Dad and his brothers- Not Ward Cleaver!

My Dad was apparently a hell-raiser from birth. The oldest of the three, he lived hard and died young. By the end of 1963 he was dead of complications from cirrhosis at age 41. A true waste of a human life. My Dad was sober for the last five years of his life and was loving, hard-working , and giving. while Mom was off getting her head together-literally. He took all three of us in an gave me the best X-mas of my youth. His second wife Earline Hill was a saint of a woman and loved me like I was her own.
Dad grew up in Harrisburg and went to Richmond Academy. He joined the Marines in the Reserves in 1940 and served with Jimmie Dyess in the 19th Separate Battalion. Most people don't know that the Augusta Marines were called to active duty before the war began. The war in Europe started in 1939 and the US had two years of training and stockpiling before December 1941. The Japanese understood which side we'd fight on and that neutrality was a sham..Dad had also been in the CCC in Florida in the late 30's. He would have been 20-21 years old when the war started.
Dad claimed to have been in the 2nd Marine Raider Battalion with Evans Carlson. From his description of the landings on Makin and fighting in Guadalcanal, Peleliu, and Saipan, I believe him. He was already binge-drinking heavily. One of his breaks in combat duty was as a DI at Parris Island. I read a court-martial report that broke him from gunny to private for strapping an officer to his cot and shaving him. He made gunny twice, private three times.
Dad didn't stop drinking when he came home. He married, and worked at the Savannah River Site as a union (IBEW) electrician. Made good money, had a beautiful blonde wife and three sons. And he kept drinking. Like most of his generation, popping the cork at Squeaky's Tip-Top was a normal, daily routine. Fishing and drinking with his war buddies on Stalling Island in the Savannah took a lot of time away from his family. And having a gorgeous, crazy wife didn't help. Mom was a screamer.
Dad was a fighter. I remember visiting him down at the old City Stockade at Lake Olmstead. Saw him once working on a city street cleaning detail. In the early 80's I was the company gunny of the Augusta Marines. I had a young recruit, hadn't gone to PI yet, picked up by the Augusta P.D. for traffic tickets and failure to appear. I gathered up the $120 needed to bail him out and went down to Ninth Street . I was in Cammies. The desk sergeant kept staring at me while I waited on the paperwork to be finished. Finally he leaned over the high desk and asked me, "What's your name, boy?" . I didn't rankle up over the "boy" part and answered "Johnnie Poole." He came down from behind the desk and took the next ten minutes telling me how he used to like, and arrest, my dad.
" I saw Johnnie down the old 'Pig and Whistle' parked in a shiny new 55 Chevy. I just wanted to tell him how pretty the car was, but he was drunk as hell!" , the old cop drawled. "Johnnie, I don't want any trouble from you! But he rolled outta that car yelling that 'Goddamit I ain't stole the sumbitch!' and the fight was on!", he said. "But, the next day when he was sober, he apologized, and I believed him."
I also visited Daddy at the Lenwood Division of the VA hospital up on Central Avenue. They had a little canteen where the patients could buy small items and he bought me a plastic airplane model. He was there drying out.
Dad was also smart. I remember him coming up in the alley behind our house on Greene Street with book he wanted me to read. It was a textbook on electrical theory and math. He thought I was smart and used to love to take me down to the union hall on Reynolds Street and set me up to play cards with the other electricians waiting for work.
The day before he died, I went to see Grandma on Battle Row. She called Dad to see if I could stop by on my way home. We talked and he said he loved me, but wasn't feeling good and we'd talk later.

Uncle Herbert was a sailor in the Navy in the war, a bartender in New York City and gay. Apparently he had some kind of fall or probably got beat up, but when he came home, he lived with Grandma in the apartment on the back of the house on Battle Row. A very neat efficiency apartment that didn't have a direct connection to the main house. Herbert loved Pepsi and used to keep cases of it under his bed. I remember how much he loved to be around me. Never did anything even remotely sexual. Just loved me and my brothers without question. He had a soft Southern accent which probably made him seem even more effeminate. I liked him.

Uncle Charles is a hoot. He's still with us and my favorite picture of him is with my Dad in the 30's standing in front of 1949 Battle Row in suits with white duck trousers. These two had deliberately rubbed their penises to erection so that my gullible grandmother would take their picture with noticeable male bulges. She never knew. Charles got busted one year scalping Master's tickets. His picture made the Chronicle and TV news. Pissed him off that he was permanently off the ticket list more than the fine.

Just normal, American men who matured in the Augusta of the Forties.

Grandparents

My paternal grandparents were Johnny George Poole ,Sr. and Katie Mae Thomas (Cadle). Grandpa was a very fat, round guy who died in the early fifties. I remember him only once. Something happened to scratch him and I recall that was the first time I can remember blood. I was sitting on his lap on the front porch of 1956 Battle Row. He was in a blindingly white spread-collar short-sleeve shirt and when he started bleeding he took it off and sat in his old-fashioned "guinea" T-shirt and pleated-front, cuffed pants with his shoes off. We were in the "glider", a metal porch swing with square perforations and stampings to make it look woven. The "glider" didn't swing from the ceiling, which was close-spaced beaded planking about two-inches wide, but sat on a tube frame suspended by four tubes on bearing pins. Didn't rock, just moved back and forth about eight inches. Grandpa and my father ran the service station at 13th and Broad Street after the war. Little leather bow ties, billed caps and all.
Granny Poole was a sweet southern woman. My grandmother's mother was quite the successful businesswoman. She built a building in the 13-1400 block of Broad Street and ran a candy store at street level. The second floor was where the money was made, though. Apparently Ma Cadle ran a string of the nicest girls in Augusta up there. But she kept Katie well away from all that.
I remember her most for her fried egg sandwiches and the quarter for sweets she'd give me every Saturday. It was the most closely held secret in the world. I was to never let her second husband , George Pilcher, know about the fortune she was giving away. Uncle George worked for the city at the pumping station and was apparently on 24-hour call as he would receive telephone calls about every four hours informing him of the levels of the Savannah River and the Augusta Canal along with the Highland Avenue filter plant status. Occasionally, he'd have to leave immediately and go tearing off down Goodrich Street Extension along the canal to get to the pumping station. When that happened he was always in a foul mood.
My mother's parents were more distant. Hester Edenfield is only a memory from pictures of a bubble-coiffed woman with teardrop eyeglasses. My grandfather was never spoken of.

Why Battle Row

I grew up in an Augusta, Georgia neighborhood called 'Harrisburg' primarily on a street named 'Battle Row'. The story is that the local patriots fought a running retreat up the hill out of town along the path that became my street. Or maybe it was the local Tories.
What I want to do here is to record my memoirs and stories of growing up in Augusta. Not necessarily thrilling stuff, but more of an exercise in writing and journalism than anything else.