Now Tom McLaughlin, he was almost ready to get out of the army when the war came. He’d been drafted four years before, with the idea that this war was going on in Europe and we were going to be ready. So then he was in for the duration of the war.
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So we went to Our Lady of Sorrows for mass in the morning, and then I saw him off downtown at the train station. When I got to work Mr. Hanna called me into his office. “What was it like?”
I said, “It was terrible. Here all these women are hanging on to these men. And then after the men got on the train, the women are all hanging on to the posts outside the train, and they’re all crying and screaming.”
I made arrangements to go, and then I got a call. Vince was shipping out. He was going to Texas. He wouldn’t be there. So I called Mrs. Drum and told her, “I’m sorry, he shipped out yesterday.” She said, “Why don’t you bring your sister Rosemarie with you instead? We can have a nice time. We’ll show you the town. We have a lot of things we were going to do with you, and we can still do them.”
