Our boys with the colors

As a young soldier in World War I, William S. "Bill" Smith favored one thing more than cigarettes or chewing gum.

He waited eagerly for his hometown newspaper, which occasionally arrived in bulk after a months-long absence.

It did not matter if the news came in a trickle or a flood, Smith, the son of a Santa Barbara, CA newspaperman, read every line.

He looked for familiar names in the latest society news, read the editorials and absorbed the advertisements.

 Newspapers connected Smith to home, and he welcomed every one.

When the U.S. entered World War II, Smith knew that victory would require the service of America's youth.

This time, he would not fight, but his contributions to the war effort proved invaluable.

Having founded The Star in September of 1937, Smith devoted himself to gathering news of importance to the Port St. Joe community.

In the weeks following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he asked community members to provide photographs of local servicemen for publication in the newspaper.

The photos, accompanied by brief news of deployments and other happenings, formed the foundation of a weekly 1A column entitled "Our Boys with the Colors."

Smith, a one-legged cigar aficionado who walked with the aid of crutches, was dogged in his pursuit of information.

When servicemen photos stopped arriving at his office, Smith fired off an article noting his unsuccessful attempts to "beg and wheedle parents and relatives."

Noting that "it seems that most of them are apathetic to the idea of seeing the picture of their man in the paper," Smith employed a new strategy.

Those who wanted their loved ones to appear in The Star would need to buy him a year's subscription for the "special servicemen's rate" of $1 a year.

"In that way, we will have the honor of printing his picture, and he will get The Star, a veritable 'weekly letter from home,' " Smith wrote.

The prodding had a purpose. Smith, the WWI veteran, knew what word from home meant to homesick soldiers, and he strived to make the "Our Boys with the Colors" column as informative and comforting as possible.

All the news

In gathering information, Smith cast a wide net.

He reported servicemen's promotions, training and medals, overseas Star subscriptions, even bits of gossip gleaned from conversations with family members.

No news was too serious or too trivial to make the column. Smith solemnly reported the ranks of the missing and killed in action, as well as new facial hair on a once clean-shaven lad.

In an item entitled "Jesse Stone Grows Beard," Smith noted that the young sailor, stationed on a boat in the Aleutian Islands, had recently sent his parents a photo of himself sporting shoulder-length hair and a goatee.

"He looks like Jesse James, not Jesse Stone," Stone's father, Port St. Joe pioneer T.H. Stone commented.

When J.E. Bounds received a letter from his brother, Sgt. Carl Bounds, reporting his distaste for Irish whiskey, Smith printed an excerpt.

"If you think whiskey is scarce in Port St. Joe, you should be with me," wrote Sgt. Bounds. "The best whiskey we get in Ireland is worse than the worst Gulf county moonshine, and is so expensive that a soldier can't afford to buy it."

Though the column would remain "Our Boys with the Colors" throughout the war's duration, a few items didn't quite fit the bill.

Lois Crosby dispatched a letter from Cedar Falls, Iowa, where she was stationed with other patriotic women in the Navy's Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES) division.

"Everything is so pretty here, lovely buildings and a beautiful campus….It is just a picture. There are 500 cadets training here and 1,000 WAVES—poor cadets!" she quipped.

Crosby's letter, coupled with word that R.H. Reddick's dog, "Boy," had been commissioned for patrol duty by the local Coast Guard unit, led Smith to consider changing the name of his column to "Our Boys, Gals and Dogs with the Colors."

Dispatches

Because family members eventually proved infrequent sources of information, Smith appealed to servicemen directly.

He implored them, sometimes by name, to send him letters detailing their latest exploits.

In the month's following the column's May 21, 1943 debut, Smith began to receive letters from soldiers, a few of whom became veritable wartime correspondents.

Smith published several letters from Leo Kennedy, who detailed the rough conditions soldiers endured in wartime.

In June of 1944, Kennedy, stationed somewhere in the Pacific, wrote, "This place is surely hell. There may be some place worse, but damn if I believe it."

Kennedy had one gripe in particular: the abundant mud.

"There's more mud in an acre of this place than there is in the whole of Willis Swamp," he reported. "A few days ago we were issued knee boots (the knee boots are worthless here—they aren't high enough)."

In August of 1944, Kennedy still had not made peace with the mud, but he found something that made him happy.

The Guadalcanal barracks had been made with Florida lumber, and to Kennedy, "anything from God's state has to be good."

Navy man Kenneth Creech, a regular South Sea correspondent, described the sweltering heat and the stench that accompanied the dead and the living.

"Have to catch rainwater in my three-gallon bucket for a bath and then wash my clothes in the same water. We smell like skunks most of the time."

With heavy artillery firing overhead day and night, Creech took shelter in his fox-hole. A good one was "worth a fortune," he said, even when it was two or three inches deep in water.

Creech took comfort in his shared suffering. "All on these islands have to lead a hard, rough life, so I am not by myself," he wrote.

In early 1944, Cornelius Kirkland was stationed with the Fifth Army in Italy.

In a letter to friend Dave Maddox, he answered two questions posed by Smith in an early "Our Boys with the Colors" column.

"Mr. Smith of The Star wanted to know what we boys were doing over here. Well, we ain't pickin' grapes."

On whether he felt frightened during his first combat mission, Kirkland answered in the affirmative, "You're damn right! I was plenty scared, but so far I have been lucky."

Corporal George Core, who would become a longstanding Gulf County Clerk of Court, wrote of his experiences in Saipan in the summer of 1944.

He lamented the mud and rain, which provided only a temporary relief from Saipan's balmy heat.

A weekly "donation" of five rolls of Life Savers, one package of gum, one razor blade, two boxes of matches and five packages of cigarettes cheered Core.

He kept the matches to burn the ants nesting beneath his bed, but gave the cigarettes to his comrades.

Though he would later be known for his precise, methodical record keeping, young Core had lost track of his days.

"To tell you the truth, I had even forgotten what the date was until I asked," he confessed. "I still don't know what the day is, but I will find out. It really makes no difference anyway, as I probably won't be going anywhere for a while."

Next week: Part II