Our dad, Clyde D. Walker, passed away at age 94 on Friday, March 18, 2016 at Community Hospice, Fernandina Beach, FL.

Born on July 30, 1921 near Screven in Wayne County Georgia, he was the son of the late Robert Lamar & Kate Davis Walker. The son of a sharecropper, he and his family moved from farm to farm in the Offerman, Patterson, and Blackshear area of Pierce County. Farm life during the Depression era left little time for schooling and he often told us that he finally quit at age 16 – while in the third grade - and went to work for the WPA clearing land for the construction of Ft. Stewart near Hinesville at the great pay of 50 cents a day!

Shortly after Pearl harbor, Dad and his future brother-in-law, Archie Winn Jr., left for Savannah to enlist in the US Navy. After completing boot camp at Norfolk, Virginia, Archie was assigned to the battleship USS Massachusetts, however my dad had become ill and was sent home on sick leave.

After his recovery he was ordered to New Orleans where he was posted as a member of Navy Gun Crews aboard merchant ships. In this capacity he sailed all the Worlds Oceans in what he considered style since he had a stateroom to share with only one other shipmate. It was one of these room mates that decided to go overboard in an inebriated condition one night while the ship was anchored at San Juan, Puerto Rico. With spotlights on him but no one taking action, my dad dove in and pulled the man to safety. Afterward the Captain told my dad he would receive a medal for his action. Sure enough, when the ship arrived in New York, Dad received an official letter from the Navy, but upon opening it he discovered instead of a medal, he was being notified of his mother's death. He was allowed bereavement leave and after returning to New Orleans and another ship, he heard no more of a medal.

The only action dad ever spoke about being in was at Hull, England during a nighttime bombing attack by the Germans and how appalled he was by the destruction he witnessed the next day.

After circumnavigating the globe and landing in California, he was on a troop train back to New Orleans when at Salt Lake City, Utah the word was passed that the War was over.

He returned to farming with his father, but was soon asked by his Uncle Tollie A. Davis to come to Ft. Myers, Florida to work as a short order cook in his restaurant. Dad took him up on it and enjoyed the life in Florida. In 1948, believing that my mother was finally old enough, at almost 16, he came back to Georgia to ask her father's permission to marry her. Gaining his blessings, Ida Mae Winn became Mrs Clyde Walker on August 18th 1948 at the justice of the peace in Offerman, Georgia.

Returning to Ft. Myers with his new bride, Clyde soon realized he needed a better paying job and got one at the Gondola Inn on the river. Two of his sisters also arrived as waitress at the Inn and soon met a three man band from Indiana that were playing at the Inn and that is how two young girls from wiregrass Georgia came to live in the heart of Indiana!

After the birth of my brother and I, dad moved his family to Jacksonville to be near my Mom's parents who had already moved there. That is when he learned the trade of Brick mason and set about building his own home on three acres in the wilderness that was Oceanway in the early 1950's, for the next sixty years it was home.

Dad was the last surviving son and still has three sisters that survive him, one in Indiana and two in Georgia.