In the North Woods with the Bobbsey Twins

“Cedar Camp was in what was called the ’North Woods,’about forty or

fifty miles from Lakeport. It was a wild, desolate region, especially in winter. . . .”

                               —The Bobbsey Twins at Cedar Camp

Long ago, as the only child of a widowed mother, during a summer stay with my grandparents in southern Illinois, I discovered a delightful series of books in my aunt’s bookcase. There was a half dozen or so volumes about the adventures of two sets of twins named Bobbsey. Freddie and Flossie were the youngest; Bert and Nan were older. They lived in a place called Lakeport. Their father was in the lumber business. 

    One book, The Bobbsey Twins at Cedar Camp, remained in my memory long after that summer. Back then, I had never been any farther north than Chicago’s Loop. Cedar Camp was in the “North Woods” a magical and potentially dangerous place, or so it seemed, where, “it was fun just to walk through the woods and breathe the sweet, spicy odors of the pine and cedar trees. . . .” and where, as happened to Bert and Nan while in the woods gathering chestnuts, “there was a quick darkening of the air, the wind began to blow, and, so suddenly as to startle the children, they found themselves enveloped in such a blinding, driving squall of snow that they could not see ten feet on either side!”

    Eventually, both sets of twins became lost in the swirling snows and have exciting experiences before they are rescued. Nan finds shelter with old Mrs. Bimby, the wife of Jim, a woodcutter. Self-reliant Bert braves the storm in an attempt to find the Mrs. Bimby’s husband, whom his wife believes has lost his way home in the snow. Bert, wanders through the woods, becoming hungry and thirsty. He remembers that it is possibly fatal to eat “dry” snow, but melting the snow and drinking the water are safe. (A cautionary instruction for young readers.) For a time Bert is pursued by a wildcat. And he fends off the creature temporarily with “snowball bullets,” then takes refuge on a large rock with smooth sides that the wildcat cannot climb. Freddie and Flossie follow a dog named Rover to where Bert is stranded, and Rover chases off the wildcat. The three children are soon found by their father who is leading a search party.

    Many years later I did get to the north woods several times—northern Wisconsin and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. At some time during those trips, the memory of the Bobbsey Twins at Cedar Camp would always creep back into my consciousness. 

And then, several years ago, while visiting our daughter, Alice, in Wisconsin, the Bobbsey Twin connection came full circle. The very same books that I had read as a preteen now belong to her. As I sat down on a dark, cold afternoon in a house in the north woods and began to read once again The Bobbsey Twins at Cedar Camp.

    Thirteen Bobbsey Twin books preceded The Bobbsey Twins at Cedar Camp. Laura Lee Hope is cited as the series author. I was surprised to learn recently that Laura Lee Hope never existed. The name was one of many pseudonyms created by an entrepreneurial giant in the publishing business, Edward L. Stratemeyer, who employed a team of writers. Under the name Stratemeyer Literary Syndicate of New York (1906), Stratemeyer provided the characters and formulaic plots. He and the other writers produced more than 800 books, using some 60 pen names, and brought to life some of juvenile literature’s most popular characters. One biographer estimates that Stratemeyer probably wrote an additional 220 books himself.

    By 1921, the year Grosset & Dunlap published The Bobbsey Twins at Cedar Camp. “Laura Lee Hope” (probably several writers using that pen name) appears also to have written eleven Bunny Brown books and seven Six Little Bunkers books. 

    Other book series created by the Stratemeyer Literary Syndicate includes the adventures of the Motor Boys, Tom Swift, the Hardy Boys, and Nancy Drew.

    Stratemeyer began his writing career in 1888 at the age of 26, as a contributor to and an editor of several magazines. He then wrote one of his first books using the pen name “Oliver Optic”, and eleven books as “Horatio Alger Jr.” Stratemeyer died in 1930, but his syndicate of ghostwriters continued to churn out the most popular juvenile books of the century.

Human Bondage Red and Black: a Dark Chronicle

In 1995 the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency and the Illinois Association of Museums published a booklet titled Generations of Pride: African-Americans in Illinois, A selected Chronology. Katheryn M. Harris compiled a calendar of events arranged by date from 1619 to 1994. The first entry, 1619, tells of a Dutch ship that brought twenty Africans to Jamestown, Virginia. They were, surmises Harris, “the first permanent involuntary settlers of the black race in what is now the United States of America.” And presumably the beginning of Black History in this country.

    “Slaves as property” were recognized by Virginia law in 1661. According to the Chronology, the Virginia slave codes protected white society from “‘an alien and savage race.’ Though modeled after indentured servitude laws, the codes prohibit any rights for slaves.”

    The French government agreed to sanction slave trade within the Louisiana colony in 1712. Traffic in human flesh then dealt not only in Africans but also in Native Americans. 

    “Before the French established themselves in the Mississippi valley,” wrote N. M. Miller Surrey in The Commerce of Louisiana During the French Regime, 1699-1763, “there was trade in slaves carried on by the Indians of that area.” Surrey said that Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle while on the Mississippi in 1681 learned “it was necessary to buy war captives in order to deal successfully with the natives. . . . His plan was to buy the slaves and carry them back to their people and there offer them for sale. The parent tribe, La Salle discovered, would pay more liberally for one of their own than [one] of foreign blood.”

    Slaves were kept and traded by many Native American tribes. Alvin M. Josephy Jr. wrote in The Indian Heritage of America: “ A principal object of most raids was to secure slaves, one of the main elements of wealth.” 

    The French accused the British of creating wars among different Indian tribes “solely for the purpose of securing the captives.” French traders in the south and southeast took up the British practice of pitting tribe against tribe and dealing in prisoners. This trade was outlawed by the French king, but the traders continued in secret. “In May, 1709, the Alibamon fell upon the Mobile Indians,” said Surrey, “killed the men and carried some twenty-seven or twenty-eight women and children as slaves to the French at Mobile.” 

    Colonial officials in Louisiana made a request in 1708 to the crown (it was rejected) to be allowed to exchange Native Americans for Negro slaves in the French West Indies at the rate of two Indians for three Negroes. Indians slaves being in their native land often escaped. It was believed the imported Africans would have less reason to escape. 

    In 1712 Sieur Antoine Crozat’s patent gave him exclusive right to bring annually to the province of Louisiana from the Guinea coast one cargo of Negroes. It seems Crozat did not import many slaves. 

    The Company of the Indies, a French syndicate, in 1719 received a patent to govern Louisiana. The Company owned a right to the slave trade. Two years later 1,312 Africans were bound into French servitude in Louisiana by the Company. The total would rise to close to 7,000.

    French colonists utilized slaves to clear fields and plant and harvest crops such as tobacco, rice and indigo. The indigo plant is a source of grayish blue dye.

    “The Negroes were drawn from Caye, Goree, Juida, Angola and Senegal,” wrote Surrey, “though by far the greater number was obtained from the coast last named. The mortality while on the journey across the ocean was high.” Slaves that arrived in good health often soon fell sick and many died within weeks.

    According to Surrey the first man aboard a newly arrived Company slave ship was the health inspector. Each African was examined. The sick were sent to a hospital for treatment, or sold at auction. “Since the supply never was adequate, the bidding was usually brisk, sick Negroes often bringing quite as much as healthy ones. There were some persons in the province who made a business of buying them, taking the chance of being able to cure them and when well of selling them at a considerable advance on the cost. These doctors, it was said, were careful ‘to put their curative secrets in practice only for themselves.’” 

    In 1720, 500 black slaves from the Caribbean island of Santo Domingo were brought to the upper Mississippi valley by a French mining entrepreneur, Phillip Renault. 

    LeCode Noir ou Recueil de Reglements (The Black Code), rules for managing slaves in Louisiana, was adopted by the French in 1724.

    Between the end of the Revolutionary War and the establishment of the Northwest Territory, Virginia held title to the Illinois country. On giving up that claim in 1784, the Virginia legislature insisted that the French of the Northwest be allowed to keep and practice all their ancient rights and privileges.

    The U. S. Congress soon passed the 1787 Northwest Ordinance, which was a code of laws for the newly acquired land north of the Ohio River and south of the Great Lakes. Less than 1,000 blacks remained among the descendants of the French settlers in the old colonial villages of the Illinois country.

    Although Article VI of the Northwest Ordinance outlawed slavery, Territorial Governor Arthur St. Clair believed it was not applicable to the slaves then in servitude. St. Clair said Article VI “was intended to prevent the further introduction of slaves into the territory.”

    The first Territorial Legislature legalized the “Indenture System.” It has been described as follows:

    “All Negroes under 15 years of age were required to serve till the age of 35 (women, 32). Children born of slaves then in the territory must be registered with the county clerk within 30 days, and must serve out the full term. Transfers of slaves were permitted and masters were allowed to leave the territory with their property.” 

    The Northwest Territory then adopted a slave code similar to the one used in Virginia and Kentucky.

    Later, between 1800 and 1809, while Illinois was part of the Indiana Territory, laws were enacted to allow slaves to be brought in as indentured servants. The time of indenture could be for 99 years.

    Indiana became a state in 1809. Illinois would become a state nine years later. The Census of 1810 enumerates 781 African-Americans within the Illinois Territory. One hundred sixty-eight are slaves; 613 are free persons of color. Free blacks were prohibited from entering the territory and slaves could be imported as hired labor for 12 month periods for work at the Shawneetown salt works.

    Although the 1818 Illinois State Constitution prohibited slavery it sanctioned the indenture system. Later legislative acts called “The Black Laws of 1819,” based on the old territorial precepts that slaves were property without legal rights, were enforced. The importation of slaves for emancipation was prohibited. Blacks could settle in Illinois only by possessing certificates of freedom.

    Paul Finkleman (“Slavery, the ’More Perfect Union’ and the Prairie State”) wrote that the “The Black Laws had little effect on the actual migration of blacks into Illinois, although many individuals suffered anxiety from registration procedures and fear of prosecution. Between 1820 and 1860 the state’s total black population increased by more than 500 percent, from 1,374 to 7,628.”

    In 1852 the Illinois courts concluded all blacks were free—fugitive slaves were the exception—but it wasn’t until 1865 that the Illinois General Assembly repealed The Black Laws of 1819, and became the first state legislature to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, which abolished slavery in the United States.

Memories of "The Mighty Eighth"

Memories of “The Mighty Eighth” 

There are American veterans for whom the passing years have not dimmed the memory of four 1200 horsepower radial engines giving life to a 55,000 pound bomber, and lifting it into the stratosphere; who remember sunlit skies suddenly blackened by storms of exploding antiaircraft shells; who still feel the sickening lurch and buck of a direct hit, and who have not forgotten the smell of raw gasoline, hot oil, mothballed parachutes and burning flesh . . . Events once momentous to them, but now mostly forgotten by others, make up the fabric of these veterans’ recollections.

    On July 4, 1942, at 7:30 a.m. twelve Royal Air Force (RAF) Douglas A-20s, flying in three elements of four planes each, roared out over the English Channel. They would raid German held airdromes in Holland. Six of the twelve air crews were from the United States Army Air Force’s newly activated 15th Light-Bombardment Squadron (8th Air Force), based at High Wycombe, England. 

    The event prompted one writer to observe it was a curious occasion when “Americans and Britons should thus jointly celebrate America’s Independence Day. . . . [It] seemed to be a particularly happy omen.” 

    On the other hand an Army Times historian concluded the mission could hardly be called a success: 

    “One British and two American crews were shot down, another plane jettisoned its bombs, and two planes returned with bomb-loads intact, having failed to recognize the camouflaged target until too late.” 

    That same day the 8th Air Force recorded another event that cast an ominous shadow on the future of Germany’s Third Reich—the first heavy bomber, a B-17E Flying Fortress, arrived in England. 

    The July 4 A-26 raid, however, was not the first combat mission flown by members of “The Mighty Eighth.” Near the end of June, Major Lessing became the first American pilot in a U.S. uniform to fly a mission into German-held territory. He accompanied an RAF fighter squadron over France in one of 36 Mark V Spitfires. On 29 June a crew of the 15th Bomb Squadron flew an RAF Boston (A-20) in a British formation on a bombing mission to the railroad marshaling yards at Hazebrouck, France. The Squadron Commander, Charles C. Kegelman, and his crew were the first US airmen to bomb occupied Europe.

    The first 8th Air Force fighter operation in WWII occurred July 26, 1942, when the 31st Fighter Group flew six RAF Spitfires on a sortie over the French coastal areas.

    The initial B-17 raid by the 8th did not take place until August 17. Twelve Flying Fortresses of the 97th Bomb Group left Grafton Underwood carrying 18 tons of bombs, and attacked the railway marshaling yards at Rouen, France. The lead pilot was Paul Tibbits. He would later drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Six other B-17s were sent on a diversionary mission against St. Omer. They successfully confused the German radio direction finders. All aircraft returned safely.

    For veteran airmen who have some lurking, indefinable itch to add a bit of vitality to their reminiscences, there is a place where that desire can be satisfied. It is the United States Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio, where one can take a nostalgic journey into the past.

    The museum is a vivid kaleidoscope of manned flight history, beginning with Assyrian, Egyptian and Greek mythology and continuing on to a Wright brothers’ Flyer, an F-117A Stealth fighter and exotic space craft. The workhorses and dauntless fighters of the air from World War I through Desert Storm are there. Some aircraft are seen in life-size dioramas; others can be seen in detailed scale models. Featured are aircraft of historic renown: an original 1911 Wright “B” Flyer, a Caquot Type R observation balloon from World War I, a Hawker Hurricane and a Supermarine Spitfire from the early days of World War II. There is  a Mig 15, flown to South Korea by a defecting North Korean pilot; Bockscar, the B-29 that dropped the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki; a B-36 that dwarfs every aircraft in the museum, and there are many other examples of the evolution of military aircraft.

    Perhaps the most haunting display is three reconstructed buildings. They are a control tower and two Nissen huts similar to those used by the 8th Air Force in England. On the first floor of the control tower is a 1940’s era weather station. A recreated mission briefing room and “Belly Tank” military club bar can be found in the Nissen huts. The briefing room is complete with uniformed mannequins, mission map and target schedule. With a little imagination one can picture themself transported back to those bleak years when England was under aerial attack; when allied bombers thundered toward their targets, and sleek fighters flocked overhead to protect them. It reminds many of us of a time in 1942 and ‘43 when America struggled to recover from the attack on Pearl Harbor. 

An Example from Binti Jua

While still in high school I developed an interest in reading about the big game hunters of Africa. I found the motion pictures produced by “bring ‘em back alive” Frank Buck, Clyde Beatty, Carl Akley (he killed a leopard with his bare hands), and Martin and Osa Johnson fascinating. 

    Ernest Hemingway’s stories of the daring white hunters of Africa inspired me to hope that someday I might roam the Serengeti in search of elephants and lions, hunt among the Mountains of the Moon and descend into Oringorogoro a trusty Manlicher rifle in the hands of my faithful gunbearer. And perhaps in the misty forests of Uganda encounter that most fearsome of quarry, the gorilla! 

    Such were the romantic dreams of youth in those days, when high adventure in distant, exotic places seemed the supreme adventure and fulfillment of manhood.

    That was long before I read the Year of the Gorilla by George Shaller. Upon reading this book I was amazed and a bit chagrined to learn that armed only with binoculars, pencil and notebook, Shaller stalked, observed and communed with the great silverbacks of the African highlands. 

    What kind of heresy was this? 

    Shaller’s work opened the door to further studies of apes and chimpanzees by Jane Goodall, Dain Fossey and others. We learned that Chimpanzees used tools.

    In time, some gorillas and chimps appear to have been taught to communicate with their hominoid mentors. But there is always the doubt that this proves only that apes can mimic humans in the same way that parrots produce words and phrases. 

    Yet a nagging question became evident: By whose definition could “being human” now be decided? Certainly apes are not human even though they might display humanoid behavior? 

    This brings to mind another book.

    On a hot Mississippi afternoon I fished a discarded paperback novel out of a barracks trash can. It had an intriguing premise. Some explorers found a valley in New Guiney inhabited by what they judged to be a new species of apes. But were they apes? Might they not be a very primitive species of hominids? 

    These “apemen” seemed intelligent enough to be used as laborers of a kind, for their strength was greater than a man’s. Yet, how could one decide if they were simply beasts of burden or a kind of sub-human slave?

    The debate over the future of these creatures raged on until a wise man asked what was the defining criteria of man’s human nature? Why, he said, man had a concept of a metaphysical authority greater than his own, he recognized God’s presence in his creation. Did the apemen recognize a supernatural power beyond their understanding? If so, they must be admitted to the human race.

    When a young boy accidentally fell into a zoo exhibit area inhabited by gorillas several years ago, it was a large silvberback male who appeared to warn off the other gorillas. He sat motionless near the boy, touching him once with a finger as if to reassure himself that what he was seeing was actually there. The boy, unmolested by the gorillas survived. Then, more recently, another boy tumbled into a gorilla habitat. This time a female gorilla named Binti Jua carried the boy to a safe place where he could be rescued by paramedics. Her action has been credited to a maternal instinct. The fact that she had been raised in close contact with humans is seen as another factor in what some call extraordinary behavior for a primate. 

    Gorillas are not domesticated animlas regardless of how they are raised. Unlike dogs, cats or cattle, gorillas have not developed a synergistic relationship with us. They are not bound by loyalty to favor us with compassion. So why should they have any feelings of compassion or sympathy for a man-child whose life was in jepordy? 

Audie, Bill, Ernie, and Willie and Joe

Ernest Taylor Pyle was a 40-year-old journalist at the time World War II began. Pyle had built his reputation on writing human interest stories about ordinary Americans during five years that he and his wife roamed America’s Great Depression hinterlands. He went to London in 1940 to cover the Battle Of Britain. 

  The United States and England invaded North Africa on November 8, 1942. Ernie Pyle arrived in Algiers two weeks later. He began sending dispatches back to the Scripps-Howard Newspaper Alliance. 

  In his introduction to Ernie’s War, David Nicholes wrote: “Only rarely did he write about the so-called ‘big picture.’ Rather, Pyle focused on individual combatants—how he lived, endured by turns battle and boredom, and sometimes how he died, far from home in a war whose origins he only vaguely understood.”

  On December 1, Pyle reported: “At last we are in it up to our necks, and everything is changed, even your outlook on life. “Swinging first and swinging to kill is all that matters now.”

•   •   •

  Audie Leon Murphy was born on June 20, 1924, near Greenville, Texas. His parents were sharecroppers. He enlisted as a private in the Army in 1942. During the next three years, Murphy would become, in the words of Richard L. Rodgers, “one of the best fighting combat soldiers of this or any other century.” 

  Murphy was nothing like what you might picture as a World War II “Rambo.” He was slight of build, only 20 years old and looked more like a boy than a combat hardened soldier, the day he earned a “battle field” 2nd Lieutenant commission.

  During Murphy’s combat career, he was wounded three times. He received the Congressional Medal of Honor and 33 other awards and decorations for “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty.”

•   •   •

  World War II infantrymen Willie and Joe were creations of soldier cartoonist William Henry “Bill” Mauldin. To most GIs Willie and Joe, much to the discomfort of Army generals, reflected life in the trenches and spoke their true feelings about war and military life. 

  “Sgt. Bill Mauldin appears to us over here,” wrote Ernie Pyle, “to be the finest cartoonist the war has produced. And that’s not merely because his cartoons are funny, but because they are also grim and real.”

  Bill Mauldin was born in 1921 on a farm near Mountain Home, New Mexico. “An early case of rickets,” said Mauldin in his autobiography, “left me with an oversized skull on a scrawny, pot-bellied frame.” 

  At age 13, Mauldin subscribed to a cartoon correspondence course. He also began taking lessons from a professional cartoonist in a nearby town. Mauldin’s first paying job, ten dollars, was designing a postcard for a pottery company. 

  In high school Mauldin concentrated on art and journalism and joined the ROTC. He later attended the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts for a year. At 18 he enlisted in the Arizona National Guard. A few days later the Guard was “federalized” and Mauldin went to the Army’s 45th Division at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. 

  By the time the 45th got to Sicily, Mauldin was on the staff of the 45th Division News, and his cartoons often appeared in the Army newspaper, Stars and Stripes. Many of his cartoons soon were published in a book, Up Front. In 1945 Mauldin’s work earned him a Pulitzer Prize.

•   •   •

  Ernie Pyle knew Mauldin. “His work is so mature that I pictured him as a man approaching middle age,” wrote Pyle. “Yet he is only twenty-two, and he looks even younger.” He also noted that Sgt. Mauldin had earned a purple heart after being wounded during the Italian campaign.

   I don’t know if Pyle ever met Audie Murphy. 

  Pyle, as were Murphy and Mauldin, had been born on a farm. He shared with them a kind of up-country respect and sympathy for the everyday soldier. He mourned “the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches along the high rows of hedge throughout the world.”

  Of the three men it was Pyle, the noncombatant, the war correspondent, who would become a combat casualty.

   Before the war ended in Europe, Pyle was assigned to the Pacific Theater. On April 18,1945, on the island of Ie Shima, a Japanese sniper’s bullet struck him in the head.

  Mauldin and Murphy came home at war’s end. Each hailed as a hero. By some whimsical twist of fate Hollywood recruited them for the feature rolls in Stephen Crane’s haunting tale of the Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage. 

  Murphy made several more movies; Mauldin became a political cartoonist and received another Pulitzer prize. Murphy died in a plane crash in 1971. Mauldin, also, is no longer with us. Willie and Joe have achieved immortality in the archives of World War. II and in the hearts of war veterans.

Eyeless in Dixie

Several years ago I attended a panel discussion on “Race Relations  . . . Where Do We Go from Here?”  Evidently it was a landmark meeting considering the size of the audience and comments to the effect that such a meeting would not have been as well attended in the past, and even that it would not have taken place. 

From that analysis encouragement might be taken that times are changing. However, if the intent was to formulate a strategy for resolving some of the local racial problems I am sure many who were at that meeting would admit we have a long way to go.

I saw none of the mayors of the county’s three major communities at the meeting. I saw a chief judge, but no other elected official that I recognized. If they were there they had nothing to say.

  There were sincere, wise and thought provoking opinions expressed by the eight panelists and from members of the audience. Perhaps the most succinct was the then current, “Can’t we just get along?”

This certainly should be corollary to the Golden Rule. If we followed that simple instruction, the eleventh commandment, everyone would get along. Well, maybe, most of the time, we’re not perfect.

I have no solutions to offer. Considering the complexity of the problem—the many problems—and the many viewpoints on the causes of those problems. 

Are “prejudice” and “racism” the same? Can someone harbor prejudicial attitudes towards others yet not be a racist? 

I don’t think there is a human being on this earth that doesn’t hold some prejudices. We are conditioned to prejudice by experience. We react emotionally to events in our lives and are influenced by the attitudes of our peers and parents. My grandmother being of Scottish lineage never met an “Englishman” that she didn’t hold a grudge against. To her they were all “Johnny Bulls.” It you are aquatinted with the history of the Scots and the Brits you might understand why she felt that way. (And because my affection for her, I have a twinge of resentment when I see that symbol of colonialism, the Union Jack.) 

My grandmother’s prejudice was not a racist cant; it was social and political, arising out of nationalist feelings for Scotland. She did not see the British as a separate race, but as oppressors; she did not advocate boiling all Englishmen in their plum puddings, but she wouldn’t invite them to supper. 

Prejudicial people can also be racists.

Racism is a far more virulent and deadly. Racism condemns whole populations to exclusion. The Holocaust in Europe during World War II happened when segments of society were portrayed in organized propaganda to be the cause of moral and economic corruption. The majority of these people were Jews, defined by “the master race” as an “inferior race” by way of a flawed fabrication of ethnic identity. In a totalitarian society that worshiped the myth of racial purity and claimed to tolerate nothing less, the remedy to inferiority was extermination. 

My education in the effects of racism came when as a callow 19-year-old airman I was assigned to an airbase at Jackson, Mississippi. During the next six-and-a-half years I spent time in Florida, Puerto Rico, Georgia, Alabama and Louisiana. The first lesson I learned was it wasn’t polite to say the Civil War was over, and that the South had lost. In the ‘50s, when Illinois first garnished its license plates with “Land of Lincoln,” parking your car on the streets of Biloxi, Mississippi, risk having your ties slashed or worse. As one of those pre-civil rights, small town raised “Yankee soldier boys,” blind to the implications of the deeply held and rigidly adhered to tenets of racial segregation, I was perplexed, but not necessarily angered by segregation’s ramifications. I was told by a genteel southern lady that the ”Nigrahs” were like so many children, who had to be restrained from improper behavior, and kept in their place. It really was for their own good,she said. 

Sure, I had had some experience with prejudice having grown up in the 1930s and ‘40s. I attended a grade school where the student population was 30 or 40 percent African-American. But as I recall whatever racial tension existed there came from the usual childish rivalries for playground status, territorial disputes and bullying by older students both black and white.

Down in Dixie in the ‘40s and 50s it was a whole different ball game.

Riding the West Capitol Street bus between Hawkins Field and downtown Jackson introduced me to the ground rules of segregation in the South. Black people entered the bus by the front door, dropped their fares into the box and then exited the bus and walked to the rear entrance where they again got onto the bus and sat in the seats at the rear. Once I saw a man who evidently had been shopping and was carrying some packages. He did not get to the back door in a timely manner in the opinion of the bus driver. As the man grasped the edge of the door it snapped shut trapping his hand and the bus took off. The man ran beside the bus for a block until it stopped at the next corner and the door opened. Out of breath and shaking, he climbed into the bus. 

I saw that black people could buy a sandwich in a restaurant, but had to eat it outside. Drinking fountains, bathrooms, even movie theater seating, all segregated, and as I saw it, ironically, keeping both blacks and whites in their place. 

One winter evening I boarded the bus and found it empty except for one African-American woman sitting in a seat that was ahead of the back entrance. The significance of this seemed unimportant until a few blocks later a man got on and as he dropped his fare in the box I looked up and saw him staring intently toward the rear of the bus. I had been daydreaming about the young lady I was going to take to the movies. Then, as if my dreaming had become a nightmare, I was suddenly keenly aware that something frightening was about to happen. Everything seemed to come sharply into focus: the harsh penetrating light inside the bus, the darkness outside the windows, the menacing way the man walked down the aisle toward the woman, the rumbling of the bus as it picked up speed. The man bent down, shouted, and grabbed the woman by both arms. I saw her face contorted, anguished. He pulled her to her feet and walked her to the last seat at the back of the bus. He pushed her down, said something again. She shook her head and glared at him. He turned, and then I saw how pale and passive his face was, how his eyes caught the overhead light, how neatly he was dressed in shirt and tie. He sat in the seat where the woman had been sitting, folded his hands in his lap. He looked toward me for a long moment, then turned and confronted his own reflection in the dark window.

Once, while sitting in the small cafe that was attached to the operations room at the airbase, I noticed a bird colonel come in. He wore the wings of a senior pilot and a 12th Air Force patch on his sleeve. I later learned he was just passing through, and was waiting for his plane to be refueled. The colonel ordered coffee and a sandwich, but instead of sitting at one of the tables he went back into operations. A few moments later, on my way back to the weather station, I saw the colonel eating his sandwich seated in a chair in the operations lounge. For him, apparently, being an African-American, the cafe run by a Jackson concessionaire was off limits. He could buy his food there, but he had to eat it somewhere else.

Did I, back then, as a young white man in the segregated south, become angry, did my conscience rise up in righteous indignation? A little angry, perhaps, after a while, but there was the feeling this was the way things were, and I could not conceive of any way that they would be changed. Yet, within a few short years Sarah Louise Keys, Claudet Colvin, and Rosa Parks would refuse in acts of civil disobedience to give up their bus seats. The Montgomery bus boycott followed, and the Civil rights movement began to gather momentum.