When I wrote about WWII Veteran Elmo Powell (May 23 column), I
didn’t have a photo of him in uniform. I wished I did at the time
because it would have been the perfect touch for a Memorial Day
tribute. I told about how he had survived the war and come home to
raise a family, while his older brother John (known as Junior) was
killed at Okinawa.
When I wrote about WWII Veteran Elmo Powell (May 23 column), I didn’t have a photo of him in uniform. I wished I did at the time because it would have been the perfect touch for a Memorial Day tribute. I told about how he had survived the war and come home to raise a family, while his older brother John (known as Junior) was killed at Okinawa.
After the column came out, I received this surprising e-mail: “Hi Kat, my name is Linda Armenta and I live in Gilroy. My mother, Wanda Lewis, called me early Friday morning very excited. She read the article about Elmo Powell and it turns out he is her cousin. She also lives in Gilroy. She is very interested to know where you got the information about Elmo. She and her family left Oklahoma when she was a child, but she has memories about Elmo and his brother John. We would be interested to hear from you. Thanks, Linda.”
“I was running around telling my neighbors, and I don’t really talk to them much, but after I saw the article in the Dispatch, I was so excited, I was telling everybody!” 80-year-old Wanda Lewis told me when I called to arrange to meet her. She and her little dog Molly were waiting curbside for me as I drove up.
She welcomed me into her home, and as we began talking, we figured out that my grandpa’s brother John (Elmo’s father) was married to her mother’s sister Jewell (Elmo’s mother). In other words, her mother was my grandpa’s sister-in-law. She and my mother were both first cousins to Elmo Powell.
It turns out that my great aunt Jewell (Elmo’s mother) was the one who named her. Wanda was born in Jewell’s house in 1928, and since Jewell only had boys, she wanted the chance to name a girl, so her sister let her name the new baby “Wanda Mae.”
As an only child of two only children who were born to parents late in life, I don’t have any siblings, aunts, nieces, nephews, uncles, cousins, parents, or grandparents. Finding family connections, even distant ones, means a lot to me. I can’t believe that someone from Oklahoma who is related to my mother ‘s family lives just eight minutes from my home here in Gilroy!
Wanda told me about my mother’s cousins when they were children back in the 1930s and what it was like playing with them on the big creek that ran near their home in a little town called Cement, Oklahoma (population less than 500). On hot summer days, they used to dam up the creek so they could wade in the water, and they would make a swing and hook it to the trees there so they could swing out over the water. “I made clay things out of the soil around the creek bed,” Wanda recalled. When Elmo, his brother Junior, and the other cousins didn’t want Wanda tagging along, they would say, “See that cave – there’s a bear in there!” and try to scare her away. “We had an outhouse back then, and we took baths in a big tub in winter. We had to take a horse and wagon to get to the doctor.”
Wanda later moved to Chowchilla, where she met her future husband, Bobby Lewis, who used to wink at her in church when they were children. They went steady in high school and were married for 56 years. His work with Southern Pacific brought them to Gilroy, and he worked on the railroad for forty years. They raised two daughters, and Wanda is very proud of her five grandchildren and three great grandchildren.
After a great time of hearing Wanda’s stories, Wanda had a special gift for me; after reading the Memorial Day tribute to Elmo, she had called up her sister-in-law, Dorothy (Dot) Sanders, in Chowchilla, and Dorothy had sent her the very photo I had wished for: Elmo in his brand new Navy uniform, ready to go off to war.
It has a few creases and cracks in it, but you can still see his face clearly. Elmo Powell looks out at the world a little pensively, not knowing what the future holds, but open to new adventures. His sailor’s cap is as white as the whitecaps on the ocean waves. It is 1944, and he has just enlisted in the Navy.
As I wrote about him two weeks ago, I couldn’t have imagined how he would help make family connections right here in Gilroy 64 years later.
