It was Aug. 24, 1944, at 2 a.m. in Florida in a military base hospital … I was born. There was a hurricane raging outside and the lights went out. By the time the standby generator kicked in, I was here, obviously undeterred by circumstances.
Little did I know or imagine what the next 81 years would hold and what a great deal of it I would remember.
My parents were delighted when I was born, as I was their first child. However, my first Christmas found my mother worrying about my father’s upcoming overseas assignment. He was a navigator on a B-17 bomber, having graduated at the top of his class in navigation school after flunking out as a pilot on multi-engine planes.
During World War II, those bombers all had names given them by their crews. His plane was named “Baby;” my first namesake was indeed a warplane, stationed in Foggia, Italy, flying bombing missions over Germany. He was one of the lucky ones and made it back safely. It helped that the bombers were accompanied by fighter planes flown by the Tuskegee Airmen, who protected the bombers as they made their runs.
And while, they were all stationed in Foggia, it was segregation as usual. My father, who was the third generation of his family to be born in the same house in Piedmont, West Virginia, never met another native of that town who was also in Foggia at the same time. Clifton Brooks was also from Piedmont and a member of the Tuskegee Airmen. The two men never met each other and that to me is sad.
Years later, in a newspaper interview just before Brooks spoke to Keyser Rotarians about his experiences during the war, he said, “In the air above Germany in 1945 we were not only equal, but the pilots of the 99th fighter squadron in their P-51s were the protectors. They were charged with escorting the giant B-17 bombers and their crews into enemy territory where they dropped their loads of bombs and returned to their base in Foggia, Italy.
“Back on the ground, it was a different story. There was no equality, not even in the midst of World War II,” Brooks said.
When Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese in 1941, the year my father enlisted in the Army Air Corps, Brooks and other black men wanted to enlist but had a difficult time doing so until units like the Tuskegee Airmen were formed.
When the war finally ended in 1945 with the defeat of Japan due to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki and the ultimate failure of Hitler’s power in Europe, my father came home with all the other airmen, soldiers and sailors, ready to rebuild their lives.
It seemed like new housing projects sprang up overnight and people seemed happy to be looking forward again instead of spending time scouring the news for reports of the war and their loved ones overseas.
When my father came home, he packed my mother and me up and we headed for California. This was in 1946 and it was in California that my earliest memories really begin. I remember the beach along the ocean where we would go near our Los Angeles home. I remember squishing my toes in the sand and picking up seashells.
They made friends with others who had come back from the war and my mother’s sister and her husband also came to California. Her sister was a nurse and had met her brother-in-law, a naval architect, when she was working a case. She was only 18 months older than my mother and their first child, a boy, was born two months after I was.
It was in California that the first of my two younger sisters was born. Given that my mother had to have an appendectomy when she was five months pregnant, for her it was definitely not an easy time. Because she was limited and spent much of her time in the hospital until the birth, my father asked his father to come and help.
When my mother went to the hospital to actually have my sister, my grandfather was left to babysit me. That was something I’m sure neither one of us remember as fun. I distinctly remember leaning against his shoulder, crying my head off as he paced the floor trying to get me to stop. I not only missed my parents but he smelled terribly of the pipe he smoked for years.