Early Years

 

It was 1919 and the Great War, the one to end all wars was finally over.  The world was awash in relief and joy.  I was born just before Christmas on December 22^nd at the small six and a half acre farm north of Alton, IL that had been handed down from my paternal great grandfather Charles Hesselbach.  He had bought the farm from the Meyers in 1857 after emigrating from Germany to Madison County, IL via New Orleans and the Mississippi River.  My proud parents were Robert Groshans and Charlotte Heafner who married eighteen months earlier on Apr 18, 1917.

The two-story house where I was born was big and sturdily built having originally been a grain mill.  Downstairs was the kitchen, the living room, and a small bedroom where my grandmother, Anna Hesselbach Groshans slept.  The rest of us lived in the two rooms upstairs.  I was the oldest.  I was soon joined by my sister Dorothy (1921) and my brother Robert (1923).  By the time Leon joined us in 1928, the upstairs room we shared was getting crowded.  When grandma died in 1933, my folks moved their bedroom downstairs giving us kids some extra space.  Unfortunately the second upstairs room was unfinished and I remember snow coming through the weatherboarding onto the floor in the wintertime.

Our farm was just north of Alton in a little valley along a dirt path known then as Coal Branch Road.  It was named after the little stream that ran past the farm and alluded to all the coal mines that dotted the area.  Our little “metro” area was even once named Coal Branch.  Eventually Alton expanded gobbling up many of the little villages in the region.  When they annexed the Alton Brick Company land south of us, our road was paved and became known as the Alby Street Extension.

Despite being close to Alton, our house was country living at its best.  No electricity or running water.  Heat came from burning coal and firewood.  Lighting from kerosene lamps.  Water came from a well in the yard that we carried in to fill the sink and washbasins.  In the summer we would fill an outdoor bathtub.  Our only extravagance was an outhouse with two seats!  Being close to Alton we soon got a wall-mounted telephone.  No push-buttons, no rotary dial, not even a dial tone.  A hand crank alerted the operator, who would make the connection for us.  Of course, it was a party line, with each household given a unique ring.  But anybody could listen in and we all did.  “Piking” as it was called, was one of our few entertainments.  It reduced our privacy but on the positive side we all knew what was happening with the neighbors.

When I reached my teens, our family got a nice tabletop Majestic radio so we could listen to Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats and episodes of Amos & Andy.  Unfortunately the big radio quickly drained the rechargeable batteries so we didn’t use it very often.

On Sundays our family would pile into our pride and joy 1913 Model T Ford and drive out what today is Route 3, north of Piasa Creek, close to Beltrees to visit my grandmother, Caroline Steiner Heafner.  Once in a while Mother and I would visit her during the week. Since Mother didn’t drive we took the horse and buggy.  As you can imagine this trip would take all day.

At one time or another our family grew just about everything on our farm.  We were pretty self-sufficient.  Mostly we raised chickens and hogs and grew vegetables.  We also had several milk cows and a few horses. For spending money my parents would deliver milk to Alton households with the horse and buggy. That business soon dried up when the government passed laws requiring milk to be pasteurized before being sold.  Still, for years afterward, a few people came out to the house to buy our fresh milk. 

Of course early on, it was my job to milk the cows.  I did it every morning and every evening seven days a week.  A milk farm knows no weekends or holidays.  My usual day started at four thirty.  There was a lot more to do than just milking the cows.  I also had to hand crank the separator to skim off the cream, wash the quart glass bottles, churn the butter, and make cottage cheese and buttermilk.  After it was all done I would take the “worthless” skim milk and feed it to the hogs. 

In the bottomland next to the pasture, we had a large asparagus patch.  At that time Godfrey was the asparagus capital of the nation.  It was shipped to Chicago via refrigerated train cars.    Since “ice block” refrigeration was unreliable, it was not unusual for the asparagus to spoil before arriving in Chicago. 

Like my great grandfather who bought the farm, I liked to garden.  My Dad would use the horses to plow and harrow most of our land to make it suitable for grazing our livestock.   I took what was left to use as a garden.  My mother insisted on the normal vegetables, which we always had plenty.  I also grew California Wonder peppers, Marglobe tomatoes and sweet potatoes.  But I liked to experiment and grow some uncommon ones too.  I tried growing eggplant, peanuts, cauliflower, and even tobacco.  I would send to the Department of Agriculture for free bulletins telling you how to grow them.  During the Depression you could get seed free from the Township Supervisor’s office.  I put in my own hot beds for growing the seedlings.

After putting in a full day on the farm it was time to walk to school.  Louis Veltjes, an older neighbor kid, showed me the way to McKinley School on my first day of Grade School.  That was where I went for the next six years.  Once out of elementary school, it was on to Roosevelt Junior High School on Langdon Street and then Alton High on College Ave.  Mostly I had to walk to school and it was three miles one way to High School.  If I timed it right I could hitch a ride part way with our neighbor, Herb Farrell, who would deliver fresh milk each morning to the Strickland Dairy at Thirteenth and Langdon.

Despite the walk, I always enjoyed school, especially the math classes. I was never really good at English.  One of my teachers insisted that I join National Honor Society.  I guess it was his way of trying to let me know that I had potential.  I was always curious about everything; and I loved to read, although books were scarce around our house. On rare occasions a neighbor, Joe Boucher, would bring me a book to read.  My favorites were the Tom Swift detective stories. The rest of the time I would read the old school books packed away in my grandmother’s trunk.  They had belonged to her brother, Ed Hesselbach. He had been studying to be an architect at the St. Louis Manual Training School (started by Washington U.) until his untimely death at the age of eighteen.  I learned a lot from reading his books.  Before long I was calculating cube roots manually.  Not even my teachers could do that.  I was limited though.  Half his books were in German (sometimes German script).  Still I tried translating them.  Hopelessly, as I was never fluent in German.  Those books were my pride and joy and I have kept them ever since.
 

Even with my diligence toward my studies, there were few jobs for me after high school graduation in 1938.  Despite FDR’s alphabet soup of government programs, the Depression was still dragging on.  I, along with 123 other eager jobseekers answered a newspaper ad for a clerk at Louis Horn’s Grocery at 7^th and Henry St. in downtown Alton.  Being a farm boy, Mr. Horn figured I knew how to work and dress chickens so I got the job.  For $12.00 a week.  I was rich!  Since a workweek was usually over 60 hours I was earning every penny.  It was only Mr. Horn and his wife Alvena in the store, so we did everything.  I started out delivering groceries and anything else that needed doing.  Eventually he taught me to cut meat.  I figured I was going to work there forever.

War Time

Three years later, in December of 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and WWII was on.  The next month along with millions of other young men, I enlisted into the Army. I still remember those first few days. They were a whirlwind. It was fifty degrees on January 9th when I left home for the first time and boarded the train to Peoria for the swearing-in ceremony. From Peoria it was another train to Rockford, IL where we arrived at three in the morning and welcomed with the temperature below zero. In Rockford we took IQ tests, received our uniforms, and loaded back on a train for shipment to Jefferson Barracks in Missouri. We arrived there at midnight and were escorted into a huge tent with the temperature still below zero. The tent was loaded with hundreds of guys just like me, naked and freezing, waiting in line for the first of many medical inspections. The doctors poked and examined everywhere. I felt sorry for myself but more so for the three doctors who had to check us out.

My Basic training was at Jefferson Barracks and it ran a couple months longer than usual because of a meningitis case that quarantined the base.  In the spring I was sent to Radio school across the river at Scott Field in Illinois and in the fall to Radar school in Boca Raton, FL.   After a three-day journey on a steam engine train, we were glad to arrive in Boca Raton.  It was a dream.  Our “school” was a converted millionaire’s club.  It was also super secret, a court martial offense for even mentioning the word “Radar”.  It ended way too soon.  Around Thanksgiving 1942 I was shipped to Langley Field in Hampton, VA.  For the next year or so I was assigned to Anti-submarine patrol.  After Pearl Harbor, Germany had declared war on us, and the US was afraid of German U-boats attacking our East Coast cities.  I started flying as Radar Operator on a B-17 Flying Fortress out of Langley and later at Fort Dix, NJ.  I also did a stint in Charleston, SC hunting submarines.  While at Charleston I was sent to gunnery school at Tyndall Field in Panama City, FL for some ten weeks.

Returning to Langley Field, I was reassigned to a B-24 bomber with the newly formed 13^th Air Force 868^th bombardment squadron.  The plane and rest of the crew had just arrived from training in Pocatello, Idaho.  Our B-24 Liberator, a heavy long range bomber, had 10 crew members:  pilot, copilot, engineer (Meisenheimer of Florida), Asst Engr.(Bud Williams of Iowa), navigator, radioman, radar operator, nose gunner, tail gunner, and bombardier.  I was the Radar operator, a new secret technology.  We named our plane “Long distance” after the telephone calls home we all made while training throughout the US.  At Langley Field we practiced Radar-controlled low-altitude bombing (~ 1000 feet). We used 50-gal oil barrels floating in the sea as practice targets.  They were spread out over the Atlantic and our task was to use Radar to find each one and sink them.

With our training finally complete in Jan ’44, we headed for the war in the Pacific.  But we first had to get there, puddle jumping across half the world.  From Langley, VA it was to Louisville, KY then Memphis, TN.  On the next leg we had a big scare with an engine problem. One of the bomber’s engines began running wild.  It was bad enough that we all got into our parachutes and prepared to jump.  Luckily our pilot got control of the plane and we made an emergency landing in Oklahoma City, OK.  We flew on to Tucson, AZ for repairs but the problem never went away completely.  (Eventually the Army junked it for parts and we got a new plane named “Sunsetter” in the Pacific.)    In Tucson I forgot my wallet in the hotel where we were staying.  (I would sleep with my wallet under my pillow for safe protection.)  Luckily my pilot’s brother lived there and he was able to retrieve it for me.

From Tucson, it was on to Fairfield, CA and finally the Pacific.  Leaving the US we flew next to Hawaii, then an early stop on Christmas Island with an oil leak (somebody left the oil cap off), then to Kanton island, to Espiritos Santos, and finally to Carney Field on Guadalcanal.

Our bomber was part of the secret “Snooper” squadron using newly invented Radar to guide the modified B-24s.  Our group under commanding officer Col. Stuart Wright was the first of three to receive “Snooper” training at Langley.  The mission of the squadron was low level, anti-shipping strikes under the cover of darkness.  The parabolic antenna of this system was located in a housing that replaced the belly ball turret.  We flew lone missions at night that usually lasted 8-22 hours.  Flights were busy for me because the navigator would always be asking for secondary confirmation from my radar.  I used the Radar to spot all the islands we were supposed to fly over along the route.  Nobody on the plane wanted to get lost over the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean.

Our B-24 normally carried 4-1000 pound bombs.  Our targets were usually enemy ships.  We flew at night to avoid being seen by the enemy.  With the Radar though, I could “see” through the dark and guide the bombardier in hitting the ship and shutting down Japanese supply lines.  When we released each 1000-lb bomb our bomber would jump a thousand feet higher into the air.  We were forbidden to target heavily armed ships, like battleships and destroyers because the planes were too valuable.  (One crew on an early raid on Rabaul disobeyed orders and sank the heavy cruiser, Haguro, a flagship of the Jap navy.  Despite the threat of court martial, they received a medal.)

If no enemy ships were found we had secondary land targets such as airfields.  Our only daylight mission was to blowup a refinery (Balikpapan, Borneo) to deprive the Japanese of badly needed fuel.  We flew several Harassment missions over the Japanese stronghold of Rabaul.  We would fly over it all night dropping small 100-pound bombs so the enemy soldiers couldn’t sleep.  We also flew some crew rescue missions over the ocean but they were generally fruitless.  The ocean is huge and people floating in it are almost impossible to spot.

As McArthur’s Army leap-frogged across the Pacific, our bomber squadron advanced from Guadalcanal with them using New Georgia (Munda) as a new base, then in Mar ‘44 the Admiralty Islands (Momote Airstrip-Los Negros), then in late Aug ‘44 Noemfoor Island, off the neck of New Guinea (now Indonesia).  On long missions to the west we had a refueling stop on Halmahera Island, Indonesia.  The squadron moved there in Mar ’45 long after I had left the Pacific.

In August ‘44 our Snooper squadron flew nightly missions, 1900 mile round trip, from Los Negros Island to bomb the Palau group.  On one follow-up mission to Peleliu (9/44) in the Palau Islands, my navigator and I were surprised by all the “islands” we saw on the Radar as we approached.  The extra “islands” turned out to be Navy ships that were surrounding it in preparation for invasion.  Only the pilot had been forewarned what to expect.  We dropped 3-1000 pound bombs on the runway perfectly, earning us a citation.  We nearly got shot down though.  Having got caught in a Jap searchlight, we were thankfully saved by a well-placed shell from a Navy gun. It was a good thing because no Army Air Corps crew member shot down over Palau survived the war.

When we returned from a mission we would each get 2 ounces of whiskey.  Half the crew didn’t drink so I got double.

Conditions and sanitation were primitive on the islands.  At one point I got an infection in my navel and was put in the hospital on Guadalcanal for a while.  The doctors cured it using the new wonder-drug antibiotic, penicillin.  Because I missed the crew’s normal R&R, I was granted a rest leave in Australia.  I was fortunate because I avoided the missions to Truk Island (April, 44) where a lot of crews were lost.  The Navy ended up bypassing Truk.  I spent two rest leaves in Australia and loved it both times.

After our crew flew enough missions, we were to be sent back to the US.  Because of all the casualties at the time, we had to wait a month to get a boat back.  It was an unfortunate wait.  Once back in the US, I immediately took a train to St Louis for a much needed rest leave.  When I arrived I found out my father had just died a couple days before on Dec 14, 1944.

My next assignment was in Victorville, California, where we repaired and tested airborne radars.  But I was ready to get out.  My enlistment was indefinite for the duration of the war.  After the surrender of Germany, I found out my grade level was going to be released.  But I was about to be promoted and the new grade level was not going to be released anytime soon.  With the invasion of Japan looming I could be in for years to come.  So I went around to all the secretaries of the Captains who had to sign off on my promotion to find my papers.  When I found my promotion papers I convinced the secretary to lose them so I wouldn’t get promoted.  It worked.  I took the train to Fort Sheridan, IL north of Chicago where I was released on July 31, 1945; little did I know the atomic bomb would be dropped the next month ending the war.

Post War

After being released, I went back to work for Louis Horn in the grocery for a big bump in pay, $40 per week and only a 48-hour work week.  I worked there for another three years.  During that time I met Cecilia at a dance in Beltrees Hall and got married on June 5, 1946.  Pat was born in January 1948.  With a growing family, I needed better employment.  In 1944, Congress narrowly passed the GI bill.  Prior to WWII, only the rich could afford college.  Now I could go too.

Even though my mother always insisted we get an education, she thought I had flipped when I quit what she thought was a good job, to go to school (while married with two kids).

I had heard about the American Television Institute in Chicago.  When I found out that Laverne Bregenzer was attending, I was convinced it was for me.  Besides it matched well with my radar training in the Army Air Corp.  In the fall of 1948, I enrolled at the school.  The main campus was located at 5050 N. Broadway but there was also a building and lab downtown.  Initially, my intention was one year to become a technician.  Once there I was impressed and stayed to obtain a Bachelor of Science.  I initially lived at 3235 Belle Plaine on the north side of Chicago.  Later I found a basement apartment at 2016 S. Allport, south of downtown, where Cecilia, Pat and Jeannie joined me in June 1949 until my graduation in 1951.  While going to school I also worked part-time at the publisher Who’s Who in America.

After graduation I interviewed with McDonnell Aircraft and went to work there in July.  I found out later, that since I graduated from an un-accredited school, I had to be approved by J.S. McDonnell himself to be hired as an engineer.