In this letter, my Dad discussed his travel adventure from Denver to Florida for gunnery school, called someone a “swell egg,” swore, and to describe the town in Florida where he wound up he dropped Sinatra lyrics. Well-played, Dad!
Also, my Dad mentioned “Skunk Holler” in this letter so I decided to do some digging to see what he was actually talking about. I found this weekly publication from Tyndall Field that is quite interesting. It was written a few months before my Dad was training there and references Skunk Hollow on page seven. http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00076230/00059/1j
Enjoy!
USO
Sunday, Oct 31st
Dear Mom and Dad,
How’s everything? I hope that everything is okay and that you are feeling fine. Well, at last, I’m at gunnery school here at Tyndall Field, Florida, it’s near Panama City on the Gulf of Mexico. Panama City is East of Pensacola, the great Naval Training Center for Aviation Cadets.
We left Denver about 6 o’clock Wednesday and arrived here at Tyndall Field about 4 o’clock Saturday afternoon. We had quite a few stop-overs, we stopped in Kansas city, Missouri for about an hour and then we stopped in Birmingham, Ala, for an hour but we couldn’t leave the train then we stopped at a few small towns the names of which I don’t remember. We had a Captain in charge of us all the way from Denver and he was certainly a swell egg and we had a lot of fun with him; we got mighty good meals we had chicken three times and a good steak dinner but the rest of the meals were just about average.
The field here itself doesn’t seem to be bad but from what we’ve heard there’s a lot of unnecessary stuff that they make us do and we just call it “chicken shit.” I hope you’ll pardon the army expression but that’s what we call it and the name’s very appropriate. Some of the fellows told us that we won’t get paid while we are here but that will be all right with me because we’ll never get to go in town and even if we did I don’t think I’d want to because it’s only a two by four town.
The first week or two we spend in a part of the field called “Skunk holler” while we go through processing. Oh, yes, we live in nice “tents.”
I guess that everything will be okay once we really start school but until then we’ll do all kinds of detail and K.P. while also going through processing, it will be a mighty busy week.
Well, I guess that’s about all, be good, take care of yourself and God Bless you all.
Your loving son,
Franny
P.S. After I finish gunnery school I’ll get a ten-day delay enroute that means that I’ll be home as soon as I get through school for a week to ten days.
Duke of Dead Air 