Ancestor Archives: Garland Eugene Macy (1924-2009) Part 3: Chasing the Dream

 

by Rocky Macy

Part 3:  Chasing the Dream

  

Garland MACY was honorably discharged from the US Army Air Corps on December 18th, 1945, and returned to Neosho, Missouri, the place where he had been living when he joined the military in December of 1942.  Though he was at times loathe to admit it, Garland had been deeply affected by growing up in poverty in the Great Depression, and for the rest of his life he would consider the accumulation of wealth to be the ultimate indicator of success. That was the dream he was chasing.

Camp Crowder was still active and teeming with soldiers, and one of my Dad’s first moves on the road to wealth and success was to buy a half-interest in a “yellow taxi cab” (a 1941 Plymouth) that his cousin, Dalton MACY, (also a World War II veteran) owned.  He said the car needed a new engine, and his investment of $500 helped to secure that.  Not long after, according to an entry in Dad’s journal, Dalton ran a stop sign on Camp Crowder and their taxi was banned from the base, a situation that led to the doom of the fledgling cab company.  He said that he believed the cab was soon repossessed by someone.

Dad had saved around a thousand dollars from his military pay, but once back in Neosho he began running around with three of his cousins, all war veterans, drinking beer and carousing and his savings were soon almost gone.  He realized early on that if he was going to achieve his dream of having a family and becoming prosperous, he would have to abandon that lifestyle.

Dad’s cousin, Dalton MACY, the cabbie, had married a SREAVES girl, Betty Lou, from Seneca, and Dad, soon met and became attracted to Betty’s older sister, Florine SREAVES, who was a waitress at the Hopkins Cafe in Neosho.  At the time they met, in very early 1946, my Dad had a steady girlfriend who was a “WAC soldier” stationed at Camp Crowder, and he said that Florine had several boyfriends.  She was an older woman, twenty four, and Dad was twenty-one.  Dad described Florine, who was to become my mother, this way:

“She was small, 100 pounds, with long dark hair, beautiful and fun.  We hit it off right away.”

They were married in Columbus, Kansas, on March 31st, 1946, less than three months after they met.  He described the day of their marriage in his journal:

“It was a hot day, although it was spring, March 31.  We took my cousin Dalton Macy and wife Betty, sister to Florine, with us.  We drove from Neosho to Columbus, Kansas, and went to one of those quickie wedding chapels. 

“I believe it was a Sunday.  Not sure. 

“We were both nervous and scared.  We drove all around town in Columbus looking for the place.  Had to ask several people for directions, embarrassing.  When we found the place it was kind of like a carnival.  The yard was full of couples, laughing and hollering, waiting for their turn.  It’s a wonder we didn’t both back out.” 

Dad and Mom started married life on almost nothing but love.  Dad said that he had a little over a hundred dollars and a half-interest in a cab company that was going under.  Mom had $500 in the bank and a 1940 Studebaker Champion that was paid for.  (Not long after their marriage, one of Dad’s cousins borrowed the Studebaker - and got drunk and wrecked it.)  Dad spent most of his savings on a set of wedding rings for Mom.  By the time of their marriage he had gotten a job at Pet Milk in Neosho, the place where he had worked during his senior year in high school, for $35.00 a week, and  Mom continued waitressing at the Hopkins Cafe on North College Street in Neosho.  Dad said that neither one of them missed work on the day after their wedding.

(At Pet Milk Dad was forced to join a union, and he felt that he got nothing of value for his dues.    He spent the next seventy-odd years complaining bitterly about the awfulness of unions.  He referred to unions several times in his journal as “the ruination of America.”  Over the years he and I had several spirited disagreements on the topic of unions!)

My parents initially lived in a couple of apartments in Neosho, but soon after their marriage they decided to head out to Brentwood, California, and get some seasonal work at the orchards where Dad had worked before the war.  Dad said that they drove a 1939 Ford to California, and that it was a “good one, the first model with hydraulic brakes.”   I know they stayed in a worker’s camp in Brentwood because one time when I was young and still living at home my mother asked me out of the blue if I remembered “Spike?”  I asked her who Spike was and she said, bashfully, “Oh he was a kid at the camp in California where we picked fruit. He was always getting into trouble.  You weren’t even born yet.”  

Spike made an impression on my mother.  I hope that he had a good life.

After the fruit was over they drove down to Dad’s uncle and aunt’s (Bob and Gladys NUTT) in Baldwin Park, California, and stayed with them a couple of months.  Dad described that part of the California trip this way:

“Bob was a foreman over a construction job in Venice, on the west coast, building a jetty out into the Pacific Ocean for boats to park.  He gave me a job as a time-keeper, and I checked dump trucks in and out.  We stayed at their house for two or three months.   Kind of a boring job, so I finally quit and we came home.”

(That would have been my mother’s first trip to California.  When we went there as a family in 1958, I remember Bob and Gladys were trying to convince them to pack up and move to Los Angeles.  They had found a house that was reasonably priced and convinced my parents to drive by and look at it.  I can remember all of us peeking in the windows of the vacant house.  My mother desperately wanted to live in California - or Florida - or anyplace warm, but she could never blast Dad out of rural Missouri.)

When the newlyweds returned to Missouri they “leased-purchased” a twenty-acre “rabbit patch” with a small house.  They bought five milk cows and began selling milk and making about twenty dollars a week.   They also went to a sale and bought twenty little pigs which the hauler delivered and put in a wire pen - and the pigs escaped and scattered about the neighborhood.  Soon they began to meet all of the neighbors as people called to report pigs in their yards, gardens, and even in their homes!   Dad and Mom remained on their farm for about a year before finally giving it up.  He said they never managed to accumulate enough for a down payment on a loan.

Dad said that he then borrowed several hundred dollars from his cousin, Herschel MACY, to lease a small grocery in Neosho.  The lease only had six months to run, and they assumed that the owner would extend it.   But after my parents got the place cleaned up and going good, the owner decided that he wanted it back.  That was another false step on the hard road to success.

After their adventure in the grocery business, Dad went back to work at Pet Milk and Mom, who was pregnant with me, stayed home.  At that point he received a surprise check from the government for  $450 in back “furlough pay,” and they used that money as a down payment to buy a small house at 510 Park Street in Neosho, a place which sat right next to the US Fish Hatchery and a busy set of train tracks.  My parents gave $3,500 for that house and sold it a couple of years later for $4,500.  Our family lived in that small house until the arrival of my little sister in the fall of 1950.  Dad, who always liked to work with his hands and make things, bragged in his journal about the cement and block front porch that he added to that house.  He was working on that project when I was born in March of 1948.

Dad said in his journal that he and Mom discussed having a family and that they agreed they wanted one boy and one girl.  When my sister Gail (now Abigail) was born in October of 1950, their family planning had been completed - successfully!

My earliest memories are of walking by the Fish Hatchery in Neosho and throwing rocks at the rainbow trout.  Dad said in his journal that I would throw in handfuls of gravel and the fish would rush to the surface thinking they were being fed.   One of my mother’s worst memories was undoubtedly of the time when two high school girls knocked at the front door with me in tow - and told Mom that they had found me playing on the railroad tracks!

(I was living in Neosho forty years after they sold the little house on Park Street and was riding a bicycle past there one day when I saw a woman working in the yard.  I stopped and told her who I was, and it turned out that  she was the daughter of the woman that Dad and Mom had sold the house to - the same family still owned it!  The lady took me through the house, but it didn’t stir any memories.  The last time I drove by there was four or five years ago with my grandson, Boone, who was a high school student in Neosho at the time.  It looked as though the house was about to be torn down.)

We left Neosho shortly after my sister was born and moved to Goodman, the next town south.  There we lived in an old two-story frame house on a couple of acres.  My folks bought a pair of calves, and Dad continued to work at Pet Milk in Neosho.  I can remember two incidents at that place, both traumatic.  One day when it was storming, my mother asked me to telephone someone about something.  I got up on a kitchen chair to reach the old crank phone on the wall, talked to the operator whose name I think was Violet, but she couldn’t get the call to go through.  Just as I hung the receiver up, a bolt of lightning came out of it and left a black mark on the wall!  Another time I crawled under a neighbor’s barbed wire fence to get a better look at his mule.  The mule promptly kicked me in the chest, and I ran home crying - and had a perfect hoof mark emblazoned on my chest!

It was while working at Pet Milk that my dad had his only serious vehicle wreck.  He had a new 1950 Dodge pick-up truck and was coming home late from work one night when he saw a horse running in a field next to the road.  What he didn’t see was another horse running parallel to the first horse at about the same speed, only out in the road.  The horse and truck collided head-on with the horse’s head coming through the windshield.  The pickup got the worst of the deal, and the stunned horse trotted off.

Dad bought a work truck next and also a couple of milk routes.  He would get up before daylight, drive his routes collecting ten-gallon cans of milk, deliver them to Pet Milk in Neosho, then park his truck and spend the rest of the day and into the evening working at Pet.  I would sit up late at night with my mother listening to her scary radio programs (like “Inner Sanctum”) while we waited on Dad to get home from work.  He was finally getting focused on the dream.

It was while Dad worked at Pet Milk that he made his only donation to a blood drive.  The plant manager was trying to get one hundred percent of his workers to donate and he talked Dad into volunteering when his shift ended at midnight.  He had finished donating and was doing the mandatory sit-and-wait while enjoying a cookie and some juice when he began to feel funny when he noticed the nurse grinning at him.  The next thing Dad knew he was waking up on the floor.  He had to wait another hour before being allowed to drive home - and then get up and go to work again before daylight.

Dad sold his milk truck and he and Mom started another business venture in 1953.  Mom’s sister, Christine DOBBS and her husband Bob, were running the Linwood Cafe on Highway 71 at Goodman.  They owned a house and property across from Linwood Corner on the other side of Splitlog Road.  My parents and the Dobbses decided that piece of land would be a perfect place to build a truckstop cafe and gas station - and with an $18,000 loan from the DX gas company, they did just that.  A few years later they added a bunkhouse for tired truckers.

My Dad and Bob DOBBS set up a pair of sawdust pits for pitching horseshoes out in front of the station. It attracted horseshoe pitchers from around the area, as well as some truckers who would just pull in off of busy Highway 71 to pitch horseshoes for a while.  It was quite a popular attraction!

The Macys and Dobbses ran that truckstop complex, “La Bella View,” up until 1958 when Dad and Mom sold their interest in the business to the Dobbses and bought a tourist cabin court (eight units) four miles north of the tourist town of Noel, Missouri, in Ginger Blue Village.   Our cabin court was called “Riverview” because the property bordered a beautiful stretch of the Elk River.  

My folks had built a nice ranch-style rock home by the truckstop, and when we moved to Noel they leased that home to a couple who managed a large local feed mill.  A few years later they sold the house to the Dobbses, and many years later Bob and Christine sold it to another of the SREAVES sisters, my aunt, Mary Ruth, and her husband Fred MARBLE.  All told, that house stayed in the family for over forty years!

During the years that we had been in Goodman we were able to take three summer vacations:  one to San Diego in 1955 to see dad’s brother Wayne and his family.  Uncle Wayne was dying of leukemia and that trip was the last time that Dad was able to see him.  In 1957 we took a drive through the South that included New Orleans and much of the Gulf Coast.  (My parents in later years took several trips on their own - and one with the Dobbses - to a favorite place of theirs in Panama City Beach, Florida, on the Gulf.)  Our final trip as a complete family was back to San Diego in the summer of 1958 to visit with Wayne’s widow, my wonderful Aunt Mary, and her daughters, Janet and Linda, and then on to the Los Angeles area where we saw some of Dad’s aunts and uncles - and stayed with Bob and Gladys NUTT who took us all to Disneyland!  

We ran the tourist court near Noel for six years, from August of 1958 until August of 1964, and those were easily the best years of my young life. - although because it was a summer enterprise, there were no more family vacations! An old widower named Frank DUNCAN had owned it, and the place was in general disrepair when we moved in.  Dad enjoyed sorting things out and making repairs, but after the first winter it became obvious that a second income would be needed.  He leased a DX service station in town where he sold gas, serviced cars, and did general automotive repairs, and Mom and Gail and I ran the court.

Our family made many friends with the regular tourists, the ones who would return every summer.  Most of our business was out of Tulsa and Kansas City, but we also had two special families from Texas who came and stayed with us each summer.  After the morning and early afternoon work was done - emptying the trash and garbage, cleaning the cabins, doing laundry, and mowing, Gail and I would often head to the river with our tourist friends or with one of two sets of weekend neighbors who had cottages adjoining our place.  

Dad said this about Riverview in his journal:

“We all worked it, and the kids helped a lot.  Both Rocky and Gail learned to swim in the Elk River.  Our summer neighbors, the Bledsoe’s, taught them to swim.  Rocky would stand on the dock and catch sun perch by the hour.  They would bite on anything - worms, shrimp, bread.  He would fill a five gallon bucket and then dump them back in the river.  Gail would spend half of the time on the bottom of the river, looking for turtles and pretty rocks.  You could holler for her and if there was no answer, just wait a little while and she would pop up.  Scared us half to death!”

Dad bought a building on Main Street in Noel in 1962 and started an appliance store where he sold kitchen appliances, televisions, radios, and eventually lawnmowers, tillers, and many other items including furniture.   Two years after Macy's Appliance Store opened we sold the cabin court and moved into town.  After that my mother worked with him in the appliance business, and Gail and I and even her future husband, Bob SMITH, also worked there at various times.  It was another Macy family affair!

The appliance store was going strong when color televisions started coming on the market.  We had one of the first ones in our own home - to spur on sales - and Dad would open the store on Sunday nights and invite the public in to watch two of the first color programs:  “The Wonderful World of Disney” and “Bonanza.”  He was also the primary local dealer of CB radios when that craze hit.

A Kansas City Southern freight train blew up in downtown Noel on the night of August 3, 1969, causing one death, many injuries, and five million dollars in property damage.  That blast was so powerful that it did some damage at our house a mile-and-a-half out of town, and did major damage at the appliance store in town.  But it also provided a big economic boost to local businesses like my Dad’s.  As people began to repair and rebuild they needed to replace appliances and furnishings.  I also remember that he and I worked daylight-to-dusk replacing television antennas because every single one in town had been destroyed by the blast.

But nothing lasts forever, and the death knell of the appliance store was Walmart.  It reached a point where Walmart was selling small appliances - things like crockpots radios, televisions, and even lawnmowers, cheaper than my dad could buy them from his wholesalers.  Dad said he began with a $6,000 inventory, eventually worked it up to $100,000 and accumulated $50,000 of debt from locals on his charge book.  As Walmart grew stronger Dad could see what was happening.  He quit replacing merchandise, and in 1982 sold what was left (on credit) to his TV repairman.  

Dad’s next venture was selling real estate, an activity that dovetailed nicely with his purchasing of rental properties, something that he and my mother had been doing for several years.  Mom helped in the real estate business answering phones and managing the office for a couple of years until she became ill and could no longer work.  

As my mother became increasingly ill, an illness that lasted over three years and finally culminated in her death, Dad worked days at the real estate office and paid people to take care of Mom at home, and he took care of her in the evenings.  He had reluctantly placed his own mother in a nursing home during her terminal illness ten years before, and he was determined not to do that with Mom.  (I think that he was also consciously sending a message to my sister and myself about the importance of not putting parents in nursing homes.)

My mother passed away in December of 1986, and in the next twenty three years before his own death my father had a couple of long-term girlfriends, but never remarried.  During his final years he began selling off some of his rental properties and started concentrating on making money through investing:  church bonds and publicly traded stocks and bonds.  By the end of his life he had achieved the level of security and comfort that he dreamed of since his childhood days of trapping rabbits.

Throughout his life my, and especially during the half-century that he lived and worked in Noel, my dad was a fairly ruthless businessman and trader, although he undoubtedly would not have described himself that way.   He seldom lost in any negotiation.  But he also had a big streak of humanity that was often evident.  He took good care of his renters and responded quickly and personally to any problems.   

Not long before he died there was a big power outage in Noel due to an ice storm - and Dad’s big house was one of the few places that had electricity.  Many homes were out of power for several days.  Dad invited a large, three-generation Hispanic family to move in with him and share his home.  He told me later that the grandmother of the group had made him some wonderful meals during the several days that they were there.

Dad began his last full day on this earth carrying out his Christmas tradition of delivering candy to his renters.  While he was doing that he slipped and fell on one of the rental house porches and hurt himself.  During our regular evening phone call that day he told me about the fall and said that he was going to bed early.  I encouraged him to go to the doctor the next day if he still did not feel better.  That was our last conversation.  My sister telephoned me at my home in Arizona in the middle of the night and said that she had a call from the hospital.  Dad had become worse, phoned for his own ambulance, and made it to the hospital in Neosho, the place where both of his children had been born, and died soon after his arrival.  It was several hours before dawn on Christmas Day.

Dad’s obituary was composed by my sister and myself:

“Garland Eugene Macy”

“Garland Macy was born in rural Newton County, Missouri, on October 19, 1924.  He passed away on Christmas morning at Freeman Hospital in Neosho.

“Mr. Macy was preceded in death by his wife, Florine (Sreaves) Macy who died in 1986, his father and mother, Charles E. Macy and Hazel (Nutt) Macy, and two brothers, Wayne Macy and Tommy Macy.   He is survived by his sister, Mrs. Betty Lankford of Seneca, a son, Rocky Macy, of Litchfield Park, AZ, and a daughter, Gail Macy, of Fayetteville, AR.

“Other survivors include seven grandchildren:  Nick Macy of West Plains, MO;  Heidi and Jason Petcher of London, England;  Molly and Scott Files of Salem, OR;  Tiffany and Nathan Burke of Lowell, AR;  Tim and Erin Macy of Kansas City, MO;  Justin and Lisa Smith of Springdale, AR;  and Reed Smith of Las Vegas, NV.

“There are six great-grandchildren:  Boone Macy, Lauren Pfetcher, Sebastian Files, Brieanna Burke, Ruby Pfetcher, and Judah Files.

“Garland Macy was a staff sergeant with the Army Air Corps during World War II.  He served in England and France and was awarded the Purple Heart.

“Mr. Macy was a prominent businessman and real estate broker in Noel for many years.  He was a past member of the Noel School Board, the Noel Chamber of Commerce, the Noel City Council, and the board of Directors of the State Bank of Noel.

“Garland Macy will be mourned and missed by his family and his community.  He was a good friend and neighbor to the people of Noel, the town that he called home for over fifty years.

“The family will hold a visitation at the Ozark Funeral Home in Noel this Tuesday evening from 6:00 to 7:00 p.m.  The funeral service will be Wednesday, December 30th, at 10:00 a.m. at the Ozark Funeral Home in Noel, followed by burial with full military honors at the Noel Cemetery.

“Pallbearers will be grandsons and husbands of granddaughters.

“Contributions may be made to “Friends of the Department of Social Services of McDonald County,” through the Ozark Funeral Home.  The organization helps to meet the needs of children in foster care.”

My parents are at rest at the Noel Cemetery, just feet from a parcel of land that they once owned.  Noel was their home for many years, and so shall it remain.

Mrs. O'Leary's Damned Cow May Have Been a Horse!

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

Newspapers.com, a cash cow that resides in the barn of Ancestry.com, which, in turn, is majority-owned by the Blackstone Group, a private equity investment company that this morning is selling for $115.28 a share on the New York Stock Exchange - that cash cow is today circulating an item of interest over the internet which discusses the "Great Chicago Fire," an event that began 150 years ago this evening when a Chicago farm wife, Catherine O'Leary led her horses to the barn and then promptly retired for the night.

Soon she and her husband, Patrick, were awakened by an excited neighbor who had seen flames coming from the O'Leary barn - which was actually a shed attached to the house.  Rumor had it that Mrs. O'Leary had possibly left an oil lamp burning in the shed and that one of the farm animals had kicked it over - and some poor cow got the ultimate blame.

That fall in Chicago had been hot and dry, a drought was in effect, and the city, constructed primarily of wood, was a tinder box just waiting for a flame and a breeze.  Two days after the fire had originated and gotten out-of-control on the O'Leary farm, it had burned five square miles, destroyed over 17,000 structures, and killed more than 300 people.  

An article in Newspapers.com blog, "The Fishwrap," by Jenny Ashcraft, contained this clipping from the Chicago Tribune that was published on October 11th, 1871:

"The West Side.

"At 9:30 a small cowshed attached to a house on the corner of DeKoven and Jefferson Streets, one block north of Twelfth street, emitted a bright light, followed by a blaze, and in a moment the building was hopelessly on fire.  Before any aid could be extended the fire had communicated to a number of adjoining sheds, barns, and dwellings, and was rapidly carried north and east, despite the efforts of the firemen.  The fire seemed to leap over the engines and commenced far beyond them, and, working to the east and west, either surrounded the apparatus or compelled it to move away.   In less than ten minutes the fire embraced the area between Jefferson and Clinton for two blocks north, and rapidly pushed eastward to Canal street."

That article continued at length, and numerous other pieces about the fire ran in the same edition of the Tribune.  And it's all available at Newspapers.com.

I subscribe to Newspapers.com  and Ancestry.com.  Both are excellent history and genealogy sources, though quite pricey by my modest standards - but the care and feeding of private equity firms like Blackstone does not come cheaply!  Subscriptions to both as well as to Fold3, Ancestry's other cash cow that helps with accessing military records, are available free in many libraries - though sadly not mine.

Oh Give Me a Home Where the White-Tailed Deer Roam . . .

 

by Pa Rock

Nature Lover

The deer seem to sense when the shooting is about to start.

Yesterday in the mid-morning I stood on the back porch and watched three deer, a doe and two half-grown fawns, timidly working their way toward the chicken coop, eating grain that I had scattered on the ground for the chickens.  They kept edging closer and closer to the old building, undoubtedly eying the corn that was inside scattered on the floor.  As I stepped off of the porch and headed to the mailbox on the other side of the house, Mama and her youngsters bounded off toward the pond, but when I came back a couple of minutes later, there they were again, nibbling their way up to the coop.

This morning, just before daylight, I walked out by the pond and saw five young white-tailed deer running along the foggy fence line, and rarely does a day go by that I don't seen a few crossing the country lane and trotting across the yard.  Deer are very comfortable here and know that I would never cause them any harm.  And there is the corn, and the chops, and the apple cores that I leave around the pond.  Some days the squirrels enjoy an apple treat, and some days a hungry deer does.

But the hunting season looms large, and my white-tailed friends will soon go into hiding until the shooting finally stops around mid-December.  The first "youth portion" of firearms deer hunting season is October 30th and 31st which puts kids in the woods with guns over Halloween, a brilliant move on some bureaucrat's part.  Then there is the "main portion" of the kill, November 13th through the 23rd, where Bubba and his adult friends climb up into their makeshift tree houses and see how much beer they can guzzle between occasional bursts of gunfire.  November 26th through 28th is the late "youth portion," and finally there is a hunt for "anterless" deer from December 4th to December 12th.

Many local liquor stores run beer on sale during hunting season.

I am not opposed to deer hunting because there are plenty of families in this area who need the meat, and the deer population obviously requires "thinning,"  but I do regret the near carnival atmosphere that the hunting season seems to generate, from drunks with guns stumbling around in the woods to newspaper photos of grinning young children standing next to glassy-eyed dead deer.

The deer frolicking around my little acreage provide me with more emotional sustenance than than a whole truckload of crappy summer sausage could ever hope to do!

Hide well, my friends, and be safe!

Missouri Exacts Revenge on Mentally Impaired Black Man

 

by Pa Rock

Missourian

Yesterday evening just before dark the state of Missouri put 61-year-old Ernest Lee Johnson to death for three brutal murders that he admitted committing in a Columbia, Missouri, convenience store more than a quarter-of-a-century earlier.   Mr. Johnson's impending execution had drawn international attention based primarily on the fact that he had serious intellectual disabilities and had even undergone brain surgery in recent years.  His lawyers argued that executing a person with mental disabilities was a clear violation of the Eighth Amendment of the US Constitution.

Missouri's governor, a former rural county sheriff by the name of Mike Parson, was asked by lawyers for the convicted man as well as two Missouri members of Congress and Pope Francis, to grant him clemency and change the sentence to life in prison, but Parson, who describes himself as a strong "pro-life" politician, declined to intercede.  

(Mike Parson had been quick to pardon a St. Louis husband and wife pair of lawyers after the white couple a few weeks earlier had put on a show in the yard of their expensive home by waving weapons at a Black Lives Matter march that was occurring peacefully in a street that went past their gated community.)

The Pope asked Governor Parson to show respect for the prisoner's humanity and the sacredness of life.  The congressmen, the only two black members of Missouri's congressional delegation, had requested mercy for the prisoner based on his obvious impaired mental condition, and they also referenced the historical inequity of capital punishment being used far more frequently on black prisoners than on those who are white.

Some could argue that if Johnson had been a rich white boy instead of a poor black one with serious mental impairments when he committed those heinous crimes, he would have been bounced into a mental hospital quicker than you could say "John Hinckley, Junior."

But Parson sat on his hands - as did the nation's Supreme Court, an emerging bastion of conservative intolerance, which also declined to intercede on a mentally impaired black man's behalf.

And so this morning Ernest Lee Johnson is dead.  He was willfully killed by the state of Missouri and politicians who were far more interested in throwing red meat to their conservative base and exacting revenge than they were in achieving any semblance of justice.

Sadly, it was just another day of politics-as-usual in the "show-me" state.

Missouri to Execute Intellectually Disabled Black Man This Evening

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

This evening at 6:00 p.m.  (CDT) Ernest Lee Johnson, a 61-year-old intellectually disabled black man, will be put to death in Bonne Terre, Missouri.   Johnson killed three individuals in a Columbia, Missouri, quickstop more than a quarter of a century ago.  His lawyers maintain that his execution would be a violation of the Eighth Amendment which they contend prohibits the execution of people who are intellectually disabled.

Missouri's governor, Mike Parson, a former rural county sheriff and a self-proclaimed "pro-life" politician, has the ability to grant Ernest Lee Johnson clemency and change his punishment to life in prison, and two Missouri members of Congress, Cori Bush of St. Louis and Emanuel Cleaver of Kansas City, have asked him to do that.  In a letter to Governor Parson last Friday, the congressmen wrote:

“Mr. Johnson’s execution would be a grave act of injustice. Killing those who lack the intellectual ability to conform their behavior to the law is morally and legally unconscionable."

The two black congressmen, both Democrats, also brought up the fact that capital punishment has a long history of being applied on a racial basis:

“Like slavery and lynching did before it, the death penalty perpetuates cycles of trauma, violence and state-sanctioned murder in Black and brown communities. We urge you to correct these injustices using every tool available, including the power to grant clemency.” 

Also last week a representative of the Vatican wrote a letter to Governor Parson on behalf of His Holiness, Pope Francis.  In the letter the church official stated that the Pope

"wishes to place before you the simple fact of Mr. Johnson’s humanity and the sacredness of all human life.” 

But the pleas of Missouri's only two black congressmen and the leader of the world's Catholics did not budge the Baptist Republican politician whose home county is over 97% white and less than half-of-one-percent black. And Parson continues his strong defense of life right up until the moment of birth.

(Parson has used his power as governor to intervene in court decisions in the past. A few weeks ago he pardoned a white husband and wife pair of lawyers from St. Louis when they brandished weapons at a Black Lives Matter protest that was marching down the street past the couple's gated community.)

But Governor Parson said as late as yesterday that he will not intervene in the Johnson case.

Johnson's lawyer has asked the US Supreme Court to stay the execution. If the Court does not act, ErnestLee Johnson will become the 91st person to die in a Missouri death chamber since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976.

His death will occur before the sun sets this evening.

Ancestor Archives: Garland Eugene Macy (1924-2009) Part 2: Becoming an Adult in World War II

 

by Rocky Macy

Part 2:  Becoming an Adult in World War II

My father’s fruit-picking sojourn to California ended in the fall of 1942 and he returned to Missouri on a bus with plans to enlist in the Army.  At the time of his return to the Midwest, Camp Crowder, which was located in Newton County just outside of Neosho (where he had graduated from high school) was going strong.  That December marked one year since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the newly established Army post was already home to over 100,000 soldiers.  During the war Camp Crowder became the largest inland military base in America.  Dad recounted that Neosho was “sure different” when he returned, with “soldiers everywhere.”  Upon arrival back home, Garland, who had just turned eighteen in October, went to the recruiting office and signed up.

The new enlistee was sent to Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis, Missouri, where he spent six days and nights in a tent in the snow before being officially sworn into the Army Air Corps (the precursor of the United States Air Force) on December 12th, 1942.

According to material in my father’s journal, he was then sent to St. Petersburg, Florida, for basic training.   I remember him telling me that he was transported from St. Louis to St. Petersburg by train, and for some reason, perhaps as a punishment for some minor military infraction, he had to peel potatoes the entire trip!

The military had taken over the hotels in the St. Petersburg area, and my father’s group was assigned to an older hotel called the “Edgewater.”  He said that it was three or four stories tall.  Most of the troops were fed at the “Vinoy,” a larger hotel that was relatively new.   Dad said that he had KP (kitchen duty) there several times.   The Vinoy fed continuously, all day long, so KP duty there was a lot of hard work that never seemed to slow down.

Dad wrote about military pay at several points in his journal.  He said that he earned $50.00 a month as a private when he first joined.  Of that $50, the government held out $6.40 for a $10,000 life insurance policy and $4.80 for laundry - leaving the new recruits with $38.80 to spend for the remainder of the month.  (He had probably cleared that much trapping and selling rabbits as a six-year-old!)

Here is my father’s description of his Drill Instructor, the person with the primary responsibility for turning civilian kids into a cohesive military fighting force of young adults

:

“Our drill instructor, a P.F.C. acting drill sergeant, was loud, strict, and abusive.  I thought he was probably Jesus Christ, and I think he thought he was, too.  He caught me and another private making a left flank instead of a right, and he said, ‘All right you damned farmers, I’ll teach you right from left!”  He had us hold a big rock in our right, outstretched hand for about an hour.  Every time they marched by us, he would yell ‘Get that arm back up!’  It almost fell off.”

Dad said that he was given an aptitude test in basic training that said he was suited for mechanics or armor.  He didn’t know what armor was, but he had been a mechanic and did not want to go that route.  Dad was sent to Lowry Field #2 in Denver, Colorado, for ten weeks of “turret” school.  He remarked that Denver was as cold as Florida had been hot.  Dad said in his journal that while at turret school he learned about “50-caliber machine guns, 20-caliber cannons, and 30 calibers.”    He also said that his training focused on the big bombers - B24’s, B25’s, B26’s, and B17’s - but that he never saw any big bombers after leaving turret school.

My dad was promoted to Private First Class (PFC) after turret school, and received a four-dollar-a-month raise in pay.

Dad’s next assignment was more training, this time on the “A24 Douglas Dauntless Dive Bombers” at Meridian, Mississippi.  He was assigned to armament and his duties included taking care of the plane’s guns, bomb racks, and bomb sight.  The pilots and gunners training at Meridian could get extra flight pay if they flew a certain number of hours a month, so there were always training flights taking place.  If the plane’s gunners had in their time, the mechanics and armorers could go up for a ride on the practice runs.  My dad, who had never been on an airplane, gave this accounting of the day he was asked if he wanted to go up:

“One day they asked me - and I was ready.  They would go up and make 10 dives each trip and the only stipulations before take-off were these:  if the pilot had trouble and told you to jump, you got the hell out fast.  You had a chute.  And, if you puked in the plane you cleaned it up . . .  Well, each time they flew up high then tilted that sucker straight down at a white circle on the ground - and when you thought it was going to crash, the pilot yanked it straight up and it felt like all of your insides were going out your butt - and then you went blind, couldn’t see a thing.  When the pilot leveled off you could see again.  Then here we would go straight down again!  When the pilot hit the bottom he would release a small smoke bomb and try to hit the white circle on the ground.  A puff of smoke would show you where it hit.   

“Ten dives and I made it okay, but I was scared as hell.  When the plane was high on the level if it got below a certain speed a buzzer would go off - and I didn’t know what it was.  I was afraid the pilot would say ‘jump,’ and I never had a chute on before.  I wondered if I would know how to get it open. 

“When we got down I was making a run for it, proud as hell.  But the pilot hollered, ‘Hey, I’ve got to make another run, get back in.’  I didn’t really want to, but I wanted to look brave, so I said ‘Yeah, let’s go.’  About halfway through that next time I got so sick I thought I would die, kind of like first cigar sickness, and I puked in my hat and held onto it.  Was I ever glad for that tenth dive!”

According to my dad’s journal, it was also in Meridian where a local girl gave him some non-military training in the back seat of a parked car late one night.  Neither of them had any idea who the car belonged to.  Dad, a simple farm boy from the sticks, fell in love, but his new friend was soon snapped up by a young officer with a much better pay grade.  

From Meridian, Mississippi, my dad next went to Congaree Army Airfield in Columbia, South Carolina, a base which was just being set up.  At Congaree he trained on P39 Bell Aircobras, small fighter planes that he described as looking like “little hummingbirds, each with a 37 mm cannon right through the nose cap and two 30 caliber machine guns firing through the blade.”  He said it was a “neat trick” to synchronize them so as not to shoot the prop off.  Dad made corporal while at Congaree and his pay jumped twelve dollars to sixty-six dollars a month!

It was at Congaree Air Base when Dad met his best friend while in the military service.   Joe SPAKE was dad’s age and also relatively new to the military.  They served together at Congaree, in England, and in France, and the young friends stayed in contact after the war.  Joe and his family lived in another state, but I can remember our family stopping by to see them one time when we were on vacation, and I can also remember them coming to our home in Missouri for a visit.  

(Joe passed away from natural causes many years ago when he was still relatively young, and our families lost contact.    Joe’s children and I have managed to reconnect over the past several years, and his daughter has been very helpful in sorting out our dads’ assignments while they were stationed in the States and in Europe.  Many thanks, CP.)

When the training at Congaree Army Airfield was completed in early 1944, the young aviators and their support teams were ready to head to Europe and join in the war.  Dad was just nineteen in March of 1944 when his unit departed Ellis Island, New York, enroute to England.  The ship sailed past the Statue of Liberty on the way out to sea.  They disembarked at Liverpool, England, after twelve days at sea, unloaded their ship, and boarded trains for the RAF airfield at Ashford, Kent, which would be their home until they relocated to France shortly after D-Day.  At Ashford they lived in “two-man sheep shelters.”

Upon arrival in England Dad was promoted to the rank of sergeant, the only one of the MACY cousins who served in the military in World War II to achieve that rank.  (After the war a couple of cousins always referred to him as “Sarge.”)

Dad’s unit had the responsibility of working on P47 Thunderbolts, planes which carried eight 50-caliber machine guns in the wings, and three bomb racks (one in the belly of the aircraft and one under each wing).   The bombs could be replaced with eight 5” rockets that were five-feet-long.  My dad described the P47 as “a real airplane, a fighter bomber.”  

The P47’s from Ashford were flying daily missions over France, weakening the German positions in preparation for what everyone knew was coming - the big Allied invasion of Europe.

(Fully loaded with pilot and armaments the P47 Thunderbolt weighed in excess of 17,500 pounds, but could still fly at speeds in excess of 400 miles an hour.  Military history sources on the internet describe it as the best ground attack aircraft in the US arsenal at that time.  The US manufactured 15,600 P47 Thunderbolts between 1941 and 1945.  It truly was as my dad had described it, “a real airplane, a fighter bomber.”)

Dad was promoted to staff sergeant and became a flight chief while at Ashford.  His job included responsibility over eight aircraft and twelve men.  The duties for his squad included keeping the guns “harmonized” and “synchronized,” loaded and working properly, and also to see that the bombs or rockets were loaded and their release mechanisms were working properly.  He was issued a bicycle to ride up and down the flight line checking on the work.

As a staff sergeant Dad’s pay increased to $96.00 (USA) or $115.20 (overseas pay).  He was doing so well that he began sending money home for his mother to bank for him.  He said that by the time he got home he had about a thousand dollars in savings.

It was while Dad was stationed at Ashford, Kent, that he was able to reconnect with his older brother, Wayne.  He knew that Wayne was in the Army and serving somewhere overseas, but had no idea where he was at until . . .

“One day I got a letter from him (Wayne) through the regular English mail, not through the Army.  I don’t know how that was possible.  Wayne stated that he was at Porthcawl, Wales, which joins England at one end. 

“I got a pass to London and rode an army truck there.  (Then) took a train to Porthcawl without a pass to there.  Dodged MP’s at every stop.  Found his outfit outside of town.  He thought I was nuts, but he got a pass into town and said “I want to show you something.’  We went into a store that had ice cream.  Boy, was it ever good!  I hadn’t seen any since leaving home.”

(Several military regulations were ignored or flagrantly violated during that misadventure.  Soldiers were not permitted to reveal where they were - which Dad had obviously done at some point since Uncle Wayne knew how to reach him by regular English mail.  Wayne put his location in the letter to Dad.  Aunt Mary told me a couple of years ago that Uncle Wayne could not even tell her where he was, but he sent her a piece of jewelry with the jeweler’s name on it and she was able to figure out from that clue that he was in Wales.  And then there is the matter of a young sergeant crossing the border into Wales without any paperwork and hiding from MP’s along the way - and managing to locate his brother.  Not too shabby for a “damned farmer” who barely knew his right from his left a year before!)

An entry in Dad's journal said that his unit, the 513th Fighter BomberSquadron of the 406 Fighter Bomber Group of the 9th Air Force) crossed the English Channel by boat - along with all of their equipment, shortly after D-Day in late June.  They landed at the now-famous Omaha Beach.  He said they initially stayed in the first town, close to the beach, in French barracks and then moved on to Mourmelon le Grand where he received a serious non-combat wound that ended his direct involvement in the war - but more on that later.

Joe SPAKE’s daughter provided - through letters that her father wrote to her mother during the war - more information on the move to France.  She said they arrived in France in August (not June as Dad had said) of 1944 and initially stayed in the town of Tour-en-Bessin and then Cretteville.  The following month they were at St. Leonard Airfield in France and then later that same month (September) arrived in Mourmelon le Grand.

(My father also told me on several occasions that he was in a military group that marched beneath the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, though that was not referenced in the journal, so I don’t know the chronology of that event - and it is conceivable that I misunderstood him.)

It was in Mourmelon le Grand where my dad was accidentally shot by a pilot.  In his journal Dad talked about the pilots.  He said many were being shot down and consequently many young and inexperienced pilots were being called up to take their places,  The new pilots, though certainly brave, also tended to be nervous.  Many did not survive their first missions.  

One day Dad and his team were working at getting the plane for one of these inexperienced pilots ready for the mission.  The pilot was in the cockpit and Dad and his crew were loading ammunition and making last-minute preparations and adjustments. Dad said they had loaded the plane with 250 rounds of ammunition for each of the 50-caliber machine guns, 3 bombs in the racks, and 8 of the 5-foot rockets.  The rockets had explosive heads that could either be armor-piercing or explode on impact, something the pilot could determine by flipping a switch.  The action for that switch had to be checked before take-off.

In checking the wire to the switch that determined the ultimate use of the rockets, Dad was leaning across four rockets on one wing of the plane in order to reach the wire.  As he was leaning the nervous pilot flipped the wrong switch and fired one of the rockets.  Dad said his arm was above the rocket, but a 5-inch fin on the rear of the rocket hit his arm as it roared past.  He described what happened next this way:

“It knocked me about 50 feet across the metal parking strip, around and around.  I thought it tore my arm off.  (But) It just ripped out all of the meat, muscles, tendons, and nerves in my left forearm.   A guy in our bomb loading truck saw it and picked me up.  He said  ‘Hold your arm tight with your right hand to slow down the bleeding.  He got me to a field hospital in Rheims.  They had lots of serious wounded there from the front, so  it was sometime before I got my turn with a doctor.  Finally one tied it together the best he could and put a cast on it and said someone else would redo it later.”

In his journal Dad said that he stayed at the field hospital in Rheims a couple of days and then was sent back across the English Channel to Southhampton, England, where another doctor cut the cast off, operated on the arm, and put it in a new cast.  He stayed in Southhampton two weeks and was then sent to Cherbourg, France, in order to ship back to the United States.  He gave this description of the boat ride back to the States:

“We came home on a small, older ship.  It was filled with wounded and German prisoners.  It took 22 days and we were broken down and drifting half of the time.  I figured we would either sink or be torpedoed just sitting out there by ourselves,   But we finally made it to New York.  I was sure glad to see the Statue of Liberty.”

The Americans on the ship who were mobile were given an opportunity to leave the ship and experience New York City.  Dad described that adventure this way:

“They issued us $5.00 apiece to go into NYC and look around.  The first place I stopped was a barber shop.  I think the haircut was $1.50, but the barber said my hair needed a treatment and maybe a singe.  I thought that was okay for $1.50, but the barber was a typical New Yorker, too slick for a country boy.  He got $3.50  I had $1.50 left.  I got a beer and left.”

Dad’s next stop was O’Reilly General Hospital in Springfield, Missouri (which later became the private and religious “Evangel College” and is now known as “Evangel University”).  He was operated on again while there and spent almost a year permanently assigned at the hospital.

My dad’s service wound left him with a “numb forearm and two crooked fingers for life," but he never wasted time feeling sorry for himself. "There were lots of accidents, many fatal, so I was lucky.”  

When Dad got to the hospital in Springfield he was (of course) anxious to see his family.  As soon as he could he arranged a brief pass to go to the Neosho area (about seventy-five miles).   Dad’s parents didn’t have a phone, so he called his aunt, Ina Pearl (MACY) LOWE, the relative whom he had stayed with during his junior year at Neosho High School.   He told Aunt Pearl that he would be in town that evening, and would she please tell his parents - and Pearl, armed with a story, headed straight to the newspaper!   Later that day, March 17th, 1945, the following short article ran at the top of the front page of the “Neosho Daily News,” above several war stories of national importance:

“Sgt. Garland Macy Wounded in Action" 

“Mrs. Jack Lowe, 323 West Adams street, this morning received a telephone call from her nephew, Sgt. Garland Macy, who returned to the States last night.  Sgt. Macy, a tail gunner, was wounded in the arm in Luxemburg on January 26th and received the Purple Heart Award.  He is now stationed at the Springfield O’Reilly hospital, Springfield, Mo.  Sgt. Macy will arrive here tonight to spend two days with his parents, Mr. and Mrs. C.E. Macy, and other relatives and then will report back to O’Reilly hospital.  Sgt. Macy graduated from the Neosho high school in 1942 and enlisted in the Army in the fall of that year.  He was sent overseas last spring.”

Pearl was no doubt excited to hear from the nephew who had once lived under her roof, and she no doubt garbled a few facts unintentionally.   Dad was never a tailgunner and he never saw Luxembourg - and he was not wounded in action.   But he was wounded while serving overseas during World War II, and he did receive the Purple Heart as thanks from a grateful nation.

Dad was eventually discharged from active duty on December 18, 1945, three years and six days after being sworn in.

Staff Sergeant Garland MACY had answered the call and done his duty. He had gone into the military service as little more than a wide-eyed farm boy, and he emerged as a confident young man who had seen more of the nation and the world than he ever imagined he would see - and had done his part in helping to win a world war.  

Now Garland was ready to get on with the rest of his life - and start chasing the American dream.

Pedigree Collapse

by Pa Rock

Family Historian

A basic assumption in genealogy research is that the number of each person's biological predecessors (forebears) doubles with each generation.  A person will have two biological parents (whether that person knows who the those parents are or not), four biological grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, thirty-two great-great-greats, and so on.  Of course, if you keep projecting those generations back through time, at some point, at about thirty generations or so, they will equal more than the population of the earth at that time.

So at some point our family trees - a.k.a. pedigrees - must begin to collapse.  The human race evolved slowly over millions of years - it did not just spring forth suddenly with countless individuals bathing in the gene pool.

And almost anyone who has traced their family tree back very many generations has stumbled upon the situation where the same individuals occupy different spots on the same tree.  That happens when when people who are already related - usually some degree of cousins - reproduce together.

A pair of first cousins would be individuals who are the children of a pair of siblings and their spouses,  First cousins share one set of grandparents with each other.  If that same pair of first cousins become attracted to each other and produce a child, that child would only have three sets of biological great-grandparents instead of the standard issue four, or, put another way, one set of great-grandparents would hold down two spots on the family tree.  And from there on, more and more ancestors would be repeated in successive generations..  The tree would be experiencing "collapse" - the same number os spaces but occupied by fewer actual individuals.

That collapse kicks in at any level where people who are already related begin to reproduce.  First cousins have a set of grandparents in common.  Second cousins are the next generation, and they have a set of great-grandparents in common.  If two second cousins reproduce, their children will have seven pairs of individual great-great-grandparents instead of eight - and the tree has begun to collapse.

Marriage among cousins has been relatively (pun intended) common throughout history.  People married within their own extended families due to isolation, for protection, or to preserve land or wealth.  Some, such as royalty, used marriage to preserve power - or to acquire more land and power.  It wasn't all blissful romance.

But that was then, right?   Today there are so many people in the gene pool that marrying close relatives has the feel of immorality.  However sensible that might seem, it is not the case in most of the countries of the world - or even here in the US.  Every state in the United States of America allows the marriage of second cousins, and twenty-states and the District of Columbia allow the marriage of first cousins - with six more allowing first-cousin marriages under special circumstances.  

Those states which permit first cousins to marry in the United States include:  Alaska, Hawaii, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Tennessee, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Maryland - - - and the following states allow the marriage of first cousins under special circumstances:  Utah, Arizona, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Maine.

And laws like that lead to the collapse of entire forests of family trees!

October Origins: 'Peanuts' and 'The Twilight Zone'

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

According to information that I came across in today's issue of "The Writer's Almanac," two important landmarks in American culture made their appearance on this date in the 1950's, and, in keeping with the theme of this blog from the past two days, both individuals behind these cultural achievements were children of the Great Depression.

The iconic comic strip, "Peanuts," penned by cartoonist Charles M. Schultz, first appeared in newspapers on this date in 1950.  The deeply profound children and animals who populated the strip became an important component of Americana during the comic's five-decade run as they stepped beyond the pages of domestic and international newspapers and made appearances in such venues as comic books, television specials, movies, advertisements, and even stage musicals.  Today Charlie Brown, Lucy and Linus Van Pelt, Snoopy, Woodstock, and all of the others are still as recognizable and beloved as they were during their heyday, a period of time that encompassed the entire second half of the twentieth century.

The gang from "Peanuts" spoke to social issues in ways that were less confrontational than bold news headlines, yet they still managed to deliver commonsense messages on things that mattered like race, gender, war, education, families, and the importance of kindness.

And Rod Serling's amazing television series, "The Twilight Zone," made its first appearance on America's original small screens - television - in 1959.  Serling, an experienced television writer had grown weary of trying to address important topics through television drama, only to have his work chopped and diced by censors.  In 1959  with the creation of "The Twilight Zone," he managed to get his passions onto the screen by cloaking them in science fiction.   "The Twilight Zone" featured shows that often contained surprising twists and uncomfortable moral messages.

(Most evenings my mother sat in front of the television and did hand-sewing, knitting, and needlework.  She didn't care what was on the screen - it was just background noise for her sewing.  But on Friday nights when "The Twilight Zone" came on everyone was expected to get quiet and not interfere with Mom's show - and, of course, the rest of us enjoyed it, too!)

"Twilight Zone," like "Peanuts,"  managed to bring attention to issues by presenting them in a more non-traditional manner than a straight dramatic effort - and both are now recognized as significant milestones in the evolution of modern entertainment and enlightenment.

Jimmy Carter: Another Child of the Great Depression

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

Yesterday in this space I wrote about my father's life from the time of his birth in October of 1924 until his decision to join the Army and help with the war effort in late 1942.  Much of that narrative centered on life in the rural midwest during the Great Depression of the 1930's and how my father adapted to those rough and impoverished times.

On the day my father was born, October 19th, 1924, there was an eighteen-day-old baby living with his own new parents in the very rural community of Plains, Georgia.  Little Jimmy Carter had been born in an actual hospital on October 1st, but he still came home to a country farmhouse that had neither electricity nor indoor plumbing.  Jimmy's dad grew peanuts for a living, and his mother kept house and encouraged her children to read.  It was proper etiquette in the Carter home to bring a book to the table and to read while eating.

My dad was trapping and selling rabbits when he was six-years-old, and when Jimmy Carter was six he was selling boiled peanuts - from his Dad's farm - out of a wagon along the side of the road.  Both boys appeared to be mindful of the need to make money in order to escape the ravages of poverty and the Depression.  But somewhere not long after the age of six their paths began to diverge.

Young Carter, by having a firmer foundation from which to spring, was soon hauling excess farm produce to town in his wagon and selling it locally.  He shepherded his savings, and by the age of thirteen he was able to buy five houses at bargain prices and turn them into rentals.  Carter, who had a maternal uncle in the Navy who regularly sent the family postcards from exotic ports-of-call, decided early on that he wanted to serve in the Navy.  Even before entering his rural high school in Plains, he had sent for a catalogue from the US Naval Academy so that he could see what he needed to study and accomplish prior to applying there.

The school in Plains covered grades one through eleven, and when Jimmy Carter "graduated" eleventh grade in 1941, he immediately enrolled in the local community college for a year and then transferred to the Georgia Institute of Technology for another year so that he could meet the requirements for entry into the Naval Academy.  He was admitted to the Naval Academy in 1943, placed in an "expedited" program due to the war, and graduated in 1946.  Carter went on to in the Navy's submarine program and served as a researcher under famed Admiral Hyman Rickover where he helped in the development of the Navy's nuclear submarine program.

Jimmy Carter left the navy a few years later when his father was diagnosed with cancer.  He went home to save the family farm, which he did, and then got involved in local politics, and the rest, as they say, is history!  My father, a lifelong Republican - though not a crazy Republican like those who define the party today - was not a particular fan of Jimmy Carter's while he was in the White House, but as the years slipped on by, Dad's opinion of Jimmy Carter seemed to continually rise.

I think a lot of people experienced Jimmy Carter - and Rosalynn - in that same way.   They were clearly two of the finest human beings to ever reside in our White House, and their values in life were undoubtedly impacted by the hardships and sacrifices that our nation had to endure during the Great Depression.

Happy birthday, President Carter!  May your day be filled with peace, contentment, family, and love!