Sunday, May 19, 2024
Remembering Uncle Bob
Robert Lee “Uncle Bob” Saunders was an early-day resident of Gatesville and the son of one of Gatesville’s early business pioneers. Born in 1880 in Gatesville, Uncle Bob had many memories and stories from his childhood which, later in life, he put in writing during the 1940s and 1950s for The Gatesville Messenger in a weekly column titled “Down Memory Lane.”
According to John Frank Post, editor of the Gatesville Messenger from 1946-1978, “Mr. Saunders composed his Down Memory Lane columns from his West Main Street home in the shadow of the county courthouse dome. Deadline time would find him hunched square-shouldered over his small desk pecking away at his typewriter.” Post continued, “disdaining the rules of grammar and political correctness, he wrote like he talked – straight and plain-speaking. He was spared any tedious research, as his gifted memory supplied him with facts that he could weave into his own inimitable embroidery, using colorful anecdotes, local history, and happenings. Yes, Uncle Bob knew how to juice up a story.”
Post recalled that the “Down Memory Lane” column was a hit with the readers of the newspaper from the beginning. Post said that Uncle Bob’s close friends felt he viewed his writing as a “gift to his generation and a legacy to generations to come.”
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The following is an excerpt of Uncle Bob’s Down Memory Lane column that appeared in the December 7, 1951, edition of The Gatesville Messenger:
Fort Hood isn’t Coryell’s First Army Installation – Remember Camp Martin?
Throughout the years Coryell County has always done her part when it come to furnishing manpower for the army in the wars that our fair southland has been interested in. The first draft for manpower was in 1861, when our Coryell County boys, John T. Grant, Crockett King, and others – joined up and marched away to fight for the Southern Confederacy. Then again in 1898 quite a number of our Coryell County boys volunteered to help Uncle Sam whip the Spaniards in what was known as the Spanish – American War.
But at no time in the history of Coryell County did we have any army camps in the county, with the exception of Camp Martin, which was located down at Pecan Grove, when Captain Henry Sadler was training his company of soldiers in World War I. That company of home boys were in camp such a short time before they moved to Camp Bowie in Fort Worth that most of us have forgotten that we ever had soldiers in camp that close to the town of Gatesville. Of course, Uncle Sam didn’t have to lease or buy any land down at Pecan Grove, as Uncle Frank Martin was only too glad to have our local soldier boys pitch camp under the big pecan trees on his land. Weren’t those boys on their way to help whip Kaiser Bill of Germany and make the world safe for Democrats?
Everybody in the town of Gatesville who had transportation would drive down to Pecan Grove and visit Captain Sadler and his lieutenants, Chess Sadler, and Loraine Burt, and all the others. This was back in 1917, and most of our boys who were shipped to Europe finally came back home in good shape and took up their vocations as if they had done no army service, but of course, that was to be expected, for that’s the kind of manpower raised in Coryell County.
In 1940, [prior to World War II], all our National Guard companies were sworn into Federal service, and the government leased a large body of land on the outskirts of Brownwood and hurriedly built barracks for any army camp. That is where our own Texas 36th Division trained under my old friend and school chum, General Claud V. Birkhead. General Birkhead shipped his division in good shape, and you all saw his division on the road as he brought them through Gatesville on the way to maneuvers in Louisiana. This was the largest body of soldiers and equipment that we natives had ever seen.
When our Congress declared war [World War II], there was a big job ahead for the Federal government. They met it by drafting our manpower and, of course, they had to have camps to train all these draftees. We of Coryell County knew that we would be called upon to furnish our prorata part of the manpower, for well did the Federal government win the war, but we didn’t expect to be called on to surrender 138,000 acres of Coryell land.
Our people had to grin and bear it, for the government first condemned all this land for army purposes, put as they thought a reasonable price on it, and told our folks in the southern part of the county to take it or leave it, which in plain language meant get your stuff together and move so we can build a camp to train soldiers. That’s how come vast Camp Hood, named after our own Texas brigadier general John B. Hood, came to exist.
