Difference between revisions of "John T. Wilson Biography"

Latest revision as of 16:21, 21 December 2008

John T. Wilson, born in 1917, was the third of seven children of Bert Winiford Wilson and Clara Mabel Wimer. He was born while his parents still lived with his Wilson grandparents, James Luther Wilson and Elizabeth Annabel Stoughton, near West Liberty in rural Worth Twp., Butler Co. PA. Eventually his parents moved to property across the road from his grandparents. Both his father and grandfather worked at forestry and had a sawmill. Being around this activity resulted in John's having a life-long love of woodworking and carpentry. They also worked at oil drilling. Later his grandparents moved to Slippery Rock, and for a time. His grandfather was a partner in a car dealership until the Great Depression ruined the business. John Wilson's maternal grandparents, Isaac C. Wimer and Margaret Jane Robinson, lived on a farm down the hill from the Bert Wilson place in Worth Twp. John and his brothers and sisters would follow the creek down to the Wimer farm where his Grandpa Wimer raised field crops and had a barn full of cows. The Wilson children attended the McClymonds school.
In West Liberty and Slippery Rock, several aunts and uncles and cousins lived. The men enjoyed hunting, and one year they brought home a young bear cub. Grandpa Wilson chained it to the barn and they raised it. When John was a small boy, he wandered too near the bear and it grabbed him and wouldn't let go. John's sister Ruth managed to pull him out of his coat and get him free from the bear. Soon after, the bear was sold to Ringling Brothers Circus.
In about 1930, when John was 12 or 13 years old, the family moved north to a farm at Nickleville, Richland Twp., Venango Co. PA. His father wanted to be nearer the oil fields. John went to high school at the new Crawford High School in Emlenton, sometimes driving or carpooling with other kids from the area. He met his future wife, Ella May Beals, at the high school, and they started spending time together at school events in 11th grade. There was no money for dating or going anywhere. John actually decided not to return to high school after 11th grade and dropped out for a year. His sister Ruth convinced him to return by offering him a pocket watch if he would graduate. Thus Ella graduated a year ahead of him, she in 1935, he in 1936.
John worked with his father for a couple years, dressing bits for oil drilling. Ella did housekeeping for a variety of families in the area, as well as in Washington D.C. In 1937, he gave Ella a diamond ring, and a cedar chest he made, with the carved letters of her name fitted into a diamond shape on the front.
On 15 Aug 1937, they took their first train ride, to the Cleveland Exposition. Other weekends they went on picnics and rides; John bought his first car in July that year.
When REA (Rural Electrification Administration) came through Nickleville, PA in 1938, a lineman allowed him to try on the cleated boots and climb a pole. John hired on with the crew,and that began his lifelong work with the agencies building power lines in rural areas. He began with REA in PA and OH in 1938. It would be ten years later, after WWII, that he found steady work with TVA in 1948. Meanwhile he did short jobs if various places for REA and for small private power companies, and whatever other work he could locate. REA had work in Vermont and North Carolina; at one point to avoid going to Vermont in winter John accepted a posting to North Carolina. He and Ella decided to be married before he left to go south. Ella did her shopping in Washington where she was working, and the wedding took place in Venango County, at the parsonage, of 2 February 1940. John's brother Russell was his best man. They took a honeymoon to Niagra Falls, and then both had to return to work, Ella to Washington. On 14 February John stopped by Washington on his way to Laurens, North Carolina. In late spring the job ended, he returned to Venango Co. PA for a bit of work in Polk. Being shuffled back and forth across the country doing jobs for REA set a pattern of his life of being comfortable with mobility, and later in life they would travel throughout the mid-west and the west coast visiting children and sightseeing.
When John was sent south again by REA, Ella's job in Washington had ended and she joined him, for a period of living in boarding houses in one small town and another. They put up with the occasional bedbugs and irksome neighbors. Occasionally she found work waitressing or babysitting, but largely it was a lonely time for her in a strange culture, where they were the "yankees". Then in Monks Corner, SC, the lease became available on a cafe and gas station, the Green Gables, and as his job was ending, they took the lease. It was always a close call whether they would earn enough to be able to refill the gas tanks before they went dry. They could only restock as much beer as they had bottles to return; if customers didn't return the bottle, local children would find and bring the discarded bottles in and sell them to the cafe. Besides the shortage of cash, time was an issue. The cafe was open 24 hrs a day. John and Ella slept in shifts, but if a customer required a hot meal, Ella had to get up and fix it. After ten weeks, they gave up the lease, but found that after the sale of whatever stock and equipment they had, they came out with a thousand dollars. They returned to Venango County with their profit, and soon used a small part of the earnings to buy their first trailer. (It was probably 8 ft wide by maybe 12 ft long. Over the years with TVA they upgraded periodically to longer models, and wider. Their last trailer bought in the late 1950's was ten ft wide and forty ft long. This was a period when trailers were truly mobile, before the day of the stationary double-wide "mobile home".)
They returned south to jobs in Tennessee and Kentucky, whether with REA or private companies is unclear. In 1943 their first daughter was born in Tennessee. She was taken home to see the grandparents on Mothers' Day.
John worked for Holston Defense in Kingsport TN, trying to avoid the army draft by working in critical industry, but in August of 1943 he was drafted. They took the trailer home and parked it at the Wilson farm, as Mrs. Wilson was ill and Ella was needed to keep house. John went into training, then to officer training at Furman University in South Carolina. As the war progressed, apparently a decision was made that officers were not what was needed. His class had been pronounced the best that ever went through the accelerated training, but then the entire class was "washed out" without their commissions. John went to Texas for training as a tail-gunner on a B-17 bomber. Ella visited him occasionally in the different training locations, but gas rationing and crowded trains made travel difficult, especially with an infant. On 23 March 1944 Mrs. Wilson died. John came home for the funeral; his brother Ray had already been deployed to Europe and couldn't come home. They moved the trailer to the Beals farm. Ella and the baby moved into the "apartment" side of the farmhouse. (The apartment was added for Ella's grandmother Elizabeth Anna Frederick when her husband died and her daughter & son-in-law, Ella's parents, bought the house and farm.
By January 1945 John was shipped out from Camp Patrick Henry in Virginia, and by mid-February was in Foggia, Italy with his crew. On their first bombing assignment they missed their target on the first pass, so came around again. By then the anti-aircraft fire was ready for them and they were hit so that a fire broke out in the bomb bay. They tried to put it out, and failing that, tried to get the bombs to release over rural areas. The bombs were jammed and wouldn't release. In the excitement of the emergency, the navigator lost track of where they were, or in trying to reach Russia perhaps they overflew the extent of their maps. They were lost, and the bomb bay fire worsened until the decision was made by the pilot to parachute the crew and ditch the plane. Parachuting was not something they had rehearsed. John tried to slide out feet-first instead of the recommended head first dive, and wrenched his back in the process. He also apparently pulled his parachute cord too soon, and found himself floating slowly downward in freezing cold atmosphere, with snow. He'd lost one glove, and kept shifting the other one from hand to hand. When he reached the ground, it was a clear sunny day. They had landed in Hungary and were one-by-one rounded up by farmers with pitchforks. Someone in the group could translate as it was discussed whether to kill them or not. They ended up in German prison camp, and for the duration of the war, they were marched from one location to another trying to evade the advancing allied armies. Ella was notified by telegram that her husband was missing in action. The pilot, Harvey Mitchell, had been injured and sent to a hospital, so he could communicate with his parents. Mrs. Mitchell then wrote the other POW families that the crew were all alive and well when Harvey last saw them. John lost thirty pounds, and later recalled how good a bowl of barley soup could taste, when they could get it. His primary memory was of hunger, and of walking and walking. He was liberated at Mooseburg, 20 April 1945. At his first good sufficient meal, his stomach couldn't handle it and he vomited. Together, prisoners and liberators made their way back across Germany to France, on their own for food and lodging. One of John's crewmates pulled a handmade red & black cross stitched white tablecloth from a German farm clothesline for carrying eggs taken from the barn. John brought the cloth home with him, with a yolk-stained corner, to give to Ella. In France there weren't enough transport ships for all to return at once, so the offer of some spending money was made to those who would wait. John figured it was his only chance for sight-seeing, and stayed. He bought a small hand-painted Quimper dish to bring home. (Also among his souvenirs of the war were various European coins, a map of part of Germany, his prison camp armband with swastika, and a wooden shoe on which he wrote the dates and places of his war experience, and names and addresses of his crew members. He arrived back in Pennsylvania that spring. They continued to live in the farmhouse apartment. There was no work. Ella's brother, Loy Beals, who had a garage in Emlenton, let John work with him. In August John and Ella's second daughter was born.
Finally in 1948 John secured a position as lineman with TVA. The agency was organized into crews that built the dams on the Tennessee River, maintenance crews that maintained the dams, and construction crews that built the steel towers and power lines to carry electricity to the rural southern communities. John hired on as a construction lineman in the Western Division, headquartered in Jackson Tennessee, but building lines throughout western Tennessee, Kentucky, and northern Alabama and Mississippi. He began as a lineman, but fell 30 ft. from wone of the towers onto a concrete base and injured his back. After hospitalization, rather than being placed on permanent disability, he was promoted to foreman, so that he didn't have to climb. His crews built steel towers and strung high voltage lines, changing location often as jobs were finished. One of these lines crossed the lower Mississippi River, and he pointed out in later years that a tall tower built on a large concrete base on the eastern bank of the river was by then in mid-river, the river's course having shifted.
See REA:http://newdeal.feri.org/tva/tva10.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Utilities_Service
See TVA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_Valley_Authority
In 1948 John and Ella moved from place to place every few weeks. The family's yearly summer visits back to Pennsylvania were made during the years of the building of the national interstate highway system. The first trip made in less than 24 hours was celebrated.
In the fall of 1949 the older daughter started first grade in a two-room schoolhouse in Jackson, TN. After that, during the school year, they moved less often. John would commute home longer distances from work sites. Still, a typical school year included at least 4 and as many as 6 schools. In 1956 the job was in Scottsboro, Alabama. The oldest child was entering 8th grade, and the decision was made to stay there permanently, so that both children could complete the requirements of high school graduation. Over the years John and Ella had saved enough to send both children to college.
After retirement from TVA, they purchased a piece of hillside property and with the help of a good neighbor who owned a home construction company, they built a house. John returned to Pennsylvania and cut the cherry trees from the woods on the Beals farm, and had it cut into paneling and flooring. He bought and disassembled a two-story log house in Tennessee and transported it to the building site for reassembly. On both floors, a door opened at middle of house into what had been an open breezeway, but became an entryway and hall downstairs, and stair landing and hall upstairs. The doors opened onto porch and balcony that ran the length of the house. A stone fireplace anchored the living room. Cherry-wood floors and paneling warmed the dining room, which looked out over the valley. John added a laundry room beyond the kitchen, and a large garage. Upstairs three bedrooms provided for family visits and grandchildren. A "mountain" rose behind the house, and at the base of this ran a creek. In the creek's bottom land John planted a large garden, which he plowed with a tractor. Enough produce was frozen each summer to deliver freezer chests of vegetables to both the children's families. John removed the rear seat from an old Volkswagon, and would load it up with styrofoam chests full of frozen food, and drive to Wisconsin or North Carolina or wherever the children were living. His other hobby was refinishing old furniture, some of which he purchased over the years from locations where he worked. Other pieces were old family items from Pennsylvania. When his first grandchild was born, he delivered a handmade cherry cradle to California. The next year he refinished a chest of drawers with mirror for her, strapped it onto the roof of his VW, and drove it to Arizona. In the back seat area, he carried a handmade bookcase, ends the shape of a teddybear, made to fit a set of children's books.
In about 1982/83 John's health began deteriorating . He suffered from emphysema, caused by years of smoking Lucky Strike cigarettes, a habit begun when cigarettes were handed out to the soldiers in the army. His illness deteriorated with various complications, and he died at the VA Hospital in Birmingham, Alabama in May of 1985. His body was returned to Pennsylvania for burial.
He had two daughters, and four grandchildren, two of whom were adopted.

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