.  She looked to be in her sixties, handsome but severe, her hair pulled back in a bun.  She wore a floral blouse and a black skirt that reached to the ground.  I assumed she was the lady of the house.  She walked over to me, bent down, and studied my face.  My nose was broken.  My face was bloody.  I must have looked like hell.  She looked me in the eye and said, “War no gut.  War no gut.”  Then she went away.  In a few moments she returned with a large glass of warm milk and a piece of sweet bread, its texture like cornbread.  And she with her own hands fed me pieces of that bread and held the glass to my lips.  I will never forget her kindness.

Maybe I dozed a while after eating.  I was in shock, so I didn’t know how time was passing.  I remember the Germans coming into the barn and putting a heavy greatcoat on me.  They helped me out of the barn and laid me in the back of a wagon.  A Clydesdale stood harnessed in front.  There were three other wounded men lying on the straw, an American and two Germans.  The American had an L-shaped hole in his head.  His hands were tied, but he kept trying to get them up to his head to dig at the hole.

It was getting cold, but the sky was still light when we set off.  The journey was a jumble of memories.  I was exhausted, but I couldn’t sleep — neither was I really awake.  The wagon drove from the farm along a road that went through Wesel.  The town had been completely devastated by Allied bombing. I had never seen such ruin.  Not one structure intact.  The contents of houses and buildings were blown all about like garbage, hanging from hedges, from trees.  Bodies and parts of bodies were everywhere, lying where they’d fallen, on sidewalks, in streets, sometimes covered with sheets, sometimes not.  It was horrible.  You cannot imagine it.  When I looked upon that death and devastation, I prayed that my family would never experience such a thing.

Afternoon passed into twilight.  We were in the countryside again.  Somewhere along the road, the horizon lit up with a roar.  I was told it was a V2 rocket, launched at London.  The wagon kept rattling along.  At some point I became aware we had stopped.  The wounded American was gone.  He had died, I guess, and they had taken him off.  We were at a crossroads.  Soldiers were digging foxholes, preparing to defend this place the next morning.  I was very thirsty.  I remembered the word, Wasser, from the German I took at MI.  “Wasser!” I called out.  Somebody brought me a canteen.  Did they give it to me because I wore this German greatcoat?  Because I was lying beside wounded Germans?  I drank. “Gut,” I said, and handed back the canteen.  We moved on.

Sometime in the night we reached a place that looked like a schoolhouse.  Soldiers unloaded us.  I remember lying on the floor, below some bunks, listening to artillery open fire far away.  There was a screaming as one round drew closer and closer, then a tremendous concussion when it hit.  One of my ears started bleeding.  My eardrum was punctured.

The next morning some soldiers came and carried me into a little room with a makeshift examination table — boards covered by a rubber mat, propped between a window sill and the back of a couch.  There was a German doctor who spoke perfect English.  He told me that he had been educated in London.  He looked at my left hand, which was badly swollen, and told me that he would remove the burnt flesh and the shell fragments from it.  He said that he would cut my wedding band off, too, because it was aggravating the swelling of my finger, and he was afraid I might lose my finger if the pressure weren’t relieved.  He cut my pants leg off, and examined the holes in my thigh.  He said he would have to debride these wounds, and remove whatever shrapnel he could find.  For the wound in my right hip, where shrapnel had clipped the bone, he believed he could do nothing other than stop the bleeding.  He said that he had no medical supplies — no bandages, no disinfectant, no anesthesia, nothing.  He explained that he was going to put a piece of balsa wood in my mouth.  I was to bite down on that when the pain became too great.  Some assistants were called in to help restrain me.  The doctor began to work, cutting and probing, removing burnt skin and metal.  I passed out.

When I later came to, I discovered that he had used brown paper to stanch the bleeding.  He had used paper for bandages.  He had bound these bandages with string.  American medical staff would have a lot of trouble removing this paper from my wounds, but he had done a good job.  They would find my wedding ring, cut and bent open, in my watch pocket.

Soldiers put me on a stretcher, and moved me by wagon again later that day.  I could hear artillery pounding.  The German army was falling back in retreat, and we were moving with them.  In the evening they put me under a low shed or chicken coop among wounded British soldiers.  The boy lying next to me offered to share some hard candy he had in his pack if I would open it for him.  He was using his pack for a pillow.  He was badly hurt.  We had a little candy for supper that night, the first food I’d had since the German lady offered me the milk and bread.  The boy was dead in the morning.

The next day we moved up the road again, this time by ambulance.  Another night in a barn-type structure.  On the fourth day, my journey ended inside a big courtyard at the top of a hill.  When the soldiers brought me out on my stretcher, I could see high walls surrounding the courtyard and a long flight of steps leading up to a castle.  They carried me up the steps into a great foyer, then down a long hall.  We passed a big reception room, then a fine, library-like room with tall glass cases full of antique weapons and guns.  There was a brass rail running along the top of the cases that supported a wheeled ladder that ran along in front of them.  Somewhere down the hall we entered a room with straw scattered on the floor where maybe a hundred and fifty wounded soldiers lay.  I was laid among them.

In a little while, every man was given a piece of dark bread with a nasty white paste on it.  A boy lying near me said it tasted like they had run a fat sow around till she sweated this stuff.  He was a paratrooper from Georgia the Germans had shot in the buttocks — quite a character I’ll get to in a minute.  Along with the bread, a metal bowl, like a wash basin, came down the line.  You’d take two or three swallows of this greasy soup, and pass it on.

A German doctor came in.  He walked the rows, examining the wounded, most of them German, some British, and this Georgia boy and me.  This is not a pleasant thing to mention, but I had not had a bowel movement in three days.  When the doctor checked me, I told him that I had not been in position to … you know.   His English was excellent.  He immediately understood, and ordered his assistant to produce what was necessary from a supply bag he carried.  He gave me a very, very small brown pill.  He gave me a drink of water to wash it down, then passed on.

His examination of the other men took some time.  As he was leaving the room, I hollered, “Doctor!”  I don’t know what was in that little brown pill, but it worked quick.  He waved to me, sent two attendants over to pick me up, and I took care of my problem right there.  They pushed the old straw over to the side and put me on some fresh straw.

The thick stone walls of this castle muffled the sound of artillery fire, but by the morning of the next day, that sound was growing louder — it was incoming.  When the doctor made his rounds again, he told me that he was leaving me in charge, as the ranking enemy officer, while he evacuated the wounded German troops.  They’d try to send ambulances back, he said.  By afternoon, the German soldiers were gone.  The shelling was growing louder.

I ordered everybody who could walk to find out if this castle had a cellar, then move everyone who couldn’t walk down there.  They did.  They carried us down a wide, circular staircase where we found a hundred or more civilians hiding from the shelling.  Two German nurses were among them.  They had stayed behind, or had been left.  It was cold in the cellar. One of the nurses wrapped me in a blanket and put me up on a mattress at the bottom of the steps.

Toward evening, the shelling settled down.  The Georgia paratrooper came limping over and I asked him, “Why were you trying to earn a Purple Heart that way?”

“They didn’t shoot me coming down,” he said.  “I got down OK, found this little hole and got in it.  Came the order to move, I was fixing to run, but when I went to, I raised my fanny too high.  That’s all they could see to shoot at.”

“Well,” I said, “I don’t think anybody’s going to shoot at you now.  Why don’t you run upstairs and get us a little souvenir from that gun room?”

So he disappeared up the steps.  Then came the darnest crash of glass you ever heard.  He came back loaded with antique guns.  He gave me two — a matching set of flintlock dueling pistols.  I put them under the cover.

The next morning we heard the sound of diesel engines pulling into the courtyard.  We thought it was the German ambulances returning for us.  Some of the British boys started crying because they had hoped we were going to be rescued.  You could hear boot steps on the floors above us. Then silence.  The door opened at the top of the stairs and this crisp, upper class British voice called out, “Who’s down there?”

The British boys started screaming and hollering.  I shouted over them, “We’re British and American wounded!  Who are you?”

“British Second Army!” he said.

I stayed with this British officer as he supervised our evacuation.  He told me that their army had overrun the area during the night.  That morning he had been leading a patrol, securing the town, when German ambulances blundered into them on their return to the castle.  He had pulled up to the lead ambulance and asked the driver where he thought he was going.  That’s how the Germans led the British to the castle.  As he told me about how he found us, he had his driver light a little can of Sterno.  He took a tin cup and crumbled little bits of chocolate into it and when it was melted, he added water.  He made me the best cup of hot chocolate I ever tasted.

He ordered my stretcher put on the back of his jeep.  On the way out of town, I saw Allied tanks everywhere.  Around every corner, tanks.  Tanks along the road, Allied troops and supply lines all the way back across the Rhine.  It was very clear who was in control.  “Operation Plunder” and “Operation Varsity” had succeeded.

I had seen something of the cost.

As soon as I got to an American field hospital, I sent V-mail to Evelyn:

 

March 30, 1945

                                                                                    Somewhere in Germany

 

My darling wife and daughter,

 

This is one letter that I hardly know where to begin ….  Darling I’ve been a prisoner of war — I was captured by the Germans last Saturday and recaptured by the British yesterday.  I was shot down after crossing the Rhine the 24^th and I am shot up just a bit but nothing to worry about.  I’ll be OK within three or four months.  I will tell you exactly where and how I am wounded in later letters.  I’ve prayed every day and night that I would be recaptured so that the War Department would not send you word I was missing.  I’ll be leaving here for England real soon and I promise you I’m going to be alright.  The war over here can’t last much longer, I know.  I saw what the enemy has.

I got tired fast.  Will write more this evening.  I pray you both are well.  Say your prayers every day and night.  I love you more than anything on earth.  And I’ll always be

 

Your devoted husband,

Charlie

 

My V-mail reached Evelyn before the War Department sent its solemn telegram.  She kept it and showed it to me when I got home.  Think of how many wives received word like this:

The Secretary of War desires me to express his deep regret that your husband, 2 Lt. McNeil Charles E. has been missing in action in Germany since 24 Mar 45.  If further details or other information are received you will be promptly notified.

 

The doctor who looked after me at the American field hospital was from Montevallo, Alabama.  What a small world!  He was a tall, slender fellow, very personable. When he saw how the German doctor had bound my wounds, he said, “How in the John Hell did this happen?!”  Picking all that paper out of the bullet holes kept him busy a long time.  Fortunately he had anesthesia for the job.  He took such good care of me that I gave him one of the German dueling pistols.  When he was done, he had a nurse soak my wounded hand in some sort of antiseptic.  And I finally got a bath.

The other thing I got was a Purple Heart.  An officer stopped by the ward one morning and told me that the wounds I’d received in action entitled me to this honor.  He pinned the medal to my bed.  Well, I was grateful, but I had only done my duty.  I thought of all our boys who hadn’t made it back.  I thought of their sacrifice.  They were the heroes who deserved honor, not me.

Years later I would find a bit of verse that expressed my sentiments about this.  I have kept it always on my desk:

                                                When you go home

Tell them for us and say

For your tomorrow

We gave our today.

 

No medal adds anything to that.

After several days I was taken to an evacuation site for transfer to a general hospital in Wales.  I was lying on a stretcher in a misty rain.  Attached to me were big tags: one stated my name, rank ,and serial number, the other described my wounds.  As I lay there, this fellow knelt down and shook me.

He said, “Are you Charles McNeil from Frisco City, Alabama?”

I said, “Yeah.  Who’re you?”

He said, “Barnett.  My brother’s married to your cousin.  I knew you in high school.”

“Well, what in the world are you doing here?”  Talk about a small world!

He said, “I’m in charge of how you’re getting out of here.  I can send you by plane or boat.  How do you want to go?”

I said, “Put me on the next plane.”

Within half an hour my stretcher was aboard a C-47, a plane just like I’d been flying, piloted by a boy whose mission was identical to mine a couple of weeks before.

I spent most of April at the 156^th General Hospital in Wales, where they performed surgery on my thigh and hip, and put my left hand in a cast — the cast with a wire-rig to keep my fingers extended.  I was completely bedridden and in a lot of pain for a few days after the surgery.  It made me feel funny to be so weak, to have to ask an orderly to put me in a wheelchair to go to the bathroom.  The only way I could rest or sleep was with codeine.  Sometimes I’d ask for a pain pill and tell the nurse I’d take it in a minute.  Then I’d put it under my pillow to save for the evening, when I could get another pill.  It seemed a miracle that you could take codeine and sleep without pain.

When they announced President Roosevelt’s death over the P.A. one morning, the entire hospital seemed to hush.  Staff still came and went in the rooms, but there wasn’t the usual joking among us.  The mood was serious.  Roosevelt dead?  Our Commander-in-Chief?  The longest-serving president in American history?  It seemed impossible.  He had pulled our country out of the Great Depression.  His “fireside chats” on the radio had comforted millions of families through very dark times.  He had rallied the nation after Pearl Harbor.  He had led us to war in Europe and the Pacific.  Now victory was near and he was dead?  I remembered that one of the few disagreements I’d ever had with my father was about Roosevelt.  I had just started college.  I was beginning to think independently.  I told Daddy that I thought many of the president’s NewDeal programs were unnecessary.  Daddy argued that the New Deal had preserved the nation and that Roosevelt’s strong leadership was essential to America’s recovery.  I suppose mine was the minority view.  Anyway, as I lay in bed that morning, I felt what many people of my father’s generation felt — that Roosevelt had been more than a president.  Of course, we’d have anotherpresident.  The Constitution would provide for Truman’s transition.  But would we have a great leader, a great man equal to the unfinished business of the war?  The uncertainty only sharpened my longing for home.      

I wrote Evelyn and Charlyn every day, sometimes twice a day.  I’d finish one letter and start another.  Thinking about them made me feel good.  And they were all I wanted to think of.   Through my window I could see spring coming on.  The beautiful weather reminded me of Sundays back at the university when Evelyn and I would go to church, and later on, to a show.  I so much wanted to hear from her, but the system was such that her letters hadn’t found me yet.

Toward the end of my second week of convalescence, I learned that I would be headed back to the States.  The doctors determined that I would need a bone graft for my hand, a procedure that would have to be performed in an American hospital.  When I got the news, I was so excited I jumped out of bed and hurt my side.  I knew that the Army let every vet make a phone call on Uncle Sam as soon as he hit stateside.  I’d try not to scream at the operator, “64171 Mobile, Alabama!”  The boys in the ward kidded me about my good luck and they all asked me to do favors for them when I got back.

Within several days of this good news, a batch of mail finally arrived from home.  I was deliriously happy:

England

April 19, 1945

 

My darling wife and daughter,

 

You are the sweetest wife on earth, Coots — you were so sweet to send me Charlyn’s handprint and footprint.  I’ve showed them to everyone and the doc told me, “Well, you’ll soon be seeing your daughter.”  Cutie, today I got up and walked around and this afternoon I walked out and took a good sun bath.  My front and back got a little red so tomorrow I’m going to stay out there for three hours and get ahead of you.  Boy, if I go home on a boat, I will take a sun bath all the way across.

Darling, your letters today were so wonderful and the little cards from Charlyn were cute as I know she is.  Coots, I’m so pleased that you have paid for the car.  I didn’t know a thing about it and it made me feel good to know it belongs to us now.  In fact, you’re such a smart business girl I may even let you handle all of my business.  I would pay you real good and I know you would make good.  Will you take the position, Mrs. C. E.?

Darling, we have so much to do, so much to be thankful for and so much time to make up.  Some day, my darling, we will do everything we have ever talked about.

Today we have been married 20 months.  I’ll be home for our 2^nd anniversary and that will be wonderful.  Remember last year when we were at Sumter, S.C.?  Darling, I don’t know how to tell you how much you mean to me.  Our love for each other will grow as the time passes.  Now that we have started our family we will work hard to raise our children as we see right and I know that with God’s help we will have a wonderful family.  God spared my life on the 24^th of last month, darling.  That’s the second time He has given me my life and it seems as if He is leaving me here on earth for a definite reason.  Having you for my wife is one of the greatest blessings for me.

Good night darling.  I pray you both are well and take good care of yourselves.  Say your prayers every night and don’t worry.  I love you both more than anything on earth and I’ll always be

 

Your devoted husband,

Charlie

 

P.S.  Hug & kiss Charlyn for me.

 

The last week of April, I was transferred to the 53^rd General Hospital in Scotland to await passage stateside.  Some of my buddies from Aldermaston flew up to see me before I embarked.  The mail was following me, too — from Evelyn, from her father, Gus, and even from my father, a letter so sweet I broke down and cried.  I was the happiest soldier in the Eastern Theater of Operations.  I was going home.

 

 

Chapter Nine

 

Orders came the end of April for my transfer to New York.  You know, they asked me if I wanted to go by boat or by air.  Imagine that.  Get home in a week or just a day?  I wanted to shout, “Put me on the next plane!” but instead I crossed my fingers and waited for the weather to break.  Of course I was going to fly.

At the hospital in Scotland, I had struck up a friendship with a young captain whose name I don’t remember.  We shared the same flight back to the states.  He told me about a soldier from New York City, a boy I believe from his unit, who had lost a leg and could not yet return home.  The boy wanted his captain to call his mother and father and tell them what had happened and how he was doing.  Well, the captain did call the boy’s father shortly after we arrived at Mitchell Field, New York.  During the course of their conversation, the man invited him to lunch in the city and asked him to bring a friend.  Since we were staying together at the field hospital, the captain asked me along.  He told me that the gentleman had offered to send his car for us.

The next day, this big, long limousine arrived, driven by a chauffeur in livery.  He took us into the city to a large townhouse on Fifth Avenue, where a doorman escorted us into the lobby and put us on a small elevator.  Upstairs, we met the gentleman and his wife, a very gracious couple.  They invited us into their living room, which overlooked Central Park.

After introductions and some small talk, the man asked us our preferences for drinks.  I forget what the captain replied, but I said, “Well, I’ve learned to drink scotch, and I enjoy having a drink of scotch.”  The man walked across the room, pushed a button, and the whole wall folded back: there was the most elegant bar you’ve ever seen.  He offered me a glass of Pinch Scotch.  Although I’d been drinking Johnny Walker Black, I discovered that Pinch was very good indeed.  As I recall, this gentleman was originally from the South.  His business, exporting and importing timber, had brought him to New York.  Had I not been such an inexperienced young man, I might have asked him for his card, but I didn’t.  It never occurred to me to do that.  I was simply grateful for his hospitality.

About noon, we drove downtown in the limousine for lunch at a private club.  A doorman helped us from the car.  A maitre d’ guided us to their table, then summoned their waiter.  It was very clear to the captain and me that our hosts were highly regarded by the staff and were well known by others who were dining there.  As we were looking at the menus, the gentleman’s wife leaned over to me and asked what I would like, more than anything else, for dessert.  I replied that strawberry shortcake had always been my favorite.  She nodded to the waiter as I said this.  We had a wonderful meal, the best I’d eaten in months.  And to finish it, the chef brought me an eight—layer strawberry shortcake.  It tasted like they picked the strawberries that morning.

Who were my hosts that day?  You know, I cannot remember.  But they gave me a couple of gifts.  One was a velvet box containing Pinch Scotch — I must have said how much I enjoyed it at their home.  The other was a card admitting me and one guest to a private club in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan: everything on the house.  I never used the card because I wasn’t in New York long enough.  I still have it, though.  Stamped on the bottom of the card is the club chairman’s name: Auchincloss.  Many years later that name appeared in the national newspapers when John Kennedy became president.  Kennedy’s wife, Jacqueline Bouvier, was related by marriage to the Auchincloss family, an old, moneyed, New York clan.  The couple I met in May 1945 apparently moved in some pretty high circles.

As I said, I didn’t stay long in New York.  Within three or four days, I was flown to another hospital where I had elected to have the bone graft performed.  I had chosen Foster General in Jackson, Mississippi, because it was close to Frisco City and Mobile, and because the foremost orthopedic surgeon in the region was there.  I had phoned Evelyn to let her know when I would arrive.

An ambulance picked me up at the airport.  On the way to the hospital, I looked out the window, and guess who I saw driving behind us?  As luck and the Good Lord would have it, Evelyn and her father, Gus!  The moment I recognized them, I shouted to the driver, “Stop the car!  Stop it right here!”  You better believe he stopped.  I jumped out and she jumped out and in a second we were in each other’s arms.  You’ll have to imagine my happiness because I can’t describe it.

Within an hour I got a ten-day leave.  My surgery could wait.  Evelyn and Gus and I must have talked nonstop all the way to Mobile.  If my hip or back hurt during the long drive, I don’t remember.  It was so wonderful to be with my wife and her father, rolling along through the Southern springtime, watching the landscape grow more and more familiar.  A month before, through a long, cold night, I’d been lying on straw in the back of a wagon, listening to the groans of dying men and the hammering of artillery.  And going where?  Only God knew.

Now I walked through the door of the Bells’ home in Mobile and there was Evelyn’s mother holding my baby daughter.  I looked at them, I looked at Evelyn and Gus, and my heart simply overflowed.  I reached for my little girl — six months in the world and at last mine to hold.  I took her, despite the stiff bandage on my left hand, and gingerly cradled her in my arms.  She looked up at me: Who was this big stranger?  Where did her grandmother go?  How could she know her daddy?  When she cried, I think we all had tears in our eyes.

The next days all ran together, they were so happy.  I would wake up in the morning and look around in wonderment, thankful for everything.  Evelyn and I spent a lot time playing with our baby.  We called her Millie now, short for Mildred — you see, we had named her after Evelyn’s mother and we wanted her to recognize that name as hers.  Little Millie had more energy than I did.  I tired easily.  I guess I needed more rest than I thought.  Sudden loud noises bothered me more than they did my baby.  A slamming door would make me jump, so the Bells kept the house very quiet.  Even their cook, Annie, kept her bustle in the kitchen to a minimum.  The evening before we drove to Frisco City, she fixed us one of her specialties —  a rump roast made with gravy black as the ace of spades, so full of grease it was dangerous and every bite delicious.

My reunion with my mother and father was also very emotional, of course.  My father, who was seldom demonstrative in his affection, met me on the porch and hugged and kissed me and cried.  How good it was to be home!  Leighton was there, too.  He had returned to help Daddy look after the store.  Felix and John Albert were still at war in the Pacific.  When would they be joining us again?  I thought of them often the next few days.  I’d walk around studying the rooms in the old place, remembering how we’d grown up together there.  I’d walk around the yard, looking at the trees, looking at the fields out back and across the road, remembering that barnstorming pilot setting his plane down, exciting John Albert and me with our first vision of flight.  I wanted my other brothers back with us, where everything was peaceful and good.

Evelyn was so very attentive.  Because she thought I needed more rest than I could get among my family or hers, she suggested we drive down to the Bell summer home at Gulf Shores, where we could be alone.  I very much wanted time alone with her, too.  In those days, there were more sand dunes than houses at the beach.  The Bells’ house was an old-fashioned place with a big porch where you could sit and watch the surf roll in.  We’d spend the early mornings and late afternoons walking the shore.  I believe Millie might have had her first chilly dip in the Gulf that first week of May. It was after an evening walk on May 7^th that we heard the news — Germany had surrendered.  The war in Europe was over.  May 8^th was proclaimed Victory in Europe Day.

We heard this news on the radio.  We didn’t get a newspaper in Gulf Shores.  I’m not sure where we could have bought a newspaper if we’d wanted one.  There was no television, of course — it hadn’t been invented yet.  So we listened to the news on the radio, then turned it off.  The house was quiet and fresh with a spring breeze.  Outside you could hear the breakers, and the Gulf was green and beautiful.  What did we need to celebrate?  We were together.  The peace was celebration enough.  I prayed that the same peace would come to the Pacific and that my brothers would come home.  AndI prayed that my children would never know war.

When my leave was up, I returned to Foster General Hospital for surgery.  The doctor explained what he was going to do.  He said that the knuckle and surrounding bones in my left hand had been shot out.  He would attempt to reconstruct them.  His procedure required that he take a piece of bone from my shin — my tibia — and cut it into three parts which he would then wire into the metacarpals of my hand.  He hoped that they would grow into those bones and give me the good use of my hand.

The night after surgery it was my shin, not my hand, that really hurt.  The doctor had put a big bandage on my lower leg and had bound it very tightly.  My shin was throbbing from the pressure of it.  I asked the nurses to loosen it just a little, but they would do nothing.  Evelyn and my father had come over to stay with me.  I remember Daddy saying, “Well, if the nurses won’t handle it, I’ll take care of it.”  So he took out his pocket knife and cut the bindings.  Instant relief!  I think the nurses took their cue from that when they changed the bandage.

My period of recuperation extended into a thirty-day leave, June through early July.  Before I left the hospital, the doctor gave me strict instructions to avoid any kind of shock to my hand.  He was concerned that the new bones might not set properly, particularly the one forming the knuckle at the base of my middle finger. 

Well, I hadn’t been fishing in years.  So of course, Evelyn and Millie and I returned to the house at Gulf Shores, where Gus kept an old cypress skiff.  It was a heavy twelve-foot boat with an old Johnson outboard that you cranked by winding a rope around the flywheel on top of the engine.  One man could handle it just fine.  On the second morning there, I went down to the boat by myself to put out for a good day of fishing.  I got my tackle aboard, got the rope coiled around the flywheel, steadied myself for a good, hard pull, then yanked  — and my feet slipped right out from under me.  My left hand struck the gunwale as I fell.  Although the blow jarred it a little, it didn’t hurt.  My hand was in a heavy cast.  I got the boat started, went fishing, never gave the accident a second thought.  I must have gone fishing a dozen times or more over the course of my leave.  My hand never hurt.

When the doctor removed the cast thirty days later, he took one look and said, “Tell me how it happened.”  He pointed to the knuckle at the base of my finger.  Instead of protruding, it was sunken.  I told him about my little fishing trip.  He just shook his head and said, “Well, that’s unfortunate, but this was an experimental procedure.  There was no guarantee that it would’ve worked.”

It seemed like a minor disability, this sunken knuckle.  I began a program of physical therapy at Foster General that continued with my transfer to the Convalescent Hospital at Cochran Field in Macon, Georgia.  I had several long leaves during the summer, which I spent with Evelyn and Millie.  I grew stronger, got rid of my cane.  My leg still tingled a little, but I could walk fine.  I wanted to fly again, but the doctors at Cochran Field recommended against it.

Why?  Despite months of exercise and therapy, my left hand remained weak.  I couldn’t grip tight with it.  I couldn’t make a fist without pain.  Compared with what I’d been through in Germany, this seemed to me a minor problem.  The doctors, however, judged this disability serious enough to assign me to “permanent limited-service status,” which meant that I couldn’t fly.

All right, I thought, time will take care of this.  In the middle of the summer, I received word that paperwork was in process for further war decorations in connection with Operation Varsity.  In August, Japan surrendered.  I heard from Mama and Daddy that Felix and John Albert were OK.  What could I feel but grateful?

In late September I was transferred to the Regional Hospital at Maxwell Field.  There I waited to go before a disposition board whose members would determine my capability.  Surely I would fly again.  During the fall, I was promoted to First Lieutenant.  In November I was awarded the Air Medal and Bronze Service Stars.  When the disposition board met in December, however, they recommended that I be assigned to “general military service with waiver,” that is, with a waiver from piloting.

Well, so be it.  Since the Army wouldn’t permit me to fly, I petitioned to go before a retirement board.  There was a problem with that course of action, though.  Unknown to me, the high command had determined that too many officers were being retired from Maxwell with permanent disability income.  So I was in a bit of a predicament.  On the one hand, there was my one hand, you might say — my disability, as certified by the Air Corps’ doctors.  On the other, there was my recent promotion.  The brass at Maxwell did not want me to appear before a retirement board because that would have incurred the wrath of brass higher up the chain of command.  It was sort of ironic that they had recently decorated me for participating in Operation Varsity, which had earned me the disability that now contributed to their reluctance to let me go before the retirement board.

I got leave for Christmas and met Evelyn and Millie in Frisco City.  It was a joyous holiday.  Leighton and his family were there with Daddy and Mama.  My sister and her family drove over from Louisiana to join us.  The house was full of laughter and conversation and food.  Mama and the cooks did lots of cooking.  There was so much to catch up on, so much to learn about each other after being separated so long.

Felix and John Albert were still overseas, stationed in the Philippines.  John Albert was a captain or major in the Air Corps, and Felix was in the infantry.  My brothers had been corresponding with Mama and Daddy, and John Albert learned where Felix was based — so he hopped a plane and flew there.  He got together with the officer conducting mail call and told him, “I want you to call out a letter for PFC Felix McNeil.”  The men assembled, letters were called out.  When Felix came up, he said, “Where’s my letter?”  That’s when John Albert jumped up.  You can imagine how happy their reunion was.  It was an emotional time for all of us.

At night, after we had put the children to bed, the train would pass behind the house, blowing its big horn.  It would wake the children up and we would have to settle them down all over again.  That old horn reminded me of when I was a boy and my Uncle Mack would stop for coffee.  Mack White was my mother’s brother and a senior engineer on the Frisco Railroad.  If he planned to stop, he’d start blowing his whistle before the train rounded the curve that brought it behind our house.  I remember Mama giving him coffee and cake, and slicing some extra cake for him to take back to the hobos who rode on the cars.  On the days he didn’t stop, Mama would stand in the back yard and wave to him with her apron.

Too soon the holiday was over and I returned to Montgomery, where I had been appointed to the Officers’ Reserve Corps.  There wasn’t a lot to do.  While my petition to meet the retirement board was still working its way through channels, I was honorably discharged.  I said goodbye to the Army Air Corps on February 3, 1946.  Because I never went before that board, however, it took several months of correspondence before I could set matters straight with the Veterans Administration.  Eventually Congressman Boykin intervened on my behalf and everything worked out.  Small matter that I wasn’t going to be a pilot.  I would make my mark outside the service.  Evelyn and I had started our family.  Time was flying and we would fly with it.

 

Chapter Ten

           

After my discharge from the service, Evelyn and I looked for a place to live.  We found a little two—bedroom house on Briley Street that we rented, I think, for $57 a month.  In 1946 Briley Street was at the edge of town.  There wasn’t much beyond it but Wragg Swamp.  The center of Mobile was still Bienville Square,  where the old streetcar circled after its run down Government Street.  And around Bienville Square were the old stores where everybody shopped — Hammel’s, Sears, Gayfer’s, and Kress’s.  The old hotels were still there too — the Bienville, the Cawthorne.  I suppose the Merchants National Bank was the tallest building because the Waterman tower hadn’t gone up yet.

If you had sat on a bench in Bienville Square in 1946, looking at all the people and bustle, you would never have dreamed that those stores and hotels would ever close.  You couldn’t have imagined that Wragg Swamp, out west, would be filled to establish the malls and shopping centers that would draw the retail center out what would become Airport Boulevard.  I certainly couldn’t have imagined such a thing, any more than I could have looked at the Bienville Hotel and imagined it the site of a bank I’d help found — a bank that would open one of its first branches on reclaimed swampland along Airport Boulevard, a bank that would grow big enough to buy the Waterman Building.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

What I was thinking about in 1946 was how to support my family.  My second daughter, Marilyn was on the way.  I wanted to return to the University of Alabama to finish my degree in chemistry, then apply to medical school.  But I had to have something to do in the meantime.  I think I’ve mentioned that Evelyn’s father was in the life insurance business.  He represented Protective Life.  One day he said to me, “Why don’t you come down to the office and see what I do?  You may be interested in doing this until you go back to school.”  So that’s what I did.  And I never went back to school.

I began selling life insurance in the spring.  I think the first policy I ever sold was to a man who owned a garage, a repair shop, here in Mobile.  He was working on my car and I mentioned to him that I was going into the business with Gus and he said, “Well, I need some insurance.  Come back and see me.”  Talk about an easy sale!  Of course most of my calls weren’t like that at all.  I encountered many rejections, but I learned to accept them for what they were.  I’d think, Did I explain that right?  How should I explain that better?  Life insurance can be one of the hardest products on earth to sell because the person who commits to buy it will never personally benefit from it.  His agreement to buy it, to invest in it, represents a very unselfish act because he’s doing something for his loved ones that will only be realized upon his death.

When I started out, I went back up to the country I knew best, around Frisco City and Monroe County, and made calls on the people who knew me.  Over time I built up a good book of business based on strong personal relationships.  I liked meeting people and I joined civic organizations in Mobile to meet more people.  I think the first civic organization I joined was the Junior Chamber of Commerce, which, by the way, elected me president in 1947 or ’48.  I also joined the Lions Club.  And of course there was the church.  I want to talk about the church in a minute, but first let me say that I think I was extremely fortunate to have the right kind of personality to be good at my line of work.  I’m not boasting.  I was fortunate.  And I think that was because of the way I was raised.  My father taught me, “You pull the man up beside you as you’re climbing the ladder.”  That’s what I always tried to do.  Business relationships and personal relationships went hand in hand.  I must have done something right because I steadily grew the business, meeting and exceeding all of my production goals.  Within ten years I was made a member of the Million Dollar Round Table.  In 1956, this select membership represented the top one percent of the entire life insurance sales force, nationwide.  This achievement marked a milestone for me, but so did that year, 1956, because I had to say goodbye to my father.

Let me back up a little bit.  I suppose it was in the early fifties that Mama noticed Daddy was getting forgetful.  He was in his late seventies, still active around the farm (Leighton was running the store), but his memory lapses were becoming a problem.  I suppose I realized there was trouble when I stopped to visit him one day.  I had been up home, making calls, and I stopped by a field where he was driving a tractor.  I waited for him at the end of the row and as he drove up, I smiled and waved at him.  He never gave any indication he recognized me.  He just turned the tractor and went up the next row.  This was very disturbing, but I didn’t want to upset him so I didn’t try to flag him down.  Shortly after this incident I returned to have a talk with him on the porch.  He was sitting there with Howard Green, a servant who lived with his wife, Lucy, on our place and who, at Mama’s direction, had become Daddy’s constant companion.  Now Daddy wasn’t talking to Howard, he was just talking.  He seemed to be troubled by the cows in the pasture across the road.  He seemed to have trouble counting them.  When I sat down beside him he looked at me like who are you?   He had no idea who I was.  I was devastated.

When I returned to Mobile I called Bill Roberts at Cogburn Nursing Home and confirmed that Daddy could have a good room there.  Cogburn was near where we lived and I wanted Daddy close by.  In those days Daddy’s condition was described as “hardening of the arteries,” but I think we’d call it Alzheimer’s now.  In any case, it was wearing Mama down.  She had a hard time dealing with him when Howard wasn’t there.  She was afraid he’d hurt himself, walk out of the house, walk off, and get lost.  Even so, I knew she wouldn’t like what I was going to do.  I just had to steel myself to do it.

I drove back to Frisco City and parked in the back yard.  Daddy and Howard were sitting on the back porch and I said, “Howard, get Daddy bathed and shaved and put him on some clean clothes.  Pack the rest of his clothes, too.  I’m taking him to Mobile.  I want you to go with me.”  Then I went on to the front of the house and met Mama.

She said, “Oh sugar, I didn’t know you were coming up here today.  It’s so good to see you!”

And I said, “Mama, I’ve come here to get my daddy.  I’m taking him to Mobile.”

And of course she broke into tears, saying, “No, no.”

And I said, “I have to, Mama.  I’m going to take him and put him in Cogburn Nursing Home where it’s real nice and he’ll have a nice room and they’ll take good care of him.  They’ll relieve you of this responsibility.  You’re just not able to take care of him anymore.”

I knew this was the best thing for everyone, but she kept crying.  We were both hurting, but this had to be.

I said, “Now Mama, you can get ready.  Get Lucy to help you pack some clothes and get ready.  You can stay with Evelyn and me for a while.  You can go with me to Mobile to take Daddy, or you can stay here and cry.”

Of course she got ready to go.

And she saw that Daddy had a beautiful, cool room at the nursing home.

She stayed with Evelyn and me for a while and then returned to Frisco City.  After she left, Evelyn and I continued to visit Daddy every day.  Not many months passed before his health started to decline.  Dr. Walsh advised me to check him into the Mobile Infirmary.  He wouldn’t eat, and before long the veins in his arms wouldn’t take the needle for intravenous feeding.  One day I came into his room as a nurse was trying to insert an intravenous needle into his foot.  He was under an oxygen tent, breathing very erratically.  I knew he was near the end and I said, “Please don’t do that.”  She said she had her orders and I said, “I know, but that’s my father, and you don’t need to do that.”  So she left to find her supervisor.  When they returned, I just told them both that I didn’t want them in the room.  Then they went away, I suppose, to find a doctor, and I sat there holding Daddy’s hand until he died.  I lifted the edge of the oxygen tent and kissed him goodbye.  I kissed him goodbye, then sat there by the bed, and called Mr. Duffy at the funeral home, and told him that I would like him to prepare Daddy for burial, and that he would be buried in Frisco City.  Then I called the rest of the family.  I called Evelyn.  I called Leighton at the store, and asked him to go up and comfort Mama.  Then I called my brother in Birmingham and my brother in Baton Rouge.

The services were held at the First Baptist Church of Frisco City, in the same sanctuary where Daddy loved to sing “The Old Rugged Cross.”  I’m sure we sang it again for him.

My father lived a good life, a full life.  His love and his example remain with me to this day.  He never questioned his faith, or his duty to his family, his neighbors, his community.  I have tried to walk as he did.

 

From the time Evelyn and I began dating, we attended church together.  When we started renting the little house on Briley Street, back in 1946, we attended services at Dauphin Way Methodist, because that’s where Evelyn had been raised.  The minister was a fellow named Carl Atkins.  When I first met him, I thought, Now this is the kind of man I want to listen to.  He was one of the best speakers I had ever heard.  He was a wonderful minister and a great leader, and in time we became great friends.  My daughters were baptized in Dauphin Way Methodist.  When Chuck was born in 1949 and John in 1955, they were baptized there too.

At that time the church was located on the northwest corner of the Catherine and Dauphin intersection.  But it was growing — what with new members joining and the families of the congregation growing — and within a few years the congregation was going to outgrow the building.  Now the stewards of the church were dedicated and energetic men —  Jimmy Bedsole, the Delchamps brothers, Clay Turner, Merrill Thames, K. T. Riley.  I was a good bit younger than they were.  I looked up to them.  So when I had an opportunity to join the board and help, I jumped at the chance.  We were going to build a new building right across the street, on the southeast corner.  We spent a lot of time fundraising.  In order to be a good fundraiser, I think you have to make a serious financial commitment yourself, so I did.  And when somebody would say to me, “Oh, I don’t think I can pledge that much,” I’d say, “Let me tell you why you can.”  I’d put it that way.  Reverend Atkins had that kind of faith in his congregation.  That’s the way he led.  That’s the way the board learned to lead.  And I was very fortunate to be chairman of the board when we built the new church.  Evelyn and I remain committed to Dauphin Way Methodist.

My father always taught me that to be part of a community meant giving to it.  That’s true in the community of faith.  And it’s surely true in the civic community.  By the mid-fifties I had four children, three of them in school.  So it was only natural that I’d be interested in their education.  That’s why I served on the Mobile Board of Education.  That’s why I served eighteen years on the Board of Education.  Without compensation whatsoever.  In those days it was purely a matter of civic duty to serve on that board, and I think that’s one of the reasons the board was so effective.  The men who served there prior to my joining — men like Alfred Delchamps, head of one of the largest grocery chains in the South, or John Shaw, executive for the Coca Cola Bottling Company — were business leaders who didn’t expect to be paid for what they deemed their civic duty.  When Alfred Delchamps asked me to stand for election to the board in 1956, I  was honored to be asked to serve.  And I served three six-year terms, twice as president.

Now this was a tumultuous period for public education all over the South.  The schools had to be integrated.  But in Mobile, unlike Montgomery or Birmingham — or Memphis or Little Rock or many cities further north — there were no riots.  There was no violence.  There was none of that because we accommodated the entire community and worked behind the scenes to defuse issues before they became explosive.  I’ll tell you a little bit more about that in a minute, but let me first say something about how we managed the business of meetings.

I’m not criticizing anyone, but when I first joined the board, the meetings went on too long, sometimes as long as three hours.  We’d get the agenda the day before.  We’d walk into the meeting.  The president would turn the agenda over to the superintendent, then he would entertain discussion for every item on it.  And we’d sit there, going over and over something we should have already made up our minds about.  So when I got to be president I said, “Let’s change this a little bit.  You’re going to have the agenda at least twenty-four hours ahead of the meeting.  If you have any questions about an issue, call the superintendent or me.  Let us know your questions so that when we start the meeting we can address them.”  I think the longest meeting we ever had after that was maybe twenty to thirty minutes.  If we got onto a subject which involved further debate, we would adjourn the meeting, go into the superintendent’s office, discuss the matter until we had reached a decision that satisfied us, then reconvene the meeting in order to formally decide that issue, then move to the next item.  And whenever we adjourned to the superintendent’s office, John Will was with us.  He was the newspaper reporter who covered our meetings, one of the most beloved reporters this town has ever seen — Mobile later named one of its schools after him.  We knew what we were doing was a matter of public record.  We thought of John as one of us.

Our goal was a peaceful transition from segregated schools to desegregated schools.  To achieve that goal we met formally and informally, collectively and individually with leaders of the community, black and white.  We did a lot, just a lot of work.  We were lucky to have an excellent superintendent in Dr. Harold Collins.  Whenever the board made any formal statement to the public, beyond our meetings, the press release went through Harold Collins’ office.  Why?  Because school policy would be implemented through his office.  We advised him.  We set policy in consultation with him.  We were not going to “grandstand” or play politics with what he had to do.

On one occasion the national media approached me.  I think it was on the opening day of Murphy High School.  I forget the year in the mid-sixties when the first black students were admitted, but as you might imagine the occasion was tense.  In fact, the late summer of that year was very tense.  The board had met constantly that summer, sometimes several times a week, maybe several times a day in the week before school opened.  Rumors were flying all over the place.  One rumor was that Governor Wallace was going to call out the highway patrol to surround Murphy, opening morning.  I had called the governor’s office and received assurance that no such thing would happen.  I had spoken with the sheriff’s office, too, and I knew that they were going to keep the black students safe.  Well, I got a phone call at 4:30 or 5:00 that morning, telling me that state troopers were surrounding the campus.  I thought, This is terrible, but I’m going to take my daughters to school.  And I did.  Sure enough, there was a cordon of troopers.  We crossed through them without trouble.  I spoke to students and parents, telling them everything was going to be fine.  I got my daughters inside and went to the principal’s office.  I asked him to ring the bell as soon as he could to get the day started.   And he did.  There was order in the halls, order in the classrooms.  When somebody from the media asked me how we were going to get through the day, I simply replied, “We’ve done our homework.”  And that was true.

Murphy, of course, was just the tip of the iceberg.  We were under court order to integrate the entire public school system, the largest in the state.  The federal judge overseeing the mandate was Griffin Bell of the 11^th  Circuit, based in Atlanta.  I met with him several times.  He smoked a pipe, wore a bowtie.    He was later named Attorney General by President Carter.  He was a good man to work with.

One of my counterparts in these meetings with Judge Bell was A. J. Cooper.  A. J. was a lawyer with the NAACP.  His family ran a funeral home business in Prichard.  We got to know each other quite well, visited in each other’s homes.  In fact, I remember sharing drinks once at A. J.’s  — it must have been at his family’s place, because we wound up leaning up against a casket in the showroom and talking for a very long time.  I thought, Here we are, two men from different sides of town, different sides of the South, and we’re going to get through this all right.

Not that we didn’t have our difficulties.  The county had passed a ten-mill tax to fund the construction of new schools.  A. J. insisted that a new school had to be built where Central High was, in an all-black, very poor part of town.  I didn’t think it would work.  I told him, “A. J., there’s just no way that white parents are going to bus their children down there, where everything’s so run-down and dangerous.  Why don’t we build the new school in a nicer section where everybody can bus in?”  But he wouldn’t hear it.

We took this debate all the way to Atlanta.  Judge Bell listened, smoking his pipe.  Then he leaned back, put his feet on his desk and said, “Y’all go to lunch and work this out.  Today.  Come back to my chambers and tell me your plan.”

So we did.  I don’t need to go into details, but Central High was eventually closed.  John LeFlore High School was built.  Davidson High School was built.  A number of other schools were built.  I wound up giving the dedication speech for Davidson.  And A. J. eventually became mayor of Prichard.

After my retirement from the school board in the fall of 1974, I received this letter from our counsel:

 

Dear Charlie:

 

When I first began actively handling legal matters coming to the firm from the school board, Mr. Pillans [founding partner of Pillans, Reams et al.] strongly admonished me to avoid making any direct effort to establish a personal relationship with any individual member of the board, in order that our value to the board as a whole should not be diminished […].  While this may or may not have been the wisest course, and while it has not always been easy to do so, I have always followed Mr. Pillans’ advice in this regard.

 

Now that you are leaving the board I do not feel the same restraint […].

 

Being now free to do so, therefore, I want to convey to you, not only for myself and for Mr. Pillans, but from all of the members of our firm our sincere feeling of admiration and respect for you and for the service you have rendered to Mobile County as a member of the board, something which we, because of our knowledge of the affairs of the board, are in position to know and appreciate […].

 

There is no question in my mind that but for your strong leadership during the board’s time of extreme crisis […] the board would literally have ceased to function in a rational manner.  I really don’t suppose anybody is fully aware of this but you and I and Mr. Pillans, and we will always admire and respect you for it.

 

Sincerely,

 

Abram Philips, Jr.

 

 

I cite this letter for the record.  I remain grateful for these words, but I had only done what I believed my duties required.

 

During the period I served on the school board, the life insurance business was flourishing.  When Gus retired, I took over leadership of the firm.  It was a very busy time, professionally.  One of my neighbors, Jim Crowe, worked for the First National Bank of Mobile.  He was an excellent banker who went on to join the First National Bank of Birmingham as executive vice president.  I told him I’d miss him when he moved away.  I didn’t dream of the turn our friendship would take.

One Sunday afternoon Jim phoned me and said, “What do you think about starting a bank?”

“Are you talking about me starting a bank?  I don’t know anything about banking,” I told him.

“Well,” he said, “I’m thinking of two or three businessmen you should meet with.  Why don’t you think of two or three men and get everybody together to talk this thing over.”

The first person I thought of was Marion Ward, a retired banker from the American National Bank in Mobile.  He was one of the most astute bankers I knew and I believed he would do an excellent job of organizing the issues.  So I called him.  We put a small group together and met over coffee one morning at the St. Francis Motel on Government Street.  This was in the fall of 1964.  During that meeting we made a list of potential investors — doctors, lawyers, businessmen — and divided them up among ourselves in order to approach them directly.

One thing led to another.  Over the next eight months we developed a business plan, secured a charter, determined the equity we would need, and raised it.  I believe our initial capitalization was five million dollars.  We sold some two and a half million shares of stock at two dollars a share.  Jim Crowe helped finance us.  First National Birmingham would be our correspondent bank.

We opened Commercial Guaranty Bank on June 5, 1965.  Marion was our president.  David McGonical was vice president in charge of operations.  I sat on the board of directors as chairman of the executive committee.  It wasn’t the best time to open a bank in Mobile.  That very morning the headline of the Mobile Register announced that Brookley Field was closing — twenty-one thousand civilian jobs were going to be lost.  You would have thought that would hurt us.  But we opened with the largest number of first-day deposits of any Alabama bank.  In fact, our deposits grew so quickly that we had to undertake a second equity offering before the year was over.  It sold out.  We raised another ten million at five dollars a share.  Everybody wanted a piece of Commercial Guaranty.  The community welcomed us.

Well, almost everyone did.  Shortly after we opened, I got a call from Colonel Rushton, president of Protective Life Insurance Company.  He told me that he’d just got off the phone with the CEO of Mobile’s third largest bank, who told him that, as a result of my association with Commercial Guaranty, he’d be canceling a large amount of credit life insurance his bank had with Protective Life — some thirty-five million dollars’ worth.  Now Colonel Rushton and I had a very good relationship.  He wasn’t upset by this call, but he was concerned by this other fellow’s behavior.  He didn’t think it was good business.  He knew that the credit life insurance with this other bank wasn’t my account.  The bank itself sold the policy with its loans.  I hadn’t sold the bank the master policy, and I received not one penny from it.  Colonel Rushton just wanted me to be aware of this other banker’s bad attitude.

I went right down to that bank to have a talk with this man.  When I got there, his secretary told me he wasn’t in.  “Fine,” I told her, “I’ll wait.”  I knew he was there.  After a few moments, she went into his office.  He came out and invited me in.  I told him about the conversation I had just had with Colonel Rushton, that neither of us appreciated this kind of threat.  I probably told him two or three other things, too.  Then I walked out.  No other banker in town ever behaved like this fellow.  In fact, I got a call from the president of a larger competitor and he told me that if there were ever anything his bank could do to help us, he’d be happy to do it.  That credit life policy was never cancelled.

Commercial Guaranty was successful because of Marion Ward’s leadership and David McGonical’s attention to detail.  They put together an excellent staff and they concentrated on serving the customer.  One of the first drive-through branches in Mobile was ours, out at Bel Air Mall.  That’s an example of what was, then, an innovative approach to serving the customer.  It’s standard practice now.  Our board was very active, too.  When we first opened, we’d meet once a week to go over every problem.  We never drew a director’s fee.  As the bank grew and opened branches all over town, we decided to build a new headquarters.  We chose the old Bienville Hotel site on the corner of St. Francis and St. Louis streets, across from the Merchants National Bank.  When we outgrew that, we bought the Waterman Building.  This was about the time we were asked by Birmingham Trust National Bank to consider merging our operations into Southern Bancorp, the intrastate holding company.  When we did that, I joined the holding company’s board.  The new entity became SouthTrust, the biggest bank in Alabama.  SouthTrust’s Mobile headquarters remain in the Waterman Building.

When Commercial Guaranty moved to the Waterman Building, I moved my office there, to the sixteenth floor, top of the tower.  This was during the time I served as chairman of the school board.  Whenever a principal retired, I’d always write him a letter, thanking him for his service.  One day, the principal of Vigor High School, a Mr. Brittling, came by my office to express his appreciation for the note I’d sent him.  He mentioned that he was going to get his real estate license.  I told him, if he ever came across any cut-over timber land, I’d like to talk about it.

About six weeks later, he returned to my office with a map of Mobile County and pointed out an entire section, 640 acres, Section 23 I believe it was, and said, “Look here.  I think you might be interested in this.”

“Has it already been cut?” I asked him.  I wasn’t interested in paying for any merchantable timber, just the land.

“Yes, it has,” he said.  “There’s not much left on it.”

“Well,” I told him, “Let me talk to the Lands Department of the bank and get an appraisal on it.  I’m going to need to get a forester to go out and see what the value of the timber left standing is.”

So I did that.  I forget what the price per acre was, but it was reasonable, maybe eighty dollars an acre.  I looked into financing it through the bank.  The financing would come close, but I’d need an additional twenty dollars an acre that I just couldn’t cover at the time.  So I decided to pass on it.

About the time I was making up my mind, I got a call from Gerald Wallace, a doctor here in town, and he said, “I hear you’re looking at that Section 23.  You mind if I take a look at it?”  I said, “Go right ahead.”

He decided to buy it.  He was shrewd.  You see, he’d been aware that oil companies had been doing seismic tests around that area, and sure enough, after he bought the section, a company approached him about doing some drilling on his land.  He decided to partner, share the risk and the reward.  A year and a half later they struck oil.  It turned out that land was right on top of the biggest oil field in Mobile County.  Union Oil wound up developing a well there that pumped I don’t know how many hundreds of thousands of barrels.  Section 23 turned out to be worth millions of dollars.  I guess I missed that deal, but I haven’t lost any sleep over it.  My life has been full of so many other blessings.

A few years before this little episode, I had gone through a dark time that puts such things into their proper perspective.  My eldest son, Chuck, had joined the insurance firm, following his graduation from the University of Alabama.  He hadn’t been working long when he fell ill.  The doctors diagnosed cancer of the testes, a highly malignant cancer.  Following emergency surgery, the doctors told us that the cancer had spread into his lymph nodes.  They thought he had six to nine months to live.

Dr. Martin Perlman took his case.  He didn’t know of a cure, but he knew there was a lot of research going on, worldwide.  He began looking into this and contacted a chemist in Japan who was experimenting with a particular drug that might have a clinical application for Chuck’s case.  Dr. Perlman arranged for the drug to be sent to us through the Anderson Hospital in Houston, Texas.  He put Chuck on a regimen of this chemotherapy, one treatment a week.

It made Chuck very sick.  He would try to come to work after a round of this therapy.  He’d sit by my desk for a while, then he’d have to run down to the bathroom and throw up.  He lost his hair.  He grew very thin, very frail.  Every week, another round of this therapy.  I forget how many weeks this continued.  People would meet me on the street and ask, “How’s Chuck doing?” and I couldn’t even answer.  I’d break down, crying.  It was one of the lowest periods in my life.

We lived it a day at a time, the whole family did.  We watched and prayed.  The weeks turned into months, then six months.  Then nine months.  Then a year.  Chuck was alive and getting his strength back.  Then three years.  Chuck was doing fine.  Then five years.  No recurrence.  It was a miracle?  It was another miracle.  I firmly believe that it wasn’t just chemotherapy that saved Chuck.  God did.

News of Chuck’s recovery spread through the medical community.  Men who were suffering from this cancer would call him, or their families would, and Chuck would travel to meet them.  He went all over the country.  He gave them hope.

What can a man be but grateful when he has known miracles?

 

In the decades following the war, Evelyn and I raised four wonderful children and saw them through college.  My youngest son, John, joined the firm when he graduated from the university.  Chuck grew strong again.  I gave my daughters away in marriage.  My sons married too.  With the boys helping run the firm, I tried my hand at developing some real estate on the coast.  In fact, it was through the board of the bank that I partnered with T. W. Mitchell in these real estate ventures.  They turned out pretty well, as did my investment in Commercial Guaranty.

I also got into the frozen food business, way out in Texas.  How do these things happen?  Evelyn and I had a friend who married an Atlanta fellow named John Winton.  His father had started a frozen food brokerage that booked shipments to major grocery chains.  John called me up one day, said, “Charlie, what we should do is build a frozen food plant.”

I said, “What kind of plant?”

He said, “A plant that freezes spinach, turnip greens, peas — things like that.”

I told him, “John, I don’t know anything about that.”

And he said, “Well, let me get some information together for you.  I want to make arrangements for us to go down and meet the man who has built the only frozen vegetable plant in south Texas.  It’s a model plant, built by a friend of mine named Joe Gerber.  Joe’s family is in the packing plant business.  He grew up near the San Joaquin Valley in California.  They ship vegetables all over the country from there.  He knows what he’s doing.”

So I told him I would consider it.  I flew out to Texas to meet Joe Gerber  — twice, in fact.  The first meeting didn’t develop into anything because the other partners wanted controlling interest in the venture.  I told Joe at that time that I wasn’t going to take part in financing a plant unless our partnership controlled it.  About six months after the first meeting, I flew out to Texas again to talk with another group of potential partners.  This was in December of 1982.  I met John Winton in San Antonio.  We talked over various angles over dinner.  The next morning we drove to the little town of Uvalde, about seventy-five miles east of San Antonio.  There we met a CPA named Bob Coleman who represented a number of growers in the area.  We looked over the land and a fresh vegetable plant these men owned, where they crated their produce and trucked it out fresh.  Then we went around to the First State Bank of Uvalde.  Bob showed John and me to the boardroom, and said, “Y’all have a seat while I go get the governor.”  I thought, Governor?  A few minutes later he comes back with a stout, smiling fellow who sticks out his hand, saying, “Hey, Mr. McNeil, I’m Dolph Briscoe.”   Turns out this man was a two-term governor of Texas.  Uvalde was his hometown.  Dolph Briscoe was not only one of the largest landowners in the state, but also the owner of the bank.  John and I talked to him about building the plant.  We wanted to give the growers an ownership position, while Joe Gerber and we would retain majority ownership.  The governor liked the idea, and told us that when we got the deal put together, to come see him again, he might want a stake.

After we left the bank we went to meet the growers.  We had lunch together at a motel restaurant in a little dining room where they held civic club luncheons.  There were about twelve of them — terrific men, just outstanding, successful men I thought would make good partners.  I talked about the deal we had in mind.  They asked a lot of questions.  They asked me what I was going to put up.  I said, “Cash, of course.  I assume you all will put up cash, too.”  But what they wanted to do was put up their farming property, including the fresh food plant.  Now that was not a big building — just open sheds with a little office.

Over the next several months we put the deal together.  Joe Gerber got the plans for the plant drafted and ordered the machinery.  John was taking care of contracts for distribution.  And I stayed in touch with the CPA and the bank there in Uvalde.   I think our initial investment was around six hundred thousand dollars.  We built a several-thousand-square-foot facility and called it Frio Frozen Foods.  Everything seemed to be getting off to a good start.  Dolph Briscoe was very helpful.  The president of his bank, Louis Bracy, was very encouraging.  Bob Coleman was going to take care of our books.  Joe Gerber had contracted for the farmers to grow certain vegetables to be ready for harvest by a certain time.  He was also going to oversee processing at the plant.  Then came the hardest freeze anybody had ever seen in that part of Texas.  It froze all the way down to McAllen, two hundred miles south of San Antonio, right by the Rio Grande.  Of course all our vegetables were destroyed.  This would have been a total disaster if not for Joe Gerber.  He got on the road, driving all over New Mexico and Arizona, buying crops out there, arranging for them to be trucked to our plant.  He kept the plant going.

Now you’re not going to believe this.  The winter of our second year of operation, I got a call from Joe.  He told me there was eleven inches of snow on our crops.  You know, when you operate a frozen food plant, you don’t expect the food to be frozen before it gets to the plant.  Anyway, it was a good thing he had made connections with all those farmers in New Mexico and Arizona because we needed them again.

Governor Briscoe said on many occasions that Frio Foods was the best thing that ever happened to Uvalde.  We became the largest employer in the community.  Over three hundred people worked there.  Joe continued to run the company very successfully until his wife got sick with cancer.  When she died, he didn’t have his heart in the business anymore, so he recommended we sell it, which we did.  By then Frio had become the largest packer of turnip greens west of the Mississippi.  It was a successful venture.  It gave me the opportunity to meet a lot of people.  Joe and I became good friends.  He still calls me a couple of times a week at the office.  We talk about this and that, and also about the little antique business we have going down in the town of Comfort, Texas, called Highbrow and Hicks.

 

So this chapter amounts to a sort of snapshot of my career.  You turn around, decades have passed.  I suppose the years following the war brought me my share of success.  The main thing is, Evelyn and I raised four wonderful children together.  And I found a way to give my family what they needed.  I also managed to pay what I call my “civic rent.”  To the extent that all this has worked out, you can call me lucky.  I’ve certainly tried my best to play the cards that were dealt me, but let me tell you something: it’s a greater hand than Luck that deals the cards.

As I look back over my life I wonder, what would I have done differently?  And I know that I would have liked to have spent more time with my family.  When my daughters were little, I was very busy.  I felt I had to be.  The world was moving very fast, and I felt like I had to keep up with it, to make a place in it for all of us.  The funny thing is, you do that too long, and you tend to miss out on what your real business is all about in the first place.  Of course, it’s not business at all, it’s family.  Now you might think, everybody knows that, like 1+1=2.  But the facts are different.  One and one are always going to equal two, but the time you want is always running out.  Your children grow up.  And you grow old.

I did manage to take a little more time off work when my sons were getting bigger.  I loved to take them hunting because it’s what I had known as a boy, and I knew how to show them that world, because my father and oldest brother had shown it to me.  I suppose I clipped out this poem I keep framed near my desk when I realized how fast the time was flying.  You can substitute a few words, and it works just as well for a daughter as a son:

What shall you give to one small boy?

A glamorous game, a tinseled toy,

A boy scout knife, a puzzle pack,

A train that runs on curving track?

A picture book, a real live pet…

No, there’s plenty of time for such things yet.

 

Give him a day for his very own –

Just one small boy and his dad alone.

A walk in the woods, a romp in the park,

A fishing trip, from dawn to dark.

Give the gift that only you can –

The companionship of his Old Man.

Games are outgrown, and toys decay –

But he’ll never forget if you “Give him a day.”

This puts it about right.  Except for one more thing.

Evelyn was always there for all those days I couldn’t be.  She was always home for the children when I was working on housing us.  And she was always there for me when the working day was done.  There would have been no home but for Evelyn.  She was home for Millie, Marilyn, Chuck, and John.  And for me.  Always.

 

 

Chapter Eleven

           

I cannot finish without talking a little more about what I’ve loved since I was a boy — the woods and fields, the rivers and the Gulf, hunting and fishing.  I have loved these things from earliest memory — from the time that Daddy first taught me to hold a line, from the time my oldest brother, Felix, taught me to use a rifle.  And I think maybe my love of this life, this sporting life, has only deepened as I have grown older.  This is partly because the love of simple things can’t help but deepen with time, but also because it has given me so much of the world in the company of good friends.

 

When Evelyn and I began our life in Mobile, I liked to get up before daylight to go fishing on the Causeway.  I’d drive to John’s Bend, wade out, and cast for bass.  There’s a seawall out there now and an interstate exit off the noisy Bayway, but in those days the Causeway was a two-lane road.  There wasn’t much traffic early in the morning.  The bay was quiet and beautiful with the sun coming up.  I’d catch two or three bass, take them home, dress them out, and cook them for breakfast with grits.  Then I’d go to the office.  It was a good start for the day.

One of my earliest fishing and hunting friends in Mobile was Albert Metzger.  I guess I met him in ’46.  Albert’s family owned Metzger’s Clothing Store.  For a brief period after the war, he went out to Houston to work for a department store called Sakowitz so that he could learn from their operations how better to run his family’s store.  Anyway, he met his bride-to-be in Houston, and when they were married, he asked me to be his best man.  Albert and I were good friends.  We bought a little skiff together that we used to hunt ducks on the bay.  As our lives became busier, we came to value more and more the time we spent away from the pressures of the office.

I guess it was in 1957 that an article in Sports Afield caught my eye.  The title was “Fishing for Baby Tarpon in Trees.”  The writer talked about using a lure called a Lucky Thirteen to catch these baby tarpon among mangroves growing along jungle streams down in Mexico.  You flew down to the Yucatan, to Merida, then took a train to the Bay of Campeche.  I got to thinking about it and I mentioned to Albert that I thought this would make an interesting expedition.  He told me that he’d been reading something about the country around Merida, where there was supposed to be good quail hunting.  He said maybe it would be a good idea to go after some birds as well as fish.  Of course, we had to go.

I forget what service we used to book the trip, but this fellow named Pepe met us at the Merida airport.  He had the biggest old Cadillac you’d ever seen.  And I mean old — ran in a blue haze, but he was proud of it.  He was full of bull about everything, Pepe, our guide.  He took us hunting around “Indian mounds” outside Merida.  Hell, these weren’t “mounds,” they were Mayan ruins.  He took us to Chichen Itza, one of the most beautifully preserved of all Mayan cities.  We went into an ancient temple where the sun came through a little slip in the wall to a sundial that told the very hour and the date.  Pepe may have been a little short on local history, but he took us to some extraordinary places, and he got us to the birds.  We shot a lot of quail.  We didn’t use dogs.  We’d just flush them, walking.  We’d shoot in the morning, then stop about noon in the middle of the countryside, in some little village he knew, where we could get something to eat at some little comida or restaurant.  Then he’d go upstairs and take a nap.  And we would too.  That’s how we were introduced to the siesta.  You’d sleep a couple of hours in the middle of the day, then get up and go hunting later.

Now we had made arrangements to meet Albert’s sister and her husband at Isla de Aquada, a village about two hundred miles south of Merida.  That’s where we were going to fish.  Pepe drove us to a narrow-gauge railroad that carried us on down there.  You should have been on this train.  It was amazing.  Everything from chickens to hogs to goats were riding, along with people, many of them riding on top of the boxcars, sitting in the sun, happy as they could be.  I’d never seen anything like it.

Isla de Aquada was at the tip of a peninsula extending between the Bay of Campeche and the Laguna de Terminos.  If you look on a map you’ll see that the Bay of Campeche forms between the Mexican mainland and the Yucatan and its waters are continuous with the Gulf of Mexico.  The Laguna de Terminos is something else.  It might be called a lagoon, but it is immense, over six hundred square miles and fed by seven rivers.  Our hotel overlooked this great lagoon.  The place was what you might call “rustic,” maybe a half-dozen thatched huts, connected by boardwalks winding to a common dining room.  None of it was air-conditioned.  But on the site it was located, it was beautiful.  Nothing but sky and sea and green shoreline, trailing far off, till that was just sky and sea.  The fishing boats would come right up to the beach to wait for us.

When we set out the next morning, the hotel had packed us a lunch that consisted of one sandwich, one bottle of soda pop, and one bottle of water.  We were going in a little boat with an outboard motor driven by a boy who could barely speak English. We were going across a part of the lagoon, then upriver, and all this boy could say was “si, si” whenever you asked him anything.   So off we went.  We rode a long way.  When we got to the far shore, we located a river, then headed up it.  The boy started twiddling his fingers, like he was reeling, saying, “Fish, fish.”   In no time we were hooking mango snapper and snook, really good fish, fantastic-eating fish.  We were hooking them good.  And then I noticed there was water around the soles of my shoes.  There we were, with no radio, miles from the hotel, fishing along a jungle shoreline in a leaky boat.  The boy didn’t seem to be worried, though.  Young “Si-Si” would ease in close enough for mangrove limbs to overhang us, whip out a pocket knife, cut off a branch, fashion plugs from the twigs and patch the boat.  He seemed to be content with this system.  His boat kept floating so I suppose he’d done this many times before — not that there would have been any point in asking him about it.  After a while he headed us up a narrow stream into the middle of what really looked like a jungle — huge mangroves bushing out thick from both banks, where you couldn’t see any solid ground, just  tangled roots, and behind the mangroves a wall of tangled green leaves and vines.  We got maybe fifty feet upstream, and everywhere you looked there were these prehistoric-looking lizards, big as cats, sitting on the mangrove limbs.  As we passed, they’d turn their heads and stare at us.  Iguanas everywhere you looked.  And I thought, Man we’re going back in time because this is sort of scary. 

The stream was so narrow we’d have to cast straight off the bow.  We rigged up Lucky Thirteens, treble-hook lures, just as the article had suggested.  These are what you call “plugs.”  You’d cast out and pop them, make them jump across the water.  And those fish hit them like crazy.   They’d hit and dance off ahead of us, just running away with the line.  They’d run and jump, and the line or one of the hooks (the fish couldn’t get all of them in his mouth, you see) would hang in the mangroves and the fish would just wind up dangling there, flipping around in the air, six to eight pounds of gray and silver.  And that’s what the writer had meant about fishing for tarpons in the trees.  It was wonderful.

Well, I don’t know how long we did this.  We were having such a good time we forgot all about the iguanas and the leaky boat, which had stopped leaking more or less.  We were catching these fish and fighting them in and letting them loose.  Or getting them untangled from the mangroves and letting them loose.  It was great fun.  Then all of a sudden, they stopped biting.  They just stopped.  Albert and I looked at each other.  Then we looked at “Si-Si.”  We asked him what happened.  He grinned and said something we couldn’t understand.  He eased the boat up against some roots high as the gunwales, secured a line, got out, and disappeared.

I said, “Where the hell’re you going?  Don’t leave us up in here!  We don’t know where we are!”

No response.  Gone bare-footed into the jungle.  I looked at Albert.  He looked at me.  I said, “Well, Albert, I’m sure he’s not going to leave us.”

He said, “How do you know?”

I said, “I don’t.  But he’s not supposed to!”

So we sat there.  We listened to “Si-Si” rustling off until we couldn’t hear him anymore.  I don’t know what we were thinking.  We sat there.  Then we heard a disturbance well upstream, a splashing.  It sounded like somebody beating the water with a limb.  And we looked around and saw the fish cutting around the boat again.  He had driven them back.  The place was suddenly covered up with tarpon.  We stood up and cast and the fish were hitting again.

It was a great day.  As the light began to slant, we decided we should get back to the hotel and signaled “Si-Si” to head home.  We caught more eating-fish on the way out, and threw them in the bottom of the boat — there was a little water they could suck on.  Then we headed back to camp.  Now this is a true story.

I said to Albert, “I hope there’s enough gas.”

He got to the back of the boat, picked up the gas tank.

He said, “There’s no gas in this tank.”

We mentioned this rather emphatically to the boy, who said, “Si.”

He had opened the motor up, heading back to the hotel.  Big wake behind us, going across the bay.  No gas, no reserve.  We must’ve had twenty miles ahead of us.  I don’t know what the boy was thinking, and I don’t know where the gas came from, but we kept going — a couple of hours in chop that soaked us and the motor kept running.  Finally we saw the shoreline.  Then we made out the huts, then we made out the boats beached around the hotel.  Spitting distance and I thought, We can surely get someone’s attention if the motor dies now.  We hit the shore with the outboard sputtering.  I don’t know how we got home, but the good Lord was with us.

That night, the hotel chef baked us the snook we’d caught for dinner.  It was delicious.  The chef baked it with some serious peppers.  I’d eaten hot food in my life, but nothing like this.  Albert’s sister and brother-in-law shared the meal with us.  His in-law, Jack Goldsmith, was a heavy man with a hearty appetite.  I looked across the table at him and his brow was covered with sweat.  And we’d all just showered before dinner.

We fished close to the hotel the next day, the four of us, on a larger boat with first-class tickets, which meant that you didn’t ride where the chop could wet you.  Then we headed back to Merida by bus. These were big, bolt-spring vehicles that bounced along the roads, making a bigger wake of dust than the boats we’d seen chewing water on the bay.  No air-conditioning, windows open, the dirty wake backing all around you whenever you slowed down.  Like the train, the bus was loaded with people and animals of all kinds.  There was a little ladder on the back of the bus, so people could climb up and ride on the roof.  We seemed to stop at every country crossroad because somebody had to get off or get on, or somebody flagged us down with something to sell.  By the time we made the two hundred miles to Merida, we were dirtier than we’d ever been in our lives.  Your skin was just another coat of grime.

We were booked in the Columbia Hotel, supposedly the finest in town.  We walked into an air-conditioned lobby that felt very good.  There was a prominent sign that announced a spa.  As I signed in, I said, “Is that open?”  The desk attendant said, “Yes, sir.”  I said, “Well, I want to go now.”

I put my bags in my room and returned downstairs with a change of clothes.  Jack and Dorothy did also.  Albert didn’t.  He just wanted to sleep.  He missed a great thing.

This spa just went on and on.  In the first stage, you showered, or rather they hosed you down, which was fine with me, I was so dirty.  Then they put you on a slab and oiled you down and rubbed you some, which brought the weariness out closer to the skin.  From there, you went into a steam bath where you sat till you were pink and weak.  Then you staggered into a room where there was a tiled walkway, slanting down to a pool — a delightful place, where you just floated around like warm jelly.  I bobbed around there a long time.  I don’t know how they dipped me out, it felt so good.  Then they took me to another room where they slipped a crisp sheet over me and put me on a soft table for a long massage, which I don’t remember that much about, I went to sleep so quick.  I have no idea how I got back upstairs.  The rest of the trip was anticlimax.

Jack and his wife, Dorothy, and I talked for years about how nice that spa was.  And I kidded Albert a long time about how he slept through the perfect conclusion to our adventure in Mexico.

 

Another of my oldest sporting friends in Mobile was Billy Stimpson.  I guess it was in the early fiftiesthat I joined the hunting and fishing camp his father founded in the twenties.  I’ll talk about Bull Pen and what it has meant to me and my sons a little later.  Bull Pen’s a legendary place for all Alabama sportsmen.  For years Billy and I hunted deer and hog and turkey together in the Tombigbee sloughs and fields stretching for twenty miles around the camp.  One morning in the spring of 1967, he called me at home, wanting to go after bigger game.

He said, “McNeil, I think we should go on safari in Africa.”  He had a plan — four men, six weeks, Mobile to Africa, then on to Australia, Hawaii, California, back to Mobile.  He’d already talked to one of his brothers about going.  He had also talked to Cabell Outlaw — this was George Cabell Outlaw, who was running Morrison’s Cafeteria, which his father had founded.  Did I want to go?  You can imagine.  I listened a few moments, then said, “Billy, will you hold on?”

I said, “Evelyn, Billy’s on the phone, and he thinks we should go hunting in Africa.  Is that alright with you?”

She said, “Well, yes dear, that sounds fine with me.”

That’s how we got started.  I was going hunting in Africa.  Nobody I knew from Mobile had ever been on safari.

I won’t go into boring details — guides, camps, guns, airlines, hotels, all that.  We spent the next eighteen months sorting it all out.  We put the trip together through Abercrombie & Fitch, which at that time was a serious tour outfit, not the fashion retailer it is nowadays.  We did just a whole lot of planning.  But as you know, however carefully you plan, all plans change.  Billy’s brother, Ben, was supposed to go with us, but six months before departure, he announced that he and his wife were expecting a child, so Ben had to back out.  His brother, Dut, took his slot.  But that wasn’t the end of it.

Two weeks before our flight, we had a big Safari Party at Billy’s.  People came all dressed up in hunting and native costumes.  And a lot of people had a good bit to drink, including Billy.  It was a pretty wild time.  Evelyn and I left early to drive down to our place at the Gulf.  The next morning, Cabell Outlaw called me and said,  “McNeil, you’ve got to come back to Mobile.  Billy broke his shoulder last night, playing touch football on the lawn.  You and Dut and I have to decide who’s going to be the fourth.”  We drove back and met at the Mobile Country Club.  We needed a friend who could make arrangements on short notice because we were going to leave in seven days.  We talked about several men, and chose Dudley Dawson, head of Southern Industries.  We called him, said, “Dudley, you’ve got seven days to get shots and your passport.  Can you do that?”  You bet he did.  We had a big bon voyage party, complete with champagne, at the Mobile Airport.  This was September 1968.  We were connecting to Atlanta, then New York, where we’d fly Pan American to Johannesburg, South Africa.

Now there’s an interesting connection here.  Maybe a year before, Dudley had invited me to San Salvador for the inaugural flight of Tacker Airlines to Miami.  Dudley’s company had a significant equity position in Tacker.  There was a reception celebrating the event and at this reception I met a board member of Pan American Airways.  In the course of our conversation, I mentioned that several of us were planning this trip to Africa and on around the world.  And this gentleman said, “I would like to invite you to fly Pan American.  I would be happy to make some special arrangements for you.”   So that’s how we wound up booking on Pan Am.  Let me tell you, that director took good care of us.  We flew first class.  The crew knew us by name.  The airline packed all of our rifles and shotguns in a big, foam-lined crate so that all the sighting-in we’d done on them wouldn’t be affected by shipping.  On the trans-Atlantic leg we flew a Boeing 707.  In those days, you could step into the cockpit and visit with the crew during the flight.

Abercrombie & Fitch had arranged for a driver to meet us at the airport in Johannesburg and take us to our hotel, where we had booked a top-floor suite for four days.  I believe Cabell knew the owner of this hotel through some mutual friends.  Again, we were well taken care of.  This gentleman even entertained us at his home one night.  Johannesburg was a fantastic city with modern skyscrapers and beautiful residential areas.  It was a mining town (and still is) in an upland region rich with gold deposits.  Because of the altitude, the nights were cool, something that surprised me.  You don’t expect summers in Africa to be cool.  I remember buying a cashmere sweater that became part of my wardrobe for years and years.

From Johannesburg we flew about two hours northwest to the neighboring country of Botswana.  In those days, they were just beginning to discover the diamonds that would become that country’s main export.  Today Botswana’s the largest supplier of gem—quality diamonds in the world, but in 1968 it was very, very backward.  Our destination was the town of Maun in the north of the country.  We flew there on a DC-3, the plane I had flown in the war.  (I told you they were reliable — going on thirty years, same model, just a great airplane).  We landed on a grass runway and met our “white hunters,” our guides, who owned the company Abercrombie & Fitch had contracted to take us into the bush.  Their company was called, appropriately enough, Safari South.

Now these men were terrific hunters, excellent outdoorsmen.  Although they were called “Europeans,” they’d all been born in Africa, and they were tough and reliable.  Each of us — Cabell, Dut, Dudley, and I — had the services of his own white hunter.  My man was named Frank Miller.  When he was younger, he had been hired by the British to help put down the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya.  I think a couple of the other white hunters had too.  They planned for us to hunt the next thirty days from three different camps in the wilds beyond Maun.  We were to set out the next morning.

They took us to a little hotel, where my friends decided to take a nap.  On the way, I had seen a little stream and told Frank that I thought I’d like to do some fishing.  So while the other men slept, I went out and caught — well, I forget the local name of these fish.  I think it was something like bream, but they were certainly the biggest bream I’d ever caught.  I gave them to some natives.  My first day on safari, I went fishing.

We got the Land Rovers loaded up, ready to go, the following morning.  A little thing happened which will tell you how tough and proud these white hunters were.  I was wearing a black beret to keep my head warm.  Cabell’s hunter saw it and said something disparaging, like I wasn’t qualified to wear it.  Now I don’t know whether he said it because he had worn a beret fighting the Mau Mau, or what, but he was out of line.

I said, “Let me tell you something, mister.  You don’t know anything about what I’m qualified for.  You don’t know anything about what I’ve seen or what my background is, so let me tell you right now.  I’m as qualified as anyone to wear this thing, you understand me?”

He had nothing to say.  Over the coming weeks, though, as we all got to know each other, swapping stories, he understood where I was coming from and offered me an apology.

We rode out in Land Rovers across a desert-like plain.  There was no road, just this dry land as far as you could see, here and there trees and scrubby vegetation.  I don’t know how long we drove before one of the vehicles got a flat tire from the big thorns on this scrub.  We all stopped so the white hunters could get the tire changed, then we split up, planning to rendezvous that night in camp way off in the Okovango Delta.  The Okovango was the major river in the north of the country.  It has maybe the biggest inland delta in the world.

We all had open licenses, which meant we could go after any kind of game we wanted, except for cheetahs, which were protected .  I told Frank that I’d really like to get a leopard.  Now the way you do that is to bait the cat by hanging kill in a tree.  You’d try to establish a feeding location for him.  Once you’d seen he was feeding there, you’d build a circular blind fifty to sixty paces off the tree, where you’d sit and wait until dark, when the cat usually fed.  There were impalas all around on the plain, hundreds of them, just jumping and jumping and jumping.  So I sighted one with a 7mm bolt-action rifle and brought him down.  We tied him to the back of the Rover and dragged him around for a while to spread his bloody scent, then hung him up in a tree.  I shot a second one, we dragged him, and hung him up in a different location.  Then we headed on to camp.

About dark, the Rover started coughing and sputtering.  Frank stopped and told Noye, his main native tracker, to get the jerry can so we could gas up.  Wouldn’t you know it?  Somebody had emptied that can, stolen all the gas.  We were stuck.  I didn’t know what we were going to do.  Frank had a brief discussion with Noye in whatever dialect they shared and Noye set off on foot.

I said, “Where’s he going?”  We were scores of miles from Maun in the middle of no where.

Frank said, “To camp.  He’ll hit a jeep track somewhere and follow it.  He knows the general direction we’re headed.”

We had two other natives with us.  They built a fire and we settled down to wait.  When the sun goes down on the Botswana plain, it gets cold very quickly.  I sort of wished I had that cashmere sweater from Johannesburg, but it was packed with other supplies on another truck, gone to camp.  I looked around.  Nothing but wild dark in every direction.  The sky was huge with no star, no constellation I recognized.  I wondered if there were leopards dining on those impala we’d hung in the trees.  Here was Africa.  It was quite a feeling.

After several hours, we saw headlights, frail as lightning bugs, come jittering out of the dark.  They were far away, but I was very glad to see them and I watched them get bigger, heading toward our fire.  Directly, the Rover drove up with Noye and a bottle of scotch and some gas.  When we reached camp, my friends were having after-dinner drinks around a big fire.  They’d waited supper as long as they could, broken down, and eaten without me.  That’s why they sent the scotch, which made for a pleasant trip, after all.

The white hunters had set up camp on a little island cleared of trees in the delta swampland.  The big cats didn’t like to cross water, you see.   Dudley and Dut shared one tent.  Cabell and I another.  The tent had zippered mosquito netting at the front, a canvas floor, and twin beds with good mattresses.  It also had a canvas porch with a canvas tub where the native boy assigned to you brought heated water from the fire every eveningfor your bath.  He’d hold the mirror while you shaved, hand you a towel when you got out.  He’d wash and iron your clothes, clean your boots, have your bed turned back in the evening, have it made the next morning.  He’d have fresh clothes laid out for you after came in from hunting, clothes laid out the next morning when you got up.  There were cooks who’d have breakfast ready: sweet rolls, bacon, eggs, toast, a typical breakfast, only set out in the middle of the jungle.  These cooks baked bread too.  They had a stainless steel box with several compartments and metal loops on each side.  They’d put the dough to rise in a top compartment and move it to bake on the bottom.  At night, after they’d done cooking and the fire was burnt to coals, they’d insert poles into this stainless steel box, carry it to the fire and set it down where they’d spread a hole for it.  Then they’d heap coals back up on the sides of it and leave it to bake until morning.  You talk about delicious bread!

These safari camps were very nice.  There was electricity from a portable generator.  And even an ice machine.  We’re talking about fifty-something servants, including trackers and gun—bearers, organized around our white hunters and us.  It was a fine operation.  You’d return after a long day’s hunt to a warm bath waiting on your tent-porch.  For dinner there’d be appetizers set out on a table with whiskey, while the cooks were busy preparing whatever game we’d shot that day.

Now I documented this whole thing.  I saved the brochures, took lots of pictures, even shot reels of home-movie footage of the trip.  Later, I got somebody in Mobile to record the theme from the movie about African lions, Born Free, for the sound track to this film.   I must have shown it in clubs all over Mobile in the years after our trip.  Eventually, I had the whole thing copied to video.  You can still see it.

What I may as well say here is that I also had a reel-to-reel tape recorder that I used to set out on a table by the fire in the evenings.  This was when everybody had a few whiskeys under his belt, when everybody was telling stories, especially our white hunters, using the foulest language you’ve ever heard.  Everything went down on that big old tape recorder, a suitcase sized model with a little microphone.  I’d set it up, patch the mike, press “record,” then I’d just leave it on till the tape ran out, which usually followed the point we ran out of high spirits or whisky.  My recollection is those tapes are pretty filthy.  Somewhere among my notes is a directive to my children not to listen to them till I’m gone.  I say it here again with a laugh, not that I believe one generation changes that much from the next, or that we have that much to hide.    I’m not sure where those tapes are stored.  They’re probably white noise by now.

Our first morning in the swamp, the big African sun came up and we had a fine breakfast.  Frank and I loaded into the Rover and hauled out of camp.  Herds of all kinds were moving around the delta.  One of the first animals we came across was a kind of antelope called a tsessebe.  He looked like great, wiry mule.  “There’s a big one,” said Frank.  “You want him?”  I guess I did.  I shot him, got him hauled back to camp.  Then we got to talking about bigger game, Cape buffalo.

These animals were serious bosses.  The bulls weighed a half—ton or better, with massive horns, six feet wide, thick as timber.  They had a nasty reputation.  They stood down hungry lions.  They killed more hunters than any other game.  Only leopards were known to be quick enough to get their calves.  They were bad.  They still have that reputation — just serious, mean beasts.  “Think we should get one?” asked Frank.  I looked back in the Rover, said, “ You have your boy hand me my .457 Magnum and let’s go.”   This was a gun we used for elephant.

Frank drove us out onto a huge grassy plain.  It looked like there were thousands of these animals in a herd.  He yelled, “Tally ho!” and off we went, driving right out into the middle of them.  When they started running, it sounded like thunder.  He drove his Rover like a ranch horse.  He’d choose a bull by his horn size, then work on isolating him from the rest of the herd, cutting him out, then running him till he slowed to a walk.  Then I’d stand up and shoot.  I brought down a couple of them this way.  The third one was different.  He was a massive old boy.

We cut him out, slowed him down, then he stopped and squared off at us — just threw his shoulders down, and lowered his head like he was going to charge.  When I saw this, I stood up and shot him twice.  Now a .457 shoots rounds the size of .50 caliber machine gun shells.  The bull stepped back, but his legs were steady.  I couldn’t believe it.  I must’ve been pretty excited because I  shot him again and couldn’t drop him.  I don’t remember whether I missed his head or the place just off his shoulder, aiming for his heart, but I put another round straight into him.  And still he stood.  He looked bothered, angry about business, only he just couldn’t find how to go forward.  At this point, Frank started driving around him and I shot him again.  The old bull stood and kept trying to fix us, trying to turn and come on.  I shot him again and again as we circled him.  Finally he wobbled and dropped.  When we checked him, we found I’d hit him eleven times, hit him everywhere, shoulder, neck, and flanks.  The bullets had passed straight through him.  I’d even hit him through the head, only the round had not touched his brain.

We had a pretty good morning.  Frank decided we should stop for tea (what he called “tay”) about 10 a.m.  Well, I didn’t care a lot about tea, but packed in a little wooden box there were some good—looking sandwiches made of that wonderful bread I’ve mentioned.  So we tucked into these.  I started on my sandwich and it was kind of good, a little funny, and I said, “Frank, just what exactly is in this sandwich?”

And he said, “Tongue, Charles.”

And I said, “What?”

“It’s tongue, Charles.  Delicious isn’t it?”

No it wasn’t.  In fact, the idea made me queasy.  I stopped chewing and swallowed hard.

I said, “What kind of tongue exactly are we talking about, Frank?”

“Buffalo,” he said.

I put down my sandwich and said, “Look here, Frank.  From now on, we’ve got to change a couple of things.  First thing is, I want the crusty ends of the bread.  That’s my favorite part of the loaf.  Second thing is, I don’t want anymore tongue in my sandwich.  Anything but tongue.  All right?”

No more tongue after that.

We hunted maybe ten days out of this first camp.  We checked the trees we’d baited.  We baited a couple more.  One morning we discovered that one of our baits had been fed on, so we built a blind fifty to sixty paces off the tree.  This was in the early afternoon.  We drove around, hunting some more, and returned about four o’clock.  The blind was big enough for Frank and me, so we crawled in.  I put my rifle into the gun rest we’d built to keep it pointed out of the slit.  Once you had it sighted, you left it.  You wanted to make sure you had a killing shot.  When you hit the big cat, you wanted him to drop dead out of the tree into the grass.  You did not want to walk into that tall grass with a wounded leopard waiting for you.  Frank and I napped a while, waiting for dusk to come.  Noye drove the vehicle off, downwind a quarter-mile or so.  We waited a long time, but no leopard ever came.  None of us got a leopard on that trip.

We also looked for lions every day, looking out for carcasses they’d been feeding on — zebra, antelope, impala.  One morning we were driving around the savanna where there were these huge termite hills, ten to fifteen feet high, maybe twenty to twenty-five feet in circumference at the base.  We noticed that one of them looked like it had been clawed down the side.  We were off aways from it, starting to circle it, and Frank said, “My god, there’re the lions we’ve been looking for!”

Soon as they saw us, they scattered, all except for the dominant male, a big black-mane lion, who just sat up and stared at us.  We eased up to within thirty-five paces.  Frank had told me he wouldn’t charge us unless he was hurt, so I got out of the Rover, put a cartridge in my .457, aimed behind his shoulder for the heart and squeezed off a round.  He dropped.  I was told to shoot him again and I did.  Then we waited six to eight minutes.  Frank told Noye to go up and check him, so he got out with a long stick, carefully approached the lion and touched that stick to his open eye.  It didn’t blink.  He knew he was dead.  We examined him.  He was three hundred to three hundred and fifty pounds, a fine animal.  We took pictures of him, and of us with him, got him loaded into the Rover, and headed back to camp, where the servants skinned him, saving his head and claws and pelt.

Now except for the lion and zebra, we ate everything that we shot.  Cape buffalo and wildebeest, springbok and impala all make excellent steaks and roasts.  We had oxtail soup, too, a real delicacy.  The game birds we shot around our next camp were particularly delicious: dove, guinea, francolin.  I’d be coming back to camp in the afternoon and run up a bunch of guinea hens — round, puffy birds.  They’d flush, go screeching off, settle back down.  I’d put away my rifle, get a shotgun and bag some.  I got real fond of guinea-breast or francolin-breast sandwiches the cooks would pack for my lunch.  Much better than tongue, let me tell you.

This second camp was on a bluff overlooking a beautiful river.  I don’t remember whether it was the Okovango itself, or one of the big streams that branched off it in the delta.  In the evenings, you could watch the herds come down to the river to drink.  Doves sometimes would just fog in.  It was in the area around this camp I hunted wildebeest and springbok, as well as fowl.  The springbok were little antelope that were very fast.  They could jump twelve to fourteen feet.  You had to shoot them from a distance.  One of the interesting things about this animal is a fold of skin that runs from the center of the back down the spine all the way to the rump.  Just before the springbok dies, this pouch opens up to reveal a crest of long, white, bristly hair — that’s the “flag.”  When the animal dies, this “flag” closes up again.  I have all this on movie film.  I also have some pillows covered in springbok hide that John and his wife gave me a few Christmases back.  You can open the pouch in the hide to see the springbok “flag.”

Even though we were well provisioned, you could get thirsty after teatime.  One morning I had wandered off from the vehicle while a flat was being fixed or an animal we’d killed was being loaded.  A little stream had eddied into a pool where I decided to kneel down for a drink.  When Frank saw me doing this, he hollered, “Charles!  Don’t do that!  Get back from there!”  It startled me.  I stood up.

“That’s the way the crocs get their meals,” he explained.  “They’d just as soon have you as impala.”  He told me there were crocodiles all over the delta and they liked to lie in the shallows, waiting for something to come for a drink.  They killed more people than I could imagine.  Well, after that, I kept to the canteen.

The crocodiles weren’t as big a problem as the flies, the tsetse flies in particular.  They were everywhere by the millions.  You’d hit a bush driving around, and it would explode with tsetse flies.  I had a swatter made from a wildebeest tail, a tough, bushy tail with hairs twelve to fourteen inches long.  This helped only a little bit.  The insect repellant helped only a little bit.  These flies bit you through your clothes.  Before long, we decided we’d have to drive back to Maun to get our blood checked for a parasite the flies carried.  It caused sleeping sickness that could eventually be fatal.  There was no vaccination, but there was a treatment if they determined you’d been infected with this parasite.  Dudley and Cabell decided that they didn’t want any more of these flies, so they stayed behind, while Dut and I drove back into the bush to our third camp.  In fact, Dudley and Cabell decided to return to the hotel in Johannesburg.

It was from the third camp that we hunted roan antelope and elephant.  Besides leopard, these were the only two animals I had wanted to bag and hadn’t.  On the day we found elephants, I was riding with Dudley’s hunter, Willie Englebrecht.   Frank was busy back at camp.  Willie was an excellent hunter.  When we came across some elephant dung, he put his hand in it to see how warm it was.  It turned out to be quite fresh.  He sent two of his trackers ahead to one side of what we judged the trail.  We drove off along the other side.  There were coconut palms up ahead.  Elephants love to eat coconuts.  We hadn’t gone four or five minutes when Willie said, “Grab your gun!”

I hadn’t seen anything.  He gestured off seventy-five to a hundred yards, and there they were, among the trees.  There were ten or twelve of them, just standing there, as if they were sleeping in the shade.  He brought the truck to a stop.

He said, “Now we’ve got to hurry because the other trackers may startle the herd in a moment.  They’ll stampede.  We don’t want that.  What we’re going to do is get out of the truck and charge straight into the herd.  I want you to run.  I’ll be running right beside you.  When we get up to them, I’ll pick out the one you’ll shoot.  You fire when I say.  You ready?”

I loaded my .457 and said, “Let’s go.”

So we charged.  We got pretty close before they started to move.  Willie pointed out a bull with big tusks who had turned to run.  He said, “That one there.  Shoot him right up the ass.”

I paused and fired one round, then another, as Willie said to do.  I got a third shot off, aiming at the back of his head, as he disappeared into the trees.  I hit him in the shoulder.

“Now let’s wait here a moment,” Willie said.  “You hit him good with those spine shots.  He won’t get far.  When he realizes he can’t keep up with the herd, he’ll turn to wait for us.  He might even try to come back after us.”

The sound of the herd died away.  Then we eased down the trail.  We hadn’t walked far before we saw the wounded bull standing with two other elephants.  They seemed to be waiting on him.  I don’t remember if they were cows or younger bulls, but when they saw us, they hurried off.  He watched them go, then he turned, staggering, trying to come at us, and collapsed.  I walked up and finished him with a shot to the brain.  We took pictures.  I had the tusks removed, along with one of his feet.  We sent one of the trackers off to a nearby village with news of the kill.  The locals ate elephant meat.  Before we left the animal, there were twenty or more natives carving steaks off him.  He fed a lot of people.

The white hunters had skinners who prepared the hides and heads and other trophy parts of the big animals we shot.  We got them all sorted and ready for curing in Maun, where we said goodbye to the excellent men of Safari South.  Thanks to them, the hunt had been a tremendous success.  They would see that everything was cured well enough for shipment to a taxidermist we had contacted in Denver, Colorado.

Back in Johannesburg, we met Cabell at the hotel.  He told us that Dudley had flown home after receiving notice that his father was critically ill.  This was a sad note.

We left South Africa, headed east on a 707.  We refueled in Madagascar before the long flight across the Indian Ocean to Perth, the capital of Western Australia.  We refueled there and headed on across the continent to Sydney.  We planned to visit three days with a fellow Dut had met when they were cadets at Marion Institute.  Dut had remained friends with him over the years.  He was originally from Birmingham, but he had moved to Sydney after going to work for a man, a Greek national, I believe, who owned coal and shipping and other businesses in Australia.  Anyway, this fellow made us welcome and entertained us.

Sydney was an absolutely gorgeous city overlooking a beautiful harbor with an amazing amount of water traffic.  The famous opera house was well under construction.  Those great roof vaults were in place, looking like sails, and they had begun on the glass walls enclosing them.

We stayed in a terrific hotel run by the British.  The clerks were formally attired in pinstriped cutaway coats.  The staff couldn’t do enough to wait on you.  Each of us had a one-bedroom suite, beautifully appointed with fresh flowers, a box of chocolates, a bottle of scotch, a bottle of liqueur.  Fantastic place, fantastic time.  We spent two days there, though we had planned three.  What we hadn’t considered was that we’d be crossing the International Date Line and so would “lose” a day on our return to America.  We wound up having to cut our stay in Sydney short.  Dut’s friend had planned a big send off party for us on the third evening, but we were going to have to leave that morning.

Now we had been splitting the hotel bills in this way: according to which leg of our trip we were on, one of us would pay for the hotel on that leg.  I was paying for the hotel on this particular leg, and although there were only three of us, the place was so nice that I knew the bill would be substantial.  When I stepped to the desk for checkout, the manager said, “Mr. McNeil, there is no bill.”

I told him, “What do you mean?  We had three suites.”

“The account has been settled,” he said.

I could learn nothing more about it.

When we got home, we talked to Dudley.  He hadn’t paid for the rooms, but he had made the reservations.  It turned out that he had arranged for them through a friend who worked at Southern Industries, an Australian citizen, whose mother lived in Sydney.  We got Dudley to admit that she had paid the bill.  Mrs. Grace Virtue was her name.  So the four of us got together and had a jeweler design a beautiful brooch that we sent her as a thank-you.

The trip home was long because we had about half a world to cross.  We flew into the night, refueling in Tahiti, then on into morning, refueling again in Honolulu.  First Class was not full, so we could stretch out on the seats with pillows and blankets.  It was quite comfortable.  By the time we reached L.A., it was evening again.   I think we spent the night in an airport hotel.  Next day, Dallas/Fort Worth, then Mobile.  Our welcome-home party was a little subdued because we learned that Dudley’s father had passed away that day.  We all reunited at the funeral a couple of days later.

I guess it was early in ’69 that the four of us got together for a flight to Denver where we conferred with the taxidermist.  Each of us had fifteen or sixteen animals he was working on.  I had a couple of zebra skin rugs and two warthogs, which I still have in my den.  The warthogs were shoulder—mounted with big old tusks sticking out of their mouths.  They’re ugly-looking animals.  I also had impala, tsessebe, and the springbok mounted.  The lion’s mane and pelt I had made into a rug, but it deteriorated over the years and we had to get rid of it.  The lion’s paw I had made into an ashtray holder.  The paw itself was about eight or nine inches in diameter.  I had a stool made of the elephant’s foot.  I keep it in my office.   His tusks I keep around my gun case.  The Cape buffalo horns were so big we took them up to the Bull Pen Hunting Club, where they stayed on the wall of the clubhouse for a number of years until somebody decided they didn’t go with that part of the world and had them put outside.  They rotted away in the weather.

Maybe the dearest trophy from our safari is a shot one of the white hunters took of the four of us.  It was the night of Dut’s birthday and we’d been celebrating around the campfire, laughing and telling stories as we always did.  I had a picture blown up from the negative, framed it, and sent it as a Christmas present to Dudley, Cabell, and Dut.  Some years later, Dudley had his photocopied and blown up to life-size.  He gave copies to each of us.  I keep it hanging in my den.  There we are, happy together, lucky men.

Now I could not give you a fair picture of my life as a sportsman unless I told you a little something about Bull Pen, one of the oldest hunting clubs in Alabama — if not the whole country, considering it still operates under leases going back to its founding in the second decade of the last century.  Billy Stimpson’s daddy was its co-founder.  He and his partner, Jim Radcliff, bought or leased scores of thousands of acres in the Tombigbee delta up in Monroe and Washington Counties.  The place is a paradise.  It abounds not only in fish and fowl, but in deer, wild hog, and wild turkey.  When I was asked to join, the club had thirty-two members.  It was a privilege to be asked.  Still is.

The lodge was about ten miles east off the highway running through Sunflower.  The blacktop ended at an old logging road that descended into bottomland, thick with ash and gum and oak.  You didn’t go back there without a truck, a four-wheel-drive truck, preferably.  The road got real muddy after you crossed Red Hill Creek and got into the swamp.  The wooden lodge sat on a tall bluff overlooking the river.  In those days it was only three or four rooms, centered around a den with a huge fireplace.  One of the rooms was called “the Snoring Room,” where the members who snored loudest slept so they wouldn’t keep everybody else up.  Back then, there was no TV or radio allowed.  No cards either.  The hunts would range from the lodge twenty miles across the delta.   The cooks would often bring lunch out to Hickory Ridge, a little rise in the swamp where there was a cabin.  We’d have roast beef or fried chicken or venison or dove or quail — really fine spreads.

I loved the hunting and fishing and fellowship at Bull Pen.  I made many friends there.  And as my sons grew up, I took them there with me.  They loved it too.  Of course, they learned how to hunt and fish, but they also learned about being around older men — how to say “yes sir” and “no sir,” how to respect their elders and earn their respect, lessons they’ve carried with them all their lives.  And when Chuck and John got old enough, they became members.  John has taken his son there many times. 

I have many Bull Pen stories, too many to tell in this book.  But there is one I’d like to relate.  It says something about how special the place is, how special the hunting life can be.

It was the autumn of 1970, a crystal-clear beautiful day.  Whatever care there was, was not under the sun in those woods.  We had enjoyed a great lunch out at Hickory Ridge.  Billy Stimpson was the president of the club at the time and he had overseen the drawing of stands for the Bedwell Drive.  We were going to shoot deer — maybe hogs if they were fool enough to get in front of the dogs.  In those days you could still count seventy-five to a hundred deer on a drive.

From Hickory Ridge, Billy led six or eight jeeps up into the northern part of the property.  We drove along, talking and laughing, looking forward to the hunt.  When Billy put a hunter on his stand, he would explain to him, carefully and in detail, where the game would be running on the drive, exactly where the animals would cross, exactly what would happen everywhere around that stand.  If there was a game trail anywhere nearby, Billy would point it out.  He could point to the tracks on the ground.  By the time Billy left a new hunter on his stand, the man was about to have a fit because he knew something was going to run right by him on the drive.  Billy was the best there was for that.

Anyway, I had drawn the stand next to Billy’s, so I was the last one out of the jeep before Billy parked it.  He took me down to a place where I’d been before, a lowland running down to a pond along what was called the Water’s Line.  I knew where Billy would be standing after he left me.  The game trail passed right by his stand.  I knew how the deer or hogs were likely to break around the pond, run right past him before I could even see them. As he walked away from me, I said, “Now, Billy, I know you’re going to cut me off.”

“Oh, no,” he said, “you know I wouldn’t do anything like that.”

Yeah, right.  But that’s not the point of this story.

It was a beautiful fall day in November.  Crisp and cool and windless.  A few wispy clouds high overhead.  You could hear the drivers coming, whooping and hollering.  You could hear the dogs barking, breaking into a low, steady bay if they got on a scent.  As the drivers got closer, I started walking back to the jeep.  I was going to break down my gun and store it.  As I said, I thought Billy would cut me off.  When I got to the jeep, I found Billy there, too.  He’d gone there to “find,” let us say, a bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label, his favorite brand of scotch.

“McNeil,” he said, “where we are standing is a piece of hardwood timberland that has been in dispute over the last fifty years between the Laubenthals and ALCO.  It is as close to virgin timber as anything you will ever see, so let’s have a drink to its beauty.”

I said, “I think that’s a good idea.”

So Billy and I sat down under a tree and poured a couple of glasses.  The tree we sat under had leaves bigger than a maple and more brilliant, bright and golden leaves, the color of the scotch we poured, and they had started to fall, to carpet the ground where we sat drinking.  The sun was going down, flaming crimson on all this gold.

Now anchoring the drive along the Water’s Line was a man I knew.  He was sort of the boss of that end of the line.  His job was to keep the line straight, keep the drivers spread out, so there would be no gaps.  His name was Jimmy Webb.  He was a very accomplished woodsman.  He could do anything: he could hunt, he could call turkey, he could fish, he could paddle a good boat, he could cook, he could do just everything a woodsman should know how to do.  You loved being with Jimmy Webb.  He could also sing.

In a moment, Jimmy walked up to us.  I turned to Billy and said, “How about asking Jimmy to sing “Shoes?”

And Jimmy sang.  He had this quavering voice and it rose up in the light of that sky:

I got shoes, you got shoes,

All God’s children got shoes.

When I get to Heaven gonna put on my shoes,

Gonna walk all over God’s Heaven.

 

I’ve got a song, you’ve got a song,

All God’s children got a song.

When I get to Heaven gonna sing a new song,

Gonna sing all over God’s Heaven.

 

The sun was going down as Jimmy sang.  The sky was on fire and the woods were lit with it.  The sounds of the drive seemed to die away.  Everything around us seemed still and quiet like a cathedral, only the light was falling through autumn leaves instead of stained glass.  I’ve been in Notre Dame,  I’ve been to many European cathedrals.  I’ve been lucky enough to see many beautiful places, far beyond Europe, but I don’t remember anything more splendid than that moment in those woods, listening to Jimmy sing.  What game was shot that day I don’t recall.  What I remember is sitting there with Jimmy’s voice moving over the light, one perfect afternoon, so many years ago.

 

I don’t hunt or fish as much as I used to.  I don’t get out to Bull Pen much anymore, though I keep thinking I’ll get in one more turkey hunt with Billy.  The old lodge burned down last November with tragic loss of life.  It happened in the wee hours of the morning.  A big fire had been burning in the fireplace all day, all night.  It must have escaped between chinks in the old mortar, up in the ceiling.  Once it got out, there was no stopping it.  When they smelled smoke and opened the doors to escape, the air rushed in and the lodge practically exploded.  It was gone in minutes.  My son John was there when it happened.  He says it was a lucky that anyone escaped.  I think it was a miracle.  I know it was a miracle that John escaped.

He still mourns the lives lost there, as all of us do.

 

Lately I’ve acquired some good land up in Monroe County, not terribly far from where I grew up.  There’s a lot of acreage for game.  John and his boy will enjoy hunting there.  Chuck and his daughter might even do some hunting.  I expect my daughters and their families will enjoy the place, too.  I’m putting in a big lake I’ll stock with bream and bass.  The youngsters might want to do some fishing.  I’ll buy some canoes, so those who don’t care to fish can go paddling — out to an island where I’m thinking about putting a gazebo.  Overlooking the lake will be a bunkhouse and a cabin I’ll build with a big porch for rocking chairs for Evelyn and me — and the younger generation, when they find the time to sit down.  God willing, I plan to spend more time with family there.  I believe I’m going to call it “Kings’ Place” in memory of my brothers and my mama and daddy, who named Leighton, Felix, John Albert and me after kings.  I am looking forward to everybody sharing special times together in this beautiful, quiet place.  I expect it will be a refuge and a joy.

I am blessed in my eighty-third year.  By a wonderful wife and daughters and sons and grandchildren, and now, great-grand children.  Life is a continuing miracle.  It is love that makes life good.  I wake up gratefully every day.  I wake up early.  There is no reason in the world to miss one moment.