The app for independent voices
Sing
“Hallelujah, I’m a bum
Hallelujah, bum again
Hallelujah, give us a’ hand-out
To revive us again”
My father taught me this song then asked me to promise not to tell anyone he had taught it to me.
In 1935, in the depths of the depression, a gunfight with an abusive step-father resulted in my father being escorted to the state line between Georgia and North Carolina. The stepfather rode a horse and carried a shotgun. My 15 year old father walked ahead.
At the state line, he was told “Don’t come back.” At age 15, my dad became a bum.
After a year of riding the rails, he lied about his age and enlisted in the U.S. Army. After artillery training at Fort Brag, he was discharged from the U.S. Army and enlisted into MacArthur’s “Asiatic” Harbor Defenses of Manila and Subic Bays.
For two or three years, my father trained Philippine units and manned the big guns of Corregidor. He only had a 3rd grade education, but he was a human calculator….able to quickly and accurately multiply numbers in his head. The Army used him. (His picture on the boat from Corregidor to Manila is below. He was Army but his hat looks like a sailor’s cap colored Army green. Maybe it was loaned to him?)
In the Philippines he had a woman who lived with him as his wife. The Army transferred him to guard the Panama Canal….tearing him from his Filipino love.
After the Death March….after the war….he moved to Georgia where laws forbid marriage between a white man and a Filipino woman. He married my mother, a 5’7” blonde who ran even when walking was a option.
But the Philippines were impossible to forget. My baby sister is named Dolores Romona….my mother allowed her daughter to be named after my father’s Filipino love. 🤷♂️
