Charles C. Patton Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

older, considerably older than five years because of Itheir
experiences and the whole atmosphere of, say, college day? was
gone.
Q. Well, they say you can't go back.
A. You can't go back. That's right. We didn't go back. Made
new associations. We didn't have the parties that we used to
have, the dances. There just wasn't the interest, people didn't
have the interest to do that any more.
Q. Well, what was the post-war interest?
A. I guess, it was the men coming back to their wives and
families and trying to get started making a living and that's
what was going on. Before the war nobody was even marrield and
didn't have any wives, so it was entirely different, a different
group of people and their interests were different.
Q. Did you miss the excitement of the war years?
A Being in the service. . . well, there was a lot of
satisfaction to it. I'd made a life far myself in the service,
and T1d had a certain amount of authority, and I had a certain
amount of knowledge about things, and being an officer in the
service had it'a perks and things, and I was proud to have been
in the Navy.
Now I want to tell you how I got into sailing. I gueqs it
all started when I got to know Lew Herndon, who was iq the
neighborhood when I was a kid but he was fourteen years yojunger
than I. He was one of twins of Dick Herndon and Hennietta
Herndon and it so happens that, we were on the Board of Deacons
at the First Presbyterian Church. Richard Grabel was the
minister at the time and Richard Grabel had gotten this idea of
making a home for Presbyterians, an old folks home for
Presbyterians, out at the Sanitarium, the Palmer TB Sanitarium
that existed out on old Chatham road and Lawrence Avenue. He got
some of us Deacons to go out there to start cleaning the place
up, get it ready to take some old folks in to live there. A d so,
I got very involved with the Presbyterian Home and I sp 3 nt an
awful lot of time painting and chipping and doing all kinds of
things out there. Lew Herndon also came out and helped and his
wife, Bobbie, came out and helped. That was the first time I had
met her, and we got to be quite good friends. Bobbie had been
interested in sailing when she was growing up on the Hudson
River at Nyack, in New York. She had sailed in "Lightnings" with
her father. She and Lew belonged to the Yacht Club, and they had
tried to sail Lightnings there, and the Lightening class
went to pot, I told them that I had learned to sail on a
and that the guy whose Snipe I had learned to sail on,
building another kind of boat that was all fiberglass.
the first fiberglass boat in the country. Ha built it in