We Few - We Chosin Few

At 17 years of age I joined the United States Marine Corps.  Walking off the red clay hills of the Presbyterian Orphanage Home in Lynchburg, Virginia, I had a quarter in my pocket, bus ticket to Richmond Virginia and a meal ticket to breakfast the next morning.

My brother, Bill, sister Janie and I had been sent to the orphanage in the year 1939.  The war in Europe had already started.  I would spend the next 10 years of my life in that orphanage.  Our mother had died of an ear infection when I was 6 years old.  They had no antibiotics in those days, and there was nothing anybody could do.  She was buried on a cold day in December or January.  It was too cold for me to go to her gravesite.  My last memory of my mother is of people hold me up so I could see he in the coffin.  She is buried somewhere in Roanoke, but to this day we have not found where.

We stayed awhile in Ohio with one of our uncles and then ended up in Norfolk, Virginia, in early 1939.  My father worked in steel construction and was living in a boarding home when we arrived there.  My sister went to stay with one of our aunts, so until we left Norfolk we didn’t see her.  We were happy, but the welfare people didn’t like the way we were living, so they took us away from our dad.  This is how we ended up in the orphanage.  When we left Norfolk, it was one of the saddest days of my life.  My older brother Jessie had just married our neighbor’s daughter, Ruth Capps.  We had become good friends with the Capps family.  The youngest boy Louis and I became lifelong friends.

The orphanage was almost like anything else; it had its good and bad parts.  The girls took care of the kitchen and the laundry.  The boys were responsible for the large farm that had both crops and livestock.  The Jersey milk cows were one of the best herds in the state of Virginia.  Sometimes during the strawberry season, the girls would help the boys pick the crop.  They would also help during the canning.  These were the fun times at the home.  The home made its own cheese and butter in the early days; raised, killed and cured hogs; had its own school and wrote its own bulletin.  In short, the orphanage could almost survive on its own.

My job was taking care of the hogs.  Every time a sow had a litter, there was almost always a runt that would die.  I’d beg to take care of the runt, so when the home gave me one, I named it Oinkey.  This was the best pet I have ever had.  Oinkey grew to be the biggest pig on the farm.  He would follow me everywhere, and I made sure he got first choice of the slop.  The cart that held the slop was parked outside the mess area.  It was made of steel with two wheels and a handle to push with.  On top was a large wooden barrel that had to be emptied once a day.  The orphanage sat on top of a hill, and the pigpen was about a half a mile away.  Sometimes if you went too fast, you would dump the barrel over on the sharp left turn at the bottom of the hill.  Oinkey loved me to have a spill because he got it all.

Whenever it snowed, they would hitch up the horse to help take the milk cans and the slop barrel back up the hill.  The milk cart held three large cans for the milk, and it would take two boys to push it up the hill.  I really became very strong pushing that cart up the hill.  Oinkey by this time was turning over the barrel by himself.  The assistant farm manager, Mr. Bryant, told me one day that they were going to kill Oinkey because he was the biggest pig on the farm.  They gave me $10 because the pig belonged to me.  He had become a big problem, but it broke my heart to give him up.

We had a football team called the “Shoeless Wonders.”  Years before I came to the home, the team was written up in “Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.”  The headline of the 1941 clipping was “Strange As It May Seem” and read, “The Presbyterian Home Football Team, Lynchburg, Virginia, possesses only one shoe for the entire team (for kicking off).  From 1922 to 1930 they were unscored, untied and unbeaten.  Rubbing their feet with pine resin for stimulation in freezing weather, members of the Shoeless Wonders played the entire game barefooted.  One shoe was used for kickoff.  A barefoot back once punted from goal to goal.  Strange as it seems, this motley crew was unscored, untied and unbeaten for eight consecutive years.”