The Early Years
Page 2
I was friends with Johnny Anderson and he told me that his brother, Willie, needed some help at his typewriter shop. I went to work for Willie Anderson for $5 a week and he worked my butt off. I picked up and delivered typewriters and adding machines. Willie taught me how to clean and service them. I was working for Willie Anderson when the war started.
There was war already in Europe and in China. Lots of it in the papers and the movies, but I didn't think we'd get into it. I didn't know anybody around Galveston that thought America would get mixed up in it. I mean, there were box cars full of scrap metal lined up from Texas City all the way to the Galveston wharves that was all going to Japan. Lots of Japanese ships, and American ships too, were hauling it out of Galveston. Who knew that all that junk we were selling them, they'd turn around and shoot it back at us? We didn't have television. We didn't know the things we know today. I'm sure that the politicians knew war was coming - spying, diplomatic talks and all of that. But it was a surprise to most of us when war did come.
Della liked to dance but I wasn't much of a dancer. We went to the picture shows a lot, and to the beach to swim. Della and I were going steady by the end of 1941. I have a snapshot of us together taken right before the war. She had on a red dress - but you can't tell from the black and white photo. On Sunday afternoon, December 7, 1941 I was with Della. We'd been out somewhere and had come back to my parents' house and we were drinking tea and listening to the radio when news of Pearl Harbor came on. That was about a month and a week before my seventeenth birthday.
In 1942 I got hired by the Galveston Wharves railroad. I ran messages for old man Rogan, the yard master. I road a bicycle up and down the Galveston wharves and took assignments and messages to the switchmen and engineers or to the stevedores. It was rough bumping down the tracks on a bike. Rogan would say that he thought they were working down the tracks in this or that direction and I'd take off. Sometimes I would have to ride five miles to find them, and man, were there rattlesnakes in the high grass along the tracks. It was lousy with snakes! I would bring the switch engine crews assignments to take such and such rail cars to this or that pier. This was back before hand held radios and portable telephones, so communication up and down the tracks to the switch engines was conveyed by written messages.
During the next year a lot of people that I knew joined the services or got called up and started leaving town. Some of my older cousins joined the Navy - Martin Cheever, George Smith and three of the Faust boys went into the military. My cousins L. B. Traverso and Willie Traverso went into the Army and Harry Traverso was in the Navy. In the Fall of 1942 they drafted my uncle Pete, my father's younger only brother. Pete was forty years old and he was a cripple. He had broken both his feet when he was a little kid and he never did walk right. He was an alcoholic to boot. Man, I never understood how they drafted Pete. They took him into the Army Air Corps at the end of September '42. They shipped him off to Colorado or someplace out west where he never got out of basic training. When he got there, they saw that he couldn't walk and that he was an old man. They just didn't know what to do with him. Took them more than six months to figure out how to get rid of him. They finally discharged him in March of '43. They said they discharged him because he worked in an essential war production occupation. Hell, he was a printer's helper. They just didn't want to give him a medical discharge and have to pay him any disability.
I had forgot about this incident before I went to sea that my cousin, Don Faust, reminded me of when I saw him after many years in the summer of 2004. He reminded me that I had given him a suit when we were teenagers and he never forgot it. I was working during the early part of the war and I had gone down to a tailor shop and got myself a suit made. I always liked to dress well but also I was hard to fit.
I'm not so tall and then I was about 118 lbs. I had it cut very modern. It was what they called a "zoot suit" and it was made from a beautiful piece of material. I paid $70.00 on installments and that was a lot of money in those days. Don grew up to be taller than me, but I'm three years older than him and at that time, I must have been about 17 years old, we were about the same size. He really admired that suit, so I said he could have it. Neither of our families had very much but I was an only child and working and he was one of four boys. He was really surprised that I gave it to him, but he liked it so much I wanted him to have it. Funny that he never forgot that suit.