Autobiography of James David White, Sr.
I was born on the 28th of September, 1925, the fifth child of David and Rosa White. I was named after my grandfather, James Franklin White and my father, David Green White. There were other White cousins named after Grandpa James, so I was called Jim Dave by the White side of the family. At home and by Mom’s family, my Woods relatives, I was Jim or Jimmy. Mom always told me that I was her most difficult pregnancy and her most difficult child. She had 8 children, so that is no small feat!! I was the most difficult pregnancy because I was so active. I kicked all the time. When she went into labor, Dad realized that it was a more difficult labor than her previous four times, so he hired someone to ride on horseback the eight miles into Morehead to bring Dr. Nichols back. Mom claimed that I was born with two lower teeth – one totally in and one covered by a little flesh. It was not much fun for her when she nursed me! She also insisted that at nine months of age I was walking around and talking in sentences, often saying, “I want the titty and I want it now!” My brother George teased me about that for years! I had the croup as a baby and scarlet fever later on. Mom, with her little education, was able to nurse me back to health both times.
When I was the baby of the family, as soon as Dad walked in the door from work he would call out, “Where’s Jim? I want a bite of Jim!” I would start crying. I was afraid that he would really bite me!
We were a family of avid readers. My sister Loretta read to me so often that by the age of three I could correct her if she read a wrong word. I don’t know whether I was really reading or if I had memorized the stories. Throughout my entire life reading remained a passion and a great source of pleasure to me.
I received the “most difficult child” moniker because I was so stubborn. Once when I was about three years old, I threw a spool of thread off the porch. Mom told me to go and pick it up. I said, “No, I won’t do it!” She told me again and again. Finally, she picked me up, carried me to the spool, pried open my fingers, and forced me to pick up the spool. Another day I threw a clothespin off the porch, and Dad tried, unsuccessfully, to make me pick it up. After that my sister Jerri heard Mom and Dad talking about me. They were wondering what in the world they were going to do with me. How were they going to get me to mind them? They decided to try asking me to do things instead of telling me. That worked like a charm. I was willing to do whatever they asked me to do, but unwilling to do whatever they told me to do. Another story they told about me as a child was that I used to pee off the porch. When Mom found out about it and scolded me, I told her, “It’s OK. No one can see me because when I pee off the porch, I keep my eyes closed!”
When I was born, we lived in Cranston, KY. Dad had a store, a grist mill, and the post office there. Mom had “hired girls” to help her with the cooking and cleaning. Then she could spend more time working with Dad in the store. Mom had an old cookstove in the kitchen where she and the girls cooked most of the food, and there was a tin heater in the living room that heated the house. Dad had potatoes and onions holed up in the garden, and he would dig them up in the winter and cook them in the tin heater. The outside leaves of the onions burned a little, but inside they were soft and sweet. This was Dad’s home remedy for colds. Whenever anyone was catching a cold, Dad would fix one of those onions. I still remember how sweet and wonderful those onions tasted.
Dad had a Model T Ford. He was so proud of that car, but he never learned to drive it. John always drove it. On the way to visit Grandpa and Grandma Woods in Enterprise, there was a long hill to go up. The car couldn’t make it up that hill in forward gear. Mom would order all of us out of the car except John. He would put the car in reverse and back it up that hill while the rest of us walked and walked all the way to the top.
Dad wanted all of his children to get a good education, so brother John went to Morehead to attend high school and lived in a dorm. That was too expensive to continue for each of us children, so Dad decided to move us all to Morehead. He chopped down trees from his land, hauled them to the lumber mill, and worked there for a dollar a day in exchange for having the trees cut into lumber to build a house, the house that Mom and then sister Jerri called home for the rest of their lives.
When I was a child, I raised a white Bantam rooster. Bantams are smaller than other types of roosters. Because they are smaller, they work very hard to be dominant. My rooster was servicing all the hens, causing them to produce Bantam chickens instead of the other larger types, so Mom came to me one day and said, “Mrs. White would like to buy your white rooster for $3.00.” That sounded like a lot of money to me (and it was way back then!), so I agreed to sell my rooster. We had neighbors named White who were no relation to us. I thought that was the Mrs. White who was buying my rooster, not Mom. Later we had chicken for dinner, and I guess then I realized that we were eating my rooster.
One summer Loretta stayed home in the Morehead house to take care of Dad while Mom, George, Jerri, Maxine, baby Don, and I went to the farm that Dad owned on the Little Licking River at Cranston. We picked lots and lots of berries which Mom canned and made jellies and jams on the wooden stove in the tenant house on the farm. That house was wallpapered with mail-order catalogs (Montgomery Ward, Sears, etc.) by the previous tenants. George did a lot of hunting and also set trout lines across the creek. We borrowed a boat from the neighbors to catch more fish. Mom cooked everything that George killed and everything that we caught, including turtles.
Most every day we put tubs of water out in the backyard for our baths. Mom started with the youngest and bathed each of us in turn. Chiggers were a problem there. Mom kept salty grease in a coffee can. She would put some on each of us to kill the chiggers before we took our baths. One time George woke up in the night because he was itching so badly. He grabbed what he thought was the can of salty grease. Unfortunately, it was a can of homemade syrup. He smeared it all over himself. It was a mess! Everyone had already had their baths and there was no warm water left, so he had to draw cold water out of the well to get the sticky syrup off.
When Dad went to work for Grandpa White, Mom took in laundry to make ends meet. Sister Jerri and I walked to town to pick up the dirty laundry from the banker’s home and from other rich people. Then we hauled the clean laundry back to them.
When Dad was ill, he wouldn’t let us children go anywhere. One evening sister Jerri and I decided to sneak out and go to the movies. We climbed out the dining room window, and sister Maxine closed the window to cover for us. We thought everyone would be asleep when we returned home and we would get away with it. You can imagine our surprise and terror when we returned to find the house all lit up and Uncle Estill in the living room visiting Dad and Mom. We had no choice but to come in right in front of them. We expected to be in trouble with Dad, but he just said, “I didn’t think you had it in you!” After that he eased up on us and let us have some fun.
Another White family lived in our neighborhood. They were not related to us, but we were friends. William, Elwood, and I used to go over to the creek to swim. On the way we would play on the railroad trestle. When we heard a train coming, we would dare each other to jump into the creek below. We’d all jump—just in time. That game ended when Claude Kessler, the engineer on the train to the clay mines, recognized us and told his wife. She told Mom. I got “the finger” (pointed at me) and a scolding (“Don’t you EVER do that again”) from Mom.
When I was in high school, I worked at the store after school and slept above the store at night in case somebody tried to break in. One time someone did try to steal gas from the pump out in front of the store. He woke me up. I turned on the outside lights, and that scared him away.
Dad died when I was 16. Maxine, Don, and I were the only children left at home then. Since I was the eldest of us three, Mom leaned heavily on me for emotional support and to run the store.
I was very competitive in school. I always wanted to have the highest grades. In fact, I was first in my graduating class, and I gave the valedictory address at graduation. Many years later my homeroom teacher, Mary Alice Jayne, died, leaving mementoes of her years of teaching to Jack Ellis, a professor at Morehead University. Among those papers was my valedictory speech. Mr. Ellis thought it was the most patriotic speech he had ever seen, and he had it published in the local paper.
During WWII it was reported in the newspaper that no one under 19 years old would be sent overseas to combat zones. My two older brothers were already overseas. The same day that report appeared in the paper, I, at 18, was being loaded onto a ship headed for Naples, Italy. As we got off the ship, little Italian children came up to steal things from the soldiers’ backpacks. They would even steal the food right off our plates. The troops that met us when we arrived tried to keep them away. At first we felt sorry for them because they seemed so hungry. Later on we realized that they weren’t all that poor, and we also realized that the food we had was all we were going to have to eat ourselves.
While we were bivouacked in Italy, we wandered around the area during our free time. Our trucks would get stuck in the deep ruts made by carts over thousands of years. We stopped at farms and watched the people tromping grapes to make wine. The farmers would fill our canteens with their home-made wine in exchange for chocolate bars. Our D Ration was a chocolate candy bar full of nutrients. I didn’t like the bar very much, but the locals had no chocolate and they loved to get the bars.
When we were in France, the Germans began retreating. Then they started fighting back in some areas, but we had hundreds and hundreds of them coming in groups to surrender to us.
At the Maginot Line there were bunkers that had been built during WWI to protect the French from the Germans. The Germans were on one side of the Rhine River and we were on the other. It was strange. We could see them walking around and they could see us. We were armed but were not shooting at each other. We even talked back and forth across the river.
I was a lead scout in the third infantry division. One day I was ordered to head out, and when I tried to stand and move out, I couldn’t rise. It was as if two hands were on my shoulders pushing me back down. Just then there was enemy gunfire right over my head. Had I stood up I would have been hit. Mom prayed for me every day. I always felt that it was her prayers that put God’s hands on my shoulders that day.
On Christmas Day of 1944 another lead scout stepped on a mine and was killed. I was nearby and was hit by pieces of shrapnel in my foot and shoulder. German soldiers came along and booby-trapped all of the dead Americans. I was awake, but I played dead until they left. When our medics arrived, I quickly warned them that our bodies had been booby-trapped, so they were able to disarm the explosives and save us and themselves. When I woke up in a hospital in Paris, my shoulder was wrapped and I couldn’t feel it. I thought I had lost my whole arm. I was sent to a hospital in England and finally sent home on a hospital ship.
My brother John was stationed at Hickam Field in Hawaii. When Dad became very ill and was near death, John received emergency leave to come home. It was while he was home that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Had John not been on leave, he probably would have died in that attack.
My brother George was shot down over Austria. He said he never was as tickled as when the German troops arrived to take him into captivity because they saved him from the local people who were attacking him. The locals hated all Americans because we had been bombing them relentlessly. The Germans treated him better. George was imprisoned until 1945 when my former outfit liberated the prison camp. George knew it was my outfit and he looked for me, but because I had been wounded, I was already home before George was set free.
After WWII, I went to Bowling Green College of Commerce in Bowling Green, KY. There were no dorms so I rented a room in a private home there. I earned my Bachelor of Science Degree in accounting in three years. Because I had been wounded in the war I went to school under Public Law 16, and I qualified for one more year of school, so I went to the University of Kentucky to get a Master’s Degree in accounting. I completed all of the course work, but I was tired of school by this time, and I never wrote the thesis that was required for the degree.
When I graduated from college, there were few jobs available. My first position was at Cowden’s Clothing Manufacturing in Morehead as a payroll clerk for a dollar an hour. There wasn’t much room for advancement there, and when they began laying people off, I decided to make a move. The job market had improved somewhat, so I applied at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, and took the Junior Management Assistant test. I scored well on the test, so they picked me up on their JMA program. Most people started as a GS5, but I started out as a GS7. I wasn’t doing accounting, my chosen field, there, so I got a job at Seagram’s Distillery in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, as an accountant. Then I took a civil service exam and was hired by the IRS as an auditor. I didn’t enjoy having to penalize poor people for problems on their tax returns, so I decided to return to working as a civilian employee for the Air Force. This time I was sent to Mallory Air Force Depot in Memphis, TN. I became an auditor of the requirements computations which were then sent back to Wright Pat AFB to be included in the Air Force budget. It was here in 1954 that I first met my lifelong friends Lucille Buckner (Bucky) and Jean Shaffer.
My sister Maxine visited me in Memphis and got to know Bill Cole, my best friend. I was dating her best friend, Mary Carolyn Gevedon, at that time. Soon we all decided to get married, and on June 1, 1957, we had the first double wedding ceremony ever performed in our Baptist Church in Morehead. The next year Maxine had her twin girls and Carolyn and I had our son James David White, Jr. My friend Bucky was with me at the hospital when Dave was born, and he called her Mamaw while he was young. To this day he considers her his adopted grandmother.
Soon after Carolyn and I were married, Bucky, Jean, and I were all transferred to San Bernardino, CA, to work on the missile program. Dave was born there. We loved living in California, and enjoyed seeing the sights on the week-ends with our friends Bucky and Jean. After a few years we were all transferred to Ogden, Utah. That was the prettiest place we ever lived, but it was very cold and snowy in the winter. We belonged to a wonderful church in Ogden. We sponsored a youth group and I was the Sunday School Superintendent. We had a wonderful life there, but after a few years I transferred back to Wright Pat AFB in Dayton, Ohio. We remained there until I retired from my position as a computer systems analyst with the Air Force.
When we returned to Dayton, we bought an RV and enjoyed traveling around the USA. When we weren’t on a trip, we kept it parked at Rocky Fork Lake, Ohio. We enjoyed spending week-ends there while I was still working and then moved there when I first retired. We had a pontoon boat on the lake, and I was able to indulge my lifelong love of fishing.
Bucky and Jean retired while we were in Utah, and they relocated to Lake Havasu City, AZ. We went out to visit them a few times and became “snowbirds”, wintering there after I retired. When the drive back and forth across the country became too tedious for us, we settled full-time in Lake Havasu. Dave got a job at the community college there, moved his family of four out, and our whole family was together in Arizona.
I needed a few quarters of employment paying into social security in order to qualify for Medicare, so I went to work doing tax returns at H & R Block in Havasu. I also worked as a volunteer camp host at the visitor center in the cool Hualapai Mountains near Kingman, AZ., during several hot Havasu summers.
My Mary Carolyn passed away on May 12, 2005, after a long battle with cancer. I was devastated at losing her and struggled to find a way to go on with my life. I started attending grief support sessions at our local hospice, began to make new friends, and joined a walking group started by those in the support group. For years I had made a habit of walking several miles every morning, so joining the walking group was an easy way to start socializing again. It was in the support sessions and the walking group that I met another Mary, Mary Irene Brooks Ratajczak. Her husband passed away a few months after Carolyn. We fell in love and were married in 2007. We both enjoyed traveling. We took cruises in Alaska and Hawaii, a wonderful car trip around the West with Dave and Jenny, and a few trips back to Kentucky to visit sister Jerri, visiting other friends and relatives and sightseeing along the way. We felt we were a “match made in Heaven”. We enjoyed our church “brunch bunch” and our survivor friends, as our grief support friends called ourselves. We especially enjoyed our time with our family.
In December of 2009, I was diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia, cancer of the bone marrow. I vowed to fight as long as I could, and I had six months of chemotherapy treatments and many blood transfusions. When I was told that the treatments were no longer working, I continued to fight as long as I could. My loving wife Mary, son Dave, and daughter-in-law Jenny cared for me at home under the supervision of hospice. I finally went to be with the Lord on March 11 , 2011. Inurnment is in the Columbarium at Community Presbyterian Church, Lake Havasu City, Arizona.
