Joe H. Copeland

Notes for JOE H. COPELAND, JR.:

Born June 11, 1920. Oldest child of Joe H. Copeland Sr. and Lizzie Ford. Born at Antioch, about 4 miles south of Morrow, AR, and about a half mile north of present Antioch Church. Joe Sr. was a schoolteacher, and the next term was at Evansville. After that his next school was at Zinnamon, and Dad managed to buy a 120 acre farm with a house near Zinnamon,We always called this the "Bradshaw" place, with a complete set of buildings for 8 dollars! There were four more of my brothers and sisters born while we lived there. Ouida Evelyn in 1923, Mary Alice in 1925, Foster Ford in 1927 and Wanda Ruth in 1929.Sometime after we moved there my grandpa gave me a pet crow named "Jim". There never was a worse pest! Dad had some chicken coops outside with about 200 baby chicks in them and Jim would walk around a coop until he spied a crack then he would peck until he got the attention of a chicken and he would grab whatever showed through the crack and pull until something gave! We had chix with only one leg, one foot, one wing, no beak, or just whatever he could grab was missing. Jim didn't last very long after Dad found out what he had been doing! He would come into the house at any opportunity and grab anything he could carry and fly away with it. We found things in hollow trees years later and thought they had been put there by Jim.

Sometime during these early years after my sister Ouida was big enough to walk, she was never still unless she was asleep and during daylight hours she was everywhere and wasn't afraid of anything. We had an old tomcat that was nothing but a real gentle toy and my sister would pick his hind legs off the ground and "plow" him. She plowed him a lot of miles and he was usually worn out when she parked him. One day though, she and I had him in the house playing with him and when we got through with him one of us put him in the oven of our old cook stove and forgot him. Next morning Mama got up and built a fire in the stove and while the oven was getting hot she made up a pan of biscuits - opened up the oven door to put her biscuits in and there was the cat! He yowled to the top of his lungs and Mama screamed to the top of hers and he hit the floor in a hard gallop! He survived somehow though without any very serious damage and sometime later went visiting to my Grandma's house and my uncle saw him hiding in the weeds, thought he was a fox and killed him with a rock.

We lived there until the fall of 1924 and since money was scarce, Dad decided we should "go to the cotton patch" and try our luck at picking cotton. We loaded some clothing and camping gear into the wagon and went to Oklahoma. I don't remember a lot about that trip, but one of the things was when we crossed the Arkansas River I could see a man fishing from a houseboat there below the bridge.I never knew whether he caught anything or not. One of the next things was when we stayed in the wagon yard at McAlester, OK and someone stole my dog. We got malaria there in the river bottoms and spent most of what we made buying medicine but toughed it out until about Christmas.By this time we had worked our way to Lindsay,OK., and we stayed with dad's uncles Millard and Doc and his aunt Lizzie Tye.I was with Uncle Millard's family enough that I remember Earl, Floy, Martha and Emma Lee. I met their younger brother,James Joseph in later years when he came to the store where I worked hunting Caterpillar parts. One of the other parts salesmen waited on him and called me when he learned that his name was Copeland. He worked for Griffith Co, and they were building the Lemoore Air Station at Lemoore,CA. Uncle Doc was married to Betty Tye, sister of Aunt Lizzie's husband, had Lloyd and Virgie Marie. Lloyd owned the first automobile that I was ever in. Aunt Lizzie was married to a lawman(Bill Tye) in Lindsay, and they had a daughter named Corrine who was married to Chester Rhodes. Sometime about Christmas,Dad decided to send us back home, so he put my mother, me and my baby sister Ouida on the train at Norman, OK and we went back to Arkansas! My Grandpa Ford met us at the station in West Fork ,AR with a buggy. Dad stayed awhile longer and went on to Hobart,OK and was there when the schoolhouse burned. This was at a Christmas program and the fire was caused by a candle on the Christmas tree .This was quite a tragedy, the schoolhouse had been overhauled and had heavy mesh screen over the windows and the doors all opened to the inside. All the people inside started trying to get out and the ones outside were trying to get in and no one was getting anywhere. A lot of people perished in that fire, and as a result, schoolhouses were built to better plans after that.There had been good crops that year, and there were new cars parked there for several days that no one could find owners for. Dad decided to give it up after that, and he traded our team and wagon for our first automobile, and came home driving a 1913 model T Ford! He got to within about three miles of home when he straddled a boulder in the road and had to get a neighbor with a team of mules to pull him off! We didn't use that car very much because gasolene was terribly expensive, 15 cents per gallon, license was 4 dollars per year and tires may have cost as much as $5 each!! We took it for a drive one Sunday and the radius rod came down and we ended up in the ditch! Dad took it and parked it in the grainery shed and gave up joy riding for a while. He and one of my uncles were working crossword puzzles one night when they happened to notice "it was light as day" outside, they looked out and the grainery was afire. The first thing to do was get the car out so they rolled it out and parked it then went back to fight the fire. They forgot all about the car, and next morning found it had rolled off the hill and parked in a branch below the house. A hen had chosen the front seat for her nest and was setting on a nest full of eggs and had stayed on her nest through the whole ordeal, and not a single egg was cracked!

Dad, my uncle and Grandpa Ford decided to put in a tomato crop in 1925 and had their crop pretty well established when Grandpa got bedfast and died - my first experience with death.During this time I got barely acquainted with some of my relatives, saw some of them for the only time in my life. There was Uncle Oscar,Uncle Buster(David),Aunt "Bunch"(Georgia),Aunt "Doll"(Rachel)Aunt"(Shang)Mae and several of their children including Oren and Reba Hill and H.M, Dorothy and Norvain Plunkett.I managed to know all of my first cousins on the Ford side except Mozelle Ford and Glenn McDaniel. Two of my uncles from Western Oklahoma came back here during this time in brand new Fords. One of them had a "self-starter" on it and cost $100 more than the other.

In 1926 Dad was teaching school at Strickler and he bought a 1924- Chevrolet. He wanted to take us on a visit to Grandpa's on the weekend, so we got ready and when he got in from school on Friday pm we climbed aboard and took off. After numerous flats and other troubles we got to Morrow, AR (about 25 miles) at 2:30 am, broke the driveshaft while crossing the creek - called Grandpa and he got one of his neighbors to go pick us up. Dad and Grandpa went after daylight and towed the car in and they worked on it until Dad had to leave and walk back home and start classes on Monday. He held school that week then walked back to Grandpas on Friday night and spent another weekend working on it, loaded us all up and started home and got to Strickler and broke down again and had to get someone to take us home in the middle of the night. That car was only about 2 years old when we were having all that trouble. "They just don't make 'em like they used to".

A year or so later while Dad was teaching school, he usually rode a mule or horse. This particular morning though, it was colder than usual so he decided he would try to go in our T model. He got him a bunch of corncobs and soaked them good with kerosene and poked them in around the manifold and set them afire, thinking that if he got the manifold hot that it would start easier. The fire didn't go out when it should have, as gasolene was seeping out of the carburetor and he had quite a blaze going. He was afraid to pour water on it for fear of spreading the fire, so what does Mama do except grab a bucket of water and douse it good and proper! Dad went to school in high style that day!

After that he taught school at Zinnamon, Strickler, and various places in Washington County for the next several years. I'm not sure what kind of a salary he got. It seems to me that most of the time he got 30 dollars per month. I know he would spend awhile at the University each summer in order to keep his teacher's certificate current. We lived near Zinnamon all this time where all the other seven living children were born. Went to school at Zinnamon until I finished the 8th grade in 1933. Some of the time during this period, I can remember that we could make some money to buy groceries by making railroad ties.There were three grades of them, and the best grade sold for 35 cents. Of course we always wanted to have all top grade ties, and I would load 12 of them on the wagon and drive them 10 miles to the nearest railroad where the tie yard was located. The tie inspector would usually cull at least one tie in a load and he would offer 5 cents for it, I would refuse to let him have it and would take to him on the next load and he would probably accept it and maybe cull another one. Once after I had collected for my load and paid for all the things I had bought I had a nickel left and decided to buy me a "Coke". I believe that was the best I had ever tasted but I couldn't enjoy it for thinking about all the little mouths at home that had never tasted anything like that! After my grandparents died and my uncle Mike decided to go to California, we moved from the place I described earlier to their old home place where the rest of my siblings were born. There was David Bruce in 1930,Leota born and died in 1934, Neva Joy in 1937 and Jack Roger in 1939. One of the greatest tragedies of my life was in July 1934. We had just buried my stillborn baby sister earlier in the week and our house burned to the ground on Sunday. Everything we had except the few clothes we were wearing was gone, and there wasn't a nickle on the farm! We had the best bunch on neighbors that it was possible to have, and they came to our rescue! One man even gave Dad 5 dollars! With no money on hand and no way to get any, we decided the only thing to do was try and rebuild so the neighbors came through again! We had plenty of timber on our place, so with help from the neighbors we cut timber and sawed it into lumber and built us a new house. Not much of a house, but it was home for some of us for more than 50 years. Late that fall, Dad got a small clothing and food voucher from the Welfare Office and about the same time got a job on WPA for 28 dollars per month.He worked on a road crew for awhile improving the road from West Fork to Devils Den State Park. He was then promoted to foreman and sent to Resettlement Administration at Lake Wedington where he worked in conservation and reforestation for a few years .We had been milking cows to provide some income, but there was a bad drouth that year and we didn't grow any feed so we had to sell our cows. We drove 7 of them to the local grocery store where we applied them to our bill at 3 dollars per head then sold the rest of our herd to the Government for about the same amount.During this time I had an offer from the foreman on the WPA crew. He was a grape farmer and needed some new posts to support his grapevines. It was getting close to Christmas, and I had no money to buy Christmas presents with so I agreed to take his offer.If I would get him a hundred posts, roadside,he would pay me a nickel apiece for them so long as they were six feet six inches long and not less than three and a half inches at the little end .It took about all the timber I could find on our place, but I finally after about three days got them all together. He paid me the five dollars and I caught a ride to towm and bought Xmas presents for the whole family, then came down with the "flu" from riding the back of a truck to town and back in the cold weather.

There was no way I could get to town to go to high school so it looked like my education was finished. I Had an exciting offer from one person who would allow me to board with his family, do chores and help milk 12 cows twice a day, help with the farm work during the summer, and I could go to school during school season and I would be paid 5 dollars per month year round. I thought it over and decided I couldn't afford to get me an education, so declined and stayed at home, worked on our farm, worked for neighbors for 25 cents per day, and sometime 10 cents per hour until my two older sisters were old enough to go to high school. Dad made arrangements for us to "batch" in town during the week and go home on weekends. I was 18 years old then, too old for the freshman class, and the seniors didn't want anything to do with me because I was a freshman, so there I was! I toughed it out for one term, and at the end of term I got a chance to enlist in the CCC, a poverty program initiated by Pres. Roosevelt to give young men a job and keep them off the street.Incidentally, it was also the counterpart of Hitler's "Youth Corps",In later years I have had to explain to several people about our "concentration camps", some folks thought we actually had them! It paid 30 dollars per month of which I could keep 8 and my family got 22 which was a Bonanza for them at that time!Dad was able to give up his WPA job and stay home. He also started growing broilers about the same time, they were just getting started in Northwest Arkansas . One thing a person learns from lean times like that is to do without.It is a pretty hard way to learn, but he soon finds that he doesn't need nearly so much as he thought he did. When the first CCC camp was built in our area, it was staffed with boys from North Dakota. They were replaced by a company from Nebraska who were then replaced with two other groups from North Dakota . This was experimental on the part of Government. They finally decided that local people were better suited for local projects. Several groups were sent from Arkansas to places like Idaho,Montana,Washington, etc. The goal of our CCC group at Devil's Den was to build a State Park. We finally got a complete company of Arkansas boys and had locally experienced men.There were boys from all walks of life, and some of the stories we got were unbelievable! Most of the guys were away from home for the first time, some of them had never been anywhere. I think that the most amazing thing I heard was from one of the boys who said he had his first bed of his own when he joined the CCC.He had grown up sleeping on the foot of his parent's bed! We built new roads, a dam of native stone, camp grounds and hiking trails, and several log tourist cabins, after a few weeks there a group of us were sent to Hot Springs to build a new camp on Lake Hamilton.When that job was completed we were taken back to Devil's Den where we continued work on the park. We started a new Dam there in the Lee's Creek valley, but the War came along and it had to be abandoned. Much of the work we did is still visible today and is being used by many people. I stayed there for a year when an Army recruiter came out one day and asked me if I would like to enlist in the Army, and I said I would! This was in 1939, I enlisted in the QM Corps for service at McChord Field, WA.

After taking the required basic training, they still hadn't finshed the buildings at McChord Field so they couldn"t move us for an indefinite time, and several of us volunteered for temporary duty at Fort Lewis just in order to have somehting to do. I worked at the Post Commissary until I came down with the measles and was sent to the hospital. While there McChord Field opened up and everyone moved on over there except the ones who were in the hospital and we were transferred out to other organizations. I was assigned to a QM battalion in Hawaii, then transferred to Co. A. 40th QM reg't in San Francisco all in one week. The 40th was moved to Fort Lewis and was absorbed by the 3rd QM Bn. there. All this transferring was being done in the Spring of 1940- I went to 3rd QM in June and we went on manuevers to Chehalis and Tenino Washington in August. I was determined to go home on furlough that Xmas, so I saved my money and on the last day of November I walked into the bus station in Olympia and gave the agent 7 ten dollar bills for a ticket to Fayetteville, AR, and they gave me back a nickel ! When I got home, I found that Dad didn't have any kind of an operable vehicle, so I went to Abshier Bryan Motor Co., in Fayetteville and bought a 1937 Ford "60" for 325.00 & made monthly payments on it. I was making 26.00 monthly at the time. When my furlough was up I went back to Fort Lewis, I was doing real well there, when they sent me to Motor Transport School in Baltimore for 17 weeks, and before that time was up the draft started and all of us who were away in school were transferred out to make room for draftees and I was transferred to the 15th US Infantry, 3rd Inf. Division, stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington. After finishing the MTS School, I was sent back to Fort Lewis and got there just in time to go on manuevers to Hunter Liggett Military Reservation near King City, California. While there, North American Aviation went on strike in Los Angeles and since the LA Police Force couldn't handle it, we were ordered to go and put them back to work. They were striking for a 35 cents per hour minimum and 75 cents maximum. We pulled into the gates at about work time, put on our gas masks and bayonets and started walking. We had most of them back working next day. We did such a good job handling that strike that our regimental commander was promoted to Brigadier General and was given a command in Alaska.

After the strike was settled we stayed around Los Angeles until July 1st. They were just beginning to organize the USO and we were involved in several projects. One of them was a film, "The Bugle Calls" with Wallace Beery. They used our regiment quite a bit while we were there, but we didn't get to finish it and they sent a camera crew to Fort Lewis later and we did some more filming on the Post Parade ground and we just barely got it finished before Pearl Harbor.

Soon after Pearl Harbor, we had no idea what was coming next so we dispersed in several towns from the Oregon line to the Canadian Border, and after they were sure we wouldn't be invaded we started training and preparing to go to the Pacific. After several weeks of intensive training they gave us a series of shots for yellow fever, etc. and sent us to a staging area at Fort Ord, California. Someone had sabotaged the yellow fever serum, so we all wound up in the hospital. They had replace us with another division for duty in the Pacific. After we recuperated we went to Camp Pickett, Virginia, staged for ETO and I went along with them through North Africa, Sicily and Italy. We fought the French for about a week when we first went to Africa, then when we got all our differences settled we went on to chase the Afrika Korps out of Africa. We wound up the African Campaign in the spring of 1943 then regrouped for the Sicilian Campaign with the Seventh Army-.

The German Air Force bombed Bizerte almost every night. We left Bizerte for Sicily in the late afternoon, and were well on our way when we heard the Germans heading for their usual raid on Bizerte, and satisfied that this was the case we didn't pay a lot of attention to them. It wasn't very long, however until we heard them coming back, and we thought they had spotted us and were going to make a bomb run on us so we opened up on them with everything we had. When the dust cleared and we could find out what was going on, we got the shock of a lifetime! We had shot down 27 planeloads of paratroopers! Our own 82nd Airborne Division was on their way to jump ahead of us on the South Coast of Sicily! We almost wiped them out, it was a long time before they could get replacements and regroup for combat. This was one of the major setbacks that I know of. Another was one they called "the Second Pearl Harbor". There were a group of ships unloading at Bari, on the East Coast of Italy, there were two complete hospitals, an ammunition ship and several others all tied up and unloading when a lone German plane came over just on the dot at noon and he put a bomb down the funnel of an ammunition ship! It almost wiped out the town of Bari, and they probably just don't know yet how many people were killed.

We landed at Licata, on the south coast of Sicily, and during the day while we were waiting our turn to unload we weathered eleven air raids by the German Air Force.They started on us as soon as they could see and worked on us all day! We sent several of their pilots to the happy hunting ground! We went through Sicily in less than two months and landed at Salerno in the fall of 1943 we pushed the Germans up the boot of Italy until we got stalemated at Cassino, so we pulled some of our people out and landed behind them at Anzio, where we were stalemated again--sat there on an eight by twelve mile beach with the Germans looking right down on top of us from January until May. While there I saw some of the first German buzz bombs, they brought a few of them over one winter evening and experimented with them on our ships in the Nettuno harbor. One of their radio guided bombs blew a Liberty ship half in two. I was on the "rotation" plan, and after 18 months overseas could be sent back home for reassignment with wayside stops at Jefferson Barracks, MO, and Fort Sam Houston, TX, I finished the War in the Automotive Section at The Infantry School, Ft. Benning, GA.

After discharge, I went to Dallas and worked a year for GMC. Bought a grain truck and went to wheat harvest in KS and Nebraska-came home to AR - married Helen Teague on 7-10-1948,-raised chickens for awhile, got hungry.Our son, Allen Bruce ,was born 5-7-1949. When he was about two years old we sold twenty thousand chickens on Friday then moved to California on Monday where I went to work on a farm and then when work slowed down that winter I went to Hanford,CA . My uncle Michael Ford and his family lived there. He was married to Florence Treece in Arkansas and moved to Ca when I was a small lad and had lived in the San Joaquin Vallety for a long time. I became well acquainted with all his family, Dora May,Henry Haden and Robert Bryan. I went to work for a Caterpillar dealer and stayed there until 1960 when I got a chance to transfer back to Oklahoma where I continued this work for a total of 22 years.I first worked in Tulsa, then established and operated a parts and service store at Eufaula, OK for a while then another at Sallisaw where we were supplying parts and service to contractors engaged in the construcion of the Robert S. Kerr navigation system on the Arkansas River, and the building of Interstate I-40 through Eastern Oklahoma and Western Arkansas. Our son Bruce Graduated from high school while we lived at Sallisaw.He enrolled at WestArk in Fort Smith for awhile, got married then enlisted in the Air Force and finally retired as a Master Sergeant, recruiter in Little Rock, Arkansas . I was transferred back to Tulsa about the same time,1968 . I stayed there until the spring of 1970 when I retired and moved back to Arkansas, I raised cattle for a few years, established a combination book and antique store called "Books'n'Bygones". We had a good business going there when the road to Devil's Den State Park slid off into the canyon and stopped our tourist trade, so we sold it out after a few years and moved to town. After the death on June 7,1995 of my wife Helen of 47 years ,I started volunteer work for the genealogy section at the library, where I still work. I was always interested in genealogy. I heard of "Big Joe" Copeland when I was real small, and when I got a chance I started hunting him!! I went with Ruth and Bruce to a family reunion in Sparta, Tennessee, and was able to get enough information together that I was really hooked! I've found everything except a chimpanzee so far, and I'm looking hard for him! I took out a little time a couple of years ago to go to CA and rounded up my childhood sweetheart ,Ethel Wright Rosebeary, and brought her home with me! We were married by Casey Copeland at Farmington,AR on June 8, 2001, just three days short of my eighty first birthday, and just three months shy of her seventy ninth!! We are happy as possible for eighty year old folks to be, and are looking forward to the next eighty years!

This is February 26, 2003Joe H. Copeland Jr, age 99, of Fayetteville passed away Saturday February 22, 2020 in Fayetteville. He was born June 11, 1920 in Cane Hill, Arkansas the son of Joe H. and Lizzie Ford Copeland Sr. He was preceded in death by his parents; his wife Helen Copeland; two brothers and three sisters.

He was a veteran of the United States Army serving during World War II. He served in the Tunisian, Sicilian, Naples-Foggia and Roma-Arno campaigns. He worked as a parts manager for Caterpillar and was a farmer.

He is survived by his son Bruce Copeland and his wife Pat of Farmington; two grandchildren Wade Copeland and his wife Amy and Dustin Copeland all of Farmington; four great-grandchildren Blake Copeland of Sitka, Alaska, Dylan Copeland and his wife Victoria of Lexington, South Carolina, Abby and Jacob Copeland of Farmington; one brother, Jack Copeland and one sister Neva Joy Biggs both of Zavalia, Texas and numerous nieces and nephews.

Cremation is under the direction of Moore's Chapel. To sign the online guest book visit www.mooresfuneralchapel.com.