Chapter 13
When we arrived at Camp Dix the first thing we did was go single file through a room for a medical checkup. A doctor was standing there and asked "how do you feel?" I said 'Okay' and he said "Next". That was the extent of the medical checkup we got and of course no one complained about anything because all they wanted to do was to get home again. We were afraid that if we told of any problems they would put us in the hospital and keep us for weeks. We didn't want that to happen......even John Brady with the ruptured appendix went through the line quickly.
The next step was to go into a room where a sergeant made out our income tax and gave us some of our back pay so we had money to get home. They took out 188.00 to pay the income tax on my salary for the year I was in prison camp. I don't know how they had the nerve to do that after what we had been through. They talk about how badly the Vietnam veterans were treated when they came back, but I think what happened to us was just as bad. We didn't have any crowds to meet our ship or parades to welcome us back either. We later discovered that we should have insisted on more medical help and reported our health problems so they would have been in our medical records. A few years later when I needed treatment for my back, there was no way to prove that it was service connected. When I did try a few years later to get some compensation at Buffalo and Rochester VA centers for stomach and back problems all I got was a runaround.
I sent a telegram to my wife and told her I would let her know when to come to Rochester, then I sent a message to my father to tell him of my return to the country. I went to the PX one day and drank a half glass of beer. I discovered I wasn't in very good shape yet and had to go back to my bunk to lie down for several hours to recuperate from the drink. After all I had been through I weighed 124 lbs. only two pounds less than when I entered the service, however. I had at least a half dozen Army blankets and I mailed two of them home and later wished I had mailed a lot more as they were nice blankets and I sti11 have one.
When it came time to find out where we were going next we lined up in front, of the desk of an officer who was giving out papers to report to a large recreation club in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. It was one of those fancy places with tennis, golf, swimming and horseback riding for two weeks of rest and relaxation. The line got shorter and the man ahead of me got his papers. It was my turn at last. The officer stood up, announced that the resort was filled up and the rest of us were to go home for two weeks then report to Atlantic City for reassignment or discharge. I was so disappointed as this would have been such a nice honeymoon for Lettie and I. Another example of how things worked for me in the service.
We made preparations to go home and soon it was time to say good-by to Bruce. It was a very hard thing to do after the two years we had spent together and all that we had been through. We agreed to write often and get together when we could.
I met another man, Jim Smith, the nephew of Ray Smith who worked in the Canandaigua post office and we decided to come home together. He lived in Newark and I decided to take the train there with him. We were none too neat traveling on the train as we were still wearing our old dirty uniforms from prison camp. At Newark I took a bus to Canandaigua as I had not notified anyone that I was coming. I wanted to make it a surprise so I got off the bus at Main Street and didn't even take a taxi home. I had all, my belongings in a bag which I threw over my shoulder as I walked home up Chapin Street. I didn't even see anyone I knew along way home. When my father got home from work I was in the bathroom shaving and I walked out and said 'hello'.
Two days later Lettie arrived in Rochester and I borrowed my father's car to go pick her up. We stayed with my father several days and then decided we would leave as it was difficult to get along with my stepmother. We rented a room at Lowes Tavern on South Main Street which was a combination tourist home with room and board. We spent the next two months at different places like Niagara Falls, Hill Cumorah and around the lake. We were entertained at dinner parties by all the friends I had before entering the service. I bought a used Chevrolet coupe with the back pay that I received so we had transportation.
During these first few weeks at home I began to realize what three and a half years in service had cost me in terms of my position in life. Here I was at 29 with no job, a little money and a car. All the friends who had escaped being drafted, some legally and some not, had really prospered. Most had made a lot of money working in defense jobs, had new cars and homes of their own. After giving up three and a half years of your life for your country, the reasons others didn't go and their prosperity was always on one's mind. I wouldn't have done it any other way, however, as the good times had in the service far outweighed the bad and those memories will always be with me. I was lucky to have had the chance to fly those airplanes and make so many wonderful friends not to mention the exciting experiences.
In August 1945 we drove to Atlantic City where we stayed in a large hotel taken over by the Air Force. It was right on the boardwalk and included the Atlantic City Convention Hall. I'd never seen a room so large, approximately the size of a football field, on the first floor of the hotel. The beauty pageant was held there the first week we were at the hotel. We watched the parades on the boardwalk in front of the hotel and saw all the contestants. They asked all of the ex-prisoners who were there for fifty volunteers for one evening and, as we had always known that you never volunteer for anything in the army they had quite a time coming up with fifty guys. As it turned out, they were the lucky ones who each escorted a beauty contestant to a large banquet one evening and the rest of the men were envious.
We attended meetings all week to help decide whether to stay in the service or get a discharge. I had already made up my mind to get out so gradually got all the necessary papers signed and got ready to 1eave for home. The parking there was limited and our car was in so tight we couldn't get it out to use while there. My car was in the back row with two rows in front of me. The cars were so close together that they touched and I had to get the license plate numbers of those in front and around me and hunt them up to move the cars. The cars were so close together that the paint was scraped off both sides of the car when we finally got it out. When we returned to Canandaigua, we rented an apartment on North Main Street and became friends with Len and Marcia Bobbins in the next apartment. They built and lived in the house that I now own. I had to find a job, so went back to Eastman Kodak, but the pay they could offer was about half of what I could earn working with my father and Clarence so I decided to paint.
I painted with my father and Clarence as Gordon had his own business and Leon was working at Brigham Hall. There was not much work that first winter, but I did get a chance to help Leon for a couple of months at Brigham Hall. The next spring we had the chance to rent the house on Mason Street where Sands and Millie Mullins had been living. I went to Rochester and had a good talk with the landlord whom I convinced to rent it to us. At that time the rent was only $25 a month and as soon as the Mullins moved out, we moved in. While living there our daughter Lynn was born on April 22, 1947.
During the summer of i946 we took a trip to Kirksville, Missouri to visit Bruce and his wife Marie. Paul Maxwell, one of the pilots I had flown with in England, lived in Tarre Haute, Indiana and I had his address so we stopped to see him. His wife was home and told me where he worked so I looked him up. It was some kind of a factory or office building and I was walking down a corridor when I saw him ahead of me so I caught up, tapped him on the shoulder and said 'hi'. He was very surprised and we spent the evening with dinner at their home. We stayed in a motel and drove to Missouri the next day. Bruce was just getting settled in and lived in a small older house off the main road. We stayed several days with them, talking, fishing and going on picnics. We arrived there on a Saturday and stayed up half the night talking and drinking. The next morning we awoke with terrific hangovers and Just barely made it through church services. In the afternoon Marie made a container of soup to take to Bruce's grandfather who was 90 years old and had just returned from the hospital after having a leg amputated. He was gone when we got there and we found him down at a pool hall telling all his buddies about the operation. They are tough old birds in that part of the country.
Bruce was a woodworking teacher at the high school and later he moved to Santa Rosa, California to teach there. On weekends he taught woodworking to prisoners at Alcatraz. We had a good time with Bruce and Marie and although we never got together again, we corresponded for years. The big Swede, Al Johnson, owned and operated a motel 'Shady Rest' on a lake in Minnesota and he wrote several times and invited us up for a free vacation, but we never got there.
Back home we looked forward to Lynn's birth and then her childhood years. When Lynn was about two years old we were visiting with our neighbors Ted and Gertrude Smith and several of their friends one evening. Lynn was sitting of the floor and everyone was sitting around her talking. Suddenly Lynn spoke up saying "Daddy looks different than Mommy in the bathtub". The room. was immediately enveloped in a deadly silence and my heart stopped beating. Then Lynn finished saying "Daddy has wrinkles on his belly" and everyone doubled over with laughter. That came close to being my most embarrassing moment.
From 1946 to 1950 the painting business was not very good and we had to save our summer wages to carry us through the winter when work was scarce. I remember one December when I only worked Two days and made $17. In 1953 we bought our first house, on Telyea St. next door to my sister Dorothy, at a cost of $731.10 it was financed on a GI loan through the local bank. We moved there December 3 and it was a warm sunny day at 63 degrees, a perfect day for the three of us and our cat "Betty" to move. In 1948 the three of us, known as R.G.Benson and Sons started working part-time during the winter doing all the painting at F.F. Thompson Hospital which made it easier to buy a house. I had had a garden on Mason Street and made quite a large one in the lot on Telyea Street. I have managed to have a garden every year since then although some of them were small. I also inherited a love for flowers from my mother and have always had flower gardens and plants.
During the late 1940's when Lynn was small we took a trip to Utah in the month of December and we only got as far as Lancaster, south, of Buffalo, when we ran into a terrible blizzard and the roads were closed. We got into the parking lot of a closed summer motel with a number of other travelers. They opened up the motel so we would have a place to spend the night in the lobby and some of the rooms. There was no heat and we were awake shivering all night. Lynn was in the bed between us and it was so cold her cheeks were frostbitten by morning. Early in the morning I put the chains on the car and we were able to get started. We decided to take the southern route and we had snow piled up on the car until we got to Oklahoma, where everyone wondered where we had come from.
We made another trip to Utah a few years later and went via the northern route. I am unable to remember exactly which events occurred on which trip so will relate them as I recall them, without much regard to the year.
The first trip during the winter was the year they had the hay lift for the farm animals due to the severe winter weather. One morning the temperature was 45 degrees below zero with so much frost in the air that you couldn't see the mountains to the east. One week it only got up to 14 below, but the cold was more bearable as the air is so dry. Mrs. Clark used to go out and hang up the washing in a short sleeved dress when it was down to 10 degrees above zero. The farmer who was a friend of Jimmy Clark's was a sheepherder and he was stuck with a flock of sheep way out an the prairie with no feed for the animals. We took a load of hay in Jimmy's truck and his friend had a big bulldozer which he used to make a trail through the snow from the road ending to where the herder was. He had a little clearing in the deep snow and about half of the sheep were laying around it frozen to death.
The little sheepherder's wagon was very interesting and as it was 10 degrees below zero we were glad to get inside. There was Just room for the four of us and the stove made it very warm. He insisted we stay for dinner and grabbed an axe, went outside and cut some chunks of meat off one of the dead sheep. He cooked it in the little stove and between the heat and the smell of that mutton cooking we would have been driven out if it hadn't been so cold. As it was, we lost our appetites. We did squeeze into the narrow aisle with a board an our laps for a table and had mutton with hot biscuits and honey. To this day I can't stand the smell of lamb cooking.
On one of the trips to Utah we left Lynn with her grandparent and went on to California by train to spend several days with Neil Ullo and his wife in Walnut Creek, California. He had started an electrical business and was selling and installing appliances in that area. I went with him one day and helped him install a washing machine. Neil remembered all his hungry days in prison camp and was very strict with his children at mealtime, making them eat everything on there plates. It was almost an obsession with him. We had a good visit and several years later they made a trip east and stayed with us when we lived an Telyea Street. We took the train back from California and were lucky to travel in one of the first Vista dome cars. The country was especially beautiful through the Snake River canyon.
Sometime during the 1950s we needed a new car and the Clarks in Utah could get a better deal. We had them purchase a new Chevrolet for us and Mrs. Clark and Jeanie drove it to New York for us. They got stuck in a big snowstorm in Ohio and I left by Greyhound to meet them. The bus got stuck in Erie, Pa. and we had to walk the last quarter mile to a train station. After a long wait I was able to get a train to Cincinnati, Ohio. They were about fifty miles to the west of there in a motel. I stayed in a hotel for two days and we talked back and forth by telephone. The parking lot outside my hotel room was full of cars with nothing showing but the aerials. Finally traffic started to move again and they were able to come ahead and pick me up. We got stuck again in Fredonia, N.Y. by a two foot snowfall and had to spend the night in a tourist home as all the roads were closed. The next morning we struggled for hours to got the car out of the parking lot and were able to get the rest of the way home. In those days there was very 1ittle snow removal equipment and these were hard trips to make.
In 1954 we were painting a house on North Main St. when my father complained about chest pain, but for more than an hour he kept going up and down the ladder holding his chest. Finally he said he couldn't work anymore and was going to drive to the drugstore for something to cure indigestion. After about fifteen minutes we heard the ambulance and feared it might be for him. The phone rang in the house and the lady came out to tell us my father had been taken to the hospital with a heart attack. He lived about a week and we all took turns sitting in the waiting room, but were never allowed to see him for more than a minute at a time. The doctor told us he had suffered a massive heart attack and knew he wouldn't live. I never forgave the doctor because if he knew he wasn't going to live I think we should have been allowed to spend more time with him.
This occurred in October when Dad was 74 years old. He was only a couple of weeks away from his 75th birthday in November and had planned on retiring and taking a trip to Florida. I made up my mind to retire before my health would prohibit me from enjoying a few years of retirement. I have always considered myself lucky to have had the chance to work with my father for so many years and get to know him. He once told me that it gave him great satisfaction to have raised nine children nobody getting into serious trouble even though none were a great success.
I continued working with Clarence until 1959 when I was offered a job as a painter in the maintenance department at the hospital. It took me almost a year to make up my mind because I didn't want to leave Clarence working alone. It was one of the hardest decisions to make, but I know the advantages of steady work even though I had to start with a cut in wages. The first few years I tried to help Clarence with some of his work on weekends when I could. I have never regretted the move because I would have ended up working alone when Clarence retired. I had only worked at the hospital a few months when I had my first serious illness. I entered the hospital acutely ill and the doctors decided to operate for appendicitis. They found an adhesion from the appendix to the intestine on the other side and I was suffering a bowel stoppage. I was back to work in two weeks, but had to take it easy awhile.
The only outside activities my father participated in were pitching horseshoes and bowling and he was good at both of them. He was especially good when bowling for money. He and four other bowlers would travel around the area to bowl in pot games and he always made a little money. He also bowled in one nationals tournament in Chicago. After his death I bowled for about ten years on a team with Leon, Clarence and, sometimes, Ken Montanye.
In 1966 I was divorced and Lynn was attending college at Hillsdale, Michigan so I lived alone for three years on Telyea Street. I was working at the hospital and took the same dinner with me everyday: a sandwich of lettuce, mustard and baloney. I ate my dinner at the hospital cafeteria after work each night and had TV dinners or ate out on the weekends. Several weeks after my divorce Pat Wager introduced me to her neighbor who was a widow and I started dating Kate. After the divorce I had the house, a car, some bonds and $18 in cash so I was starting out again financially. I tried to help Lynn with her college education by taking on more work at the hospital. I worked in maintenance four and a half days a week and Monday afternoons I was the purchasing agent for the hospital. I did all the Ordering and delivery of supplies to all the departments in the hospital. In the evenings and Saturdays I took care of the lawns and mowed the grass. I did this for two years and kept very busy.
On October 17, 1969 1 married Kathryn Coons and moved into her home an Perry Place. The following year I sold the house on Telyea Street for $14000 to a girl I knew at the hospital. Lynn was now living in Rochester and attending Nazareth College after marrying Dan Avery on February 17, 1968. My grandsons Bejamin and Timothy were born in Rochester on November 14, 1971 and February 25, 1974.
My sister Helen died of cancer in 1974 and my brother Gordon of cancer in 1979. In 1980 Kate and I sold the big house on Perry Place and moved to a smaller, newer home on Chapel Street. This house was just right for retirement with a dry basement, nice garage and workshop.
In 1970 the new hospital was finished and it was quite a big job moving into it. For several days I was the only department member at the new hospital directing all the truckloads of equipment to their new locations while Harold and Brownie were directing the move from the old hospital. Some days it took me over two hours to eat my lunch usually on the run and answering phone calls. The first few years there I did little painting as everything was new so I kept very busy doing maintenance work and book and record keeping for the department. I soon became a "jack of all trades" which made the work interesting as there was something different to do all the time.
1979 when I was 62 years old I gave a lot of thought to retiring early, but my birthday passed and I was still going to work. The work was so interesting in the hospital and I was in good health so I decided to stay until 65. The fear of financial problems makes it hard to decide when to retire, but I now find that I have more money than when I was working. A small hospital pension and Social Security have eliminated all financial worries at least for the present. My 65th birthday was July 23, 1982 and it was a perfect time for retirement. My last day of work I painted a room and worked right up to the last hour, not leaving until the regular time. I requested that there be no retirement party as the boys in maintenance gave me a gift certificate for $80 from Grossmans lumber and I used it to buy lumber and materials to make bird houses. After twenty three years of working with Dad and Clarence, then twenty three years of working at the hospital I figured it was time for retirement. I really enjoyed the hospital work and the chance to be around so many nice people. I was offered the chance to work part time at the hospital after retirement, but I knew that I had had enough and never Thought of it again.
On the first day of retirement it was a warm sunny day and my birthday, so I decided to put the hammock up in the backyard and lay in it. I discovered I had stepped in a pile of dog pooh and had it on my socks, shoes and hammock. I washed out the socks, shoes and took down the hammock to put it away. So went the first moments of retirement. The first couple of years I enjoyed working with wood and built many birdhouses, selling quite a few. I only charged enough to have money to buy materials for more.
For two summers I painted my sister Dorothy's house for her. I only worked a few hours each day and didn't charge her anything for labor as I was doing it Just to keep busy. It is a big house and I realized it would be the last time I would be able to do anything of that size. Working with high ladders was getting difficult.
In the early spring of 1985 1 decided to try oil painting. I sent away for an artists outfit and bought some materials at an art shop. I had never tried anything like this before so I made a painting studio in the basement and started out with pictures from an instruction booklet. Even the early ones I painted were okay so I decided to continue as long as I could see improvement. I have done more than 150 paintings over the past two years and am still improving. I have sold some pictures and given away the rest. I also build and finish the frames for them. It makes a good hobby for the cold winter months.
This coming July 23, 1987 will be my seventieth birthday and I have enjoyed five years of retirement, keeping active with gardening, reading, lawn care, oil painting, helping my brothers and writing this autobiography.