Escape from Archangel: An American Merchant Seaman at War

Biloxi, 1936

Bitoxi> 1936 O. M. Smith, Jr., answers to "Jac." He never liked the names his initials stood for—you called him Oswald Marion at your own risk—and early on he let it be known that he would be called Jac, without a k. He was tall and thin and had fire-red hair. A quiet young man, he could be stubborn at times, and he wasn't much for putting up with foolishness—unless, of course, he was the one being foolish, which he often was. He was a good son, a dependable friend, a not-so-good student, a musician of sorts, a better sailor, a not bad fisherman. He didn't mind work and never set out to start trouble, although he didn't walk away from it either—there were boney-hard fists at the ends of those long arms. It was the whipping he got when he arrived home with "skint knuckles" that taught him to use diplomacy in a crisis. His grandmother was determined his hands would be fit for playing the piano. Never mind the hard times. Her grandchildren would be "raised right" a Southern term that meant -5>- children would be handled with dignity, discipline, true Southern culture, a sense of heritage, a fair measure of religion —all reinforced by the use of afirmhand. Jac's sister Elizabeth was born in Louisiana, but Jac was born in Tishomingo County, northern Mississippi, where his father worked for a lumber company until it went broke in the Great Depression. Forawhile the family tried to make do picking cotton. Jac remembers following his mother, pulling the cotton and putting it in a huge sack. His mother made him a smaller sack. He would follow her down the rows of knee-high cotton sprouting from Tishomingo Countygravel. Sometimes he fell asleep between the cotton rows, resting his head on the cotton he had picked. Eventually the family had no choice but to return home to the Gulf Coast, where his grandmother had a small farm in D'Iberville, across Back Bay from Biloxi. They grew all the vegetables and fruit they needed, and fish, shrimp, and crabs were abundant in thebay. They slept on mattresses stuffed with corn shucks and carded raw wool for quilts. His grandmother received butter, milk, and eggs as payment for music lessons. His father worked at whatever he could find. Things like shoes and new clothes were harder to come by, but the Smiths were no worse off than most families at the time. At night,Jac and his sister would sit on the floor while their mother taught them geography. First the states and all their capitals, then the countries and capitals around the world.Jac dreamed of one day seeing all these marvelous places his mother taught them about on those evenings by the light of kerosene lamps. At school he would tell his classmates that he would one day travel the world. They thought he was crazy. -10- It was by kerosene lamps, one on each side of the keyboard , that his grandmother, Hattie Scale, began the musical education of the children. This meant endless hours of piano training. "If you missed a note," Jac says, "you got your knuckles cracked with a ruler. If you played the right notes, you got praise and a gold star. Grandmother taught music along the coast for fifty-eight years, and many a musician remembers the cracked knuckles given by Mrs. Scale. I have enjoyed the piano all my life." Jac's childhood revolved around education, chores, odd jobs, and boats. There were plenty of boats on Back Bay, where fishing wasn't for fun, it was for food. It was not his family that was poor. South Mississippi was poor. Almost every family in the region had been hit hard by the Great Depression. This did not mean people lacked education and culture. The South has always prided itself on being genteel, and Mississippians were no strangers to hardship . The Civil War had broken them, Reconstruction crippled them, and just as the good times of the 1920s had finally filtered down to the Gulf Coast, the Depression rolled in, busting a real estate and building boom and bankrupting a string of brand new resort hotels, not to mention a few banks. But the Gulf Coast was a better place than most in which to grow up during the...