After working at the
Alabama Veterans Museum and Archives for the past 5 years,
Bob Smaltz at age 87 is planning to rest a spell. He began
with the Museum by way of TARCOG, he fit so well at the
museum, he was later hired. He is the man who prepares the
famous Coffee Call every first Saturday of each month at
8:AM at the Museum. He would arrive by 5:AM to have
everything perfect... hot and ready for the 130-180 guest he
and a group of volunteers would serve.
Bob also gave very
poignant tours of the Museum. His tour was always thorough
and has been known to last up to 90 minutes! Museum
President, Jerry Crabtree could be heard referring to
someone about Bob by saying, "He'll out work any 2 sixty
year olds." And he could!
Did I mention he was a
'true gentleman'? Always respectful, appreciative,
independent -(to a fault), a snappy dresser - including tie
and loved to take care of you. He can cook, serve and clean
up, today's man...not so much.
On Friday October
14th, a small luncheon was held in Bob honor at the Museum.
Friends stopped in to wish him well and to let him know how
he much he has meant to them and his part at the Museum.
Bob's military service
sent him all over
the Pacific from 1942 to 1946.
Teresa Todd
AthensPlus.com
October 14th, 2011
Below is an article
from an interview with the Limestone Spirit in 2009 with
backgrounds on Bob and 2 other Athens Veterans.
Article from the Limestone Spirit
From Pacific patrols to Korea's cold ground
Limestone veterans share common hope future
generations will listen.
Wendell E. Powers was
just a Limestone County boy looking to get home and start
working in construction again.
James Patteson still had fresh memories of the remote
Japanese island where he had climbed dead volcanoes and
camped on weekend trips off base.
And Clarence R. "Bob" Smaltz was a West Virginia native who
had just spent months processing other soldiers and sailors
out of the service.
None of the men, whether it was Powers and Patteson
finishing their service during the Korean War or Smaltz
being discharged from the Navy in April 1945, thought of
themselves as a veteran right away. It would take decades
before they wanted to connect with others who had served, to
tell stories as well as listen.
Ten years ago, Patteson wandered into the Alabama Veterans
Museum and Archives in Athens. He's been back regularly ever
since as a volunteer.
"I liked what I saw and like the people in here," he said.
"There's a lot of good stories in here."
Each man, each veteran, has his own story.
Smaltz
The day after the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor, Smaltz tried to join the Navy in Baltimore. The
doctors detected he had a heart murmur and sent him away. He
was drafted, and accepted, two years later.
He spent the war on a 30-man, 110-foot wooden convoy escort
ship, hop-scotching from one miniscule Pacific Island to the
next as a way to get closer to eventual landings for such
battles as the invasion of Okinawa.
Smaltz and his fellow sailors listened to the ship's
broadcast of sonar pings off of enemy submarines and rolled
and flung depth charges from the deck. At other times, they
patrolled the waters around landing sites, calling in news
of approaching Japanese kamikaze fliers over tropical
waters.
"We never had to use heat on the ship at all," he said. "A
lot of times, it got so hot down in the compartment we slept
on deck and watched the flying fishes go by with the
phosphorous in them."
Each man gradually slipped into acknowledging his veteran
status as he recognized that the gravity of what his war
meant has slipped in modern times. They watched as others in
their generation slipped away without ever talking, without
ever sharing their war experiences.
Now, they share a common hope that future generations listen
to what they have to say.
"A lot of them don't know what their fathers or grandfathers
have done because they don't talk about it," Smaltz, now 85
and living in Ardmore, said. The same goes for observing
Veterans Day at 11 a.m. on Nov. 11 with the ringing of
church bells and a national pause. "People have lost
interest."
Not so for those who lived through the conflicts.
"You get older," Wendell Powers said, "and you have more time to think
about it."
Powers
For Powers, a past president and now vice president of the
museum, being drafted into the Army in 1952 during the
Korean War meant leaving behind his job driving a dump truck
in Limestone County. In the whirlwind of the next few
months, the man who had never gotten far from northern
Alabama found himself in Tennessee, then North Carolina, and
then California.
Just before he shipped out to Korea, he was able to see for
a few hours his brother, Bobby Powers, a U.S. Marine. Bobby
Powers had just come in on the General Gordon, the same boat
Wendell Powers was due to leave on in just days. If the two
talked much about Korea, Wendell Powers said, he doesn't
recall the specifics, but one bit of brotherly advice was
invaluable.
"He gave me some seasickness pills," the Athens man said.
"He told me to take the pills and don't quit eating so I
didn't get sick.
"I'll tell you what, it was a lot of them sick and they were
really sick. Some of them, we hadn't got out of the Golden
Gate Bridge."
The ship crossed the International Date Line just in time to
completely skip May 7, 1952, what would have been Wendell
Powers' 21st birthday. Once in Korea, he was sent north to
patrol the area right around where leaders from both
countries met regularly.
He often saw the poverty of the country - Koreans working in
their rice fields directly in the line of fire and small
children rooting for food in the Army dumps or snatching
watches off the wrists of soldiers offering them candy.
Other times, during night patrols, it was so dark he
couldn't see his hand in front of his face. Within days of
reaching the combat zone, one of the men he had been in
basic training with had been killed, another taken prisoner.
The Southerner devised a way of rolling into his blankets
and sleeping bag to stay warm while he slept outside. Still,
it got so cold that he would wake up with frost on him. He
got used to the gallows humor.
"They pitched me a flak jacket," he said of reporting to a
company of fellow soldiers one evening. "They said, 'I hope
you have better luck than the last guy who had it.'
"Every day was the same. You didn't know whether it was
Sunday or Wednesday. They were all the same."
On the boat ride back to the United States at the end of his
tour, Wendell Powers found the ship's chapel very different.
Where it had been packed on the way to Korea, there were now
plenty of empty seats.
"I guessed they passed the danger," the 77-year-old man
said. "That's the opinion some of them had."
Patteson
Patteson, too, spent time hunkered down in a sleeping bag
overseas during the Korean War, but he didn't make it past
the Japanese island of Hokkaido. There, when it snowed nine
months of the year, he did mostly clerical work and explored
the cold, mountainous region with fellow soldiers on the
weekend.
One of his first forays off base was to see a movie in a
nearby town. He and some others paid their yen and settled
in among a purely Japanese crowd to watch a John Wayne
movie, only none had given much thought to what day it was.
"It was the anniversary of Hiroshima and they started
showing film of that," Patteson, now 80, said. "When we
could, we got up and we left."
He had enlisted in the Army near San Antonio on April Fool's
Day 1952 because a cousin tipped him off he was about to be
drafted. And while some couldn't wait to get to combat,
Patteson, now an Athens resident, said he was happy with his
desk.
"I was glad nobody was shooting at me," he said.
Wednesday, November
04, 2009
By Erica Jacobson
ericalejacobson@gmail.com
