Starke County, Indiana - The whole text, 1928 (part 3 of 3)

Ollie Hepner tells a good one on himself. He was in the cook mess one day in camp and when he cleaned up he overlooked a piece of potato peeling he says no larger than the end of his thumb. Suddenly there appeared the inspector and seeing this peeling, Ollie said, the Inspector gave him the greatest calling of his life and for full fifteen minutes he never heard such oratory on a potato peeling. If he had not known what it was about he would have thought that a dead horse had been left on the grounds. That cured him he said, and never again while he was at that mess was there anything left for an inspector to find and grow eloquent as well as sarcastic about.

One of the boys, Russel Cannon, who was over there, frequently wrote home to his mother and while the mother, of course was always apprehensive of what the letters would contain, yet the son always wrote with a smile. In one of his many letters to his mother he told about being in the battle front when the poison gas was thick, and the shells and balls were flying thick and fast and brrsting. One of the shells burst right in front of him. This, he said, gave him the-fright of his life. "'Out of here I go or I go west.'' He turned and started to go back, a shell burst right in the way he was going and again he turned and faced ''as he was'' when another shell bursted. He said, 'Mother if it had not been for those shells bursting as they did I do not know where I should have gone but I know I would have been going yet. And yet, I stood there all right - but this surely is hell if there ever was or is

A. good one was told by Walter Wallace, son of our fellow townsman and wife (Jerome Wallace). Walter was a First Lieutenant in the Y. M. C. A. of the 313 Div. At one of the many battles, one of the boys, by the name of Pat O'Brien was severely wounded and taken back a short distance to the emergency hospital which was located in the fighting zone. After - a while Pat came too and in a dazed sort of way looked all around him and then cried out, "Since when did: Ireland get Home Rule?"'

Ward Wilhelm, hitched up the old gray horse to his auto and drove all around the town (Knox). This act created so much merriment and practically the entire town got out to see the Gasless Auto.

One night while we were on duty back of the wires a second "'louie'' who had just come on to the front kept asking all the boys for some hard tack, saying that they had forgot to ration him before they sent him to the front and he was hungry.

At another time, a new recruit on the battle front was given tins of hard tack to take to the boys in the trenches. On account of darkness and not being familiar with the lay of the land he headed straight for Germany. The noise made by the _ clanking of the tin cans caused the boys to yell at him instead of giving him some hot shot, "Where, you, there buck going with that grub, get back of the barbed wire or we won't get anything to eat tonight'' (I was one of the boys in the trenches). Well he got back in a hurry and we got some hard tack anyhow.

Going over on the boat there was a colored boy who 'seemed to have a car load of 'sand in his pocket, and it seemed that about a hundred times a day he would take out some of the sand and look at it and say, ''Honey, if I ever sees your ma, we wont part again until dey builds a bridge."

At one time when on the vessel going over there, I chased to the rail to feed the whales - there was only one vacant place and that was between two colored boys. What I saw when I looked made me whiter and the two colored boys when I looked at them also appeared to be white.

On Armistice day we all felt happy of course but the best of all was to see a ''stewed"' pilot with the Majors Special Plane about 10 feet high over a highway chasing the frogs from the road.

One day while Forrest Whitson and Tom Hurley were at English Lake where Forrest Whitson was sleuthing for sequestered sugar, the grocer who was being investigated, and by the way an Englishman, was asked what was in some small sacks in his kitchen. '"That's a little lump of sugar for my tea," he said, and smiled wisely. ''I have another lump there for my coffee.'' Forrest, believing in personal protection on little expeditions of this nature, had armed himself with a monkey wrench from the car. Upon hearing the last remark from this wise grocery man, Forrest knocked him on the head gently with this monkey wrench from his car, and said, "There's a lump for your COCOA."

These stories are given to scatter sunshine along with the sedate facts of Starke County's story of the World War and not for the purpose of hurting the feelings of any buddy or any other person.