About Betty Arrington
Betty Locke Arrington (Grandmother) was born September 20, 1921, in Miami, Texas, to William F. and Lorene Locke. She was a lifelong resident of Miami, where she was a rancher and businesswoman. She married John Mark Arrington on January 1, 1942, in Miami. She and Mark had three children: Kay and her husband, Jim, live in Mobeetie; Mark and his wife, Nancy, live in Forney; and Ann and her husband, Charles, live in Miami.
Betty was an outstanding and loving wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and great-great grandmother! Her entire family loved her so much and, if you let them, could sit around for days telling stories about her and her experiences with each of them. She was also very active in the Miami community. She received the Golden Nail Award in 1994 for her outstanding work at the Roberts County Museum as financial chairman, board chairman, grant writer, and special events coordinator. She was a member of Roberts County Historical Committee since 1985. She was a volunteer on the committee to publish two historical books of Roberts County, where she proofread and wrote much of the historical content. Betty was a member of the United Methodist Church, where she taught adult Sunday school classes and youth fellowship for more than twenty-five years. She served as the Republican Party chairman of Roberts County for several years.
You will also learn in this small book that she was a friend to so many during the warand a mom to some. She and Mark welcomed many young men into their household as they were preparing for or coming back from war, and Betty took great pride in that later in life. You will read her firsthand account about how the boys became brothers through this war, and Betty loved giving each of them a little piece of home, as many of them were far from where they had grown up. Betty continued later in life meeting and gathering with these early friends and enjoyed it a great deal.
O n December 7, when we were attacked by Japan, Mark was at Tech, at Lubbock, and I was at the University of Texas. We had planned to marry that next summer, and I was... I dont know exactly where he was when he heard it, but I had kind of dropped off to sleep and had the radio on in my room, and I heard that we had been attacked.
And when I woke up, I thought it was a dream, and I got dressed and got ready to go to a concert. About that time, the phone rangMark had called me to tell me. And we talked about it and decided that it wasnt long until we came home for Christmas, a couple of weeks, and so wed get married during Christmas.
It was a total surprise; we never dreamed anything like that could happen. We knew the war was going on in Europe and that war was pending, but it wasnt real to us, and we were going ahead with our college lives. Mark had had to register. Every young man had to register the year before, and then they drew your number and gave everybody a number in this county.
I remember when the numbers came out in the Miami Chief, which Daddy sent to me at the universitywhy, Mark was number fifty-five, which would mean that if they called thirty at one bunch and thirty in another, then he would go into the Army within two months of when they began calling them.
So we married, and he knew he would be called within the next two months. We decided that I would go ahead and go to school until May. So we got married and went to university and got an apartment. We were there from January 1 to February 8, when he was called.
In the meantime, he drove back to Lubbock and tried to get in the Air Corps, which was the sort of elite branch, especially for college-educated young men, and they wouldnt take him because he wore glasses. [Laughter] Before the war was over, they were taking them with one eye, I think. [Laughter] Anyway, they wouldnt take him, so he came back to Austin and just waited to be called. So we had a month and eight days there together, and he was notified he was to be drafted.
When he left, we came home for him to be taken into the Army. We came home that weekend, and when he left on the train, Ill of course never forget itwe didnt know if wed ever see each other again. And I went on back to the university, and Mark was sent to El Paso, to Fort Bliss, where he was inducted. That was an induction center down there, and he was sent there, and he was inducted into the Army. He was assigned to the field artillery and sent to Fort Sill, Oklahoma.
This field artillery unit he was in was the Sixth Field Artillery at Fort Sill. He was assigned to Battery E 26, but of course he had his basic training there, and that was, at that time, eleven weeks. They were trained, and he was put into the mule pack outfit; thats what they called themselves. You had to be six foot, weigh close to 180 pounds to be in there, because they loaded their Howitzers on mules, and you had to be a pretty good size, pretty strong, to handle all the mules and the field artillery that was mounted on their backs. These were used in the mountains of Burma and Italy during the war.
He was trained there in that eleven weeks. I saw him once. He managed to talkthey were not supposed to be off of the base during basic training, but he talked a sergeant into letting him off for three hours. I rode the bus up there from Austin, and he had called and managed to get a room at the hotel for me, and so I just checked into the hotel, and that night about twelve oclock, he showed up, and he had to go and be back at the base by two or three. And then, after that eleven weeks, in May, they packed up all their gear and were getting ready to ship them out, either to Burma or Italy.
Figure1. Mark and John, his dad. The barracks in the backgroundwasthe office for Battery E.
As they were all packed up and standing by the train, in formation, the first sergeant called out for anyone that could type to step out, and Mark was one of them that could type, so he stepped out, and they told him to take his gear and go back to the unit.
He was put in a training center, and there were fifteen to twenty sergeants together in there, in that training center, for three years. They trained 120 men. New recruitsgreen and didnt know anythingcame in, and they had eleven weeks to get them ready for combat over that three years. In the beginning, he was in the office; they needed somebody to handle all of the paperwork and everything, and for two months he was just there in the basic field artillery unit.
Then for twenty-four months, he was made a technical sergeant, and he was in court personnel. Then for eighteen months, he became a staff sergeant, and he was in the gun crewman pack artilleryhe was an instructor. And like I said, there were fifteen that
