Veterans Day brings reminders of father for local man

By Scott Wright

CENTRE — Local businessman Victor Poore is reminded of his father every year at Veterans Day, and the thought often causes him to revisit an old photograph of his old man that captures a bit of the history of a battle fought over 50 years ago.

“It's just I got a picture of my father when he was in the Philippines during World War II,” Poore says. “I'm assuming this is when Gen. [Douglas] MacArthur came back to take the place over. I've got a picture of him and another soldier.”

The withered photo shows Poore's father and another man holding aloft a captured Japanese “Rising Sun” flag that had flown over the island before U.S. soldiers and marines evicted the Japanese after they overran the island in the spring of 1942.

Poore says he doesn't have a lot of memories of his dad, but he does remember one topic that wasn't discussed after his father returned from the Pacific: the war itself.

“We wouldn't talk about it,” he said. “My father was a lot like Rick Bragg's dad, who he talked about a lot in his book 'All Over But the Shoutin'',” Poore says. “His father and my father were like parallels. He came home, he drank. He couldn't be still.”

Poore says he still remembers how he learned his father would soon be coming back home.

“I was in the front yard playing and back in the day the politicians would put a speaker on top of their car and drive through neighborhoods making announcements,” Poore says. “This car came up the road and it had a speaker on it and someone said, 'the war is over.'”

He says he also remembers wondering exactly where his dad was, but he says at around 4 years old he couldn't really understand his mother's answer.

“I kept asking where he was at and she just said overseas,” he says. “But that didn't register to me.

Poore's father, Sydney, was an infantryman in the United States Army. And like the veterans who stared death in the face and then came home from Europe and the Pacific and started the backwoods, blood-pumping racing circuits that eventually became NASCAR, Poore says his dad was a thrill-seeker after he got home, too.

"Well my daddy, when he came out of the service he'd get drunk, roll the car in a ditch and the law would get him,” Poore says. “He was a sergeant in the Army at one time, but he liked to fight so he was a private by the time he came home.”

After the war ended, Poore said he and his parents moved to Gadsden. But the move didn't help his father forget the things he must have done and seen in the war.

“He ran off and left me and my mother down there,” Poore said. “They got a divorce when I was 8 years old.”

Poore said his father won medals for his actions during the war, but the records were lost after a Pentagon warehouse fire in 1959.

“I tried to find them but they told me there was nothing left,” he says.