Field Mice in Wichita

First, I have a public service announcement. The management, Google, has informed me that in order to continue to find my blog you'll have to create a Google account. I hope that doesn't cause a problem for anyone. Most people use Google anyway. It's more user friendly, and it's easier to find stuff, at least I think so. 

Back to my subject for the day. Although I 've been trying to stick to the story of my uncles during WWII, something in Boyd's last letter reminded me of a story my parents told me about their first house in Wichita. My mother Wenonah wasn't happy with the apartment where they moved first, to say the least. As I mentioned in my post of October 23, 2015, her landlady burned her trash right next to the clothesline where Wenonah hung my diapers, so as soon as they were able - my parents rented a house.

The house was located on the edge of town, and there were a lot of mice living a field nearby, so my parents' problems changed from inconsiderate neighbors to little mice running around the house. My dad got busy setting traps, poison, and plugging all the openings he could find in the floor. That's when he learned that steel wool was better for this than wooden patches or putty, because the mice couldn't chew through it. He must have written to Boyd about his mouse problem for him to joke about scaring them away with a picture from the war. 

Anyway, the story that impressed me most about Don's battle with the mice was how he killed them by hand. He said that the mice had free reign over the house at night and they were still busy when he got up for work in the morning, so while it was still dark outside, he would sneak into the kitchen and turn on the light. This would catch a mouse of two in the middle of the floor. The mice would try and run, but they couldn't get any traction on the linoleum floor, so Don was able to reach down and swat them up against the wall, killing them instantly.

Everett Rejoins the Action

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Everett and the other survivors from the battleship Oklahoma were given their choice of ships for their next assignment. Everett chose the USS San Francisco, a heavy cruiser which had been at Pearl Harbor for repairs at the time of the Japanese attack but had not been hit. He avoided being assigned to one of the battleships, targets of the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. What he couldn’t know was that the USS San Francisco would be chosen as the admiral’s flagship, and would be involved in some of the heaviest fighting of the war.

The repairs on the USS San Francisco were cut short, and by mid-December she was heading back out into the Pacific with Everett aboard. For the first few months of 1942 the San Francisco operated out of Pearl Harbor. She was first sent to defend American troops on Wake Island, but was ordered to withdraw when news of Wake’s fall reached fleet command. Next, the San Francisco supported reinforcements to Samoa, one of the next targets of Japanese expansion, and she shelled Japanese installations in the Gilbert and Marshall Islands. From there the San Francisco joined a task force heading for Rabaul, in New Guinae, the center of Japanese operations for the South Pacific, but they were attacked by Japanese bombers and turned back.

By the time the USS San Francisco returned to Pearl Harbor in March of 1942, the ship had not received any fresh supplies of food for almost three months. Everett told Don and Wenonah that with no fresh fruit or vegetables, his hair started falling out, and his fingernails started peeling off.

After being resupplied at Pearl Harbor, the USS San Francisco was sent back to the states for three weeks, and then she joined a convoy carrying a large force of American troops, along with food and munitions, to New Zealand.

About that time, Everett decided to get married, to a girl he had met in San Francisco. They had opened up a joint bank account and he had started sending her money.  Boyd, who was still in artillery training stateside, wrote to Don, worried that their little brother might actually go through with the marriage:

4/7/1942:  

Dear Don and Jimmy, thanks for the letter. It was good to hear that Jimmy is getting along so well. You both must be getting used to the inconvenience of having a baby by now (actually I wouldn't be born for another 2 months). You may not think I am an expert on the subject but every time I look at those pictures of my two it makes me feel old and expert.

Everett’s letter about getting married sounds like a joke at first but he must be serious since he wrote us both the same thing. I am going to write him and tell him that I’d like to see him before he definitely makes up his mind. If he is really in love with this gal O.K, I wouldn’t meddle or interfere, but after all, so far she has been just one of many & he probably hasn’t even seen her for 6 months.

He should at wait until he has some time off to think it over. He couldn’t live with her now even if they were married, & if he doesn’t come through this war, all the marriage would mean is a pension for her as his wife when actually they never had a chance to live together.

By the way don’t worry about writing capt. On my letters. The rule here is that promotions come only after a full year of active duty. Even though I have a lot of seniority, I still won’t be promoted for some time.

This is a swell camp, and I hope I will get to stay a while. Eleanor is coming out as soon as we know & it should be settled any day.

Hope you don’t have to get in this. Stay right with your job and your family if you possibly can, and don’t volunteer.

If you have any trouble with those Kansas field mice you can put this picture where they’ll see it.

It was taken at Moro Bay near here where Jap Subs have sunk several oil tankers. Good luck to you kids. Sincerely, Boyd

In June, the Japanese landed troops on the island of Guadalcanal, just east of Australia, the main supply base for Allied forces. The US command immediately made plans to retake the island, and two months later, US marines landed on the beach and took the almost completed airstrip, which they named Henderson Field, after a pilot killed in the battle of Midway.

The marine landing was covered by several cruisers and by air support from three aircraft carriers, commanded by Admiral Frank Fletcher. When the Japanese navy attacked the transport ships unloading supplies for the marines, admiral Fletcher, fearing that he would lose his carriers, withdrew, leaving the cruisers and transports unprotected. What followed was the Battle of Savo Island, the worst defeat in US naval history, with almost 2000 US casualties.  

After the Battle of Savo Island, Everett’s ship, the USS San Francisco, headed for Guadalcanal.

The War in the Pacific

Good News! ChickasawPress.com is up and running if you would like to buy a copy of Wenonah’s Story on line.

With this post, I’m going to go back to the story of my dad’s brothers, Boyd and Everett, during WWII. Sorry for jumping around like this. If you’d like to review Everett’s escape from the sinking Battleship Oklahoma at Pearl Harbor, see my post of September 20, 2015.

Both my uncles served in the Pacific Theater. I did some reading about the war, and by knowing that Boyd was in the 161^st Infantry Regiment, and that Everett was on the USS San Francisco, I was able to follow them through the war, and also to fit together what I know about their personal experiences. I didn’t get much help from Don’s older brother Boyd. He never talked about his war time memories with Don, and his son, my cousin Tom Gunning, told me that the whole subject of the war was off limits in their house. On the other hand, Don’s younger brother Everett seemed to enjoy recounting his experiences. He told my parents several stories, and while on leave, he was interviewed by the local newspaper and radio station in his home town of Enid, Oklahoma.

To give you a little background, the Japanese rapidly followed up their victory at Pearl Harbor by taking Hong Kong, Guam and Wake Island. Then they marched through French Indochina and Thailand into Burma, and down the Malay peninsula toward Singapore, sweeping British and Dutch troops and naval vessels aside as they went. By mid-March they had taken Singapore, defended by 85,000 British troops, and the Dutch East Indies with their rich oil stores. In April 100,000 American and Philippine troops under General Jonathan Wainwright surrendered to the Japanese on the Philippine island of Luzon. By the time I was born in May, 1942, many began to think the Japanese were invincible. My mother Wenonah was terrified.

After Wainwright’s surrender, the American and Filipino prisoners, exhausted after 4 months of fighting, and suffering from malnutrition, malaria and dysentery, were marched 80 miles up the Bataan Peninsula by their Japanese captors. The stragglers were beaten and even bayoneted if they failed to keep up. 600 Americans and 10,000 Filipinos lost their lives during the ordeal, afterwards known as the “Bataan Death March.” Boyd’s unit, the 161^st Infantry Regiment, was on its way to the Philippines at the time of the Japanese attack. If he had been there, he would have been among those on the Death March. As it was, he was sent to the island of Guadalcanal instead.

The first American successes in the Pacific war were the result of intelligence efforts.  On April 28, 1942, about the same time as fall of the Philippines, the Japanese sent a fleet of transport ships carrying troops to establish a base at Port Moresby in Papua, New Guinea. From there they hoped to launch attacks on Australia, America’s main supply base. Orders for the movement were decrypted by American Intelligence, and the Japanese convoy was met in the Coral Sea by planes from two US aircraft carriers, the Lexington and the Yorktown. Although the Americans were overmatched by superior Japanese planes and torpedoes, they managed to turn back the Japanese troop transports and Port Moresby was never taken.

The next move in Japan’s strategic plan was to take Midway Island, about half way between Japan and Hawaii. It was then held by a small US force, and had the Japanese been able to take it, they could have again  threatened Hawaii, the Americans’ main naval base in the Pacific. Again US naval intelligence deciphered the Japanese orders, and on the day of the attack, June 4, 1942, the Americans took the Japanese by  surprise and sunk four of their six aircraft carriers. The Americans only lost one carrier out of their four, reversing the balance of naval power in the Pacific war in our favor. 

General Jonathan Wainwright remained a Japanese prisoner in Manchuria until the end of the war. 

Te Ata

Unfortunately the Chickasaw Press web site is blocked again but you can still get books by calling them at 580-436-7282. Wenonah’s Story is still on sale for $20, and you can also buy the other newly published books: Chokma-si, the book of photos from around the Chickasaw Nation by Branden Hart and Stanley Nelson; the reprint of the first Chickasaw Dictionary by Vinnie May and Jesse Humes, first published in 1973, with comments on pronunciation by linguist Josh Hinson; a new cook book, Ilittibaaimpa’, Let’s Eat Together, by Vicki Penner and Joann Ellis, a reprint of Richard Green’s biography of the Chickasaw performing artist and preserver of Indian culture, Te Ata.

Now that my book has been published,  I've had a little more time to read, so I picked up the new edition of Te Ata. I have long been a fan of the author, Richard Green, who became our tribal historian while my mother was on the Chickasaw Historical Society Board back in the ‘80’s. Since then he has done a lot of research, both reviewing documents and doing interviews with tribal elders, which I think is so important.

Frankly, I didn’t pay much attention to the first edition of Te Ata. I knew was that she was a performer, and I didn't bother to read the book, thinking she must have just taken advantage of her Chickasaw heritage to draw a crowd, but she was so much more. First of all, she did really know about her heritage. She was related to the Colberts, and also to Douglas Johnson, the last Chickasaw governor before statehood. Her father spoke Chickasaw just like my grandfather, and she went to the Chickasaw boarding school, Bloomfield, like my mother.     

A shy but talented actress, Te Ata began presenting dramatizations of Chickasaw legends that she had been told as a child while attending OCW, Oklahoma College for Women. From her school performances, she attracted the attention of the Chatauqua Institute, an organization supported by philanthropists to spread culture to small towns, and she performed on their circuit for several summers. My mother describes the Chatauqua performances in Wenonah’s Story.

Anyway, Te Ata, continued to perform to an advanced age. She was a student of Native American culture, visiting tribes across the country, even into South America, learning the traditions, legends, dances and songs of many tribes, and presenting them to audiences around the world.

We are greatly indebted to Te Ata for being an ambassador for our people, promoting a greater understanding and appreciation for our culture and heritage.

By the way. Don’t think I’ve ruined the book for you. Mr. Green has done a masterly job researching the details of Te Ata’s life. The book is full of stories and it’s only by reading it in its entirety, that you can get an appreciation for Te Ata’s dedication and spirit. Also even if you already know about Te Ata, this latest edition of her biography has a large section of pictures not included in the first edition

Chickasaw Festival

Old Chickasaw Capitol in Tishomingo

I had never been to the annual Chickasaw Festival before this year. I was either away from the state, or too busy with my work, but this year I was invited to participate in a book signing there on the release of the book, Wenonah’s Story, that I wrote with my mother.

When I was a child there was no festival. We went to the annual Indian Exposition in Anadarko instead. It’s only been in later years, after the Native American tribes won their sovereignty, the right to organize their own governments, and the right to provide for their own people, that the Chickasaw Festival has come about.

My mother Wenonah lived to see it, and she and my father used to be regulars at the annual meeting and festival. Being there myself was a moving experience, and made me proud of our tribe, and what we’ve accomplished. I say that as if I had something to do with it, but that’s what tradition and heritage can do for you. It can make you feel part of something bigger than yourself.

The celebration was held September 25 through October 3 with events held all over the nation, from Ada, the current site of the Chickasaw government, to “Tish,” or Tishomingo where the old capitol is located, to the Culture Center in Sulphur, to the old Chickasaw community of Kullihoma, to Emet, the home of Douglas Johnston, the last Chickasaw governor before statehood. There were stickball games, a 5-K run, tours of the many Chickasaw facilities around the state, storytelling, craft demonstrations, an art show, a rodeo, cooking classes, the annual princess pageant.

My daughter now has both Chickasaw cook books, and she is an expert in cooking pashofa and corn bread.

Thursday night there was a ceremony recognizing the achievements of outstanding citizens, and the release of the new books published by the Chickasaw Press, the only native American press in the country.

Saturday began with a speech by Governor Anaotubby on the state of the nation. The list of programs and accomplishments was long but the governor has an easy going, engaging way of speaking that kept it from being boring. After the governor’s speech there was a parade – my cousin Homer, as one of the new Hall of Fame inductees, got to ride in it, and then an art show, food, stick ball, book signings, and other activities too numerous to mention.

It’s really awe inspiring what the nation has become: the health programs, the educational programs, the projects to discover and preserve our history, from the archives in Sulphur to archeological projects in Mississippi. Classes to learn to grow traditional plants, cook traditional dishes, to make baskets, stick ball sticks, arrows, to learn Chickasaw legends and tradition, and to even speak our own language. The legal struggle to obtain compensation from the US government for the debts owed the tribe from the time of the removal and statehood is continuing. The tribe is a billion dollar business now, and employs 14,000 people in the state of Oklahoma.

I’m not very well versed on the many government projects and programs, but I know they benefit all of us. My cousin stayed in the nation’s retirement center in his last year, and died in the old Carl Albert hospital. Another cousin has gotten hearing aides and glasses through the tribe, and my grandchildren have received excellent medical care at the new Chickasaw hospital in Ada, and scholarships for college. One of my cousins is able to get meals from the local Chickasaw community center, and the tribe is even going to pay to pave the driveway out to her house.

Chickasaw social services sent a visiting nurse out to see my mother and provided her with some of her medicines during her last years, and some of her friends in Ada even cooked her some pashofa when she became ill for the last time.

You ought to go to the festival next year. It will make you feel proud

Don's "Diaper Trouble"

 

Wesley Hospital, Wichita, Kansas

Since my dad worked for Boeing aircraft, which was considered essential to the war effort, he managed to avoid the draft during WWII, but two of his brothers served in the Pacific Theater, and they carried on a steady correspondence with him throughout the war. Don’s youngest brother, J.E., was in the navy, but he didn’t have to go overseas.

Letters from the front were all read by a military censor, so Boyd and Everett couldn’t say anything about what they actually going through, so they chatted about superficial things, and commented about the things Don told them in his letters.

The following is one of the letters Don got from his younger brother Everett, who had survived the attack on Pearl Harbor (see post of September 20, 2015). The letter was written in October of 1942, from the Pacific, where he would soon be embroiled in the Battle of Guadalcanal – but more about that later.

Oct 21, 1942, USS San Francisco. To Don Gunning 3112 E 3^rd, Wichita

Dear Don, Your letters have been coming with every mail. You won’t have anything new to tell Jimmy’s Mother from this letter. Your letters are always full of good news tho. Your diaper trouble sounds critical. My girlfriends have all decided out of sight out of mind. They never write. It is comforting to know someone is concerned with my welfare, sometimes I am disturbed about my outcome also. Tell everyone hello.

Your Bud, Everett.

In his comment about “diaper trouble,” Everett was teasing Don about a rectal fistula he developed about the time I was born. A rectal fistula is basically an abscess of the buttocks that drains pus through a hole in the rectum, leaking onto your underwear, hence the diaper reference. My dad would kill me if he knew I was telling this story. Maybe he’s looking down on me right now, saying, “wait ‘til I get my hands on him.”

Anyway, in addition to the nuisance, it must have hurt pretty bad, and it might have caused a fever too. My parents always attributed the fistula to my dad’s having to sit out on the hospital steps waiting to get in to see Wenonah after I was born, but I doubt if that would have caused it.

After Wenonah brought me home from the hospital and settled into a routine, Don went to the doctor to see about his fistula, and was referred to a proctologist, a doctor who specializes in that sort of thing.

The proctologist told Don he would need to open the fistula, and he admitted him to a hospital for the surgery, probably Wesley Hospital, where I was born. After the procedure, he kept him there for several days, to observe the wound, and to have the nurses change the dressings.

Don’s roommate in the hospital was a professional roofer who had been hospitalized for a back injury. Apparently he had backed up to admire his work and accidentally stepped off the roof. Don enjoyed listening to the roofer’s stories. He had had a lot of falls, and seemed to consider them just part of the job. The roofer had a large family, all involved in the roofing business, and in the evenings they would all gather around his bed, and laugh and talk about their experiences. Don entertained the family for years with stories about the roofers.

Don had only one problem with his roommate. On the first evening after he was admitted, his family brought him a bowl of grapes that was infested with gnats. Don spent the rest of his hospital stay swatting gnats.

When Don came home, the doctor instructed Wenonah on how to treat the wound. Since a fistula is an infection, the wound can’t be closed, so it was left open, and Wenonah was to apply a sulfonamide paste every day. Preparing the paste was a complicated process involving heating the sulfonamide powder to liquefy it. The result was a caustic mixture that caused Don to “rise up off the bed in pain” according to my mother, whenever she applied it.

The other story my dad told about his experience was going in to see his doctor for follow up visits. Apparently the doctor wasn’t a people person, and couldn’t recognize his patients when he met them, so when would enter an examining room, his nurse would prompt him by saying something like, “Dr. Brown, this is Mr. Gunning.”

Well, one day when my dad went in for his visit, the nurse forgot to make the introduction. Unfazed by the omission, the doctor went right to work, asking Don to pull down his pants and to bend over. When the doctor looked at my dad’s butt – he swore this is true – he said, “Oh, Mr. Gunning.”

June 2, 1942

Wenonah, Don and me, with Don's best friend, Bud Bickford (L)

In spite of my mother’s prodigious memory, she always saved things that reminded her of people and events. She started as a child, with a little box of keepsakes: the little red donkeys off of Grandpa’s chewing tobacco wrappers, the little crucifix that Pappa sent her from San Antonio, and the string of beads she bought with the dime Pappa gave her to spend when she went to the district meet in Ada, Oklahoma.

When Wenonah was older she began to take an interest in politics. I guess that was natural, since her older brother Snip, short for Homer, was a state senator. She saved newspaper clippings that mentioned him, and also stories about other prominent people and notable events. She must have got that from Mama, her mother, who had newspaper articles dating back to 1910.

Anyway, Wenonah’s dedication to preserving memories has been a wonderful thing for me, because I’ve inherited her keepsakes, pictures, letters and newspaper clippings. She started making memories for me on the day she brought me home from the hospital, by buying a newspaper and saving the front page.

It was Thursday, June 2, 1942, and it makes fascinating reading.

There were no less than twenty stories related to World War II. For example:

Midwest Warned to Expect enemy Air Raids: Wichita Cited Among cities Now in Danger.

Assassins’ bullets Thursday brought death to Reinhard Heydrich, No. 2 man of the Gestapo, whose ruthless tactics gained him the title “Der Henker” - the hangman.

British Dislodge Rommel from Libyan Stronghold

Nazis Stalled on Red Front

Senate Votes Balkan War: Resolutions Passed Against Bulgaria, Hungary, Rumania

Gas Rationing Ires Congress

Commemorate Pearl Harbor In Celebration Here Sunday: Six Months Anniversary

There were only two front page stories that didn’t concern the war: The news of Charlie Chaplin’s divorce from Paulette Goddard, and that of an unruly elephant which had been banished from the Wichita zoo and relocated to a nearby farm.

It seems remarkable to me that Wichita, Kansas, would be expecting an air raid. The long range bombers of the day had a maximum range of 2000 miles or so. Neither Japan nor Germany had an airfield close enough to even bomb our coasts, let alone Wichita, 1500 miles inland, but this is the degree of panic that gripped the country at the time.

The second page of the paper had several stories that concerned our family more directly. Property owners were protesting the freezing of rents, which had risen to outrageous levels because of the shortage of housing for workers at the aircraft plants, and the renters were protesting being evicted on flimsy grounds so that property owners could raise rents. Wenonah’s landlady used a different tact. She burned her trash next to the clothes line where my diapers were drying. Wenonah wrote a letter to the editor of the newspaper about her:

The World’s Meanest Landlady

A Home Town News reader writes that she has just discovered the “meanest landlady.” The woman burned her trash in the incinerator directly beneath the clothesline where a line of baby’s diapers were hanging. The baby’s things had been carefully washed with a mild soap, boiled, rinsed over and over again, and finally disinfected. “To a mother,” the reader writes, “that was nothing short of a crime.”

Still getting no cooperation, Wenonah told Don she that she couldn’t take it any longer, that she had to get away from that woman. So Don and Bud looked for us a house. We couldn’t afford to buy one, but they located a little house for rent in a nice neighborhood, and we moved. The house was on S. Bluff. There wasn’t much of a yard, but there was no incinerator next door either.