I was born in May of 1939 so I was 2 ½ when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. It’s my first living memory. My Dad was 35, he had flat feet, a badly damaged left knee and 20/400 vision in his left eye so when he went to all the military recruiters they chuckled politely and said “Next“. He went to the Marines, the Navy and finally the Army. I have the letter he wrote to my Grandmother complaining about not being taken. Wound up joining the Texas National Guard and drilling in the Sears parking lot That’s my second living memory, Dad going out the door on Wednesday night in his WW1 Doughboy outfit with his ‘03 Springfield and me hanging onto his leg because I thought he was going off to fight the Germans or the Japanese or something. Mom drove me over to Sears to watch once in a while so I‘d know he wasn‘t off fighting. For a guy with 4 years of pre-law and 2 years of Law School it seemed to him his talents were wasted being an Insurance Adjuster in Houston Texas while there was a war on but so be it.
There was a spur railway line near our duplex where a daily train went out to some industrial sites outside Houston. They ran a switch engine and empty boxcars out to the factories in the afternoon and picked up the loaded boxcars. As the war went on traffic increased and sometimes there were three runs a day. All my friends and I would line the tracks and wave to the engineer and the fireman. Sometimes they would throw us lumps of coal until the neighbors complained that “somebody” was defacing the sidewalks. So I became a train junkie. I learned to identify all the engines by type and pretty soon Dad started taking us to see the trains as they left the main station. Now I’m normally pretty smart and I can figure out why people do things but this one went right over my head ‘till a few years ago. Somehow Dad found out (besides being in the TNG Dad was an air raid warden) when the Troop Trains were leaving. He wasn’t the only one. When we parked along the train tracks there were usually 50 or more cars there. People sat on the fenders and they stood on the *running boards and they waved American flags and they ran along the track tossing packages of stuff to all the young guys in the trains going off to save the world from the likes of Hitler and Mussolini and the leadership of the Japanese Military. The trains left almost every night. I have no idea how many men got on those trains all over the country but 500,000 or so of them didn’t come back. Every chance they got Mom and Dad took me to see them off. And told me we were going to see the trains.
*Google it.
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