Autobiographical Sketch for CHAMBLESS, Robert D.

From Gauss and his Children

1 A Short History of my Life
2 Source
3 Notes

A Short History of my Life

In the beginning, which for me was April 18, 1922, there was the continuing large flurry of WWI veterans trying to carve out a new life, of homes, wives, families, and jobs. They pretty much depended on politicians, or other leaders, or other just plain folks to make all the decisions about issues larger than the new and immediate challenges which I just mentioned as their concern.

Then about the time I was four, in 1926, the "Florida land boom" burst. My father was a carpenter, who only very recently had built a little bungalow in St. Petersburg, Fl, on which the bank promptly foreclosed on the mortgage. They had no better use for the house than to allow my folks to rent it for a while.

In the summer of 1928 we moved to Cincinnati, where I did third grade.

When the general depression of 1929 began, we went to Noble, Il, which had been mother's birthplace. There I did fourth grade. Economic times were still pretty desperate, and Dad decided that, if we were going to be hungry, we might as well go back the Florida, where we at least would not be so cold.

And so here we were, back in the South, again: Guy and Sarah Elizabeth Sanderson Chambless, parents of Robert Devore and his younger brother, Joe Franklin. I did fifth and sixth grades in West Central grammar school and seventh through ninth grades in South Side Junior High. We were vastly helped in those otherwise tough years by the fact that the Veterans Administration built a large hospital at Bay Pines in north St. Petersburg, and Dad got to use his carpentry there for a good amount of time.

In the summer of 1935 we moved from St. Petersburg to Miami. Three years later I graduated from Miami Senior High School on June 3, 1938. (A few dates stick in my head, uselessly; this is one of them.) That Fall I spent a worthless semester at the University of Florida, playing table tennis and shooting pool in the student union building--pretty heady stuff for a sixteen-year-old who should have known better, but did not. At any rate, my disgusted and disappointed parents said "come home." I went to the General Continuation Department of Dade County, where I studied bookkeeping, typing, shorthand, and business machines for about fourteen months. I worked in a number of wholesale meat houses from May. 1940. Until called into service in March, 1943--Hygrade, Cudahy, John Morrell, and Wilson Company.

I was working at Hygrade Food Prod Corp plant in Miami--really a branch house, as they were called--when Pearl Harbor happened, 12-7-41. I soon enlisted in the Army Air Force and waited to be “called up.” This didn’t occur until March, l943--a very long time to be in limbo. Wilson & Company’s office manager said he could not give me a raise because “they can call you any day now.”

Then in March I went to San Antonio Aviation Cadet Center--then on to Ellington Field, Houston, for Pre-Flight, then to Harlingen, TX. for Aerial Gunnery School, then about Sept l5 to Hondo, TX, for Navigation School. We were in class 43-18-2, which meant we were the 18th class of navigators to graduate from Hondo--as were called “Hondo’s Christmas gift to the world”--two days before Christmas. We were given orders, to be put in the breast pocket of my brand-new second lieutenant’s blouse. My orders told me to report in early January to Roswell NM, Air Base, to learn to be a Bombardier, on the Nordin bombsight. Four of us rented a car--more like a jalopy--and drove to Atlanta, where we turned it in and proceeded our way to our various homes in the Southeast. I got home to Miami for a very short Xmas--then got a train to Roswell. I will not soon forget getting off the train in Amarillo to stretch our legs. There was a lot of snow on the ground, it was raining, and the wind was blowing hard from the north. As a consequence, every raindrop was full of Texas Panhandle dust, and it looked very pretty on my new officer’s blouse. Such was war-time travel.

Bombardier School was pretty much uneventful, except to night-time bombing. While one student was on the bomb-sight, dropping bombs through the Nordin, the other student was back in the back leaning down over the opening in the fuselage, through which he was to take pictures of the success or failure of that particular bombing run. Now this was February in NM, below freezing at ground level, and two degrees colder for each l,000 feet we climbed, to a bombing altitude of 12,000 feet. When the cold air came into the fuselage, it was a bit difficult to psyche oneself up enough to take meaningful pictures of your buddy’s success or failure up front and the bombsight.

We graduated about April 15, and a good group of us were sent to Columbia,SC, to be assigned to a flight crew in B-25s, which consisted of six: pilot, copilot, navigator-bombardier. engineer, radioman, and armorer. As soon as we were assigned we went to Greenville AFB for crew training. And here ends this chapter.

III

(I earlier wrote an account to follow my assignment to crew training in early `944 to Greenville, SC, but somehow it must have been erased. I shall, then, repeat myself.)

After crew training at Greenville, including bombing runs at Myrtle Beach, SC, and navigation training flights all around eastern and southern states, we flew to Aacrament Air Base, CA, where mechanics took the “combat carburetors” out of our B-25s and but in “long-range carburetors.” This was so that, with extra gas tanks in the bomb bay, we could make that twelve-hour flight to Honolulu, on our way to help in the prosecution of WWII in the SW Pacific.

For some unknown reason, it took almost a whole month for those people to get those new carburetors put in, there in Sacramento. So we had to suffer. The pilot, Richard Purnelll, and the copilot, Louis Nelson, and I had to make several overnight trips to San Francisco, suffering the eating of fresh sea-food, testing the companionship of SF’s female population, etc., etc. Though it was pretty rough duty, we bore up under it fairly well.

When we finally made the 12-hour flight to Honolulu, somehow the mechanics there did not quite take so long to restore the combat carbs, to get us ready for “combat". We leapfrogged from Christmas Island to Canton Island to Guadalcanal, and finally to Lae, on the eastern side of New Guinea. A few more days of “training,” and we were sent to the Fifth Air Force, 24th Bomb Squadron, on Nadzab, on the far northwestern tip of New Guinea.

We flew night bombing missions, mainly, harassing bases of isolated Japanese all over that part of islands and outposts west and south of where we were. Our objectives seemed to be to keep all those troops pinned down and basically out of the general ongoing fighting, both on land and in the air. In about April, 1945 (not having a journal I have to lean heavily on memory) two crews in our squadron were assigned temporary duty to Leyte in the Philippines to drop “Free Philippine” news-letters and surrender leaflets--directed toward the Japanese occupiers, on a good number of islands all around the Philippines. The many islands in our daily itineraries served two purposes. They were dropped on many islands, so the Japanese could not know which island we would next land on, and so that the natives could have real news about what was going on.

After about three weeks, our crew and two other ones rejoined our squadron, which by now had moved to the Philippine island of Palawan, the long finger of an island which stretched down toward the French Indo-China coast and toward Borneo. We then flew missions from there--harassing and strafing in French Indo-China and supporting the invasion of Borneo.

I had a brief illness in late June, and someone know something, because I was moved from a hospital room in Leyte to a hospital ship, and arrived in San Francisco in early July, then by train hospital coach to North Carolina, then given 39 days’ convalescent leave just after the first A-Bomb was dropped. When the 30 days was up, I went back to NC, and was promptly processed to discharge as of late September. So home, well ahead of a lot for soldiers, and civilian life began again.

When I got back to Miami in September, 1945, Tommy Thompson, who had been my boss at Hygrade Food products before the was, back in 1940-41, was now in the grocery and catering business. He wanted me to work in the grocery so he could spend more time on catering. After three months of 10-13 hour days, six days a week, I decided, though I dearly loved Tommy and his wife, that it was not for me. So in January,, 1946, I enrolled at the Univ of Miami under the GI Bill, where I majored in Accounting and minored in Economics, graduating (in two and a half years) in June, 1948.

Testimonial: the GI Bill is one of the most important and successful Federal programs in all of history. Thousands of returning veterans would never have been able to go to college without it, and in the ensuing 69 years (has it been that long?) they have made a terrific impact on our nation, economically and socially.

After working nearly a year for Ryder System, headquartered then on 21st Terrace in Miami, I left to go to Texas Christian University, to study further in the seminary toward the ministry--at Brite College of the Bible, now Brite Divinity School. Finishing in 1951, I pastored several churches, the first of which was St. Nicholas Park Christian Church, on Beach Blvd in Jacksonville, FL.

When I went there they had a wooden building, built when this area was known as St. Nicholas Park, where the train on the way to Jacksonville Beach from downtown Jax, made its first stop. When an automobile bridge was put across the St. John’s River and South Jacksonville became really accessible to Jax, the city of Jacksonville made the country church tear down its out-house. So when I got there, there was a church building with no “facilities.”” Thankfully, Mr. J.P. Anell, a fine Catholic layman and a pharmacist, had put in a drug-store right next door--with “facilities.” We used them--and abused his hospitality, until in 1953 we built our first permanent unit--a sanctuary with a boiler-room and two facilities--female and male. Progress!!! I could write a book about St Nick, but much of it should be left unsaid. Nearly everyone was wonderful, and two of our children were born there, and we were very often blessed in those three and a half years. But in September, 1954, we moved to First Christian, Russellville, Ar. More to come.

Written 2006, Raymore, MO

Source

I found these sketches on my father's computer after he died. His sight had gotten pretty bad by the time he wrote this, and he had done no copy-editing. I have done it for him, just changing spelling and a little punctuation.