52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Week 21 -- Military

This week in 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks, Amy Johnson Crow asks us to post about the military members in our family history.

Here's a roster of military service in my family:

8x-great-grandfather Samuel Packard served in King Philip's War (1675–1678).

My 4x-great grandfather Richards Packard served in the American Revolution (1775-1783). 

My great-great grandfathers Mathew Hale Packard and Charles Reed served in the Civil War, for the Union (1861-65).

My great-great granduncles Thadeus Bullock Packard and William B. Packard served in the Civil War, too, also for the Union.

My husband's great-grandfather, Daniel McLeod Marshall, served in the Civil War, for the Confederacy.

My father, Arden Packard, served in the U.S. Navy in World War II (1939-1945).

My father-in-law, Leonard Marshall Rhodes, served in the temporary U.S. Coast Guard during World War II.

My husband's grandfather, Andrew Lewis Rhodes, served in the temporary U.S. Coast Guard during World War II.

My brother, Arden "Ned" Packard II, served in the U.S. Marines in the VietNam War (1955-1975).

My husband, Keys Rhodes, and I both served in the U.S. Coast Guard in the Cold War (1945-1991).

 We were surprised to find that my husband's father and grandfather had been in the Coast Guard before he was.  We had thought he was the first in his family to serve in the USCG, but he was actually the third.

I was the first woman in the Packard-Reed family to enter military service. 

We're proud of our service and of our families' military tradition.

 

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks 2024 - Week 17 - War

War!  Huh!  What is it good for?  Absolutely nothing!

Those who were around in the 1960s will recognize that line.

Though rational people would prefer to avoid war, one thing that comes out of it: stories.  At least it is good for stories.  Many of the stories that come out of war are, as one would expect, grim and gruesome.  Some are sad stories, some touching tales of humanity or the lack of it.  And some are just downright funny.

My father, Arden Packard, was in the U.S. Navy in World War II.  He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1934.  Having been fascinated by flight since he was a lad, he applied for flight training, and was so assigned in 1937, at Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida.  He became a carrier-based naval aviator and his first assignment as a naval aviator was to USS Yorktown.  One story that came out of his days afloat concerned the commanding officer of a destroyer assigned to a carrier group.  One night, after the captain had retired to his cabin for the night, one of the other ships lost control and began to drift into the destroyer's path.  The captain was summoned to the bridge and quickly briefed.  He began to give orders.  "Now, everyone stay calm.  Stay calm, like me," he urged.  Then he barked out this order:  "Two toots on the rudder; right full whistle."  Dad never mentioned whether the ships collided or managed to avoid it.

There were sad stories about friends who never got to see peace restored.  Dad had two best friends at the Academy.  Their names were Edward "Ned" Worthington and James "Jimmy" Newell.  Ned Worthington was killed at Pearl Harbor.  Dad died in April of 1954 of pneumonia.  Jimmy Newell outlived them both, and my mother and I visited him and his wife in Norfolk, Virginia, when I was in high school.  The three Navy buddies had an agreement that they would each be cremated and their ashes scattered from a U.S. Navy aircraft.  Ned Worthington's ashes were scattered off Koko Head in Hawaii.  Dad's were scattered over Glendale, California.  I don't know about Jimmy Newell, who most likely passed on many years ago now.  My father assigned the nickname "Ned" to my brother, in remembrance of his friend.

[This post is a little late.  I'm catching up.]

Military Monday:  On the Flight Line

The photo posted here is my father, LT Arden Packard, USN, with his Corsair aircraft.  It was taken at Naval Air Station Miami, FL, about 1942.  He had been fascinated by flight at least since high school, if not earlier.  At his school, he had been a member of the Aero Club in the 1920s.  When he graduated in 1929, he enlisted in the Navy and took basic training at San Diego, where he was enumerated in the 1930 census.  He was also enumerated in that census at the family home in Pasadena, nobody having told the enumerator that he was in the Navy and stationed elsewhere.

He qualified to take a competitive exam for an appointment to Annapolis.  He passed, and entered the Naval Academy in the summer of 1930, graduating in 1934.  He received orders to the aircraft carrier Saratoga, and after that, to the Farragut.  In 1936, he was sent to Naval Air Station Pensacola, FL, for flight training.  Upon completion, he was ordered to the carrier Yorktown, but this time as a member of a fighter squadron, not as a member of the deck department, as before.  From there, he spent time attached to carriers out of Norfolk, VA, and then Coronado, CA.

Dad was medically retired in February of 1941, but was called back to active duty in October of 1941.  Perhaps no solid information was circulating about what was about to happen that December, but there was some sort of build-up going on if the Navy was recalling broken-down old pilots. 

His next assignment was to Naval Air Station Jacksonville, Florida, as a flight instructor.  During that assignment, he was sent to the Empire Central Flying School, a facility of the Royal Air Force in England, to learn the tactics the British were using against the Germans.  He brought that knowledge back to NAS Jax to teach his students.

Dad retired from the Navy after World War II was over.  He died 25 April 1954.

 

  

A to Z Challenge On the Move: A is for Arden

Arden was my father's name.  He did not have a middle name.  His parents were Walter Hetherington Packard and Elizabeth Jane Reynolds.  He was born in Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, California, 29 April 1911.

His name was a bit of a bone of contention and lapse of attention.  His father wanted to name him Walter Hetherington Packard, Jr., according to my aunt.  Elizabeth Jane nixed that, saying that two Walter Hetherington Packards would be too many.  Undecided about what permanent name to hang on him, my grandfather put Arden on the birth certificate, with no middle name.  And apparently grandpa and grandma Packard could not agree on a name, and left it at Arden.

I have no idea how my father felt about being named for a dairy.  Walter Packard was the supervisor at the Arden Dairy in Los Angeles.

My father's interest in flying began fairly early.  In high school, he was a member of the Aero Club, an organization for boys who were fascinated by the relatively new phenomenon of flying.  My father kept that fascination.  He enlisted in the Navy out of high school, and was sent for training at the San Diego Naval Base.  That was in 1930, and in that year's census, he was counted both at the family home in Pasadena, where he wasn't, and at the San Diego Naval Base, where he was.

While an enlisted man, he took the competetive examination for admission into the Naval Academy.  He won entrance, and graduated from the Naval Academy in 1934.  After getting initial experience as an officer under his belt, he applied and was accepted for flight training at Pensacola Naval Base in Florida.  There was a family there named Reed, and their younger daughter, Martha, met Arden there, and they were married in 1937.

They never owned a home while my father was alive.  Not even after he got out of the Navy after World War II.  They always rented, which gave me dyspepsia tryng to find them in property records.  From Pensacola, Arden and Martha set out for his first duty station as a Naval aviator -- Norfolk, Virginia.   They started their family fairly early, and while he was out on an aircraft carrier in August of 1938, mom was back in Pensacola to obtain her mother's help for the birth of their first child, Mary Elizabeth. 

The Navy sent my dad back to California for a while.  I remember reading in his service record that he had kept that he was a technical adviser on some training films made in Hollywood.  That record got lost when an individual who shall always be accorded my opprobrium selfishly destroyed it and several other precious keepsakes when she wanted our storage space at the house she and my mom and I both shared with another woman.  All she had to do was ask; there was plenty of room for the items in my closet.  All three adults were employees of a local hospital, and I was in high school.

After Norfolk, the Packard Family migrated to Florida, to Miami, where he was assigned to the Naval air base there.  That's where my brother, Arden Packard II, was born in 1942.  I guess my mother thought two Arden Packards in the world was not such a bad thing.

After Miami, dad was sent to Jacksonville Naval Air Station, also in Florida.  My mom once pointed out to me the house where they lived in the Riverside - Avondale area of Jacksonville.  They also lived a while at Jacksonville Beach.  My dad was not one to stay in place long.

After World War II, they stayed in Jacksonville a brief while, then it was back to California, where I was born in 1947.  We stayed there a few years, which I do not remember, and when I was about three or four, we went back to Jacksonville.  From there, we went to Pensacola, where dad had an offer of a job based on his degree in Engineering from Annapolis.  And from there, we went back to California, and were living in Tarzana when he died in 1954.

There was one final migration, when my widowed mother took my sister and my brother and me back to Florida.  We were accompanied by our teenage cousin Rosanna, who wanted to visit the Reed relatives in Jacksonville.  That was where my mother lived in the first house that she lived in that wasn't rented.  She bought a house around the corner from her mother and sister.

Family History Writing Challenge: Getting to Know my Father

I had just turned seven years old when my father, Arden Packard, died in 1954.  Pneumonia took him off.  I never really knew him, save for a few stories my mother told me and some very sketchy memories.

A few years ago, I finally got around to ordering his service record from the National Personnel Records Center.  One of the surprising things I found out is that my father spoke Spanish.  It makes sense, I suppose, since he was born in Los Angeles, California, and raised there.  Has that anything to do with my own affinity with the language, to the point that I am about to receive a bachelor's degree in Spanish and history from the University of North Florida, and am studying a Spanish colonial period of Florida?  Who can say?

In the service record there is a document titled Acceptance and Oath of Office.  This is the document recording his promotion to Lieutenant (junior grade) in the U.S. Navy, dated 11 August 1937.  His signature is on it, and I can see how similar my brother's signature was to our father's.  The document also touches history a little bit, as it is signed by the then Captain W. F. Halsey, who as Admiral William F. "Bull" Halsey, was one of the chief naval commanders of World War II. 

Unfortunately, my father had a delicate digestive system.  My aunt has told me how grandmother Packard would cook his meals in a special cooker called a "water cooker."  He learned to "Fletcherize," which meant that he chewed his food forty times before swallowing it.  My mother may have been exaggerating when she told me that he chewed Jell-O and milk, but possibly not by much.  Mom also told me that dad would look at us kids and tell us never to do what he was having to do.  I have to say that I have taken his advice much to heart!

These problems led to surgery in 1939, and he was then medically retired. This was a blow to him, because all he had wanted to do was join the Navy and fly.  He had taken flight training at Pensacola, Florida, Naval Air Station, and that is where he met my mother.  The telling thing about this is that he was called back to active duty in October of 1941.  Someone knew something was about to happen, if the Navy was calling back broken-down old pilots!

Kept from flying in combat, he became a flight instructor.  He would much rather have been in the air; however, he saw and did his duty readily.  On a fitness report dated 31 March 1944, Admiral A. C. McFall, his commanding officer, said:  "Lieutenant Commander Packard performs his duties of ground training officer in a most satisfactory manner.  He is a constructive thinker, which with his initiative, energy, and general ability, makes him an excellent man in his present assignment.  Packard is a man of excellent character.  He is fully qualified for promotion and is so recommended."

In his service record I also found an answer to a family story.  My mother told me that my father had, during World War II, been sent to England.  She said it was during the Blitz, the concentrated bombing attacks Germany made on England, hoping to break the spirit of the English people.  The Blitz took place between September of 1940 and May of 1941.  It turns out my father was not there during the Blitz. He went to England in 1944.  His assignment was to attend the Empire Central Flying School, outside of London at a location called Hullavington.  He was there to be instructed in the tactics the British had developed against the Germans in air combat, and bring that knowledge home to his students at the Jacksonville (Florida) Naval Air Station.

I know what he would have thought of my brother having joined the U.S. Marine Corps out of high school.  Mom and Dad had a dog whose registered name was Ceiling Zero (an aviator's term for being socked in with fog), but her day-to-day name was Smokey, which had been my father's nickname at the Naval Academy.  He would prepare two identical bowls of dog food, and set them down on the floor.  He would point to one of them and say, "Marine chow," and to the other and say, "Navy chow."  Smokey went for the "Navy chow" every time.  Dad also taught Smokey a trick.  "What would you rather be, a dead dog or a Marine?" he would ask the dog.  Smokey would roll over on her back, with all four legs in the air.

I have to wonder what he would have thought of me, however, when I joined the U.S. Coast Guard.  First, there would have been all the jokes about my height (5'4") and being a "shallow-water sailor."  In his day, women did not do such things as join the military -- until World War II broke out, then women did all sorts of jobs they had been "unsuited for" just a few months before.  I also think he would have been proud of me for having worn the uniform of our country.
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Armed Forces Day: A Family History

Today is Armed Forces Day, so I am going to talk about ancestors and other relatives who have served in the military forces of the United States.

On my father's side, I can trace back to a Revolutionary War ancestor, Richards Packard.  He enlisted in Massachusetts at the age of 17, in 1780, and serve two enlistments.  We don't have any War of 1812 ancestors in this line, because in around 1796, Richards Packard headed up to Canada, not because of any change of heart after the war, but because in Canada, in Quebec, the government was giving land away without much worry about who they were giving it to!  He found farmland to his liking, and settled in the area of present-day Georgeville.  His movements after the Revolution had a northward trend, from Massachusetts to New Hampshire, up into Northern Vermont, and then into Canada.  I guess he was more picky about his land than about the winter climate!

My great-great grandfather Mathew Hale Packard "retro-migrated" back to the U.S. in around 1850, settling first in Chautauqua County, New York.  He is enumerated there in the federal 1850 and 1860 censuses and in the 1855 New York state census.  He was still in New York in the 1860s, and there enlisted in a cavalry regiment for the Civil War.  On the other side of the family, another great-great grandfather, Charles Reed, served in an Indiana infantry regiment.  Both men suffered more from illness than from combat action, neither having been wounded, but both feeling effects of disease.  Both received pensions based on disability; Matthew Hale Packard didn't benefit from his for long, for he died in 1881.  Charles Reed lived, in poverty, until 1920.

I don't have any record of anyone in World War I.  My maternal grandfather Perry Reed was a railroad freight agent, and therefore in an occupation of national security importance, so he wasn't drafted.  My paternal grandfather ran a dairy; I don't know if he had any particular deferment; I haven't looked for the draft  registration status of either one of these yet.  Just haven't had time.

My father, Arden Packard, enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1929, right out of high school.  A year later, he took a competitive exam and won entrance to the U.S. Naval Academy (the way serving sailors got in).  He graduated from the Academy in 1934, served on aircraft carriers, and finally got to indulge a passion of his childhood and youth -- he entered flight training at Pensacola Naval Air Station in 1937.  It was in Pensacola that he met my mother.  He was medically retired in about 1939; in 1941 -- several months before Pearl Harbor -- he was called back to active duty.  He was restricted to limited flying because of his medical condition, but became a flight instructor.  Despite the limitations on his flying, he was rated in one fitness report among the top 5% of Naval aviators!

My brother, Arden Packard II ("Ned"), enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1960, after he graduated from high school.  I can imagine what our father, who died in 1954, would have thought of that.  Daddy taught his dog, Smoky (registered name Ceiling Zero) a couple tricks which indicated his opinion.  He would set two identical bowls of dog food down, calling one "Navy chow" and the other "Marine chow."  Smoky went for the "Navy chow" every time.  He would say to the dog, "Smoky, which would you rather be -- a dead dog or a Marine?"  The dog would roll over on her back, all four legs in the air.

When I was a little girl back in the 1950s, I was unconventional.  Alas, I grew up in an all-too-conventional family.  When I expressed a desire to go into the Navy, my mother and brother were aghast and absolutely prohibited it.  "Nice" girls didn't do such things.  When my husband and I got married, he was in the Coast Guard.  I saw what fun he was having -- he really did enjoy it -- and said I wanted to share in the fun.  "Sure," he said.  His confidence in me (and in my sense of honor and self-respect) enabled me to do what I had been blocked from doing earlier on.  I enlisted in the Coast Guard Reserve 3 February 1976 as a yeoman third class, becoming the first woman in my family to serve in the military. When I had to stand down in 1991 because I had developed arthritis, I was a lieutenant (junior grade).  I had been selected for lieutenant, but did not get to advance.

Happy Armed Forces day to all serving members and to all veterans!
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Wordless Wednesday: An Opinion of the 1934 U.S. Navy Dress Uniform

Arden Packard (1911-1954)
U.S. Naval Academy Class of 1934

Carnival of Genealogy 74 - Swimsuit Issue

This is my father, Arden Packard around 1915-1916 when he was four or five years old. He is wading in the Pacific Ocean. He was born in Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, California, 29 April 1911. He went on to enlist in the U.S. Navy in 1929, and a year later took a competetive exam which qualified him for the Naval Academy. In 1934 he graduated. Though the picture shows him in the water, he preferred the air. Having been a member of his high school's Aero Club, he went on to take flight training at Pensacola Naval Air Station, being certified as a Naval Aviator in 1937, the year he also married my mother. During World War II, he was the lead flight instructor at Jacksonville Naval Air Station. Keeping things in the family, my husband later worked at Jacksonville NAS in federal civil service!

The fashionable garment my father is wearing speaks for itself!