I asked, “How long will he be gone?”-not knowing then that some of the boys were never coming home. I asked why they were crying, and they said it was because Uncle Herb was going to war. I refused to sing a note.īut my silence seemed to work out all right anyway because my mother and my grandmother and my aunts were all crying and nobody cared much whether I sang or not. She loves her sailor boy / And he loves her too.” However, as with other assignments later in my life, I panicked in the public eye and went stone silent. I had practiced and was now supposed to sing in my four-year-old solo voice a little ditty that celebrated sailors with lyrics beginning “Bell-bottom trousers / Coat of navy blue. He had joined the United States Navy, and we were there to say goodbye.Īctually, I had a rather formal part in this bus stop program. Apparently in 1944 there was a war on somewhere, and he was now deemed old enough to go and do his part. That’s where the Greyhound bus stopped in our little town, and that morning my Uncle Herb, all of seventeen years of age, was leaving for San Diego, California-wherever that was. In the final few weeks of 1944 I was bundled up and taken, at about six in the morning as I recall, down to the Big Hand Cafe on the corner of Main Street and Highway 91 in St.
