Page 69 - Anthology

ONEITA PERRY

LEST WE FORGET LAWRENCEBURG, KENTUCKY

WAR-TIME SERVICE IS HARD ON EVERYBODY

I was born in September 1925, in Anderson County, Kentucky.

Mom and dad married when they were about fourteen. My dad worked for the railroad as a rail
maintenance foreman. Dad died from cancer in his mid-fifties. I had one sister and two brothers. One

brother died at age twenty-one from complications from surgery to remove his tonsils. My other brother
served in the navy in WWII.

My early childhood was typical for the area and farmers. I was going to school and I played baseball on
the boy’s team when they were short a player. If somebody was sick or whatever, then they would let me
play. I played second base and Huston played first base. Huston was one of the best players. He and
two other guys were really good. No other girl ever wanted to play baseball with the boys – just me. I
loved baseball, I loved to play. I also played marbles – We played “keeps” and got a lot of the boy’s
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marbles. Huston liked to play a game called Rolley-hole . It is quite complicated, but a lot of fun.

Baseball would continue to dominate our lives. Huston and I stay up late to watch the San Francisco
Giants play on television. Sometimes it seems like daylight will arrive. The three-hour time delay makes
it rough. But Huston continues to be a big Giants fan, so we stay up to watch the games together.

I completed grade school at about the age of ten and graduated high school at age seventeen. A few
days before graduating high school, one of my teachers, Ms. Rhoda Kavanaugh, sent me to see Mr.
Lewis Sherwood, President of Lawrenceburg National Bank. I was unaware that she was really sending
me to an interview with Mr. Sherwood.

He asked me a bunch of questions that I thought were getting a bit personal, so I asked him why. He
said it was to help him decide if he was going to hire me. He did, and I went to work at the bank the very
next day. I worked various positions at the bank for the next forty-eight years.

I retired as a Vice-President and remained on the Board of Directors for several more years after
retirement. As I think back, playing marbles for keeps might have been my start in the banking business
– playing for keeps.

Thinking back, I guess you could say this was pretty special. Women did not usually play such a role
during that time, and certainly not in higher up positions.

War-time service is hard on everybody. I think one of the worse things that can happen to a family is for
their country to be in a war. I had a brother in the navy and did not know what was going to happen to
him. And, while he was away is when my other brother died from having his tonsils out. It was a bad
time; I lost one brother, and another was off fighting in the war. I was worried about him.

I was somewhat sheltered from WWII in that I went to work right away and was living on my own in the
city. Huston and I had dated off and on several times. But we were not married at the time he entered
the service. During war time I was working at the bank and I did not correspond with him. The people in
town and at church were talking about the war, and that is when I learned that he was captured and was
missing in action. It was much later that we found out that he was a prisoner of war. Thinking back on it,
I guess I didn’t really have sense enough to know how awful it was for Huston to be missing and a POW.
I knew it wasn’t a good thing. It would be much later before I learned just how bad it had been for him.