I looked my mother’s younger brother’s records years ago. Uncle R P died when I was just a youngster leaving a wife and 5 small kids (my first cousins) in a very small Mississippi Delta town with a population of less than 300. Very poor growing up. Found out he enlisted before Pearl Harbor and unfortunately stationed in the Philippines. Unwillingly had to participate in the Battan Death March and was a Japanese POW survivor. He hated Doug Out Dougie and the Japanese. Nobody except my Dad knew the horrors he endured. He could not stand to be anywhere Asians. Luckily, we only have a few Chinese grocery stores
(Chinaman stores as they were known) restaurants and a few pharmacists. He died at age 42 mostly from his ill treatment as a POW. He was the first person I ever saw give himself insulin injections. I remember one time he had a low sugar and no hard candy in the glovebox of his farm truck. He pulled up to his garden, dug up a sweet potato and peeled and ate it raw. His children turned out well. The oldest girl had an aunt who was a nurse in Memphis who helped her to become a nurse. One boy joined the Navy to see the world and was stationed at Meridian Naval Air Station. But he served and retired from the Reserves. He was an anccountant with a national heavy equipment company.Another became a plumber and the other a farm manager like his father. The other girl married full time army guy and she was a computer tech. Gripes me that we spent trillions on “The Great Society” and the poor whites of the South never received any help or were denied services. Families helping kin to better themselves - the way of the poor in the South. Blacks weren’t the only ones to share crop.
