Tabor City Tribune

CARTER'S COLUMN
Back From The Dead
By W. HORACE CARTER

Did you ever just run into someone that you hadn't seen in 11 years and whom you had good reason to believe was dead?

That's just what happened to me last Friday afternoon. I attended a meeting at Lake Junaluska, some 40 miles West of Asheville, on Thursday and Friday and late in the afternoon was waiting in front of the Vanderbilt Hotel for a taxi that was to carry me to the airport.

The North Carolina Veterans of Foreign Wars were holding a State Convention in the Vanderbilt and this fellow walked right up to me, called me by my first name, and I was one more embarrassed individual.

"I'm sorry fellow. Seems like I remember your face but I just can't place the name," I said.

"Jesse Clyde Hayes," came the answer.

You could have knocked me over with a feather. J. C. Hayes, my old Navy boss. Hayes was a chief pharmacist mate and the chief master-at-arms in the naval Hospital, Charleston, S. C., when I got out of boot camp in 1942 and was assigned to that station. He gave me the first break I ever got in the service by naming me his assistant in the master-at-arms office. I worked there for 14 months.

Hayes was transferred to the U. S. S. KIDD, a destroyer, before I left Charleston. In the Pacific the KIDD was hit by a destroyer and about a third of the crew was killed. I was never able to get in contact with Hayes after that and I assumed he must have been killed in the explosion.

But he was not that unfortunate. He came out of the sinking all right and stayed in the regular Navy until 1951. Then, after 17 years in the service and still being only 34 years old, he retired and returned to his home in Cherryville, N. C.

He is now enjoying that retirement. He has never married but I believe he has enjoyed life more than any man I can remember. He always has a smile on his face, and I have never seen him downhearted or temperamental.

He says he is just simply lying back with his feet propped up now and when the postman brings him a letter, he just hollers "Bring it on in and have a Coke."

He is a happy, go-lucky fellow. One I'm mighty happy to have known and one whom I'm happy is alive. Of the thousands of people that I came to know in the service, none left quite such a lasting impression as did Jesse Clyde Hayes from Cherryville.