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From:
Subject: [FEATHERSTONE] Ernest Featherston 1892-1987
Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2001 10:42:07 EDT


All: I found this newspaper obit for an Ernest Featherston in one of my
boxes that JFH sent. Does anyone know how he connects? Does he belong to
any of you?

Ernest Featherston


Generation No. 1

1. ERNEST1 FEATHERSTON was born 1892 in Arkansas, and died January 01, 1987
in Long Beach, California.

Notes for ERNEST FEATHERSTON:
1987 Newspaper Article by Tom Hennessy entitled: "Old Doughboy is buried in
same uniform he wore home in 1918."

They buried Ernest Featherston Monday. Whatever cosmic formulas determine
the number of years assigned to each of us they had allocated nearly 95 of
them to Ernest before darness closed in on him New Year's Day. He had been a
Doughboy. In grateful remembrance of that, Ski Demski marked the day of
Ernest's buriel by flying Long Beach's most celebrated flag at half mast.
And Ernest's family marked it by carrying his lean and elegant shell to the
graveyard in the same uniform he had worn home after the Armistice in 1918.
It girded a size 32 waist back then, and the size of that waist had not
changed much in the nearly seven decades since Ernest joined the Fourth
Division, U.S. Army, and shipped over to the war against the Kaiser Bill.
"Eat little, walk a lot," had been his regimen.

Though a farmboy, himself, he was no Arkansas version of World War I's fabled
Tennessean, Sgt. Alvin York, propelled to fame by heroics and circumstance.
Ernest, in fact, was quick to note that his arrival in the trenches had not
sent the Huns scurrying in panic from the combat fields of France and
Belgium. And when he got down to details, it was to acknowledge that his
entire World War I output consisted four shots, all fired in the space of a
few seconds at---but not into---a primitive German biplane. "That pilot just
flew right on past us," Ernest told me one morning back in 1984. We were
sitting in the living room of his Long Beach home, and we speculated a bit on
whether that pilot was still alive and, perhaps, sitting in his living room,
telling a time-enlarged story of how he had once flown through a hailstorm of
Yank bullets.

If Ernest's chronicles were less than monumental, World War I nevertheless
remained "the most exciting part of his life," says his daughter, Karen
Collins, of Lakewood. Moreover, his war was not without its terrifying
moments. This was the dawn of the technological revolution in warfare.
Young men who had faced nothing more complex than barbershop harmony were
suddenly being thrown against tanks and machine guns, aerial bombardments and
poison gas. And more than 100,000 of them never came home. Ernest did. He
took the life that had been spared and used it as a good man should. Moving
to Long Beach in 1920, he made a career in engineering. And he fathered four
children. They gave him 15 grandchildren, and the latter gave him
great-grandchildren in numbers which Ernest, in his twilight, gave up trying
to calculate.

He had retired to a rocking chair, but decided he did not like that and began
showing up once a week at the Veterans Administration Hospital. The idea was
not to see what he could get from the VA, but to see what he could do for
those who had fought in his war and in the wars that followed.

Long past his 90th birthday he was still turning in a weekly seven-hour
volunteer shift when a hip injury put him in bed for the rest of his days.
When he died, we lost another link in the fragile chain that binds us to the
past, for he had a faculty for recalling events of yesteryear as if he had
emerged from them only hours ago. Take the Armistice: "I know exactly where
I was when I heard about it. We were going up to the next front, near a town
that wasn't a town any more; just a pile of rubble. Before we got in there,
we heard French soldiers shouting, 'La guerre est finie.' Some were laughing
and some were crying and some were drinking."

Ernest Featherston deserves a better tribute than some lines in a newspaper
column. Alas, he and those brave Doughboys who fought with him are vanishing
too quickly now, like so many dry leaves tumbling out beyond history's
horizon. The day is not far off when we will awaken to find they are all
gone. But instead of tribute, he would probably like it known that World War
I did not whet his taste for more conflict. When it ended, he took his place
in the ranks of the vast majority of soldiers who find that one war is more
than enough. He gave his testimonial on that theme to a television reporter
who once asked what Ernest thought of war. "Everybody loses," he said. "Why
have a war? We should learn to live together in peace." Ernest said that
two years ago. Now he has shipped out again, billeted to enternity in an
olive drab uniform which was given to him by his country but seems scant
payment for what he and the others gave in return. La guerre est finie.
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