talking roots

I’ve always wondered. Did Great, Great Grandfather Thomas Hunt look up in the sky from Blount County, Tennessee in 1835 and see that momentous passage, so ballyhooed in that year, of Halley’s Comet? What were his memories of the second war with Britain, the War of 1812, and where was he and what did he think in 1826 when he heard that both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams had died on July 4th of that year?

Of course, I’ll never know, but I determined that at least for one generation my descendants will have such information — just in case some unknown grandchild or great-plus grandchild is interested someday.

I (Deason Hunt) was born in 1943 during the Second World War of the 2oth Century. It was over about the time I turned two years old, so I obviously don’t remember it as a contemporary. I spent lots of time hearing about it as I grew up, and along with playing cowboys and Indians, my friends and I played lots of WWII make-believe. I carried wooden M-1 rifles with fake bayonets, BAR’s, and we sat in foxholes, also make-believe, fired at the Nazis and Japs with our 50-caliber machine guns and tossed an occasional hand grenade. There were army surplus stores where we could walk around and look at all kinds of army gear, and war movies were as popular with young boys as shoot-em-up western movies. There were lots of on-screen war heroes who we tried to imitate, but the greatest of these was John Wayne. Most of our dads served during the war, but, at least in our family, that service was never mentioned. I found most of the details of my Dad’s (Deason Hunt, Sr.) service after his death by papers I inherited and some additional research.

I also was not aware of the dropping of the two atomic bombs on Japan to end the war in the Pacific. I was, however, aware later that it had happened because we lived under the threat that the Soviet Communists would attack us with their atomic weapons. These were felt as real threats to end civilization, and we had duck and cover drills in school (get under the desks and cover your head/neck with your clasped hands). These were also handy for the weather scourge of the areas where I grew up in Texas — tornadoes. People bought and buried and otherwise built underground fallout shelters in their yards, (We were too poor to afford one.) and radio/television had signal tests in case of enemy attack — the test of the emergency alert system. After the fall of the Communist state in the Soviet Union in 1989, we learned they were as worried that we would do the same to them so that we had a world-saving standoff. It turned out that the play-like enemies of our youth, the Japanese and the Germans, became our allies during the cold war, and we actually spent all those years hating/fearing our WWII ally, the Soviet Union. To be continued…. Next, The 1950′s