American Legacies Organization, Inc.

As my father was driving down the highway, he passed a soldier in uniform hitchhiking home to his family. Deep in grief, my father had no inclination at that moment to do a good deed. Yet it was almost as if something outside himself pulled him to a stop,

Hoyt Sherman Griffith, Jr. was born in 1926 in Philadelphia, the great-grandson of General William T. Sherman's younger brother, Hoyt Sherman. His family was adventurous and curious about everything, and I knew that young Hoyt's parents had transported him back and forth across the continent several times before he entered the seventh grade. Sure enough, my tale of finding a wonderful bed-and-breakfast opened up his memory.

The winter wind was biting but the soldier did not notice the cold. The pain all that his mind could focus on. The end for him was near, he could sense it. It was December 1944, in Neiderbroon, France, a time that would later be named the Battle of the Bulge. Some 80,000 soldiers lost their lives here. Karl Marion West was one of them.

One particular day around Christmastime the other students were particularly disruptive. Mrs. Beckwith had left the room to get the principal to restore order and Lucy stepped onto a table in the front of the room and dropped a stack of books onto the floor. The children immediately stopped their misbehavior and turned their attention to Lucy. The sense of control and command was a feeling Lucy realized she truly enjoyed.

The farmers would get together and build a log house, say 18 feet x 20 feet. There were no floors in the house, benches made of 8-inch poplar logs split in two, with wooden pegs for legs served as seats.

The house was not supplied with windows. At convenient distances chinks were left out from between logs, through which the light and cold wind could enter.

I joined the navy while still in high school in Minnesota. It seemed to me they took too long to call me up so I signed up again. This came back to haunt me later. I was sent to boot camp in Idaho. When I finished there, I was sent to CA to San Pedro to work on the USS Callaghan. She was commissioned on Nov 27, 1943, and attached to the Pacific fleet. We sailed to Hawaii for our shake down cruise.

Remember when stuff from the store came without safety caps and hermetic seals because no one had yet tried to poison a perfect stranger. And with all our progress ... don't you just wish, just once, you could slip back in time and savor the slower pace ... and share it with the children of today ... When being sent to the principals office was nothing compared to the fate that awaited the student at home.

At Pearl Harbor, all the ships that had been hit _ well, not all of them, but so many had been hit and were on fire and everything, and here we were in this little canoe all in the middle of this.

Now let me ask you this. There's a lot of side things, should I tell all of those? There are a lot of side things that are unusual, and nobody else had one exactly like I had

On Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, the day Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, 23-year old J.W. "Bill" Simpson wasn't worried about much of anything. His mind was far from the growing world conflict that day as he sat in a car parked off Second Street in Monticello, KY, shooting the bull and drinking moonshine with one of his buddies.

It was at 6 am on February 19, 1945 that the Thurston began landing operations at Iwo Jima. The invasion of the small Pacific island turned out to be one of the bloodiest and most remembered battles of World War II.

Although the U.S. flag was flying above the island, the Japanese were far from relinquishing their territory. The battle continued for another 29 days.

People that live on a farm, or in rural areas, understand the fun of hunting in the great outdoors, once said to be the "Sport of kings," it's a sport that's hard to explain to a city dweller, they lack the ability to comprehend what the sound of a full throated "Bay" of a good Black and Tan coon dog sounds like. A hunter knows the sound of his dog's "Bay," even though that dog is miles away, it's like the drama and music of an opera, and that sound carries over hills and mountains as the hunter rushes to his dog's location.