By Charles McClure
news@ltview.com
I was a wee sprite during the 1960s, living on a rural East Texas farm where television reception was a bit of a hit and miss affair for the most part. We had one, which my father labeled the “idiot box.” While I could occasionally see an episode of Bonanza, or the evening news, most of the time the screen was filled with what dad described as “snow.” My parents were well educated, so I wasn’t ignorant of world affairs – just preoccupied with chores and toys, as it should be with a child.
Every night, my father, a former newspaper editor turned college history professor (and part-time farmer), read the Dallas Morning News aloud, peppering many articles with his political interpretation of the day’s events. He made his politics clear. He strongly supported the Civil Rights movement and backed the Vietnam War.

Living in the South, I understood racism first hand, despite my youth. I saw it and despised it each and every day of my life. However, I had little comprehension of what war truly meant. My view was shaped by my dad, a World War II veteran, and John Wayne Saturday matinee movies. Even now, well into middle age, it would be disingenuous of me to claim any real understanding of war, having never served in the military. Instead, my life has been spent enjoying the relative peace that is the Fruited Plains.
While much has been written about Vietnam being the first war chronicled on television, it was an after-thought to a seven-year-old growing up in High, Texas, with a population which was far outnumbered by livestock. Suffice it to say there were no peace demonstrations on, or near, the farm.
However, Vietnam was not like our current wars, which in my opinion are not particularly well reported by the press and only touch a small segment of Americans. There were numerous aspects that made Vietnam different, beginning with the draft and personified by the far higher casualties than the current wars in the Middle East.
So in spite of our rural isolation, Vietnam managed to find a way into our tiny, rural hamlet. I clearly recall how the war managed to attract the attention of a farm boy after a neighbor hung a banner with a large gold star in their window. It made an impression because my mother was clearly shaken when she first saw the banner, and went to visit Mr. and Mrs. Joel May Sr.’s home. When she came back, I asked why she was so upset.
“Charles, that is a gold star banner,” she said slowly and carefully, as a mother tends to do with a little tike. “Their son was killed by the enemy in the Vietnam War. Mrs. May is now a gold star mother.”
Being only eight years old, I barely understood where Vietnam was located; however, I did know Joel May Jr. He was the first “real soldier” I remember seeing decked out in dress uniform during a visit home. Joel Jr. was what good American stock was all about, and our families – distantly related – had been friends for generations.
Joel died on Nov. 4, 1969 in Quang Tri, South Vietnam during an artillery exchange. He was a career Marine who had served his nation for 14 years at the time of his death.
Not long after his funeral, his father erected an American Flag in his son’s honor, which would be hoisted every morning at dawn, and carefully lowered each evening at dusk. It flew for more than 30 years until his parents went peacefully into that good night.
I frequently thought of Joel Jr., even after we moved to Lake Travis in the 1970s. I frequently stopped in to see the family when returning to visit the farm, where a member of my family lived from 1822 right up until just a few years ago when my mother, who retired to the farm, passed on.
Mrs. May was a sweet, wonderful, warm woman and was the first gold star mother I ever knew. Her husband was the salt of the earth. The Mays treated me like a son.
Today, few people even know about the gold star mother’s program, which began during World War I. According the program’s Web site, www.goldstarmoms.com, gold star mothers “is a term that came into general use with the creation of the service flags used to show that a family had a child in the service (a blue star) or a son that had died in the service (a gold star almost covering the blue star so that a rim of blue still shows). Mothers of slain soldiers came to be known as gold star mothers. The phrase is sometimes capitalized but this is incorrect because it is not the proper name of any organization. The phrase is generic and, through customary usage has come to designate any mother whose child has been lost in war.”
So when our own son and son-in-law joined the military, my wife and I hung two blue star banners, in our windows. Both are sergeants in the U.S. Air Force. Our son (my step-son, but I don’t think of him that way), will be on hand this Monday at the third annual Memorial Day Service at Heritage Park, the home of Lakeway’s Spirit of Freedom Memorial, and begins at 10 a.m. Our son-in-law (whom we also think of as a son) is currently deployed in Iraq. Both are war veterans.
So this Memorial Day, I would like to honor the memory of Joel Ausbin May Jr., and thank God for my two beautiful blue stars.