A Road Less Traveled

This will be my twelfth Substack post, and it feels like time to head down a different road—a path that leads straight to Dad arriving in Lancaster in 1948 as the band director for Lancaster High School.

But to understand how he got there, we need to step into the way-back machine and go to 1940.

Dad entered Davidson College on a music scholarship at age 15, turning 16 that November. He played the xylophone and kettle drums and performed with both the Davidson College band and the ROTC band, appearing at college events and on spring concert tours across the Southeast. It’s hard to imagine the transition that lay ahead.

In 1943, he enlisted through the ROTC program at Davidson. After completing basic and officer training at Fort Benning, Georgia, he was commissioned a Second Lieutenant and shipped out to Europe in the summer of 1944.

On December 16, 1944, during the opening days of the Battle of the Bulge, his platoon found itself pinned down by a German machine gun positioned on higher ground. They couldn’t move.

I’ll let his Silver Star citation tell the story:

“Seeing that all elements of his company were pinned down by the same fire, and realizing that the hill had to be taken in order to accomplish the battalion objectives, Lieutenant Watkins arose and moved forward. His courageous and fearless leadership initiated the assault on the machine gun position, and the objective was taken.”

The weight of those words makes what comes next even more poignant.

Afterward, he was evacuated to a hospital in France with trench foot, where he remained until January 25, 1945. And Christmas came while he was there.

The hospital served a full holiday meal: fruit cocktail, turkey with dressing, two kinds of potatoes, giblet gravy, vegetables, pie, and ice cream—the kind of dinner you’d expect back home.

For reasons he never explained, Dad saved the menu.

You know how sometimes something will pop up on your Facebook feed asking, “If you could go back in time and ask someone one question, what would it be?”

One of mine would be this:

Why did you save that menu?

It must have meant something to him.

That menu eventually found its way into one of his scrapbooks, alongside countless other keepsakes from his life, especially from his time during World War II.

I had seen those scrapbooks many times. But donating the collection to the Lancaster County Archive Center has forced me to slow down and really study what was there.

Finding that menu—and cross-referencing it with his service records—helped me piece together this three-week stretch of his life. It also reinforced something I’ve come to understand more clearly over time:

Dad saved almost everything.

In future posts, I’ll continue his story as he transfers from the hospital in France to a recuperative hospital in England. It was there that an officer noticed a notation in his record—that he was a music major at Davidson—which led to his appointment as the music officer in charge of all military music for England, Scotland, and Wales.

Encore

St. Louis Blues March (1976)