We had just finished eating supper and were sitting around the table talking. Mom was looking through the mail that Dad had brought back from town earlier in the day. Us kids were watching her, hoping maybe we’d get a catalog or magazine. [In those days a catalog could provide several days of entertainment for us kids.] Mom suddenly got up and without saying a word opened the back door and went outside. I think we all turned and stared at Dad who was still sitting at the table, drinking a cup of coffee. He didn’t seem to notice anything being different. In a few minutes, Mom came back inside crying. It was one of the few times I ever saw her cry. Dad looked up and asked her what was wrong, She held out an envelope and said to him, “This”. It says have ten days to report to the draft board.
We were put to bed early that night. We didn’t understand what was going on and went to sleep listening to Mom and Dad talking in the kitchen.
[Talking with dad in later years about his draft experience he said that when mom opened that letter and went outside he thought something had happened to one of her brothers that had gone overseas and was fighting in the war. He told me he should have had a deferment from the draft due to his job because the demand for coal, which was needed for the manufacture of steel, was at an all-time high because of the war, but there was a mix up of some sort that resulted in him being drafted. He said that during his physical examination, it was learned that he was legally blind in his right eye and that along with his lack of education classified him as 4F and he was sent home.]
I remember that Dad started cutting down the trees he had deadened that spring. Every evening after work he chopped and trimmed. In a few days, the whole garden was covered with logs and piles of wood that he had chopped from the limbs. That weekend Dad’s brother who owned a horse showed up to help him. By dinner time the next day, the garden was clean. They had used the horse and a homemade sled to pull the logs and haul the chopped wood to the woodshed and spent the afternoon sawing the logs into blocks with a two-man crosscut saw. The next day, until Dad’s brother had to leave, was spent splitting the blocks and stacking the wood. It was a large woodshed and by the time they stopped, it was nearly half full stacked to the roof.
Later when we were talking I asked what made him cut all that wood, and he answered “I thought I’d be gone for a long time and I knew it wasn’t enough and wouldn’t last very long.”
That evening after Dad’s brother left, we went to visit my grandparents, Dad’s parents. I remember it being a very somber visit, with the adults just sitting around talking and making us kids keep quiet. Usually, when we went there it was a noisy place. There would be uncles and aunts and cousins to visit and play with, lots of running and hollering while playing games like tag or hide and seek, and of course the usual thing of the older kids playing tricks on the younger ones. These always ended with someone getting mad and saying, “I’m gonna tell mommy”, and that would bring out the moms to holler at us saying “You kids either play together or come sit on the porch”. That only worked for a little while until someone else got mad, then it would start all over.
Dad didn’t go to work the next morning. I remember following after him that day as he walked around, fixing little things, here and there, that he had been putting off doing but for some reason, we didn’t talk much. I guess I knew something was bothering him and didn’t know how to ask what it was. That evening he sat us all down and told us he had to go somewhere and for us to be good, do our chores, and help and mind Mom while he was gone.
Mom woke us early the next morning to tell Dad goodbye. One of her brother-in-laws had come to take him to Lewisburg to report to the local draft board. From there he was taken, along with some other draftee to Ronceverte where he took his first train ride from there to Clarksburg where the induction center was located.
Dad said he had hitched rides on coal and log trains before but this was his first real train ride. The trip back from Clarksburg was his second and last train ride.
With Dad gone I was determined to keep the wood boxes full, not quite five years old and able to carry only four or five sticks of wood at a time for the cooking stove and one block for the heater but with a little help from Mom I was able to keep those wood boxes full.
A few nights later we were sitting around the kitchen table talking about Dad when we heard a knock at the front door. Mom went into the middle room and asked, “Who’s there”? We heard someone say, let me in, it’s cold out here, we all recognized the voice. Mom rushed and opened the door and there stood Dad. I think it was the happiest moment I ever saw them share.
Later I learned from Mom that at the time if Dad had been inducted into the army he would have been sent straight from the induction center to a camp for training and from there on to where ever without a leave as they do today and since there was no telephone service in our area and Dad couldn’t write she wouldn’t have known anything for sure until Dad could get someone to write for him which would probably not be until after he finished boot camp.
On Monday Dad went back to work in the mines and our lives returned to normal for the rest of the year with one exception. That Christmas I got my first store-bought toy. A brand new big shiny red truck. “ Not really so big, only about six inches long, but it was red and shiny.”