Today is November 11th, 2007, and Veteran's Day. I can only imagine what that first Veteran's Day in 1918--known then as Armistice Day and signifying the end of hostilities in World War I--"The Great War" and "The War to End All Wars"---- might have meant to most American families, especially if you had a loved one who was off fighting in a foreign country.
In my mind's eye, it is November 11th, 1918. My grandfather, John William Head---called Billy Head and born in 1886 in Booneville, Tishomingo County, Mississippi---would more than likely that day have been at work in Cameron Park, Waco, Texas. Billy had hired on at the park for the City of Waco as a gardener in 1914 and, after 42 years, retired in 1957 as an assistant superintendent.
Billy had brought his family from the Big Sandy/ Chapel Hill /Winona area near Tyler, Texas, where they grew roses and farmed. At that point in America's history, the majority of its citizens were farmers who lived in the country or in very small towns made up of a few buildings. Not many Americans lived in the big cities.
At that time, Billy and his wife, Sally Lee Allen Head (my grandmother) had four boys: My Uncle Perry (Perry Allen Head), my Uncle Odie (James Odia Head), my Uncle Red (David Rankin Head), and my daddy, Ralston Cecil Head (also known as Uncle Goober to all my cousins). Ralston was born February 8th, 1917, and would have been a baby not quite two years old on that first Armistice Day. Ralston's two sisters, my Aunt Sister (Juanita Blanche Head) and my Aunt Toots (Alma Louise Head) were not born yet, and neither was the baby of the family--- another boy, my Uncle Son (Durward Allen Head). There had also been an oldest child that was stillborn, making Uncle Perry the oldest living child of my grandparents, Billy and Sally Head.
The Heads at this time would have lived on St. Charles Street, across the Brazos River from Cameron Park and in East Waco, most likely near the old historic home we know today as East Terrace. Ralston was born in the St. Charles Street house in 1917, and the Heads did not move until 1921 to the old house at 2224 North 4th Street, just across the street and right by the Herring Avenue main entrance to Cameron Park. I know the house that Ralston was born in has not been there for many, many years, and wasn't there when I was a kid.
The old house at 2224 North 4th Street was probably built not long after the Civil War. The man who tore it down in 1969 thought that the square nails and the wonderful old timbers, still salvageable, used in its construction dated it to at least a hundred years old. This was the house I remember so well, as in 1948, Ralston built a house right next to the old house, for his own family--- his wife, Marie Ellison Head; his first-born, a daughter (Me---Dorothy Marie Head) born in 1946; and his second child, also a daughter (My sister, Sue Ellen Head) born in 1948, the year the house Goober built was finished and we moved in. My little brother who was born in 1958, Charles Lee Head, was named for Daddy's dear childhood friend and World War II buddy, Charles "Chick" Fox, with the Lee part of Charlie's name being for my grandmother, Sally Lee Allen, who had been named in honor of Civil War General Robert E. Lee in a nod to her Southern roots and the Confederate veterans in our family.
My grandparents would each have been about thirty-two years old in 1918. Billy and Sally, both born in 1886, were close childhood friends who had married in 1905. Ways of living at that time and place on the first Armistice day in 1918 would have been very similar to what I remember of life at 2224 North 4th Street.
My grandmother, Sally Head, raised chickens for the family's meals for meat and eggs and kept about two hundred in a large flock. Most ran loose during the day, but were penned in a large chicken coop at night to protect them from marauding dogs, raccoons, and foxes. Mama Head sold dozens and dozens of fresh eggs to neighbors and local stores.
I have many "chicken memories"---of chickens as pets---- a white hen called Henrietta, fancily named for the girlfriend of my cousin Pereugene, and another white hen called Anastasia, another wonderful name....I know that to tell if an egg is good to eat or cook with or if it is rotten, you put the egg in a pan of water and the good, usable egg will go to the bottom of the water, but the rotten egg will float, so you would discard the egg that floats.........deviled eggs, scrambled eggs, fried eggs, eggs used to cook with....white eggs and brown-shelled eggs.....many precious, cheeping yellow baby chicks---of killing chickens and dressing them.....and then eating them as fried chicken, roasted chicken, baked chicken, chicken and dumplings, or chicken noodle soup which was really tasty when you were sick.
I remember a chicken "eating" my gold baby ring that I accidentally dropped out a window when I unlatched the windowscreen, the ring fell off my finger, and the chicken below gobbled it up like a bug---never did find that ring!.....of sitting on the back steps, eating a piece of warm and crunchy Cinnamon Toast my mother had just made for me, when a big white hen ran up, grabbed the toast, and ran off with it in her mouth, leaving me scared and crying--I was very little when this memory happened, and I was rather afraid of the big chickens who were fairly aggressive toward me and anyone of a small stature......besides, I was sitting on the bottom step, and that old hen looked me right in the eye before she grabbed my toast and scared me half to death!.... and I still have the scars from a tyrannnical old rooster who chased me and then "spurred" me on the leg when I turned around and kicked at him---I think my mother, Marie, made sure that particular chicken got put into the cooking pot!
The Heads had several cows they milked. Sally, also known as Mama Head, usually did all the milking and took care of the garden, the chickens, and the stock, as well as did all the household chores, made butter and homemade soap and handsewed beautiful quilts, made clothes for the family, washed over an open fire in the yard using a huge black, iron kettle, and did all the cooking and canning of vegetables from the huge garden. To say the least, Mama Head was a busy lady who worked hard, as most women did in those days.
I remember black and white cows-- which I know now were Holsteins used for milking--- eating hay and feed in the old barn that was originally one of the Mule Barns for Cameron Park. The concrete watering trough for the mules, built around 1910, is still there in the little barn lot, right next to the garden plot.. (The current owners of the property are so very gracious to let the Head clan "visit" this revered spot, to--- as my sister, Sue, so eloquently puts it--- "Renew our souls". We try to go there and to Cameron Park as often as we can.)
I remember a wonderful garden one very rainy year and treasure a photograph of my grandparents, Billy and Sally, standing with me and their dog, Mickey-- a Jack Russell terrier--- in that same garden with the twelve-foot tall corn rows and over-sized okra plants. It always amazed my parents and the aunts and uncles that I remembered that amazing garden, as I was only three or four years old at the time. In 1918, most food consumed by the family was either grown in the garden or raised. Seldom was anything bought at the local store, and then it was only coffee, salt, pepper, sugar, flour and cornmeal--the most basic staples--whatever you couln't grow, raise, or make yourself, though sometimes steak and other meat was bought from the butcher if no beef cow was on hand to fatten.
If you tired of eating homemade biscuits or cornbread made in an iron skillet in the hot oven of Mama Head's wood-burning cookstove, you could buy loaves of freshly baked and already sliced Jones Fine Bread at the store and make yourself a ham sandwich, using thick slices of ham from the hog that you or a neighbor had butchered. Add a few dill or sweet pickles canned from your own garden, sliced tomatoes, a little onion, and lettuce from that same garden, and you had a feast--a real treat--a change from the delicious everyday fare of fried chicken, pork chops, and chicken-fried steak.
Many of my daddy's childhood friends, especially Louie Lee, told me the best chicken-fried steak they ever ate was cooked by my grandmother, Mama Head, in an iron skillet on that wood-burning cookstove. I also remember Mama Head making a between- meals snack for me, Sue, and all of the cousins using that wonderful store-bought "light bread" and homemade grape, fig, or plum jelly.
Even without our modern day methods of communicaton like television and the internet, word of the Armistice would have spread rapidly throughout the countryside and cities. I don't know if city dwellers would have had electricity then, so I don't know for sure how word of it would have spread---person to person, on the radio, or by telegraph or telephone. If there wasn't electricity, did the lamplighters come around to light the street lamps? Probably the lamplighter was way before my grandparents' time, and the cities would have had electricity in 1918, so most folks probably first heard it on the radio.
I remember my mother, Marie, telling me about her older brothers, Irving and Marvin Ellsion, climbing up the telephone poles----why I can't remember exactly--perhaps to listen in on the neighbor's conversation---I think the boys got into trouble for it....so they probably had telephones in the city in 1918. ( Note: Someone older than my sixty-one years will have to answer these baffling questions!)
I would think that celebrations would have taken place all day and most of the night, with many people out on the streets, gathering together and rejoicing with their neighbors that hostilities between Germany and the Allied nations had truly ceased and praying their boys could now come home. I am sure folks were thankful, hoping and praying that the armistice would hold, and it did. Another time of celebration was June 28th, 1919, when an official peace treaty--- The Treaty of Versailles---signed in France--- officially ended World War I .
The World War I Armistice went into effect on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month--November 11th, 1918. Americans would have probably listened to President Woodrow Wilson deliver an address commemorating Armistice Day on the radio or read about it in the newspaper on November 11th, 1919, the next year.
I can imagine all the Heads and other families gathered around their radios, listening to President Wilson's 1919 address to the American people, which began, "To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in this country's service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nations...".
Originally, Armistice Day was observed with parades, public meetings, and by businesses briefly suspending business at 11AM. Three years later, in 1921--the year my mother, Marie Ellison, was born--an unknown soldier from World War I was buried at Arlington National Cemetery in the now famous "Tomb of the Unknown Soldier". In 1938, Congress made Armistice Day an official holiday--"A day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace."
In 1954, to honor World War II and Korean War veterans as well as those from World War I, Armistice Day was changed to Veteran's Day. Until the day they died, all my older relatives--the grandparents, parents, aunts, and uncles---always referred to Veteran's Day as Armistice Day. And I usually do, too. Congress proclaimed that Veteran's Day was "a celebration that honors America's veterans of all wars for their patriotism, love of country, and sacrifice for the common good."
The family of my mother, Marie Ellison Head, had an up-close-and-personal connection with World War I. My mother's "Uncle Budge," one of the Jones boys and my grandmother Annie Belle Jones Ellison's favorite older brother, was a soldier who was a casualty of the 1918 Spanish Flu epidmic that killed so many people worldwide. Ann was only twenty-two years old at the time, married with children. Beloved Budge had lived with them a while, so his death had to be tragic for her and her family.
I can just imagine the joy and hope for world peace on that first Armistice Day! The world was a simpler place and time then, without many of the modern ways we humans have of killing each other today. The horror of war stayed with the veterans in my own family. My father, Ralston Cecil Head, was forever changed, as he was a Medic in World War II---an assistant to a surgeon who saved wounded soldiers lives by cuting off their arms and legs. (None of his children...me, Sue, or Charlie... knew this until many, many years later, and it explained a lot of why Daddy was like he was.) When the Army wanted my daddy to become a doctor after the war, he told them , "NO!" He had seen too much blood and death to be a doctor. Ralston instead became a skilled carpenter who created lovely things and built beautiful homes.
My Uncle Frank (Frank Curre, Jr., married to my daddy's baby sister, Alma Louise Head Curre--nicknamed "Aunt Toots") is one of the few veterans still alive today who survived the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on that day "that will live in infamy", December 7th, 1941. This surprise attack forced America into World War II. My parents had been married only a few months, and, like most Americans--- young and old alike-- my parents and family members put their lives on hold for their country.
My Uncle Frank is living history. Only in the last few years has he been able to talk openly about his memories of being a Pearl Harbor survivior. (My daddy, Ralston, who died in 1989, could never talk about the war and suffered greatly from post traumatic stress syndrome, which is now treated, but wasn't back then.) Uncle Frank is a deeply emotional, sincere speaker who talks to schools and other groups. Later generations need to hear his story, as it is an important uniquely American story.
My Uncle Frank is honored to be this year's Grand Marshall of the Veteran's Day Parade that will be held tomorrow beginning at 11 AM in Downtown Waco. I am so proud of my Uncle Frank and all our veterans, living and dead, who have sacrificed so much to keep America free.
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