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A soldier's meal: Bath man recalls Korea
BY JAMES JACENICH • STAFF WRITER
 | | A scrapbook of memories from his Army service during the Korean War help transport Sam Donaldson Jr. back more than 50 years. (Recorder photo by James Jacenich) |
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MONTEREY - Sam Donaldson Jr. has a way of making the best of less-than-perfect situations. For example, a Christmas in war-torn Korea could have been worse for a company of Army soldiers, but for Donaldson's efforts.
Donaldson, 78, has lived a long, happy life. He is a regular part of the Bath Senior Center. He enjoys being with friends, and the activities the center offers. He is a faithful member of his church. He's satisfied with the choices he's made. Things turned out pretty well for him despite a rough start in life.
Donaldson was born in Philadelphia in 1929. When he was nine months old, his mother died of pneumonia. His father wasn't able to take care of him and his four siblings alone. It was the beginning of the Great Depression.
His Aunt Ruby and Uncle Sam Donaldson brought him to Hot Springs and raised him as their own. He even became a Junior, adopting the name of his new father. As far as Sam was concerned, they were his parents, even after he grew up and found out they weren't.
 | | Donaldson, pictured here in Korean in 1951, has a degree in commercial dietetics from Tuskeegee Institute, is a Korean War veteran, a deacon of Piney Grove Baptist Church, and active member of the Bath Senior Center. (Photo courtesy Sam Donaldson) |
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The senior Donaldson was head bellman at The Homestead for 47 years. He was a good provider, Donaldson says. Donaldson also had a number of surrogate uncles that taught him to fish and hunt.
Aunt Ruby, "Mother," didn't like Hot Springs. "It lacked water and sewer," says Donaldson. "At that time there were outhouses (in town)."
Donaldson was raised as an only child. His mother was active in the community, taking part in church and civic activities. She was a problem-solver, he recalls.
Donaldson attended a three-room school in Switchback (now Pinehurst) near Hot Springs, where three grades were taught in one room.
"Water came off the roof," says Donaldson. "Mother was afraid of diphtheria (from bad water), so Mother dug a well." She got to know Rachel Ingalls, wife of Fay Ingalls, who lived at The Yard. The Ingalls owned The Homestead at the time.
The friendship that developed between the women was unusual for the time, Donaldson says. After all, Ingalls was the wife of the owner of The Homestead, and Ruby was only the wife of the head bellman.
"Maids would go crazy when a black woman would come up to the front door to see Miss Ingalls," says Donaldson. The Donaldsons are African-American and lived under an officially sanctioned system of racial segregation and second-class citizenship back then, he said.
"Mother thought the community (of out-of-town temporary workers at The Homestead) needed a restaurant of their own," he said. So Donaldson's mother enlisted the help of the Ingalls family and got a restaurant started in Hot Springs. It was known as the Tea Room, Donaldson says.
It was there Donaldson would learn about food services through his family's involvement with the restaurant.
Ingalls asked Ruby to be in charge of food services at the horse show grounds, too.
Ruby was always doing things for other people, he said. She was an organizer. Fay Ingalls, in his 1949 book, "The Valley Road," a short history of Bath County and The Homestead, explained the community choral chorus was revamped in the 1940s with members of the African- American community. "Ruby Donaldson, wife of the head bellman, keeps it going and several times a year concerts are given in the Liberty Theatre in the village, the proceeds going to the Visiting Nurse Association," he wrote. "Perhaps the present-day concerts are a bit more sophisticated and less spontaneous (than in the past) but there are some appealing voices and the sincerity with which the spirituals are sung makes them well worth while."
Ruby wanted her adopted son to have the best, but she knew he was limited in what he could do. "Black schools did not go beyond 11th grade," said Donaldson. So she sent him to Greensboro, N.C., to a culinary institute, where there were 12 grades and his education could help him get to college.
Donaldson did end up at Howard University, but flunked out the first year. He wasn't interested in studying, he says.
Prompted by his mother, he would eventually go to Tuskeegee Institute in Tennessee to study commercial dietetics. Food studies were a natural for a man whose mother ran a restaurant. But Donaldson says he didn't care that much for cooking, either. He was more interested in interior decoration and art.
A friend at the senior center disagrees with that assessment, however. "He's a good cook," says Diana Richmond of Warm Springs. "He's a always bringing in a new recipe."
It was while he was at Tuskeegee that the Army called Donaldson to duty. North Korea attacked South Korea on June 25, 1950. On Oct. 23 that year, Donaldson received his certificate of acceptability from the Army. By December, he was in Korea.
Donaldson recalls the snow was knee-deep when he arrived in Pusan, Korea. He traveled through Seoul on his way to the front. "We went over there to clean up," he says. "The streets were all torn up from the war."
The soldiers were issued rifles for the first time after arrival, he says. They loaded up on trucks and headed into the country. "People were starving," he says. Donaldson saw a homeless boy with one leg, begging for food from the soldiers.
"You'd better get used to it," another soldier told him. "You'll see a lot of it over here."
Donaldson was assigned to the 250-man African- American 58th salvage company and made his way to the front. The company handled battle cleanup - broken vehicles, trash, and dead soldiers.
Soldiers needed to eat to keep up their strength, and Donaldson knew how to turn powdered food into something palatable.
"They started me off as a plain cook," Donaldson says. "I moved up to first cook. Ninety percent of the food was dehydrated - eggs, onions, everything. You put water back in and everything comes back. It takes time, it was edible, take your time and the guys ate it ... Guys got depressed over there. If you gave them good food you made them happy."
When the head cook was transferred, Donaldson was put in charge. "I knew they had Army books - they answered all my questions," says Donaldson. "I kept (the cafeteria) going for a year."
But that wasn't enough. Korea is far away from anything the soldiers were familiar with. Life in Korea was no picnic. "All day long there were transient (soldiers) coming in and out, in and out."
Donaldson recalls one typical winter's night. "The snow was three feet deep. It was midnight and you had to give the guys something hot."
War takes no breaks, even for sleep. Donaldson recalls the nightly lights-out routine. "We called it bed check Charlie," says Donaldson. That was a soldier's way of saying that an enemy airplane flying overhead could see any lights in camp and would attack. Enemy airplanes came under the radar undetected, Donaldson says.
So, in the dead of winter, the soldiers had to extinguish all sources of light in their tents, including heaters, to keep from being spotted.
Donaldson worked near the demilitarized zone, the 38th parallel that separated north from south, established at the end of World War II by the United States and the Soviet Union.
"I was glad to be up there but I was scared to death," he says. He was glad because service near the DMZ meant a shorter tour of duty in Korea. "It was a five-point zone," he says. The more points earned, the sooner one got transferred out. "I was up there eight months and got a chance to come home earlier."
Donaldson's first Christmas in Korea was a hurried affair - he hadn't been there long enough to learn the system and wasn't yet settled. But by the second Christmas, things were different.
He used the skills he learned growing up in Bath County to give the soldiers a Christmas to remember. He knew how to ask for what he needed. He knew how to approach his superiors with an idea and he knew how to make that idea a reality.
That Christmas, Donaldson heated and decorated an old building, turned it into a dining room and filled the tables with food. A decorated Christmas tree somehow materialized, complete with lights and decorations. Donaldson made the rounds of the various Army units in the area and procured what he needed to outfit his Christmas banquet room.
"The dining hall was a first-class cafeteria when I got through with it," says Donaldson. He reversed the recommended order of food, putting cold foods first and hot foods last. That way the food was still hot when one got to a table. And the tables were put in a Tuskeegee Tee, something he learned at college. The men were arranged with the senior people in the middle of the "T" with the other men arranged by order of descending rank from there.
"We were getting a little morale back in there," he says.
Donaldson could have stayed in the Army. His superiors were happy with what he did that Christmas and offered to send him to a school that would lead to a warrant officer commission. But he preferred to stay with the men he trained with since boot camp, so he turned down the offer.
After discharge from the Army, Donaldson completed his degree in commercial dietetics at Tuskeegee Institute and returned home to Hot Springs. He helped his mother run the Tea Room restaurant for many years. When she was too old to run the restaurant, he took care of her until she died.
Donaldson never married. He lives alone in a twobedroom apartment in the new retirement community on the hill behind Bath County High School. It's neatly furnished. He has a cabinet full of knick-knacks, artwork on the walls (some from Korea), and a deer head displayed at the entrance. It matches the deer head (his first) hanging in his bedroom over the picture of a five-year old Sam Donaldson Jr.
Donaldson plays the piano and sings in the choir at Piney Grove Baptist Church, where he is also a deacon.
He has a lifetime of memories and accomplishments to cherish. He enjoys the seasons of the year and the various occasions and people that inhabit them. But Christmas is a special time of year for him.
"He is very generous at Christmas time. He is always putting out presents for everyone," says Richmond. "He goes to all the merchants in the area and gets donations. He's a great organizer and a good cook."
"He keeps everybody laughing," says Richmond.
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