Military Heritage: Virginia Lees

By Joseph Andrew Lee

Storytelling was an important part of my family growing up, so it’s probably no surprise to those close to me that I became a writer. As a kid I learned a lot about my family heritage through my grandpa’s war stories and my dad’s tales of Lee family heritage.

I remember how proud I was to have such a distinguished family tree, even though at the time it was all hearsay. I didn’t care. In fact, I remember as a boy reciting what I knew of my heritage to my peers on the school playground as if it would win me some kind of contest.

One of the first families to colonize Virginia, the Lee family also boasts some of the most prominent names in America from pre-Revolutionary War through the Civil War. Names like Richard Henry Lee, whose motion in the Second Continental Congress was the first to call for independence from the British Colonies. He and his brother, Francis Lightfoot Lee, signed the resulting Declaration of Independence. Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general and president of Washington and Lee University, needs no introduction.

Themes of patriotism and national service were always present in the stories of my heritage, and I recall being fascinated that my name came from a U.S. Marshal in the Oklahoma Territory, my great-great grandfather. His name was, of course, Joseph Andrew Lee, and it was said that he was sometimes gone for weeks on end chasing outlaws on horseback. His double-barreled, double-hammered, Damascus-twist shotgun was given to my father by his grandmother, and one day it will be passed along to me.

As I grew older, however, I could have dismissed all of this as lore it weren’t for my grandpa Wendell Ray Lee. He was the one person who seemed to connect the dots and make it all real for me.

He was born in Paul’s Valley, Oklahoma, and retired from the military after fighting in three foreign wars. He was a “charter chief,” one of the first in the Air Force to be promoted to what is still today the highest enlisted rank—E-9, or Chief Master Sergeant.

His war stories, in part, inspired my 10 years of service as a Marine. I assumed I was following a long line of Lees, including my grandpa, into military service. However, it was actually my grandma’s blood line that traces back to the Lee family of Northern Virginia. As it turns out, my grandma’s maiden name was Calkins, but her mother’s maiden name was Lee. This means that my heritage actually includes two completely different Lee family lines! Of course I was a bit worried about this upon first discovery, but my father traced both lines back far enough to conclude that they weren’t related. Phew!

A “Virginia Lee” or not, my grandfather was certainly one of the most inspirational Lees I knew. He was a sight to see—and hear—as his presence was rarely unrealized by anyone in the room. The epitome of the pejorative “Okie,” he would have been considered “out of uniform” if he wasn’t wearing overalls and an Oklahoma Sooners hat.

He seemed to be entertained by the sound of his own voice—and so was everyone else. His twangy southern drawl concluded with a rolling chuckle and a trademark Southern squeal when he told his stories, and boy did he love telling them.

His friends memorialized him as “a milkman’s son, a bootlegger’s boy, and a top sergeant in the United States Air Force.” Of course, I was always curious about the bootlegging part, considering our family has always been about law and order—my dad is a lawyer and his brother is a probation officer.

One day he told me the story of when he was a boy in Oklahoma. His father was running a dairy farm when a bad drought hit the area, creating the Dust Bowl. Most of the farmland became useless. In addition, a competing dairy chain had moved into the area with new, refrigerated milk trucks. My great grandfather couldn’t compete and he was driven out of business.

To make ends meet, he opened a speakeasy called “The Barn,” and it was exactly that—a bar in a barn. One day my grandpa rode along with his mother on a bootlegging run to bring liquor across the border from Texas into Oklahoma.

A Texas county sheriff was chasing them along an old dirt road and my great grandma was passing him bottles of liquor to throw out of the car. Probably one of the only illegal acts he ever committed in his life, and he just thought it was hilarious.

“With all that dust on the road, see, the sheriff couldn’t hardly see a thing!” He laughed as he would tell the story. “That’s probably the only way we got away with that.”

After graduating from high school and spending a year at the University of Oklahoma, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps at age 17 with aspirations of being a pilot. Unfortunately he washed out of flight school.

“I probably had one of the longest runs as a buck private,” he admitted. “When I would write home my mother just couldn’t understand why I was still a private.”

Down but not out, he was still going to get into the sky if it killed him. Eventually he was assigned as a radio operator and a waist gunner in a B-17 “Flying Fortress.” He attended radio operator school in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Gunnery School in Yuma, Arizona, before forming up with his new flight crew in Omaha, Nebraska, as a corporal. By Christmas 1944, he had trained up for war and was shipped off to England carrying orders to bomb the Germans.

“On our first mission we got lost,” he laughed. “How we could get lost … I tell you … being a radio operator I flipped over to the command frequency. I heard the command pilot tell the rest of the pilots to spread out a little bit, maintain the same indicated air speed and altitude and we’d be out of the clouds in five minutes.”

Five minutes passed and they did, in fact, emerge from the clouds—but there wasn’t another aircraft in sight. They were all alone over Germany.

“We were scared to death,” he said. “Well, at least I was.”

His B-17 had gone so far off course that it didn’t have enough fuel to make it to the bombing site and also return to base, so they dropped their bombs in an “alternate location.”

“The pilot, after we got back, got his you-know-what chewed and the reason being we were told that George Patton was on his way to Berlin,” he said. “We could have dropped bombs on our own troops! Let’s just say that was an eventful mission and a heck of a start to my time at war.”

He had lots of war stories, and I could recite any one of them by memory. Some were about learning Morse code. Others were about taking enemy fire, or the bone-chilling cold. Most of them, however, focused on his antics, and those of his crew.

I always figured it was better for him to remember the fun times than the bad times. Even I can recall the funny moments from Marine Corps boot camp more easily than the painful. There were probably plenty of painful memories for him but he didn’t speak of many.

All told, he flew 23 missions over Europe and returned to the states to marry his high school sweetheart, Anita Calkins. My family has always thought it was so romantic that he had her name stenciled above his window during the war—“Anita’s Boy.”

He told me a couple times that his path in life wasn’t what he had planned.

“I never intended on making the military a career. It just turned out that way,” he used to say.

He went on to serve in both the Korean and Vietnam Wars before retiring with the rank of Chief Master Sergeant. His service decorations include the Air Medal with three oak leaf clusters, the Presidential Unit Citation, Good Conduct Medal with two bronze service stars, European/African/Middle Eastern Campaign Medal, and the World War II Victory Medal.

After his retirement from Hamilton Air Force Base in my home town of Novato, California, he became the general manager of a local cable television company, earning the nickname “TV Lee.”

He was a member of the local Masonic Lodge, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Disabled American Veterans, the 490th Bomb Group Association, the Novato Rotary Club, and the Sacramento Woodworkers Association. He was one heck of a woodworker and had every tool known to Norm Abrams of This Old House fame.

About 10 years ago, just after I became a military journalist, my grandpa called me at home. He never calls me. We call him—that’s just the way it works in my family.

But just this once he called me to ask a favor—that one day I use my talent to tell his story.

This month marks the one-year anniversary of his burial at Arlington National Cemetery, and ever since, I have thought about the impact he has made on my life and on the Lee family’s military heritage.

His death also gave me a renewed interest in my family heritage. With the Lee blood line originating in Virginia and now a family member buried there, my father and I started to become concerned that there wouldn’t be any Lees in Virginia to visit the family grave and carry on the Lee family name in Virginia. Of course, we all assumed there are plenty of distant relatives in Virginia already but none we knew.

A week after his funeral I found myself looking for job opportunities and a listing jumped off the page at me. The USO needed a writer and where else but in Arlington, Virginia. It was serendipity. My grandfather and I both received the benefits of the USO while in the military, and I just knew that if he were still alive he would have insisted that I apply.

Just a few months later, armed with new information confirming my Lee family heritage in Virginia, I set off to put down roots in Arlington, where I would have the opportunity to tell the world the many stories of service and sacrifice made by our brave troops.

Perhaps some day my storytelling will inspire another to continue their own family’s tradition of military service just as my grandfather’s storytelling inspired mine.

-Joseph Andrew Lee is a USO multimedia journalist.