Joe Uknavage, Jr. and the Civil Conservation Corps, CCC

 

In 1936 my dad, Joe Uknavage, was sixteen years old, living with his parents and younger brother in Royalton, Illinois, a poverty stricken coal mining town hit hard by the Depression. He signed up for the Civil Conservation Corps despite their rule that a man must be 18 years old, and soon was sending $25 a month home to his mother, of the $30 he was paid. That was mandated by the CCC rules.

 

 

 

 

 

The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was a work relief program that gave millions of young men employment on environmental projects during the Great Depression. From its inception in 1933 until it was disbanded when the United States became involved in WWII on December 7, 1941, more than 2.5 million men had served in more the 4,500 camps across the country. They had planted over 3 billion trees, combated soil erosion and forest fires, and occasionally dealt with natural disasters such as hurricanes, floods, and droughts. (Quote: Joseph M. Speakman, 2006)

 

Dad became a man over the next three years, working his way west in CCC camps in Illinois, Minnesota, Idaho, and California, making friends, toughening his body and his mind. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In November of 1937 he was sent home to his mother’s bedside as she lay dying. After giving birth to her fourth child in 1924, Anna Jane Devine Uknavage was advised by her doctor that another pregnancy might kill her. We believe her kidneys were failing. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anna managed that directive until 1937 when she once again found herself pregnant and ill. She died in December of 1937, age 37, leaving a married 22-yr-old daughter, Petrona Tucker, 17-yr-old son Joe,13-yr-old son Bill, and her husband, Joe Uknavage, Sr., age 50. My Dad told me that he prayed and prayed, walked the dirt roads of Wasson, Illinois, begging God to save his mother, and that when she died he lost his faith in God, so angry, so lost. 

 

He returned to the CCC and was in Tulare, California in late 1939. (In researching the CCC online I just discovered that CCC records are being digitalized and made available to family members so I have ordered my dad's. I hope to learn of all the Camps where he worked and when).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dad’s father, Joe Uknavage, Sr., died on a cold, wet day in February of 1940, in Benton, Illinois, his health eroded by alcoholism, poverty, and loneliness (my opinion). In April when the 1940 federal census was counted Dad was living in Harco, Saline County, Illinois with his Uncle Roy Devine and next door lived Dad’s sister and her husband Reuben Tucker. 

On the census form Dad’s occupation is “Leader in CCC”. Two months later, June 4, 1940, Joe Uknavage joined the US Navy and started training at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station. For the next six years he was a U. S. Navy Sailor, rising in rank from AS to BM1c, Bosun’s Mate First Class. Dad was always proud of his Naval career and before that his participation in the CCC's. In both, his leadership skills brought him success. 

In August, 2016, Joe Uknavage's granddaughter, Rachel, took her son, Simon, then age 6, to visit a memorial site in southern Illinois that featured a monument to the CCC men. She took that opportunity to tell Simon about his Gr-Grandpa Joe's service to our country, building parks, planting trees, clearing waterways. That particular monument did not have Joe Uknavage's name listed but now we know that just north of there near Springfield, in a small town named Meredosia, his Gr-Grandpa Joe was at CCC Camp 2677 in 1938.

RD’s Art – Overcoming Depression

 

One of our friends is struggling with depression right now and that brought to my mind a highly personal and sensitive subject, one RD might rather forget, but I think it is another example of his creative side and since it was such a big part of our lives I want to talk about it.

Thank God, after years of struggle, he overcame debilitating depression and I think he did it in a very creative way. At the risk of embarrassing RD by telling too much about this time of his life I will describe some of the ways he tried to come out of that deep hole he was in.

He spoke honestly with our family physician, Dr. Maynard "Mike" DeYoung at the Family Clinic and the two of them decided on a regimen of anti-depressant medicines which he took for awhile, but they didn’t help him and the side effects were not good. In his determination to help RD, Dr. DeYoung became a personal friend and he and RD went deer hunting together in the Rocky Mountains, along with a couple of Dr. DeYoung’s friends.

 

 

 

 

After gentle probing about RD’s spiritual beliefs Dr. DeYoung invited the two of us to join him and his wife Barbara at First Christian Church where we came to admire the minister there, Charlie Patchen. Some months later Dr. DeYoung told us of a Wednesday night church group that met in the basement of First Christian, and there was talk that people were getting real help from the ministry of Derin Carmack, former principal of Wellington Junior High, also lay minister. We met new, interesting people there; Loren and Sheila Crabtree became good friends and Sheila taught us both about positive affirmations, a confidence-building technique that helped.

RD also starting going to a chiropractor in town, Ole Lipiec, who treated his lower back pain using the Palmer Method of chiropractic, a gentle technique of adjustment. Soon many of our friends availed themselves of Ole Lipiec’s healing touch and we still talk of him today. He, too, became friends with RD and tried his best to heal the whole person. Ole and his wife, Kathy, moved to Maryville, Missouri, or we would still be going to him.

But the depression lingered, sometimes exacerbated by life events, but always present. After years of struggle RD finally consented to see a psychiatrist for I thought talk therapy was the answer as it had helped me when I struggled with mental health issues. RD was balking at the plan, telling me his experience in the Teams with mandatory sessions with psychologists and how he and his teammates taunted and teased them, never confiding or complying.

Right before his first appointment with the psychiatrist RD came to me with an alternate proposal for his treatment. It was “If we can afford to pay a psychiatrist, maybe instead of that we can afford to get a horse?” He went on to say that he’d always wanted a horse of his own and that the care and training of the horse just might be the medicine he needed to come out of his self-destructive thoughts and behaviors. So that’s what we did, cancelled the psychiatrist appointment and RD soon had his first horse, Rocket, a bay thoroughbred, gelding owned by a friend, Nick Chenoweth. Rocket had been returned to Nick by the trainer he hired who said Rocket was untrainable. RD thought otherwise. He and Nick soon struck a deal.

And yes, it worked! Not immediately, not overnight, but each day RD got up and went outside to work with Rocket who needed a great deal of care, understanding, and patience, for he too was damaged. Those with horses know that keeping one involves more than just clean water and a little hay. 

 

 

Soon, RD was learning where to find the best second-cutting horse hay in this area, when it was available, how the prices compared, etc. He and Rocket preferred a mix of grass and alfalfa. And we bought “sweet feed”, a grain/molasses mix that Rocket really liked and was his reward for good behavior. Ranchway Feeds was our go-to place for that. Then, big, strong tarps to cover the hay and tack, all sorts of tack including ropes, bridles, brushes, combs and saddles. RD removed ticks and dewormed but brought in a mobile veterinarian for shots and stitches and a farrier to trim hooves. If I remember right, after a couple of farriers RD took over trimming the hooves himself. Together RD and Rocket healed themselves and each other.

Rattler soon joined Rocket and became RD’s second horse. Maybe he thought Rocket needed a companion. Rattler got his name after being bit in the nose by a rattle snake when he was a colt. He was a roan quarter horse gelding and very smart. He loved to learn and didn’t have Rocket’s startle reflex. 

 

 

I recall one of the games he and RD learned to play whereby RD put some grain in an old tire and Rattler taught himself to grab the tire with his teeth and bounce it up and down on the ground as the grain hopped out. Then he ate the grain. Years after RD stopped putting grain in the tire Rattler still tested each tire in the pasture that way.

 

 

 

Nick took his herd up in the mountains for the summers then brought them down to a grazing pasture near the foothills as fall set in. One year he asked RD to feed and water the herd at that foothills pasture while he took a trip. I went along a couple of times. There was a young black horse with an injury, an ugly cut, on his forehead. We watched as he tried to eat the hay RD threw out for the herd but the other horses kept him away. Of course, RD soon came up with a way to keep the main herd occupied with their hay while he fed the little black horse away from the others. When Nick came back from his trip RD told him about the injured black horse and Nick said he’d probably have to put him down. That was the day RD became the proud owner of his third horse! 

He brought him home and gifted him to me, and let me name him, too. I named him Sid after RD’s Uncle Sidney Russell who was injured overseas in WWII and came home to Arkansas a changed man, sad and quiet. Sid was a small black quarter horse gelding with a white blaze on his nose. He was my first and only horse but RD cared for him, became quite fond of his fiesty spirit. Sid was always watching for an open gate. Only after he died did we learn from our vet Charlie Mizushima that Sid was stunted in growth due to parasites in his gut and the extreme amount of scar tissue they caused. He probably lived with a lot of  pain.

 

 

 

 

RD’s last horse, Roamer, came to us from his dad, Doyle Russell. Doyle was a staunch Democrat and may have named this horse after Governor Roy Romer, or maybe it was Roamer, as in drifter. I never knew for sure. Roamer was a white half Arabian, half wild mustang gelding. He was different from the quarter horses in temperament. One difference I recall is that he didn’t like to walk in water, as in cross a creek. But he had a good personality and we loved him. We loved all four of these horses but I know Rattler was RD’s favorite.

For the next fifteen years RD had horses, and what they brought to our lives was invaluable. He rarely rode them, aside from that eighteen months or so he hired a local cowboy to help him with training. He never put shoes on their hooves. Never needed a horse trailer. Instead he studied them and the way they interacted with birds, dogs, and people. RD trusted them and they trusted him. He learned Linda Telllington’s “The Tellington Touch” a deep massage technique that brought pain relief and calm to each of the horses. 

Thank you, Rocket, Rattler, Roamer, and Sid. And thank you, RD, for finding your own creative approach to restoring your mental health by giving of yourself to other living creatures. My respect and admiration for you grew as I observed and filmed those fifteen years of you with your horses.

RD's Art - Class 29 Book

 

In June of 2000, RD completed and published a book titled "To Be Someone Special - The Story of UDTra Class 29". It had been in the making for about a year. and is all about his Underwater Demolition Team Training Class #29 in the winter of 1962, Coronado, California.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There were 41 graduates of that class, seven officers and thirty-four enlisted men. The initial group numbered approximately four hundred enlisted men and 30 officers, but the attrition rate was steep over the twenty-six weeks of intense training as men voluntarily dropped out or were dropped due to injury. On December 10, 1962 Class 29 graduated forty-one victorious frogmen. RD was one of those enlisted men. He was also one of the nineteen enlisted men who came straight out of Navy boot camp to UDT training, a new experimental policy instituted in 1962 in an effort to improve the trainee attrition rate while not compromising the quality of training. It was successful in Class 29 and those nineteen "boots" were proud of their achievement.

After training the frogmen were assigned to either UDT 11, UDT12, or SEAL Team One, west coast Teams. They rotated from advanced training to deployments in Vietnam over the course of their enlistments. 

RD's book is about their shared experience in training, not about their time in Vietnam. In the 1960s the UDTs and newly formed SEAL Teams were secretive by design. The mystique of "The Men With Green Faces" had a huge role in their success. Nowadays with all the movies, books, and even video games about Navy SEALs the public doesn't realize the UDT/ SEAL Teams operated as a clandestine force, a secret weapon in Vietnam.

 

 

RD located and contacted as many of his classmates as he could. That in itself was quite a roller coaster ride, the reunions, the long telephone conversations, the joy at finally getting contact information on a classmate only to learn he was no longer alive. Eleven of the forty-one had died, and two he could not find. He asked the twenty-seven living teammates, seven officers, "The Magnifient Seven", and twenty enlisted, to write about their memories of training, and they did! And Jack Sudduth, OIC of the training unit, contributed his memories of training, and that class in particular. As for the thirteen who could not contribute, and a few who could but didn't, RD wrote about those men whom he remembered well yet struggled to tell their stories as they would want them told.

 

 

The book is heavily illustrated with photographs, charts, artwork, and even poems. As RD received each story from a classmate we filed it in a separate folder then searched for appropriate photographs to accompany the story. RD's memories of training, already vivid and accurate, were stimulated by what his teammates wrote. For months he re-lived and breathed his UDT training experiences in his head and his fitful sleep.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finally, in June of 2000, we took the finished manuscript, created on our home PC, to Kinkos, ordered fifty copies of the 180 pieces of paper, most printed on both sides, brought those back home where we formed an assembly line on the big flat surface of a bed, and walked up and down with armloads of papers, making RD's book. We hadn't numbered any of the pages for a couple of reasons so it was essential we not make mistakes in the page order as we assembled fifty books. Then back to Kinkos to have them bound with coil binding and clear plastic front and back covers. 

This was a huge undertaking by RD, born of love for the Teams and his desire to share his memories with his classmates, let them know what they meant to him. He never intended to make the book available to the public therefore most people don't know about this creative project of RD's. The books were well received by his classmates, treasured even, well...except for one. One of RD's closest friends in Class 29 was married to a woman who insisted he walk away from his experience in the Teams and not look back. She was offended by the booklet RD sent out, a preview of the book, with Team art included, a humorous thing. Perhaps she had her husband's best interests at heart. We'll never know. It was she who wrote to RD and told him to stop corresponding with her husband. It made him angry and broke his heart but he did what she asked, no, she demanded. And he made the offhand comment to me that the guy always did have a problem with the women in his life.

Throughout this class's training RD's boat crew excelled but it was during Hell Week they really pulled ahead, so much so the instructors suspected that somehow they had sneaked in an outboard motor. But no, they truly were an exceptional crew with six enlisted men and ENS William T. White III as coxswain. RD tried to explain the dynamics of that to me several times but I didn't really understand. I came away with this...Mr. White knew the water, the waves, and how to read them from his experience surfing all his life and his crew trusted him completely. They won Hell Week and secured early, a big thing. RD was surprised to learn that thirty-eight years later Jack Sudduth still believed Boat Crew 6 must have cheated. No, they were really that good!

 

 

At some point when there was discussion about naming the book RD suggested "Yesterday's Wine", after Willie Nelson's song with that title. He created a cover using that theme. But he was outvoted and the other cover with Barney House's art was preferred. When we assembled the books I made one with RD's Yesterday's Wine cover for I think it says a lot about him and his relationship to these men.

RD's Art - the Shop and the Weasel

 

After RD's military service in the Sixties, a sailor in the Navy's Underwater Demolition Team ELEVEN, he lived in Houston a short while before returning to his folks' place just north of Wellington, Colorado. The transition from the UDT/SEAL Teams to civilian life in the 1960s where the mood of the country was anti-war and anti-warrior, took some time.

 

He and two friends, Larry Johnson and Bill West, built a 30'x50' wood-framed machine shop on RD’s parents' property, applied for a license to run a garage, and started a business. RD and Bill were business partners with Bill bringing to the table his expertise and skill in operating the flame cutter and metal lathe.

 

 

RD recalls a particularly challenging and fun project for Western Scientific Services. He located a WWII military amphibious track vehicle, a Weasel, in the scrap yard at the Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, and brought it back to the Russell Garage. No doubt, it was RD's UDT experience which prompted this solution to Western Scientific's need. Finding the Weasel in a place where WWII vehicles go to die is so 1960s UDT where funds were scarce and cumshaw a skill. UDT 11 Chief Gagliardi was a cumshaw pro.

 

The Weasel needed work as its Studebaker engine was undersized for the use planned for this vehicle in the deep snow of the Colorado Rockies. So RD and Bill replaced the engine with a more powerful Ford engine. I don't imagine that was a quick and simple job.

 

 

 

The Weasel is probably scrap again, up near Leadville, Colorado, a place that often has the reputation of being the coldest place in our nation.

That was over fifty years ago so Western Scientific's weather station has long since been replaced by modern technology. But as long as RD and Bill West are around to tell their stories, and people like me write about creative projects, the Weasel lives.

RD's Art - The Articulated Man

 

This unusual piece was designed to be the pilot of a simulated spacecraft RD built called the Stealth Machine. I will write up the story of that project later but this guy is a stand alone piece of wood sculpture. RD named him The Articulated Man. Made of wood, plywood, nuts, bolts, and glue, he can be positioned in many ways, much like an arthritic human.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We particularly like his hands and fingers which bend in all the joints. Even the thumb moves, as Bella was intrigued to find. I like his feet too.

 

 

 

 

 

Bella recently helped her grandpa loosen some connections and tighten others so that his flexibility was improved. (Not Grandpa's flexibility, but that would have been nice.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

RD made this sculpture over several months’ time in late 2003, about the time grandson Lucas was born. The Articulated Man has hung out in the basement these last twenty years and yesterday Lucas gave him a new home in the greenhouse, brought him out into the light of day.

RD's Art - Greeting Cards

 

Some of RD’s artwork is serious work, like the oil paintings and sculptures, but when he draws and illustrates greeting cards his whimsical side is on display.This Christmas card is special to me because he drew our home so well.

 

 

 

 

This card of Congratulations was for Bill and Linda Hartwig when they built their new home in Terry Shores.

 

 

 

 

 

And this Thank You card was for my brother and his wife and son after we visited them in Sierra Vista, Arizona in 1977.

 

 

 

 

 

This last card was for me, and it’s my favorite. Drawn on 8-1/2”x11” paper, 4 separate pages stapled together to create a wedding anniversary card, I really love the sentiment and the way RD depicted himself, really treasure this expression of his love.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Thank you, Bob.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In conclusion, RD has made colorfully illustrated party invitations, anniversary cards, letterhead, and announcements about events that bring a smile when received in the mail. The very first announcement I recall is this one for our 1957 Chevy.