Alfred D Guion

AT DELL AVENUE

        As Lincoln Avenue was the home of my childhood and boyhood, 71 Dell Avenue, Mount Vernon, was the home of my youth and early married life.  There I emerged from High School, started a business, married and began bringing up a family.

It may have been the fact that my mother had to live very economically that the value of the dollar was early impressed on my growing mind and the advantage of a savings account became important.  My mother paid me ten cents a day for cleaning ashes from the furnace and stoking it in the winter time, and once a week rolling the ash barrel from the cellar door at the back of the house to the curb in front for the ash man to collect.  I took great pride in watching my savings account grow, which enabled me eventually to…

The following memories are quotes from “Reminiscences of Alfred D.  Guion, written in 1960 while he was on a four-months “around the world” freighter trip.

The story of my boyhood would not be complete if I failed to mention my sisters and my favorite cousins and playmates – the Duryees – Adele, Nan and Dudley.  Dud was my own age, the girls a few years older.  Adele, who was three or four years my senior, seemed, at my age, to be old.  Their father, whom I called Uncle Eddie, was my mother’s cousin, and although he had perfectly good and respectable parents he turned out to be the black sheep of the family.  Alcohol was the cause.  In these days we would have regarded his failing as a disease and taken medical means to correct it, but at that time no such charitable view was taken.  My mother, who always…

Tippi (Tuxie) and Freckles (Orange Tabby)

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USS Montpelier

From: The Secret Diary of an American Sailor, Seaman First Class, James J. Fahey aboard the USS Montpelier :

2 August – All hands rose at 4:30 am because of storm warnings, the ships turned back 110 miles from Shanghai.  A typhoon is heading towards our position.  We will then travel south and patrol around until the danger passes.  The sea was full of enormous swells today.

3 August – It was very chilly on the midnight to 4 am watch.  The sea was very rough.  All hands were up for sunrise General Quarters at 4:30 am.  We were to refuel the destroyers today but could not because of the condition of the ocean.

The radio reported that 820 B-29 super forts hit Japan — 819 planes returned to their home bases.  It was the largest raid in history.  They dropped 6600 tons of bombs.

Clement Attlee…

Major Hugh Paul Seagrim

Major Hugh Paul Seagrim

For all the heroes that became famous, there are just as many that did heroic deeds which, for them, was their duty. One of them, British Major Hugh Paul Seagrim, dedicated his life to resisting Japanese forces when they invaded Burma.

Seagrim was born in Hampshire, England in 1909. He was schooled at Norwich and then joined the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. In 1929 he obtained a commission in the British Indian army. He was sent to Burma and before long was accepted by the Karens, forming close friendships.

British in Burma

Burma, now called Myanmar, is situated west of Laos and Thailand in Southeast Asia. It was a colony of Great Britain from 1886 until 1948. The different major ethnic groups living in Myanmar are Burmans, Karen, Shan, Chinese, Mon, and Indian.

Most Indonesian countries regarded the British as haughty foreigners…