1-5
THE HOMEWARD STRETCH
As we went across the
southern Atlantic, we were long enough into our trip that we began to forget
where we were from and where we were going. It was just experiencing the now, taking
one day at a time in our island community.
The Southern Baptists found out that we were people just like everyone
else and there was quite a lot of mixing, particularly with members of the
opposite sex.
Bill was first
attracted to a girl named Madelaine who wanted to learn to dance and got Bill to
teach her. Madelaine didn't want
her chaperones to know because they considered it a deadly evil, so they danced
on the back deck in Second Class.
The chaperone still found out and gave Bill a long lecture about
corrupting young girls. This seemed
strange to me because Madelaine was older than Bill. By the time we were in the South
Atlantic, Bill was spending more time with Madelaine's sister, Ann. Bill told me
that Ann was interested in Shakespeare, and that they were reading some of his
plays together. I looked at a
couple of the plays, but they looked pretty stuffy to me.
The young men did a
good job of maintaining the blackout and we had no sign of a raider on the way
over to South America. It did get
warmer again and we went back to sleeping on deck. The trip was getting to be a lot longer
than had been planned for and the people who ate in the regular dinning rooms
began to complain more than ever about the food. The radio officer was still
very friendly and seemed to have an endless supply of canned pineapples and
other fruit. When we had been in
Mombasa, he had introduced us to fresh mangoes which we had never tasted
before.
Only about 20 per cent
of the passengers had visas for the United States, so most of them were going to
leave the ship at Pernambuco or Trinidad.
So when we got to Pernambuco, the dock was a mess as several hundred
passengers were getting off with all their steamer trunks and suitcases. The through passengers were asked not to
go ashore until later. We were in
port for about three days and had plenty of time to sightsee. This included going out and swimming at
a beach which was very clean and a lot of fun.
Then we left for
Trinidad which was only a few days trip.
That close to shore everyone felt safer and relaxed the blackout. Before we got to the port, we received a
radio message telling us to be careful, that there was a submarine around which
had sunk a ship coming in just a few hours ahead of us. I'm not sure we were on the same course
as the sunken ship, but we didn't see anything. Trinidad was hot and dirty. I think we only went ashore once. All the rest of the passengers who were
not going to the United States got off there, no doubt to go to other countries
of South America.
The next few days on
the way to New York, Bill and Edward Dewey spent a lot of time listening to
American stations we could now get on the radio, listening to the World
Series. Baseball for them had been
an occasional sand lot pickup game, but nothing like the major leagues. I think that the last game in that year
of 1941 was played the day before we arrived in New York. They were so excited because something
unexpected happened in the last inning.
I'm not sure if I ever knew and if I did I don't remember. You will have to look it up in the
record books. I do think it was
between the Dodgers and the Yankees.
As soon as we arrived,
everything changed. People who had
been good friends for three months, suddenly became strangers as they prepared
to take up their separate lives.
The ship's owner wanted to charge extra for the longer than expected
trip, but people just laughed and ignored him. After all, the loss of fresh water which
delayed our ship in getting away from Mombasa was his fault as well as the crew
striking for warmer clothes. The
latter caused the long delay in Capetown.
The Dewey kids headed
for Auburndale , Mass. where there was a Congregational mission home for kids
whose parents were abroad. Muffin
had gone there when she came back to finish high school, but she was now going
to college in Kansas.
In those days the
American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions had representatives in most
major cities even though their headquarters was on Handcock Street in
Boston. They had a representative
meet our ship and, I believe, put us on a train to Washington. We visited with Dad's brother, Uncle
Frank and his wife, Aunt Eunice.
They helped us get new clothes.
Bill's had mostly been ruined by sea water that got into his cabin, and I
hadn't had much to start with as I had left Gaziantep traveling
light.
Next, they put us on a
train for Kansas. However, there
were no through railroads so we went first to Chicago where another American
Board representative met our train and took us to breakfast. Then she took us to another railroad
station across town and onto a train to Kansas.
The previous time we
had been in America on furlough, we had stayed at Grandmother Well's house on
North Holyoke. She had died a few
years before, so arrangements had been made for us to stay with our other
Grandmother, Grandmother Myers, who had remarried and now was Grandmother
Green. She lived on North Arkansas
Ave. Grandmother Green met us and
took us home to a house we had not seen before, one just north of North
High. This would be very convenient
for Bill but I would have to walk about a mile to junior high school. We had only missed a week or two of
school, so we didn't really miss much of our education. We later found out, as friends wrote to
us, that the folks who had gone on the other ship via Australia arrived in San
Francisco within several days of when we arrived in New
York.
At grandmother's I had
the front bedroom. Bill shared the
attic with an older cousin, Marvin Cook, who was working in Wichita in those
days.
I remember we were
news, arriving from a foreign country, and a news team came out to the house and
took our picture in the living room.
We were also oddities in the two schools we were going to, and in the
first few months were asked a number of times to tell the other students about
ourselves. On Sundays we had a
standing invitation to take the bus over to the College part of town where after
going to Sunday School and Church, we had Sunday dinner at Aunt Alice's. Grandmother went to the Presbyterian
Church near her home, and our step-grandfather Green would have a small Seventh
Day Adventist service on his front porch with another friend. The latter was, of course, on
Saturdays.
This was the routine
we settled into until the coming of World War II to the U. S., two months
later. We heard from our friend,
the Radio Officer of the S. S. Kauser, that a few trips after its first arrival
in New York, when he was not on it, it was sunk by a German
submarine.