"It's smarter to be lucky than it's lucky to be smart"
-- Stephen Schwartz, "Pippin"
It's only in retrospect that you realize how lucky you have been, and that's never more true than in genealogy. Having made some amazing discoveries -- a "surprise" great-grandfather, the birth parents of my adopted great-grandmother -- it's only when I compare my DNA against that of my full brother that I realize how fortunate I was in the genetic lottery when it comes to obtaining the breadcrumbs necessary to solve those mysteries. If we'd had to rely on Patrick's DNA, it never would have happened! Although he's definitely my full sibling (fun fact: that's one of the two fully-predictable-by-DNA relationships, the other being parent/child), the bits and bobs we inherited from four generations back is substantially different. He got much better teeth and skin than I did, though. So it's important to remember that "luck" can be relative.
I think that's why it's hard to identify a particularly "lucky" ancestor; when you're working backward in time the way we do in genealogy, a person's death is the first thing you encounter. You know how the story is going to end, so it can be hard to view their life with an optimistic lens. I grew up knowing that my mother's father had died the summer between her junior and senior years of high school -- "lucky" wasn't the word that came to mind. Then, well, I got lucky -- and found out how wrong my assumption had been.
He was named George Wayne Thomas, but, on his first day of school, his mother leaned out the door as he walked away with his friends and remonstrated "now, you be a good boy, sugar!" From then on, he was "Shug" to absolutely everyone in the small town of Woodward, about halfway between Ames and Des Moines, Iowa. His father died of a ruptured appendix when Shug was 14. In 1923, Shug married Inez Frantz Holmes, a widow with a 4-year-old daughter. My mother was born in 1924. Shug's mother, Dora, lived with the family until her death in 1938, all in the same 800-square-foot house in which my brother and I grew up half a century later.
Shug was 48 years old when he began suffering from severe headaches. He was diagnosed with a tumor of the pituitary gland in June of 1941 at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. As my mother always told the story, "the operation was a success but the patient died, anyway," when he succumbed to complications following the surgery.
I was clearing out the little house after Mom died when I came across a packet of letters that Shug had written to his mother while serving in World War I. The house had been doling out marvelous family memorabilia, but once I recognized what I was holding, I was a little horrified. I'd read about the mud, the poison gas, the privation and inhumanity the soldiers had experienced and, honestly, I just didn't think I could take an in-person account. For an entire year, I put the letters aside.
But I did at least know that Shug lived through the war, that he returned to his mother and his tiny little Iowa hometown, married a woman he absolutely adored and lived what appeared to be a contented life. Getting hold of myself, I laid out the correspondence and began to read.
Spoiler Alert: the letters and postcards are an absolute treasure. They are how I got to know the man who died two decades before I was born. But beyond that, they paint the picture of a pretty lucky guy.
Shug enlisted in the American Expeditionary Armed Forces shortly before he likely would have been called up. He was 25, the household bread-winner. On May 6, 1917, he and "the rest of the bunch" from Woodward, Iowa, traveled by train from Des Moines to Denver. They all had requested to enter the Coast Artillery together but Shug didn't get in, so as his friends headed west to the Pacific, he was routed south to join the Aviation Section. By May 15, he was in San Antonio, which he found to be very hot but otherwise a generally good time, taking apart "aeroplanes" in order to learn how to put them together, even getting a ride in one "before I lost my nerve."
Just as the heat peaked in August, Shug was sent to Toronto, part of the staff of a Major Fitzgerald. There, he encountered Canadian soldiers returning from the front, missing limbs and permanently scarred by mustard gas. He told his mother that nobody, including him, had any idea what war was until they'd seen the damage done to those men. He took his first boat ride, to see Niagara Falls, but decided he liked airplanes better, and said Ontario was full of a lot of pretty girls who seemed quite fond of American boys. As winter arrived in Canada, he returned to Texas, breaking the trip with a week-long stop to see his mother, extended family, and Ella, a girl from nearby Madrid with whom he corresponded throughout his absence.
Edward R. Hampton, Chickasha, OK
Chas. E. Focht, Grinnell, IA
Shug
William H. Curtis, Manhattan, KS
Otis R. Dougherty, Altoona, PA
Stationed at Taliaferro Field in Fort Worth, Shug went on many more airplane rides. He met some "Society Folks" who more or less adopted him, perhaps at the urging of their pretty daughter. They let him use their big, 7-passenger Packard, invited him to parties at their big house and weekends at their cottage by the lake with "motor boats and everything."
In July of 1918, Shug wrote from Detroit, saying they'd learned only the day before that they were being sent to Europe. Upon reaching New York City, he was quarantined for a bit when a couple of his companions came down with measles, so missed his intended transport. Once released from hospital (measle-free), another patriotic family invited him to their home on Long Island, showing him the sights of the city and the island "bungalows" of the rich and famous.
Finally, on September 7, 1918, Shug wrote "from somewhere in France." Although not allowed to say much, he reported that the voyage over was boring, but that France was very beautiful, a lot like Iowa. He compared agricultural and building practices, admiring the roads made of crushed white rock, the tall avenues of plane trees, and the use of thick hedges in place of fences. In October, he wrote hopefully of the Peace Proposal, and said they heard the explosion of shells day and night, and he'd gotten a glimpse of a German fighter the last time he was up in a plane.
The day we moved to Toul the ceiling was about 200 feet, but the pilots were full of navigation and used compasses over the clouds, with the result that the crew chiefs and mechanics listened to "the last shot of the war" all day long.
from A History of the 2nd Army Air Service, edited by 1st Lieutenant Hugo B. Law, 638th Aero Squadron,
Published at Toul, France, April, 1919
In November, after the Armistice, Shug was able to write in more detail about the places he'd seen in France, including Joan of Arc's birthplace in Domrémy. He met up with some young men he'd played baseball with in Iowa; they had been on the front lines of the fighting and "had some stories to tell." Responding to something in one of his mother's letters, Shug said he was sorry to hear so many people back home were getting "the Spanish Flu." He wrote of "seeing France by Packard truck," going through the German trenches "all made of concrete and fixed up fine, electric lighted and everything." He and his pals "found a lot of French bombs and had lot of fun exploding them."
For Christmas, he said "we didn't hang up our stockings, so didn't have anything in them (except feet)" but ate extremely well and enjoyed gift boxes provided by the Army. Shug sent home a newspaper clipping about a plane that crashed, killing a pilot he knew. He said the pilot had not been carelessly performing aerobatic stunts as the newspaper claimed but that his engine had cut out soon after takeoff and he'd been too close to the ground to do anything about it. In January, he wrote of his sympathy for his paternal uncle and aunt who lost their son to the influenza epidemic. Their eldest daughter would also die of flu four months later.
In February of 1919, Shug and a friend he'd made in Texas were given leave and traveled to Paris, seeing the Eiffel Tower and Champs d'Elysees, then traveling down to Toulouse and Perpignan, and up into the Pyrenees and even Spain, where American cigarettes got them across the border and back. He appreciated being where it was warmer and didn't rain as much, but he and Jack were disappointed by the number of American servicemen they met who were rude to the French people and dismissive of their customs and civilization. On March 19th, he got a vaccination to prevent Typhoid and noted wryly that "it is my 15th shot. If I am not immune to it by now, it is not the fault of the American government." Shug says that he forgot to mention to his mother that they had been 'reviewed' by General Pershing. "He is a very poor talker but very military."
In May, Shug was sent to Germany, where "there is castle after castle along the Rhine that belong to some titled or rich German." He said they were not supposed to talk to the Germans but they did, anyhow, sharing rations with the locals who had very little to eat.
On July 8, Shug wrote again from Long Island after a rough voyage back to the US. He said he was "ever so glad to see the Statue of Liberty, but if she ever wants to see me again, she's going to have to turn around." On July 24, Shug's hometown paper announced that he was back in Woodward.
I don't know whether my mother knew the letters existed. If she did, I wonder whether, like me, she thought they would tell a painful story that she didn't want to hear.
But instead, they describe a boy from a tiny farm town in Iowa who got to see things he'd probably never even dreamed he would -- not just Niagara Falls and the Eiffel Tower, but castles and mansions, Generals and Presidents. He crossed the country on trains, slept on the Texas dirt and in French barns, and at a time when many people were still coming to terms with the idea of automobiles, was routinely flying about in airplanes.
Despite all of that -- or perhaps because of that -- he recognized that his relationships with the people around him were the thing he valued most. He wrote that he couldn't wait to get back home, where there were "a lot of good people there that he missed a great deal, especially my dearest little mother."
In short, if there can be a "good" wartime experience, Shug had the best one imaginable. He learned a lot about the world but even more about himself, and came home a man who was comfortable in his own skin, able to set his hand to almost anything, and, most of all, appreciative of the people around him. I don't expect he was happy all the time, or that things were always easy, but he'd learned to take each day as it came, enjoying what it had to offer. He coached the football and baseball teams, laughed with and loved his "Inie" and his girls, and was remembered at his funeral as "a man of cheerful service... and, therefore, his friends were legion."
He was very lucky.
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