Every Man a Hero

by Ray Lambert

  But for a lot of us, especially in the heart of Alabama where I was born and raised, things were pretty much the way they’d been since the foundation of our old barn was first put down. We had no running water, no indoor toilets, and no electricity. Air-conditioning meant opening the windows to catch a breeze.

  Refrigerators were just starting to become popular home items around the time I was born, but they didn’t reach most homes in rural Alabama, at least not ours, for many more years. We kept our meat by smoking or curing it—funny that meat like that would be considered a delicacy today, though you can’t argue with how good it tastes. Lard—pig fat—was used in just about everything. Not the best thing for your health, according to the doctors.

  Folks didn’t have closets full of clothes. They might own as many as three or four pairs of shirts and overalls, one of which would be fairly new and always clean—that was what you wore to church on Sunday.

  Farms were all family affairs back then, which means that the kids were part of the labor force. We were set up with chores—easy ones, of course—practically as soon as we could walk. Fetching wood or water, tending to the animals—it was routine for us and pretty much any kid who lived in rural America in those days. It taught you a lot, and not just about how to deal with an angry rooster or a temperamental tractor engine. Responsibility and an appreciation for hard work were not just ideals to strive for when you lived on a farm; they were what you had to do to survive.

  I mentioned refrigerators, and I guess I shouldn’t say we didn’t have one. We did—but it was actually a well. You could keep your milk and butter down there, above the water, of course, retrieving it by rope. Up north you’d have maple syrup on your pancakes for breakfast; where I lived we’d raise sugarcane, press it (or have it pressed at a nearby mill), and cook it so that it became molasses. Different source, but roughly the same idea when applied to pancakes.

  The answers to the questions I’m sure you’re dying to ask: If you didn’t have plumbing, where did you get your water?

  We’d draw it from the well—lower a bucket with a rope and haul it back up.

  Yes, we used an outhouse.

  No, we did not have soft toilet paper.

  Yes, any paper, including store catalogs, would do.

  I can’t say I have fond memories of digging the pits—a typical job for a kid—or handling the lime that you’d throw down the hole as an air freshener. But after so many years gone now, what are left are memories of happy times. I’m sure there were bruises and nicks and stumbles along the way, but they’re all long healed. I remember blueberries in early summer—sweet candy, fresh off the bush. I remember my grandma packing up the kids in the wagon behind the horse. I remember what seems a perfect time in a perfect place very long ago.

  I had two brothers, Euel and Harland. Euel was about two years older than me, and we spent a lot of our lives together, physically and mentally. We fought quite a bit, as brothers sometimes do, but as we got older the fights stopped and we became pretty close friends. We did chores together, went to school together, shared things only brothers share. We would sense what the other was thinking just by looking at him—a good thing, since neither one of us was what you might call a talker. Since he was my older brother, I always felt safe when he was around; he would back me up when I needed it.

  I’d do the same for him, no questions asked.

  Harland was two years younger than me. Harland was what I would call a free spirit, or at least more than I was. Maybe it was just that his energy put him in so much motion that he couldn’t be satisfied staying still in one place too long. Cancer cut him down when he was in his mid-fifties. You don’t get used to loss, not really, but you can grow philosophical about it. You realize it’s going to happen to us all.

  My sister, Gloria, was born many years later; during the war, in fact. That age difference was huge, especially in those days when your older siblings were all boys. I’m sure it seemed to her that her older brothers were always bossing her around, or acting more like parents than brothers. But we loved her dearly, and maybe on occasion spoiled her just a little bit. I don’t think I’ve known a kinder, more loving person in my life.

  I got my first real taste of the family lumber business the year I turned thirteen. My cousin Durwood Williamson and I got the job of cutting down the trees. Chainsaws were well off in the future—our biceps supplied the power for the two-man saws. It was man’s work, and we were proud to do it, even if it had us going as long as there was sunlight.

  We were old enough to cut down trees, old enough to drive the trucks that hauled the logs to the saw, but we weren’t old enough to drink coffee—at least not me. Maybe the folks thought it would stunt my growth, a not uncommon belief back in the day.

  And yet . . . for some reason, red-eye gravy, which is made from pan scrapings and coffee, was fine.

  I grew up in the South with the two B’s—if you got out of line, you got the Bible and the belt, though not usually in that order. Maybe we weren’t better behaved than children now, but I would say we learned to respect our elders and mind our manners darn quick. If the world wasn’t a better place for it, at a minimum it was more polite.

  The Depression

  The Roaring Twenties, of course, gave way to the Great Depression, the worst financial bust our country has ever known. Living through it, there were no sharp dividing lines, no one day where prosperity ended and poverty began. Sure, there was a stock market crash—that was in October 1929—but there had been crashes before, and Wall Street was far away. It was just one factor among many that either caused or were part of the Great Depression.

  We were poor, but so was everyone else. When you’re a kid, making your own toys and finding some way to amuse yourself for free don’t seem like a big deal if all your friends are doing it. Being hungry is something else, but in our case we were lucky to always have food.

  We moved from Maplesville to Prattville when I was eight; a few years later, we relocated to Collirene, about twenty-five miles as the crow flies southwest. If the other places I’d lived were small, Collirene was tiny—a grand total of fifteen kids populated the entire elementary school. Our teacher was an angel, hardworking, caring, and so dedicated. I still remember how important she made me feel bending over my desk to check my work or answer some question I had.

  We grew up fast in those days; kids handled jobs that today would be reserved for people in their late teens and beyond. Aside from learning how to handle livestock—besides the cows and chickens, we also had hogs—I’d fix machines when they broke down, and I got to be a fair mechanic. Even more impressive, at least looking back, was the summer job I got at eleven working a bulldozer. I helped build a road, and my specialty was uprooting tree stumps so the graders could smooth the bed.

  The bulldozer was a mechanical beast, but not nearly as ornery as its flesh-and-blood counterparts can be. With my dad and uncle raising cattle, I was put to work helping to care for the animals, learning to rope and brand just as if I were a cowboy out west. And just like a cowboy, I learned to break horses. Another time and place, I could have been Buffalo Bill or maybe just an anonymous cowpoke, earning his living on the Plains.

  High school was in Hayneville, some eighteen miles away. Unlike when I attended elementary school, I didn’t have to walk; I caught the bus. Which was welcome, given that I’d been up for hours milking the cows and then setting them out to pasture. And I knew the driver—it was my brother Euel.

  By this point, the Depression was in full steam, and the lack of money was evident to everyone, even young teenagers like myself. People bartered for food or clothes or other necessities. And neighbors tried to help each other. I remember butchering a cow—another skill I picked up young—and delivering the meat to people in town. We weren’t selling it; we were giving it away. It was an act of charity and neighborliness. You looked out for your family, and you looked out for other people if you possibly could . . . two lessons that would stay with me
for the rest of my life.

  * * *

  As bad as the Depression was, my family would have made it through all right if it hadn’t been for an accident at the sawmill. My dad was working one day when a log rolled off and crushed his hips, legs, and chest, breaking a number of bones in the process. His injuries were extreme; it took him two years to recover, and even then he couldn’t do the heavy work he’d devoted his life to doing.

  That changed our lives in many, many ways. Not working meant no money; disability insurance didn’t exist, at least not for regular people like us. We moved to Selma, Alabama, about twenty-five miles away. It was a larger place, where it was easier to get health care and other things now that the family was no longer self-sufficient. My brother Euel got a job driving a coal truck. I worked training horses and taking whatever odd piece of work I could find. I was only in high school, but I felt guilty—I wasn’t pulling my own weight.

  The only thing I could think to do was to drop out and get a job. So I did.

  Trees, Dogs, and Laundry

  The Depression went on and on. My father’s youngest brother, Alvin, decided to give up the sawmill business. His new venture was delivering logs to a Selma lumber company. The money was better, or at least stable. I went to work for him. We harvested cypress along the river, often pulling trees out of standing water a foot deep, lopping off the runners and branches, and then loading them into a truck to be taken to the mill. Later, I took my uncle’s place on a crew dredging the river so it would be deep enough for boats to safely travel.

  I was fourteen, and was paid a dollar a day—a decent wage in the early 1930s in Alabama. To give you a comparison, a quart of milk in Birmingham, a far larger city not quite a hundred miles to the north, went for between eleven and fourteen cents. I was saving on rent, since I could live with my uncle, and soon I was able to buy some clothes to replace the ones I was wearing out and outgrowing.

  By the time I was seventeen, I’d grown tired of working as a logger. I thought of going back to school. One of my cousins, Ralph Mims, invited me to live with him and his wife, Eunice, back in Clanton. I took up the offer, but only after he agreed to let me earn my way by doing odd jobs and much of the cooking, laundry, and cleaning. Every day I’d drive Eunice to the Isabella Agriculture School, where she taught math and I continued my high school education. I also played halfback on the football team.

  A year of school was all I could manage. Money was so tight that I didn’t have any left for clothes, and it was just too obvious to me that I needed to earn a living.

  Ralph assisted me again, hooking me up with a local veterinarian who needed someone to help train his horses and generally help out. I went to live with the doctor and his family, and soon found myself appointed as the deputy veterinarian of Chilton County, a position that gave me a badge and a gun. My weapon of choice, though, was a hypodermic needle, which I used to give dogs vaccinations. The county took rabies pretty seriously; if your dog didn’t have a tag proving he’d had his shots, the poor pup would be hauled off to the pound and kept there until the owner paid fifty cents for the vaccine.

  I never had to use the gun, but the holster on my belt made my job a lot easier. Fifty cents was a lot in those days, and some of the farmers could be pretty ornery as well as protective, especially when it came to their dogs. I remember one of them coming to the door and swearing that he had no dog in the house—which was a hard position to maintain with all the barking behind him.

  Our discussion ended when the dog shot out between his legs to confront me. The animal was vaccinated without further incident.

  One of my favorite jobs for the doctor was training horses. It’s a specialty that requires many things, chief among them patience. You can’t force a horse to do something he doesn’t want to do. You need to convince him that what you want is what he wants, and vice versa. You have to make him understand that if he trusts you, he’ll succeed.

  Getting an animal to trust you is a difficult but worthy task, one you can’t fake. You have to be honest with yourself and the horse. You have to be dependable, willing to show your faith in him, and above all, you need to be patient and gentle.

  Learn how to do it reliably, and you’ll have the skills you need to lead men as well.

  I trained horses, took odd jobs. I moved on to other temporary posts. But I didn’t have a real calling. Worse, I didn’t have a steady income.

  Looked at objectively, and from a distance, I had a lot going for me. I was young and had a wide assortment of skills. I was good with animals. I knew my way around heavy equipment, both to work it and fix it. I was in good shape. I could cook. I could clean. No job was below me. I worked hard, and I didn’t complain.

  I did not have a high school diploma. That was a drawback. But it was also common at that time and place.

  Even so, Alabama was still mired in the Depression, and there just weren’t a lot of jobs to go around. And with older, more experienced men available, why take a chance on a kid not yet out of his teens?

  As 1939 drew to a close, there was one large organization that was hiring, and that was not only willing to bring on a kid like me, but actually preferred someone of my age and skill set over older men.

  The U.S. Army.

  Two

  Echoes of War

  You’re in the Army Now . . .

  Nazi Germany’s moves in 1938 to take over Austria and grab Czechoslovakia left no doubt war was coming, and that it would eventually threaten the United States. Even so, neither the American public nor our Congress seemed ready to address our military needs. The army had shrunk following World War I, and between that and the Great Depression, we were woefully undermanned and under-equipped.

  Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939; Great Britain and France immediately declared war. Months later, Germany invaded Holland and Belgium, sweeping through the lowland countries on the way to France. By the end of the summer of 1940, Western Europe was a Nazi camp. Londoners ducked bombs every night, and spent every day expecting to be invaded.

  While many Americans still believed the U.S. would escape the conflict, we were rebuilding and expanding our military just in case. My interest in the army coincided with the start of the buildup, just after President Roosevelt had declared a limited emergency and Congress had authorized appropriations to start funding modernization. The army, under Chief of Staff George Marshall, was already reorganizing, dramatically changing its combat structure to go with the new armaments and men it was adding.

  I thought of none of that when I was deciding what to do. My goals were finding a job to help my family and to advance myself in life. Joining the army wasn’t an easy decision, though. No one in my family, as far as I knew, had been in the military; we didn’t have that tradition.

  I talked to my Uncle Alvin about it. In many ways, he was the wisest of that generation in my family; he’d had more education than my father or their other brother, and he had a calm, logical way of working arguments out. We sat and talked a bit, and he agreed it was the best thing for me.

  He also drove me up to Montgomery, Alabama, the nearest recruiting station as far as I knew. When we got there, I bid him farewell and went in to talk to the recruiting sergeant.

  The station was at Maxwell Field, one of the army’s preeminent air bases before World War II (and after, for that matter). Which probably explains why the recruiter tried to get me to join the U.S. Army Air Corps. (At the time, what became known as the “air force” was part of the regular army.) Of all the military branches, it had the most catching up to do. The air corps was getting new equipment, and training pilots and crews for what was still a very new phase in warfare, especially for the United States. I suspect my knack for fixing machinery might have made me an excellent candidate as an airplane mechanic, if they didn’t want me as a pilot.

  But I was a tough guy, or wanted to be. I told the recruiter I didn’t want to go into the air corps; I wanted to be in a fighting unit.

&nbs
p; “I want to be on the front lines,” I told him.

  Direct quote. What a stupid thing to say.

  If the recruiter was insulted—or amused—he didn’t show it. “Sure thing,” he told me. “We’ll get you into the First Division.”

  It was all the same to me, as long as I was going to be where the action was.

  By then, it was pretty late in the afternoon, maybe even evening. The recruiter had me and another fellow go over to a hangar where we could bed down for the night. In the morning, we’d head over to the 1st Division at Fort Benning, Georgia, and begin our training.

  I wasn’t in that hangar too long before I got to thinking about what I’d committed to.

  I was twenty years old, had never been able to finish high school, had worked all my life. I wasn’t afraid of hard work, or even following orders, but did I really want to commit myself to army life?

  What all did that entail? How dangerous was it, really?

  And a million other questions, none of which I had the answer to.

  So I changed my mind. I got out of the bunk, left the hangar, and started walking back to my uncle’s house in Selma, twenty miles away.

  He was surprised to see me come in the door. I guess that’s an understatement.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked. “I thought you joined the army.”

  “I need to talk about this,” I told him.

  And so we did. He made it clear I couldn’t live with him anymore, and the truth was I’d already reached that decision myself. He had no work for me and I didn’t want to be a freeloader.