John Mitchell’s mother, Lillian Mitchell, and father, Noah Mitchell
Courtesy of the Mitchell family
IN THE SPRING OF 1943, JOHN MITCHELL’S WIFE, ANNIE LEE, WASN’T the only one aching for his return from the Pacific War. His father, Noah Boothe Mitchell, wanted him stateside, too, a feeling expressed in a poem he composed at the family homestead in the Deep South. The verse, typed on a Royal typewriter and mailed to the island of Guadalcanal half a world away, was titled “Rainbow in My Heart.” It began:
There is a rainbow in my heart,
But no pot of gold lies at the end.
The pot contains my cherished hopes
Of my dear one’s return again.
The poem’s rhymed quatrains, with their tender love along with a fervent hope for a safe return, also displayed a pacifist streak. The closing stanza went:
And when this grim war is over
And he comes home at last,
Let us keep that hope eternal
That ALL such wars have passed.
JOHN WILLIAM MITCHELL, THE FUTURE WORLD WAR II PILOT, grew up in the rural village of Enid in Mississippi’s Tallahatchie County—Tallahatchie being a Choctaw name meaning “rock of waters.” He was a third-generation Mississippian. It was his great-great-grandfather Washington Mitchell who, in the first half of the 1800s, had moved from North Carolina to an area east of the Tallahatchie River. Enid did not yet exist officially, and the early 1840s was when a survey crew started a settlement while working on the Mississippi and Tennessee Railroad. One of the patriarch’s sons, William Washington Mitchell, nearly a man when the family arrived, married a woman of Irish descent named Jane Carson, and family lore has it that she was related to Kit Carson, the famous frontiersman and scout.
The Mitchell-Carson marriage produced eight children. The first son, William Carson Mitchell, arrived on October 1, 1845; he was John Mitchell’s grandfather. William Carson’s eventual marriage to Josephine Wilson of nearby Sardis, Mississippi, drew more frontier glamour into the family sphere; Josephine was said to be a distant relative of an earlier pioneer of even greater fame: Daniel Boone. If all that is true, John Mitchell’s ancestral lines intertwined with those of two of America’s best-known folk heroes.
William was a teenager when he enlisted in the Confederate Army, joining the nearly 80,000 other white men from Mississippi, the second state to secede from the Union, to defend slavery in the “War for Southern Independence,” as it was known. No surviving family records indicate that the Mitchells—most of whom were merchants and storekeepers—were slaveholders, but slavery was vital to their state’s cotton economy. The state’s slave population exceeded its white population—437,000 to 354,000. William fought in northern Mississippi and Tennessee under the command of Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, who built a reputation as “The Wizard of the Saddle” for his tactical use of the cavalry in mobile, quick strikes. Forrest later became an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan.
William returned home to Mississippi after the war. He and Josephine married two years later, in 1867. They raised three sons. The youngest, Noah, born in the summer of 1881, became John Mitchell’s father. It was during Noah’s teen years that the settlement where a handful of Mitchell families had lived for decades, which had been called various names over the years, officially became the township of Enid. With its railroad depot, grist mill, bank, barber shop, several stores, school, post office, and even a few saloons, Enid had grown into what one resident later called “a thriving place.” It was home to Civil War veterans, doctors, and merchants, such as the Mitchells, who built a brick store in the center of town that various members of the family were involved in operating for decades to come. With its train depot, Enid had also become a shipping point for white and red clay mined from the hills eight miles north of town. But Enid was “thriving” in the context of a region still largely rural and undeveloped—the wilderness. The village’s population in 1900, according to the US Census, was only 180.
Noah went to high school more than two hundred miles north of Enid at “Bell Buckle,” the nickname for the prestigious Webb School in the Tennessee town of Bell Buckle, a stop on the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad. The school had been founded by another Confederate Army veteran, William R. “Sawney” Webb, a disciplinarian who had graduated from the University of North Carolina and whose own classical education had included instruction in Greek and Latin. Webb and his wife had first started the school in Culleoka, Tennessee, in 1870, but when the town had legalized the sale of liquor in 1886, the couple, ardent prohibitionists, would have none of it; they had relocated thirty-five miles west to Bell Buckle.
Young Noah Mitchell arrived on campus the next fall, in 1887, paying the semester’s tuition of $39 in cash his father had given him. The Webbs had built a new schoolhouse on six acres of beech forest a short walk from the train station. Noah joined a sophomore class of forty-seven students that included other boarders, day students, and, unusual for the time, a handful of local girls. When he graduated in 1900, he was one of twenty-six classmates still standing. The schoolwork proved classical and demanding, and Sawney Webb insisted on a strong work ethic, trustworthiness, and honesty. He despised deception, admonishing students with a line that eventually became the school’s motto: “Do nothing on the sly,” or, in its Latin translation, “Noli res subdole facere.” The schoolmaster also had little tolerance for social pretense, a view he had included in the school’s original mission, which was, in part, “To turn out young people who are tireless workers . . . who are always courteous without the slightest trace of snobbery.”
Compared to his peers at school, Noah was on the small side. Indeed, in the sophomore class photograph taken during his first year at the school, Noah was placed in the first row, seated on the ground with the other shorter boys. His expression is one of seriousness, almost sadness, but then, not a single student in the photograph wears a smile; there is a gravitas to them all. Noah is dressed in a jacket, white shirt, and tie. His clasped hands rest in his lap; his brown hair is parted neatly down the middle. His brown eyes look dreamily to one side. The period dress notwithstanding, the facial similarities to his future son John are unmistakable.
JUST AS HIS OWN FATHER HAD RETURNED HOME AFTER FIGHTING in the Civil War, Noah returned to Enid after graduating from the Webb School, so it was in Enid where John Mitchell would be born into the modest, unpretentious life the Mitchell clan had built. Noah soon met Lillian Florence Dickinson from Temple, Texas, and when they were married on December 23, 1904, he was already established as a salesman marketing the clay from nearby mines as well as Mississippi long-leaf yellow pine from forests farther south. With railroad construction taking off, Mississippi was experiencing a timber boom; just two other states, Washington and Louisiana, produced more lumber in 1904. It was work that took Noah—who was only in his twenties—to parts north, such as New York City, as well as overseas, to Europe and England, where he sold clay to foundries. Nonetheless, he and Lillian began a family the year after their marriage; two boys and two girls were born in the next decade before John William’s birth on June 14, 1914. The baby boy with the same brown eyes and hair as his father was called “Johnnie Bill” at first, then “Johnnie” as he got older, and later still, in the military, he became “Mitch.”
Johnnie Bill Mitchell grew up in an Enid that hadn’t changed much over the years. “Just a wide place in the road,” his father would continue to say about the village for years to come. The village’s population actually decreased slightly from 1900 to 1920—from 180 to 174 residents, according to the US Census. Meanwhile, Tallahatchie County, where Enid was situated, experienced steady growth; its population increased from 19,600 in 1900 to 35,953 in 1920. The nearest “big city” was Charleston, twelve miles to the south on the east side of the Tallahatchie River. Its population was 1,834, a hub by comparison, featuring several churches and schools, a courthouse, and a jail. Getting around the county was never easy, though; most roads were dirt and gravel, or mud in winter and dust in summer. It was in 1914, the year Johnnie Bill was born, that state officials gave their approval to construction of the first paved road in all of Mississippi, an eleven-mile stretch in Lee County that eventually became the first leg of US Highway 45.
Johnnie Bill grew up in the same house his father had, a single-story, wood-shingled structure located in the village center. The front of the house looked out onto the railroad tracks less than a hundred yards away. The trains rumbling through town at night, their whistles blowing, were jarring to visitors but something Johnnie Bill and his family slept right through. The front porch running the length of the house was a popular spot on hot summer evenings, while inside a large fireplace in the living room kept the house warm during occasional winter cold spells. The bedrooms were toward the front of the house, while the dining room and large kitchen were in the back, with easy access to the well just outside the rear door, where Johnnie Bill and his siblings fetched buckets of water for cooking and cleaning. The privy was farther back; it would be thirty years after Johnnie Bill’s birth before basic plumbing was installed.
Pecan and maple trees filled the large backyard. Even with his frequent travels as a salesman for the Memphis-based Gayoso Lumber Company and his own Mitchell Clay Company, Johnnie Bill’s father found time to maintain a pear orchard just south of town, producing an annual yield of about a thousand bushels. “The fruit is excellent and abundant,” noted a local newspaper, adding that Noah was “selling the pears cheap, only one dollar per bushel.” People came from all over for his pears. In their large yard Noah kept a sprawling vegetable garden with flowers that attracted birds of all kinds. “Birds seem to know those who love them and it seems to me that a good many more birds come to our place than to some of the neighbors,” Noah wrote proudly in an essay titled “Around Home.” The family kept track of goldfinches, mockingbirds, orioles, bright red Kentucky cardinals, and northern flickers, a type of woodpecker. They listened to the doleful croaking of slate-colored rain crows, and their days often began and ended to the lyrical sounds of brown thrushes. “I do not believe there is a bird on earth that can surpass them in sweetness of song,” Noah wrote of thrushes. “The morning notes are bright, clear and cheerful, while the evening song seems a little sad and sleepy and much like a lullaby, but both morning and evening renditions are purest melody.”
These were the sights and sounds of Johnnie Bill’s home. His grandfather William Carson lived next door in a smaller house, and on the other side was the redbrick, mazelike general store. Inside, a balcony with iron railings—accessible by a staircase in each of the four corners—ran the length of the interior walls, increasing the store’s capacity tenfold. Upstairs was office space that at one point was used as a funeral parlor, at another time as a barbershop. Over the years various uncles and townspeople owned or operated the bustling emporium, and it was a place where Johnnie Bill and his brothers and sisters were always welcome. The main floor was lined with shelves, and cubbyholes were filled with everything imaginable from candy and treats to such foodstuffs as meal, flour, and dried lentils, as well as cookware, horse collars, shoelaces, matches, and axle grease. Separated by a window toward the rear of the store was a meat house, and the ground floor even had room for displays of women’s apparel and menswear. A big iron potbellied heater in the middle and a small fireplace on the balcony provided warmth.
Johnnie Bill’s world was Enid and the surrounding countryside; it was family centered and small town. The life beyond seemed to be passing him by, even with the railroad right there. Automobiles, the “good roads movement” and new railroad lines—hallmarks of progress—were happening elsewhere, not in his backyard. But if he missed out on some of the big events of the time, he was fortunate to go largely untouched by others. In 1917, the United States entered the war that had been raging across Europe since 1914. Congress passed a law that spring requiring all men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty to register for military service, and in April, President Woodrow Wilson’s call to arms promised that “the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into every fiber of our national life, infecting Congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, and the man on the street.” Johnnie Bill’s father was one of those men. Noah Mitchell went to his local draft office on September 12, 1918, joining 157,606 other Mississippians who registered to be called. He listed his occupation as “clay miner” for the Mitchell Clay Company and his nearest relative as his wife, Lillian Mitchell. But Lillian, her toddler Johnnie Bill, and the other children were spared losing their husband and father to combat. By the Great War’s end in November 1918, 43,362 men from Mississippi had been inducted into the military, but Noah had not been one of them. Though willing to go, he was never called; he was too old—thirty-seven.
Then, the same year as Noah’s draft registration, the influenza pandemic swept around the planet, a lethal virus that infected cells deep in the lungs and, in fifteen months, killed up to 50 million people worldwide. In the United States, the death toll was put at 675,000, and in Mississippi, which the prior year had seen 442 flu-related deaths, 6,219 residents succumbed. In cities and towns throughout the state, Sunday church services were canceled, public meetings postponed, and schools closed. The Mississippi Delta region was especially hard hit, but farther north in Enid, the Mitchell family managed to dodge the disease’s deadly grasp.
Johnnie Bill’s young life was not without tragedy, however. In May 1919, a month before he turned five, a baby sister named Elizabeth was born, Noah and Lillian Mitchell’s sixth child. Six months later, the baby was dead. The family soon suffered an even greater setback: in February 1922, Noah and Lillian were in Memphis when she took ill and was hospitalized. Eleven days later—and only in her late thirties—she died. The culprit was encephalitis, a rare and sometimes fatal infection that causes swelling in the brain. Johnnie Bill was seven, with four older siblings ranging from nine to sixteen years old. The funeral was a sad affair, attended by the extended Mitchell family except for Johnnie Bill; he had a bout of the flu and remained home. Lillian Dickinson Mitchell was buried in the family plot at Enid Oakhill Cemetery, about a mile north of the village.
His father faced parenting alone while juggling his diverse business interests. Johnnie Bill’s sixteen-year-old sister, Florence, shouldered some of the household responsibilities, but Noah Mitchell also arranged for an elderly black woman to move in as the family’s nanny. Evelyn Lott, a Mississippi native, was in her mid-sixties when she joined the family, herself a widow. She was quite possibly born a slave in 1860, but little information about her has survived. The 1930 US Census listed Evelyn as “Negro” living in the Mitchell home as “Servant.” The little there is in Mitchell family letters and materials shows affection for her, albeit in the broader social context of unalloyed racism. Fifty years removed from the Civil War, a horrific backlash to Reconstruction was well under way throughout the Deep South. The movie director D. W. Griffith’s racist epic, The Birth of a Nation, had been released to great acclaim in 1915, a year after Johnnie Bill’s birth; the film had become a runaway hit and the nascent Hollywood’s first blockbuster. The three-hour dramatization of the Civil War and Reconstruction portrayed the Ku Klux Klan as heroes restoring order to a South torn asunder by lawless, sexually predatory ex-slaves. Its message of white supremacy resonated powerfully—a review in the Atlanta Constitution gushed, “Ancient Greece had her Homer, modern America has her David W. Griffith.” Lynching throughout the South during that period occurred with frightening regularity, while Klan membership soared. Mississippi politics, meanwhile, featured its own “Great White Chief.” US senator James K. Vardaman, spewing bigotry while dressed in a white suit, white hat, and white boots, his flowing hair worn long, embodied the archetypal southern demagogue. The popular Mississippi politico once asserted, “If it is necessary every Negro in the state will be lynched; it will be done to maintain white supremacy.”
Vardaman’s keenness for lynching seemed another of the events out there, beyond Johnnie Bill, who, as was the custom, would casually refer to black men and women as “niggers.” But his family’s brand of racism may have been more paternalistic than venomous. Tucked in the family’s well-worn, 832-page Bible from those years is a yellowed newspaper clipping of a poem, “Negro Mammy.” The overtly bigoted poem is mixed with caring and was perhaps saved in appreciation of Evelyn Lott, the fixture in the Mitchell home during Johnnie Bill’s formative years.
Send me a negro mammy
From the good old Dixie land,
Tie her wooly old head
In a bandana red;
Put a dishrag in her hand,
And, oh, let her be in her cotton-checked dress.
Tell her a song to moan,
For I miss her sadly.
Will welcome her gladly
In my new-made Western home.
EVENTUALLY JOHNNIE BILL’S FATHER FELL IN LOVE AGAIN. IN DECEMBER 1927, Noah hosted a holiday dinner party for twelve at his house. Several of the female guests were schoolteachers, including one named Eunice Massey. Eunice taught in the Batesville School fifteen miles north of Enid. Dinner—a feast built around two geese with seasonal vegetables—was served at 9:00 p.m. and was followed by music and dancing late into the night. The party made the social notes of the local weekly newspaper. “Everyone declared it to be a real party and all were delighted.” Especially Noah and Eunice; they hit it off and were soon a couple. The next year Noah, or, as the wedding notice called him, “Mr. N. B. Mitchell, our handsome townsman,” was married to “the beautiful Miss Eunice Massey.” Noah was forty-seven years old, and Eunice was twenty years younger. “Their many friends wish that their pathway through life shall be strewn with lovely and fragrant flowers.”
Johnnie (no longer Johnnie Bill) grew to like his stepmother, whom he called by her first name, but he was never as close to her as he had been to his mother or even Evelyn Lott. He was practically grown—fifteen—when his father and Eunice married on July 14, 1928, and by then his days were filled with sports, schoolwork, and the outdoors. In just about any sport he was a quick study, able to pick up baseball or tennis in short order. He loved and excelled at basketball, relying on his speed and athleticism to make up for his small size; as a teenager he weighed only about 135 pounds. He loved the woods just as much, heading out with his father and two older brothers to camp and hunt. His father had taught him to shoot as a boy, although the first time, he had been too small to hold the rifle; he had pulled the trigger as the barrel rested on his father’s shoulder. When he managed to shoot his first dove out of the sky, his father carried on as excitedly as if he had swished a basketball through the hoop from midcourt. Starting when he was twelve or so years old, Johnnie began to camp out for a few nights alone, taking along bare essentials—a blanket, frying pan, salt and pepper, maybe some bacon—to live off the land. He fished and hunted squirrels, rabbits, and birds, developing a self-reliance that seemed ordinary to him and his peers but was soon being championed by President Herbert Hoover as the defining feature of American men: “rugged individualism.” While camping, Johnnie found himself looking up into the sky, fascinated. He especially liked the moon and its monthly phases, and he became known in his family for his sense of direction; he was able to study the sun, moon, and stars to find his way home.
It was around that same time—when he was twelve or so—that he got his first taste of being airborne. Fliers, known as “barnstormers,” came through on occasion, landing in a cow pasture in a two-seater biplane that was often a salvaged leftover from the First World War. Johnnie did not have the $1.50 fee to take a ride, so he pulled a fast one by convincing the cashier at the emporium to advance him cash and charge the family account. Up he went. He was hooked—and wanted more.
“I’d always beg my dad for a couple of bucks so I could go and take a ride in one of those open cockpits,” he said years later. “I always liked airplanes.”
Though Noah Mitchell never went to college after the Webb School, he always treasured the lessons he had learned there about the value of education and strong character. That meant nothing less than academic excellence was acceptable for Johnnie. Enid had a single school, covering grades one through twelve, and the boy indeed shined in the classroom, so much so that he skipped the eighth grade. But his success at school was certainly complemented by home-schooling. Noah drilled Johnnie in Latin, running him through the paces of verb conjugations. He filled the house with books, and Johnnie was required to read Charles Dickens’s collected works. Johnnie was drilled in mathematics as well; he was pretty good at it, but it did not come as easily to him as other subjects did. And, as a result of extra practice at home, he developed a neat writing style.
Johnnie was seventeen in 1931 when he graduated with high honors from a high school whose senior class consisted of fewer than a dozen graduates. His father, having missed out on higher education, was likely the one who pushed the idea of college and, given Noah’s extensive travels, had him looking northward, specifically at Columbia University in New York City. Johnnie sought—and won—a prized $500 scholarship, one of only twenty scholarships the university awarded annually. That fall, Johnnie Mitchell left the Deep South and, in a sense, left for good. Both his grandfather and father had returned to Enid after being away at the Civil War and boarding school, respectively, but not Johnnie. He returned for visits but never again looked homeward to Enid.
EVEN WITH THE ACADEMIC SCHOLARSHIP, JOHNNIE SOON FOUND himself under constant financial pressure. He came from a large family with a father’s modest income, in which frugality and money consciousness were ingrained. He started to study economics with interest, but his need to always be working interfered. His steadiest job was in a college cafeteria as a student waiter or as a server behind the counter, slinging hash. When he could, he picked up extra odd jobs that typically paid fifty cents an hour. Every little bit helped. In the fall he worked college football games, using the pass that came with being an usher to view the game and then selling the free ticket given to all students. He tried pursuing personal interests. He began to box and was good at it, winning an intramural bantamweight championship, and he continued playing basketball in an intramural league. But the Ivy League college proved demanding in every way, as he juggled his studies, jobs, and sports.
Johnnie managed to get through nearly three years, but that’s when he decided he’d had it with the financial strain. He eyed West Point, which was free—if he could get in. To gain admission, he devised a plan. First he dropped out of Columbia in the spring of his junior year. Then he enlisted in the US Army, figuring that within a year he’d have the training needed to test into West Point. He wasn’t interested so much in military service as he was in a free ride to complete his college education. In the spring of 1934, just as he turned twenty years old, he was dispatched to an army base in Hawaii, farther away from home than he’d ever been.
But things did not work out as planned. Instead of a quick entry into the elite military college, Johnnie spent the next four years in Hawaii as an army grunt. “I passed the tests all right, but I couldn’t pass it high enough,” he said about falling short of West Point’s admission standards. “I got left by the wayside.” He never earned a degree.
Hawaii did work out in other ways. The island was a paradise, after all, its beaches among the most idyllic in the world, a playland of sorts for a young man in his early twenties. Moreover, the nation was staggering through the Great Depression, and for someone who had yet to decide what he wanted to do in life, the army took care of his every need. Johnnie was stationed at Fort Ruger, built in 1906 at Diamond Head on the coast of Oahu, thirty miles southeast of Pearl Harbor. He served in what was known as the Coast Artillery Corps, a branch of the army created as the first line of defense against an enemy invasion. “In order that no foreign soldier put foot upon our shores, Coast Artillery personnel must be expert in the efficient use of fixed and mobile cannon and anti-aircraft guns,” said the corps’s commander, Major General Andrew Hero, Jr. Johnnie was a “plotter” on a team manning a 155 mm cannon with its nearly twenty-foot-long barrel. During target practice, a ship towed a target offshore and Johnnie calculated the lead time for the cannon shot.
He earned a promotion to corporal, starting out earning $18.75 a month and, with pay raises, eventually $42 monthly. Never idle, he found ways to work off the base and always played sports. He dabbled for a while in journalism as a sportswriter for the Honolulu Advertiser. He honed his tennis game, taking lessons from a local pro and playing in tournaments all over the island. He was a starter on the base’s basketball team, which played in a league against teams from other bases. Etched in his mind forever was Oahu’s natural beauty. It was a “world of greenness and beautiful flowers on every tree and shrub.” Once his three-year tour of duty expired, he decided to re-up for another hitch. Why not? He was unable to get into West Point, but Hawaii was great: he soldiered, partied, and played sports. Then, during his fourth year at Fort Ruger, his thinking changed, as if something had clicked; he realized that while the living might be easy and he would always love the central Pacific island, he needed to get on with life. Before the year was out, he had bought his way out of the corps, paying $150 to do so.
Johnnie returned to the continental United States in 1938, apparently for some soul-searching. He did not go back to Enid. Instead he headed to Atlanta, Georgia, where his oldest brother, Philip, was living. He bunked in Philip’s apartment for the next several months. He spent his days working in his brother’s liquor store and at night managed to knock off a couple more college credits by taking courses at the University of Georgia’s extension school. He made new friends, including a young couple living in his brother’s apartment house and a worker at the store with whom he stayed in touch for years, a “nigger porter,” as he later described his friend, who was “clean, intelligent and courteous.” But overall, Johnnie seemed to lack any plan, just going along, getting along, unsure of his next move.
Until one night he experienced an epiphany. He and Philip sometimes went to watch planes take off and land at the Atlanta airport, then called Candler Field and built on an abandoned car racetrack less than a decade before. Johnny had always liked gazing up at the big sky, the stars and moon, and he’d liked airplanes ever since flying with barnstormers back home. He and his brother hung around the airfield killing time, especially liking to watch the Douglas DC-3s, the new twin-engine propeller planes that were fueling the popularity of air travel. One time Johnnie offhandedly said, “I could learn to fly.” Philip scoffed, which stopped Johnnie in his tracks. His brother did not believe he could do it. Johnnie took it as a dare, and at that moment his next move became clear. He grew serious and this time asserted—as fact—that he would learn to fly. And he meant it. Within days he headed downtown to the recruiting offices of the US Army Air Corps and applied to aviation school. He was accepted and, in October 1939, left Atlanta and his brother for San Antonio, Texas, to start basic training. Johnnie Mitchell was twenty-four years old and at last had found direction. He would become an army pilot.
LIVING IN SAN ANTONIO WHEN FLYING CADET JOHNNIE MITCHELL settled in at Kelly Field was a petite and pretty brunette named Annie Lee Miller. Just twenty-two, she was sharing an apartment on East Woodlawn Avenue with her cousin Josephine, or Josie. She worked for her uncle, Dr. Joseph Kopecky, who liked being called Dr. Joe. She was the “gal Friday” in his general medical practice.
Annie Lee was from El Campo, a rural farming town a three-hour drive to the east of San Antonio. She was a homegrown Texan through and through—had rarely, in fact, ever traveled beyond the state’s borders. Her young life had so far orbited around her hometown and two small but growing cities, San Antonio and Austin. And no matter where she happened to be, she always had relatives nearby, as she was from a big extended family. Her grandparents on her father’s side were German immigrants who had settled in the central Texas town of Temple to farm and raise eleven children, including her father, Armin W. Miller. Her grandparents on her mother’s side were from Czechoslovakia, and they had started a farm and family just north of Fayetteville, Texas. The couple raised eleven children as well, including Annie Lee’s mother, Theresa Kopecky.
In 1916, two years after Armin Miller and Theresa Kopecky married, Annie Lee was born on November 2. She was the couple’s second child. They were renting a farm just east of El Campo at the time, but Armin soon eyed eighty acres of available land further out from town. With a bank loan he bought the parcel in the fall of 1918. He dug a well, built a barn and a four-room, bungalow-style house, and then put everyone to work. Cotton was a main crop. Annie Lee and her brother, Joe, began picking cotton at the ages of six and seven, respectively, working alongside seasonal migrant workers from Mexico. The kids were taught to hoe the rows of crops, chopping away the grass and thinning out the cotton. Come picking time, grown-ups strapped long canvas sacks over their shoulders—bags holding up to a hundred pounds of seed cotton—while Annie Lee and Joe used much smaller sacks made just for them. They’d load a wagon stationed at one end of the patch, and it was work that Annie Lee and Joe actually liked, because their father had them climb atop mounds of cotton and tumble around in them to pack the cotton down. Armin Miller then hitched horses to the wagon to transport the load to the cotton gin in town.
While Armin managed the fields, Theresa managed the house. She was a tiny woman, barely five feet tall, and a feisty bundle of energy who never hesitated to speak her mind and tell the kids and her husband they weren’t doing enough. Theresa Miller was an excellent cook; her fried fish and frog legs, baked cheese kolaches and poppy-seed cakes were just a few of the dishes and desserts always in demand at the frequent family gatherings. Annie Lee loved a drink her mother made using clabber—milk that had curdled—shaken in a glass with sugar and cinnamon. In addition to her work in the kitchen, Theresa maintained an expansive flower garden to brighten the grounds, and she’d send Annie Lee out when need be to pick a bouquet from the beds of purple violets, white Shasta daisies, blue cornflowers, and various colored roses that circled the house.
Although Annie Lee’s mother had never gone to school, she valued education; in fact, many of Annie Lee’s uncles and aunts who had finished school had ended up staying in education as a career. When Annie Lee began school at age six, her teacher was none other than her Uncle John Kopecky. She and her brother, Joe, would walk the dirt road to school, joining up with kids from surrounding small farms along the way. Their destination was the Tres Palacios School, a one-room schoolhouse with between thirty and forty students. The daily round-trip walk was eight miles.
In the summers, Annie Lee spent weekends at a ranch her uncle Dr. Joe had bought, which everyone considered a “real paradise.” It was about twelve miles north of San Antonio, a property heavily wooded with cedar and live oak trees, and featuring a spring-fed stream filled with bass, catfish, and perch running from the Guadalupe River. Cousins and uncles lined the banks to fish, and to cool off they’d jump into the waterway’s deep pools. Dr. Joe built a cabin with a wood stove, a refrigerator and freezer, and a screened-in porch along one side for sleeping. He presided over the weekend affairs, walking the grounds wearing a pith helmet, shorts, and no shirt, a hand-rolled cigarette in one hand, a beer in the other. Annie Lee, her family, and dozens of cousins, aunts, and uncles feasted on spicy homemade chili and all kinds of barbecued meats, with beer for the grown-ups stacked in ice-filled washtubs. Eventually the accordions were unpacked and the singing began. Dr. Joe, proud of his Czech heritage, often led the Slavic tunes.
When Annie Lee began high school in El Campo at age thirteen, her extended family, once again, was all around. As it was too far for them to walk from home, the Millers and Kopeckys pitched in to rent rooms two blocks from El Campo High School. Three Kopecky boys stayed in one bedroom, Annie Lee roomed with some girls in another, and her brother, Joe, stayed with cousins in a third bedroom. They all shared the kitchen with the widow who owned the house and needed the rental income. Come the end of the school week, Annie Lee and the others walked nine miles to get home, taking the most direct route across fields and meadows rather than the winding dirt roads.
She was only sixteen when she graduated in June 1933, one of sixty seniors. In its coverage of the graduation, the high school newspaper, The Rice Bird, included one-liners about each member of the class, things such as “Our Prince Charming,” “Our Lady Preacher,” and “Basketball and Tennis Shark.” The entry for Annie Lee read “God’s Gift to Teachers.” Though her parents needed her brother, Joe, to stay home after high school to work on the farm, they were able to afford to send Annie Lee to college for two years at the University of Texas. It was in Austin that Annie Lee tasted real independence for the first time. Yet another relative lived nearby—this time Ludmila Kopecky, her mother’s sister—but Aunt “Ludma” was hardly the hovering type. Ludma, in her late twenties, worked as a nurse at the University of Texas Health Center and was considered “modern.” She kept her own apartment, owned her own car, dressed stylishly, and played a steel guitar. On weekends she performed in clubs, singing and playing her guitar. Ludma lived life “in the fast lane,” as one of Annie Lee’s cousins once said, “with wine, men, song and dancing until dawn.” While in college in Austin, Annie Lee spent lots of her free time with Aunt Ludma. They’d go to movies together or the clubs, or Ludma would make dinner in her apartment, using her secret recipe for baked chicken and herbs. Annie Lee came to regard her Aunt Ludma as a big sister of sorts, worldly and wise.
ANNIE LEE MOVED TO SAN ANTONIO IN 1935 AFTER FINISHING HER two-year college program, living with her cousin Josie and working for her uncle, Dr. Joe. That was the setup for the next four years, as she earned her own way, roomed with a favorite cousin, and enjoyed the life of a single woman barely twenty years old. She, Josie, and their girlfriends enjoyed socializing with the servicemen from the several nearby bases. On weekends, when the Officers’ Clubs on the bases opened their doors to civilians, they joined the flocks of women who went. Some of Annie Lee’s friends considered dating a soldier a very big deal. But Annie Lee wasn’t convinced. She had fun going out, for sure, and at different times she dated one or more men but none seriously. She was wary of getting involved with someone in the service; here today, gone tomorrow kind of thing. But then came a new year, January 1940, when her cousin Josie proposed a double date. The men were aviation cadets, she said. Josie knew one, but Annie Lee’s would be a blind date—at age twenty-five slightly older than the soldier boys they were used to. He was from Enid, Mississippi, Josie told her. Annie Lee hesitated, thinking “Not another flyboy.” But Josie persisted, and she caved.
The first date led to a second, then a third, and soon enough Annie Lee Miller and Johnnie Mitchell were well on their way to becoming a couple. The first Sunday morning in April found them, along with cousin Josie, heading off in Johnnie’s secondhand car for the eighty-mile drive to Austin to visit Annie Lee’s Aunt Ludma. Annie Lee and Johnnie had gotten past the awkwardness of a blind date and discovered the kind of chemistry that’s often difficult to describe but that each recognized. They liked each other right away and were comfortable in each other’s company. They shared an interest in movies, an easy sense of humor, little tolerance for people who acted superior to others, and, perhaps most important, a small-town upbringing surrounded by family and regular folks.
For Annie Lee, the Sunday drive to Austin was the first chance to show off her new man to her favorite aunt. Racing to Austin was more like it, though, because Johnnie pushed the car hard along the paved parts of the road to speeds exceeding eighty miles per hour. Maybe he was just aching to move fast, as he now did in the sky during training exercises at Randolph Field, or maybe he wanted to impress his new gal, but, either way, it backfired. He got caught, pulled over by a Texas Highway Patrol officer for speeding. Johnnie tried to act nonchalant, as Annie Lee later told her aunt, uttering his version of Scarlett O’Hara’s line in Gone With the Wind: “he’d worry about that tomorrow.” But Annie Lee could tell he was embarrassed and annoyed at having to pay the stiff fine with money he was saving for a brand-new car. They told Ludma about the ticket but decided not to say anything to Annie Lee’s parents. Johnnie worried that the police stop would taint their impression of him, still in the early stages. Annie Lee told Ludma, “They would think we were fools.”
That glitch aside, they enjoyed their afternoon with “modern” Ludma—afterward Johnnie went on and on to Annie Lee, praising Ludma’s singing voice—and enjoyed many more dates that spring. They sometimes partied with friends in Annie Lee and Josie’s apartment, drinking their way through a pint of Johnnie Walker Red and chatting the night away, or went out with a crowd for dinner in San Antonio, either at Kline’s, a popular restaurant and club, or at the even more popular Earl Abel’s on Main Street, started during the Depression by Earl Abel, a former silent film organist and famous for its fried chicken for decades to come. The restaurant had an outdoor area known as “The Garden of Eatin’.” They experienced the rough patches that new couples do, usually involving Johnnie’s jealousy about two guys Annie Lee had dated and who were still around, one named Skelly and the other Clay. At one point Johnnie announced that he wasn’t going “to play second fiddle any longer.” But mostly there were flowers and fun and a romance that steadily gained traction throughout the first half of 1940. The clincher came on July 26, when John William Mitchell received his pilot wings and commission as a second lieutenant in the Army Air Corps. Graduation was held at the base for a class of 240 new pilots. Johnnie’s father, Noah, and one of his brothers had talked about coming for the big day but in the end didn’t make it. Instead, Annie Lee Miller, sporting a new blue-and-white-striped dress, was the one looking on as the presiding Army Air Corps officer, Colonel Millard Fillmore “Miff” Harmon, Jr., shook Johnnie’s hand after Johnnie received his diploma and flying pin. “You pinned my first pair of wings on me,” Johnnie wrote Annie Lee years later, “and I believe it was when I became thoroughly convinced that I was going to marry you, come hell or high water.”
But graduation also meant separation. Johnnie was given four weeks to report to Moffett Field south of San Francisco. Before his departure, he spent as much time as he could with Annie Lee. Their last time together was lunch the day he left, during which they only “talked of little things so the conversation would not become serious,” as he recalled later. Then he said farewell and embarked on a good-bye road trip of sorts. With other pilot friends, he drove all night to Jackson, Mississippi, where they dropped off one rider and then continued north. He reached Enid at daybreak. Johnnie spent a few days there, then drove nine hours with his father to Atlanta to his brother’s place, where another brother and his family were also visiting. Right away Johnnie began writing letters to Annie Lee—an epistolary habit that would last for years to come. He told Annie Lee that his father and brothers and their families hadn’t gotten to bed until 5:00 a.m.—a happy reunion, he said, with lots of drinking and “singing some of our old time songs.” Next he told Annie Lee of a sour moment: telling his father about her. Johnnie, of course, was excited to share the news. But the first thing the wary Noah had asked him about was her religion and racial background because, explained Johnnie, “he is prejudiced against Catholics, Germans and Jews.” When Johnnie had replied that Armin Miller was pure German and Theresa Miller pure Czech, his father had gasped and said, “My God.” Johnnie had gotten mad. He’d told his father that he didn’t give a damn what he thought and that he’d be ashamed once he met Annie Lee.
Leaving Georgia on Friday, August 16, 1940, Johnnie headed cross country, driving through the Painted Desert in Arizona, stopping to gape at the wondrous Grand Canyon, and continuing on through the Navajo Desert, where, he said, it was “117 degrees in the shade—but there was no shade.” It was the same year Woody Guthrie was writing lyrics for what became one of the most famous folk songs ever, “This Land Is Your Land,” and Johnnie was having his own “this land” moment, driving Guthrie’s ribbon of highway and looking above at that endless skyway. To be sure, all around him were signs that the world war, which had been expanding overseas since the prior September, when Hitler’s Nazis had invaded Poland, was getting closer to home. In May 1940, President Roosevelt, addressing Congress, had asked for hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for fifty thousand new airplanes, and then, addressing Americans in a fireside chat later in the year, had asserted that the nation must become “the arsenal of democracy.” When Johnnie got to Reno, Nevada, he was surprised by the throngs of couples flocking to the resort not to gamble but for a quick marriage—surprised until he realized that marriage was a deferment from the first peacetime draft in US history, to be held the next month. For his part, though, Second Lieutenant John Mitchell was en route to continue his training for the rapidly expanding Army Air Corps. In Texas during basic training he’d initially flown in a Vultee BT-13 Valiant, a training plane that was tricky to fly and could stall easily. But he’d taken quickly to the task, discovering a comfort in the sky and a knack for navigation for which he’d become known—a sense of direction learned, as he later said, from a boyhood spent “in the woods, telling my position from the sun, moon and stars.”
Johnnie pulled into Moffett Field seven days after leaving Georgia and, after barely getting settled, resumed flying exercises. He’d thought about flying bombers but was assigned to a pursuit squadron, which meant he was going to train as a fighter pilot. It also meant getting the chance to fly a Curtiss P-36 Hawk, a fighter plane considered the fastest at the time. When he got the chance on Wednesday, September 4, he couldn’t wait to tell Annie Lee. “Yours truly put in about an hour and ten minutes soaring over this sun-kissed land at about 265 mph,” he wrote excitedly before going to bed. “I took off so suddenly that I was almost thrown back through the tail assembly and by the time I had made one climbing turn, pulled my wheels up and was straightened out, why I had 10,000 feet altitude. Those little babies can climb almost straight up.”
It was the early autumn of 1940, and Johnnie was finding his place—at long last. He missed Annie Lee, for sure, telling her so in his frequent letters. But he sensed, too, that he was coming into his own, that he’d found a purpose—flying—a woman he loved—Annie Lee Miller—and, of course, the moon—always Johnnie Bill and the moon. It was a feeling he tried capturing in words in late September after his first flight in the skies over California in a P-36. “This is one of the most beautiful nights,” he wrote Annie Lee. “And I stepped out on our little porch to watch a plane glide down the runway and roar off into the night. The moon was shining in a cloudless sky and reflecting very brightly upon the wind-stirred bay. I stood and looked for a while and thought—it is good to be alive and it is a wonderful life.”