The Time of My Life: An Autobiography from the Greatest Generation

By TOM ERWIN

This trip through time takes us on a journey from the day to day struggle to survive on a Louisiana farm through his teenage years growing up in prewar New Orleans, a three year tour of duty in the South Pacific during World War II, the postwar search for a new beginning, a forty year career in Radio and Television Broadcasting, and finally, retirement.

It is kind of a rags to riches story, running the gamut from abject poverty to traveling the world over, rubbing shoulders with the highest of the high, and the richest of the rich.

The Time of My Life is a personal history of one member of The Greatest Generation. That group of Americans who, without coercion and no thought of personal gain except freedom, dropped all tasks at hand, took up arms, fought and won the greatest of all wars, and returned hope and freedom to a chaotic world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 3, 2005
• ISBN: 9781463494032

TOM ERWIN

Tom Erwin was born in 1924, in the very depths of the Great Depression.  He was the youngest of four sons in the family of a tenant farmer. In “The Time of My Life” his memories provide an accurate and colorful profile of life in America covering eight decades.  These vignettes from his multifaceted life present a revealing example of the perseverance, work ethic and love of country so prevalent among those of that era who earned the title, and have since come to be recognized, as “The Greatest Generation.”

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© 2005 Tom Erwin. All Rights Reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 05/25/05

ISBN: 1-4208-5011-3 (sc)

ISBN: 9781463494032 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2005904094

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

CONTENTS

The Book

Chapter One

THE FARM YEARS: 1924-1936

Chapter Two

THE CITY LIFE -

NEW ORLEANS: 1936-1941

Chapter Three

THE WAR YEARS: 1941-1945

Chapter Four

THE YEARS THAT FOLLOWED. 1945-

Prolog

About the Author

FOR:

Barry and Mary

&

Kathy, Dexter and Samantha

And for Nancy who was my loyal and loving partner for so many of the years documented in these pages, and she still is.

The Book

The purpose of this work is to try to document my personal memories of certain times and events that helped shape my life and my philosophy of life over a period of more than eight decades. All that you read here will be factual and true to the very best of my recollection. If there are slipups on specific dates or exact names of some of the real people mentioned here, or if some quotes are not attributed, it is because this is a work of memory and not intended as a fully researched historically accurate account of the subjects described.

I have undertaken this endeavor at the urgings of numerous friends and associates, and at the request of my children. I will feel fully compensated if those who read it come away with a better understanding of what life was really like in an era when our country made the biggest strides in both human and economic development in its history.

Some of the stories are related in greater detail than others, but all of them played equally important roles in the transformation of what I was, to what I am…

Amen Event = Any occurrence that brings great joy to a multitude of people

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Mike and Louise Erwin Cir. 1918

Chapter One

THE FARM YEARS: 1924-1936

In the spring of 1924, when few people had anything and most people had nothing, a native Louisiana farm family, Mike and Louise Erwin, moved to the Mooreland Plantation just south of Alexandria, Louisiana. Louise, born in New Orleans in 1898, was already bulging with her fifth child, which she was expecting in August. Her husband, born in Central Louisiana in 1888, was a sharecropper, a farmer who had no land to farm. So, the family lived on and farmed land belonging to somebody else then paid the rent at the end of the year with half of their crop. But sometimes, when they had a bad crop and paid a year’s worth of bills for the bare necessities, there was no money left to pay the rent. That’s what had just happened the year before their move to Mooreland Plantation. So, the Erwin Family, Mike and Louise and the boys, Charles 7, Mike 5, and Jimmie 3, (a daughter, Mary, had just died eighteen months earlier with Whooping Cough) set about putting in a crop in anticipation of better times. But that was not to be.

In the middle of a parching Louisiana Summer Mike was working in the field when he detected a small puff of smoke rising above the roof of the house. He quickly unhitched the team and galloped to the house on one of the horses. By then it was too late. Louise had gotten the boys and herself out of the house in time, but the weathered, unpainted farm house nestled in the corner of a cotton patch burned like tender, with flames gushing from the open windows and doors and through the roof. Nothing was left but the ashes of years of backbreaking work, and any hope they might have had for the near future.

The family occupied another ramshackle dwelling on the plantation for the remainder of the year. And Louise gave birth to her fourth son, Thomas Barry, in that formally abandoned shanty, with no doctor in attendance. I was that fourth son. And for the rest of my life, until I began to think of retirement, I had no official proof of my birth. We stayed on there until the crop was harvested and in the fall, the Erwin Family migrated further north to a farming community in Morehouse Parish, north of Bastrop, Louisiana.

I am not sure just how they traveled, but along the way, they stopped at St. Francis Xavier Cathedral Catholic Church in Alexandria, where it is recorded that I was born on the 30th day of August, 1924 and was baptized there on the 15th day of October, 1924. No place of birth was entered in the record. I would have to use that Certificate of Baptism in later years to help prove the facts relating to my date of birth.

Upon arrival in Morehouse Parish, the sharecropping ritual started all over again. We moved regularly in the following years from one farm or plantation to the next, all within the same general area. My three brothers and I grew up in the process, and each of us had started school at six years of age. We sometimes attended two or more different schools in the same year. There was the Boykin Place, the Leonard Place, The Tisdale place, The Montgomery Place, the Lambert Place and others with similar names that have slipped my memory. The last two are the ones I remember best and contrary to the recollections of some of my peers, my memory tells me that the Great Depression was just as great in rural America as it was in the cities.

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Charles, Mike, Jimmie, Tom Erwin 1926

On the Montgomery Place we farmed about 30 acres. We had a mule and a horse, a homemade wagon which Jimmie had built using raw lumber and old cultivator wheels, a cow and calf and a couple of hogs. By then we had accumulated a few hand tools, an old cultivator and a couple of plows. If we didn’t have something we needed, we borrowed it from a neighbor or just did without it. My brothers and I, before leaving for school, took care of the daily chores, milking the cow, feeding the animals, bringing in wood for the fire place and my mother’s wood-burning cook stove, and making sure the lamps in the house were filled with kerosene. With no electricity, we used kerosene lamps and light from the fire in the fireplace to do our homework at night. We also had to carry water from the well, which had been located before we arrived on the scene, about hundred yards from the house. I could never quite understand why grown men digging a four foot square well some thirty feet deep wouldn’t dig it in a more convenient location near the house. The chores had to be finished in time for us to grab our lunches and catch the school buses, one going one way with me and the other going toward Bastrop with Charles, Jimmie and Mike.

Virtually always, our lunches consisted of two biscuits with a piece of fried salt pork in one and, as often as possible, a fried egg in the other. There were times when the egg bin got so depleted that we had to fall back on eggs from an old turkey hen for lunches. I can remember the turkey’s nest was on the ground, hidden in a briar patch. We always scooped the eggs out of the nest with a spoon to keep from leaving a scent that might cause her to hide her nest somewhere else. There were times when we had no lunch if that old turkey hen hadn’t laid an egg the day before.

The bus I rode was a pickup truck of sorts, with benches on each side and covered with tin over a wood frame. The school, which consisted of two rooms, was located about five miles up the road from home. I don’t really recall if it was red or not, but it was always referred to as the little red schoolhouse. I think the official name for it was Tallou School. Only one room of the school was used because we had only one teacher. Her name was Miss Harkness, and she was a jewel of a lady. She taught three separate grades in that one room. Each grade was given assignments, which they worked on while she lectured and taught one of the others. She lined us up every morning and gave us a thorough inspection for cleanliness and personal hygiene, checking our ears and teeth and hands. I don’t remember a single boy in any of the classes who wore shoes to school during the spring and fall months. Sometimes, if we had missed brushing our teeth at home, we would cut a twig from a black gum tree in the schoolyard and shred the end of it to form a brush and use it to clean our teeth before the bell rang for inspection.

My father worked from time to time on what were called day jobs, where you just work a day here and a day there when a particular job had to be done. I can remember many mornings when he would leave on horseback long before daybreak and ride six miles to the town of Galion, located on a rail line, where he and another man would unload a full rail carload of gravel with shovels, and ride the horse back home after dark. His pay for that job was two dollars. There just weren’t any steady jobs to be found and no cash money in circulation.

Virtually everybody raised what they ate and filled in the menu with the meat of wild game. We hunted squirrels, rabbits, deer, birds and anything else edible to put meat on the table. We made slingshots with rubbers cut from old inner tubes and fashioned blowguns from long joints of switch cane and hunted roosting birds at night. We fished and bathed and learned to swim in the bayou just across the road. In the winter we built bird traps with thin strips of cypress hewn from roof shingles, and set them in thickets with a trail of corn leading to the trigger. We set steel traps along animal trails and around watering holes in the woods and caught rabbits, possums, raccoons, skunks and an occasional fox. They were skinned and the pelts treated with an oak-bark tanning solution that didn’t work very well, and sold in town. I don’t think we ever perfected the technique of deodorizing the skunk pelts and eventually surrendered on that count.

We built a flat bottom boat, which we left tied up in the bayou at all times and fished at every opportunity. We twisted thread from Mom’s sewing kit to make fishing lines. And when we lost all our small hooks on underwater snags, we often bent straight pins into hooks and caught bream nesting in the shallow pools around the base of the large cypress trees standing in the edge of the water.

I think the real key to our survival was the fact that my mother had been born and raised in New Orleans and her uncanny skill and marvelous talent in the kitchen could turn the most meager and plainest ingredients into a very savory meal. She was an absolute genius at making something good to eat out of absolutely nothing. And to me no one since has ever come close to matching her biscuits. They had to be good, because they were our staple food, and I don’t ever remember eating what we called light bread until I was eleven years old. We could not afford to buy yeast. I remember that at that time, the price of a twenty-four pound sack of flour was 68 cents.

There were probably twenty to thirty families living in the general area, virtually all of them in the same economic stratum. Two of them were my uncles and aunts and their children, and we lived fairly close together. While these were very trying times, all of these people set Sundays and holidays as a time to get together for a little fun and relaxation.

One 4th of July we had a big community fishfry. I can remember my father and some of the other men baited a hole in the bayou for several days before the event. They tied up small sacks of cornmeal and dropped them in the deepest part of the bayou to draw the fish into that area to feed on the cornmeal. They were mostly Buffalo Fish. Then, a couple of days before the event they made a paste of what they all called induberries. I have no idea what induberries were or are, but when they threw wads of that paste into the water at the baited hole, the fish began to do all sorts of crazy things. My father said the induberries made the fish drunk. The men were out in boats and the fish became so active they were boiling the water in that part of the bayou. They began jumping up and out of the water and swimming at high speed and running along the surface flapping all over the water. The men were scooping them up with nets as fast as they could dump them in the boats. The action lasted for about 30-minutes, and when it died down the boats were literally filled with fish. I had never seen anything like it before and have not seen anything like it since. I suspected then and know now that our methods could not have been legal. But I know, too, that any game warden with a sense of self preservation also had enough sense to steer well clear of the activities leading up to that 4th of July Celebration in 1933.

Occasionally on Saturday night, one family would host a dance. John Fontenot, who was the local Highway Department Superintendent, could play the fiddle and my brother Charles, and a couple of other locals, could accompany him on the guitar. They provided the music, and the family giving the dance would clear the furniture, which wasn’t much, out of their biggest room, sprinkle cornmeal on the plank floor and that was the dance hall. I don’t remember much of the music they played and virtually all of it was instrumental. I do remember Skip To Milou, Turkey In The Straw and lots of square dances. The small kids were bedded down on pallets in the house, while those too young to dance but old enough to play games outside in the dark were experiencing the fun and exhilaration of getting their first exposure to male-female fraternization. All of these things were happening during a time when prohibition was the law of the land. And while refreshments at these events generally consisted of cake and coffee, it was not unusual for a bottle of locally stilled refreshment to make its way to the party.

There were at least three pretty good bootleggers in the general vicinity, but most of the people we knew got their liquor from a man known far and wide for his product. His name was Jack Allen Naff. He lived over on the other road across Bayou Chemin-A-Haut, not far from what is now Chemin-A-Haut State Park. He dispensed his spirits from a shed near his barn, and as I remember, he sold it for $5 a gallon. I can remember going there with my dad riding double on horseback. We rode the horse through the woods behind our house to the bayou, tied him to a tree, swam the bayou holding our clothes over our head, then walked to the Naff’s house. We reversed