Page 96 - Senior Link Magazine Fall 2021- Online Magazine

Elwood Freeman
reetings,” he remembers
the letter saying, “you
Ghave been selected …”
What a way to tell a guy that
his life must change completely.
They told Elwood that he needed
to go to the other side of the
world, to Korea – a country
he knew little about. It was a
country that had long suffered
under Tokyo; then it was riven in
two by Moscow and Washington;
and now, it was plunging
headlong into civil war. Elwood
had to go because the folks in
the South wanted a democracy
like our own. He understood
the Communist insurgents to
be America’s enemies, and he
was an American through and
through.
96 Lubbock Senior Link
Ol' Texas Boy
by Marc Schneider
Elwood Freeman State University today). When he
didn’t volunteer, and ran out of money two years in, he
probably wouldn’t wound up at the First National
have, but he had Bank of Rotan, where he was
always expected to go. when he received the summons
Every boy of fighting from President Truman.
age in Stonewall
County had gone to His mother was a bit
fight in the Second superstitious, so his leaving
World War; to go was home on Friday 13th was almost
a rite of passage. Boys her undoing. Elwood never
like his brother and his dared mention to her that, on
cousin had returned the bus to Fort Sill, Oklahoma,
as men, relating wild there were exactly 13 recruits, or
stories. His cousin that it was the 13th day of May
was a paratrooper in when he received his orders to go
the 101st Airborne overseas, or that he was assigned
Division who dropped to the 13th Signal Company
into France the day of the 1st Cavalry Division, or
before D-Day and later that February 13, 1953, was the
fought in the Battle of beginning of his return journey
the Bulge. Elwood’s home. He didn’t tell his mother
brother they called much of anything while away,
“Sonny” (though despite the flaming chastisements
his real name was she sent in the mail.
Harlan), and he was After the voyage across the
older than Elwood by Pacific, he ended up in Japan and
just a year. That one never set foot in Korea.
year difference meant that Sonny
went to Germany at the tail-end
of WWII, while Elwood stayed in
Texas.
In 1928, one year after Sonny
and four before their sister,
Maurine, Elwood was born in
the house on their family’s 200-
acre farm in Aspermont, Texas.
They grew mostly peanuts and
cotton but had milo and fruit
trees and pecan trees growing
there, too. When he graduated
eleventh grade at age sixteen, he
went to work at First National
Bank in Aspermont. After two
years of working the Burroughs
bookkeeping machine there,
he enrolled in John Tarleton
Agricultural College (Tarleton