By Jerry Davis
The WarPart III
The soldiers returned to a short-lived hero’s welcome. We listened to war stories but soon wearied.
The veterans were collecting a bonus, and some were not looking for work. Instead, they hung out on the porch of Madison’s Drugstore and bored each other with their war stories.
My mother contemptuously called them by the amount of their bonus, the $28 a week club.
My cousin Jack, now married with a family, completed his degree at Cornell University, living in a converted barracks near the campus.
Jack’s sister Mary was reunited with her fiancé Ed Cole.
Ed was our hero, a veteran, still wearing his uniform, paying attention to us kids and with an interesting war story to relate.
Ed was assigned to the weather prediction section and had to give General Eisenhower the weather report on D Day, the day troops would land on
the beaches of Normandy.
Thousands of lives depended on a reliable weather forecast and Ed and his companions could not make a precise prediction.
Ed took a deep breath and told Eisenhower that the weather would be favorable.
Rhodes Hospital on Burrstone Road in New Hartford closed, and the
buildings were dismantled or moved to other locations.
One ended up in West Winfield, converted to a home on South Street.
The hospital served 25,000 patients between 1942 and 1945 and had a big economic impact on the area.
Mike returned shell shocked, a condition we now ...
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