NEWS

The distinctive blue star on a white background and a red border indicated the home of a military service member. If the service member was killed, the blue star was replaced with a gold star.

Five Griffith brothers left their family home in Davidson to serve in WWII

Veterans Day approaches. As the Town readies itself to honor those who have served in the U.S. Armed Forces, both living and dead, in times of war or peace, many people in our area are taking the time to remember their own service as well as the service and sacrifice of their family members. This year, the Town’s annual Veterans Day service will be followed by the long-awaited dedication ceremony for the new Veterans Monument. People will gather to remember and to share.

For those who have served in the U.S. Armed Forces, there are priceless recollections of their time in service. Some memories may be heavy to bear, while other memories are thrilling, amusing, joyful. The stories of veterans may have been told again and again to friends and loved ones; or they may remain locked away, waiting for the right place and time to be told.

In an effort to capture these American stories, journalists, archivists, and community historians, like the Davidson Historical Society, seek out stories from veterans and their family members. The children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews of America’s veterans have saved letters and photographs, mementoes and recollections of their family members who served. They carry these memories and want the stories to be shared.

A watercolor of the Griffith home, painted by Davidson artist Jane Ellithorpe, captures the Griffith home as the family would have known it during the 1940s-early 1970s. Built in approximately 1924, the home fronted onto South Main Street with acreage behind it for the dairy farm.

One local family’s story of service and sacrifice, one of so many, was written down in careful detail as a tribute to the Griffith family of Davidson by a son-in-law who married the second oldest daughter of that large and memorable family.

In the winter of 1999, Daniel Joseph Cleary, Jr. was inspired to write the extraordinary history of the five Griffith brothers who all served in WWII, and of their widowed mother, five sisters, and younger brother who remained behind in the family home, bearing the worry and the loneliness of absence.

When Cleary completed writing the remarkable history, he submitted the text to the Davidson Historical Society. The manuscript was entitled, “A Unique Davidson Family in World War II: The Family of Mabel and Thomas Moore Griffith.” Cleary made several presentations about the family’s history over the next few years to groups in and around Davidson. The five Griffith brothers who served in WWII all came home safely and went on to live full, rich lives.

Program prepared by Daniel J. Cleary Jr.

Cleary himself had a long military career. He joined the Army as a volunteer shortly after Pearl Harbor in 1942 and served until 1963, almost continuously as an Airborne Infantry officer. He served in both WWII and the Korean conflict. When he retired from the Army in 1963, he was the longest continuously serving Army paratrooper on active duty. After retiring from the Army, he continued to serve the military as a civilian, teaching Army Logistics for over 20 years before returning to the Davidson area to retire on the shores of Lake Norman. He was a faithful regular attendee at the early Davidson Veterans Day program, often accompanied by a Griffith brother-in-law. He greatly admired fellow Veteran John Tobin and local PostMistress Elaine Funderburk for inaugurating the annual patriotic remembrance.

Cleary made dozens of copies of his manuscript, which were carefully preserved by his daughter, Pat Butler. Butler lives with her husband in Mooresville. Along with 31 cousins who are all descended from the Griffith siblings, Butler is a proud representative of a devoted and close-knit family that loves to get together and share their family’s remarkable stories. Butler is understandably proud of her father’s well-researched homage to the Griffith family. She provided a copy of the 1999 manuscript, slightly yellowed with age, to News of Davidson. Cleary’s text and his daughter Pat’s recollections, along with her recent interview of her Uncle Ben, the one Griffith son who was too young to serve in WWII, serve as the basis for most of this article.

Patricia Cleary Butler shown with her parents Anne Griffith Cleary and Veteran Daniel J. Cleary Jr. U.S. Army Retired

Cleary writes that he was introduced to the Griffith family in 1944 while courting Miss Annie Griffith, the second of the five Griffith daughters. He first met Anne when he was a young Airborne 2nd Lt., while he was on a short trip to Myrtle Beach. Stationed at Camp Mackall and “getting ready to go to Europe to do battle,” Cleary recounts that he owned a car but had no gas rations. His friends pooled their gas ration tickets and Cleary offered them all a ride to Charlotte. The young men wanted to take a trip to Charlotte to enjoy the nightlife before being shipped off. Cleary had other ideas. He dropped his friends off in Charlotte and then drove straight to the Griffith home in Davidson to see Anne “for some serious courting.”

“As I drove into the Griffith side yard road, I noticed the large front window, even as it is today, nearest the door, was completely covered by five blue starred flags, each of them representing a Griffith son in the service,” writes Cleary.

Young Cleary was overwhelmed by the sacrifice and patriotism of the Griffith family. The stars, and their meaning, took his breath away. The service flag, also called a Blue Star Flag, was designed and patented during WWI. The flag became the unofficial symbol of a child in service. He wrote of the moment: “Five Stars! Five Sons!”

From his first visit to the Griffith home, Cleary writes that that his greatest respect was reserved for the widowed mother of the five fighting sons. “What a Lady!” he exclaimed in his recollection.

William and Melvin (Unk) Twin Brothers and Mabel

Mabel Griffith had lost her husband, Tom, to cancer in 1940. While working as the Superintendent of the Southern Cotton Oil Company, Thomas Griffith built the family home on South Main Street and developed the Griffith Dairy Farm on the land. Mabel ran the household and filled it with 12 children, seven sons and five daughters. One of the Griffith children, a son, died in infancy.

Tom was serving his fourth term as Davidson’s mayor when he became ill and died at age 49. Cleary writes that Tom, during his tenure as mayor, "built a modern sewage treatment plant and purchased the land at the end of the street today named South Street, where today Mimosa Cemetery and McEver Baseball Field are located. Both Tom and Mabel are buried today, at the heart of the Griffith family gravesites, in that same Mimosa Cemetery.”

After Tom’s death, Mabel carried on raising her growing children while keeping the dairy farm going under “the patient guidance” of Logan Houston, an experienced Davidson farmer and community leader who had worked alongside Tom for years to operate the dairy farm.

The five Griffith brothers represented by the five blue starred flags faced harsh and harrowing tours of duty, but they all came home safely from the war. Details of their war experiences, their later careers, and family life are laid out in great detail in Cleary’s manuscript. Printed below, with special gratitude to Daniel Cleary for his remarkable storytelling and his daughter Pat Butler’s permission to share it here, is a summary of the WWII experiences of the five oldest Griffith sons, and the story of the devoted mother, sisters, and youngest brother, Ben, who awaited their return and worked tirelessly to keep the dairy farm productive.

Lt. Hunter Griffith WWII - Eldest Son

Thomas Hunter Griffith was the oldest Griffith son and the first called to serve. Tom was a Davidson College and ROTC graduate. He was called up immediately after Peal Harbor. As a Captain, he commanded a “replacement company” stationed in Normandy after the invasion. His job was to guarantee a steady flow of replacements to fill combat gaps, forwarding men and officers to the places where they were most needed.

After his service, Tom returned home safely to his wife, Milla and two sons. Later, the couple had another child, a daughter. Tom worked for nearly 40 years in Georgia and Texas for the Southern Cotton Oil Company, as Plant Chemist and later as Plant Superintendent. Major Griffith is buried in Davidson’s Mimosa Cemetery.

Jack Garrison Griffith was the second son of the family. He was called up in September 1942 and assigned to a Quartermaster Truck Regiment and Combat Engineers stationed in western Canada and Alaska. Jack’s regiment was charged with building the ALCAN Highway, an all-weather road cutting across what was then untouched wilderness. Jack worked in extremes of the sub-Arctic weather. The road building operation ran 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The men lived in canvas tents and Quonset huts, moving constantly as the construction progressed through Skagway, Fairbanks, Ladd Field, and the Aleutians. According to Cleary, building the ALCAN highway was “one of the most difficult engineering feats of WWII.”

At completion, the highway measured 1700 miles. Astonishingly, it was completed in a mere nine months. The route allowed thousands of military aircraft to be ferried to Alaska where they were taken over by Russian pilots and used in the war effort.

Major Thomas Hunter Griffith grave marker

During his 28 months in service, Jack became an expert truck and bulldozer driver, pile driver, and even a mill operator. During service, Jack narrowly escaped death from a fire-engulfed truck that had flipped over and trapped him. He also recovered from a ruptured appendix that only sidelined him from active service for three weeks. When Jack returned home, he became a short- and long-haul truck driver for the next 35 years. He married Eudine McConnell and together they raised two children in Cornelius.

George Robert Griffith was the third Griffith son. He enlisted in 1942, along with three of his close friends from Davidson: Creecy Copeland, Jimmy Lee Overcash, and Roy Brown.

George spent the war years in the South Pacific. He became a Sergeant on Guam working as the crew chief of a B-24. Cleary’s account of George’s service states that “once while taking off, his plane literally ran off the end of the runway and crashed into the Pacific Ocean.” George was stunned, but unharmed. Remarkably, at the end of the war, “George was crew chief on the plane that flew into Japanese-held territory to pick up the Japanese emissaries to arrange the surrender to General MacArthur.”

His niece, Pat Butler, remembers her uncles calling their brother "Rabbit"  because they said he was so fast, wiry, energetic and very strong. From all accounts, he was a jokester and lively fellow!

George married Francis Goodrum of Cornelius after the war, and they had four children. He continued in the service as an Air Force Non-Commissioned Officer. George died an early death from illness at age 36. He was the first of the Griffith sons to be buried in Mimosa Cemetery in 1959.

Mimosa grave marker for George R. Griffith

William Richard Griffith, one of a pair of twin brothers, was drafted in April 1943. Bill endured extreme heat during his basic training at Camp Shelby, Mississippi and life-threatening cold while later fighting in the Bulge. Bill served in General Patton’s 3^rd Army. Cleary writes that the 3^rd Army “started walking and fighting their way across France, Luxembourg, The Bulge, Germany, and Czechoslovakia.” While making their way across Europe, Bill’s division made “25 river crossings and only one was unopposed!”

In the written account of Bill’s service, Cleary pauses to give extra effect to what Bill actually did during the war. “He fought all the way from Normandy Beach to eastern Czechoslovakia – across ALL of Europe with Patton’s magnificent 3^rd Army and survived.”

Bill was modest and humble about his service according to all who knew him. He refused anyone’s attempt to call him a hero, saying regularly that he was just “a dog-faced doughboy who was lucky to get through it.”

After Bill returned home to Davidson, he married Charlotte Upright of Mooresville and had two daughters. He received a master’s degree from Appalachian State University and served for 36 years as a teacher and Assistant Principal in the Mooresville School system.

Melvin Stewart Griffith was Bill’s twin and was much better known to all as “Unk.” In August 1943, Unk was living in Davidson, the only remaining son of draft age still in the Griffith house. Importantly, Unk had a “farm deferment” from the government because of his father’s death and the need to keep at least one adult male at home to help run the dairy farm.

But Unk sat his mother Mabel down and told her that he needed to join his brothers and all of his friends who were away serving in the war. His mother “understood” why he needed to go, at least according to Unk.

After training, he was sent to Italy, assigned to “Company ‘K’, 349th Infantry Regiment of the 88^th Blue Devils Infantry Division” fighting its way up the boot of Italy. The mountainous terrain made any air support of little value. Only infantrymen could climb and fight their way up and through the rocky paths, while the Germans continually attacked from higher ground. Losses were severe, and just to survive and keep moving was exhausting, according to Unk’s accounts.

In October of 1944, Unk, manning a Browning Automatic Rifle on an exposed slope facing German lines, found himself a clear target for German artillery. An artillery round was fired directly under his foxhole.

Cleary’s account of Unk’s survival is almost unbelievable. “The resultant explosion rendered him unconscious and blew him out of the hole. Miraculously, he was not killed. He laid there, unconscious, in the open the rest of that day, that night, all the next day and on the second night when the Graves Registration people came up under cover of darkness to pick up the bodies, they found him unconscious but breathing.”

After already having served nine months on the front lines, including a stretch of 100 days without relief, Unk was shelled, rendered unconscious for over a week, and then returned to his front-line unit after only a few weeks recovery. Unk was discharged in late January 1946.

He returned home and pursued a master’s degree at Appalachian State, like his brother Bill. He married Dorothy Hart and had two sons. He devoted his life to teaching and coaching, becoming the Principal of Coulwood Junior High and Tuckasegee Elementary.

John Woods, former mayor of Davidson and advocate for veterans and their families in the Lake Norman Area, remembers Unk fondly as his own football coach at Alexander Junior High in the 1960s. Unk retired from his long career in education in 1985. He died in 1992 and is buried with his family members in Mimosa Cemetery.

Those Who Remained at Home

While the five oldest Griffith brothers were scattered across Alaska, Europe, and the South Pacific, their mother, five sisters, and youngest brother, Ben, stayed behind.

The daughters in order of birth, were Dorothy Elizabeth, Annie Moore, Mabel Eva, Mildred Ruth, and Mary Lee. Of the 12 Griffith children born to Mabel and Tom Griffith, two survive: Mary Lee and Ben Davidson, who lives in Huntersville.

Cleary writes that Ben Davidson Griffith, the one son who was too young to serve in WWII, did a man’s job, under the guidance of Logan Houston, in running the family dairy farm.

When Ben grew up, he, too served in the military. Ben was drafted and volunteered for “hazardous parachute duty and service with the famed 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.” After his military service, Ben attended Clemson University and married Victoria Templeton. They had two children. Ben is now enjoying retirement in the Lake Norman area with his family.

Although most of the Griffith children were unmarried during WWII, four of the Griffith daughters married men who also served in the Armed Services during the same conflict. These Brothers-in-Law, with their Griffith wives, also rest in the family area within Mimosa Cemetery, with graves marked by US-issued bronze plaques.

Ben Davidson Griffith. Photo courtesy of Pat Butler.

To add to the recollections of the family’s history, Butler engaged in a lengthy talk with her uncle Ben earlier this week. She said she kept him up way too late, but that he remembered so many important details from those war years.

Uncle Ben was born in April 1933. He was 8-1/2 years old on Sunday, Dec 7, 1941.

He remembers that the radio in their home carried the President’s address which told of the Country preparing to respond to the Pearl Harbor attack. His mother, Mabel, was listening very intently to the President. Ben says that it was the first time he had seen his mother cry.

Mabel knew that the President’s response meant that so many young, able-bodied sons of Davidson would be called to go to war. She had five sons of military service age, and this weighed heavily on her following the President’s speech. Mabel had been widowed in July 1940 and too soon after, at the end of 1941, she faced seeing her sons go to war.

Seeing his brothers leave one by one couldn’t have been easy. Ben recalls his brothers being called into the military in different steps, but he said it all happened quickly, and most were in the service within 6-12 months. The Griffith home was much quieter with the five sons away.

After his five brothers went to war, Ben recalls that his sisters helped in the milk house every day to ready bottles and milk for delivery to customers.

Logan Espie Houston had served in the Army during WWI (Photo courtesy of the Davidson College Archives)

At that time, the primary worker at the dairy farm was Logan Houston. Houston had continued to work with the family after Tom’s death.  Now, during the war, Houston’s role expanded, and he taught Ben many of the dairy jobs. Houston had three sons who also helped with the dairy work. It was constant work, recalls Ben. The cows were milked twice a day, in the early morning and late afternoon. “One could not miss this schedule as the cows could NOT wait!” Ben explained.

Ben also remembers the flags with the blue stars. In the front window of the living room near the front entry on their covered porch hung the five stars showing family members in service.  These hung by a gold strap.  Each hanging star was slightly larger than a standard piece of 8.5 x 11 paper, so the stars could be seen from the road as people would pass by.  Ben recalls that sometimes people would stop at the house to see if it was true that five sons were off to war.

Ben remembered some letters coming home from the warfront, but not all of his brothers were inclined to write too much. This was long before phone calls were easy to make. At one point, Jack was able to return home for a visit and Ben imagines that he probably had an unbearably long train ride to get back to NC from Alaska.

A news article from a past Veterans Day.

When a letter arrived, all the family members would gather around for an “out loud’ reading and everyone was always glad to receive the letters and to hear of the young men’s duties and adventures. If a phone call ever came in, the family had a wall-mounted Wind-Up box phone near the center of the house. These phones were on a party line. Pat says that Ben chuckled remembering that most people listened in on the party line and could hear all the conversations and news. “No privacy!” he said.

Ben remembered his mother writing to all her sons regularly, and at Christmas she would prepare packages to send to them. These usually included non-perishable treats such as candy and cookies. Sweet treats were in short supply for most families and communities as it was a priority to send these to the military.

During the war, many items were rationed, and food could be scarce. Ben remembers that the Griffiths usually had a vegetable garden and raised chickens, so that supplemented their food supply. They, like many local families and farms, grew cotton so all the children picked cotton when they were home. The cotton went to The Cotton Gin in Davidson.

There was a special group of women and mothers in Davidson who gathered regularly to pray for all the sons who were away in service and at risk in the war. The War Prayers Meeting Group included Mrs. Tom Griffith, Mrs. Henrietta Copeland, Mrs. Katie Overcash, Mrs. Ruby Fortner Brown, Mrs. Sarah Washam, and Mrs. Margaret Barkley.

When you see the Griffith Family markers in Mimosa Cemetery - especially around Memorial and Veterans Days when they have flags on the graves - you'll know more about the service of the members of this Davidson family.

Ben remembers that anyone could join the prayer time but there was a core group of the mothers who were faithful in their attendance.  They would meet in a private home and sometimes have refreshments. Ben said, “The children at home would look forward to these refreshments being brought home after the prayer time!” Mrs. Copeland had been raised in eastern North Carolina and knew how to fry shelled peanuts. That was something different for Davidson and Ben liked those nuts!

Ben said that he did not recall special celebrations or a lot of attention upon the return of any of his brothers. He remembers that the family did not even know of one brother’s scheduled return. A soldier might just show up or ride the bus from Charlotte and get off close to home. He said that the military usually tried to get a service member shipped back to a post or base near their home location, such as Fort Bragg or Camp Mackall, and then they could ride buses or trains to return to their hometowns. This is hard to imagine in our era of constant communication.

Ben also remembers that most of the men who came home from WWII did not talk openly about their service or their experiences. They returned to school, either completing an interrupted high school degree or pursuing a college degree. They returned to pursue romances, marriages, and the next steps of life. He says that the men were all very glad to return safely and their families were thrilled to have all come home.

There were also sadnesses during the war, Ben recalls. Several Davidson College professors lost sons in the war. The faithful women’s prayer group mourned the loss of one of their beloved sons, Jimmy Lee Overcash, who was killed in action over Normandy.

Pat Butler interprets her family’s service and sacrifice through the lens of the larger Davidson community. She says that “a walk through Mimosa Cemetery shows the breadth of patriotism from the community and the number of local citizens who answered our country’s call, served a long way from the quiet rural towns of North Mecklenburg and ensured that freedom and liberty were available for the generations who followed.”