Becton: Autobiography of a Soldier and Public Servant

PROLOGUE

Pusan, 1950

"L ieutenant Becton, the old man wants to see you." So said the messenger from company headquarters.

I immediately stopped trying to get my platoon organized and reported to Capt. Bill Porter, the ordinarily gregarious company commander. This time Bill’s words were few. His puzzled look said, What in the hell is going on? but all he said aloud was, They want to see you at battalion. When I asked why, he said sharply, Get your butt up there!

The battalion operations officer, Maj. Windy Phillips, second senior black officer in the battalion and a World War II combat veteran, was almost as cryptic as Porter. Becton, they want to see you at regiment. There is a jeep waiting to take you there and a truck for your men, Phillips said.

The company commander, I explained, had said nothing about my platoon. You will only need about half a squad, Phillips replied. What in the world is going on, sir? I asked. All I know is that regiment called and said have you report to regimental headquarters with your soldiers, he said. You don’t have much time to waste. Be sure to take all your gear.

When the messenger found me, we had been in Pusan, Korea, for less than twenty-four hours, so this was rather heady stuff. Rumors were flying that we were getting our butts kicked: The U.S. Forces were being pushed back by the North Koreans into something called the Pusan Perimeter. And now I was off to God knows where.

As we bounced along a very bumpy road to Taegu, the location of the 9th Infantry regimental headquarters, I was at a total loss. Try as I might, I could not think of any reason for what was happening. The fact that both my company commander and the battalion operations officer (S-3) were apparently in the dark added to my apprehension.

We reached Taegu and found the regimental command post and the operations center. Having commanded the 9th Infantry Regimental Drill Team back at Fort Lewis, I knew quite a few of the officers and noncommissioned officers (NCOs) in the S-3’s shop. There was no time for conversation as I was rushed in. After a brief, How are you doing? the harried S-3 informed me that my battalion, the 3rd Battalion, would move out this evening, heading to Pohang. I was to proceed there with a large radio rig for task force command communications.

I had a lot of questions. Why me? Why is the only black infantry battalion in the division being moved out? What’s our mission? Will the regiment follow? I only managed to ask about Pohang’s location, to whom I would report, and the expected enemy situation en route.

Personnel in the S-3’s office laid out maps and sketched the route. No enemy had been reported in the area, I was assured. The 3rd Battalion would be part of Task Force Bradley, so named because it was headed up by Assistant Division Commander Brig. Gen. Sladen Bradley. It would include elements of the division engineers, artillery, and other support units. Frankly, I did not give any thought to the fact that this task force would be integrated, made up of all white units except for my black infantry battalion and led by a white commander.

After a quick field meal, my unit and I headed east toward Pohang with a two-and-a-half-ton radio truck, a trailer, a three-quarters-ton truck, and a jeep. We moved through hills and valleys, which were fairly wooded with considerable underbrush. Certain points seemed to me to be ideal places for an ambush. I tried to banish the thought, recalling that regiment had said, No sweat, because no enemy activity had been reported nearby.

We arrived at our destination, the Yonil Air Field, at about 0430 hours. Uneventful. Mission accomplished.

Little did I know how close we had come to death. While we waited at the airbase for the rest of the battalion to join us, we caught a few winks, then woke abruptly to the news that the battalion had been ambushed and sustained casualties in the same area we had passed through. Obviously, the ambushers let my squad through, not appreciating the significance of our cargo.

This was the first time I really appreciated my guardian angel—that unseen something that always seems to be present, aligning the stars and providing protection from near misses, that sixth sense that whispers, You don’t want to do that.

CHAPTER ONE

Growing up on the Main Line

Iwas born on Tuesday, 29 June 1926, to Julius Wesley and Rose Banks Becton in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. For the most part, it was an uneventful day. The only notables were my birth weight—a sizeable nine and one-half pounds—and the fact that I was birthed in Bryn Mawr Hospital. At the time, many black mothers did not have access to medical facilities and gave birth at home. A year later my brother, Joseph William Becton, joined our family.

That unseen protective force I first truly recognized in Korea must have been watching over me from the start. Two years into my life, I contracted diphtheria, an acute bacterial disease that was common in the 1930s and claimed many lives, especially among children. I was at death’s door. It was the grace of God and the efforts of Dr. Monroe Tunnell, a black physician, that made the difference. I survived.

During the Great Depression, my brother and I were joined by Barbara Godett, who for all practical purposes became our sister. John Godett and my father had been childhood friends back in North Carolina and had reconnected as adults in Philadelphia. They were both married, and each had two sons. When Barbara was born on 2 June 1934, her mother, Violet, became very ill and was hospitalized for seven months. My parents offered to care for Barbara. As she described the situation in a letter to me, Mom and Daddy Becton became my godparents, and Julius and Joe became my brothers. [Suddenly, I had] four brothers and two sets of parents.

Home was a two-bedroom basement apartment in the Bryn Mawr Courts Apartments on the northwest corner of Morris and Montgomery Avenues. This was a twenty-four-unit, horseshoe-shaped building whose tenants included railroad magnates, lawyers, bankers, and the like. At the very least, an apartment unit sold for about $10,000, which was a lot of money in the 1920s and 1930s.

The former Bryn Mawr Courts Apartments, now called College Hall Apartments, at 801 Montgomery Avenue and Morris Road, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. (Taken by Ted Goldsborough October 1996; courtesy of the Lower Merion Historical Society)

Left to right: Me, Mom, Dad, and Joe. (Author collection)

Bryn Mawr is in a wealthy area of Pennsylvania known as the Main Line. As I remember, it lacked much of the racial tension that plagued many parts of the United States, probably because few blacks could afford to live there and most of those who did held nonthreatening positions serving the white community. Perhaps the fact that we were rare explains something I remember clearly from when Joe and I were three and four years old. We would be playing outside, and white teenage girls and young women en route to one of the nearby private schools or Bryn Mawr College would often pat us on the head and touch us under the chin. Maybe they thought we were novelties, with our black skin and nappy hair!

I perceived no derisive or derogatory intent. As a child, you can often tell when a touch does not feel right, and that was not the case with these girls and women. I think it was just innocent curiosity.

My father was the head janitor for our apartment building. Five or six black women who worked as maids in the units upstairs also lived in the basement, along with a male assistant janitor. We developed into a very close-knit group, a little village of very hardworking, religious people. In such an environment, Joe and I found it exceedingly difficult to get away with any mischief. There was always someone to tell on us when we misbehaved.

As a janitor my father earned about thirty-five dollars every two weeks with benefits. For one, our apartment was rent-free. We also received free milk and ice. This was because the iceman and milkman perceived my father to be the building’s gatekeeper. Whether this was true, I do not know. But you could say my father controlled access to the market of residents upstairs and accepted small gratuities from various tradesmen.

My father’s position also allowed him to help our relatives. Twelve of the apartment units upstairs had maid’s quarters in the basement that my father controlled. This translated into a place to stay, and one less worry, for a relative from the South who was trying to get a fresh start up North. From age eight or nine, I do not recall a time that a relative or close friend was not visiting. The visitors included James Robert Bob Williams, whom I tagged as my mother’s third son and who later became my best man. His family lived in Haverford Township, but he aspired to be a medical doctor and wanted to attend Lower Merion Senior High School, so he came to live with us during his last two years of high school.

All in all, we lived very well. My father’s job, coupled with my mother’s work as a housekeeper and laundress, amply provided for us. I cannot remember a day when we went hungry—something many blacks of that era could not say.

My parents were quite frugal when it came to money. Things we could do for ourselves without spending, we did. I was almost a teenager before I had my first barbershop haircut. Every two weeks, Dad sat Joe and me on a stool and cut our hair. He got to be pretty good at it.

There were no personal telephones in any of the basement units, just a pay phone shared by all. I believe we could have afforded phone service in our apartment. My mother was against this, however. Her view was that if we had a phone, all the neighbors would be knocking down our door to use it.

All the residents in the basement complex were churchgoers. There were two black churches in Bryn Mawr and on Sundays, we split. Half went to the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church and the other half, including my family, attended Saints Memorial Baptist Church. At the age of five, I decided to be baptized. I cannot honestly say that I had some magnificent rapture or sudden longing to cleanse my original sin. It just seemed like the thing to do at the time.

For my mother and us children, Sundays were completely dedicated to church. A typical Sunday began with the weekly family reading of the Bible, followed by the blessing and breakfast. At 10:30 AM, it was off to Junior Church. The regular service—the only part my father attended—lasted from 11:00 AM to sometime between 12:30 PM and 1:00 PM, and that was followed by an hour and a half of Sunday school. Sunday communion lasted from 3:00 PM to about 4:00 PM or 4:30 PM. I then attended the Baptist Youth Protestant Union from 6:45 PM to 8:00 PM, and concluded the day with the evening service. More than twelve hours of church!

I doubt that you could find a preacher who would say that you could get too much Jesus in one day. I would not say that myself. Nowadays, however, my wife Louise and I attend only the one-hour 10:30 AM service at the Fort Myer Memorial Chapel. That has been our practice for more than fifty years.

To say that my parents valued education would be an understatement. My father had a third-grade education. My mother had attended school until tenth grade, which was the highest level available during her school days. However, it was not even questioned that my brother and I would go to school and do our best. We attended the Bryn Mawr Grammar School from kindergarten through grade seven, and I missed only two days of class.

In third grade, my teacher was Miss Florence A. Rees. I remember her genuine concern when I got into trouble to this day. I was fortunate to have a teacher who actually cared about my well-being and growth. In fact, our school district always had some of the best, most loyal, dedicated, and caring teachers available. I don’t think any were crusading to bring equal educational opportunities or rights to blacks or other minority groups. They were not activists or saints, simply very good teachers. I never had a minority teacher during my entire K–12 years.

Beyond kindergarten, my school utilized a tracking system that divided students into tracks A—the higher level—and B. I started out in the A track and remained there through the third grade. In fourth grade, however, I was demoted to 4B—not for bad grades, but for bad behavior. What happened was that one day, a white boy and I took a white girl into the boys’ bathroom. I say took because I do not think she went willingly. Why I did it, I do not know. But after a thorough sentence of corporal punishment executed upon my rear end, I never considered doing such a thing again. I eventually returned to the A track in fifth grade.

All students in our school were required to play a musical instrument. I took up the clarinet, quickly dashing any dreams of my being the next Benny Goodman. My brother, who chose the violin, stuck it out a little longer but eventually realized he was never going to be a virtuoso. It is worth noting, though, that years later, Joe’s sons Jerry and Joseph turned out to be fine musicians.

Following grammar school, I attended Lower Merion Junior High School (renamed Ardmore Junior High School in 1939) for the eighth and ninth grades, then graduated to Lower Merion Senior High School, which was right next door. Lower Merion was and still is ranked in the top high schools in the nation, with a long and impressive list of distinguished alumni and all the trappings of a first-rate prep school.¹ When I attended, it offered every activity imaginable, including Riding Club. The student body totaled approximately 1,400. There were about 420 in my graduating class, and they represented three basic ethnic groups: white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (primarily the wealthy children of the Main Line), Italians, and blacks. There were also a few Asians. One of my good friends, Don Okada, had a German mother and a Japanese father, which was a noteworthy mix of ethnicities once World War II starting raging during our high school years.

Lower Merion’s excellent academic reputation was well deserved, and my high school curriculum was quite rigorous. I learned pretty fast, and I particularly liked any class that required mechanical activities, such as shop. I also enjoyed social studies and Portuguese, which was taught by Miss Nora Thompson, my homeroom teacher.

I struggled through biology and chemistry. Ironically, my parents had always expected me to become a physician—the epitome of success in black society at the time. In truth, I did have some interest in medicine, stemming from when I developed a series of boils under my right arm and Dr. Atkinson, then the only black doctor in Bryn Mawr, lanced them for me. I found the procedure fascinating. But my difficulties with the core courses of medical studies made it pretty clear that I was not meant to become a doctor.

When Joe and I got home from school, homework came first. No arguments. After we finished our schoolwork and Mom had conducted a cursory review, we were free to go outside and play or run errands for our family and for apartment tenants. I enjoyed running errands for the residents because doing so often meant generous tips.

There were also lots of chores to be done. During the heating season, Joe and I shoveled coal into the basement furnace and shoveled snow off the walks. In warm weather, we cut grass, although more often than not we got in the way of the serious grass cutter—our father. The onset of fall meant raking leaves around the property. We helped pick up trash all around the year.

A typical evening after dinner was spent listening to radio programs such as Amos ’n Andy or The Jack Benny Show. Some of those programs are now considered demeaning to black people, but such racial sensitivities came later.

There were no other black children in the apartment complex where we lived, and my brother and I did not play with the white children from upstairs. Throughout my school years, most of my close friends were black. My best friends in grammar school were Charles Harper and Charles Callahan.

Charles Callahan’s parents were servants on a wealthy estate in Bryn Mawr, and they had four sons who attended the grammar school. Often, the Callahan brothers, my brother, and I had to band together to protect ourselves from the bullies.

There is, of course, nothing unusual about bullies in school. What was troubling about our situation was that the bullies in question were black like us. They called us the white folks’ niggers, and they did not use that noun in an endearing sense, the way some blacks do today. We were white folks’ niggers because we were literally from the other side of the tracks—the white side of the Pennsylvania Railroad line that divided Bryn Mawr physically, economically, and ethnically.

Looking back on it, I would say those bullies demonstrated a crab mentality, a Willie Lynch syndrome in which blacks try to keep other blacks down rather than help to lift them up.² Fortunately, we left the bullying behind in grammar school. There was little, if any, of that at the junior and senior high schools.

My own family stressed constant, habitual respect for other people, especially for women and the elderly. From my earliest recollection, Dad hammered that lesson into our heads, and it goes without saying that he practiced what he preached. We were expected to open doors and hold them for women and older people. We were expected to offer up our seats on public transportation. When walking down the sidewalk with a female, we were expected to walk on the street side. I presume this was meant to shield them from the traffic in the event a vehicle ran off the road, although I have heard that before the widespread adoption of indoor plumbing, men walked on the street side to protect women from being hit by the contents of slop jars emptied from windows above.

Needless to say, the rules of respect extended to family members, living and dead, which was a reality that caused me considerable discomfort on at least one occasion. In January 1941, my father’s brother died. In keeping with the long-standing black custom of burying loved ones where they had been born, Uncle Will was to be buried in North Harlowe, North Carolina. I was appointed to accompany his casket on the journey from Philadelphia. I was fourteen, which made me old enough to understand death, but I was not all that keen about being around dead people. In recognition of the solemn nature of the occasion, I wore my Boy Scout uniform on the trip.

We had to change trains in Washington, D.C., and trains in the South were still very much segregated in 1941. Blacks sat in the passenger cars toward the front of the train, which placed them closest to the smoke and soot of the coal-fed engine, and whites sat farther back. The races shared eating facilities, but segregation was enforced by the clock: Blacks ate after the whites had finished, and if the black passengers were still eating when the train pulled into a station, crew members pulled the shades of the dining car so that white folks outside would not see the black diners. Rather than put up with this indignity, blacks often brought their own food on board and ate in their Jim Crow cars.

Needless to say, when I boarded the train in Washington, I sat up front in the colored section. But it was not the rules of segregation that disturbed me on that particular journey. Uncle Will’s remains were in the baggage car right in front of our coach. As far as I was concerned, that was much too close for comfort.

We arrived in New Bern, North Carolina, late in the evening, and ours was the very last train to stop that night. The station master had the casket moved into the baggage room, then he showed me to the station’s colored section next door, where there was a bench where I could sleep. Then he went home, telling me the undertaker would arrive in the morning. The station was empty except for me and Uncle Will. I had a very sleepless night.

I did not know for sure what I wanted to be when I grew up for much of my childhood. But I knew from an early age that I did not want to become a farmer.

Every year, from the time I was six or seven, Mom, Joe, and I spent two weeks visiting my mother’s birthplace in Caroline County, Virginia. My maternal grandfather, Randall Banks—Round Banks, as he was known—owned about twenty acres of land there, and he raised cucumbers, tobacco, corn, pigs, cows, and chickens. His house was on a dirt road, and it lacked certain comforts to which I had become accustomed. Sometime in the late 1930s or early 1940, my grandfather installed a pump in the kitchen, which meant we no longer had to carry buckets of water from the well outside. But the bathroom facilities continued to be an outhouse, and pages from the Sears & Roebuck catalog served as toilet paper. The house had no electricity, just a kerosene lantern for light.

I did enjoy much of the time I spent at my grandfather’s house. We fished for catfish and eel in nearby streams, and it was always thrilling to feel a tug on the line. Also, since religion was integral to my grandfather’s life, we usually attended two or three revivals during our stay. These were always memorable events. The preaching was spirited, and the singing was good. What I most enjoyed, though, were the food and the attention I got from the girls who liked black guys from up North.

Field work was another matter. I picked cucumbers, pulled suckers off tobacco, and cut corn. I slopped the hogs and milked a cow—once. I was, for the most part, a city boy. Out in the fields, I was ready to quit after three or four hours. It was really hard work! The only thing that kept me going was a determination not to be outdone by the others working in the fields.

After our time with my mother’s family, Dad would join us and we would drive to Craven County, North Carolina, to spend his fifteen days of vacation with his folks. My paternal grandfather lived in Harlowe and was also a farmer. We normally stayed with Dad’s sister, Aunt Ada, in Morehead City. Her husband, Curtis Horton, ran an oyster house in the winter, worked as a gardener during the summer, and served as a sexton at a white Methodist church.

I learned to swim in Morehead City, and I also spent a lot of time there fishing and crabbing. Morehead City was also where I got shot at for the first time.

I was five or six years old and playing down by the waters with my cousins Cecil, Hank, and Alphonzo Horton. Somebody had the bright idea of liberating a small rowboat that belonged to someone else. We were enjoying the ride until shots from a .22-caliber rifle rang out. Our assailant turned out to be a distant cousin who had decided to teach us a lesson. We learned it well. You never saw young boys get out of a boat so fast.

I always had a good time in Morehead City. I had a lot of relatives there. Aunt Ada had nine children, and Dad’s other sister, Sarah Sadie George, had seventeen. Aunt Sadie’s husband, Napoleon George, had a bad heart and almost never worked. I do not know how they made it from Aunt Sadie’s earnings as a domestic worker, but they did.

In 1934, when I was eight, we were in Morehead City for our annual visit. My cousin Al Horton was ten, and he was always bugging my father to let him drive our two-year-old Ford. One day, he persuaded my father to let him drive the car down the alley to wash it. As Al drove off, his older brothers Cecil and Hank showed up, along with Lonnie George, another cousin. Move over, Lonnie said to Al. You don’t know how to drive this car. The drive through the alley became what the law calls a frolic and detour. And not far from my Uncle Curtis’s house, Lonnie lost control. The car flipped over several times and landed on its top.

Some white passersby took the group to the hospital, but, luckily, no one was badly hurt. The car was totaled.

Hank was the first to leave the hospital, so he had a head start on explaining the accident at home. Even then he had the gift of gab, and this may have been his audition for his later career as a preacher and politician. He served three four-year terms as mayor of Morehead City.

My father took the news about his car in stride. He was not easily riled. But I think he also figured that since he had given the car keys to Al, he had to accept whatever happened. He wired the manager of the Bryn Mawr Courts Apartments that his car had been totaled, requesting money to buy a new one. The money was immediately sent, and the next day Dad went to the Ford dealership. Dad had always driven a Ford.

I am sure he thought he would be able to buy a new car without a hassle. After all, money was no object. But the people at the dealership did not know that. All they saw was a black man—somebody to be ignored at will—so they ignored him. Dad was extremely patient, but anybody can get tired of waiting. Finally, he left.

He went to the Chevrolet dealership the next day and bought a new car. He drove back to the Ford dealer, parked the Chevrolet out front, and walked over to the salesmen. He calmly told them he had been there yesterday to buy a new Ford but because everybody ignored him, he had been forced to buy that Chevrolet.

I think they got the message. Dad drove Chevrolets from that time on.

Sports, particularly football and track, were where I stood out as I got older. Lower Merion excelled at sports due to a skilled and consistent coaching system, quality trainers, and the best fans in Pennsylvania. We were expected to win, and win we did. During my three years of high school football, the Bulldogs of Lower Merion won all but two games and tied one. I had to maintain a B average in order to play football. Because I naturally enjoyed the sport and also wanted to do well academically, I had a double incentive to excel.

I was pretty good at football. In my sophomore year, I played on the second-string team, then moved up to first string. In those days, there were no separate offensive and defensive teams, so I played center on offense and linebacker on defense.

During my senior year, Red Blaik, football coach at Dartmouth, sent me a card, asking whether I would be interested in playing football there. That same year, I was selected as a runner-up to Chuck Bednarik as center on the Pennsylvania All-State Team. Bednarik went on to play for the Philadelphia Eagles. I also had the privilege to play against the great Emlen Tunnell, who attended Radnor High School and was, to the best of my knowledge, the only black team captain for a school on the Main Line. Tunnell ended up playing for the New York Giants and the Green Bay Packers. Both he and Bednarik were named to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1967.

I remember both bad and good days on the football field. One of the worst was in 1942, when Lower Merion was playing West Philadelphia High School. I missed intercepting a pass and was so furious that I lay on the ground, childishly pounding my fist into the grass. I did not realize it, but the guy filming the game kept the camera on me for what seemed like an eternity, particularly during the postgame critique. I never did that again.

One of my best days came a year later, when Lower Merion was playing Upper Darby, an archrival. Gus Dielens was the Upper Darby passer, and I was one of the Lower Merion linebackers. As the newspaper reported, Gus was throwing and I was catching. I intercepted five passes.

Although Lower Merion had never had a black captain of a major sports team, I was good enough to be seriously considered as a candidate, and at the start of the 1943–44 school year, I did something that may have set my azimuth for the future. All varsity-lettered players voted for the captain, and the vote resulted in a tie between Dick Whiting and me, with Dan Poore one vote behind us. I had voted for Dick. Rather than simply name Dick and me cocaptains, the coaches called for a new vote, in which we would choose two cocaptains. The top two vote-getters the second time around were Dick and Dan. In all honesty, losing out had no impact on me. But when I share this story, people often ask why I didn’t vote for myself. The answer is that I had some vague notion about the impropriety of voting for myself, and becoming captain of the football team was not important enough to me to do that.

I also excelled in track and field. My events were the short dashes—50 yards, 100 yards, and an occasional 220 yards. I also competed in the long jump, which was then called the broad jump, and became state champion of the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association during my senior year. As a matter of fact, the first time I was inside Franklin Field at the University of Pennsylvania was to participate in the Penn Relays twice for Lower Merion High School. I had previously been to Franklin Field when Mom took Joe and me to watch the parade of cadets and midshipmen for the annual Army and Navy football game. We did not go inside the stadium then, so it was a big deal for me to compete inside the stadium.

The winning Lower Merion High School football team, ca. 1943. Left to right: (line) Dick Whiting, Bill Ellmaker, Jules Arronson, Stewart Young, me, George Morgan, Luiz Mortenson; (backfield) Frank Junker, Dan Poore, Ted Hepke, Frank Basile. (Author collection)

My mother was the big sports buff of the family, and she made it out to every one of my football games. She was an avid fan of baseball, basketball, and football. During baseball season, she listened to the Phillies and Athletics games on the radio while she ironed clothes. Later in life she held season tickets for the Philadelphia Eagles. She also closely followed the career of one of her cousin Ora Washington, who was a singles tennis champion in the 1930s.

Although my father took Joe and me to see both of the Philadelphia Major League Baseball teams and also the Philadelphia Stars of the Negro League, he was rather lukewarm to football and basketball. And he saw me perform in track only one time. In early June 1944, after I had graduated from high school, my father came to a track meet at Franklin Field that featured high school champions from the various branches of the regional school districts. I was the reigning broad jump champion, and I really wanted to impress Dad. It was a disaster. I ended up with a severe knee bruise and had to be carried off the field.

Looking back, I can truly say that my participation in the Lower Merion sports program was extremely beneficial not only for my physical and mental well-being, but also for the life skills it imparted. For one, I learned true sportsmanship. Sports also taught me much about people in general. For example, there were few blacks on the football team, and during my senior year, I was the only black on the first string. On the football field, however, everyone was equal. During the game, the only issue was winning, which was embraced by the team.

I think that there are certain concerns all humans share and goals they will work together to achieve, no matter how different their backgrounds. The desire to win is one of those.

It would not be long before I witnessed another: the desire to survive.

CHAPTER TWO

My Call to Service

December 7, 1941, was a typical Sunday for my family. We spent the bulk of the day in church, so we did not hear about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor until late that evening when we were listening to the radio. The next day in school, students and teachers discussed the attack and the U.S. declaration of war against Japan. I was fifteen years old, however, and it was some time before I really grasped the enormity of what had happened.

By this time it was my ambition to become a pilot—a desire enhanced by a visit to the school by Gen. Henry Hap Arnold, who was then chief of staff of the Army Air Corps and a Lower Merion graduate. I had even joined the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) in my junior year in high school as a prelude to learning how to fly. CAP members took classes in aeronautics, navigation, meteorology, and aviation regulations, and we routinely participated in close order drill. I became quite proficient in that, and I often found myself in charge of the drilling, which gave me an opportunity to demonstrate leadership skills and gain experience giving orders to a racially mixed group.

In December 1943, at the age of seventeen, I joined the Army Air Corps Enlisted Reserves. I took the oath of enlistment along with four other members of the Lower Merion football team, which meant that I would be joining the active Army after I graduated from high school in June 1944. I was very eager to join. Bob Williams, who had lived with my family while attending high school, was already in flight school at Tuskegee and had fueled my eagerness with stories about his experiences there.

My parents showed no anxiety about my joining the service. All able-bodied Americans were contributing to the war effort. In fact, my brother Joe was already in the Navy. When he was fifteen, he had run away from home a couple of times. I never knew why, but he wanted to join the Navy. Since Mom was convinced he would keep running away until something drastic happened, she signed papers stating that he was seventeen, permitting him to enlist.

The vast majority of Americans supported the war. There were conscientious objectors, of course, but they acted out of their deeply held religious belief that war is wrong no matter what. Generally, total mobilization was the order of the day.

At home, most people accepted severe restrictions without any grumbling. Sugar, silk, cigarettes, and gasoline were rationed—although black market gas was readily available at 25 cents a gallon—and hoarding was frowned upon. People saved empty bottles, tin cans, and the foil from cigarette packages and turned all these items in at collection points to be used for other purposes. I had not yet heard the term, but this was recycling in the truest sense. Families