- Historical Date: December 21, 1940
- Location:Muskegon, MI
Sunday to Be Happy Day for Guards and Kin
Special Train Will Bring 60 Company G Men Home for Holidays At 7:55 P. M.
“And we’ll all turn out when Johnny comes marching home!”
That will be the theme song of many a Greater Muskegon family Sunday when at 7:55 p. m. 7- members of Muskegon’s Company G of the Michigan National Guard now in training at Cap Beauregard, La., detrain at the Pere Marquette station here.
Back for Christmas and the holidays, Greater Muskegon’s guardsmen will enjoy a 10-day leave, starting their return trip at 5:45 a. m. Tuesday, Dec. 31. Among the men coming home are the following:
Charles Schneider, A. E. Kirch-Gardenour [sic], Melvin L. Berry, Jack enbauer [sic], James R. Wolfcale, Harvey E. Klomparens, Donald W. E. Farber, Donald J. Jackman, John Groulx, Roy Borgeson, Hugh Hilsop, William Zeigler, John Clark, Frank Hutta, John Kwak, Mike Kovatz, Bennie Richell, James Schultz, Arther Vandermeulin, William Willis, Willard Brener [sic], Jay Dake, Jack Davis, Clarence Deboeuf, Lewis Downey, Forrest Hughes, Mac Knowles, John Miller, William Pehr, William Sprecken, Harvey Alexander, Clarence Atwood, George Bergeson [sic], James Brener [sic], Charles Calliff, Jay Cutler, Harry Debeouf, Matthew Gauthier, Harold Gleisner, Chester Halasinski, Milton Hammond, Stanley Jastrembski [sic], Raymond Kitchen, Frank Lovelace, Jay Meyers, Homer Nichols, Donald Nickelson, Elwin Schyler, Worthy Scofield, Herbert Smith, Carl Stenberg, Charles Stanley, Edward Tapek, Charles Taylor, Earl VanNettan, Benjamin Viau and William Young.1
I don’t have any information on how many people turned out at the train station to welcome the boys home, but there were most certainly some families gathered to greet them. The newspaper included all their names, though several have spelling errors. I’m sure it would have been much harder to fact check in those days!
Here’s a list of the ones I know were misspelled:
- Willard Broner
- George Borgeson
- James Broner
- Stanley Jastrzembski
After two months away, I imagine these young men, these soldiers, bounding off the train, full of stories of what they had seen and done off in Louisiana. War still seemed like something very far away.
- “Sunday to Be Happy day for Guards and Kin.” Muskegon Chronicle, 21 Dec. 1940.
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That is my great uncle Frank Hutta in the above pic. Don’t know much at all about his service as he didn’t speak about it.