My Trails into the Past

This is my third year working on this year-long prompt, hosted by Amy Johnson Crow. I will write each week in one of my two blogs, either Mam-ma’s Southern Family or at My Trails into the Past. I have enjoyed writing about my children’s ancestors in new and exciting ways. George J. Gorrell, born in 1915, grew up in Webb City, Missouri. He worked a lot of small jobs in the area and then in 1940, he went to Glendale, California to enroll in an aircraft mechanics course for a year. Here is a photo of the Kidder’s OH shop, where George wrote on the back that he “witnessed a major fire due to carelessness.” He finished the training in July of 1941 and accepted a Junior Mechanic job at the Sacramento Air Depot (later McClellan Air Field) in Sacramento, California. It had a yearly salary of $1680. He wrote that he stayed first at “the YMCA in downtown Sacramento, then stayed at a boarding house at 819 16 th Street (which has long gone) near the old Governor’s Mansion....