Story of his youth from Don Jackson

 May 20, 2020

Here a story of his youth from Don Jackson.

 

I Wish I Had Asked More Questions!

 

      I, Donald L. Jackson, was born in December 1940 in Lubbock, Texas to young parents who were struggling to find their place in the world and looking for opportunities to build a future.  Good jobs in Lubbock were hard to find.  My Dad had a brother in San Diego who was a butcher for a large supermarket and told my Dad to pack up and move west to southern California, land of opportunity.

 

Don Jackson at age 9 months

 

      So, on September 22, 1941, Mom and Dad loaded up the ’38 Chevy and headed west [It’s a thousand miles from Lubbock to San Diego.]  The picture of me was taken on the first or second day of that trip in New Mexico where we were forced to stop for road construction.  I don’t know how long that trip took or where we spent the two nights, but we got to San Diego and my Dad went to work in the grocery store.  And then we all know what happened.  On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the U.S. was thrust into World War II.  The rumor was that the Japanese would continue moving east and attack the west coast of the United States.  A week later, December 14, 1941, that ’38 Chevy was loaded and we were headed east, back to Lubbock.

     We spent the next nine months in Lubbock, where Dad worked at a service station.  It was during this time he was drafted, went through the physical exam, and failed due to a broken leg he had received playing high school football.  The story was that the leg was filled with screws and pins.  (I had heard stories of him building a rack on his stripped down Ford, where he could cradle that leg while he drove.)

 

      He learned there were jobs in California where the Kaiser Shipyards in Richmond were building Liberty ships.  So, along with my grandfather and grandmother, (my mother’s parents) the cars were loaded and on September 16, 1942, we once again headed west.  My Dad spent three years as a layout foreman laying the keels for Liberty ships while my grandfather worked on a crew repairing ships that were damaged and returned to the yard.  My grandmother got a job at the Ford plant where they were building landing crafts.  At the end of the war she was assigned to drive the unshipped vessels out into San Francisco Bay and pull the plug.

 

      In January 1945 my sister, Judy Jackson Donohoo, was born in Oakland. After the end of the war, it was back to Lubbock, Texas.  My Dad built a two-wheeled trailer and loaded everything we had into that small trailer and pulled it back to Lubbock.  Judy and I are not sure, but I believe our mother, my baby sister Judy and I traveled on the Santa Fe train from Oakland to Lubbock.  We think my Dad had a passenger, maybe my grandfather, who rode with him and helped with the gas expenses and maybe the driving.

 

      This information came from my “Baby Book” that mother kept during my first six years.  I’ve had the book since she died in 1985 but I had never taken the time to go through it.  The moral to my story is that I wish I had asked more questions of my family about their thoughts and experiences of their lives.  That’s what has drawn me to the Jackson Brigade but I know it’s too late to capture those years.

 

Submitted by Donald L. Jackson