Flags, Sisters' Weekend, and The Greatest Generation

Today my good friend, and crit partner, Janet Ferguson is sharing our special 'Flag of the Week.' Here's Janet...

Every few years, I’ve gotten to experience an idea my oldest sister came up with—Sister Weekend at the Beach. It’s awesome that she came up with idea and also that she has a condo we can use on Hilton Head Island. We have a chance to catch up without our kids around and bond (we sometimes invite our husbands), and now that our parents have passed on, we share special memories.

Well, I knew Jackie Layton featured the American Flag on her blog, and when I saw a family had hoisted one in the sand, I was reminded of my father’s service in World War II.
I interviewed my father,James White, in 1997 and printed his story so that our family would be able to have his history to pass on. He was a determined and somewhat lucky man, dodging death on several occasions. The oldest son of a widow in tiny Hickory Flat, Mississippi, he aptly called his home town at the time “a wide place in the road.” During World War II, he enlisted in the Signal Corps so he could choose his area of service.

After basic training at Camp Crowder Missouri, weeks of teletype and radio school, then thirteen weeks of field artillery at Fort Eustis, Virginia, my father began radar training. At first, they used radar connected to their big guns. He said, “We were firing at a target pulled by a small plane, and once we got too close to the plane.” He transferred after that to Camp Davis, North Carolina, to attend another eight weeks of special training. “We went to school each day to a class which was across a pull-up bridge. Everything was top secret. I had to be investigated and approved before attending this training. No one was allowed in the area except those attending the classes. The bridge was kept pulled up at all times except when someone was allowed to cross.”

He had many other interesting stories, but I found this one intriguing. If you’d like to read more about Fort Davis, here’s a link http://www.nchistoricsites.org/fisher/ww2/ww2.htm. My father never made it overseas to fight in the war as his appendix ruptured just before his unit shipped out to Germany. Did I mention he was lucky? And so were my sisters and I to have a father from that Greatest Generation.