Diane’s Country Music Newsletter — 20 July 2016
Wednesday, July 20th, 2016FEATURED ARTIST – FREDDIE HART
“One of the greatest things that ever happened to me” was time in the Marine Corps, Freddie Hart told me when I called him several weeks ago. He was 14 when his parents signed the papers for him to enlist in 1942. He’d already spent a year in the Civilian Conservation Corps. Times were tough for an Alabama sharecropper family with ten boys and five girls. Freddie’s formal education ended with the second grade in Phenix City, Alabama. As a member of the Third Marine Division during World War II, he participated in the battles for Guam and Iwo Jima. Except for combat, “I wish everybody could do one year and then go home,” he told me. “That was a wonderful thing.” (more…)