Queen Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary) was born on April 21, 1926 at 17 Bruton Street, London. Her birthday is officially celebrated in Britain on the 3rd Saturday of June each year.
I was born on the same day twenty years later in Stillwater, Oklahoma. My birthday is officially celebrated on my actual birthday. My father returned from World War Two in the Pacific and married my mother on St. Patrick's Day in 1945 a few days later. They had met while working in an Army office before he was sent to the Pacific.
He first went on commando raids behind enemy lines as part of the pre-invasion planning in New Guinea. He came ashore by way of a PT boat at night. At one point he wrote his family how he had been behind enemy lines without a gun. After the invasion he checked on the morale of troops on the front lines in New Guinea, moving from fox hole to fox hole. Later, he spent time in the bars and other recreation places in Sydney Australia reporting on the morale of the soldiers on leave. During this time he sometimes posed as a war correspondent. He sent a picture of himself in an officer’s war correspondent uniform, thinking his family would recognize this was not his normal uniform since he could not directly say what his role was for security reasons. A family friend living in their town, Greenville, SC, who had been in a similar role, told the family what he was doing.
When my parents married my father was still in the Army, now a Staff Sergeant, and my mother was a civilian employee of the Army. They lived in St. Louis while he continued his duty in Army Intelligence and attended many St. Louis Browns baseball games. After discharge from the Army, my parents briefly went to my mother's home town, Stillwater OK. Her father was a country doctor in Oklahoma before it was a state and she was raised on the family farm. My grandmother ran the farm to support the family as my grandfather made very little money as a doctor since his patients did not have much money to pay him. He was often paid with farm products.
I was born in the same hospital as my mother. They then returned to Austin, TX so my father could finish his doctoral work, interrupted by the war. In 1950 we went New Orleans where he got his first teaching job at Tulane and I was raised to great food and music.
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