The ep13 War Clouds-World War I

This is Jimmy Powers coming your way with another Grantland Rice story. This is Jimmy Powers transcribed. Today from the Granny Rice's best-selling autobiography, The Tomb of the Shouting,

we take you back to the period of World War I. It was 1918. Granny was no youngster. He'd been established even then as the most widely read sports columnist in America. But let's see what he had to say about this particular period.

I'll pick up his narrative in first person that reads like this. When the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917, I was 37 and had been banging away for the Tribune Syndicate for four years.

Quite a string of papers were using the sport-like column, and my pay amounted to $300 a week. In December of that year, I handed over all my securities, totaling about $75,000, to a lawyer for safe keeping.

If I didn't come back, at least they remained a tidy chunk for my two girls. Then I enlisted as a private in the infantry. On December 5, 1917, a bitter cold day, I pulled out of New York headed for the balmy old south.

It was five above and snowing when our train chugged into Greenville, South Carolina. We were marched to Camp Sevier and issued gear, a pup tent and miscellaneous paraphernalia. My tent had a rent in it as big as a frying pan.

The next morning, when I awoke, I found myself up to my ears in snow and mud. The cold I got that first night in the sunny south lasted until the armistice. The majority of our outfit consisted of southern farm boys.

The fact that I was older than most and knew my left foot from my right probably had a lot to do with my becoming a sergeant drill instructor and then a candidate for officer training.