Thursday, July 19, 1945
Our Army and Navy Boys
Mr. and Mrs. E. A. Hudson have received the Purple Heart and three battle stars which were posthumously awarded their son, Technical Sergeant Edward Keith Hudson, who was killed March 15 near Ingwiller, France. Together with his platoon, he was occupying a wooded section where they were preparing for an attack. Keith was observing enemy emplacements from a concealed position, when enemy tanks placed fire on the area…
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Private First Class Luther Neil Hudson is home on furlough with his wife and his parents, Mr. and Mrs. E. A. Hudson, of Green Bank, after serving the past two years overseas. He was in Africa, the invasion of Sicily and in Italy. From there he was sent to England and Wales where he spent the past few months. He is with the Quartermaster Corps.
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PFC Berlin Sharp, son of Holmes Sharp, of Mountain Grove, VA., is fighting with the 149th Inf. 38th Division in Zambales Mountains of Luzon.
PFC Sharp is an automatic rifle man and has been in the thick of every fight, since the automatic rifle is the most effective weapon we have…
PFC Sharp entered the Army August 1942, and has served in Hawaii, New Guinea and Leyte before the invasion of Luzon. He has three brothers in the service, Paul of the Merchant Marines; Bedford in the Paratroopers, who has served 14 months in France, Holland, Belgium and Germany; and Boyd, who is serving in Germany with the Field Artillery. He has been awarded the Combat Infantry Badge, two Battle Stars and the Bronze Arrow Head, denoting an assault landing.
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Mrs. H. J. Menefee has learned that her daughter, Evelyn Menefee, of the Army Nurses Corps, has been promoted to 1st Lieutenant. Lieutenant Menefee has been serving in France since November 1944.
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THIS IS AMERICA
Written by a member of a B-17 crew, fighting somewhere over Germany.
Back in the states nowadays you hear a lot of beefin’ about everything – gas, tires, cigarettes, nylons. It’s a good thing you do. It means that Americans still care. When you quit gripin’, you’ve lost interest. Gripin’ is just the good old American way of saying, “Let’s go.”
To a foreigner, America is an amazing, rather wonderful place; the average American can tell you it’s a pain in the neck. That’s just his way of claiming a part of it.
The kid selling papers on the street knows more about “patriotism” than the Elite guard, but he wouldn’t know how to spell it. Americanism isn’t screaming about love of country! It’s the right to play poker on Friday night and go to church on Sunday morning.
America is a guy with a silk hat and tails eating doughnuts and coffee in an all-night beanery. It’s reading the funnies first on Sunday morning; it’s turning off the war news to listen to Phil Baker or Fibber McGee; it’s soap operas and Vox-Pop and Mairzy Doats and Scrambly Amby.
America is vast forests and magnificent buildings and dams and highways and Coney Island and Macy’s. It’s also apple pie and baked beans and hot dogs and True Confessions.
It’s St. Paul’s Cathedral and a preacher on a mule. It’s the sign on a door that says, “Rubenstein, Finkelstein, Cohen and O’Grady.
It’s high heels and slacks and a mink coat; it’s being in a hurry with no place to go and nothing to do when you get there.
It’s kids that jabber jive, and kids that say, “Sighted Sub, sank same.”
It’s kids that fight to hear Harry James, and kids that fight on a coral atoll for an ideal.
It’s people that love to laugh at a hanging and cry at Al Jolson.
It’s people that love to hunt, but hate to kill; people that love the woods and cut them down; people that save tin cans and paper sacks and toothpaste tubes and throw away enough food in the garbage can every day to feed a nation.
It’s people that yell their heads off about the way the country is run, and forget to vote.
America’s best people go to Reno, and its worst go to church.
America is kids in bobby socks screaming for the Voice, and kids in bobby socks who are building the planes that bomb Tokyo. Its housewives with a welding torch.
It’s everything big and everything small; everything good and everything bad; it’s for everything and against everything.
It can’t be built up and it can’t be torn down.
It just grows and its people grow with it. It’s a big brawling, good natured, evil tempered giant that sleeps and eats and wakes and stretches and wakes the world with its laughter or its anger.
It grew up the hard way and refuses to grow old.
It’s the most tolerant and the most vengeful. It’s a polyglot of every ism, affected by all, and ineffected by none. It has everything it has and appreciates none of it.
It’s the best there is and the worst there is, and you can’t get along with or without it, so you get to be just a little bit like all of it. – Yank Magazine
BODY FOUND
A body, identified as that of James Lee Bowers, aged about 70 years, was found in a shallow grave in a cornfield on Buckley Mountain, near Stillwell, last Saturday morning.
There was a bullet wound in the chest and the chest crushed in over the heart. The body bore the appearance of having been dead for about a month.
Squire T. S. McNeel held an inquest. The finding of the coroner and jury was that James Lee Bowers had come to his death from a gunshot wound and injuries to his chest at the hands of person or persons unknown.
The deceased known as Buster Bowers, had been missing since June 11. The law officers have been searching for him for several weeks. The Sheriff and his deputies, the State Police and Town Police found the body.
Up to the time this was written, no arrest has been made.
LOST – MY WIFE
Will the man who stole her and my Grape-Nuts please bring back the Grape-Nuts? I can run a farm without a wife – but not without the energy in those malty rich, sweet-as-a-nut Grape Nuts!