Short-cut home from Turkey / Six Day War

By Harold W. Motte, Florence, SC

During the hostilities leading to the Six Day War in 1967, I was a Navy radioman on the ammunition ship Mazama in the Mediterranean Sea. When our ship hit port in Turkey, I got word that my mother was very sick and I had to come home.

The Turkish Air Force got me from the ship to the dock and took me to the end of a commercial air base where I boarded a military plane. I flew from there to the big naval base at Rota, Spain, where you took off to come to Virginia or New Jersey.

So I’m just sitting there waiting on my flight and about 3:00 that afternoon, a Navy petty officer comes and wants to know if anybody there has any kind of secret clearance. He said they needed a guard to go with the courier, an Air Force colonel, on a C130 that was leaving in 30 minutes and would arrive about midnight in Norfolk, Virginia.

I’m thinking, okay, I’ve got clearance. I’m not supposed to take the jet out of here until about midnight and we’d get to New Jersey about 3:00 or so in the morning. But if I go on the C130 now as a courier guard, I’ll land in Norfolk about 12:00 o’clock and I’ll be a lot closer to home. Makes sense, right? So I agreed to go.

He took me over to a hangar where there’s this pallet about 15 feet square piled with canvas bags, all classified material going to the States. Then he hands me a 32 revolver in a shoulder holster and four bullets taped up in masking tape, in a little row like you buy screws.

I felt like Barney Fife on the Andy Griffith show and I’m thinking, what good would that do me — “Just a minute, let me get these bullets out of this tape and load up my gun before you do anything”?!

Then a fork lift hoisted that pallet and me, my 32 revolver and my taped-up bullets up into the back of this giant C130 cargo plane. The colonel is already there, and all there was in the back of that huge plane was me, the colonel, two little cots, this pallet of stuff, the Cargo Master, and the pilots.

Well, we take off and we’re flying along when all of a sudden, the Cargo Master comes back and says, “Y’all come up to the cockpit, we got to descend to about 2000 feet — the back of this thing didn’t close up like it’s supposed to.”

So we went up with the pilots, they descended to 2000 feet, opened up the back end of the plane and re-shut it, re-pressurized it, and we went on back to our cots.

A little later I’m sitting there talking to the colonel when I noticed a small box strapped down on the belly of the plane. I was curious, so next time the Cargo Master came by I asked him what it was. He hesitated a little, then he said, “That’s white phosphorus.”

See, we’re on a plane with all this classified material and if something was to happen, such as somebody tries to get that material, then the white phosphorus would be ignited. And if the plane crashed, it would ignite.

If you even breathe on it very closely and you have hot breath, you’re liable to disappear! White phosphorus is highly volatile at a very low flash point, and it would literally disintegrate that whole plane and us and everything around it.

I said, “Okay, how much longer before we land somewhere and I can get off of here!”

Well, the next thing we know, the Cargo Master comes back again and says, “We’re landing.” I said, “Landing?  We’re in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean!”

He said, “No, we’re not that far out, we’re going to have to land at the Azores, we got some write-ups.” I said, “I’ve just got two more questions — what’s a write-up, and how many we got?”

He said a write-up was something wrong with the plane that needed fixing, and we had eight write-ups, “nothing major.” Yeah, right. By this time I didn’t want to know anything else about that plane!

So we land and taxi all the way down to the end of the airstrip, way away from everything. You know, what with the white phosphorus on board and all.

Here comes two vans, each with a driver and one other guy. One guy takes the papers the colonel was carrying and the other guy wants my gun and my four bullets. These were replacements to stay with the plane so we could have some liberty while it was being fixed. The colonel got in one van and I got in the other van.

Well, it’s late at night by this time and while the Colonel was probably relaxing in the officer’s club or something, most everything else was closed up. So my driver took me to the civilian bar at the airport terminal.

They started serving me rum and cokes in tall, skinny bottles about eight inches tall. I don’t know how many I drank. I vaguely remember the guy taking me back to the plane, but I don’t remember anything else until we landed in Norfolk about 8:30 the next morning.

Now, if I’d just waited on that jet to New Jersey and got another flight from there, I’d have been home in Florence, South Carolina long before we ever got to Norfolk, Virginia!

(Harold had forgotten his very first military lesson: never volunteer.)

All of My Heroes Have Always been Soldiers, and Sailors, and Airmen, and Marines…

I learned the Star Spangled Banner in grammar school right along with the Pledge of Allegiance. Our music lessons at McKenzie included folk music, rounds, spirituals, patriotic music and national anthems from ours as well as several other countries.

I loved all of it, but especially the service songs — Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines. Chorales or Choruses from various branches of the service came to Florence in the 1950′s and the whole town turned out. The most popular movies were war stories from WWII, whether they were love stories, musicals, or dramas. When television arrived at our house, Victory at Sea became a favorite show.

Memorial Day was originally called Decoration Day, a solemn time to reflect, and to put flowers on the graves of fallen soldiers. The day was first officially observed on May 30, 1868 to recognize servicemen who had died in the Civil War, but since WWI it has included servicemen and women killed in any conflict.

These days a lot of businesses will remain open, many featuring special “Start of the Summer” Memorial Day Sales. Some folks will take the day off and take advantage of those sales. Or they might picnic at the park or barbecue in the back-yard, enjoying a long week-end off from work.

It wasn’t always like that. When I was small nearly everything closed down on Memorial Day in honor of the men and women who had died in service of our country. Nevertheless, many churches will still include America The Beautiful in their Sunday worship services, and many remembrances will still be held at National Cemeteries from “sea to shining sea.”

In researching my daddy’s family tree, I discovered that in the late 1700′s Stephen Motte was granted a “patent” for land in the North Carolina coastal area for service in the Revolutionary War. He traded that land for a parcel in what became known as Mott’s Township, the territory around Olanta, South Carolina.

My great-great-grandfather John Motte served with Captain Zimmerman’s Pee Dee Artillery. Wounded in May of 1864, he spent time recovering in the Confederacy’s Chimborazo Hospital in Richmond. His son David Motte, too young to be regular Army, became a teenage prison guard attached to the Confederate Army.

Grandfather Charles H. Motte joined the Army after the Civil War, stationed in New Orleans where he met and married my grandmother Etta Follette.

Some of Etta’s relatives had been Union soldiers during the Civil War, one fighting in several of the same battles in Virginia as John Motte. Charles and Etta’s first son Percy served in the US Army in WWI.

My father Harold Motte, Sr. enlisted in the Army Air Force in 1941, served several years and re-enlisted. He became a glider pilot and an aircraft mechanic. (See first photo above.)

Several of my mother’s brothers joined the Navy during WWII, Palmer becoming a career submariner. My brother Harold served in the Navy in the 1960′s, stationed on an ammunition ship in the Mediterranean Sea during the Six Days War.

Maybe it’s not politically correct nowadays, but every time I hear From the Halls of Montezuma or Anchors Away, my heart still flutters a bit and I recall my family’s centuries-long heritage of military service.

I hope that whether you have Memorial Day off from work or not, you’ll pause for a few moments and say a prayer for all those serving today, grateful that so many have been – and still are – willing to pay the price for our freedom to have a “holiday” such as Memorial Day.

(Reprinted from 2006.)

Department Store Browsing in the 1950′s

By the time I was nine or ten years old, I found department stores could be just as much fun as dime stores for browsing, the great pastime for kids in pre-television days.

McCown-Smith Department Store was located on Dargan Street right where Evans runs into it. One entrance was on Dargan and a second one on East Evans — another two-main door store.

McCown-Smith sold a lot of blue and white enamel basins and cast aluminum cook pots, but they seemed to specialize in linens. You know, cotton sheets and chenille bedspreads.

They also featured crocheted antimacassars, tatted doilies, lace-edged dresser scarves, and embroidered table runners. My grandmother Mimi took me shopping for those in McCown-Smith one time. I’d never heard the word “antimacassar” before that day — but most folks had one on the back of every armchair and couch. Those were the days of Wildroot Cream Oil hair tonic, and when a fellow leaned back some of his Wildroot would come off, and naturally you needed an antimacassar to keep it off the sofa.

Of course, these things would wear out fast with weekly washing, so you’d have to take another trip to Mc-Cown Smith. And of course your knickknacks couldn’t sit on a naked table-top, they needed a lace doily. Likewise your hairbrush and bare wood needed a dresser scarf in between them. McCown-Smith sold them all.

Across East Evans Street was Belk’s Department Store. You could go in a big glass swinging door on Evans Street, march in a straight line back to the shoe department and come out on Dargan, then circle back up the sidewalk to re-enter on Evans. It drove the salesladies batty but it seemed like fun at the time.

Riding Belk’s elevator was an adventure, if you could convince the attendant you weren’t just horsing around. Running up the staircase was faster anyhow. By the time the attendant closed the door, worked the lift, and on arrival jerked the car up and down several times trying to get the elevator floor level, you could have been up and down the staircase two or three times.

Belk’s second floor Ladies Ready-to-Wear seemed hushed and dignified. I liked to sashay between the long, silky evening dresses or run my fingers back and forth on wool coat fur collars, but the clerks lingered at your elbow, sweetly suspicious if a parent wasn’t in sight. “May I help you find your mother, honey?”

I really preferred downstairs Belk’s, anyway. Perfume, bedroom slippers or earbobs, just about any gift item you could want was displayed atop glass cases. Dusting powder or leather wallets, everything had such a neat smell. Belk’s smelled almost as good as the Donut Dinette over on Palmetto Street.

In the middle of the 100 block of West Evans was an amazing store – J. C. Penney. I was fascinated by the cables running through the air from ground-floor countertops to second-floor business offices. Little round containers zipped along those cables carrying money and sales slips, who knows what all. Mechanical ding-ding sounds accompanied the containers up those cables.

Today we think nothing of putting our deposits into a vacuum tube at the drive-through and watching it zoom up, over and into the bank building. I guess Penney’s had the idea first, at least here in Florence.

On down West Evans, if you crossed the street and turned right on Irby you came to the big Sears Roebuck and Company. Another two-main entrance store (front and back), it offered lots more for a kid to investigate. Clothing took up the front, ladies and girls on the left, men and boys on the right. Cosmetics, jewelry, and shoes occupied the middle.

Serious stuff like electric cook stoves and wringer washers were way in the back. There were lots of tools and tires and men shoppers back there. Girls found that department dull and boring; we didn’t do much browsing back there.

Hats were a must in the 1950′s and every department store had a millinery section. Big round mirrors were provided with stools to sit on while ladies tried on the latest fashion. Aunt Myrtle, a millinery specialist most of her life, believed in hats! My mother had floppy straw ones with feathers for Sunday go-to-meeting, pill-box types for funerals, and silk-flower caps for weddings.

Sears frowned on little girls trying hats on for fun, but switching hats around on the fake heads was amusing when the saleslady was elsewhere.

Over in the unmentionables department, long fake legs showed off nylon stockings. No shoes. No torsos either, just legs and hose. There wasn’t any such thing as pantyhose then, just stockings. Ladies wore garters around their thighs to keep them up, or a girdle if they needed extra help holding their tummy in.

Fake hands at an adjoining counter wore short “Dress Gloves for Any Occasion,” white or tan for summer, navy blue or black for winter. I wondered if the skin tone went all the way down to the fingers and if the hand had any fingernails, but I never got up the nerve to peel off a glove and see.

Watchful sales clerks kept a close eye out when kids went browsing in the department stores (some called it snooping). “Don’t run, don’t touch, and if you break it, you bought it” sort of cramped our style, but browsing was still good entertainment. Even grownups liked to do it in the pre-TV 1950′s downtown Florence.

Aunt Myrtle Played for Silent Movies

Myrtle Veronica Motte Snyder Boekhout was my daddy’s sister. She was born in November 1900 and died in March 1984. She was quite a personality. She is why I have been a musician most of my life.

Aunt Myrtle played for silent movies, she told me many years ago. Last year I asked her son Bill Snyder if it was true. “Yes,” he said, “she played for the silent movies, probably in New Orleans in the 19-teens.” I wondered where in New Orleans that might have been but Bill didn’t know.

Since then I’ve found that probably Myrtle played for the silent movies right here in Florence. She was too young when her family moved permanently back to South Carolina (her father’s home state) to have played for New Orleans movies. But Florence had quite a few theaters in the 19-teens and Myrtle was the right age to have put her musical talent to good use here. For quite a while, the Colonial Theater served as a combination Opera House (live performances) and movie house (first for silent movies, later for “talkies”).

I was curious about how the music and silent movies worked. Did the film companies provide the music to the theaters? Did they only send a list of pieces to be played, along with the frames they went with? You know, fast giddy-up stuff for the western chase scenes, slow dreamy-romances for the love scenes? Or did the theater manager pick the pieces? Or hire a musician and then let her pick?

You know, it’s hard to get that sort of information today. I am grateful to the internet for the answers to that question, and now I understand Aunt Myrtle’s stacks of stuff. She had reams and boxes and folders of piano music in her apartment on West Evans Street. Atop the piano and the dining room table were stacks of music. Underneath the popular sheet music were books of classical music; everything she’d ever needed for the films was still there at her fingertips. She entertained us with great rolling renditions whenever we visited her.

I discovered that in big cities, an upscale theater would have an in-house orchestra to accompany the films. Imagine that! The production company would ship the entire score along with the film canisters and the orchestra would rehearse like mad to learn the material before the first showing. (And you know, they still do? Silent movies still circulate in the big cities, in theaters especially dedicated to them!)

In smaller cities the theater might only have an organ, perhaps calliope-style. The organist in some cities rose out of the floor on an elevator. This was a full-time paid position. The organist might receive the score with the film, or if the film company only provided a suggested list the theater manager (if he was generous) or the organist (if he wasn’t) would go out and buy the music.

In smaller towns like Florence there was only a piano. The film came with a suggested music list and the pianist provided her own music. She watched the film as many times as it took to decide what pieces to use where. It must have been a lot of work.

I never did learn how the pianist was paid. Was it by the showing? By the movie? By the difficulty? Was she reimbursed for the music she bought? I have no idea and I don’t know who to ask.

Now, this wasn’t Aunt Myrtle’s only occupation. She was a ladies millinery specialist who worked for some time in a Richmond, Virginia department store. She knew all about ladies hats and she never went anywhere without one herself. Aunt Myrtle lived here in Florence when I was a child, but she didn’t insist I learn all about ladies hats — no, she wanted me to learn how to play the piano. So I did.

Chopin, Bach, Beethoven, Handel, Tchaikovsky, big band numbers, movie themes and church music — if she loved it, she knew I would too. At the age of six I began taking lessons from Myrtie Berry Wescott, and for ten years I went twice a week during the school year. I learned how to read music, play scales, do finger exercises, and memorize long concertos. I worked hard, determined to play like Aunt Myrtle.

Long, trilling runs up and down the keyboard were her trademark. Fast or slow, soft or loud, crashing major chords or eerie minor ones, octaves and arpeggios galore. Somehow, however, these beautiful runs escaped me. A glitch in my finger joints has interfered, so I don’t play exactly like Myrtle. But I do play, and I love to play, and that is her doing.

I was born several generations too late, but I wish I could have attended a silent movie with Myrtle at the keyboard. That would have been a blast!

Strains of Music

Remember “Strains of Music” in the 300 block of West Evans Street?

In the late 1950′s Hal Strain owned and operated this popular music store in downtown Florence, offering a variety of instruments for music students and band members. My own interest started and stopped at a set of vertical stands in the main room of the old house; sheet music.

Spring time always brings back sometimes pleasant, sometimes unsettling memories of music recitals, marking the end of one musical academic year and the beginning of summer vacation. Independence from scales, finger exercises and the classics was granted in the summer. That’s when we made occasional forays to Strains for popular sheet music.

My piano teacher Mrs. Myrtie Berry Westcott didn’t allow such things inside her piano studio. No popular pieces, no folk music or even hymns were permitted to be played there, nothing but Standard instruction books with the works of Chopin, Beethoven, Strauss, Mozart – you get the idea.

Strictly classicals, strictly as-written, strictly no fun stuff allowed. Well, for nine months out of the year, twice a week I sat on her piano bench with Mrs. Westcott to the right of me, baton in her hand and voice in my ear. “Count, Bette, you must always remember to count.” One-and, two-and, three-and, we would count. Or if we were struggling with eighth or sixteenth notes it might be “one-and-ah, two-and-ah.”

Sometime in late winter we would select our recital pieces. I say “we” but really it was her selection. She would make a pretense of giving us piano pupils a choice but the choice was limited to two or three pieces in our grade range. I remember quite a few of those recitals, nerves and all. Pretty frilly dresses for the girls, dress slacks and shirts for the boys. Our recital hall seemed to change every year. One year it was the museum, one year Hodges Piano and Organ on North Coit Street, and one year the auditorium upstairs at the Library.

No matter what the venue, the atmosphere was the same, stage fright and nervousness. Squirming in my seat as I waited my turn, I would use my knees as a makeshift keyboard and rehearse my own piece over and over. “Can’t you be still,” my mother would whisper. No, I couldn’t, I was terrified I would forget the whole thing.

If I didn’t do well, then I might not get a shopping trip to Strains of Music! Somehow I always played well enough to earn a “well done” from Mrs. Westcott, a hug from my parents, and reassurance that my reward would be forthcoming. Sheet music!

The summer months were a wonderful mix of play times. Some outdoor fun time was spent in Circle Park or Timrod Park and some was spent at Mimi and Da’s farm. But a great deal of fun time was spent indoors at the piano, picking out the melody of big band numbers from the movies or direct from The Hit Parade on television.

For special treats mama brought home entire music books like Hits of the Forties or the Best of Guy Lombardo. It was easy to keep my fingers and brain limber during the summer months, I’d just turn on the radio, flip through pages to the appropriate piece, and follow along while listening to real musicians play the real thing.

Strains of Music moved from Florence to Waynesville, North Carolina in 1961. Other music stores contained sheet music and music books of course, and over the years I’ve shopped in every one Florence had, I think. But the last time I went looking for sheet music was not in an actual store, it was on-line — nowadays you can simply plug in your credit card number and print your own pages right off your computer printer.

It’s not the same, though. The paper is smaller and the musical notes are smaller. I’d rather push open the door with the jingly bell and smell the aroma of new guitars, band instruments, polishes and wax. I’d rather finger the metal racks and flip through the piano pieces, sniff that velvety, woodsy paper and visualize big bands playing those wonderful numbers. I could look at the bars of music on the page and hear the song in my head, despite the sounds of customers in the background thrumming the strings of a guitar or banjo.

Some time ago my daughter brought me a little present, a very old piece of sheet music. “Kiss Me Good Night (Out the Window You Must Go).” I’d never heard of it before but the words are catchy and cute. Copyrighted in 1913, it was probably printed in the 1920′s.

As I took the piece out of its protective plastic cover, she had no idea what a thoughtful gift it really was. That woodsy, velvety feel and smell of the paper took me right back to Strains of Music, like it was just yesterday.

Childhood misadventures (and memories of Dr. Price)

MRI’s, CT scans, x-rays and angiograms – the older we get, the more those terms become familiar to us. But when was the last time you had an old-fashioned fluoroscope?

I was four or five the last time I had one. Chewing on things like little rubber dolls and fingernails was an “unattractive habit,” according to mama. She tried to discourage me from putting non-food items into my mouth, but how else can a little kid tell what things are made of, if you don’t taste them?

Many interesting things invited a bite or a taste, like the tangy popsicle stick after the frozen orange flavor was gone, or the salty-sweet coated paper lining the Cracker Jacks box, or the chewy wax bottle once the syrupy contents were sucked dry.

But I have to agree, the nickle shouldn’t have been one of those things. That metallic flavor was very different from anything sweet or salty, you couldn’t suck any further taste out of it, and it was entirely too easy to swallow accidentally. Which is what I did, much to the dismay of my mother.

I had to tell her; after all, I wanted my nickle back. A nickle would buy something good, like a tootsie roll or two, and I didn’t come by too many nickles in those days.

Mama’s reaction was a bit extreme, I thought. “Oh my Lord, what did you swallow?!” Bundled into the car in a flash, down to Dr. Price’s exam room we went. From there I was rushed over to a strange room at McLeod Infirmary, conveniently located next door to the doctor’s office.

Lying still on that hard table was scary, especially when all the lights were off. And then came the stern admonishment from normally jovial Dr. Price: Go home, lie in the bed and read comic books, don’t play outside, don’t run or jump or do anything fun for several days, and things will “work themselves out.” And of course they did, in due time.

I quit trying to use my taste buds to determine the make-up of inedible objects for a while after that.

Several years and bouts of sore throats later, Dr. Price made a pronouncement to me with a smile as he prepared a penicillin shot: “Next time you’re in here with tonsillitis, we’re going to yank those tonsils right out.”

That was the last time I was in there with tonsillitis! Believe me, whenever I got a sore throat after that I never let on to anybody. I may have snuck into the bathroom and gargled with salt water a few times, taken an aspirin or two, but no horrible tonsil-yanking for me. I wasn’t sure how they went about it but it didn’t sound too pleasant. I didn’t intend to find out.

I made it from grammar school to junior high without too many misadventures, until the amazing ambulance ride from school to the hospital one afternoon. Sometimes with a head cold I’d get a tickle in the back of my throat, caused by a swollen soft palate. I’d learned that if a tickle evolved into a cough, I could easily stop it with a few sprinkles of table salt. Accordingly my pockets usually held one or two little salt packs (like you get with french fries), and just a bit of salt licked off the palm of my hand would do the trick.

This particular day I was all out of salt when the tickle started. Soon a cough developed, and after a couple of minutes I couldn’t stop coughing. I tried to tell the teacher I needed some salt but she thought I was nuts. Cough, cough, salt, please get me some salt, cough, cough! Instead she got me a cup of cold water, which just made things worse.

Worried by then, she did what any responsible teacher would do: she sent for the ambulance. Now, in those days, there was no EMS – the ambulances looked a lot like hearses. I was a real star, coughing my head off while the attendants in white uniforms laid me out on a stretcher and loaded me in the back of that long white car.

My fellow students watched and waved as off we went to McLeod Infirmary, probably thinking they’d never see me again.

Of course by the time we pulled up to the emergency entrance at McLeod, the cough had run its course. I guess I’d sweated enough from all that coughing that licking my damp salty palms was enough to stop it. There at the hospital door was my anxious mother, who soon understood my problem. A simple cough triggered by a simple tickle, the whole thing avoidable with a simple application of table salt.

No matter, I was there, Dr. Price was there, and I had to be checked out for the sake of the school officials. After a brief listen to my lungs, a look down my throat and a “tch, tch, tonsils still there, hmmm?” I was declared fit to go home. My star status was dimmed somewhat when I turned up at school the next day none the worse for wear, several salt packets stowed in my pocket.

Well, today I seldom have sore throats or coughs that can’t be stopped with a sprinkle of salt. But I do still have my tonsils, thanks to Dr. Julian Price’s penicillin shots – or his “yank-’em-right-out” promise, depending on your point of view!