Letter: Getting ready for OSD
To Marion Friends:
In preparation for Old Settlers' Day I spent some time last week talking to brother Bing Hayen, one of the oldest settlers in the Fred and Florence Hayen part of our family.
He and wife Helen are residents in a suburb of Houston. We met them, their daughter Amanda and her family, down in Oklahoma for a mini-family gathering.
Old Bing and I had a chance to talk about his military days, especially those days of WWII, when he was a young pilot of a B-17. He flew 33 missions before he came home, eight of those during the Normandy Invasion, those eight being that many more than a normal "tour" of 25 missions, for active duty pilots and crew in those war days.
Bing has a great memory and gave a good detail of his experiences which I found most interesting. One of the events he recounted has to do with some of the 60-year-old columns found in recent Marion County Record editions.
After his tour of active flying was completed, his and many other bomber crews were furloughed home by ship. On his particular ship, the Mauritania, there were thousands of German prisoners who had been captured in the early days of the invasion.
The U.S. officers on board were given the task of processing these prisoners on board ship as they made their way to prison camps in the states. Bing said he and the rest of the U.S. service personnel were less than inspired to be a part of this processing, but some colonel took charge who knew what he was doing and they got the job done in the eight to 10 days it took to zigzag their way across the Atlantic.
I wondered to Bing if some of those prisoners could have been shipped to Peabody and possibly worked in Marion County fields, maybe Harry McFadden's and others? If so, again it proves to be a small world, is it not? Bing has many more stories, maybe some of those to be saved for later letters to this paper.
As to the coming OSD celebration, brother Warren Hayen is traveling from Indiana to be a part of his 1948 class reunion. Warren has had much health difficulty in the past several years, and his beloved wife Phyllis is gone from us now, but he is excited about making this "last" (as he calls it!) pilgrimage to the Old Town for the Big Day. Those of you who know Warren, look him up on Friday or Saturday. Give him a pep talk. Connie and I will be there on Saturday, and hopefully at Eastmoor United Methodist Church on Sunday. See you all at the parade.
Jan Hayen
Parsons
