Forward March

By Joe Ross

Born 1930 in the heart of the depression, Joe Ross was the sixth of seven children. His father died when he was three years old, leaving his mother with seven children, no insurance, and no means of support. The sole source of income came from his mother taking washing and ironing jobs for white families. The first of the family to graduate from high school, Joe was valedictorian of his senior class. He enlisted into a segregated US Army three days after graduation.
Joe submitted numerous applications to attend military schools. He was denied these opportunities when a company commander said black soldiers didnt have the mental capacity to learn technical skills. After integration of the armed forces he re-applied for those technical schools and was accepted. The crowning moment came when Joe became an instructor at the United States Military Academy at West Point NY.
He served honorably in the military with a 21-year career. Duty assignments included many stateside posts and overseas duties in Korea, Vietnam, Germany, Hawaii, and the Dominican Republic. His many military medals and awards include: Army Commendation Medal, Combat Infantryman Badge, and American Presidential Distinguished Unit Citation and the Purple Heart for a combat wound during the Korean War.
After retirement, Joe was employed as Chief Cartographer for E.S. Preston Associates Inc. Columbus, Ohio. After one year, he became a member of the firms board of directors. Three years later, he was recruited and employed by the Keuffel and Esser Engineering Manufacturing Company. He held positions as Mapping Sales Engineer and Micrographics Systems Specialist for fourteen years and retired again in 1985.
Joe was constantly involved in community and local civic activities. He served as a School Board of Education Vice President. In addition Joe was a Red Cross First Aid Instructor, Volunteer Emergency Rescue Squad member, American Legion Baseball Coach, Little League Football Coach, and Scoutmaster for Boy Scouts of America.
A father of seven children, Joe has been married to his wife Verlean for over fifty years.
A portion of his memoirs from his Korean War experiences is on record at the Museum of African American History in Detroit, Michigan.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Apr 20, 2006
• ISBN: 9781452054643

Book preview

© 2010 Joe Ross. 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 8/6/2010

ISBN: 978-1-4520-5464-3 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4259-1237-6 (sc)

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

Contents

FOREWORD

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

EPILOGUE

FOREWORD

Alex Haley provided an excellent service to all African Americans. His internationally acclaimed novel ROOTS inspired us in many ways. Through his writings, we eagerly listened to the drumbeat of our ancestors. For this, I am eternally grateful for his devotion and determination in tracing the footprints of Kunta Kente back to the motherland.

His dedication in attaining his goals inspired me to dedicate my life’s experiences as a testament to the determination I had in achieving my objectives.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I dedicate my life’s achievements to my wife Verlean. I cannot have a story of my life’s experiences and not include the utmost reason for my success. Regardless of my military assignments or what other endeavors I pursued, she was always there to give me the support I so desperately needed. Her dedication to rearing our children and supporting me has been outstanding. I campaigned for political positions during times when the atmosphere for black politicians were dangerous. She was fearful, but supported my endeavors.

Our belief that our children must have one parent home always put her quest for a career in a holding state. She waited until our youngest child began elementary school before starting her career. After 22 years of family devotion, she began her career in the medical profession (nurse’s aide) attended classes while working and retired as a physical therapy technician.

Special thanks to my children for their fascinations and questions about my childhood life that influenced me to record my life on cassette tapes for them and my grandchildren. The tapes produced an excitable decision; transcribe them to a manuscript for future book publication. My daughter Gail, realizing the problems I was having editing and re-taping tapes, purchased a dual cassette recorder. This gave me the ability to record, edit, and insert text as desired. My daughter Jo presented me with a new personal computer with word processing abilities. A personal note read: DAD, write your book and thanks for everything you did for us.

CHAPTER ONE

The Depression Years

Welcome to the life of Joe Ross. I feel very strongly about my life’s achievements and owe it all to the way my mother raised us. The high standards of scrupulously values and self-determination she imbedded in me prepared me to overcome any obstacle to reach my goals. For this, I am forever grateful.

The Thompson plantation near Logansport, Louisiana is the birthplace of my paternal grandfather and my father born July 1888. Logansport Louisiana is in northwest Louisiana, 34 miles southwest of Shreveport, LA. My paternal grandfather (age unknown) was born in slavery and was two years old when slavery ended in 1865. His parents continued to reside and work for wages at the plantation. At the age of eight years, my father worked in the plantation fields, weeding, and picking cotton with his father and never received any formal education.

At age seventeen, he left the Thompson Plantation and employed at Temple Lumber Company. Temple is a mill, located in the neighboring town of Longstreet, Louisiana. This mill closed and relocated to a small East Texas town, Pineland, Texas. Pineland is in he heart of the Texas piney woods, located on US route 96, 20 miles north of Jasper, Texas and 25 miles south of San Augustine, Texas. He accompanied the mill with the move. My farther met and married his first wife (Alberta) and two children were born Anderson and Josie Mae. Alberta died shortly after the birth of their second child. Her death left my father with a job at the mill and no one to care for his children.

My mother, Myrtis Louvenia Chism, born July 24, 1900 in Jefferson Texas moved to Pineland with her mother. At age fifteen, her mother abandoned her and a minister; Benjamin Franklin took her into his home. My father, eighteen years older, needed someone to care for of his children and my mother needed someone to care for her. The minister granted the permission to marry and performed the marriage ceremony. This ideally suited marriage of necessity turned into an everlasting love. After the marriage, the number of children increased to five. One of my father’s brothers, Sammy, having no children of his own, took the children of the previous marriage to rear as his own in Logansport, Louisiana. My father and mother produced seven children (five boys and two girls). The girls Helen born 1920 and Lillie Mae born 1933 were both the oldest and the youngest. The boys birthdays are Tommie Lee born 1922, John Elmo born 1924, Otis A born 1926, Booker T. born 1928, and me born 1930.

We lived in a three-bedroom wood frame house. Built by the Temple Lumber Company and rented to company employees. (Deducted from each weekly paycheck) The kitchen contained a wood burning stove with oven and a table with home made chairs. There was no indoor plumbing and our water source was a single outside faucet. The house was full of rats, roaches, and of us. We constantly baited traps with table scraps and cheese in a never-ending war with the rats. We vigorously attacked the cockroaches with a device similar to a hand held bicycle pump attached to a liquid reservoir container loaded with an insecticide named Flit. This was a continuous losing battle and the insects always won. Our light source came from kerosene burning lamps, we did not have electricity until after mid-1942, when installed there was a single drop cord lowered from the ceiling in each room.

The town’s residents only source of income is the lumber company. It encompassed a large mill with dry kilns, a planer for finishing lumber, and three locomotives to move logs from remote forests. Sawmill operations, as I remember, began by cutting trees into logs for transportation to the mill by railroad or logging trucks. These logs are offloaded into a large pond adjoining the mill are floated to a sluice and moved to the mill by conveyor chains. Huge power saws cut the logs into boards of lumber in various sizes, and moved by conveyors to a grading station. A person grades and marks the boards. Workers pull the lumber from the conveyor to movable carts called jitneys and transported to the drying kilns. . Some boards required a special dip in a vat of liquid chemical preservatives before drying. My father’s job was to pull the graded dipped lumber from the conveyor to the jitneys. The jitneys transferred the lumber to the kilns. My brothers believed the constant exposure to these chemicals caused his death and we believe the cause was cancer. Three of my brothers and one sister died and cancer were the cause in all cases. In addition, I had surgery to remove cancer from my bladder and another brother had surgery for colon cancer.

My father died in August 1934, leaving mom with seven children, no insurance, and no means of support. I was three years old and my youngest sister was seventeen months. Two years later my sister Helen died from pneumonia. It is impossible to imagine how mom raised us, as a single parent, in the hard times of the DEPRESSION YEARS. I was born November 22, 1930, in Pineland, Texas, There were five siblings before me, and my family had meager means of support. I can only imagine the sacrifices my parents made to raise a family that size.

Mom never remarried and devoted the rest of her life to making the best that she could for us to live a better life. I was not old enough to realize her actions during these times, but her determination, morality, and love for her children were the best. She was a very religious person and a strict disciplinarian. I can assure you that if I got away from her teaching, it would not take long to get me back on her chosen path. There was a time when I was about five years old, I took a friend’s toy, and told mom I found it. She knew better and got the truth from me. She spanked me as expected using the well-preserved razor strap my father used for shaving with a straight razor. She took me to the boy’s home. I returned the toy and made an apology for stealing. That really hurt, but I never forgot the lesson learned. I was terribly ashamed because I betrayed the trust she had given me by not heeding to her teaching.

The only means she had to support her family was by washing and ironing clothes for white families. The method we washed clothes was by boiling them in large washtubs over a wood fire. Our detergent was homemade lye soap; Mom made this soap from the fat from rendered from the pork, used to make cracklings, lye, and ashes from burned hardwoods. Mom only made lye soap at night and on a full moon night; I believe that it was a type of home remedy or a superstition. Mom washed by rubbing on a ribbed washboard, rinsed and hung on a clothesline for drying. Once dry, we ironed them, using a flat iron heated on a wood burning stove. We did most ironing inside after dark when the nights were cooler, the nighttime temperature averaged between 70 and 80 degrees. Our sole source of light at night was a kerosene lantern. Before each school day, I went to the white section of town, built fires under the boiling pots, and put clothes in the tub for boiling. Mom came later, washed, and hung them to dry. After school, I took them home for ironing at night.

We washed clothes for many white families and one family stands out in my mind. We washed and ironed their clothes the entire year and our payment came in the fall of the year. The family ran a small pig farm and slaughtered hogs in the fall. They gave us neck bones, hog heads, pig feet, ears, tails, and yes the chitterlings. (We ate everything they gave us except the oink) This was payment for one year’s washing and ironing. Each day, Monday through Friday, we washed clothes for a different family.

The income from washing and ironing through hard intensive work was insufficient to provide the necessities for life and we qualified for a type of subsistence from a government program called Relief. The Relief Organization was a government assistance program to provide substance for low-income families. I can only assume that it was the forerunner for our current welfare system. We did not receive any monetary assistance but the system gave us clothing and non-perishable foods. I got knee length brown cotton stockings, long cotton drawers, overalls, and high top-work shoes. The food consisted of dried apples; Mom had over fifty recipes for cooking apples. My favorites were apple crisp, an apple dish covered with breadcrumbs and baked in the oven, and apple turnovers, called pig in a blanket. Other foodstuff consisted of yellow corn meal, dried beans, grits, lard, and unbleached flour (we had to sift the flour before using to eliminate the boll weevils). The flour came in twenty-five pound cotton prints sacks. From these sacks, Mom made hand-sewn dresses without patterns for my sister and sometimes a shirt for me. She acquired a used foot pedal operated Singer sewing machine when I was nine years old; I believe she paid for it by washing and ironing. The sewing machine is still in the family; my older brother Booker has custody.

We never visited a dentist or owned a toothbrush. In my early years, she taught us how to make a toothbrush. We took a small twig from a tree chewed the ends into bristles, put baking soda in the palm of our hand and use the twig and baking soda as toothbrush and tooth paste. Our toilet was outside and it was quite a chore to get up at night in the wintertime. I had to dress and go out to a cold facility. For toilet paper, we used outdated Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward mail order catalogs. My most dreaded chore was getting up on cold mornings to make fires in the wood burning heater, kitchen stove, and the outside pot for washing clothes. Securing wood for washing, cooking, and heating was my never-ending chore. One of the bedrooms served as a combination room. It contained a wood burning heater and served as a living room during daylight hours. The heater kept us warm as we socialized before bedtime. I cherish these times to date. I listened intently to stories mom passed from her parents about life in slavery, especially when they learned of their freedom. From her stories, I could visualize my grandparent’s elation as they reveled in their new life of being free.

We had no heat in the other bedrooms. Mom’s homemade quilts kept us warm in bed. Every household made quilts in the home. Quilting was the social event of the homemakers. Everyone visited each other and sewed on the quilts as they exchanged tidbits of information about the community.

My siblings and friends had a lasting affect on me as I grew in life. My brothers always supported me and took every opportunity available to insure I enjoyed things that they did not have or could not afford. They once pooled their monies to buy me a used leather baseball glove; they made gloves for themselves by cutting oilcloth into glove shapes and sewing the pieces together with cloth padding.

One prominent item I remember that my father left in the home was an old single-barreled 12-gauge shotgun. There were never shells for it and I used it at times as a toy, playing soldier, cowboy and Indians, and exploring the wild-west territory in the nearby pine tree forest. I was eight-year old and my brother Otis (4