Take a late morning trip to the Mayberry Mall and there is a fair chance you will find World War II veteran Turner Thompson down from Ararat, Virginia, taking a leisurely stroll around inside.
While a mall walker in and of itself may not of note, this walker has developed a little bit of a fan club. So, look for a man with a cane and a couple of ladies in tow – you may just have found him.
As everyone else was getting ready to shoot off fireworks and crank up the grill for July 4 festivities, Thompson and his friends were having a birthday dinner inside the mall for recognition of his turning 98.
“Some of those ladies most of the time are around here, but they aren’t here today. They threw me a birthday party here last week,” he explained. The affair was decked out with red, white, and blue tablecloths and napkins for the United States Army veteran.
Thompson said he tries to come to Mount Airy to walk the mall whenever possible. “I come down here and walk a little every day for exercise. I ain’t able to do much else because my legs are giving out.”
He gestured to his head and chuckled, “I’m good up here (points) but my legs are giving out on me.”
There are so few World War II veterans left, he knows of no others in the Ararat area, that Thompson is happy to tell a story or two from his time in the European theatre. “D-Day was June 5, and I went in on Sept. 1.”
“When I went in, we had one skirmish in France and that was it. Then my outfit was transferred to Holland and that’s a beautiful country. They got the prettiest flowers.”
From there they marched into Belgium and later into Germany before victory in Europe was declared on May 8, 1945. Fighting would continue in the Pacific theater until after the detonation of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August 1945 which then brought the Empire of Japan to surrender.
After the war Thompson stayed in Germany for almost another year, heading home in March of 1946. He said he was surprised to get to know some of the German people after the war and found that once the action ceased, there was more in common than one may expect.
“After the war was over with, I stayed over there a right good while and I got to be friends with them, some of them just as nice as they could be. I made some farm friends, you know – friends with the farmers.”
“There are farmers there same as the ones here. I remember there was a farmer who was turning land and he had a horse and a cow hooked up together, and I’d never seen that. Maybe his other horse got killed, I don’t know, but he needed to work that land.”
When he got back to the States he said, “It was the same old thing, I went back to farming” tobacco with a few of his brothers. Thomson knew there was not enough money to be made there so he took off to work in the steel mills of Chicago before returning years later to work in textiles in Danville, Virginia.
He said that he gets asked what the secret to his longevity is, and that folks wonder how he is so mobile, so alert mentally, and with amazing memory retention for a 98-year-old, “Good luck, good genes? I guess that’s right.”
“I laugh at some people sometimes who want to know what my secret is, I tell them I drink vinegar and honey every morning. Still today, I mix it up in a quart can and turn it up take a drink every morning.”
“Way back many years ago a doctor told me vinegar and honey is good for you and I’ve been drinking it maybe 50 years,” he said. “I mix one cup of honey and two cups of vinegar, and I take a drink of it every day.
His mental acuity was on display as he began to discuss the current situation in Ukraine at some length. His grandson is deployed in Poland, and he has some concerns for his safety given that Poland shares a border with Ukraine. “I hope they aren’t too close to what’s going on over there right now. I’m afraid something could happen.”
One of his suggestions for a long life is to have a kind heart and treat everyone with respect. He has lived long enough that he remembers well a time when this was not the norm. “You know there was a time a lot of people didn’t have use for Black people, but where I was raised in my area on Sunday a lot of the time when we were just youngin’s we’d all be in the same water hole playing.”
In the watering hole or covered in mud, he said a child is just a child the same as any other, “I’ve always had good friendships with people of all sorts, but some people just can’t seem to get along.”
Private First-Class Turner Thompson, U.S. Army, will be holding court again someday soon, if not today, at the Mayberry Mall as he gets in his laps out of the hot sun. A long life, well-lived, has gotten 98 years under his belt and with a few more shots of vinegar and honey, 99 doesn’t seem too far-fetched.
Source: https://www.mtairynews.com
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