Editor’s note: This is another column in Bill Boyd’s new series, “The Way It Was,” about growing up in Marysville. Bill continues to work with the Union County Historical Society to obtain information for his stories.
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It was some time in 1942, or maybe it was 1943, and I was tossing a ball around with a couple of my friends in our front yard. The ball went into the yard next door where the Hoopes family lived, and I went there to get it. That’s when I first noticed a sign in their front window. There was a blue star on that sign. I had never seen it before.
At dinner that night, I asked my parents what the blue star was. They told me the star was to honor their son, Jack, who was serving in the military. They said there were blue stars like that going up in windows all over town, wherever someone in the house was serving in the armed forces.
From that day on, I saw blue stars in a lot of windows. At one time, Bill Porter and I rode our bikes up and down the streets of Marysville, looking for blue stars. I counted them on one side of the street, and Bill counted them on the other side. I don’t recall how many we saw, but it was a bunch.
Bill and I took pride in knowing four of those servicemen. One was Bill’s cousin, “Blackie” Porter, who was a lifeguard at the swimming pool. All of us kids knew Blackie. Another, Jack Hoopes, was our next-door neighbor, so I knew him pretty well. He was about the same age as my sister, Betty.
Then there was Dudley Forry and Andy Overly. They were happy-go-lucky boys who were always doing funny things in school that made all the kids laugh. It made Bill and I both feel good that we knew those four Marysville boys who were serving their country.
Some time later, Bill Porter told me he saw a new kind of star, a gold one. He said that his dad told him the gold star meant that the serviceman in that house had been killed in action. I can’t tell you how sobering that was. It took the joy out of looking for stars in Marysville windows.
And you know those four Marysville boys that Bill and I knew … every one of them was killed in action. Jack Hoopes was an intelligence officer and his plane went down somewhere in Asia. Blackie Porter’s B-25 bomber was shot down over Burma. Dudley Forry was on a ship that sank in the South Pacific. And Andy Overly was a paratrooper and was killed in Holland.
Throughout the rest of the war, Bill and I sometimes looked for new blue stars in Marysville, but it was never as much fun as it used to be, because every now and then, we would see a new gold star, and that was really sad.
Those wishing to contact Bill Boyd can e-mail him at williamboyd514@gmail.com