***The Roots Is The Toots- The Music That Got Them Through The Great Depression And World War II…

 

 For Prentice John Markin and Delores Maude Markin (nee Riley) who lived through it all, survived it all, and never drew a blessed break…

…some guys, some guys like him, just though they were God’s gift to women. Maybe it was the wavy black hair and fierce brown eyes in a blue-eyed world, maybe it was the swaggering wiry figure behind the walk, maybe it was the soft-edged curlicue wisp of a southern drawl when he spoke, maybe it was the Marine dress blues set off against the Pacific island-hopping tan earned from the blistering sun but he had the girls turning their heads as he entered the USO dance that night. Some of the guys in the barracks, half-kidding, had named him the Sheik out of envy or out of respect for his full-blown prowess with the women, the cold  yankee women who helped people the weekly dances. Dances held each Friday night after the week’s work was done at the Hullsville Naval Depot (and hence the Marine contingent presence).

The idea of the dance, simplicity itself when one thought about it,   was to keep up the morale of those like him, like the Sheik and his comrades stationed at Hullsville and other local military installations, who had returned from hard island-hopping battle, those whose numbers had been called, and those ready to board the troop transports being built just up the road at the Centerville Shipyard. And that morale was kept up best, as it has been since man first started fighting his fellow man for good reasons or bad, by enlisting the aid of all the eligible young women around the Depot and those who worked in the civilian office buildings across the road. And that was how the “Sheik” met her, met his match.

Funny she had noticed him, like every other girl in the room had, when he walked in from her position behind the refreshment table which she had volunteered to cover on the sign-up sheet the week before. Then she had been distracted by the needs of a customer and had dismissed him from her mind as just another “love them and leave them” Marine looking to cash in on his war hero status among the man-starved females on the ballroom floor.  And he gave no indication, not so much as a glance, as he slid across the floor with Agnes, Gladys, Doris, Martha, from work and some other good-looking girl whom she did not know but who was dressed to the nines, that he was interested in her.

But as soon as Jimmy Mack and The Pack, the local cover band performing that night, finished up the first set after playing I’ll Get By to close the set and took an intermission break he appeared right behind her out of the blue. And began without as much as a hello, except to call out her name, to start what turned out to be his courting while she was busy serving donuts and coffee to the gathering crowds in front of her. (It was not until later, much later, that she realized how clever he had been to make his play at that time and in that way  when she could not abandon her duties and where to leave would require her to try to go around him. She thought as well that with that look in his fierce brown eyes she had as much chance of getting by him that night as an enemy soldier did out on some isolated desolate Pacific atoll.)

She secretly thrilled to his soft southern drawl as he told her that one of his dance partners, Agnes, he thought, had told him her name and he had asked whether she was going with a fellow.  No, and so here he was the Sheik at her beck and call. (That sheik thing had nothing to do with being a lady’s man, as least that is what he told her then, but was taken from the name of a group of good old boys that he played music with up and down the Ohio River before the war who named themselves the Kentucky Shieks after the fashion down south in the 1930s for groups playing old time country and mountain music.) So she talked to him, or rather he laid out his case, while she poured coffee and yessed him to death, until she could hear Jimmy and the guys warming up for the final set. He asked her if it was alright for him to wait for her after the dance. She said no. He asked for a date. She said no. No way, as much as she wanted to leave her family house and get married to get away from her tyrant father, was she going to allow herself to fall into the clutches of this good-looking, soft- spoken “love them and leave them” Marine. And that was that …