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telling jokes.”
    So many of his friends and sweethearts remember his constant laughter. And he liked to dance, and that broke some ice with the girls.
    Marion tried to find words to describe what it was like being around Franklin Sousley, and then shook her head. “You can’t imagine how much fun that boy was,” she said. And then she brightened up with a memory: “The most fun was when it snowed at Christmas. Franklin would get his family’s horse and wagon and we’d get on the sled and go out to the farm and cut Christmas trees and sing carols, and we’d ride around and distribute those trees, so everyone would get one at the same time.”
    As Franklin ripened to young manhood, his ventures with the girls stayed innocent. “Franklin liked the girls and we’d chase them,” J. B. Shannon remembers. “But did we make progress? Well, we were young innocent boys and we thought we did. At least we’d brag about it, lie about it to each other.”
     
    The Second World War hovered in the far distant background of Franklin’s boyhood. News of its great battles and gossip about the fates of local servicemen filled the air at Hilltop as he cavorted and studied and helped Goldie in her struggles with the farm. There is no indication that Franklin paid it much attention. He was only six when Japan invaded Manchuria; Hitler’s sweep through Europe had begun when he was only thirteen. By the time he’d graduated from high school, in June of 1943, there was reason to be hopeful in both theaters. The staticky radio broadcasts that he and Goldie listened to—when they weren’t tuned in to Waite Hoyt calling the Cincinnati Reds on summer afternoons and evenings; Goldie was a big baseball fan—were telling tales of victory both in Europe and in the Pacific.
    In the first American land battle of the war the Marines had captured Guadalcanal that past February, and the Germans had surrendered at Stalingrad. In March, the British Eighth Army under Montgomery broke through the Mareth Line in Tunisia; a couple of months later, German and Italian troops surrendered there. The Allies were driving toward Sicily at about the time Franklin’s small graduating class was receiving its diplomas. And from the Pacific, the radio commentators had been sending stirring reports of U.S. Navy and Marine victories with names such as Midway and Tarawa.
    All of that sounded just fine to the people in the hills and hollows of eastern Kentucky. Franklin began dating in his last year of high school, escorting Frances Jolly or Marion Hamm to church, to the movies, or just for a walk in the woods.
    But upon graduation, Franklin Sousley was more concerned with finding a way to shore up his struggling mother’s finances than dating or fighting for his country. Goldie came first, so he went straight to work at a Frigidaire plant in Dayton, across the Ohio border to the north. He lived in a small apartment at 107 Park Drive.
    He was sending money back home to Goldie from his paycheck as an eighteen-year-old staker and propeller assembler in Plant No. 2 when, in January 1944, Uncle Sam sent him a telegram. On that day, rather than accept his fate as an Army infantryman, Franklin Sousley—the hijinking hill boy who’d fight a running sawmill—made up his mind to become a U.S. Marine.
    It had been a jolt for Goldie when Franklin had gone off to Dayton, farther away from Hilltop than she had ever traveled. When she learned that the man in her life was off to the Marines, all she could do was hope for the best and pray to her Lord.
    Now eighteen-year-old Franklin, who had smiled his way throughout his difficult boyhood, was off to another world. He spoke of his “duty as a man,” but his friend J. B. Shannon remembers that Franklin was “just a big country boy, unafraid of anything.”
    Franklin was a “good ol’ boy” off to fight in the “good war.” What could possibly go wrong?
    Harlon Block: Rio Grande Valley, Texas
    Harlon Block is the figure