Tuesday Granddad blogging

Several years before my grandfather got sick and died from prostate cancer, I spent about a week with him recording his life history. I later typed up what he told me, but I've never done anything with it other than share what we'd recorded together with family members.

My grandfather was born in 1917 in Wilson County, Tennessee and spent almost all of his adult life, except his time at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, his very early career and his time in the Army in WWII, in Lawrence County, Tennessee.

My plan is to post some every week, ideally every Tuesday, but if I'm on the road or something else prevents...I'll do the best I can. There may be inaccuracies in the text, as my recording equipment was poor and I'm not a professional transcriber by any means.

I've decided to start with the War years, as that's where we started taping.

Post 1

To get a little symmetry, I guess you’d say, to the thing, I was actually drafted in 1943, in the late Fall. I had been called by the draft board twice before but was deferred because I was making loans to farm people and all the food production that farmers could produce was needed for the army. So I was deferred these two times.

When I got the third call I elected not to ask for another deferment. Because by that time there were very few young people my age left and people were beginning to look at me and wonder “What’s he here for? What’s the matter with him?” And I just sorta thought like “Everybody else has gone, so it’s my time to go, too.”

So I reported to the draft board, the last of October, first of November and went to Fort Oglethorpe which was just across the line in Georgia, near Chattanooga. There’s where I was sworn in and came back home for a while, a short while. Then I was called back to Fort Oglethorpe and stayed there just a short time and caught a bus and went to Camp Blandon in Florida, which was near Jacksonville, Florida.

I was assigned to the infantry and in going through the processing to get into to where you were going to be assigned they asked questions about everything that you had ever done in your life. And one of the things that I had done was work in the cafeteria at the University of Tennessee as a bus boy, more or less, tearing down and setting up steam tables. After I got to Camp Blandon one day they came by and said “Have your gear out at five o’clock in the morning and you’re gonna be transferred.” Where I didn’t know, but I was there and was taken to a different place for training and this was cook and baker school.

So they trained us to be cooks and to be riflemen both. Bout half the time on one and half the time on the other. After we finally got through with this basic training which I think was about six or eight weeks we got to come home for a short time and then we were assigned to go to a camp on the east coast to get shipped overseas.

Read the next post.




Technorati tags: oral history, WWII