No Ordinary Joes by Larry Colton Read Free Book Online Page A

tearful mother good-bye and boarded a train for boot camp in San Diego, California. On that same day, halfway across the world, six of the newest and largest Japanese aircraft carriers, carrying 423 combat planes, were assembling in Tankan Bay in the Kurile Islands, ready to set sail for Pearl Harbor.

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Gordy Cox
of Yakima, Washington
    A t the age of two, Gordy Cox was playing behind his house in Wayne, Alberta, with his older brother, Larry. They started chasing one of the family’s new colts, and Gordy got too close. The colt kicked him, nailing him in the left eye, shattering the bone just below the eyebrow and knocking him cold. Larry ran to get their mother, Nellie, who scooped up Gordy, put him in the family’s buggy, and drove ten miles to the nearest doctor. But the doctor was gone, and the closest town was Drumheller, another ten miles over rough, inhospitable terrain, too treacherous for a horse and buggy and an unconscious child.
    Now frantic, Nellie found two railroad men who volunteered to help. They led her to a flat-bedded railroad platform car powered by a pump handle. With Nellie cradling Gordy in her lap, the two men pumped all the way to Drumheller, then escorted them to the doctor, who stitched the wound and applied ice to relieve the swelling. Gordy remained in a coma for the next two days.
    Eventually, the injury healed. But in the months and years to come, Gordy struggled with his vision, especially close up. Reading was difficult, and he was always behind in school. He flunked the first grade.
    “Gordy’s a little slow,” his mom would explain. “He got kicked by a horse.”
    * * *
    Things always came tough for Gordy. Born at his grandparents’ remote farmhouse on the Canadian prairie on June 23, 1923, Gordy was two months old before his parents hitched up the horse and buggy and drove into town to register his birth. They put down the wrong date.
    He was still an infant when they scraped together $100 for a down payment on a plot of farmland ten miles south of Wayne. The land seemed like a good buy—there was a spring and two lakes, a barn, and an old log structure to shelter the family’s dozen pigs, workhorses, cows, turkeys, and chickens during the frigid winters. The house was another matter: it had no electricity, refrigerator, or indoor plumbing. Nor were there any tractors or combines to do the farming; all the work was done with horses. And there was no market nearby. Everything was homegrown—bread, vegetables, meat. Milk came from their cows.
    Gordy always tagged along behind Larry, the most daring of the four Cox brothers, the one who always rode his horse at a full gallop. His two younger brothers, Willie and Don, were talkative and adventuresome. Gordy was the only one who wasn’t a daredevil. He was shy and afraid of just about everything. When visitors came to the house, he hid under the dining room table. At school, he wouldn’t meet the teachers’ eyes, and on the playground he walked away from confrontations.
    To get to school, three miles away, Gordy rode with Larry on a family horse, holding on for dear life as Larry did his best to scare him, flying through fields at full speed. Sometimes on the way home, Larry detoured by the Two Bar Ranch, daring Gordy to try riding one of the owner’s sheep. He told him that was how all the great rodeo cowboys at the Calgary Stampede had gotten started.
    Eventually, Gordy asked for a horse of his own. “There’s a Depression on, son,” his father told him. “There’s no money.”
    A few weeks later, a man stopped by the farm trying to sell a little white pony that was half Shetland. Gordy’s father offered the man ten bushels of oats in trade, and he accepted. Gordy named the horse Weasel because he liked watching weasels on the farm sneak up behind jackrabbits andkill them. Weasel had previously been a workhorse, pulling coal cars in the mines; he had an ornery streak that made it tough on Gordy at first. Short-winded from