Sioux City Boys Help Win War That Didn’t Stay “Won” 25 Years Ago
Case of Bobby and Billy Harrison, Now Overseas, Typical
It was 1919. The war to end all wars was over.
When English born Robert C. Harrison, who had come to America in 1909, returned from the battlefront to his family in Sioux City, his two sons, Bobby and Billy, jumped on his knees.
In a few years, Bobby and Billy were too big for knee-sitting. Bobby began selling Journals in the stockyards district. He would get up, his father said, at 4 a.m. to “make the rounds.” Billy began selling what was then The Journal’s rival, the Tribune.
Bob an Athlete
And then, in a few more years, Bobby and Billy were to big for newspaper route. Bobby, who probably began about this time, to wish people would call him Bob, appeared in the operetta. The Prince of Pilsen, and became active in East High School and Morningside College athletics. In the early 30’s he was runnerup in a state high school tennis tournament in Des Moines and he won first place in a Morningside college freshman high jump.
Today, Flight Officer Robert L. Harrison is being toughened for action against the Japs in Australia, and William K. Harrison, when last heard from was fighting in North Africa against the Germans, who weren’t really in the war in which his father fought.
The sequence of events is not unusual. It is a parable familiar to many American and Sioux City families.
Likes Army Career
Flight Officer Harrison, his father says, is an army career man. He left Sioux City in 1933 and has served in the army since. Before being assigned to duty in Australia, he lived with his wife and two children in San Antonio, Texas, and when on a visit to his mother in Chicago last March he saw his first snow in 10 years, he said he “actually played with it, like a kid.”
The soldiers’ father lives at 1908 W. First Street here. Born in Manchester, Eng., he came to America because England was “to wet.”
He served for four years in the Canadian 20th machine gun company overseas in World War I.
Source: The Sioux City Journal, October 14, 1943
