Go west on Veterans Boulevard, branch off on Thompson Road and follow it as it becomes Rollinson Road deep into the Homochitto Forest, and you’ll come to the place where Lamar Stokes grew up almost a century ago.
Stokes, 95, who lives on Kodiak Lane just off Veterans outside McComb, likes to joke that he lives on the same road he did as a kid.
The same road, perhaps, but a different time.
Stokes grew up among towering pine trees in an era when livestock ranged free through the open woods. Instead of fences, farmers notched the ears of cows and hogs, rounding them up at butchering time.
Other food came from the garden and the forest.
“All you want came out of the woods,” said Stokes, citing squirrels, rabbits, quail, raccoon and possum. “We ate a lot of possum.”
Living right near the Amite-Franklin county line, Stokes went to Oxford School toward Gloster and graduated from Meadville High School.
Short semester
In the fall of 1943 Stokes’ father dropped him and his trunk off at Copiah-Lincoln Junior College, planning to return for him at Thanksgiving.
A school official then informed Stokes that classes had been underway for a week. Plus, tuition was $25, room and board $18, and Stokes didn’t have that kind of money.
“I said, ‘I can do anything on the farm. Give me a job and I’ll go to work,’” Stokes said.
The school gave him a job on a dairy farm — with which he had no experience — at $15 a month and let him enroll.
All seemed fine until the military draft came up, prompting Stokes to join the Navy on Nov. 1.
“I wanted to stay out of the Army,” he said, citing stories of Army men sleeping in fox holes and not getting enough to eat.
Destroyer escort
Stokes went to boot camp in Green Bay, Wis., and this lad who had never been farther north than Wesson found himself doing pushups in waist-deep snow.
At the University of Chicago he trained to be a signalman. From there he was posted to the U.S.S. Rinehart destroyer escort out of Norfolk, Va. The football-field-sized ship held 325 crew and accompanied convoys across the Atlantic.
Stokes, who had never been on any vessel other than “a wooden boat on Lake Mary,” soon got seasick. Later he came down with a fever.
“Everything in the Navy then, they called it ‘cat fever,’” he said.
Another sailor slipped him a half pint of brandy.
“I’d never heard of brandy,” said Stokes, who drank it anyway. “When I woke up a day and a half later, I was all right.”
Dodging torpedoes
On the ship, “we just escorted convoys from America to Europe, England, France and Africa and escorted convoys coming back, watching out for airplanes and submarines,” Stokes said.
If they spotted the enemy, their orders were simple: “Get rid of it.”
The ship was loaded with depth charges and equipped with .50-caliber guns. The vessel followed a zig-zag pattern at 7 to 8 knots to avoid getting hit with a torpedo.
The crew used sonar to detect subs and spotted airplanes visually.
“We stayed up on the conning tower just to watch and observe and see what was going on,” Stokes said.
“We were trained to see all planes within a hundredth of a second. They flashed it on a screen at the University of Chicago. We could tell what kind of plane it was and who it belonged to.”
They rarely saw the enemy, but one time they spotted a torpedo headed right at them.
“I looked up and saw a torpedo,” Stokes said. “Just as we turned, it went down the side, just did miss us. It could have easily sunk us.”
Another time, “I saw a submarine get sunk where they dropped a depth charge,” he said. “I saw some guys come up. They picked them up.”
Sailors on leave
In Tunisia, North Africa, the country boy from the piney woods saw stunning architecture and astonishing poverty.
He recalled a cathedral in the capital city of Tunis with a bell tower so high, a sailor could drop his hat from the top, walk back down and catch it when it descended.
As for local residents there, “I remember them living under bushes in little old houses,” Stokes said.
Sailors could sell a pillow case for $25, and a local would cut the corners off and wear it as clothing.
One time in Brooklyn, a sailor from Georgia changed his and Stokes’ 72-hour passes to seven days.
“He said, ‘Don’t tell anybody,’ ” Stokes recalled.
Stokes hustled home to Mississippi for a quick visit, but the return proved problematic when he got to Dixie Springs and realized he didn’t have his papers or money. He hired a taxi in Brookhaven to take him home, collected his stuff and dashed back to catch a train.
As soon as he got back to the ship in Brooklyn, he was shocked to receive a 30-day “recuperation leave.” By now he didn’t have a dime left. He sent telegrams to his father and a friend and finally got the funds to come home again.
A wild celebration
From there Stokes was ordered to New Orleans to join a ferry crew to China to pick up three destroyers the U.S. government had loaned. He passed through Miami in time for V-J Day — Victory over Japan — on Sept. 2, 1945.
He’ll never forget the celebration on Biscayne Boulevard.
“That town went wild,” Stokes said. “It was unbelievable. Women with no clothes on, men with no clothing on, riding fire trucks down the street.”
He traveled through the Panama Canal and around to San Francisco. His next stop would have been China, but since Stokes was due to muster out of the service soon, he didn’t want to go.
A sympathetic captain told him to throw his China orders overboard.
“I wouldn’t do it,” Stokes said. “He did it. He said, ‘Don’t say nothing to nobody.’”
Stokes avoided the China trip and got his discharge in San Francisco on May 10, 1946, at age 20.
‘She caught me’
When he got home, the first thing he did was go fishing. Then he returned to Co-Lin, where a life-changing event occurred. Stokes tripped on a curb and “she caught me. I met Pauline there, and that started that.”
The couple got married and were together more than 70 years when Pauline Stokes died last year at age 92.
Meanwhile, Stokes got a degree in agricultural engineering at Mississippi State University and went to work for the Extension Service in Simpson County, following the footsteps of his “idol,” the late Amite County 4-H club leader Monroe McElveen.
He returned to Pike County to take care of his aging parents and ran a tractor dealership, a feed store, worked offshore for Humble Oil before retiring as member services director for Magnolia Electric Power Association.
Along the way he bought 100 acres on Kodiak Lane where he lives now — or did, until his house burned recently. Now he is staying across the street with his daughter and son-in-law, Phillis and Jeff Waller.
Waller is a retired Air Force colonel.
“The World War II guys, they were a breed unto themselves,” Waller said. “They were thrown into a situation where you either made it or you didn’t. They worked long and hard because that’s the way they knew to work. They had a different life ethic. ...
“The WWII guys, based upon the equipment they had, did a fantastic job. The word ‘hero’ is overused. But what they had to put up with and what they did in that way — it produced a lot of heroes that didn’t get recognized.”
Hope for the future
Stokes, who turns 96 on Nov. 14, is a gentle man known for his good deeds — repairing mechanical wheelchairs and bicycles are among the many tasks he has performed quietly to help others.
He takes a dim view of war.
He recalls one of his fellow sailors from Rhode Island going ashore in Tunisia after V-E Day (Victory over Europe, May 8, 1945). He spotted some German POWs behind a fence and recognized one as his first cousin.
“I said, ‘What in the world are we fighting, shooting for?’ ” Stokes said. “They were cousins. I wonder why.”
During the war, “Papa and Grandpa thought the world was coming to an end,” Stokes said. “People still do. That’s my only consolation.”
He finds hope in the actions of people like Tangipahoa Baptist Church members — including his daughter Phillis — who feed shut-ins twice a week. He just wishes more people would do things like that.
“We were brought up to help folks, do things for people,” Stokes said.
As for the future, “I just hope it’s as good for the people coming as it was for us.”
