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Throughout his life, my father disliked his name. In his laterlife writings about the “good things” and “bad things” that happened during childhood, he notes that the first good thing was being born, and the first bad one was being named. Though in searching through Army records I found that he was known as Joseph T. Miller by parts of the military bureaucracy, his given name was Joe Ted. In official family lore, the “Joe” part was in honor of Joe Cannon, a powerful politician from Danville, Illinois, who served as speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1903 to 1911, and the “Ted” part was for Teddy Roosevelt, whom my father’s father also greatly admired. Interestingly, these two namesakes were known for their political clashes, and each of them actually bore the longer moniker of Joseph or Theodore. The unofficial backstory of my father’s name is that my grandmother disliked nicknames, so she used them—“Joe” and “Ted”—for the given names of her only son. However, throughout his childhood, my father was called “Bud”or“Buddy”—“JoeTed”wasusedevenbyhisnickname-hatingmother only when disciplinary action was in order. As my father asks in his memoir, “What kind of logic is that?” A mother’s logic, apparently, but it stuck. Dad’s army letters were all signed “Bud.” Bud as a Child My father was born November 14, 1925, in Danville, Illinois, a mid-sized town near the Indiana border east of the college town of Urbana and its sister city, Champaign. He was the middle child and only son of Oscar Francis and Irene Miller. His sister Dorothy was ten years old when he was born, and his younger sister, Judith, was born in 1931. He lived in Danville through the third grade, in a series of houses of which he remembered little. Dorothy told him later that “each one was worse than the one before, as the Depression struck and the money trickled away” (quoted in the memoir). In the sumchapter one Bud Joins the Army H 2 H chapter one mer of 1934, Dad’s father lost his printing job and had to search for a new one. My father writes in his memoir that “Dad started hitchhiking west, stopping in Champaign and Urbana and in each little town—Fithian, St. Joe, Gibson City, Monticello—to ask about printshop jobs. It must have taken a lot of courage for him to do this. But then, in those times courage was born out ofdesperation.Whenyoucan’tfeedyourfamily,youwilldonearlyanything.” OscarfinallyfoundemploymentinBement,asmallfarmingcommunitysixty miles west of Danville. The family’s first house in Bement had running water and electricity, but no indoor plumbing. Dad recalls that “it sure was cold, trotting out to the outhouse in the dead of winter. It made one strive to hold back the urges.” Three years later, after Dad had completed sixth grade, a new and better job at a print shop in Champaign led to another move for the family. Dad attended Junior High in Champaign; then the family moved across town to Urbana, after Oscar had accumulated enough money to start his own shop. The store, Dad remembers, “was in the rear and we had living quarters in the front,curtainedofffrom theshop. There wasnotnearlytheroomwehadhad in Champaign, and I imagine Mom was distraught about the whole thing. But Dad had the start of his dream. It lasted only five years and never was a success. When he died he owed money to various people, including the postman . Mom went to work to pay off the debts, and gave the postman our gas kitchen stove for the interest.” My father and his family continued to live in Urbana, and he graduated from Urbana High School in 1943, one of several valedictorians. He was awardedacountyscholarshiptoattendtheUniversityofIllinoisandenrolled in classes for the summer after his senior year in high school. But that fall he turned eighteen and was quickly drafted. He left for his induction center at Fort Sheridan in northeastern Illinois in January 1944. Many aspects of my father’s childhood were typical of countless rural or small-town childhoods during the Great Depression. Both his grandfathers were deep-hole coal miners in the mines of southern Illinois, and my father’s parents clearly remembered the poverty of their own youth and wanted better things for themselves and their children. Work was hard to come by in those years, and my grandfather struggled to find employment and to keep his family afloat. When my father was in...

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