Battle Tested: Street Kid, Soldier, Teacher, Patriarch

By Gregg Davis

Many call them “the greatest generation”—those who fought in World War II. Author Gregg Patterson Davis can claim that distinction. He was a kid running the streets during the Great Depression, dodging problems created by a distant father. Then he left behind his home and high school sweetheart for the battlefields of Europe&md

• Language: English
• Publisher: Drawbaugh Publishing Group
• Release date: Jan 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781941746257

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

2118 8th Avenue

This story starts in the middle of the block. A two-story, wood-siding house sits at the center of an all-white, middle class neighborhood in Altoona, PA. Two maple trees, ripe for climbing, stand as sentinels between the front porch and the sidewalk. Another narrow walkway runs along the side of the house, separating 2118 8th Avenue from its neighbor. Two blocks away, the branch line of the railroad spews cinder in the air and the grit is always present. The year is 1926.

There is a garage and a yard in the back but the grass has been worn away by the children who play there. If the yard is quiet, it’s Monday, wash day, and Virginia Gardner Davis has strung her laundry out to dry. No child dares to stir up a mess in the backyard if Mother’s clean wash is on the line.

When she was younger, Virginia was considered a very pretty woman. Now she wears glasses and often pulls her dark brown hair back in a bun for convenience of getting through the chores of her day. Like many women of her era, she spends a lot of time in the kitchen and calls herself a housewife. If you catch a glimpse of her in the backyard, she is wearing a housedress and an apron.

If it’s still early, Virginia’s husband is sitting on the little sun porch that juts out onto the sidewalk, the spot he chooses for his morning coffee. Newton Davis is a lean, tall man and considered rather attractive. He has wavy, brown hair and will never go bald. He walks and hikes a lot and is a hunter, too, but he hunts for meat, not sport. He is well-read and knows a lot of people. He was a baseball pitcher in high school and went to Juniata College to pitch but for some reason, never graduated.

As he sips his morning coffee, 60 little panes of glass in that front window separate him from the flow of blue collar workers who walk by on their way to work. Many are like him and work for the Pennsylvania Railroad.

Gregg Patterson Davis is the family’s newest baby, born on January 20, and he has joined older siblings Louise (1922) and brother Newton (1924) but the family will grow again in another eight years. Little brother Robert will be born in 1934 and precede twins Richard and Virginia who follow in 1936.

Now, nearly 90 years later, Gregg Davis invites you into his story.

My father, Newton C. Davis, was born in Spruce Creek, PA. His family owned a dairy farm but he was an only child. I always thought my dad had been spoiled. I remember him telling a story about his sixth birthday and he already had a pony. When his mother asked him what he wanted, he told her he wanted to bring the pony into the kitchen to eat birthday cake. His mother allowed that.

Dad was a machinist for the Pennsylvania Railroad and he worked on the parts that controlled the speed of the train. He was the wage earner in our family and he controlled all the money.

Railroad workers got paid twice a month, the 7th and the 23rd. At Christmastime, no shopping would get done until payday on the 23rd. But on the other hand Dad would go out and buy a car for $900 and bring it home and not tell Mother he was going to do it. He would simply say: Mother, we purchased a car today. Would you like to go for a ride? Our first car was a Chevrolet with a rumble seat. We children were put in the rumble seat and it was a big deal to go for a ride because we went out of town where we couldn’t go by foot or on our bikes.

Every week Dad would give my mother money for the household expenses and a certain part of his pay would go into stocks. He bought stocks on the curb market right in Altoona; they weren’t purchased from Wall Street. He had drawer full of stocks like Pennsylvania Railroad and other corporations but when Wall Street crashed, he lost everything. He had the paper but couldn’t cash it in.

My brother called him The Old Man; I never called him that. To me, he was my dad and when I was younger, he was my hero. It wasn’t until I was older and running the streets that I realized he had real issues; he had a drinking problem. It was close to my high school graduation that I finally realized I had been disillusioned about him and that was disappointing.

When I was a kid, he drank beer which was 10 cents a glass at the time. Moonshine was 25 cents. When the second family came along, he drank whiskey. Even though Dad drank to excess, he would still be up at 6:00 a.m. and go to work. He rarely missed work; none of those guys he drank with did. It was the Depression and nobody could afford to lose his job.

Dad would take me fishing on the Juniata, at night, 60 miles from Altoona. He would leave to go drinking and let me there to wonder how I would get home, or if I would get home. Sometimes he would take me with his hunting buddies and they would stop for beer on the way home. I would sit in the car for hours waiting for him to come out. I couldn’t turn on the car to get warm. I guess in today’s world that would be considered child abuse.

He only came down once to visit me and my family in our house; I could never be so cold and uncaring. The only thing he got out of the trip was that he was astonished at the length of our roof. He did like our children because they would sit on the couch and behave. The interesting thing about him was that he was bright, but he had terrible language and our kids weren’t used to that. I never understood why he had to swear so much.

Later in life, I ended up with post-traumatic stress, and the psychiatrist tracks it back to when I was three years old. My counselor tells me that my anxiety problems started during those times when my father disappeared for long periods on those drinking binges. I treat people so much differently than I was treated at home. I guess I learned a lot about what I wouldn’t want to do to others from my dad.

Mother was an only child, too. Her father was a local physician who eventually lost his practice due to drug addiction. Mother was self-taught and reading was really important at home. As children, we always had to have a book. We had to read and when we were done, we had to return that book to the public library and get another.

I used to volunteer to get down on my knees and scrub our linoleum floor with pads rather than listen to opera.

She was always very church-oriented and we went to church a lot, twice on Sunday and again Wednesday evening. Dad didn’t go. We lived on 21st Street and 8th Avenue. Our church was at 23rd and 8th. Mother didn’t drive-women just didn’t do that at the time-but she loved to have us walk to church with her.

Mother also liked opera music and wanted us to listen. They would put the radio on and we would gather around it in the living room. You were expected to sit there and listen to it and if you weren’t listening to it, you had to be quiet. If you sat down, you had to stay until the end. My younger brother Richard did listen but I found it boring. I used to volunteer to get down on my knees and scrub our linoleum floor with pads rather than listen to opera.

The news was important in our home and we were supposed to listen to it. Mother and Dad read two newspapers every day, the Altoona Mirror and the Altoona Tribune, and that was something else we were expected to do. You could look at the cartoons but you better read the whole paper. At dinnertime, you were expected to know what was going on so we could talk about it at the table but as children, we didn’t talk unless we were spoken to. Also, if you were asked what had happened at school that day and said nothing happened, you got reamed out. It was expected you would have something to say.

When I was growing up, we ate breakfast in the dining room but seldom ate together. Everyone fixed their own breakfast, except Dad. Mom made him a hot breakfast every morning of scrapple, eggs and bacon or pancakes. They also ate a lot of puddin’ which was made by boiling the meat off a hog’s head and mixing it with oatmeal. It cooled in a pan until it got firm, then Mother sliced it and fried in the skillet. There was very little fruit. I ate shredded wheat and cocoa. Our cocoa was made of milk but the neighbors had cocoa made of water. That meant we were better off than they were.

The milkman delivered milk in glass bottles and he left it on the porch in a little insulated metal box with a flip-flop lid. We got three quarts a week. I think it was 12-cents a quart. Even though mother made bread every week, the bread man still came twice a week and dropped our bread off on the porch swing. I think bread was seven or eight cents a loaf. I remember that bread used to come whole, not sliced. Sliced bread came later. We didn’t have butter; we got Oleo. It came in a tub with button full of oil in the top of the lid that you had to squeeze and then work into the margarine to give it that yellow color.

Wild game was a big part of our meals, and hunting was serious business. Dad did piecework for the railroad and kept a record of how much time he spent on which pieces. That gave him the chance to hold back on reporting some of his hours and turn it in later. That way when deer season came around, he could turn that in and still get paid while he was off. Otherwise there would have been no income on those days and that would have been a hardship for the family.

When you hunted, you packed your lunch which consisted of fours slices of bread that were used to make two sandwiches. Quite often it was spread with just margarine; we didn’t have butter and there wasn’t mayonnaise or mustard for sandwiches. You got two slices of lunch meat and most of the time that was Lebanon bologna because that was the cheapest. That was all wrapped up in wax paper.

You didn’t pack anything to drink. When you got thirsty, you lay down and drank from a stream. We had no candy or cookies or fruit of any sort and didn’t have chewing gum. In the woods, you could strip off a piece of birch bark or pinch off a few stems of a teaberry plant and chew that to keep your mouth from becoming dry.

We started at 7:00 a.m. If you got hungry and ate your sandwiches too early,