Honoring Their Sacrifice

Gainesboro, Tennessee is a quiet little town located in the rolling hills north of Cookeville, about eighty miles east of Nashville. In 1940, my parents, Ralph and Ruby Snell, moved with their three young daughters to this small town of 672 residents.

This young father had been called as the new preacher for the Church of Christ in Gainesboro. In his early thirties, he might have joined his family on their farm in Middle Tennessee, but a severe injury he had suffered as a teenager left him with a deformed hip and a right leg that was four or five inches shorter than his left. This injury meant he could not farm so he had gone to school and studied to be a minister and teacher.  But this injury meant something else. When it came time to sign up for the military draft, he received a 4F deferment and was exempt from military service.

As this young family was settling into life in this quiet town, the rest of the world was careening out of control. Though the town was the largest in Jackson County, it was quite rural and primarily a place where farmers came in from the countryside to purchase seed and feed and sell livestock and vegetables. However, there was one unique fact about the geography of this county and this part of Tennessee. The terrain around Gainesboro mimicked the terrain in Europe where WWII was well underway. In those first years of a new decade, this little town and the surrounding area was chosen by the U.S. Army as good place to train soldiers for the European theater. Army maneuvers began around Gainesboro shortly after America was jerked into the war by the events at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Hundreds of troops on their way overseas set up camp around the town and held training exercises before they loaded onto trains and headed out to war.

Ralph Snell and his young family and his church played host to many of these young men every Sunday for several weeks. Many of these soldier boys would come into town on the weekends and quite a few attended church.  After Sunday services, the church people would invite them home for dinner of fried chicken or pot roast, complete with all the trimmings one might expect from great southern cooks. My mother would tell, with amusement, the story of one of these boys from up north who had never had biscuits and butter and jam. After being invited home for one of these meals he came back to church the next Sunday. When the church lady invited him again for dinner he asked, are we going to have those "hot ones." It took her a while to figure out that he was referring to her biscuits. The week before she had returned again and again to the oven bringing more biscuits to the table and asking, "Would you like a hot one?"

In addition to these expressions of hospitality, there would be another way my dad would serve during the war. As the war began to gather young men from around the country, a number of young men from Gainesboro and Jackson County were enlisted into service. And, as the war began to require the ultimate sacrifice from these young men, my father was called to minister to a number of families who received their soldiers home in pine boxes. As the only located preacher in the county, my dad travelled to all parts of the county to conduct funerals and minister to grieving families. In one terrible year he conducted more than fifty funerals.

On this Memorial Day, 2014, I do not have a close family member that I remember who served and died for my freedoms. But, without fail, on every Memorial Day, I think about those young men and those families from Jackson County, Tennessee.  And, I pause to thank God for their service and their sacrifice.