Thompson & Bethie

Thompson is the reason there is a Foundation rather than a scrapbook. The service in this family did not begin with the Four. It began with him.

He was a Hanes by birth, though the early records spell it Haynes. His mother was Sophronia Hanes. His father appears only as J. C. Hanes, born in Texas. In 1898 a Galveston city directory lists Sophronia, as Mrs. J. C. Hanes, working in a cotton mill, and Alvin and Barney Hanes, who lived with her, working there too. By June 1900 she had married again, to James Milstead, and the family lived in Grant Parish, Louisiana. The census taker found Thompson there at nine, listed as a stepson, with his older sister Vinie, his older brother Alvin, a younger brother, and a stepbrother, James.

The marriage failed. By November 1914 Sophronia had left Milstead and gone to live at Jena. On Sunday, November 29, 1914, she came back to Dry Prong on the afternoon train, to the home of her daughter, where a grandchild lay dead. Milstead came to the house and demanded that she go home with him. She refused. He shot her twice, and then he killed himself. She was taken to the sanitarium at Alexandria the next morning, and she died late in the afternoon of Tuesday, December 1. Her son, W. T. Hanes, took her body home to Jena for burial. He was in his twenties. Her stone reads: “Our Mother is gone but not forgotten.”

In the summer of 1918 he was a cook in Company B of the 347th Infantry, 87th Division. On August 26, 1918, his company sailed from New York for the war in Europe aboard the transport Persic. The Army’s passenger list gives the person to notify if anything happened to him: Mrs. Bethie Hanes, his wife, at Whitehouse, Texas. Aubrey Lee was just over a year old.

Twelve days later, on September 7, 1918, the Persic was torpedoed by the German submarine UB-87 near the Isles of Scilly, off the southwest tip of England. She was carrying about 2,800 American soldiers. She stayed afloat, the soldiers were taken off by destroyers, and nobody was lost. The New York Times reported it on September 12 under the headline “2,800 Escape U-Boat Attack.” The Foundation has not yet found a record that names Thompson among the men aboard at the time. But his company boarded the Persic in New York on August 26, and no transport could cross the Atlantic and come back for new troops in twelve days.

The Foundation now holds photographs of his own discharge papers, which the family keeps. They give the shape of his war in his own file. He was inducted at Colfax, Louisiana, on September 18, 1917, at twenty-five and a half, a farmer with no prior service. He went overseas with the American Expeditionary Forces on August 24, 1918, and the record gives his arrival at a port overseas as September 8 — the day after a German submarine torpedoed the Persic off the Isles of Scilly and destroyers took the troops off her. He left for home on December 24, 1918, reached the United States on December 30, and was discharged at Camp Pike, Arkansas, on January 16, 1919, by reason of demobilization. His character is recorded as “Very Good,” with no absence from duty, and the Army owed him travel pay to Colfax. He signed the sheet himself.

The discharge also settles a question this page has carried from the start. Where he was born, it reads: Natchez, in the State of Mississippi.

He is photographed in the uniform of the First World War: campaign hat, service coat, breeches and leggings. In the center photograph of the family display sheet he stands beside Bethie with an infant on a chair between them. The family identifies the child as Aubrey Lee. He looks about a year old, which is how old Aubrey Lee was when his father sailed, so the photograph and the Army’s passenger list agree.

He came home, and he and Bethie raised four children in Louisiana, and all four of them served. Whatever he taught them, he taught it well enough that it took four times.

He outlived Bethie by eleven years and died on April 24, 1984, in his nineties, at St. Francis Cabrini Hospital in Alexandria. His obituary called him a disabled Army veteran of the First World War. He was a member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and of the Central Missionary Baptist Church near Tioga, and he is buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Pineville. Two years or so before the end, a local paper photographed him in a nursing home rhythm band, playing a harmonica ballad to raise money for the heart association. The Foundation keeps that clipping with the same care it keeps the uniforms. A man is not only his war.