3/19/2023 0 Comments Woods gone home from![]() She ordered his mother in a short and tersely worded letter to put him on a train in Chicago.Īnd his mother obeyed. Get him out of the clutches of the fleshpots in the big city and send him to stay, in turn, on one of the numerous family farms she found available and, eventually, with her in the trailer in the cook camp itself. His life wasn’t working well Here, she thought, and she had an astonishing number of relatives available There, on farms in the northern part of Minnesota, not to mention that she herself was available to take him where she was, in the southern Canadian bush cooking for a road crew, living on a cot in a cook-shack trailer. His grandmother showed him this lesson the first time that summer in Chicago. Her way of thinking taught him, early on, to deal with problems in a really practical, simple way: If it doesn’t work Here, go over There. The way she solved this problem said worlds about how the rest of his life would go. The period he spent “working” the bars in Chicago, singing to draw men for his mother, lasted only a month or so, but it seemed a forever way of life before his grandmother-now past horrified and well into scandalized-arranged to end it and save him from a life, she felt, of degradation and waste. When you’re old, the years race by, but when you’re young, very young, days and weeks seem to crawl and even stop. He was, at age five, becoming something of a celebrity in the beer joints near the war plant.ĭespite the fact that time is, of course, a constant, he learned it is differently paced at various points in life. He thought it was wonderful fun, because the men who wanted to meet his mother-a blue-eyed blonde who turned heads wherever she went-showered him with Coca-Cola and candy bars and fried chicken and hamburgers, all of which were hard to get because of strict wartime food rationing. Akidleedivytoowoodenyou?” The silly song he sang meant more attention for her. A kid’ll eat ivy, too, wouldn’t you?” Except his five-year-old version came out: “Marezeedotes. Grandmother was critical, then concerned, and finally horrified after learning that the boy’s mother was not only going out more than was good for her, but was also taking him with her to bars, dressed in a small army uniform to sing on tabletops: “Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy. The Japanese surprise attack on the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and, six months later, their invasion of the Aleutian Islands of Alaska were both still recent and frightening memories. At that time, no one was remotely certain that America was safe from invasion. A road connecting the United States to the interior of Canadian bush country was thought to be necessary in case the war dragged on or the U.S. His grandmother was working as a cook for a road crew of old men-almost all the young men had been drafted for the war-who were building a road into Canada. Word of her newfound lifestyle found its way back to a small army of the boy’s relatives in northern Minnesota. Caught up in a life of heavy drinking and wild partying, she no longer had the time or attention to raise the boy right. She now had a seemingly endless supply of pocket money from her steady hourly wage but was not even remotely prepared to resist the temptations of the big city. ![]() She had grown up on a small northern Minnesota farm, wearing handsewn dresses made out of flour sacks and earning, if she was lucky, twenty-five cents a week. When he was four, his mother took him-dragged might be a better word-to Chicago, where she went to work in a munitions plant making twenty-millimeter cannon shells. Patton’s staff who was gone for the whole of the Second World War-and they would not meet each other until he was seven years old. He was born in 1939 and his father was in the army-a low-level officer on General George S. ![]() He was not literally an orphan, but he was a lost child.
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