Capt. Tom Witherspoon
Tom Witherspoon was born in Dallas Texas in March 1919. His mother passed away while giving birth to a stillborn younger brother while we was very young, and as was often done at the time when a mother had died or family could not afford to care for their children, the young Tom was shipped off to live with his grandmother in New Orleans, Louisiana. A socialite intending to not let the new addition change her lifestyle, his grandmother had the five-year-old equipped in his own dinner jacket for the frequent formal dinners in the home.
The arrangement did not last very long however, and within a year his grandmother had decided to take an extended vacation in Europe, sending the boy to a local military boarding school for care. There the smallest uniform they had on hand had to be hemmed to the absolute limit to fit the small child. And so, rather than entering a normal kindergarten, the boy instead fell into disciplined military routine, to include daily inspections, saluting and marching. The latter must have been quite the sight, the child struggling to do his best to mimic the older boys, marching at the back of the formation with a wooden rifle on his shoulder, more a beloved mascot than a trainee. It is doubtful his instructors were ever too hard on him, but the experience must have been hard for a child at that age.
Before long his father remarried, and the young soldier was able to return home, meeting a new younger brother named Jack for the first time. The two soon formed a relationship that “brought us closer than if we were of the same blood,” Witherspoon later remembered. Unfortunately, his alcoholic father lost his job and the family decided to relocate to San Francisco for a new start. There the boys bounced around between a half-dozen schools, but they enjoyed the time together. Among their favorites things to do was the local neighborhood “rubber gun wars,” where the kids crafted wooden guns with attachments for half-inch bands cut from old car tire inner tubes. After a few kids refused to admit they were hit by some well-aimed shots, Jack solved the problem by engineering a longer rifle for the both of them, guns that stretched the bands further for greater velocity and increased their range. Doing so significantly decreased the chance a target could deny a successful strike, as he was often doubled over in pain and left welted by a Witherspoon gun. Before long, the boys were a foe feared by many during the various skirmishes that took place in those days up and down Santa Paula Drive.
The family moved one more time, roughly thirty miles south to a town called Mountain View. This new home was built on a five-acre farm, allowing the boys to turn in their rubber band rifles for real .22s. There they hunted, fished and did scouting until high school came along, at which point Tom turned in his scout uniform for football cleats. He excelled in the sport, helping win a league championship and earning his varsity letter, although he admitted he was not quite a first string player on the team.
Usually absent from the stands while he played was his father, who was increasingly was more and more out of the picture. His stepmother had grown ill and started following a religious zealot for healing, and when he decided to relocate back East, she decided to go with him. To raise the funds for her travel, she sold off everything in the house and then the house itself, leaving the children to fend for themselves. Jack and another brother were able to live with an aunt, but the elder Tom was forced to fend for himself as he finished out school, cementing a strong sense of independence and self-reliance at a young age. The best he could do was to find a job with a local undertaker; grisly work helping embalm or drive the hearse to pick up the newly deceased. But the job did include a room to sleep at night there in the mortuary, along with enough cash to get by on his own.
After high school Tom worked a couple odd jobs, then decided it was time to head off to college, moving to Chicago and enrolling at Northwestern. He soon realized his original plan of medical school was far too expensive for someone without any support and only making fifteen dollars a week, so he decided to dabble in journalism. He also looked at joining several fraternities, but chose to join Phi Sigma because they required all members to leave their previous textbooks in the large fraternity library. Not having enough for books, joining this brotherhood helped him immensely. “It is funny how you can work out things when you are left with no solutions given to you,” he remembered of the decision.
As part of his journalism studies, his coursework required him to go out and find stories, then practice writing them up, just as any reporter would. Tom remembered to wandering downtown to hit up the “plenty of ‘characters’ looking for a handout” that could always be found there, recording their tales about the “hard times” people were still suffering on the streets of Chicago. He did this for a time until he received a letter from Jack one day, saying that the family was about to lose their apartment back in San Francisco, where his mother had since moved back to. Tom dutifully dropped out of school and returned home.
Arriving there he immediately began looking for a way to contribute, when along came a Marine Corps recruiter who convinced them of a way to earn a few extra dollars each month. He and Jack then joined the reserve company that was being formed nearby. They drilled once a month, alternating drill locations between the local high school and the armory. Training primarily consisted of close order drill and the set up and take down of the Browning machinegun, so was fairly repetitive, but Witherspoon seemed to have enjoyed the experience.
Monthly drill and his full-time job managing a movie theater was enough to cover the bills, until a draft notice found its way to his mailbox in February 1941. The United States was starting to gear up in case it became embroiled one of the several wars that were ongoing across the globe, and Witherspoon now found himself as part of that call up. Not one to have his hand forced into something he did not like, particularly the thought of being sent as a draftee into the Army, he went in and talked to his sergeant. The noncom assured him not to worry about it, that all he had to do was show his Marine identification card to the local draft board and he would be removed from the list.
Satisfied and relieved, Witherspoon then turned to leave, when the sergeant teased out an additional thought from over his shoulder, asking if the reservist-turned-draftee would have any interest in being ordered to active duty in the Marine Corps. The private whirled back around, “it took me about two seconds to say yes,” he recalled of the moment, then asked if he and his brother could serve together. The two were promised orders for a unit that was soon to form up in San Diego, and he was told to report with Jack for medical screening.
He left with a letter in hand to take to his local draft board, one that stated that the reserve private was to receive orders to active duty within ten days, and so they were to cross him off their list. The promised orders arrived in only three, so he and Jack were soon on a train bound for southern California, the Marine Corps wasting no time to get them into its ranks. The duo sat across from one another in hopes that no one would take the seats next to them, thus allowing them to able to stretch out their legs for the entire ride. The trick worked, and the brothers enjoyed the several-day journey in relative comfort, surviving on cheap hot dogs or candy purchased at the various stops along the way.
The war was still nearly a year away, but the future “CO” of K Company was already mustering in.
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