Blog 3114 – 05.09.2024

Travelin’ Man

I think I get my wanderlust from my dad whose tales of adventures on the road from his boyhood travels away from home during the Depression, later as a teen in CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) camps, to his World War experiences as a sailor, Seabee, and after the war a Tech Sergeant Army burial escort taking bodies of dead GI’s home to their families and arranging their military funerals, and his brief career as an over the road long-haul semi-truck driver. My dad was a travelin’ man. He loved the road was even more than he loved to hunt and fish and how he enjoyed those and telling stories about things he had seen and done.

My dad was a great story teller and he polished his stories to perfection telling and retelling them to anyone who would sit still long enough to listen. About the time my son Jonathan David James Wallace White (he prefers to be called just Jay) was born my dad had a stroke and we took it as a warning that we might not have him with us that much longer. Fortunately he lived another seven years so Jay got to hear many of his grandpa’s stories first hand.

I was afraid he would not so I sent dad a small tape recorder and ten ninety minute blank tapes and asked him to fill them up with his “tale tales.” Dad’s stories grew and were often enhanced. When caught in an exaggeration he would just grin and say, “It just sounds better that way.”

Dad filled up those tapes and what a joy it was to get to hear his voice again even years after he passed. In addition to the tapes, in his things that Mom had kept after he died, three years later when she died, I found a manuscript of stories that he had hammered out on an old Underwood typewriter that he had bought for my brother and I when we were in school.

I retyped those stories trying to correct most of dad’s spelling errors but leaving them otherwise just as dad had typed them with his two index fingers (he called that “the hunt and peck” typing method.) I have attached a link to a scanned copy of dad’s autobiographical (mostly) stories below, if you care to read about another travelin’ man’s adventures.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David White

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HM7aWHayhA0HwKeBRtBXmSi06LgQepnY/view?usp=drivesdk

Travelin’ Man

https://drive.google.com/file/d/16c3z7F_vL6uN-bt9Yi_3VNrRX2l_zCEC/view?usp=drivesdk

More Than My Share