Got to Go Now: An Oregon Gi Writes Home During World War Ii

© 2002 by Edsel V. Colvin. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the author.

ISBN: 0-7596-9354-4 (e-book)

ISBN: 0-7596-9355-2 (Paperback)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2002100578

1stBooks-rev. 09/19/02

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Editor’s Acknowledgements

Editor’s Note

Prologue

Mother Nature’s Son  (Rocky Peak Lookout, Summer 1941) 

Leaving Home (Pacific University, Fall 1941-Spring 1942)

Back to Nature (Grizzly Mtn. and Rocky Peak Lookouts, Summer 1942)

Back to School (Pacific University, Fall 1942-Winter 1943)

You’re in the Army Now! (Basic Training, Winter-Spring 1943)

Out of the Frying Pan… (ASTP, Spring 1943—Spring 1944)

Back to the Basics (Camp Howze, Texas, Spring-Summer 1944)

…Into the Fire (France, Fall 1944)

The Battle of the Bulge (France, Fall 1944-Winter 1945)

Back to the Front (France, Germany and Austria, Winter-Spring 1945)

Sweating it Out (Austria, Germany, and France, Spring-Summer 1945)

Hurry Up and Wait (France and Texas, Summer-Fall 1945)

Epilogue

Appendix

About the Author

Dedication

For my friends who didn’t come back

And Lea, Brook, BriAnne, Alex, Stephen, Catherine, Carrie, Juliet, Penny, Cathy, and Paul.

-Edsel V. Colvin

November 2001

Editor’s Acknowledgements

The two biggest thank yous go to the letter writers and the letter keepers. My grandfather Frank, my dad Edsel, and my Aunt Nete (Juanita) kept up a remarkable correspondence from the time Dad left Gold Beach in the summer of 1941 to work on the lookouts to the time he returned home from the Service four years later. None of Grandpa’s or Aunt Nete’s letters remain because Dad was usually on the move and had to travel light, but Grandpa wrote almost daily during the time Dad was overseas. The correspondence is all the more amazing because my grandfather is said to have gone into a school only once in his life, and that was Edsel’s high school graduation. He was basically a self-taught reader and writer. And he kept every letter that was sent to him.

Thanks to my sister and author Penny Colvin, good friend Tim Hahn, Curry County historian Walt Schroeder, and author/editor Pat Arnold for their advice on publishing as well as ideas on content. Susan Irish, local graphic arts designer, did an incredible job on the cover. My cousins, Marcia Smallwood and Merry Shipps generously helped with letters and pictures from their collections. Bill Stuart, current principal of GBHS, provided the names from the WWII plaque housed at the high school. My mother, Lea Colvin, did a great job going over the letters and finding things that needed more explanation. Thanks also go to Jim and Molly Walker for reminding me about the letters in their article in the Curry County Reporter.

Finally, thanks to my family, and especially my wife Diana for putting up with my frequent absences while I was working with Dad’s letters and for answering my questions on content, spelling, punctuation, and grammar.

Paul Colvin

Editor’s Note

This book is a father-son project. Well, actually it’s more of a father-son/son-father project. The letters are from my dad, Edsel Colvin to his dad, Frank Colvin from the time Edsel graduated from high school in 1941 until he got out of the Army in 1945.

Dad’s letters follow a small-town Oregon boy from his idyllic summer job as a fire lookout overlooking the Pacific Ocean in the Coast Range in 1941, where he was alone for weeks at a time, to the bitter French winter of 1944-45 when he saw his first combat and a fortuitous, but painful, hospital stay. They continue after the end of the war in Europe in May through the summer of 1945, when he was sweating out whether he was going to be sent to fight the Japanese in the Pacific Theater. They end in the fall of 1945 with his long-awaited discharge from the Army in Texas and his return to civilian life in Gold Beach.

I always knew about Dad’s letters from the ‘40s, but they were tucked away in the basement behind the water heater. He hardly ever talked about his experiences in the war when I was little, but I did get to see (and play with) some of the stuff he brought home from Germany. I was the only kid on my block who had a real German helmet to wear when I played army with my friends in the hills behind our house on Sixth Street in Gold Beach.

An article about my parents in the Curry County (OR) Reporter in the Spring of 2000 reminded me that Dad’s letters still existed and that they should see the light of day again. (Dad was an unofficial war correspondent for the Reporter during his time on the front lines in 1944 and ‘45. Grandpa would take Dad’s letters down to the Reporter office and they were printed in a war news column. His letters were read with interest by the community that helped raise him.) I asked Dad if I could transcribe them and that was the start of typing a shoebox full of 300 or so letters into the computer.

It was also the start of hundreds of emails, phone calls, and conversations between Dad and me about the letters. When I wanted to know more about the lookouts or some of the combat experiences that didn’t make it into his heavily censored wartime letters, Dad was always willing to answer my questions.

While working with my father’s letters, I relearned a lot about him:

•   that he was smart and he worked hard, a powerful combination that served him well in college and in the Service, and later as a father, teacher, principal and superintendent of schools in Gold Beach.

•   that he was a dutiful son and brother, writing weekly and sometimes daily to his father and sisters, especially during the periods when his life was in danger, letting them know what he was doing and how he was feeling and telling them not to worry.

•   that he could face danger and not run away from it.

•   that even through some of the roughest times he could usually see some humor in a situation or at least a recognition of that’s just the way it is, so let’s get on with things.

•   that he is a survivor and that he had more than his fair share of good luck. You can’t make it through several winter months as an infantryman (read foot soldier) on the front lines in France and Germany, without being a survivor. You can’t have a bad case of hemorrhoids and get sent to a hospital well behind the front lines at the exact instant that the Germans start their last gasp attempt at winning the war, the famous Battle of the Bulge offensive, and not say you’re lucky. In my platoon there were six killed, four captured, and 10 wounded during two days of action, he wrote after getting back to his squad from the hospital stay.

I also learned why our family hardly ever went camping: Dad must have had his fill of sleeping on the ground during the mid-1940s.

These letters show an average citizen soldier’s life. There is not much in the way of graphic accounts of a front-line soldier’s life or precise military accounts of every move that his squad made. Once he was on his way overseas, all his letters were censored for any sensitive military information. Loose lips sink ships was the thinking during those times. There are a couple letters where portions were literally razor-bladed out by his censor, apparently because he gave too many details about his squad’s whereabouts or activities.

There are what we now call politically incorrect expressions, like Japs, Dagos, Jerries, and Krauts. These were common expressions of the times and are left intact. As Alvin Josephy Jr. says in The Long and the Short and the Tall, In the war years it was different. The use of such terms was part of our daily life, and… I hope that today’s reader will view their use now only as a part of history. Most of the letters are printed without any editing, but some, especially during the University of Oklahoma period, have been shortened.

It has been a pleasure and an honor to work with Dad’s letters. Although this book is primarily for family, I hope others will also enjoy it.

Paul Colvin

November 2001

Prologue

The first thing I remember was that I had difficulty in understanding why all of my friends had a mother and I didn’t.

I guess I was too young to understand about death, so all I knew was that I didn’t have a real mother. There were lots of women I called Aunt, even though most of them weren’t really my aunt. The reason I didn’t have a mother was that she died when I was a little over a year old.

Estella Jane Miller Colvin and son Edsel in Spring 1924, shortly before her death from causes related to childbirth.

My dad, Frank Colvin, hired housekeepers to take care of my three sisters and me and I guess I really never got too attached to any of them because most of them didn’t last too long. I think there was some conflict between my sisters and the housekeepers and so they just moved on and Dad would hire another one. I’m not sure how many of those housekeepers we had from the time my mother died until I was about eight, but there were several.

Aunt Hattie Hall was one of the housekeepers who kept things running at the house while Frank worked at the store. When Edsel’s sister Juanita turned 13 she took over as chief cook and bottle washer.

Not all of the housekeepers were bad. It was just that they couldn’t replace my mother, and my sisters resented them trying to do that. Since I didn’t know any better, I got along with them just fine and still remember a couple of them that I really liked; Aunt Hattie Hall and Aunt Linnie Snodgrass were like mothers to me and I’m sure I really loved them.

When I was about eight, my sister Juanita, who was five years older than me, took over the duties as housekeeper. She did all of the housework, cooking, and took care of my sister, Marjorie, and me. And of course she went to school all day in addition to that. Quite a job for a thirteen-year old girl.

Margie was two years older than Edsel. She married Cliff Moore in 1939 and settled in Crescent City, CA.

Dad purchased the Gold Beach Confectionery in 1921 and rented a house a block away on what is now Colvin Street. That is where I was born two years later and where my mother died three years later.

Frank Colvin purchased the Gold Beach Confectionery from Dave Frame in 1921 and rented a house a block away on what is now Colvin Street. He later turned the Confectionery into a sporting goods store specializing in fishing equipment. Edsel learned a lot about the world in the store’s back room, where many of the town’s old timers hung out. The store was razed when Highway 101 was widened in the late ‘40s.

The Confectionery was a place where you could buy candy, magazines, newspapers, tobacco of all kinds (cigarettes, cigars, pipe tobacco, chewing tobacco), ice cream, soft drinks including near beer (since this was during Prohibition), guns, ammunition, fishing tackle, souvenirs, cosmetics, and a lot of other things. In the back room of the store there were pool, billiard, and card tables. Plus there was a huge old stove that Dad used to keep going all day and half the night. He would burn wood, paper, and old tires that he cut in pieces. They really made a hot fire.

In 1922 the Confectionery was a place where you could buy candy, magazines, newspapers, tobacco of all kinds, ice cream, soft drinks, including near beer, guns, ammunition, fishing tackle, souvenirs, and cosmetics.

From the time I was eight to fourteen years old I gained a considerable amount of education in the back room of Dad’s store in subjects that were not usually taught in school. This is where all of the old timers in Gold Beach would gather to spin big tales, spit on the hot stove, play pinochle, and shoot pool or billiards. Dad made me a bench to stand on and he cut the back end off a pool cue so I could shoot pool. I really got pretty good at it for a kid my age. I also learned a lot about hunting, fishing, politics, and life in general in that back room. I can even remember spending some pretty long evenings at the store and occasionally I ended up sleeping on one of the pool tables until Dad closed up the store at nine or ten o’ clock.

One of the great things about growing up in Gold Beach in the 1920s and ‘30s was that I was like a son or nephew or grandson to every one of those old timers. Actually they weren’t that old, some of them being in their thirties and forties, but to an eight-year old they all seemed pretty ancient.

The Gold Beach Confectionery was a popular hangout for bridge workers, fishermen, and one little boy. Left to right: Hugh High Pockets Patchetts, Fred Wustholtz, Unknown, Johnny Woodruff, Edsel Colvin, Warren Bauer, Charlie Caughell, and Joe Smith. Edsel got a lot of education in the ways of the world in the back room of his dad’s store.

Most of the men in Gold Beach were employed as commercial fishermen on the Rogue River. They fished during the spring and fall months and then, to the best of my knowledge, they didn’t do much of anything during the winter except sit around the back room of Dad’s store and tell stories and spit tobacco. Some of them hunted and trapped during the coldest months, but there wasn’t really any work for them to do because it was before the days of logging to any great extent. My Uncles Ted and Vic Miller used to do quite a bit of hunting for cougar, bobcat, and coyotes and apparently made enough money on bounties to carry them through the winter.

Prohibition didn’t stop the old timers who had the money and wanted to buy moonshine whiskey. And it seemed to me that an awfully lot of them wanted to buy it. The bootleg whiskey was usually in pint bottles and when someone would buy a bottle they would have to hide it because they didn’t want to get caught with it. Another kid and I found where a couple of these guys hid their bottles.

After they left and went into the pool hall or someplace else, we would take their bottles and hide them in a different place. A week or two later we would go to the back door of the pool hall where they were playing poker and sell the whiskey to one of the men there. I imagine we might have sold some to the same people we stole it from. Anyway, we always sold it at a cut rate to make spending money. Some of the men who would hide their booze were too drunk to remember where they had hid it and wouldn’t even remember they had any to hide.

My dad’s brother, Uncle Henry, was one of the regulars in the back room of the store and perhaps the most accomplished tobacco spitter of all. The stove had a small hole near the top on one side and Uncle Henry could hit that hole with a stream of tobacco juice from about five feet back. All of the others just hit the hot stove with a loud hiss and a lot of steam.

The Rogue River Bridge was started in 1930 and completed in 1932, when I was 9 years old. There was quite an influx of workers to work on the bridge and some of them made Dad’s store their home away from home. Dad started adding more fishing tackle to his merchandise and that was the end of the Confectionery and the beginning of F. D. Colvin Sporting Goods. Sport fishing was becoming more popular and these bridge workers, along with the tourists, were a real boon to Dad’s business.

Dad always wore three-piece suits to the store. When the suits were worn out the housekeepers would use the good material that was left to make short pants for me. I can still remember my first day at school when I had short pants and long socks and all of the other boys had overalls or some other kind of long pants on. I think I rebelled so much at this that Dad finally told the housekeepers no more short pants for me. There was nothing worse than being called a sissy because I was definitely anything but that having spent so much time in the back room of the store. In fact I probably taught the bigger kids at school a few things about life and perhaps enhanced their vocabulary with some words they had never heard before. I guess my growing up in the company of so many male adults who chewed tobacco, smoked big pipes, drank bootleg whiskey, cussed a lot, and played pool and cards would be considered child abuse today.

I had lots of real aunts and uncles in the Gold Beach area as well as two grandmothers and a grandfather. My paternal grandmother, Miriam Dougherty Colvin, was too old to spend much time with me, and my paternal grandfather, Henry Sam Colvin died in 1919 so I never even knew him. I used to see Grandma Colvin once in awhile, but only for short visit.

Paternal Grandfather Henry Sam Colvin died 4 years before Edsel was born. He came across the Plains from Pennsylvania in 1852 and settled in Southern Oregon where he raised a family of 10. One of those 10 was Frank D. Colvin, Edsel’s dad.

But my Grandma and Grandpa Miller were quite a bit younger and I used to spend a lot of time with them. They had a big two-story house on First Street in Gold Beach, right across the street from the old primary school, with lots of good food in it.

I walked over to Grandma Miller’s after school almost every day when I was in first, second, and third grades and she always had something good for me to eat, like pie, cake, or cookies.

Gold Beach was full of Millers in the 1920 and ‘30s, and most of them were related to Edsel. Married names of women, if known, are in parentheses. Front row: Marjorie Colvin (Moore), Edsel Colvin, Elton Miller, Barbara Miller (Guerin). Second row: Alice Wheeler, Jessie Turner (Jensen), Juanita Colvin (Bauer Johnson), Nancy Buffington (Starkweather), Jane Turner (Day), Amelia Midge Miller (Moore), Myra Owens (Prevics), Jeanne Richardson (Proeger), Margaret Averill. Back Row: Berniece Averill, Edna Maupin (Miller).

Edsel visited his mother’s grave for this picture taken in 1927.

During my seventh, eighth, and ninth summers I stayed with Grandma and Grandpa Miller while they ran a campground just below the mouth of Lobster Creek, about twelve miles up the north bank of the Rogue River from Gold Beach. This was a real campground, where people camped in tents, got their water out of a small creek that ran through the campground, and went to the bathroom in a real old-fashioned two-holer outhouse. Most of the meals were cooked over campfires, although some of the campers used Coleman stoves. There was no electricity, even in my grandparent’s shed of a house that they lived in during the summer.

They always had a big garden by the campground and we had to pack water from the river in buckets to water the tomatoes every evening. The days were all mine and all I had to do was fish in Lobster Creek or the river. We never ran out of fish to eat during those summers; in fact, Grandma Miller said she could eat only so much fish, so we gave a lot of it to the campers. I guess my grandparents never worried about me wandering all around the countryside up around Lobster Creek, or at least they never said anything about it. Actually there wasn’t anything to worry about except that I could have fallen in the river and drowned, but since that never happened I guess they were right not to worry.

A very proud seven-year-old Edsel stands next to his first salmon, a 20-pounder. He was hooked on fishing from that point on. The salmon was hooked while trolling at John’s Hole, a couple of miles upriver from Gold Beach.

The rivers and creeks were full of fish. Once Dad came up to the campground from Gold Beach and we fished in a place called Mill Creek Slough. The river water was quite warm in the late summer months and the creek was very cold so the steelhead would go up into the slough and just lie there waiting to be caught. Dad and I hooked steelhead on every cast using a small spinner.

I don’t remember how many we caught, but we fished until we were both tired and then rowed back across the river to the campground. Having a Dad who owned a fishing tackle store and liked to fish was about the greatest thing a kid could imagine back then.

Edsel, shown at age

10, was free to fish as much as he pleased during the summers. Native trout were plentiful in all the creeks around Gold Beach.

Grandpa Miller always had deer meat during the summer, even though the season didn’t officially open until September. All of the people who lived along the river killed deer whenever they needed meat and no one bothered them. Curry County was quite remote and lived by its own rules in a lot of ways.

He also made home brew beer. I didn’t know if it was legal or not, but I got the feeling that it wasn’t something that was talked about too much. I remember hearing an occasional loud pop at night when the top would blow off one of the bottles in the store room. I also remember that I stole a bottle of his home brew and buried it in the little creek that ran through the campground and I guess I thought that some day I would get nerve enough to drink it, but that was my last summer at Lobster Creek. I had to leave early because I got a bad case of poison oak and they sent me home to recuperate.

The Accident

After I came home from the Lobster Creek campground and got over the poison oak I spent the rest of the summer playing with my friends in town. Since Tarzan was all the rage about that time we spent a good deal of time climbing trees and trying to imitate him. We didn’t have the vines to swing from, but we did tie ropes from limbs and swing from them.

One time that summer I was playing with some of my friends (Marjorie Sutton, Doris Moore, and Warren Bean) and I was climbing a tree and got too far out on a limb. The limb was rotten and broke and I came flying down several feet out of the tree. On the way down my upper lip and nose got tangled up with the jagged end of another branch and tore my upper lip and nose open. It also knocked me unconscious, so I don’t really remember anything from that time on until I woke up on the operating table and Dr. Wilbur Cartwright was sewing up my lip and nose. He couldn’t give me ether or gas because of the condition of my nose and local anesthetics hadn’t made it to Gold Beach by then, I guess. Anyway, I know they had to hold me down while he finished sewing me up and I was hospitalized with my life on the line for several days due to such a large loss of blood. Apparently they didn’t give transfusions then, at least not in Gold Beach.

When I fell out of the tree, Warren ran down to a service station that was about four hundred yards away and got the owner, C. O. Hervey, to come and pick me up and carry me over to George and Vera Sutton’s house which was close by. He also did the best he could to stop the bleeding or else I wouldn’t have survived.

I spent the next six weeks in a room across the hall from Dr. Cartwright’s office in the Hickok Hotel and Dr. Cartwright’s nurse, Oda Sabin, stayed with me and took care of me during that time. This was Gold Beach’s version of a hospital in the 1930s.

Margie, Juanita, Aina, and Edsel Colvin posed for this picture around 1926. A series of housekeepers took care of the younger children after their mother died in 1924, while Aina spent most of the time at her grandparents’ house.

While I was recuperating and staying in the hotel I used to have lots of visitors, but other than my father and my sisters, I particularly remember two people, Bob Caughell and Moss Averill. I guess the reason I remember them is that they were both very happy people and always wanted to cheer me up and, in fact, had me laughing most of the time, and every time I laughed it would hurt my lip. They also taught me how to whistle using my fingers or by cupping my hands. I couldn’t whistle in the normal manner because I couldn’t make my lips pucker. This might not sound very important, but to me it was really something because when I got back to school I could whistle in more ways than anyone else and was looked up to by the other boys. They all wanted me to teach them how to whistle using their fingers and hands.

The Accident

When I was about 12 years old my sister Juanita was washing clothes in the kitchen where we had the washing machine and I was in the backyard with my .22 rifle shooting at cans and bottles. I got the bright idea of rubbing a blackberry on my forehead and shooting the gun in the air and then screaming bloody murder. I came running, or staggering rather, into the house with blackberry juice running down my face not realizing that a big blackberry seed had stuck to my forehead. It really did look just like a bullet hole. Juanita panicked and was ready to rush me to Dr. Cartwright until the seed fell off and she could see what had really happened. I don’t remember too much of what happened after that. Perhaps I have just blocked it out of my mind because it was probably not too pleasant! I do know that it was the last time I tried anything like that.

School in Gold Beach

When I started first grade in 1929 (short pants and all) the population of Gold Beach was about 400 and not a very mobile population like today. Most of the kids who started first grade with me also graduated from high school with me in 1941. There were some additions and deletions along the way. Some of those additions were kids who failed a grade or two and we caught up with them. It was not unusual for a student to spend more than one year in a grade and sometimes after failing several grades just drop out of school and never finish.

The original Gold Beach Grade School was built around 1911 and torn down in the 1930s. The school’s play shed was used as a temporary school while the new building was under construction.

During my eight years in grade school I had only four teachers. We had two grades to each room with one teacher and approximately thirty kids to the room. In first and second grades my teacher was Frances Fromm, Lex Fromm’s aunt. In the third and fourth grades my teacher was Mrs. McNeely, who later became Mrs. George Mateer. In the fifth and sixth grades Mrs. Kathryn Smith was my teacher and in the seventh and eighth grades Lex Fromm was the teacher and principal.

The combined fifth and sixth grades of Gold Beach School in 1934. Married names of women, if known, are in parentheses. Front row: Norman Sonny Boyd, Charles Chic Stafford, Ivan Jones, Russell Forty, Kenneth Kirkpatrick, Leonard Carpenter, Mertie Miller, and Warren McNeely. Second row: Doris Lea Moore (Freeman), Jean Byram (Ornlin), Edsel Colvin, Lois Jean Kirkpatrick, Bill Bean, Wallace Bullard, Warren Bean, Pauline Briggs (Crook), Frances Miller (Rutledge), and John Backman. Third row: Maxine Miller (Cook), Marjorie Sutton (Munday), Elizabeth Emma Blair, Ruth Appling, Mickey Miller, Betty Turner (Thomas), Jean Helen Jones, Barbara Miller (Guerin), Marguerite Hogue, and Twila Lewis. Back row: Eldon LeClair, Lloyd Miller, Emmett Douthit, Kathryn L. Smith (teacher), Ann Buffington (Ryan), Orie LeClair, and Justin Miller.

Of all of the teachers that I ever had I would have to say that Lex Fromm was the best. He was a strong disciplinarian, but you always knew where you stood with him. You did things his way! He was an outstanding athlete himself when he was in high school and college and he wanted all of us to have an opportunity to participate in athletics. He organized basketball teams for the boys and track teams for the boys and girls and everyone from the first through the eighth grade could take part in the program. This was the first time that anyone had ever done anything like that for the kids in grade school and the program was so successful that the high school students were really jealous of us.

A highly respected educator and athlete, Lex Fromm was a major influence in young Edsel’s life. Lex, along with his wife, Georgia, treated Edsel almost like a son for several years. They took him to ball games, fishing, and to Lex’s parents for weekends.

When I say that he was a disciplinarian I really mean it. If you didn’t toe the line, you could get the paddle to the seat of your pants. And it didn’t take us long to find out who the boss was!

Mr. Fromm taught at the grade school from 1935 until about 1946, with a couple of years out while he was in the Navy during World War II. When Mr. Fromm (known as Prof’ by the adults in Gold Beach) first came to Gold Beach we were going to school in a converted playshed." The old grade school, which had been built in 1911, was a two-story building. When the wind blew real hard the building would rock and sway. This prompted the school board to declare it unsafe and to start building a new school.

But before the new school could be built we had to go to school for two years in the old playshed. It was originally built as a covered play area and was converted to a school building by partitioning it off into four rooms complete with large wood burning stoves in each room. It also featured two outside toilets, each with two holes and during stormy weather it was quite a challenge to run to the outhouse and back to school.

The first year I went to school in the playshed was when I was in the sixth grade. Hardly a day went by without us being bombarded by the seventh and eighth graders who were in the next room and would throw things like paper airplanes, BB’s or other objects over the partitions between the rooms. Then along came Mr. Fromm the next year and we thought we could do to the sixth graders what had been done to us the previous year. I’m not sure who tried to throw something over the partition first, but I do know he was the last one. We found out in a hurry that was not acceptable behavior in Mr. Fromm’s class when we heard the guilty one getting paddled. None of the rest of us wanted any part of that.

Gold Beach’s 1936 Baseball team included batboy Edsel Colvin. Standing, left to right: A.R. Bishop, Manager; George Schmidt, Ellsworth Bullard, Lex Fromm, Maurice Shorty Walker, Jimmy Daniels, Marion Anderson, Buster Wessell. Seated, left to right: Averill Tony Walker, Charlie Caughell, Elwood Bugs Oliphant, ____ Frye, Cecil Shaw, Lefty Price, Jack Caughell, Bunny Miller. Kneeling: Edsel Colvin, bat boy.

Lex, along with his wife, Georgia, treated me almost like a son for several years and since they had no children of their own it worked out real well. They took me to ball games, fishing, to Lex’s parents for weekends, and had me in their home for dinner many times. They gave me a lot of good advice over the years. Lex was a big influence on my life.

I started my freshman year at Gold Beach High School in 1937. I was about five feet two inches tall and weighed in at less than 100 pounds. I wanted to be on the basketball team, but realized my chances were quite limited, so when Lex organized a team for the eighth and ninth graders I jumped at the chance to play. We competed against other teams in the county and were quite successful. In fact we even played the high school varsity team one time in practice and gave them a