My father was a tortured soul. He seemed to live tragedy to tragedy with little happiness in between. Some of my fondest memories of my Daddy were after he fully retired and lived alone. I lived either in Portland OR, Kent WA or Allen TX during those years. I would come home for a week or two at the time and his form of recreation/entertainment was driving around Coffee County and retelling stories, events and historical trivia attached to all the different small communities and his past life. Much too late, but finally, I started writing down the stories as we would ride around since he always wanted to drive. I have found much clarity in my later years into what made his life what it was. I am sharing snippets of his stories with you today.

Ma and Pa (Daddy’s parents) had been very young when they married on May 18, 1913, (she was 14) and she was not quite 27 when Daddy was born. Daddy was born September 3, 1925, the fifth (fourth surviving) child of Willie and Mittie Lue Hudson Cook. He was born near the Zoar community in Coffee County AL. Pa was farming Grandpa Cook’s farm. Grandpa’s house burned down, and he had to rebuild. The cost of the house and furnishings were so high that when the depression hit, he did not have money to repay the loan. In 1933, the Federal Land Bank took Grandpa Cook’s property. In another government ridiculousness, Pa owed three cents to the IRS during the depression. They “stayed on” him for the three cents. IRS sent many letters and even sent people out there to see him about it. In government efficiency, I am sure they spent much more than three cents on this endeavor. (Since I am a retired government employee of 36 years – I KNOW how it works.)

I remember one story that Ma told about Daddy’s childhood. Uncle Audley – next younger child, was a baby and very ill. They called Old Dr Braswell (Ol’ Dr Braswell was always what she called him!) to come to the house. Instead of being concerned about Audley, he was concerned about Daddy. Apparently, Daddy screamed the entire time the DR was there. The DR asked Ma what was wrong with Daddy, and she said that he screamed like that all the time. Dr Braswell said that “that child is starving to death.” Ma assured him that she was providing enough breast milk for him. The DR told her that her milk was not any good and that she needed to feed Daddy. She mixed up butter, syrup, and biscuit (a staple in those days) and began to feed him. He was gobbling it up so fast that she could not keep up. Every time her fingers would leave his mouth he would scream. She enlisted the help of her oldest daughter, Minnie, and they fed him as fast as they could – with their fingers- sopping up the butter and syrup with the biscuit and alternately shoveling it in his mouth. He ate until his little tummy was full and he slept like he had not in months. I guess the old DR was right! Daddy was a child during the depression, and he told me repeatedly that there was nothing enjoyable about it. Many days they did not have enough to eat, and he would be so hungry that he would get sick bouncing around in the bus on the way to school on the old dirt, rutted roads. He told stories of carrying his lunch to school in a syrup bucket and the lunch consisted of a cold sweet potato. Food on the farm was not abundant. Daddy never had a big appetite, and I remember him always being thin, except for once in his 70’s (when he started eating ice cream every night) and he has photos in the Army of being a little heavier.

He told me that the old house they lived in in Zoar had one foot by 12 ft floor planks and the cracks were covered by 1 ft by 3-inch boards. There was no ceiling, just rafters and ceiling joists. The hogs would gather under the house when it was cold and rainy. You could hear them rut around trying to get warm and they would make dust come up from the floorboards. Daddy was a big storyteller, so I do not know if this is exactly precise.

He also told stories about playing under the house with a spool from thread, a rubber band, and a twig to make a tractor that rolled. He would notch the wooden spool with his pocketknife, run a twig through the center of the spool and cut a rubber band from an old inner tube. He put a cross stick and wound up the rubber band and it would crawl like a truck or tractor. He would make engine sounds with his mouth, changing the pitch of the sound as to whether you were going up a hill or going flat.

Daddy told me a story about the most scared he had ever been. He was about 6-7 years old and had a bad dream. They were still living in the Zoar Community. He dreamed he was outside, and a large beast (bull) got after him. He was outside and the beast got him cornered between the fireplace and the house, with his horns on both sides of him – trying to gore him. He woke up screaming. Both Ma and Pa tried to calm him down and reassure him that all was OK. He thinks he must have been sick – feverish – to dream something like that. He said that he cried and “snubbed” a long time before he could go back to sleep.

Daddy started school at Zoar. He said he went during Low Primer/High Primer; Low First/High First; Low Second/High Second grades. I recently found out that Pa was on the school board there. They went to church at Zoar Church in rural Coffee County, AL (Co Rd 331/Co Rd 333). It was considered a Methodist Church. Ma always considered herself “old-time Methodist.” His parents had prayer every morning and night until he was grown. His mother said that her father said, “The grass was never too tall, the cotton was never too white, the sun was never too high,” but what they read scripture in the morning before going to the field and at night before going to bed.

On January 10, 1934, when Daddy was nine, Ma and Pa and the family moved from Zoar to a farm in the Bradshaw Community. There was not a Pentecostal Church in the vicinity, so they had church in people’s houses in the community for a month at the time, then go around, again. He was baptized at the Dave Windham Pond when he was eighteen. He was going to Bradshaw Church of God in the Fairview Community at that time.

(I think I got my Bradshaw and Damascus communities confused in writing about Ma! They lived in Bradshaw and went to Damascus school.))

The old house was north of D. L. Catrick’s house – a 9 horse farm. (I never discovered exactly what or how much that is.) They were farmers and sometimes share-cropped. Dr Braswell owned much of the land – had bought it from the land bank after repossessions during the depression. Dr Braswell would provide the mule, fertilizer, seeds, and land and Pa would provide the labor. The proceeds would then be split between his Pa and Dr Braswell. Dr Braswell “share-cropped” with many farmers in the area. The whole family had to work on the farm to make a go of it. Daddy was ten when he started plowing with a mule. There were stumps in the fields. The mule would pull the plow over a stump and the plow handles would hit him in the head since his head was just even with the plow handles!

In 1939, the government built new houses for the farmers, and they moved into one. It was the one D. L. Catrick and Lizzie (Hattaway) Catrick had owned in the Bradshaw Community. The siblings slept 2-3 to the bed. Some of the places they lived had wooden shutters over the windows instead of windowpanes. They had no inside bathrooms, just outhouses. Every place they lived was 10-12 miles out in the country. When he was eleven and in third grade, he started going to Damascus school. He went to school there through the eighth grade.

Ned Young was the coach and the principal. He had a 1939 Chevy and sometimes he would come around and pick up boys to play basketball. Other times, the school bus would come pick up the boys and people who wanted to watch the games. He really loved to play basketball at Damascus school. It was one of the few joys of his life. He remembered that the basketball uniforms were red. He played 3 years. He was a guard and could shoot long shots – nothing but net! They played Curtiss Junior High every Monday night at Damascus, then at Curtiss’ court on Wednesdays. The Curtiss team got rough with Daddy, knocked him down, and “blistered” his skin on the waxed floor. Damascus won on Wednesday, then again on Saturday, a tournament. Mr. Maddox, a fourth-grade teacher, said he would give the first one to score fifty cents. Daddy scored first and Mr. Maddox flipped the 50-cent piece so Daddy could see it. That just gave him more enthusiasm.

Daddy had to stay out of school to help on the farm in fall and spring. He never got to go to school a full year. Finally, he quit school when he was seventeen, just finishing eighth grade.

At some time around the time that Daddy was 16-17(circa 1941), A Mr. Row had owned a farm and farmhouse that was repossessed by the Land Bank during the depression. Ma and Pa bought the farm from the landbank for $4,800 and lived there until about 1951. It was in the Bradshaw community, about ten miles south of Elba, AL. The house was built of heart pine, four bedrooms, 30×24 living room, dining room and kitchen. It still had an outhouse.

Ma, his mother, had a job! At home! She raised eight children, cooked, and fed them all, plus all the preachers and their families that Pa (his father) could round up. He loved to “entertain” and every Sunday dinner and even during the week revivals, he always invited the pastors and their families all to eat. Ma would cook huge meals and sometimes she would have to put back food for the children so that the visiting preachers would not eat it all. She said if she did not, her children would go hungry – especially the dessert! This was back in the days when the “menfolk” ate first and the women and children got what was left! Daddy said that they ate dinner at their house so many times that they kids began to think they were their brothers and sisters. They liked to eat there because Ma was a good cook, Pa invited them, but most of all – it was free! After having said all that, Daddy said that some of them were true ministers of the Gospel and have always been a factor in his life for the betterment of him and people around him.

For breakfast, Ma would cook meat from the pigs they had raised, made biscuits, and used the eggs they had raised and butter that she had churned. During the summer, when meat would not keep, they would have biscuits and gravy one day and gravy and biscuits the next! She cooked a big noon meal and called it dinner. She raised her own garden and cooked fresh vegetables. One dish Daddy loved was fresh English peas, very tiny new potatoes, and dumplings. She raised squash, cucumbers, peas, butterbeans, corn and okra. In the fall, she raised turnips, collards, and sweet potatoes. When it got cool enough, they would kill one hog to get them through till it was cold enough to kill and preserve several. They would make sausage and hang it and ham and bacon in the smoke house using hickory wood to smoke it. They ground the fat and cooked it down until all the skin and meat turned into “cracklins.” They used the fat (lard) for cooking. Talk about saturated fat, but soooo delicious!

 They had plenty of food as long as they had fresh vegetables; however, canning was still in its infancy and not a common activity until in the late 1930’s. Home demonstration agents started training farm wives to can fresh fruits and vegetables.  There is an interesting article in the Montgomery Advertiser on July 3, 1938, named “Farm Wives Aid Larders by Canning.”  If you have Ancestry.com or Newspapers.com, you might be able to read it.

Grandpa Cook would let Daddy help him do anything he was doing and seemed to enjoy having him around. He would also let him have a bit of his chewing tobacco – making sure Ma and Pa did not know! When Daddy was about 12 (1937), Grandpa Cook got a fever and died of a heart attack. It was a great loss to him because he always showed Daddy so much love.

Grandma Cook stayed with Ma and Pa some after Grandpa Cook died. In 1941, Grandma Cook got sick. Telephones were rare commodities back then. Jimmy George Wise had one of the few telephones in the area. Daddy took the lantern and walked one and a quarter mile across the field between 9-10 PM to have him call a doctor for her. She had pneumonia and died.

Grandma Hudson (Ma’s mother) smoked a pipe and used homegrown tobacco. She also twisted the dried leaves of tobacco into something akin to a cigar. Some people would chew it, and some would smoke it in their pipes. She also dipped snuff. She brushed her teeth with a small brush made from a sweet gum tree. She would get a limb about twice the size of a match, peel away the bark and shred the end. She would dip this in snuff sometimes and rub it on her teeth.

It was very interesting to hear Daddy talk about his grandparents and the different “vibes” I got from his conversation about the different ones. You could tell, Grandpa Cook was his favorite. There were so many children in the family and so much work for everyone to do, Daddy felt lost midst it all and felt he had lost his “rock.”

When Daddy was about sixteen, he went to the Agricultural School Building at Elba. They were training people to weld on shipyards. They ran a bus from Samson to Panama City to the shipyards daily. Daddy was too young to take the class, so he just went in the school bus to hang with the kids who were in training. After the class, Hank Williams and 2-3 others (Don Helms – a guy from New Brockton who played a steel guitar for Hank and later became a member of “The Drifting Cowboys” – Hank’s back-up band) would play and sing. Shortly after this, Hank got on the radio in Montgomery and went uphill (and downhill) fast. I do not think Daddy was ever impressed that he had been that close to two legends.

Daddy was drafted the fall of the year he was nineteen. He had to go to Ft McClellan 12/26/1944 for physical – pre-induction to see if he was physically qualified. So many boys back then were malnourished that many could not be inducted. The State Board sent notice not to report on 12/26/1944; but to come by bus to Montgomery Draft Board on 2/24/1945. He was inducted 02/25/1945. Serial # 44056146.

He rode on a troop train all night to Camp Shelby MS and got uniforms, then packed up their own clothes and sent them home. He stayed in Camp Shelby for two weeks, then left in early March on another troop train to Camp Blanding FL for basic training. The train traveled all night – through Montgomery, Ozark, Dothan, Waycross GA. He remembered seeing swamps late in the night. The train would stop from time to time, and he could hear the frogs in the swamp.

He got to Camp Blanding FL and it took 2-3 days to get processed in, then basic training started. He had to get up at 2 AM, revelry, police area, breakfast, couple of hours of film training, then training in field/woods; Sometimes packed up in “cattle trenches” like sardines.

In April 1945, Daddy went to Ft Lewis WA for advanced training as a Med Tech. Daddy met Sanford Phillips during his first week at Ft Lewis. Phillips was originally from Roanoke AL. Daddy’s bunk was downstairs, Phillips’ was upstairs, and Phillips was upstairs talking to the other guys. He heard Daddy talking and asked him where he was from. He said a boy upstairs said Daddy was from AL. A few minutes later, Phillips came down and they became buddies. A friendship that lasted all their lives.

Phillips had been there about a month or two (he had had pneumonia and was hospitalized and had to start advanced training over.) They had started attending a Church of God in Tacoma, WA. Phillips had a birthday while in hospital so some girls at the church made him a birthday cake after he was released. Later, they went on a picnic and rode around with the girls all afternoon. The girls had put candy rings in the cake and the girl who got the ring got to kiss Phillips. Each of the girls got one! He pretended he did not want them to kiss him, so he ran, and they chased him. But he was fooling!

One Saturday night, they spent the night with a family from the church in Tacoma. The family home had one hundred acres of beautiful tulips (75 acres) and other beautiful flowers (25 acres.) They took Daddy and Phillips riding all over their property to see the beautiful flowers. Daddy always talked about the beauty in the Seattle and Puyallup area. While I lived in Kent WA, I begged him to visit me and see all the old places he used to visit, but he never would agree to come. He always talked fondly of his time in the military. Perhaps he did not want to spoil his memory of those times and that place. Places can change dramatically, and the area around Ft Lewis had changed a lot. I always thought Daddy would have made a great career military man.  I wonder if he ever wished he had.

Phillips introduced Daddy to Floyd Medlin (Medley) within a couple of weeks and the three of them started singing together. Daddy sang lead and played the guitar. Medlin sang bass, another guy Daddy could not remember the name from Akron Ohio had a beautiful tenor voice. Phillips sang lead with Daddy. Phillips had an outgoing personality, and he would tell the audience who they were and what they would sing.

Another funny story he told was during this time. They were always singing at some mission or church. None of them had automobiles and they depended on preachers or church members to give them rides back to base. One night, there appeared to be no ride. An elderly elegant lady in a great big luxury car pulled up and told them all to get in. They sat on each other’s laps, and she kept saying “squeeze up and let a few more in.” She managed to get all the guys back to base safely, if smushed.

The minister of their church in Auburn WA, Rev Sullivan from MO, felt called to go to WA to preach. He had very little money. He had stopped and was sitting by the road on his way from MO to WA. A man walked by 10-12 steps. The man turned around and went back and said he felt led to give him $50 to pursue his calling. The minister said that really confirmed his calling from God.

Once, Rev Sullivan took them into Seattle late one Saturday evening to the Christian Mission on the corner. They had already dismissed services, and everyone was leaving. The pastor told them that he had brought a group of boys there to sing and the people filed back in there and the place filled up. The four of them sang for over 2 hours. They went back on Sunday afternoon and the place was full to hear them sing. Again.

Daddy finished Med Tech training in July 1945 and returned home for a 20-day leave. My mother, his girlfriend, was visiting her sister in Lynn Haven, FL. Daddy rode the train down there to get her to come home so that they could see each other while he was home. Ma and Uncle Audley were real bad sick during this time. The Red Cross helped Daddy get 10 more days leave. All his travel on the train – all the way back to Ft Lewis WA, where he stayed about a month, then went to Camp Beale CA. He stayed there about 2 weeks and got overseas gear and clothing. He was then sent back to Ft Lawton, Seattle, WA (which was later given to the city of Seattle as Discovery Park.) and stayed for a few days. They then boarded the ship – The President Polk – for the 14-day trip to the Mariana Islands.

The ship over to the Mariana Islands was sailing through a typhoon more than half the time. The typhoon appeared on late Saturday afternoon. Phillips and Daddy ate supper downstairs –it had gotten really rough. They had to wash their own mess kits – there were no dishes. The barrels of water in which to wash mess kits, began sliding around and slamming into walls. Many people became very ill. One guy on the ship got so seasick that he almost died. He had eaten two meals before the typhoon, and he got sick. He was a tall, stout man – 6’6”. He was at the other end of the ship; Daddy went to see him (Daddy was a Medic) and he had lost lots of weight. His MESS card still showed only two punches! Daddy took the card to the cook. They sent the man food and told Daddy to find out anything he thought he could eat – the cook would fix it for him. Daddy also scraped an apple – raw applesauce for him to eat. The man survived but had really had a rough time. Daddy said the ship would roll, rise, and fall dramatically. Daddy was on guard one night when the ship went up and then it fell into a hole – knocked him off his feet.

About 2-3 days before they got to Guam, the water was smooth as glass. They anchored in Guam, then sailed to Saipan. Daddy got off there and processed in through a large processing center. He spent about 2 weeks in Guam and Saipan before going to the Mariana Islands. There was a tank off the coastline of Saipan and he and other soldiers used to swim out to it and dive off it. There is a photo of this tank on the internet – I posted it below. Daddy had never swum in the ocean, and when he felt the seaweed, it frightened him and he went back to shore. He also got scraped up by some coral and did not know what it was. He stayed there two weeks, then on to Tinian Island. Two ½ miles south of Saipan. (Tinian is the island that housed the Enola Gay airplane- the plane that dropped one the atomic bombs on Japan.)

While serving as a medic on Tinian Island, several of the soldiers were having to get immunizations. He and another medic prepared a huge needle and syringe, mixing up an aspirin tablet with water and put it in the syringe. (I told you what a big jokester he was.) The fixed a very official medical looking table and laid these props on it. The needle was so large that some of the soldiers got scared and fainted. They got in trouble for this and a good scolding!

There was one guy on Tinian Island who built a motorcycle from junk he found on the island. The war was over, so they were bored and had too much time on their hands. There were gravel airstrips. He would ride his motorcycle on the airstrips. He was speeding around one day and had a wreck. He was not wearing a shirt and ended up with a chest full of gravel road rash. They got him to the clinic, and they treated him with Merthiolate (Thiomersal · Chlorhexidine Di gluconate, which is marketed under the name “Merthiolate“) Needless to say – he passed out from the pain of the treatment!! Daddy assured me that they had very limited drugs back then.

Daddy attended the Tinian Tabernacle church in a large tent on base. He played the guitar in the church when they had meetings.

Daddy told me another story that is just amazing. He said he found the diary of the co-pilot of the Enola Gay. He said he read it and the co-pilot had written “what have we done?” I never saw the diary, so I do not know what happened to it after he saw it.

On the train back home after the war, Daddy was housed with the doctors in the medical car of the train and held “sick bay” every morning. One soldier had a stye on his eye and Daddy had to lance it and medicate it while on the train. His patient was very grateful! The doctors and pharmacists that Daddy worked with held him in high regard. They encouraged him to use his GI bill, get his GED and then become a doctor or pharmacist. He received much encouragement in this but did not appear interested. He received much encouragement later in his life for promotions and better job positions with civil service, but he always felt that he was not educated enough to do the job; although, the people offering him the jobs felt he could be very successful. I know of at least four promotions that he was offered in his life, and he quit the jobs he had rather than accept the promotion. I never understood the lack of confidence in himself.

He was separated from the Army 04/01/1946, about seven months after the war ended.

When he got home, he went back to the farm and proposed to my mother. They married in September 1946.