I wondered why my dad has been on my mind lately, and then it hit me. I guess subconsciously, I realized that it was close to his birthday. Today, he would have been 99 years old. Now I know he probably would never have lived to be that old. He came from very poor beginnings and I’m sure they didn’t have much in the way of medical care in his tiny little farming town in northeast Arkansas,  Black Oak. As it was, he died in 1970 from colon cancer.

His own dad (my grandpa John Henry) died when my dad was only twelve years old and his dad was only 37. He died from septicemia caused by a boil.  I was always told the boil was on his rear end, but according to his death certificate it was a little closer to his….(you know). He had to have had it for quite a while for the infection to have gotten into his bloodstream and ultimately kill him. I can’t imagine how incredibly painful it must have been too. He may not have even had any medical care until it was too late. I do know that according to a newspaper article, he died in the hospital shortly after he was admitted.

I don’t know what my grandfather, John Henry Shoults, did for a living. His only occupation listed in the 1930 census, the last one before he died, was “laborer”. I’m pretty certain that didn’t mean what a “laborer’ means today. It probably meant more that he did whatever he could to earn some money.

My dad didn’t talk about his younger years and I don’t think my grandma talked much about it either. She’d tell some stories, but to be honest, it really didn’t interest me back then so I didn’t pay much attention. The only one I remember was about chicken and how when my grandpa John Henry came home late at night (probably from the bar) he would make my grandmother kill a chicken and then fry it up for him. She did make some great fried chicken, but funny, my dad never cared for it.

Since my dad was so young when his dad died, he may not have had a lot of memories, or maybe they were just memories he didn’t want to share. I think my grandfather was a drinker, so he probably wasn’t a really nice man. During my genealogy research I found a divorce record for a John and Maggie Shoults but I wasn’t able to find anything more than just a court record index. When I tried to get more information from the court, I was told there wasn’t anything else available. I was never able to prove these two were my grandparents, but I never found any other John and Maggie Shoults (or Schults or Shoultz or Schultz or any other spellings I found in the historical records.)

My dad, who only had a seventh-grade education, was drafted into the Army in 1945 when he was 19 and was “separated” in 1946. He only served sixteen months and although his discharge papers say he was a “Projectionist Motion Picture” at his funeral, we were told by members of his VFW post, that he had been a guard in a prisoner of war camp in France. Unfortunately,  on July 12, 1973, a fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, destroyed between 16-18 million military personnel files. This included about 80% of Army personnel records for those discharged between November 1, 1912, and January 1, 1960, of which my dad was one.

My dad has a namesake, the son of my older brother (shown in the first photo above). My brother passed away when he was only 40 also from colon cancer and my nephew was only eight. My nephew is a grown man now nearing his 40s and unfortunately since he was so young when his dad died and his mom remarried a couple years later, he doesn’t know much about his dad, my brother. It’s only been recently that I’ve started to tell him stories about his dad. Sadly, he has even fewer memories of his dad than I do of mine.