Remembering The Greatest Generation

Chapter IV: Marion “Red” Honaker




Red Honaker had never liked the name Marion. Too many people thought he was a woman. “I got a whole lot of samples of women’s perfume,” he told me. “And a whole lot of ads for women’s underwear. I’ll probably keep getting ’em till the day I die.”

Red had the face of a comedian. Big ears, slightly drooping eyelids, a radiant smile, and of course, red hair. He loved to recall his life experiences and could see the humor in most of them. He grew up in Naker, Kentucky, a tiny hamlet of 15 souls located thirteen miles north of Bowling Green. Its only distinction was that a post office was located there, and his mother was for many years the postmaster.

Red’s father worked for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as a lockmaster on the Green River. He was moving up in his profession. “He had real good judgment about the future,'” Red told me. “If there was a big decision to make, he’d go out by himself for a couple of hours. He’d find a log to sit on and just think. Then he’d come back and tell us what he thought we ought to do. He always made good decisions.”

Red’s dad died when he was ten, leaving all the family responsibility to him and his mother. “My younger brother was hurt worse than I was since he was only four when my dad died. He never really learned to hold down a steady job. He ended up an alcoholic living at home with my mother. He died in his fifties.”

Fortunately, Red’s mother was a spunky, resourceful woman. Her responsibilities included running the family general store and blacksmith shop, being postmaster for Naker, KY, and doing some farming on the side.

A spunky lady she certainly was. She would put tin cans on top of a fence, and then shoot them off with her Colt revolver from a distance of about twenty yards. The nearest sheriff was 30 miles away, and she was just telling the folks around town not to mess with her or her property.

Red’s Education

Red went to a one-room schoolhouse until the sixth grade. About that time his aunt, who was a teacher in Louisville, visited him and his mother. She quickly surmised that Red was getting a poor education, and urged his mother to send him to Louisville to complete his schooling. An arrangement was made so that Red would spend most of the year attending school and living with his aunt in Louisville. During the summers, he would return home and live on the farm with his mother.

Under this plan, Red attended junior high school and then Manual High School. At Manual, Red found a place for himself in athletics. He became the second-string quarterback on the football team and an outfielder on the baseball team. He also got on the school’s boxing team and became Kentucky state champion. “It wasn’t as great as it sounds,” Red told me. “There were only five teams in the state, and I was on one of them.”

Red had some fighting experience before he got to Manual. In his eighth-grade class, there was a bully named Sullivan. Sullivan would pick various heavily trafficked school walkways, draw a line across them, then dare anyone to cross over the line. Red didn’t like that at all.

“I didn’t see any darned reason why I shouldn’t walk over that line, so I did. Of course, the first thing that went over that line was my fist. You should always get in the first punch. And I did.”

Red was more than holding his own with Sullivan when a school official broke up the fight. Red was taken to the principal’s office. “She bawled me out real good. And then she asked me who I was fighting. I told her it was Sullivan. After I told her that, she quit bawling me out. In fact, she became almost friendly.”

Red Marries and Joins the Navy

After his schooling was over Red made his way as sales manager in appliance stores and department stores. He did this before his service in World War II and afterwards. During the war he joined the Navy and took on large responsibilities that were totally new to him. And he did all this with a high degree of competence. He was an ordinary man who, in a national emergency, did extraordinary things. His years in the Navy (1942-45) were the most eventful in his life, but he was happy to return home to Kentucky when the war was over. He was eager to get back to his wife whom he had married shortly before he went to war.

Red hadn’t planned on joining the Navy. In fact, he was almost drafted by the Army in 1942. He went to the registration office in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. The officials were rude to him, and told him he should get ready to go to war soon. As he left, one of the secretaries followed him out of the office.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” she said.

“Can’t say as I do.”

You sold me an appliance on credit when nobody else would, and you even loaned me some money to help pay for it. So even though I shouldn’t be telling you this, I think you should know.”

“Know what?”

“Those officials in there aren’t honest. They’re protecting all their friends from being drafted, and taking fellows like you just as fast as they can.” That got Red good and mad. He decided to volunteer for the Navy so the Army couldn’t get him. He was 27 years old.

Red Serves as a Medic and Pharmacist

During the war, Red served as a medic and chief pharmacist aboard a heavy cruiser, the USS Portland. “There wasn’t anyone in the Pacific less qualified than me to do those jobs. But after the Battle of Midway, they needed medics bad, and they needed them right away. A bunch of fellows in my group were shuffled over to the medical corps.”

Red needed a whole lot of training. That was how he met Dr. Joers. (Red always pronounced it Dr. George.) Dr. Joers, Red soon discovered, was a first-rate doctor. “He could do an operation faster and better than any other doctor I served with during the war. The doctor who came after him took 45 minutes to do an operation that Dr. Joers could do in 20 minutes, and Dr. Joers could do it better. He could tie a square knot with one hand.”

In short, Red admired Dr. Joers. But they got off to a somewhat rocky start. ” Us fellows on the ship didn’t like the idea of being a medic. Too many bedpans and that kind of stuff. So when they gave us a test over some medical material, I failed it on purpose.”

Dr. Joers called Red into his office for a dressing down. “See here son, we’re at war and we need medics. I know you can do this, so stop fooling around with the U.S. Navy. I want you to hit those books and hit ’em hard. Do you understand that?”

Red understood. From that moment on, he did his best. And his best was very good. It turned out that bed pans were a very small part of his job. He became the ship’s pharmacist, and the main surgical assistant to Dr. Joers. He qualified for a crash course in pharmacy offered at the University of California at Berkeley while his ship was at port in San Francisco.

Red’s most important teacher, however, was Dr. Joers. In addition to Red, there was another surgical assistant who was better qualified in terms of schooling than Red was. “But he almost always picked me to work with him during surgery. He worked the devil out of me. He wanted to make sure I really knew my job.” But after Red’s skills improved markedly, Dr. Joers continued to choose him to assist him. ” I think he liked working with me,” said Red. “And I regarded it as a privilege to work with him.”

Dr. Joers had become Red’s mentor. I thought this especially significant in light of the fact that Red’s dad had died when he was ten. Dr. Joers was a kind of father figure as well as a mentor to him. It took a little while for the two men to get used to each other. In addition to being a physician, Dr. Joers was a Seventh Day Adventist minister who was very staunch in his faith.

Before each surgery, the good doctor expected Red to join him in a prayer. That was fine with Red. He dutifully bowed his head. One day, after surgery had begun, Dr. Joers ran into some difficult problems he had not anticipated. He began emitting grunts of frustration and irritation. Red thought he’d lighten things up a little bit. “Would you like to curse over him, doctor?” Dr. Joers was not amused. When the surgery was completed, he gave a brief closing prayer in which he asked the Lord to give unto Red a more reverential attitude.

Red Helps Invent Medicinal Chewing Gum

Red and Dr. Joers might have been an odd couple, but they made a good team. Together, they concocted medicinal chewing gum. When sulfa, a new antibiotic, became available, they ran into a problem. To be effective this drug had to be absorbed slowly into the body. Sulfa pills or injections were absorbed too rapidly. Another way had to be found.

Red and Dr. Joers put their heads together and came up with the idea of putting the sulfa into chewing gum. This would allow for slower absorption and thus greater effectiveness. It was Red’s job to make the gum. The first problem was to get the large amounts of raw gum needed for the job.

At this time, the USS Portland was docked in San Francisco. The Wrigley Chewing Gum Company had an office building there. Red paid them a visit. He approached the assistant manager who told him that the gum wasn’t made in San Francisco, so they couldn’t help him.

About that time, the manager walked in and asked what was going on. Red identified himself as a medic aboard the USS Portland. He repeated what his problem was. The manager replied, “We don’t make it here, but we’ll get it for you—all you need.”

“How much will it cost?” asked Red.

“No charge, Mr. Honaker. And good luck to all those men on the Portland.”

Red was in business. It wasn’t long before he was turning out large quantities of sulfa gum. On the USS Portland, and on a number of other ships in the Pacific, it came to be known as “Doc Honaker’s” chewing gum. It was even written up in a medical journal.

Red’s Respect for Dr. Joers

Red could not say enough good things about his mentor. “It took the Navy more than two years to find out what they had in Dr. Joers. He graduated from a medical school that wasn’t well known, so they didn’t notice him for a while. That was my good luck. When they found out about him, they gave him a more important job and moved him off the Portland .”

After the war, Dr. Joers left the Navy briefly, but the Navy called him back. He rose to the rank of Rear Admiral before he retired from the Navy for good. Red remembered with pride the day the ship’s Captain dropped by to see Dr. Joers.

“Doctor,” he said, ” you’ve given your men mighty high ratings. Are you sure you’re not being too generous?”

“I’ll tell you what, Captain. You come back any day you want, but don’t tell me when you’re coming. You can watch my men at work and see if you think they deserve the ratings I gave them.”

The Captain returned and observed the men doing their jobs. He was very impressed. He was particularly impressed that Joers’s men, including Red, were giving classes in their specialties for other seamen. He told Dr. Joers that his ratings were right on the mark and to keep up the good work.

Not everyone was so complimentary. One fellow who got Red’s goat during the war was the famous syndicated columnist Drew Pearson. Pearson wrote some columns in which he stated that the Armed Forces should be severely reprimanded for using “unqualified” people (like Red) as medics. “Pearson just didn’t understand,” said Red, “that after the Battle of Midway, the Navy needed medics, a lot of them. And they needed them right away.” I couldn’t help thinking that when the Navy gambled on Red, they certainly made a good bet.

After the war, Red didn’t hear from Dr. Joers for some time and didn’t expect to. But shortly after the men on the Portland created a reunion group, he heard from the good doctor. Dr. Joers called Red and told him he’d been trying unsuccessfully to track him down. When the reunion group was formed, he used it to find out Red’s address. He then extended an invitation. “My wife and I would like it a whole lot if you and your wife would come to visit us in Oregon. Can you make it?”

“With pleasure, Doctor, with pleasure,” replied Red. Both men thoroughly enjoyed the reunion visit and stayed in contact with each other until Dr. Joers died.

Red Survives a Kamikaze Attack

Red liked to tell war stories that had a theme of adventure or had humor in them or both. He told me about his scariest kamikaze attack.

“There were three Japanese planes headed straight for the ship. We shot down two of them, but the third kept on coming. I was standing on the deck and he was headed right for me. I wanted to get the heck out of there.”

Red wasted no time. He made a dash for the ladder which went below. There was an “up” ladder and a “down” ladder, but Red wasn’t paying attention. He rushed downward on the “up” ladder, colliding with a shipmate who was climbing upward. That shipmate turned out to be the third highest ranking officer on the Portland. Not recognizing him, Red climbed past him without stopping.

“That was the only time I got into some serious trouble on the ship,” he recalled. “The officer put me on report. He charged me with abandoning my battle station, and with failing to give aid to an officer in trouble.”

A hearing was scheduled over which the Captain presided. Red was told he could have a navy lawyer to defend him. He replied that he would prefer to have his supervising doctor (the successor to Dr. Joers) defend him. His request was granted. This was a good choice since his supervising doctor respected Red and was also on good terms with the officer who had brought the charges. At the end of the hearing the Captain rendered his conclusions.

“Mr. Honaker, we are clearing you of the charge of abandoning your battle station. You were going below, which is where you needed to be to treat anyone wounded in the attack. Moreover, your record leaves no doubt that you would have discharged that duty both fully and competently. You did, however, make one mistake. You were in too damned much of a hurry. This led to your unfortunate collision with the officer here. I think the appropriate thing to do is for you to apologize to the officer right now in front of the people attending this hearing.”

Red turned and apologized to the officer. They shook hands. The captain concluded. “Mr. Honaker, it gives me great personal pleasure to drop the charges against you. This incident will not appear in your record .”

Red received numerous commendations during his service in the Navy, but he seemed more proud of this moment than any other. He beamed when he remembered those closing words: “Mr. Honaker it gives me great personal pleasure to drop the charges….”

I still didn’t know what happened to the kamikaze plane, so I asked Red about it.

“The gunner told me that the plane got too close to shoot down, so they directed their fire beneath the plane. The air pressure created by the exploding shells lifted the plane two or three feet. That was just enough. It flew over the ship and crashed in the ocean on the other side. The gunner said he could have jumped up and touched it.”

The War in the Pacific

During the war, Red was in ten major battles in the Pacific, for which he received a total of ten bronze stars. As a medic, he saw the carnage of war as much as anyone. He treated Marines wounded in the island invasions of the South Pacific. Understandably, he never talked about that part of his job.

Long after the war was over, he read in the paper that a Western Kentucky University professor had said that the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan was one of the most immoral acts in history. That got Red’s goat. He called the professor and told him, “You don’t know what it was like out there. And you don’t know what it would have been like out there if we had had to invade Japan.” The professor dismissed Red in a few sentences and then hung up. Too bad. He could have learned a lot by having lunch with Red and listening to his stories about what it was like out there.

Red’s Humorous Stories

Even in war there were humorous situations, which Red loved to recall. One was about the Filipino madam who, when asked by a medical officer if her girls had a venereal disease, replied, “No, no. Just a leetle. We all have just a leetle.”

I particularly enjoyed Red’s account of an experience he had while on leave. He used the time to travel by train from his base in San Francisco to Hopkinsville, KY, where his wife lived. He spent a few days at home with her. On the last day his wife drove him to the train depot to return to base. After she dropped him off, Red learned that his train was more than an hour late. He went across the street to a bar to kill the time.

“I stood a little too long at the bar,” he said. So when his train finally left, he was feeling no pain. He boarded the train and took a seat next to a civilian.

The civilian asked him what things were like out in the Pacific, and specifically, how American forces took possession of Japanese-occupied islands.

“I’ll tell you how we do it,” said Red in a jovial mood. “First, the Navy bombards the island to weaken Japanese resistance. Then the Marines hit the beaches and take the Japanese who are left. When that’s done, the Sea Bees and the engineers build roads, communication lines and that sort of stuff. The last thing they do is build a USO social club for the enjoyment of the troops. After that last job is done, the Army goes ashore.”

Red and the civilian were chuckling over that when Red felt a sharp pain in the back of his neck. Then another in the back of his head. He looked in the seat behind him and saw that two WACS (Women’s Auxiliary Corps) were hitting him with their Army regulation purses just as hard as they could.

“Those things were as solid as rocks,” recalled Red. “I shut up and they quit bashing my head in.” By the time the train reached its destination, the Army assault had long subsided. The two WACS actually helped a much-disoriented Red off the train.

Red Returns to Civilian Life

When the war ended, Red decided he would use his medical experience and go into the health field. He got a job with the state department of public health with his office located in Bowling Green. His job was to inspect the restaurants in the city. One of his first assignments was a very popular restaurant in the city’s most famous hotel. Its kitchen, however, had a huge number of health violations. Red ran all his tests and wrote up a very unfavorable report.

His boss read it with great interest. “Red, this is a very thorough report. You didn’t miss anything.”

“I really puffed up with pride when he said that,” recalled Red. “But what he did next really threw me for a loop. He tore up my report and threw it into the waste can.

“You see Red, the owner of that restaurant was a big contributor to our party in the last election. Fine fellow too.”

“Well,” Red told me, “I saw where that job was going and quit the next day.” He returned to the calling he knew best, sales and sales management. Red told me a lot of humorous stories about his sales career, both before and after the war, the best of which I will relate here.

Red’s Sales Career

One of Red’s sales jobs was with Ben Snyder, before Ben developed his prosperous chain of department stores in Bowling Green, Louisville, and other places. Red was sweeping up at the end of the day, when Ben stopped him and asked, “Son, do you have a bad back?”

“No, I don’t think so,” replied Red.

“Well, I’m looking at that pile of dust that you’re about to sweep out of the door and I see something I don’t like.”

“What’s that?”

“I see two paper clips in that pile of dust. Now those paper clips cost money. I want you to bend down and pick up things like that. Put ’em back on the shelves where I can sell ’em”.

On another occasion, Red was selling shoes, or trying to sell shoes, to an old woman whose feet were in very bad shape. “My heart went out to her,” recalled Red. “But I couldn’t find any shoes that fit her. So I told her that and she left.”

Ben saw what happened and didn’t like it. ” Why didn’t you sell her a pair of shoes?”

“Because we didn’t have any shoes that fit her.”

“Sell her a pair anyway.”

“But Mr. Snyder if I do that she’ll just bring them back.”

“You don’t know that. She might give them to a friend, she might leave them on the street car, she might get too sick to bring them back. She might even die.”

That was enough for Red. He quit the next day. After the fact, he saw the humor in these incidents and related them with relish. It was in this spirit that Red told me the story of the garbage disposal.

The Garbage Disposal Story

“I sold some of the earliest ones. Those machines could grind up just about anything. One of my customers had bought one but she was afraid of using it. She asked me if I would come over to her house and demonstrate it. When I got there she had a ten-pound sack of potatoes lying on the kitchen table.”

“Put them in the disposal Red. Let’s see if it works.”

“Well, I put ’em in there, and the machine ground up the whole load of potatoes just fine. She loved that. Then she phoned her husband at work and told him that she just ran out of potatoes. Would he bring home a ten-pound sack?”

“Then she sat down at the kitchen table and asked me if I would join her in having a bottle of beer. I told her that I didn’t drink on the job, but since this call was my last one for the day I’d be glad to join her.

“She got out two cold bottles of beer and we were about to imbibe when the doorbell rang. Her daughter came running into the kitchen and said, ‘the preacher’s here, Mom, and you know how he feels about drinking….’”

“O Lordy! Red, you put those beer bottles down the disposal and grind ’em to kingdom come.”

“I don’t know if the machine can do that.”

“It better. Do it! Grind ’em!”

Red did it and the disposal rose to the occasion. The preacher came into the kitchen. He said he’d heard a loud, explosive noise and hoped everything was all right.

“Everything’s fine,” said the lady. “That lousy disposal breaks down ever so often, and when it does, it makes a loud noise.”

Red bit his lip on that one. “It’s all in a day’s work,” he reminded himself. “All in a day’s work.”

The Washing Machine Story

Red told me that in a few instances he had sold an item by making the reluctant customer feel guilty about not buying it. On one occasion, a farmer had refused to buy one of Red’s new washing machines. Red had noticed an expensive new tractor sitting in the man’s back yard. After unsuccessfully trying every approach he could think of to make the sale, Red finally said in exasperation: “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

“What did you say?” the farmer shot back.

“I said you ought to be ashamed of yourself. You just bought that $3,000 tractor for yourself, but you won’t even buy a hundred-dollar washing machine for your hard-working wife.”

That stopped the farmer cold. He thought for a few seconds, then turned to his wife and said, “You want that fool thing?”

“I sure do,” she replied quietly but firmly. Red had made his sale.

Red and the “Hot Shot” Sales Expert

From time to time, Red told me, companies would bring “hot shot” sales experts to town. I asked him what it took to be such an expert. “Two things,” replied Red. “First, you have to live at least ten miles out of town. And second, you have to be ready to leave the state on short notice.”

“I remember this one hot shot who was selling vacuum cleaners. He was doing a whole lot better than I was in this particular county. I was curious to see how he did it. I was also curious about the black box he always carried with him. So one day I followed him.

“He went into this house and I went as far as the front porch. I could see and hear him through the screen door. The first thing he did was to pick up some dust from the floor and put it on the table. Then he opened the black box. There was a microscope in there! He put the dust under the microscope.

“Just what I thought,” he told the lady. “You’ve got moth eggs.”

“Moth eggs?”

“Yes Ma’am, and they’ll eat up all your drapes and curtains just as soon as they hatch.”

“What can I do?”

“The vacuum cleaner I’m selling is made especially to suck up moth eggs. What brand of cleaner do you have now?”

She told him her brand.

“Just what I thought. That’s a pretty good brand for normal cleaning, but it’s not strong enough to suck up moth eggs.”

“Well, he made the sale on the spot and the lady thanked him for saving her drapes.”

“He was a bona fide expert all right. He lived nine miles from the nearest town. And he left the state just a couple of weeks after he made that sale.”

Red and the Wrestling Match

During his salesman years before the war and before he got married, Red would go to the wrestling matches held at the armory building in Bowling Green.

“They’d be a good guy and a villain. One night I really got carried away. The villain was pokin’ this good guy in the eyes and had a hold around his neck. The good guy’s face was as red as a beet.

“I couldn’t take it anymore. I jumped into the ring and pulled that villain off his back. So the guy came at me. I was in pretty good shape at the time and I was holdin’ my own with him pretty good. And the crowd was cheerin’ me on. Then I felt some strange hand on each of my shoulders. Two police officers were standing behind me and said I’d have to go with them. The police station was only about three blocks from the armory. But for me it was a mighty long way. It seemed like I saw more than half the people I knew in town during that walk. When we got to the station they gave me a glass of cold water to cool me off. That was the last wrestling match I ever went to.”

Red Gets Local Recognition

Late in January, 2002, American Legion Post 23 in Bowling Green honored Red by giving him a lifelong membership to the post for his distinguished service during WWII. Red had received many commendations and awards for his conduct in the Pacific theaters.

The local newspaper made this a front-page story featuring a big picture of Red sitting beside an American flag. Red got congratulatory calls from a dozen or so veterans who had shared some of his experiences.

In March, 2002 a group of lawyers in town invited him to their firm for a “working lunch.” Food was catered in, and Red answered questions and told war stories. One of those present told me that they were very attentive to everything he shared with them. Red had asked me if I wanted to go with him as his guest. Unfortunately, I had made plans to be out of town on that day. I would have greatly enjoyed seeing him honored, for Red always will be one of my heroes.

Entry Completed March 24, 2002

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