05/27/2024
My Granddaddy Bruce was a quite and stoic man so when he spoke, I listened, or pretended to. One time I did listen was when he told the story of his oldest brother Fred. Fred had enlisted in the Navy which seems odd for a farmboy born in Sunset, Texas and raised in Wheeler County as the nearest ocean was the Gulf of Mexico, hundreds of miles away.
As Bruce told it, Fred was a boilermate on destroyer or cruiser, Granddaddy did not know which.
What he did know is Fred came home for teh last time in the late fall of 1923. Bruce told how he and his father, Anderson, went to the train station in Wheeler to meet Fred on his return and hw it was cold and raining and muddy. He cussed the mud in his old age to when he told the story.
Bruce told how Fred was killed in in mishap aboard his ship. By mishap he meant an explosion.
Fred was the beginning of a tradition of service in the Navy among my family. Five of Fred's nephews, my dad's two brothers and his three cousins, would go onto serve in Navy.
My uncle Fred made a mark though he had no family or offspring of his own.
May God remember those who did not come home and those they left behind.
