Both my parents grew up along the Kentucky River. My mother's father died when she was almost 7 and her mother remarried when Mom was a sophomore in high school and Granny and her youngest children moved to another county where the new husband lived. The older children had left for marriage,work, or war. My mother came back to her home community, worked and lived with her sister during the summer.
It was a tight community and though my parents never attended the same schools, there were connections between their families. Her oldest sister was married to dad's uncle. Dad's aunt had a relationship with Mom's uncle (her mother's half brother) who lived across the river with his real family. My mother was good friends with this aunt of my dad's and her daughter. My mother said my dad's aunt was jolly and fun and her uncle's wife was sickly and dull. Sometimes, they would all be at the river swimming, his wife and family on one side and his mistress and her family on the other side. They never spoke. Mom says that though he was stingy and selfish with his widowed half sister and her 10 kids, her uncle built the house his mistress lived in with her husband and children. Her husband mostly hunted and fished. It seems he must have known about the affair but didn't seem to care.
Even though, my parents had these and other family connections, they did not know each other very well, they did not run with the same people, they did not have an eye on each other. There was a 4 year age difference and my mother lived in another county when they were teenagers.
In 1944, at the age of 17, Mom graduated from High School and in August of that year, she moved into a boarding house in Lexington and got a job at Sylvania where radar tubes were made. She says she was in charge of 7 tables of girls and women. According to her, the other workers stayed out too late partying and were not as good at the job as she was.
Dad dropped out of school after 10th grade after missing most of 9th grade due to illness. I thought he said his appendix burst, but my nephew tells me he would not have survived such a thing in the late 1930s. Maybe it was appendicitis. Whatever it was, he said his hair fell out (fell out straight, came back curly) and he missed most of the school year. He was passed on to the 10th grade and he said he was lost. He dropped out of school and raised tobacco and ran wild, I think, after he left school. He used his money to buy and sell or wreck cars. He told us the story of how he and another car side swiped each other one night. He was too young to be driving and the person with him was passed out drunk. He thought that the police might be looking for him so he pulled over and moved the unconscious person under the wheel of the car and waited for a while, but I guess the other car didn't report the incident because no police ever showed. In 1944, he was drafted into the Navy. He was sent for training somewhere around the Great Lakes. His grandfather died shortly after he arrived for training, but he was not allowed to go home for the funeral. He said, "I guess they knew I wouldn't come back. it was cold up there."
After training, he was sent to some island off the coast of California before shipping out to the Pacific. He served aboard the USS Ocelot which was an old WWI ship. It was a supply ship and, for a time, they travelled around the Pacific followed by a ship full of ammunition before settling in a bay in the Philippines. He said his job there was reworking ammunition. He lived on the USS Ocelot, but took a boat to another ship each day where he worked filling ammo shells. He said he could taste and smell the powder years later.
Battleships and destroyers would come into the bay. He said the Japanese would use submarines or kamikaze pilots to go after these ships and that sometimes, flying in the dark, the pilots would mistake island lights for ships and you could see them crash into the land. Other times, they would survive an attack against a ship and could be heard moaning and crying in the water in the dark.
His older brother and one of his younger brothers were also in the Pacific and once when he learned his younger brother had been in port, but was pulling out, he got in trouble when he tried to climb up the side of the ship. The officer on board yelled at him and told him they might have shot him, but he let him see his brother. On another occasion, he just missed his oldest brother. That was his last chance because on December 11, 1944, his brother's ship, the USS Reid, sank during a battle that had lasted several days. There were some survivors, but his brother was not among them. Dad found out that his brother's ship had gone down by reading about it on the Ocelot's bulletin board.
My mother had 4 brother's in the war, 2 in Europe and 2 in the Pacific. Her oldest brother died in northern Italy, October 26,1944, and another brother was wounded in France, but was sent back to war after recovery in England. One brother who served in the Pacific was also wounded, but I didn't even know this until I saw the purple heart at his funeral.
In 1945, the war ended and one day the workers at Sylvania were told not to come to work anymore. After that, Mom worked at a drugstore lunch counter in Lexington, but soon came back to her home county, worked at a shoe factory then at another restaurant , but in March of 1946, she was working at a restaurant called the White Spot located on Main Street.
Dad, not quite out of the Navy, home on leave, was out with a group which included one of Mom's brothers. Dad had no date, so one of the group went into the White Spot and asked if Mom knew anyone who would want to go out with this fellow. Mom said, "What about me?" The date was not made right then, but later Dad came back to the restaurant and said, "Well, what about it?" Mom pretended she didn't know what he was talking about, "What about what?". So, he had to ask.
On their first date, he took her gambling at a local establishment. He gave her some money to put in the slot machines, but she wouldn't play. That night, on this first date, he proposed to her, but she turned him down. That was on Tuesday. They went out again on Wednesday and Thursday. Both nights he proposed and she refused him. On Friday night, she saw him out surrounded by other girls. She turned to her friend, his cousin, and said, "I'm going to marry him."
She was living with another brother and his wife and on Saturday morning, my Dad showed up there. She had slept in her brother's army uniform and that's what she was wearing when he said "Let's go get married." They first searched for her mother because Mom was not quite 19 and parental consent was needed until age 21. They couldn't find her mother, so Mom ended up lying about her age and they got married. A 3 day courtship, a not always peaceful marriage that lasted until his death from lung cancer in 2011-65 years and 6 kids, the first one 9 months and 6 days after the marriage.