Museum Musings
Arthur W. Stanley, a native of Darlington, was a WWII veteran. He served in the Pacific Theater. Stanley was the president of the Darlington Chapter of the NAACP and held the position for 40 years. He led the efforts to desegregate the Darlington County Public School System as a plaintiff in Stanley v. Darlington County […]
Below is a lovely note written by Dorothy Law Martin in March 2011. It’s about German prisoners of war who worked on her father’s farm. My Dad, W.P. Law, had a large farm on the old Hartsville Road in Darlington County. During WWII my four older brothers were in the service and farm help was […]
April 18, 1942 At 8am aboard the USS Hornet, the Klaxon horns sounded, and Captain Marc Mitscher gave the order to Lt. Farrow and the other Doolittle Raiders: “Army pilots–man your planes. Army pilots–man your planes.” The mission wasn’t scheduled to launch for another eight hours, but a Japanese patrol vessel had been sighted just […]
But what I can’t tell you about is the fear and loathing of Communism.
And I certainly can’t tell you what it felt like to be afraid—viscerally, palpably, genuinely terrified—of the Soviet Union launching a nuclear attack on the United States. Because thirty years ago whenever good ole Bert the Turtle instructed me to “duck and cover,” I kneeled down under my desk with a smirk on my face and a near-empty head, my only thought being whether Mom had packed a Kit Kat bar in my lunch that day.
What do we owe our fallen soldiers?
That’s the question I was turning over in my mind one morning in March as I drove to work down Billy Farrow Highway. Speeding past Baptist churches and modest houses and farmland, I thought about Lt. William Grover Farrow and his short yet exemplary life. A few days prior, Brian Gandy, the resident historian for Darlington County, had educated me on Farrow’s participation in the WWII Doolittle Raid, a bombing campaign on strategic military targets in Japan in 1942.