Advertisement

firehouse pizza banner

Don Locke: Lookin Thru Bifocals

Sometimes I fail to catch certain things the first time around…note-worthy things.

Recently I watched a rerun of Dan Rather interviewing Country Music Star Charlie Daniels.  I’ve always admired Charlie, not just his music, but the man himself.

Little things, an attitude, define us.  Charlie grew up in North Carolina in about the same era as I did in Kentucky.

We both knew segregation at its worst—I was born in 1933; Charlie in about 1935.  We saw blacks mistreated; as we matured we came to know it was wrong.  God made them like he made us, only a different color skin. 

As a young man Charlie worked at an asphalt plant in his hometown.  He worked with a black man.  “He knew ten times more about the job than I did—as a matter of fact he trained me on the job,” Charlie said. 

But when it came to lay one or the other off, they chose to keep Charlie and let the black man go.

Charlie went to bat for the black man.  “I’ll go.  I don’t have a family to keep up.  He’s got a wife and kids.  I’m single, I can find another job.  Keep him; he knows the job a lot better than I do—he’s the one who trained me for goodness-sakes.  Do the right thing.”  They kept the black man, thanks to Charlie.  This defined Charlie Daniels in many ways.

 Lately I heard a historian say, “The all-black 332nd Fighter Group of the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War Two, was probably the best kept secret since the atomic bomb.”  Many of the Air Corps brass hats, them, said a black man couldn’t be taught to fly.  They were very wrong.  The 332nd, flying the best U.S. Air Corps fighter—the P-51, destroyed more enemy aircrafts in the air and on the ground than any other fighter groups in World War Two, black or white.  They were known as the Tuskegee Flyers.  

The all-black 332nd won a Presidential Citation Award for their effort.  Fact is a Tuskegee pilot was the first U.S. pilot to shoot down the new German jet fighter, the ME-262, over Berlin.  The Tuskegee flyers lost 86 pilots during the war.  

Yet, as one pilot said, “When we got home and got off the ship, we saw a sign: WHITES TO THE RIGHT; BLACKS TO THE LEFT.”  Another pilot said, “The whites were greeted with a band.  All us Tuskegee pilots got were two newsmen and one ole guy playing the saxophone.”

Kindest regards… 

 
Tags: 


Bookmark and Share

Advertisements