Tuesday, November 7, 2000

Quiet life got a bit unnerving for POWs

By Bill Whitaker

Judging from the high spirits at Perini Ranch Steak House in Buffalo Gap last week, Americans and Germans involved in World War II have not only buried the hatchet but are concentrating on the ties that bind them.

For the record, those ties weren’t too terribly confining, especially for German POWs imprisoned in a compound at Camp Barkeley in the early 1940s.

As my colleague Sidney Schuhmann pointed out in her story Monday about Herbert Falk, a visiting former German POW, life for captured German soldiers at Camp Barkeley was unlike that reported in the more notorious German-run POW camps of the period.

Falk, who recalled correspondence courses, cotton picking and trips to the camp library during his POW stint, had a chance to huddle over steaks at Perini Ranch Steak House with some locally based American World War II veterans, including cryptographer Dick Tarpley and onetime Camp Barkeley soldier Bob Tiffany.

Only a few days before Falk’s visit, local historian Tracy Shilcutt, co-author of Historic Abilene: An Illustrated History, had occasion to reveal even more details about the local POW camp during a well-attended Friends of Jay-Rollins Library meeting on Abilene history.

“POWs generally led a quiet life and did not pose any significant threats,” she said, adding that camp officials tried keeping any “rabid Nazis” out of their peaceful West Texas setting. Many of the 800 or so German POWs there appeared quite happy to be out of harm’s way, too.

But that didn’t keep folks in nearby Abilene from panicking when occasional escapes were reported.

So why did some German POWs escape? Was it a sentimental desire to return to the Fatherland? A wish to race back to the fight, whether on the Russian front or elsewhere?

“Not at all,” Shilcutt said. “It was probably just out of sheer boredom!”

Quite a sight

Although cloudy skies this past weekend cut down the number of vintage cars on display in Arrow Ford’s annual exhibit of classic Ford vehicles, Tim Elyssen still showed up with what has to be the absolutely ugliest Ford in Abilene.

While most owners prided themselves on their restoration efforts, making vintage cars look as good or better than the day they rolled off the assembly line, Elyssen let it all hang out with his decrepit, worse-for-wear 1924 Ford, which pal Dave Randall describes as a “Jed Clampett car”

Elyssen, 65, bought this wreck a decade ago in Wichita Falls, sold the body off it and then allowed a friend to “dress it up” for a chili cookoff, complete with weathered lumber, rusty metal sides, a well-worn buggy seat and, for a time, an old-time still in back.

Yet it runs.

As awful as it looked, Elyssen’s old Ford was nevertheless the must-see vehicle on the lot, checked out by everyone, including Jerry and Connie Dutton, who brought to the show their restored 1929 Ford two-door sedan, which Jerry purchased at a pig sale in Brewster, Minn.

“This thing really gets the stares,” Randall said of Elyssen’s 71-year-old motorized heap of rubble. “Tim says he’s only got one more payment on it, too!”

Contact associate editor Bill Whitaker at 676-6732 or whitakerb@abinews.com. Check out Bill’s previous columns at www.brazosbill.com.