A Walk Through Life

By Charles Edmond Looney

Putting life in place...

At the age of sixteen, I could see I lacked something in my life. I had gone to Sunday school for one year while I had to live with my grandmother for my fourth grade in school. I had some health issues, and she lived closer to the doctor.

I went to a revival there for two Saturdays in a row. On the second one, I accepted Christ into my life. So since that day, I have tried to serve my Lord. Being a young boy and Christian, it was easy to be led astray while I was in my early years of military life. But in the beginning of my tour in Korea, I was in my sixth month in Korea, the war had been settled. I got a letter from a sixteen-year-old girl that I had never met. About one year and five months, we were married, so I gave most of my life so far to her and my country. The Lord took her home four years and two months ago.

I worked for the government for over forty years and was in all the wars during that time--Korea, Desert Storm, and the Gulf in '93. You see, I love my country and want to help keep it free, where everyone can live in peace.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 19, 2024
• ISBN: 9781638742197

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A Walk Through Life

Charles Edmond Looney

ISBN 978-1-63874-218-0 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-63874-219-7 (digital)

Copyright © 2024 by Charles Edmond Looney

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

A Church Layman, Military Life and War

Military Life and War

Things You Need to Know

Goodbyes

How God Has Blessed Us

My Family Memories or Our Family

A Country Boy's Life

Signs of the Times

For My Wife, the Love of My Life

Prelude

About the Author

A Church Layman, Military Life and War

My name is Charles Edmond Looney, born at the end of the Great Depression on January 23, 1934, on my grandfather's farm located at Jane, Virginia, later renamed to Breaks, Virginia.

My father, George Clint Looney, was born on April 5, 1908, and died on May 15, 1961. Dad was a coal miner during his teenage years until he died of a heart attack. He also had black lungs from all the years in the mines.

My mother, Shirley Livingston (Stewart) Looney, was born on March 6, 1916, and died on October 2, 1941. My mother passed away from TB at the age of twenty-three. I don't remember a lot about her as I was only seven years old when she died. The only things I remember are she sat in a chair a lot in front of the fireplace, and she was put in my uncle's car to take her to Catawba, Virginia, where she died from the TB. We couldn't see her. They brought her home from the sanatorium for burial; because of the TB, we weren't allowed to open the casket. I remember when she was buried. I followed up to the grave site. It was raining. My brother and two sisters were too young to remember as I am older than them.

My father remarried when I was a little older than nine years old. He married Gay Nell (Stewart) Looney. My mother, Shirley, was her aunt; and her father, George Stewart, was my mother's brother.

Dad and Nell were married on November 6, 1944, and together they had five children, three boys and two girls.

After Dad and Nell got married, she became like a mother to us. You see, she was the only mother we really knew. She loved all of us, as if we were her own children, and made sure we had all the things we needed, especially a mother's care and love.

My dad didn't have much education. He only went through the fourth grade in school, but he had a great amount of common sense and wisdom. He was a very wise man in his time, and he always tried to pass it on to us. Being a coal miner all of his adult life took a toll on him. His days were long and hard, but I never once heard him complain. We always had a vegetable garden when we lived in the Breaks. He would take care of it in the evenings and on Saturdays.

Nell would can lots of green beans and make jelly and jam for the winter months. We would pick wild blackberries, which she would can, and we got apples from Grandfather's farm. Dad would buy a bushel of peaches, which Nell would can. We had chickens and hogs and a milk cow. In the fall, just before Thanksgiving, Dad would kill one of the hogs, and we would have meat throughout the winter. Grandfather had a smokehouse, so Dad would smoke ham on both sides. The sides would be used for a bacon. Dad was also a good hunter, so we had wild game to eat, which also supplemented our meat.

We lived on Grandfather's farm until I was eleven years old, then we moved to a place at the time called Rocky Bottom; it was a bottom land between two hills with a creek running through it. I was about four miles from Grandfather's farm. A logging company had put a sawmill there, so they built a house for the manager to live in. When they logged out all the woods around there, they closed the mill and moved it to some other place. But the house was left, so Dad rented it, and we lived there for four years.

Just after my mother died, World War II was heating up, so my dad got his draft notice, but he couldn't pass the physical because of his lungs, but he wanted to do his part. The defense plants were looking for workers, so he and his brother both took jobs in an ammo plant in Radford, Virginia, where parts of the first atomic bomb were developed. They worked there until the war was coming to an end, so he came home and got another job in the coal mines at Ferrells Creek, Kentucky. So we moved there into a split-level house of US Highway 23. After we got settled in, Dad put up a grocery store in the front half of the top level, which was even with the highway. He worked in the mines during the day, so Nell and I took care of the store. Dad let a lot of people buy on credit. After a while, about a year and half, due to lack of payment, the store went broke, so he had to close it. He died with all those people still owing him.

My first experience with church was when I was in the fourth grade. I had to spend that year with my grandmother, my mother's mother, at Elkhorn City, Kentucky. I had come down with a case of rheumatic fever. The only doctor had his office at Elkhorn City, so he treated me for almost a month at her home. During that time, the fourth-grade teacher was Maxie Stiltmer. She found out I was there, so she came by every evening after school and brought me school homework to do, said she didn't want me to get behind in my schoolwork. I spent the year there and finished the fourth grade in her class. She was a wonderful teacher.

That's when I got my first church experience. My grandmother made sure that I went to Sunday school. The church was about two blocks from her house. That was the first time I ever saw my future wife. Her parents lived next door. She was only five years old at the time. Her brother Charles Alford Hall and I were the same age, and we were best friends until he died at the age of sixty-two years old.