MORE VILLAGE WARTIME MEMORIES

Ziggy was sent to Iceland and here he is outside his"living" quarters.

As he calls it, "ye, old Home"....this was just his style of humor. No doubt

Alveda's letters helped to keep him warm.

Meanwhile, back in the Village, Ziggy was not the only young man  away from his family and sweetheart during the war.  Here is Alveda with my Uncle Edward (Eddie), the youngest of the Souza clan.  She shared this photo with Ziggy.  WWII was a catalyst for villagers to start trending away from the Village as they saw new places and often met their sweethearts. Eddie would be stationed in far-off Texas and meet his lovely wife, my Aunt Grace there.  They would live there and bring up their children in Texas their whole lives.

Here is a another photo: this time of my Grandmother Delphina and her great friend, Mrs. Correia who lived with her son and his family on Bennet St. I   regret I never knew her first name only, respectfully, Mrs. Correia. She and my grandmother spent hours chatting in our living room or out on the front porch.  I never knew if they were both from Madeira.

They are on either side of an unidentified soldier but clearly since Alveda sent this to Ziggy, he would have known him.  I hope he fared well.

As we talk of young men like this, including Ziggy, I have to include 

a young man from nearby Fall River, MA. 

 This was my husband's Uncle Leo Pineault in his 

Durfee High School football gear.

This is quite a football history photo.

It is the only photo we have of him/

Uncle Leo was sent to the Pacific.  The day after Pearl Harbor the ship he was on was sunk and he and a few others managed to get on a life boat safely, only to fall into the hands of the enemy on a beachhead where they were executed.  Later one of Loe's grandnephews did some research and found out that Leo's remains were located and he is at rest in the national cemetery in Hawaii.

Just a reminder of the perilous state all of our troops were in during that terrible war.

Norm also had another uncle who was in the Merchant Marines during  WWII

and survived after many treacherous voyages across the N. Atlantic

to England and Russia as well as other countries. 

...............................

There is of course, more to tell of the Village in wartime which is anchored in the

love story of my Aunt Alveda and my Uncle Ziggy and some very exciting historical photos.

There is more to tell of the saga of Camp Myles Standish, too.

Stay tuned.

The Village and a Love Story: Camp Myles Standish

I find the information on Camp Myles Standish fascinating.  Much of it has been gleaned from the Internet including descriptions from Dr. William Hanna's presentation on the subject which were found in Taunton newspapers.  Also, a WWII veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, Jim Koller, was stationed at the Camp and he and his son have blogged on the subject.  

In 1942, the city of Taunton was notified by the War Department  that 1,500 acres would be taken over for a port of embarkation for American and allied soldiers 

shipping out to destinations overseas.

There were 10 such ports in the U.S., six of them on the east coast, of which 

Camp Myles Standish was the third busiest due to its proximity to the port of Boston. 

 Camp Myles Standish was named for the first

commander of the early colonial army .

Each port had a staging area where troops underwent physical examinations, vaccinations and such and also undertook training exercises.  For example, on Watson Pond they built a fake ship and did life boat drills.  Each port was set up to prepare an entire division in a single day for deployment. Troops from the U.S., Australia, Canada and Great Britain passed through here. 

The Camp had a 1,400 bed military hospital

The photograph below is of the guard house at the entrance to Camp Myles Standish.

On the 70th Division Association website our veteran and his son mentioned above

wrote that the original main gate was at the intersection of Bay and Watson Streets about

three miles north of Taunton center.  Nothing remains of this entrance and it is easy to miss

the small stone monument dedicated by the Taunton Allied Veterans Council in 1961.

"To commemorate the site of Camp Myles Standish, the major troop

staging area of the Boston port of embarkation through which 1, 531, 711 

personnel were processed from October 1942 to January 1946

and sent forth to engage in World War II."

At its height, the Camp contained 35 miles of paved roads, almost 1500 structures-including more than 600 barracks-500 to 700 civilian workers and at any given time 39,000 soldiers. The population of Taunton then was 43,000.

Troops also returned here from deployement before being sent out again.  This may have been the case of Ziggy whose military tracks we are hard at work following.  

The Camp also later became a P.O.W.

camp for German and Italian prisoners of war, we will write of that later in this series.

The Camp took the areas of what later became the Myles Standish Industrial Park
 and the Paul Dever School for Disabled Youth (more on that later).

 This document from Mapquest shows the area of the Park and its proximity to Watson Pond.
As those of us that grew up in Taunton know, the Paul Dever School was not far from Watson Pond.  It is now my understanding that the Camp took up more of the Paul Dever School
area and less from the Park. When I looked for remnants
 of the Camp, I always thought it just the opposite.

Meanwhile

 It seems that Ziggy and Alveda met there and commenced to cement their long term relationship in writing.  As he went through his war experiences, her letters must have kept him hopeful that she was awaiting him on his return to the States.  This is a great photograph of my Aunt Alveda, which she sent to Ziggy.  She is sitting on the front stoop of her family home on School St.  It is a birdseye view of details such as fashion, cars of the time, a possible Elm tree across the street (Elms were fast disappearing in the U.S. due to Dutch Elm Disease).  For me it is a memory of that sloping front yard and the steps at the end of the cement walk coming from the porch stairs.
This cement walk lives in my memory as my little brother Frank

 fell on the ice here as a child and displaced an important front tooth
giving him an impish smile thereafter.

Alveda kept sending letters with photos such as the one above,
and Ziggy would send letters and photos such

as this one of him writing letters in his quonset hut back to her.
His face is serious and no doubt he is wishing he were back safely with his dear Alveda.  

Next post:

The correspondence romance continues: Ziggy in Iceland watching history unfold.

Alveda steadily maintains her post, supporting him with love and news from her life.  She is a mainstay for him and exemplifies how sweethearts, wives, and families kept at their important work of never letting their soldiers forget how much they were loved and prayed for, a work that continues even today with our young people still in harm's way.

Village History and a Love Story

One of the great things about any type of creativity: painting, writing and the like, are the moments when the creative project takes on a life of its own.  I love that with painting and now I have discovered that this blog tells me what it wants to write: post by post.  It is almost as if all those lost voices are urging me on, wanting to share more and more of our roots. These posts are a perfect example.

Last week my cousin Shelley Napieralski Au shared more photos from her mother's collection. Her Mom is someone you have seen on this blog: my Dad's sister Alveda Souza Napieralski. married to Zigmund "Ziggy" Napieralski, my uncle.  These photos piece together to tell a war time love story.

Though my Uncle Ziggy did not grow up in the Village , he had the good sense and the luck to marry a Villager.  But, how did they meet, these two, one from the Village and the other from New York state?

That is where it gets really, really interesting.... They met during World War II, and they met because of Myles Standish Military Complex in Taunton.  Before I could really tell their love story, which is a beautiful one, I had to do more research on Myles Standish.  What I thought I knew, was only a small part of the fascinating history involved.  My Uncle Ziggy and my Auntie Al were smack in the middle of it all, both here and overseas.

     My Uncle Ziggy was beloved in our family, for his smile and his caring.  He grew up in

     Buffalo, New York. As a young man, like so many others of the Great Generation, he was

     thrust into war.  He was sent to Camp Miles Standish in Taunton which was

     not far from The Village as the crow flies. 

                                   The caption below this picture of Ziggy is in his own writing.

Ziggy and Alveda met at a U.S.O. at the Camp and thereafter began a writing courtship that would end in marriage in 1946.  Both were avid picture takers and avid writers.  My Aunt Al kept all the letters they wrote back and forth, all the photos which are graced with their hand written comments. 

 Here she is on the front lawn of the homestead on School Street.  

He would have received this wherever he was overseas.

 Come with me on Part I of this journey. 

 I hope I can write this with

the  respect and love that I feel.  I am honored to do so. I welcome you to 

share any histories of those wartime years that occurred in your families.

                         Next post:  the tale of Camp Miles Standish and its place in history.