June 24, 1940
The Early Years... page 1
The Early Years... page 2
Your comments are welcome and you can do that at the bottom of this page and any of the other page in this series.
4/3/19, Edited to add more content.
4/8/19, Added more content.
02/06/21, Did some edits to fix some of the code in this article.
06/29/23, Small edits to some pages and added content to Page Two.

WWII
By June of 1940 the world was well on its way to the hellish years of World War II and our family, like most other families, was to be directly affected by the events of those years. My dad, Grey Kimbrell, missed being sent off to the war because shortly before his medical exam for the draft he had a case of pneumonia and so the doctors sent him home. Of course, many of our other family members did serve in the conflict, including my childhood hero, Joe Hamrick. Uncle Joe was the younger brother to my mom Mallie and he was that one family member that most of the kids looked up to, not only because of him being a war hero but because he was always so kind to kids and we all thought that he was really cool.

Uncle Joe Hamrick
He was known as "Singing Joe" and was a Gunner's Mate stationed aboard the USS Atlanta during World War II. On that war torn day, he took over the firing upon the enemy from the crow's nest. One of the enemy's planes bore down on them. It was a suicide bomber. Joe took the plane out while his best friend, the Gunner, lay dead beside him.
From Joe's Bio by Iris Gray

... left; Joe Hamrick, 2nd from left; Ron Kimbrell(?), far right; Ken Kimbrell(me), all three of the younger kids could be Uncle Joe's kids or, the taller boy with cowboy hat; Cousin Joby Hamrick(?), the two smaller boys may be my Brothers Robert and Russell(?)


As you can see in this old photo Uncle Joe was usually up for a good laugh with the younger members of our family and as you might imagine we kids were keen to take full advantage. To me Joe Hamrick was always larger than life in large part because of his war-hero status, but for many other reasons as well. One of his more endearing qualities shows up in the photo above where he displays his willingness to have fun with the kids in our family. Mind you, he was not a silly or foolish man, just someone who had a kind heart and was always willing to spend time with all of us kids. We shared many wonderful days and evenings on this old homestead, with not only Uncle Joe, but with his wife Mildred and their boys, Doug, Gary, and Terry, plus lots of other Aunts, Uncles, Cousins and the Patriarch and Matriarch of our little tribe, Grandma Beulah and Grandpa Hoyle Hamrick.

Joe was deployed on the US Navy ship USS Atlanta (CL 51), during WWII and at one point found himself adrift in the ocean waters after the Atlanta was heavily damaged by Japanese and friendly gunfire in a night surface action on 13 November 1942 during the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal. The cruiser was sunk on her captain's orders in the afternoon of the same day. I don't remember a lot of the details for sure, but I think that he may have been stranded in the ocean for several hours before being rescued. And then there is the question about sharks, I don't remember if they were mentioned, but it would not be surprising if they were there as well.

The ink line drawing below was penned by Mallie in 1986 and it has always served to remind me of a tiger tattoo that Joe had when he returned home after his service in the Navy. Joe's tiger's head tat covered his entire chest and his tiger was looking straight out at you, showing all of his teeth in a full-throated snarl and if I remember correctly he was in full color! During my time in the US Navy, I was tempted many times to emulate my Hero by getting the same tiger tattooed on my chest, but never worked up the nerve to actually follow through.



... useful links:
Joe Hamrick Bios by Iris Gray
USS Atlanta (CL-51)



Cotton Farmers
We never lived in town while I was growing up, we were always on farmland and our Dad always tried to raise crops with the intent of making money to supplement the income that he made from working in a textile mill. I don't think that we ever realized much in the way of profit from these efforts as farmers, but we sure worked hard. My earliest memories were of cotton farming and the fact that most of our work was by hand.

... picking cotton:
Sometimes, it would be just Ron, Phil and me working in the fields, plowing the land, planting row after row of cotton seed, giving the seeds fertilizer and all of the other chores that went along with growing cotton. Then other times it would be the whole family working together, Mom and Dad and any of us kids who were old enough to work. Old enough usually meant that you were 5-6 years old and this usually happened at harvest time when we were picking the cotton. Out of all the chores that you needed to do to plant, raise and then harvest cotton the picking was far and away the worse!

Imagine for a moment that you've jammed something into the end of your finger and that you've ripped your cuticle and now try to remember how much that hurt, now imagine doing that over and over again! Picking cotton by hand is like that because the cotton is contained within the burr, or bowl and when it matures and is ready for harvest the burr will open and spread like the pedals of a flower, but these pedals are very hard and the tips of each pedal is pointed and they do tend to keep your cuticles bruised and torn and sore. Through the years we tried many different crops, like corn, strawberries, potatoes, peanuts and tobacco, but cotton was far and away the most difficult and we kids always hated it.


We had one old grey mule whose name was Tip and we used him for plowing and some other functions, but there was lots of hand tool work, like using a hoe to chop weeds from between the cotton plants.



One quick story about my brother Phil
One year our crop was cotton and as we would pick it we would store it in the house because it was the only place we had to keep it dry. So, we had been picking and storing for a while and the pile of cotton was getting pretty big and some way or other the pile caught on fire! I don't remember if Phil actually set the fire, but he thought that it was his fault and it scared the crap out of him, this because our Dad was known to hand down punishments that tended to set your ass on fire, so in his panic Phil ran outside and crawled under the house! Now the old house was set up on blocks with a space between the house and the ground, but the space was very small, so while Phil could get under there I could not, and it had fallen to me to get him out. So we first made sure that we carried any burning cotton outside and then I had to turn into a negotiator and talk Phil from under the house. I don't recall how things worked out from there, hopefully Phil didn't get any more punishment then he had already endured in his panic.



Peaches

For me this is a great little story from my younger days!
The peach picking season in South Carolina is supposed to run from May to Nov. and we always seemed to catch the hot months! Mom would take any of us who were big enough to reach up into the peach trees and gather the fruit and early on that was me, only to be followed soon after by Ron and the Phil. I don't recall if Yvonne ever had the chance to join us, but she would have surely enjoyed the experience as much as the rest of us.

Children often do work or chores of some kind in an effort to earn some spending cash and for us as kids the peach orchards offered an opportunity that was too good to pass up. During the day we would work in the orchards picking the peaches and while I don't recall for sure, it would be a safe guess that we were paid according to how many peaches we picked. A per the bushel measurement likely was  used to determine how much you had earned and in my case it would have been only a  few dollars each day. Remember that this was in the early too mid 1950's, so $5-10 for a teenager was not a bad haul for a days work, plus, some of us got to work in the packing shed in the evenings after the peaches were picked. I do recall that we were paid 50¢ per hour for working in the packing shed so that added a bit to the days total income. The down side to the picking and the packing was that the days were hot and humid in the orchard and then in the packing shed the foreman always had me work in the trucks where we were stacking crates of peaches as the processing crews finished with their washing, grading and packing them into 50# crates. He would choose me because I had already begun to grow taller than all the other kids my age and he needed someone who could stack those crates 7-8 feet high inside the trailer.  As you may know, peaches have a fine fuzz on their skin, so working with them all day can be rather itchy, especially up inside that trailer, with the refrigerator unit running full blast and those wet, 50# crates coming up the ramp fast enough to keep you in constant motion
Having said all that, we were well pleased with the cash that we made, so we didn't complain very much.
... fun factoid: Georgia is best known as "The Peach State", but when we were growing up in South Carolina we didn't agree with that at all because everywhere you looked there miles and miles of peach orchards in SC.



Being Poor
You can often hear people say that, "We were really poor but didn't know it." Well, you'll not hear that from me because I was always acutely aware of our financial status. It was only too easy to see that while our mom, Mallie, always tried to keep us clean and neat and fed we did in fact struggle to keep food on the table and clothes on our backs.

Clothes were often donated from many sources, including cousins, aunts, uncles and other families. Mom made most of our new shirts and I can remember having to stand still for long periods of time while Mom measured and cut and measured some more and did test fits. I was a kid who only wanted to be outside playing and this process seemed to drag on forever and besides, who really wants to wear a homemade shirt when all the smart-assed town kids get to be all dressed up with the latest fashion from Sears & Roebuck or Montgomery-Ward?  I can remember going bare footed during the Summer months and only getting a new pair of work styled shoes when it was time to go back to school.

For food, we mostly tried  to grow our own and most of the time that worked out great, but many times, especially in the Winter months we would go through long periods when a full meal was a rare thing to come by.