Millville's Mac - The Life Story of a World War I I Combat Marine

By John J. McNamara

Known for his quick wit, charm, and compassion, John McNamara has told the story of his life, family and war in a compelling, and honest manner. One reviewer said “Johnny Mac's book tells it like it was and makes the terror, the drudgery, the camaraderie, the bravery come alive and bring us back to boot camps and ball fields, beach landings and bayonets, battles and burials - all told in the voice of one who was there, one who still mourns fallen comrades, one who can tell the story, sprinkle it with humor and sadness and leave you feeling, "Aaah, that's how it was," leave you feeling breathless at how mere mortals could summon the courage to be better than they were.”
John weaves the stories of living in a small town, following his dreams, serving his country and meeting the love of his life into interesting chapters paralleling his life. With these stories, our memories head to our own childhood and a simpler time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jun 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312318465

Book preview

Millville's Mac - The Life Story of a World War I I Combat Marine

I was born almost a decade after World War II ended, so I never knew the war firsthand.  My Dad served in the Navy then, but right at the war's end, in stateside duty.  But, several of my uncles served.  They were Marines, Army, Navy, and Air Force and they all saw combat, whether it be in Europe or the Pacific. Thank God, they all came back, but they were changed men, and they were silent about the war, keeping its stories locked deep inside.

Johnny Mac's book tells it like it was and makes the terror, the drudgery, the camaraderie, the bravery come alive and bring us back to boot camps and ball fields, beach landings and bayonets, battles and burials - all told in the voice of one who was there, one who still mourns fallen comrades, one who can tell the story, sprinkle it with humor and sadness and leave you feeling, Aaah, that's how it was, leave you feeling breathless at how mere mortals could summon the courage to be better than they were.

Thank you John for telling the story ... your story  ... their story.  Now, I know.

-          Fr. Dan Mulcahy

Driving and listening to the audio, I was either laughing or crying and wondered what others thought as they drove by!

-          Carol Smith

I was surprised to read about the difficulties families had during Depression days.

-          Romeo Ethier

Johnny Mac's Stories are from the heart and full of laughter, love and life.

-          Dawn Marie Renaker Cooper

The lesson I learned from Millville's Mac is that even if your dream doesn't come true as you  wish, there is still much you can do to make  your community a better place for others.

-          Michael  Quirk

Prologue

Why am I writing my memoirs at 88 years of age, so late in life?

I always was a story teller, probably my Irish heritage, and events that happened so many years ago are as clear in my mind as if they occurred yesterday. Especially etched in my memory is every day I spent as a Marine fighting on Okinawa.

I loved to tell my childhood stories, or relate funny events, to my extended family, and later began to include my wartime experiences as a Marine. When I became homebound, the family suggested talking into a tape recorder to while away the time and save Grandpa’s stories. As memories came to mind, in no particular order, and many tapes later, everyone referred to my reminiscences as John’s Book.

This book is dedicated to my wife, Evelyn, who is the love of my life for organizing and transforming my spoken to the written word, and especially for her belief that you would enjoy reading this, my life story.

Copyright @2014 John J. McNamara

All rights reserved,

including the right of reproduction

in whole or in part in any form.

eBook ISBN 978-1-312-31772-7

Table of Contents

Chapter 1- Childhood and Early Schooling

Chapter 2 - Our Gang

Chapter 3 - Grandpa and Me

Chapter 4 - Growing Up Outdoors

Chapter 5 – On the Farm

Chapter 6 – Baseball

Chapter 7 – Joining the Marines

Chapter 8 – Parris Island

Chapter 9 – Junior Drill Instructor

Chapter 10 – Officer Training School

Chapter 11 – Overseas

Chapter 12 – Okinawa – Early Weeks

Chapter 13 - Okinawa Campaign Continues

Chapter 14 – Okinawa Battle Ends

Chapter 15 – China Duty and Home

Chapter 16 – Baseball after the War

Epilogue

Millville’s Mac

Memoirs as a Milkman

Memoirs of Barber School

Chapter 1- Childhood and Early Schooling

My earliest memories in the Town of Millville are when we lived on Burns Avenue. My older brother Edward was 6 ½ when he died of what I believe was some type of polio.  I remember the wake, it was 1927. I was almost 5, Timmy was three, and my sister Mary was just two months old.  I can recall my Dad holding me up to see Edward laid out in the parlor and asking him about the beautiful patent leather shoes my brother had on. I can still picture his shiny black strap shoes to this day.

After Edward died, my mother used to take the baby carriage, at times putting both Mary and Timmy in, and push it up Chestnut Hill which was then an unpaved dirt road, very uneven. It must have been quite a chore as we walked about a mile up the hill to my mother’s parents’ house, Grandma and Grandpa Duffy’s farm. They were so happy and welcoming, it was a great place to visit. We would go there daily, and if not, then very often. They would be a defining influence on me.

For a year more we stayed on Burns Avenue where the single family houses were so very close together and bordered the street. Young as I was, I could easily go from house to house and was a regular visitor at all the neighbors for handouts, getting hardtack at the Ringholms and peanut butter sandwiches from the Buckleys.

But my boyhood recollections really begin when we moved to Banigan City, also known as New Village. This was still part of Millville, and the section was simply two streets lined with company houses, two tenements each. Also called two deckers, they were erected for the workers of the U. S. Rubber, a company owned by Joseph Banigan. The Rubber Company was the main source of employment in town.

A few words of explanation - when I was born in 1923 Millville’s population was less than today, about 2000, and in area no more than four square miles. Cutting the town in two, paralleling Main Street, were two railroad lines and the Blackstone River. Main Street was intersected by another road called Chestnut Hill on the north side and Central Street on the south, so that when we moved to Banigan City, the New Village area, the change was merely from one side of our small town to the other.

Each house in Millville had its own well for water. For the company houses, provision was made for hand pumps in three separate locations on the street for pumping drinking water into buckets which had to be hand carried into the home. In addition each house had a cistern to collect rain water that could be pumped up for all other household use.

Situated between the two streets of New Village houses, the Banigan City School  was the two room school which I attended, where Miss Kennedy taught a combined first/second grade downstairs, and Miss Taft was the teacher for grade three upstairs. I really enjoyed school there. I have to tell you the conditions in those days. Millville had no town water or sewage system, and, as at home, we were served by an outhouse, one for the boys and another for the girls, with wipes, if you will, using newspaper and or Sears Roebuck catalogue pages. The school well provided the water, a bucket for each class. We had one dipper and everyone drank out of that dipper.  With no running water you didn’t have any opportunity to wash your hands so, if one got sick, everybody got sick, and that’s the way it was.

Every grade was pretty much a full house and when I started in the combination grade one/two, there were over fifty. My mother walked me to school my very first day and there weren’t enough desks. They were all taken. Miss Kennedy said, You know Johnny Yetman, so I went over to share his seat. The seats could flip up and Johnny had his seat up and was sitting on the edge of it.  Here I am sharing, sitting on the edge and very uncomfortable, so I said, put the seat down.

He just looked at me with a smile, which I took as a dare, so I pushed my back against the back and forced the seat down. He tried to put it back up, and I wouldn’t let him.  Miss Kennedy came over and said, What’s wrong John? We were both John.  I said, He wouldn’t put the seat down, so I did. Now this is the very first hour, of my first day in first grade. Even at that age I wasn’t a pushover and could assert myself!

When I finally got my own seat, in the row ahead, a couple seats over, was sitting Margaret Carroll. She was just a little kewpie doll, cute as a button with freckles, and hair parted in the center. Margaret had to cross the Red Bridge going home, but first walk towards my house.  I guess I made sure we walked together. When I got home, my mother asked, How was your day today?  Now it was very unusual for me to say something like this, because I wasn’t interested in girls, but I said, I saw the prettiest girl I ever saw in my life in school. I described her and said, Her first name is Margaret.

At suppertime my Ma brought it up and said, I think John’s in love.  From then on I never said anything about any girl at any time.  I was embarrassed that Ma brought it up.  Margaret and I have been good friends ever since and that was 80 years ago.

We had two coal stoves, one in each room, and Mr. Sweeney used to take care of heating the stoves.  They were kind of fancy with chrome trim.  Miss Kennedy would put either apples or chestnuts around the rim and, of course, the smell of apples was delicious, and occasionally the chestnuts would explode before she got to them.

My father used to make some delicious fudge, a great big pot of it, put it on a large dish with a towel over it and place it on a high shelf.  He didn’t know how high I could scramble every so often – it was really tempting.

When I was in the second grade with Miss Kennedy, I noticed that if one of the kids dropped off something, she would let them know that she didn’t accept anything.  I thought this was because she didn’t want to be obligated to anyone or show favoritism. One day my Father made a batch of fudge, he knew Miss Kennedy, as an electrician he had done wiring for her, and she was also a close friend of my mother. So he put some fudge in a dish when I was going to school and said, I want you to give this to Miss Kennedy.

Dad, she does not accept gifts. I don’t want to bring it.

Oh, she will take the fudge.

I brought it over to her desk before class started, and she peeked under it, looked at me and said, Thank you, but bring this back to your Dad and tell him I do not accept gifts.

So l took it back to my desk and at recess took the cover off saying, Does anybody want any fudge? Everybody in the class had some.  I was surely popular that day! I could see Miss Kennedy look over. She must have been dying for some but she didn’t dare come over. I brought home the empty dish and told my Dad what happened. I overheard my mother talking to my Dad later saying, I told you she wouldn’t take it!

About this age I became ill with a very high fever and was getting worse. I was lying down and above my bed was a picture of the Sacred Heart. It was sort of knitted, if I remember right. And this is the honest to God truth, when I was lying there, and I was not asleep, I saw blood dripping from the Sacred Heart.   I called Ma. Now when my older brother Edward died, he had seen a figure with white wings at the foot of his bed, an angel, just before he died, so you can imagine how scared my mother was, she thought this was it for me. There was an elderly woman in Millville, Julia Sullivan, a registered nurse, who would come to the house when someone was sick and many felt her hands were blessed. So Ma called Jule – she got a hold of her, didn’t call because we didn’t have a telephone.

Jule Sullivan came over and told my mother – how she would know this I don’t know – but she said, Tomorrow, or tonight, get a lot of old cloths together, towels and so on, because he is going to have a terrific nosebleed, but John’s going to be all right. Typhoid fever, that’s what I had.  And the next day I had one of the worst nosebleeds my family ever saw.  I recuperated, just as she said.  Jule was a holy woman and nursed many, many people, not just us.

Some years later when my sister Mary, born in 1927, was four or five, she caught polio.  Both of her heels were right up against her buttocks.  My folks had doctors come from Woonsocket, and I remember Dr. Conlon saying, She’ll never walk again.  Well, my mother contacted Jule and every day she came over and rubbed, and rubbed my sister’s legs with warm olive oil and eventually, while Mary was always crippled, she could walk.

Of course, there was one thing I wish Jule had never recommended to my mother. She convinced her to give us sulphur and molasses every spring – our personal spring cleaning. I don’t know whether any of my readers have ever taken sulphur and molasses, it’s unbelievable – just as though you had eaten rotten eggs for a month. The gas…I have to be honest with you. And while this incident occurred much later I have to tell about it. In the eighth grade one day, I cleaned out the whole schoolroom. I was the only one left in the room!! My teacher, Miss Mahoney, on the way out said, John, you stay here and open all those windows. Later she told me to tell my mother not to give that to me again. It was so bad – terrible, terrible. Cod liver oil we had to take also, which was probably good for us, but sulphur and molasses certainly wasn’t good for the people nearby.

My younger brother Tim had beautiful curly hair. I used to get a haircut, which I believe was about twenty-five cents at the time, but Tim did not. My mother put his hair into fat banana curls which reached Tim’s shoulders and this is the way he went to first grade, while I was now in the third. I couldn’t understand her doing this and asked, Why are you trying to make him into a girl? You have two girls already. At this time my younger sister Mary was followed by the birth of another sister, Catherine, two years later.  To make things worse, Tim was being idolized by the girls in first grade, and I was being teased at school with taunts like, Here is your sister, Tim. Why isn’t he wearing a dress? One day when my folks were out I took my mother’s scissors and cut off his curls. I put the curls into a box and left it on the kitchen table. I guess I must have thought my Ma would want to save them! I caught holy hell, of course, but from then on Timmy got a boy’s haircut and I wasn’t kidded anymore.

There was one incident when I was in the 3rd grade that remained with me for a long time. I used to go home with a chum whose mother always had a big plate of grapes in the middle of the table. She never failed to give us a glass of milk and some cookies – I thought she was a lovely lady and such a nice Mom. Thank goodness I didn’t go home with him this particular day. My friend went home, looked for his mother, went downstairs, and she had hanged herself. To this day I don’t know the story behind it, but it was very sad and made quite an impression on me.

Before my mother and father married in 1920, I have a picture of them in the Separation Parade of 1916, when Millville became an independent town. They tell me there were ten thousand people in Millville that day and my parents are both sitting in a car, my father like a dandy was dressed to kill with a bowler on. He was a handsome guy. My mother was gorgeous, and could have been a movie star. I plan to include that picture in this book to show you what she looked like, and I’ll tell you one thing, if she is not in heaven we don’t have a chance. My mother adored my father, they got along famously and we grew up in a happy home. Five of us children were born in the 1920’s up to the time of the stock market crash in 1929. After the crash the decade of the 30’s was the time of the Great Depression and the sixth child, my brother Bill, was born in 1933.

During the height of the depression families where the father had a paying job were the exception. Since just about everyone was poor, we as children didn’t know we were poor. We never felt different or deprived but just accepted what little we had as the norm, were very happy and made up our own fun and games.

Every Saturday morning the people in Millville would meet at the Town Hall where the government gave out food, sometimes clothing. There would be grapefruit, eggs, butter and sometimes a pork shoulder. You always brought bags to carry the food home.  So every Saturday it was my job to stand in line and you never knew what you were going to get, but whatever it happened to be it sure tasted good to us.

One day Gene Gibbons, who was in charge of the distribution, kind of whispered to me saying, Next Saturday, come towards the end of the line. So often I would hang back and he gave me a little more than he gave other people. He was a great friend of my Mom and Dad. During this time I had another little brother, Billy, so Gene probably figured with five children we could use more help. Friendship meant something. Maybe it wasn’t right but he was a good man and I am sure he felt the need was greater for some.

Sometimes the free Saturday food would include canned meat. Some would not care for it, but my Mom knew how to doctor it up so it would taste delicious, and she’d invite Mrs. Hart, the upstairs neighbor, to have supper with us. If my mother had a cabbage, I would take a leaf off it, put some mustard on, and eat it like a sandwich. Imagine giving that to someone today, but I enjoyed it.

Every so often Grandpa Duffy would come down from the farm and bring us a couple chickens he had killed, or some eggs, as well as food from the garden. My Uncle Roger had work as a millwright and also owned a small variety store on Main Street. On very many Sundays, he and Aunt Mame would give me a roast to take home. They had three children, young Roger, Charlie and Sis, and I would be the recipient of the boys’ clothing. I was happy to get it even though oftentimes it was somewhat too small for me. My arms would stick out and I wore knickers even when they were no longer in style, but I’ll never forget their kindness to us.

My Dad was a certified electrician, but there was not sufficient work to cover the needs of our family of seven and I am sure that during the Depression, there were some people who could not afford to pay my father for the work he did. He was just that kind of person who would help, payment or not.

There was no central heat where we lived in Banigan City and we heated our rooms with a coal burning stove. My father would walk the railroad tracks to pick up the pieces of coal that had been dropped off the trains. Seeing him come in with the bags of coal, I said, I could do that. I was about eleven at the time. You just knew there wasn’t much and anything you could do, helped.

Every weekend I would go along the tracks with the bushel bag. Filling it was too heavy so I would bring it home three quarters full. We kept the coal in the entryway and used the shuttle to carry the coals to the stove. Once it got going, the fire would last the whole night with a beautiful red glow.

Others would also pick up coals. Sometimes when I saw a big pile, I would go out three or four times and try to get it all before the other people. Why sometimes a pile would drop off, I don’t know. But this gave me an idea.

I used to hang around the train depot, it was a nice one, not as big as the depot in Blackstone. I got to meet the engineers and the coal tenders who would stop to use the bathroom on their Providence to Worcester run. Trains at that time needed to burn coal in their furnace to make steam for running the engine. I intentionally started to talk with the guy that shoveled the coal, became kind of friendly with him, and said, It would be nice if you could drop off some coal once in a while.

Do you really mean it?

Yeah, I’d  like it if you could throw off a few shovelfuls in a certain spot – this would be just between the two of us.

Whereabouts are you talking about?

If you could, shovel it off down by that pond between the tracks. This was the pond I had fallen into when I was doing the bendies, which I’ll explain later. If I had to pick a spot, this was best because others did not usually walk so far, and I was used to walking almost to Blackstone picking up coals.

Every so often I would find a couple shovelfuls down by the pond. When I told Grandpa he said, What’s his name? Is he an Irishman?

Yes, but I had never asked the coalman his name.

Why don’t we give him some turnips?

I don’t see him too often.

Well, I’m going to give you some turnips and when you see him tell him they are from Patrick Duffy of County Mayo.

I took the sack two or three times. Then one day the train was stopped and the coalman was having a smoke. I said, Thank you so much for dropping the coal.

It was a pleasure. It was only a couple shovelfuls.

For food markets, Millville had an A&P, a First National, as well as those run by local businessmen, such as the Borek, Davis, Kiselloff and Dean families and there may have been others. My mother did business with Mike Dean, and he carried us through the Depression just as, I later learned, some other proprietors did with their customers. This meant maybe we would pay him, and only when we could. There was no such thing as credit cards, and whatever we bought was charged and the amount added to a running tab to be repaid at a later date. This was an honor system, with no interest of course. Mike’s words to my mother were, Don’t worry about it, Winnie.  Nobody could ever say anything about Mike Dean to her, or to the rest of our family, knowing that out of the goodness of his heart he helped us so much during the Depression.  My Mom finally paid him back, and hopefully others he carried did the same. 

Just a few words about what happened to our hometown during the Depression.  Millville was one of a few towns in Massachusetts that went bankrupt. The U.S.Rubber Company, our major source of taxes, had left, so Millville went broke and the street lights went out. The state put a Mr. Long from Boston in charge, who appointed Robert McLaughlin, a friend of my grandfather’s, to carry out his orders. Long’s instructions were that any time a house became vacant in Millville, it was to be ripped down. Families did leave to look for work elsewhere and at least 40 beautiful homes were demolished. This was to keep families with children from moving in, as then the state would have to pay for their education.

Some of the upper grades were housed at Longfellow School and its well went dry. No money was available to dig another, so the teachers there donated their pay for the entire year to pay for another well, an artesian. These women were all single, as by law only women who were unmarried could teach. During a part of this time, the girls at Wellesley College donated and brought lunches for the students. 

To help the unemployed, President Roosevelt began the WPA (Works Progress Administration) to create construction jobs. Some neighboring towns used this labor for major improvements such as water and sewerage systems, but because of its bankruptcy Millville residents had no say in its governing and nothing constructive was accomplished for our town.

Millville itself has a long history. It was originally settled in the 1700’s as a mill village along the banks of the Blackstone River which provided water power. As settlements increased, a section was separated from the original mother town of Mendon into the town of Blackstone, and later the Millville area became independent in 1916.  Within our small town of only a few thousand,  the population was very diversified, first the original Yankees, and over time more recent immigrants included Irish, French, Polish, Portuguese, Italian, Swedish, Russian, Syrian, Lithuanian, Ukranian, English, Finn, Norwegian – a true melting pot. A unique part of life in Millville was the friendliness of its people and everybody got along. We wouldn’t hesitate to call a Swede a squarehead, the French a frog or puddle jumper and the Irish were the micks or the harps. You didn’t mean anything disparaging and no one took offense, it was just accepted. I have since learned this bantering, or trading of