American Legacies Organization, Inc.

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.

n 1944, on Dalton's 19th birthday, he made a decision that would affect him for the rest of his life: he joined thousands of other young men and became a soldier to do his part for his country in the ongoing conflict, World War II. After he joined, he passed his physical examination at Fort McPherson, Georgia and on March 30 was officially inducted into the United States Army.

Grandpa was quite a character and always had plenty of amusing tales to keep me entertained for hours. Grandma didn't talk very much but shared her assortment of memories with me through a tattered box of black and white photographs she had collected over the years.

I would ask, "Who is this, Grandma?" She always answered and then Grandpa would contribute a tidbit of information. Uncle Noah was five feet tall; Aunt Lizzie had ten children; Great-grandfather Allen fought in the Civil War; and so on.

My beloved grandparents both passed away in the late 1970s and somehow I was fortunate enough to be given the frayed container of photographs sitting in the top of Grandma's closet.

I was in Baltimore Maryland, and was working in the General office for the Baltimore Railroad. As I recall, it was a Sunday morning when I first got the news on the radio that there was an attack on Pearl Harbor. I chose my own way to get into the army, and I chose something to do to with transportation since I had a little experience with it.

I joined in late December 1942, and I got to Europe in early January 1943, from then on, I was apart of the transportation organization.

I spent the war in Antwerp shipping special supplies to places in Europe.