1941 LOUISIANA MANEUVERS

I was thirteen years old and preparing to go into El Dorado High School in the Fall. The U.S. Government announced that thousands of soldiers from all over the country would be commencing maneuvers in Louisiana to train for entry into World War II, which was destined in the near future. My home town is only 15 miles north of the Louisiana state line on U. S. Highway 167.

I had been delivering daily newspapers for about a year at the time. One of the owners of the newspaper offerred a job to the carriers to sell daily newspapers to the troops. The cost of the newspapers was 3 cents, and the delivery boys could sell them at 5 cents each to the soldiers. The transportation to the maneuver area would be furnished. All we had to do was go to the office at 3:00 am and pick up several hundred papers, and then we would be taken into the fields where the soldiers were bivouacked and offer them for sale. This would provide a profit of 2 cents per paper sold. (Not bad, for a boy of 13, if he sold a lot of papers!).

For weeks and weeks the soldiers, trucks and equipment poured through our town. Day and night the mighty roar of trucks, all loaded with personnel and equipment could be heard. Also the constant stream of marching soldiers could be seen for miles and miles along the highway going south to Louisiana.

We would follow the soldiers and would sell at least 100 papers each day, sometimes more. Most of these men were from up North somewhere, and we found them to be very polite, even though the heat, chiggers and mosquitos were almost unbearable. We would go out into the woods along the highway to sell the papers. There were pup-tents as far as the eye could see, and sometimes, they would offer us coffee at the "mess-tents" when they were having breakfast.

Then came December 7, 1941. PEARL HARBOR! No one knows how many of those servicemen were involved in World War II. I personally knew several that served during this war. Some of them had sold newspapers to soldiers on maneuvers before the start of that war.