SOUTH CAROLINA: Home for a Hero

Spartanburg, S.C. was torn between pride and embarrassment this autumn when a local boy named Thomas Eugene Atkins came home a hero. Few soldiers of World War II had fought more gallantly—with his hip shattered by a bullet, the rest of his platoon dead around him in the Luzon jungles, quiet, steady-eyed Pfc. Gene Atkins had kept “taking a sight” on Jap attackers, had killed 44 of them. He had been flown home on a bomber to meet the President and get the Congressional Medal of Honor. But when he got back to Spartanburg, the hero had to be viewed in exceedingly unheroic surroundings.

Home to Gene Atkins meant a wretched rural slum. His father was a sharecropper in the Hogback Mountain region, where tenant farms are rich only in ragged children, moonshine stills and Redbone hounds. The hero and his hill bride had little chance of escaping poverty. Broke, Gene Atkins was resigned to spend his $300 mustering-out pay for a stock—mule, harness, turning plow, singlefoot, geewhiz, section harrow, planter and wagon—and then sharecropping cotton on another man’s land.

A ruddy, gray-haired county doctor, A. R. Walden, thought that a hero should come home to something better. He wrote a letter, mailed it with $100 to the Spartanburg Herald-Journal:

“… Editorials and medals are fine but they will not help greatly in earning a living after the heat of war is over. I would like to see Spartanburg County show this boy we appreciate what he has done by buying him a home of his own.”

Dollars, Half Dollars, Quarters. Publisher William A. Townes agreed. Next day the Herald-Journal suggested that its readers send contributions for a Thank You Farm for Gene Atkins. Spartanburg’s radio stations joined in the campaign. The response was wonderful. The Herald-Journal got few contributions for as much as $100 but thousands of dollars, half dollars, and quarters flooded in through the mail. In three weeks the people of Spartanburg County donated $7,500.

Last week Thank You Farm—the 62-acre J. W. Turpin place, a half mile west of Arthur Jackson’s store on the paved highway—was bought and it was almost ready for Gene Atkins and his young wife.

Two thousand dollars were still left in the fund, and lumber and materials for a house (with electric lights and a bathroom) were on order. Powell’s Furniture Store of Inman had promised to furnish the front room. The First Baptist Church of Landrum had donated a Bible, the Orange Crush Co. a mule, and other gifts were still coming in—an electric pump, fertilizer, pecan trees, dishes.

Government agencies were helping Gene plan to make his land a model farm. Secretary of Agriculture Clinton Anderson had agreed to come to the farm from Washington, D.C. for a dedication.

Everybody in Spartanburg County was certain that 24-year-old Gene Atkins would be a success and a great credit to the community. Wrote the ladies of the Cross Anchor Methodist Church: “It is men like you, Pfc. Atkins, that makes this America of ours the wonderful place it is.”