Miles From Home: The Journey of a Lifetime

Growing up, I knew we were poor. I would absolutely characterize both my father’s and my mother’s families as being poor people, and I felt the difference poverty made in my life. I did not get to do the things that other kids did, have the things they had, or even look the way they did. By the age of four, I had moved four times with my family. None of the places we had lived had running water or electricity. Our house on Orinoco was no exception. Everybody on the street had outhouses, and ours was a classic one-holer. The pump and the well were just outside our back door, and we had two or three regular kerosene lamps and one Aladdin lamp to light the house at night. The Aladdin lamp had a special wick that produced a brighter, wider beam of light, but we had to extinguish all the lamps during the blackouts of World War II.

I remember sitting in total darkness during those blackouts. I also recall lying awake in bed listening to rats chewing on wood. Rats were a problem in our community, mainly around the garbage bins, but occasionally one found its way into the house. For a young boy, the sound of rats in the house was scary in the night’s pitch-black.

Without electricity to run one of those newfangled refrigerators, Mom kept our food cool in an icebox (one way to protect it from the rats). She put an ice card in our front window, which was the way to tell the ice man how many pounds of ice she wanted. The ice wagon was pulled by a team of horses, and the old ice man chopped the ice off a big block. Even if no one was home, he carried the ice inside our house and placed it in the icebox. Folks were trusting in those times.

The war ended in Europe on May 8, 1945. The Japanese finally surrendered in the Pacific on August 15, 1945, after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In late July 1945—for their use against Japan—President Harry S. Truman (May 8, 1884–December 26, 1972), the thirty-third President of the United States (1945–1953), ordered the only two atomic bombs in the world to be delivered to the airbase at Tinian by the USS Indianapolis. On August 6, 1945, Colonel Paul W. Tibbetts, Jr., piloted the B-29 Enola Gay, which released the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima on the Island of Honshu. In a single blast, the city was destroyed.

President Truman called upon the Japanese government to surrender, but they refused. Three days later, on August 9, 1945, Bock’s Car, the B-29 piloted by Major Charles W. Sweeney, dropped the second atomic bomb. Its target was the city of Nagasaki on the Island of Kyushu. In a recorded radio address to the nation, Emperor Hirohito announced the Japanese surrender on August 15, 1945. I was seven years old, and I vividly remember the celebrations when the war ended—the sound of jubilant people shooting guns and blowing horns. That was an exciting time.

When my cousin Ancil Woods, a son of my father’s non-drinking brother Joe Woods, returned from the war, he married my mother’s younger sister Betty. That made Ancil my uncle and a big part of my life. Stationed all over Europe on the frontlines, Uncle Ancil served in the Army in World War II. He fought throughout Italy and northward through the Battle of the Bulge.

Five decades later, Uncle Ancil was very cognizant of that anniversary date, and he finally opened up as the two of us waited to meet a plane at the airport. Until that night, Ancil had remained silent about the horrors he survived during combat. It was then that he told me about feeling the ground shudder as those big old tanks rumbled towards him fifty years before. The thunderous noise grew louder, and he heard sharp cracking sounds again and again—the snapping of trees as the tanks rolled through the forest. It was bitterly cold that December. Hunkered down and shivering from both the bitter cold and sheer terror, he felt utterly helpless as the enemy approached. He and his comrades knew they were trapped. It was a moving experience to listen to Uncle Ancil talk about the war, his memories still frighteningly vivid after fifty years.

I was close to Uncle Ancil and respected him. He was a small guy who weighed about 135 pounds, but he was in great physical shape. Ancil could still fit into his Army uniform when he wore it for community parades.