I have been having some trouble finding things to write about. My grandfather passed away on Christmas Eve this year, and it seems to have zapped all creative thinking from my head. The resolution, or so I hope, is to tell the story of his life. This will in theory give me a bit of catharsis, as well as give everyone else out there a glimpse into the life of the man that I always knew as “Pop”. This is not an easy thing for me to write. Even in the first paragraph, I am struggling to hold back tears. I don’t expect anyone to ever really read this, but never the less I feel the need to write.
(Full disclosure; bits of this were paraphrased from the wonderful eulogy that the pastor did at his funeral. The personal stories were hard to write, but mean the world to us.)
April 7th, 1918 was a day like any other, for the time. The “Red Baron” was still shooting down planes, as World War One was still raging on even as Churchill was urging the talks with Russia to end it. Al Jolson was at the top of the charts with “Rock-a-bye Your Baby” and in the rural area of Goochland Virginia, a rare snow was falling. Clifton Conway Nuckols was born into a family of four siblings and two proud parents Linton and Jennie.
As my grandfather grew up on a small farm, he learned early on the harshness of the country. He was born into a farming family, and that is what he did. When the New York Stock Exchange crashed in 1929 he still did what he had always done, farm. Things were hard, but the family was made of harder stuff. Growing up in a strict Baptist family meant no dancing, no playing cards, and no drinking. This didn’t matter to much to Pop because he had enough to do between chores on the farm and going to school. In 1931 he would start the eighth grade. Back then, eighth grade was part of the high school and he attended Caldwell High in Goochland. Sometime soon he contracted Rheumatic fever and had to miss a great deal of school because of it. So the family decided that he would drop out of school and work on the farm full time.
Deep in the throes of the Great Depression, the country was just scraping by. The Nuckols farm certainly was no different. Though they didn’t have a lot of money, they had plenty of food and plenty of work to keep a growing boy busy. Working hard was one thing that my grandfather never lost. Even far into the days when he SHOULD have sat around being old and crotchety, he was still outside cleaning the gutters or fixing something. He would help you in a second do pretty much anything you asked.
Years later this trait would land him a job that would not only support him but the family he would raise. In 1940 he was given a job with VEPCO. He worked initially as a lineman and moved up to service. This was not only steady work, but taught him a trade that he would use the rest of his life to helping anyone that needed it.
That same year, as luck would have it, he strolled into a cafeteria across from the John Marshall Hotel and would meet the love of his life. Margaret (my grandmother, naturally) was working there and going to school to learn the ins and outs of a machine called a “Comptometer“. (It was, at the time, the fastest and most sophisticated adding machine on the market.) They began dating and all was well until December 7th, 1941, and World War 2.
On July 17th, 1942, a 5 foot 5 inch, 133lb, twenty-two-year-old, private Clifton Conway Nuckols was drafted into the US Army. Like many drafted at the time, he was just a farm boy trying to make a living as best he could when he was called up to serve. His training in boot camp would take him all over the country. Places he probably never thought about seeing before like Texas, New Jersey, Arizona, and even California.
In March of 1943, his training would be completed and he was given the rank of Corporal. Best of all, he was given leave for a few weeks. He rushed home to be with his, then-girlfriend, Margaret. On his birthday April 7th, 1943 Margaret and Conway were married. Years later he would joke that the only reason why they had been married on that day was that he would never have to worry about remembering his anniversary.
Months later, on July 6th, 1944, my grandfather was on the Queen Mary headed across the Atlantic ocean. Headed directly into war. Exactly one month later on August 6th, 1944 he would land on Utah Beach as part of the Normandy offensive. One of the biggest regrets my grandfather ever had was that on this day, unbeknownst to him, his first child (Brenda) was being born thousands of miles away, and he wasn’t able to be there.
In the European theater, he was a member of the 3rd Army 80th Division, Artillery Unit 314 serving under General George S. Patton. His skills that he had learned years earlier at VEPCO would come in handy once again as he was part of communications between the front lines and the artillery during the Battle of the Bulge. As an odd side note, my grandfather on my mother’s side (Conway) was calling in the artillery that was protecting troops. One of those troops would be my grandfather on my father’s side. A strange touch of fate that they would be working together before they ever knew who each other were.
Pop would later tell stories of the war, and what he had seen and done. The stories had all of us enthralled. Amazing as they were, it was more amazing to hear them from him. He never once talked about the vast majority of things he had seen and done during his time overseas, until that moment. Much of it he kept to himself and would never share for reasons we [family] may never know or want to know. The stories he did tell were simply amazing. I will share just a couple that always makes me happy I heard them.
Two such stories took place in the dead of night in between battles with Nazi forces. As my grandfather was in a convoy of jeeps and artillery, they were climbing a mountain on a skinny road almost under total darkness. The convoy at some point stopped for one reason or another, most likely to avoid detection. My grandfather told the driver he was riding with he was going to jump out and take a leak, and so he did. Upon reentering the jeep and the lights coming back on, he realized that two feet in front of where he had stopped to pee was the side of a cliff that surely would have plunged him to his death.
During the same trek across the countryside, the convoy came under fire, and, according to my grandfather, a sniper’s bullet came close enough to his face that it sounded like a bee flying through the jeep. When the convoy decided to stop for the night, the troops each tried to find a place to sleep the night away. My grandfather found a nice quiet patch of bushes and laid down his heavy jacket then laid upon that to sleep. The next morning when he got up to rejoin his rank, he moved his jacket to find that he had laid it down perfectly onto a family of snakes. Either that or they found him in the night and decided to curl up next to the best heat source they could find.
The only thing else my grandfather ever told us about was when he was in a blown-out town and was searching buildings. He would almost literally stumble upon a German soldier. Luckily he was, apparently, faster on the draw than the German man was and was able to take him, prisoner. He took his German Luger and would bring the weapon home with him, one of his only real souvenirs of his time during the war. One thing that my grandfather was always proud of was that he never killed anyone during the war, at least to the best of his knowledge.
One of the last things that he participated in during the war would haunt him for the rest of his life. His division was responsible for the overtaking and liberation of the Buchenwald death camp. The horrible things he must have seen there, I can only imagine were hard for him, or anyone for that matter, to ever forget.
Finally, on October 18th, 1945 my grandfather boarded the Blue Ridge Victory. He, along with many MANY other troops were going home to their families. The ship itself was so crowded, in fact, that he had to sleep in the lifeboats. He was sick the entire trip, but it was all worth it. He was going home. Home to a loving wife, a new daughter whom he had never met, and the promise of a life fresh and new. He would carry with him the stories of those that he saw fall in combat and the atrocities that he encountered along his travels. He was also awarded the Presidential Unit Citation, A European Theater Award with four stars, and a Bronze Star for Meritorious Service. Though he never really discussed the war, it stuck with him. Years later he still had many nights of fitful sleep. My grandmother sometimes caught the brunt of it, and though she may have never understood what he was living with, she knew why. She would say simply “He’s still fighting a war.”
The years would come and go with many blessings in my grandfather’s life. He would have two more daughters, Betty (my mother) and Robin. They would go on to give him four grandchildren and then they would have two great-grandchildren. I can vividly remember all the good times. I honestly cannot think of something bad to say about the man. He lived honestly, and never asked for anything. He was happy to live in the moment of family and the love they surrounded him in. I remember all the times we would go to my grandparents’ house to have a cookout. The sheer number of hot dogs that we all cooked using those make-shift cookers he made is astronomical, I’m sure.
I remember when we went to the beach one year and Pop managed to catch a goose with his bare hands. He was holding the good calmly and asked if I wanted to pet it. “It won’t hurt you.” I can hear him saying, moments before the goose, in fact, did bite me. I remember all the (unsuccessful) fishing trips that we took together. I remember (and he would kill me to tell this story) when we got back from a fishing trip with my family and went to visit him. He was standing on the asphalt driveway (which he did himself) and he sneezed. When he did, his teeth literally shot out of his mouth and went skipping across the pavement. He quickly scooped them up and popped them back in. And we never spoke of it again.
He was responsible for teaching me how to ride a bike, something that my grandmother would never let him forget. I was probably ten years old and still didn’t know how to ride the bike I got for Christmas years earlier. Pop put me on the seat, took me to the top of the hill at his house, and gave me a push. It was do or do not, there was no try. I peddled as hard as I could to keep up with the bike, and in that simple moment, he taught me a life lesson. Get out there and do it. Succeed or fail, whatever happens, at least you did your best.
My grandfather was never one for much emotion. I don’t know if that was just a part of his upbringing or just a direct result of being a part of World War 2, but he was never without a smile. I think I only saw him give hugs to my grandmother on a few occasions, and on one rare occasion, I believe he may have even kissed her. (Obviously, something more happened behind closed doors.) However, he was never EVER not ready to give a hug to the kids. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t get a hug from him. Up until the last time I saw him he always had a smile for you and would ask you how your day was. He was always ready to hear any “good news” you had to share and was always willing to listen to anything interesting you might have to tell him.
In the end, he had been living with prostate cancer for years. Though he never really showed it, I am sure that it was a constant struggle for him to put on a happy face. He died on Christmas Eve 2011, surrounded by the ones he loved the most. Though this is a horrible situation for anyone, he was happy. He was at home, he didn’t have to suffer, and his family was by his side. That Christmas was probably the saddest thing I have ever had to go through. Even saying that though, as a family, we were all together. Telling stories, making jokes about the good times, and shedding tears over the bad. We were together, and it is all he would have ever wanted. At his funeral, he was given a military burial, though without the playing of traditional “Taps”, thankfully. I held it together through most of the service until the final salute.
My grandfather was a great man, probably more than I will ever know. He left behind a legacy of love and devotion. Both to his country and God but most importantly to him, his family. He will most certainly be missed. And as the words are blurred through the tears, I can’t help but smile to think about him calling and asking “how the weather is over there” even when he only lived five miles from my house. I guess that’s the best way to remember him, though– Doing all the things he loved to do and being with the people he loved most. My 2yr old son asked me the day after he died “where’s Poppa?” Holding back the tears as best I could, I told him that he had to go see his family. My grandfather outlived his entire immediate family. I can’t imagine what that must be like to literally be the last one. The sorrow he must have held inside all those years seeing his mother, father, brothers, and sisters all pass away before him. Where ever he is now, I hope he is resting comfortably. Take it easy for a while, you’ve earned it. I love you Pop, and I miss you.
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