The Teen Years

I was thirteen years old when I started high school in 1934. The total enrollment was approximately eighty students. Basketball was the main sport. I was five feet five and weighed about one hundred and ten pounds. My feet were so small I had to order child size basketball shoes. But I was the coach’s pet and made the ‘B’ team’s starting five and dressed for the varsity. In my sophomore year, we had a new coach. I was too small, in his eyes, and spent most of the time sitting on the bench. However, in my senior year, we had another new coach and I was grown up, all of five feet ten and weighed one hundred and fifty pounds. I made the starting five on the varsity team.... Sorry to say we had a losing season.... But all in all, it was probably the happiest year of my teen-age life.

During my senior year, Dad closed up his shop and accepted a job as shop foreman at the Ford Dealership in Linton, Indiana. We moved there shortly after I graduated, but lived there for less than six months before moving back to a small farm home on the outskirts of Sandborn. That move, too, lasted only six months. Our home burnt to the ground in less than an hour in late 1939. We barely escaped with our lives. Nothing else was saved.... but the community of Sandborn helped us to get restarted.

After being burnt out, Mom and Dad bought a nice big modern home in Sandborn. Four bedrooms and a bath upstairs. Six more rooms downstairs, plus a full basement and large front porch. My, my! How great that would have been when we kids were growing up!

From the time I graduated to my 20th birthday, was the hardest period of my life. I wasn’t hurting for money – for that matter – I never did... I may have been the richest teenager in Sandborn. I even had a savings account. I never quite understood the hardships other kids complained about during the depression. I was always able to find enough jobs to keep me in spending money.... Delivering daily newspapers and working as a grocery clerk on Saturdays. In the summertime, I picked tomatoes, strawberries, green beans, etc. for a truck patch farmer that had a contract with a local canning factory. And for a time I worked with a hay-bailing crew. But that was kid stuff and odd jobs. The nearest to a full time job was working at a service station; eight to ten hours a day, six days a week for twelve dollars.

I was nearly twenty years old. War news was becoming serious. Defense jobs were opening up in the big cities. Boys a little older than me were beginning to be drafted. In January 1941, I went to Indianapolis and applied for a job at the Allison factory; an aircraft engine manufacturer. After a couple of weeks, with no reply, I decided to enlist in the Army Air Corp.