By Don
Up until this story, there was always humor. There was humor in Meridian, Mississippi. There was life. There was our daughter Jennifer. Navy families go where the Navy sends them. All places have good aspects and in some places, the good conflicts with the bad. Such a place was Meridian.
I thought the culture I experienced in South Carolina would have made me immune to anything in Mississippi. Like going to a Baptist church at Clemson and hearing a minister greeting students with racist jokes so as to encourage them to go to his church. It did not. After arriving in Mississippi, Doris and I went to the MS Highway Patrol office to get our drivers licenses. We spoke to a sergeant. Doris produced her Bermuda license and was asked if it was an English speaking country. Meridian had a serviceman’s club. No blacks allowed. One of my sailors was pistol whipped trying to get into it. I bailed him out of the segregated tank.
Meridian was a dry town but booze was all over the place. I bought booze at Sadka’s sandwich shop and soda counter as a one-year-old Jennifer looked on. Cops would sit in patrol cars outside a hotel having an "approved” event (meaning white) to assist drunks leaving the party. But illegal booze was legal if the tax had been paid on the bottle.
Never mind segregation, it would take hours to fail to explain it. Suffice it to say I was one of three officers to supervise busloads of flight students and sailors to form up with FBI agents and search for three civil rights workers (Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner) murdered by the KKK whose members were police officers. We especially looked where vultures were circling. The atmosphere was so uptight in the search area that the second day, I carried a weapon. At one point a farmer held me and my search group with a shotgun. Local gas stations in Philadelphia, MS refused to sell gas to our convoy.
We radioed back for a tanker truck from the base. We were Feds. Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner’s bodies were eventually found. It was the day we went to war with Vietnam. James Chaney was the nephew of our maid Lucy, who we hired to clean the house and babysit Jennifer. When Doris would give Lucy a ride home she insisted she had to ride in the back.
Initially every person we met was very nice. They were similar to today’s one issue voter. We were good people as long as we believed what they believed. Their main issue was that they were against blacks. Everything was segregated. That atmosphere even infected the Naval Air Station. My leading Chief once referred to MLK Jr. as Martin Luther Coon. After I talked to him, he never said it again. The Navy was supposed to get along with their neighbors downtown. Some of us did not like the politics of it all.
We found a furnished second floor walk up in Meridian and the renters were most kind, giving us a basket full of kitchen items and their best wishes. Doris was almost eight months pregnant and we only had our express shipment and a few suitcases full of clothes. I was at the base learning the ejection, hydraulic, electrical and avionic systems of the T-2 training jet.
Nights at the apartment were boring. When an encyclopedia salesman knocked at our door, I welcomed him and we enjoyed his presentation but did not buy. We found a realtor and bought our first house that came with FHA sod and two trees. I was now a full LT (two bars). My pay was a whopping $347 a month plus $100/mo flight pay. When our furniture arrived, we moved in, buying a washer and a lawn mower.
The birth of Jennifer came next and Don, Doris, Jennifer and Christian doggie started another chapter with me starting to teach young men how to fly a jet. I usually took a 20 minute ride in our VW to the base in time for a 5 AM briefing and a 6 AM launch, flying two to three flights a day and maybe one or two a month at night.
Doris enjoyed getting up early, feeding Jennifer and talking to our next door neighbor. On weekends, I built a fence around the large yard and made a brick patio under some trees at the back of the lot.