This is our hospitality room here at the Anthony and Pippin Little Beach, Broadway on the beach,
in a hotel, September 29, 1999.
Picture of a 2,000-year-old flag up there on the podium there.
I tell it as we go in, and see a picture of Jack Shaw right there.
I'm gonna catch up on the news.
Ah, Jack, you and I are on camera over there.
Hey, Leo.
Yeah, we're on TV.
How you doing?
Yeah?
So, this is our 17th reunion here for this reunion organization.
It originally started by Joe Wall back in 1983 in Orlando, Florida, I think, was the first one.
So this is 17 years on the go, and here we're here at Hampton Inn, Little Beach in 1999.
And this is Jack Shaw, he's my chaplain here for the reunion, and he's from Bradington, Florida.
Jack and you and Charlene are here.
How many reunions you've been to now since, in this Joe Wall, originally started back in 83.
Since 83, how many reunions you've been to out of that many years?
Probably, I would say I've been to about 11.
11, that's great.
We first started when we had our reunion in St. Augustine.
Oh, that's the first one.
Well, it was at a very...
Oh, that's when you started.
Yeah, well, I helped Joe and Ray Flannery when they first started.
They were on, I somehow got on the service company mailing list,
and that was when I had a reunion that was 124th Headquarters Company and the medics.
We had that medic detachment that was with headquarters company, and they had quite a group of men.
They spread out over the whole regiment, through the battalions and all.
But the doctors and the technicians were always around headquarters company and service company.
We got started, that little reunion was over in Meridian, Mississippi,
and it ran for about seven, eight years.
The medics separated, so that left the reunion so small that it didn't function too well, so it went dead.
That's when Joe had me on his mailing list, and Joe contacted me.
Ray Flannery lives in St. Petersburg, Florida, and I live in Bradenton, Florida,
so I had been in contact with Ray Flannery since the war,
which about that time was about 51 or 52 years that we'd been in contact with each other.
Usually the annual thing, like Christmas cards, and we'd call each other every once in a while.
I gave them some mailing lists at the time that they started, of different people.
Joe was with the service company, the automotive supplier at that division.
The old boy, Broughton Stansel, lived up there in Ball Ground, Georgia, and Joe knew him.
He got to coming a few times.
Well, I had contacted him about the reunion, and I added, we were just trying to get different ones into it, you know.
He finally ended up coming to the service company reunion from Ball Ground, Georgia.
The reason the one I went to, of course, they went from Orlando, Florida, to Nashville, Tennessee.
Somehow, on the way, returning back to Florida, St. Petersburg, Florida, Ray Flannery had gone, and he was the co-sponsor.
On the way back, he got tired, and he pulled off the side of the road,
and someone ran into his car and tore it all up.
He survived, but he never was active anymore.
I mean, it was the last time he'd ever went to a reunion, or even had anything to do with it.
So that's how Joe carried it on then, from the time that you came into it, with the 106th, 7th group that you had started.
Where was it that you started your group?
In Gatine.
In Gatine, yeah.
Then at that point, you know, everything went along together, and then we got thinking then on a larger scale.
Then when Joe passed away in 19 and 18...
Ninety-five.
Ninety-five, yeah, that was it.
Then that's when we started reaching out to the broader spectrum of the whole division.
We have survived a lot of fellows, you know.
We lose a lot.
We used to have about 70, 80 come without their wives.
I mean, including their wives, there's a hundred something, you know, back in the early beginnings.
Then we had those anniversaries, you know, Orlando, Florida.
You remember Orlando, Florida, when we had the 50th anniversary of the whole division, yeah, World War II.
And all that National Guard unit.
I never saved so many stripes.
Them National Guard guys had...they were all stripes.
You remember how they sat together?
One of them was Master Sergeant or Tech Sergeant or something.
You know, you'd have one or two in your company, but when you got all those guys together,
it looked like a striped bunch of soldiers, you know what I mean?
They had all those service marks on their sleeve.
Those hash marks?
Yeah, hash mark longevity, you know, where they'd been in.
And they probably continued from World War II and just stayed in, you know, in the National Guard, in the Reserve.
Some of them are in the Reserve, National Guard now.
But then, you remember later we had the...we celebrated the 124th opening of the museum.
It was at Sanford, Florida or near there.
Yeah, it was down there.
And the National Guard kind of sponsored, helped sponsor, exactly, it's in their building, isn't it?
Right.
And we experienced that ceremony there when they named their National Guard unit to one of their own men,
in honor of one of their own men.
And as far as I know, that's the name of that National Guard unit there today.
I suppose it's Sanford, Florida. It was out of Orlando at least.
Yeah, Sanford, Florida was the address of the museum.
Yeah, museum, yeah.
I was trying to think of the name of the guy that they were trying to honor.
Yeah, I knew it at the time.
Evans, Evans, Robert L. Evans.
Yeah, he no doubt had been in that unit a long time.
He was in the medical.
Miriam Hess knew all those people.
I don't know if Miriam was a husband that had ever been in that unit or not.
He died after the war though, didn't he?
He died the year before she got to the goal of the first reunion.
Yeah.
Because he was already dead when she found out about the reunion.
He never knew that there wasn't a reunion.
That 124,106th
That was the reunion.
She later moved out to Orlando, Florida.
She lived in Orlando at one time.
She lived in...
Well, whatever that little town was.
In Versa, Florida.
Then she moved up to Crystal River.
Now she moved into Georgia.
Decatur, Decatur, Georgia.
Yeah, that's right.
She wrote me recently back.
I wondered why she moved to Georgia.
I assumed that they had always lived in Florida.
Well, that's where she lived originally, I think.
Decatur, Georgia.
That's where she was raised up at.
Oh, she just went back then, didn't she?
I think that's what it was. I'm not sure about that.
But she had a little health problem too, from what I understood.
Well, she seems to be doing okay now.
She's going to be here today.
That town in Florida was in Inverness.
That's where she lived.
Inverness?
Yeah, Inverness.
I was familiar with that.
I looked at some property there.
There's a good sized lake or something there.
A person back home in Georgia owned this property.
He moved back to Georgia and he wanted to sell it.
So I was over there and looked at that property one time.
Well, we'll just sit around here.
It's kind of rehashed things from the time this reunion started here.
We're kind of waiting around for some more.
We've got about 20 people or more already here.
But they're all out shopping right now and enjoying themselves while it's not raining.
I don't think we haven't had any sunshine since we arrived here.
And we're playing golf, but the weather's pretty iffy on golf right now.
Whether we're going to get to play any or not, we don't know yet.
So we're purposefully out of his mind.
He's going to play with rains or shines.
Well, he's out on reconnaissance, you know, Leo.
He's doing reconnaissance now.
He's going out and investigating some courses to see how deep the water is.
I was just reading recently about the percentages of people who,
if you would start a golf match while it was raining,
or what would happen if it started raining after you started playing.
So there's percentages there of very few people that start playing golf in the rain.
But there's a lot of golfers getting caught while it's raining, you know, on the golf course, on the golf course.
But you have to be very cautious about lightning, of course,
because those clubs are metal and they attract lightning if there's any around.
And that can be hazardous.
Yeah. We're losing those men now the way it is.
We don't want to lose any more out on the golf course.
No, we don't want any to get that lightning rod to the golf club.
So we're going to have our business meeting here, probably in this room right here,
tomorrow afternoon, about 2 o'clock, find out where we're going to be at in the year 2000.
And so I think I'm going to sign off right now for a little bit and talk to somebody else or something else.
Well, it's been a pleasure talking to you, Jack.
I hope you get to come to many, many more reunions.
I'm glad this many are able to come this year, and we just look forward to having a great time together.
It's a great venue here, but there's lots of activity in this area and a great place to meet.
Yeah.
I'm going to take a few pictures of the hospitality room here.
And where are you going to put that in the booth?
It's not in the booth.
Well, I know this is going to be on tape.
No, I know. I mean the pictures.
Oh, well, I'm going to take pictures of the video camera.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The hospitality room here.
You have to be in the inside that floor right there.
Check-in table here.
There are chairs stacked up there.
I'm going to need them in the meeting room.
They didn't leave here long.
There's a lot of things here. Snack area.
There's a lot of food.
And they have rooms up there.
That's the video.
This picture here was not built in the building.
This is the video.
This is more experience, right?
The editions of Ricky and Robin, just to name a few.
But you look at these numbers comparing this year to last year.
One more time.
This is the video.
And then here by the lake.
This is the video.
You can see a aquarium.
This is the video.
This is the video.
One way on the beach.
This is an eight-story building.
This is the back door here.
This sign out here at the entrance of the parking lot.
This is the video.
This sign just tells about 16 cinema pictures.
This is the video.
This is the video.
This is the lobby area right over there.
This is the room down below right there.
This is the hotel.
This is the hotel.
This is the unloading area where you check in at up here.
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This concludes our time.
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