Tag Archives: Thomas Tichenor

“Look Navy, act Navy & talk Navy”

John W. “Billy” Beam

From his WKU credentials – Bachelor of Science (Biology), Chemistry-Physics Club, Band and Dramatic Clubs, Drum Major, and manager/second tenor in the Men’s Glee Club – it might have been easy to guess where Bardstown native John William Beam was headed next: perhaps to a high school to teach science and advise students in extracurricular musical and theater activities. 

But “Billy,” as he was known, followed two of his brothers into military service.  Where his older siblings had answered the call during World War I, however, 22-year-old Billy joined the U.S. Navy after graduating in 1935.  He entered the new aviation cadet training program at the Naval Air Station at Pensacola, Florida, the site of heightened activity in the face of increasing world tensions.  Billy’s letter to WKU friend Tom Tichenor, who was working on an article about him for the College Heights Herald, offers a glimpse into the peacetime military as it sought to enlarge, modernize, and prepare for any contingency during the ongoing debate over America’s role in international affairs. 

Pensacola Air Station covered “several thousand acres,” Billy wrote, and housed 200 officers, 1,200 enlisted men and 1,000 civilian workers.  One of about 425 cadets in seven classes, Billy described a “very high type bunch” representing more than 75 colleges across the country.  Everyone resided in a six-winged barracks, making sure to keep beds made and lockers arranged with military precision.  Billy was intent upon learning the prescribed vocabulary: walls were bulkheads, windows were ports, upstairs was topsides, floors were decks.  “The time is screwy but when you get to 12 o’clock keep on going till 2400.”  The cadets’ mandate was simple: “We have to look Navy, act Navy & talk Navy,” he wrote.

Billy outlined the day’s routine, from waking up at 0600 to taps at 2200.  Groups of men alternated between squadron and ground school, where Billy had earned distinction in seven completed courses.  Flight training was a five-step, 350-hour regimen designed to make them pilots in about a year’s time.  Beginning with seaplanes, they moved to land planes, then to observation ships (“Here we get all formation flying, radio communication, navigation etc.”) to “big flying patrol boats,” and finally to “fast single seated fighters” where they learned “dog fighting, gunnery, bombing & everything else.”  As aviation cadets, Billy and his mates were given the status of officers outside of working hours, enjoying free shows, Friday night dances, and a choice of recreation on their Saturdays off.  And finally, “we get our wings & go to the fleet for three years & take our place alongside regular naval officers.”

“Billy Beam Enjoys Navy,” headlined his friend Tom’s article in the February 21, 1936 Herald.  But like that of too many young aviators, Billy’s story ended tragically.  He died on November 17, 1938 in a plane crash, ironically, at Pearl Harbor, where his country’s next war would begin.

Billy Beam’s letter to classmate Tom Tichenor is part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Click here for a finding aid.  For more collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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History from Home

David Ellen Tichenor’s D-Day letter

Everyone knew something big was coming – just not when or where – but on D-Day, June 6, 1944, the mystery was solved.  As soon as she heard the news that morning in Calhoun, Kentucky, David Ellen Tichenor penned a letter to her son Thomas, then serving as a convoy communications officer with the U.S. Navy.  In short letters (her V-Mail stationery limited her to one page) she relayed something of the predicament of ordinary people: the “majority in the middle,” in the words of philosopher Eric Hoffer, over whose heads “the best and the worst” so often clash to make history.

On the morning of D-Day, “about 4 or a little later,” she wrote, “we were awakened by the Methodist bell ringing.  [S]oon all the other church bells began ringing.  I got up and turned on the radio as did every one else.  Soon a line of people were seen going to the churches to pray – the invasion had started!” – but she had stayed home, “being too full of emotion and sadness of knowing some of our boys were in it, but I did my part of praying.” 

With the outcome still uncertain, there were only ordinary things to talk about.  David Ellen reported that she and Thomas’s father had recently spent a day visiting family in Bowling Green (she was a niece of WKU’s first president Henry Hardin Cherry).  Upon their return to Calhoun, they found that a generous rain had revived their beloved garden.  “In fact it there had been quite a storm.”  Everything, however, was “fresh and pretty.”

Six days later, wrote David Ellen, everyone was still glued to their radios, but “the invasion seems to be going along O.K.”  Nevertheless, some of the Calhoun boys were “thought to be in it and their mothers are frantic.  What  a mess the world is in.”  Mr. Tichenor was gathering “big luschious” cherries from their tree, an old one that would probably expire after “making its ‘war effort.’”  Two days later: “The first ripe tomato to-day!”

Almost three weeks into the invasion, local mothers were still feeling the aftershocks.  One of them came by David Ellen’s home crying because her son hadn’t received any of her letters (“Of course she writes all the time”) and was worried that something was wrong at home.  For another, it was worse.  “Alma” was “almost crazy,” she wrote, having received word that her son had been missing in action over France since D-Day.  With so many boys being killed, the July 4th holiday was “the quietest day I have ever known around here.”

But still, ordinary life and hopes populated David Ellen’s thoughts: a lack of rain for the garden, a new veterans bill promising servicemen a college education, local marriages and babies, and especially her postwar plans for her son.  Although the world was “a mess,” she didn’t think for a moment that it would stay that way.  “I like your idea,” she told him, “of going to school a year when the war is over and getting your masters degree and a place in a college. Bowling Green would be a nice place.”

These are some of many World War II letters in the Tichenor Collection, held in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Click here for a finding aid.  For more collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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Long white ears, killer coffee, and cardboard cartons

For many travelers, the first step of a journey involves navigating a busy airport.  During World War II, passengers faced additional stress when civilian air travel took a back seat to military priorities.  This was doubly true for airline employees, who coped with challenges that went far beyond the ordinary joys of dealing with the public.

One such employee was 25-year-old Kate Hopkins, an American Airlines ticket agent in 1943 at Detroit’s City Airport.  Her letters to boyfriend Thomas Tichenor, a Kentuckian serving in the Navy, give us a unique perspective on wartime air travel through the eyes of a clever and observant young woman.

Kate often found herself on the overnight shift–an assignment that, while wearying, gave her an opportunity to use her people-watching skills.  After one such night, she wrote poignantly to Thomas about “the little sailor and his girl who sat locked in each others arms for a full forty minutes before his flight left, while his mother very quietly sat beside him, waiting to bid him good-by; about the little girl–she couldn’t have been much more than nineteen–who was going out alone to meet her husband, a Ferry pilot, in Spokane–and her family who came to see her off.”  When the flight was announced, “her Father said ‘Well Ruthie–’ with all the pride and eloquence and love that only a Father could put into those two words, because what else could he say?” 

Ferry pilots–members of the Air Transport Command, largely made up of civilians who flew aircraft from manufacturing plants to training facilities and ports for shipment overseas–were frequent airport patrons.  Some of them, Kate observed, “are nice–others tough–some, surprisingly young and all very interesting.”  One of them “came in last nite with an enormous plush Easter bunny–its long white ears protruding from a paper sack–He’d brought it back from Wilmington for his little girl.” 

Kate grew accustomed to watching irritated Ferry pilots call the nearby base to complain when their ground transportation was not waiting.  On other occasions, she became the object of customer ire.  Determining that a passenger was too drunk to fly, she feared “he was going to hit me” when she declined to ticket him.  She “finally eased him away from the counter” by inviting him to spend his unscheduled six-hour layover trying “some black coffee at the airport restaurant–that I knew was vile enough to cure or kill him.” 

On still other occasions, the drama escalated.  In the middle of one night, Kate received a message asking to have a cab waiting for an incoming flight “to take a Lieutenant and his eleven day old premature baby to Ann Arbor.”  To her disgust, she could find no driver interested in the life-and-death mission unless they could also find a paying fare for the 40-mile return trip.  As negotiations continued, the plane landed and “the captain himself escorted the Lieutenant and the baby, which he was carrying in a cardboard carton not much larger than a shoe box, to the cab.”  The captain also grew furious with the cab driver, “especially when he’d flown at 2,000 feet all the way from Buffalo because every time he went higher the baby turned blue. . . . We finally got things arranged,” Kate reported, “to no one’s satisfaction.”

More often than not, however, Kate maintained her equilibrium.  After checking in a line of difficult customers, she ticketed a young corporal who “was on an emergency furlough trying to get to San Francisco to see his six months old son who he’d never seen.”  The baby was sick, as was his wife, exhausted from trying to run their ranch and summer camp by herself.  But the soldier never lost his smile, and “was such a big person about it all,” wrote Kate, “that I felt awfully silly after all the minor irritations I’d had that day.” 

Kate’s letters are part of the Tichenor Collection, housed in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections. Click here to access a finding aid. Travel through our other collections (and have mercy on the person “behind the counter”) by searching TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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“Passed by censor”

“Incoming mail censored shall be opened by clipping with scissors on the shorter side of the envelope.”

Every special collections library that holds war materials has them: soldiers’ letters vaguely addressed from “somewhere in France” or “somewhere in the Pacific.”  They might also show more revealing words or lines deftly excised with a sharp blade, and their envelopes may bear a stamp indicating that the contents have been inspected prior to delivery to waiting parents, wives or sweethearts.  The reason, of course, was that the letters were censored to keep potentially valuable intelligence from falling into the hands of the enemy.

During World War II, the task of censor fell to Calhoun, Kentucky’s Thomas Tichenor after he entered the Navy and received his officer’s commission in 1942.  As a convoy communications officer, he was handed the censor’s stamp and a lengthy booklet of regulations governing both outgoing and incoming military mail. 

Tom Tichenor, Navy censor

Under the regulations, Navy personnel were permitted to send mail in six ways: by letter; “urgent letter” (an expedited communication arising out of an emergency); V-mail (short for “Victory mail,” in which specially designed letter sheets were microfilmed to save space and the reduced images printed out and delivered to the recipient); post cards; Navy post cards (with preprinted, pre-authorized text and fill-in-the-blanks options); and Parcel Post.  Most of the censorship rules were easily justified: no photographs of a military character; no writing in a foreign language; no details of ship locations or strength of forces, munitions and equipment; no disclosure of casualties ahead of the official publication of same; no detailed meteorological data; and no criticisms of the “morale of the collective or individual armed forces of the United States or her allies.”  Other communication restrictions barred the keeping of diaries and the transmittal of personal recordings to or from Navy personnel.

The regulations also provided detailed instructions to censors tasked with inspection of the mail.  Outgoing mail came to the censor unsealed, but incoming mail was to be “opened by clipping with scissors on the shorter side of the envelope.”  All mail was to be read with an eye to prohibited content, with additional attention paid to the possibility of “secret writing”—even to a message written underneath the stamp—or “any unusual sign which might be a prearranged signal for a secret message.”  Other things to watch for: differing ink colors; seemingly “pointless” content; traces of liquids or pastes to be harvested for invisible ink; and code in the form of letters, numbers, drawings, indentations or pinpricks above, below or through the writing.  Photographs, of course, came in for the same scrutiny; nevertheless, the regulations advised, “Censors should use care in suppressing private prints, particularly in view of their value as keepsakes to personnel.”  In addition to shears and razor blades, the weapons available to the censor included ink, prepared according to a special formula, for obliterating unacceptable content.  Censoring ink, however, was to be used “only where deemed particularly advisable for casual indiscretions” in letters home.  

Thomas Tichenor’s copy of the U.S. Navy’s censorship regulations is part of the Tichenor Collection in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Click here to access a finding aid. For more World War II collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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