Remembering a Veteran, 2005, by Donna Besch
From MemoryArchive
Who: Autry Steadham What: Veteran When: WWII Where: Japan, from Alabama
Veterans Day has come and gone. I remember a veteran, in fact, I remember him every day. In 1971, as the 747 I was aboard approached Tokyo International, he was very much on my mind. I was about to visit Japan for the first time....he had arrived back in l945. I couldn't help but wonder what he must have been thinking and what his first impressions might have been. He was from Alabama and you might say he was just a boy off the farm, but he wasn't because his family was so poor they didn't own a farm. He was one of eight children, leaving school after the eighth grade to help support the family. There wasn't anything he couldn't do or wouldn't do to make a wage: clear land, chop cotton, paint, build roads, repair cars and trucks, work on the shipping sheds, and build houses. He was well-built, with auburn hair and blue eyes, and always very particular about his pants having a razor sharpe crease in them. He married a pretty lady from Iowa in 1939. They had ridden along to Pensacola, Florida with his mother and sister on a shopping trip. They walked down the street to the Court House in the rain and were married in the Judge's Chambers by a lady judge. When they returned to Foley,AL, he borrowed his cousin's car to go on an overnight honeymoon with his bride. They really didn't have two nickels to rub together, but loved each other very much. Their first apartment was above a grocery store and down the hall from a beauty solon where his bride worked. He worked on the shipping sheds across the railroad tracks behind the store. But, he had big dreams of driving across the country on a motorcycle. One day while he was standing on the corner talking to a couple of friends, a motorcycle came through the intersection and a car hit it....both of the rider's legs were broken. After carrying the screaming rider upstairs to Holmes Hospital, that was the end of the dream for a motorcycle, but the dreams of travel never died.
In 1944, he was drafted and began his travels to the Far East leaving behind a young wife, a three year old daughter and a baby girl, but not before building them a small, two-room house on the edge of a pecan orchard. He went through training in Little Rock, Arkansas and was shipped to the West Coast. He called his wife to told her he was going up north to visit with her brother. Her brother was not "up north" and she understood the message that he was shipping out. He was a mortorman with the 41st, seeing action on Okinawa and in the Philippines. A story was shared years later about his being with troops who took shelter in caves during a terrible storm, only to realize when the water began to rise that the cave was used for burials and when the bodies/skeletons came floating by, the troops vacated the cave in great haste. In September, he arrived in Japan aboard ship and participated in the cleanup operation of the devastation left behind by the atomic bomb.
This veteran returned to his family, sold the little house to a black congregation and helped them move it to property they owned nearby. He and his wife built a new home outside of town. Yes, they did some travelling and they added a son to the family, but he never saw that son grow up to become a wonderful man. Nor, did he see his daughters marry, travel to faraway lands and raise their children. He died in 1958 at the age of 39 of a brain tumor.
Unsigned and Unsung
