The Homecoming

About noon on Saturday, July 10, 1943, Dorothy Moore answered the phone and heard Bob's voice on the other end: He was in New York City and coming home soon.

The family waited seven hours in Omaha for his plane on July 14. His flight to Chicago was delayed by bad weather and he failed to make connections. The family received word that he would be arriving in Villisca at 9:30 a.m. on Thursday, July 15, on Burlington Train No. 6.

Nancy was too excited to eat or sleep.

Banners and flags welcomed the hero home. An arch of all the flags of the allied nations was assembled in the street in front of the Moore Bros. drugstore. A crowd gathered at the depot.

J. Harold Cowan wrote this account for the evening World-Herald:

Villisca, Ia. - Lt. Col. Bob Moore, officer-hero of this town of 2,600, came home from Africa Thursday.

He stepped off the train, arms burdened with a bulging flight bag, his helmet, his blankets.

A piping 7-year-old's voice shrilled across the platform.

"Daddy. Daddy! Daddy!" it cried.

Nancy, his daughter, ran across the platform, arms out. The bag, the helmet, the blanket, thumped to the planking. Nancy was swept into her Daddy's arms.

She nestled there for the first time in 16 months, her tiny face against his tropical sun-darkened cheek. Nancy sobbed. So did her mother, who had come over. So did her grandmother. ... And tears trickled unashamedly down Col. Moore's cheeks.

Nancy would tell her own daughter, "It was like the most wonderful thing to have him step off that train."

The townspeople rushed to Moore not only to welcome him, but also to ask about those still at the war. He offered encouragement to a mother whose son was fine, comfort to a father whose son was captured. He visited with Sheriff Frank Miller, whose son Wes was the first Villisca man to die in Africa.

The welcome continued at the park in the town square, and then at the drugstore.

"All Villisca took on a patriotic air," the Review reported, "and enthusiasm, without undue ostentation, glowed from the face of the hundreds of friends of 'Bob' who crowded the downtown streets during the afternoon to show the city's honored son they are overjoyed at his safe return home."

Mike Croxdale, whose excitement at age 2 was evident in the photos of Moore's homecoming, was puzzled when his own father later returned from the war in the Pacific. After months of hearing about the war against the Japanese "yellow peril," young Mike was stunned to see his father with a yellow cast to his skin, caused by quinine he had taken for malaria.

The Home

Moore stayed briefly in Villisca, traveling to neighboring towns to speak at luncheons and update the home folk on how their boys were doing at the front. He made a point to call on the families of men who had been killed or captured.

Soon Moore was sent to Fort Benning, Ga., where he helped start a leadership course and instructed 40,000 officers. They taught more than tactics, as a press release from the Infantry School at Fort Benning explained:

"Colonel Moore lists three things that make men fight: Pride in self, pride in the man's organization, and hate. The last of those - hate - he names as the most important. Without it, he says, the Americans suffer unnecessary deaths.

"'I can't tell you how to hate,' he states. 'You can only learn it for yourself. ... It was not until we reached Tunisia that my men learned hate.' "

Moore told of a Villisca sergeant, Monty Storm, who left the hospital to join his unit in battle.

"After considerable fighting, the Germans put up a white flag to surrender," Moore related, "and the sergeant stood up to accept them as prisoners. He was instantly killed, mowed down by a burst of fire from the Germans who were raising the white flag. That taught the platoon hate. From that point on, they had the spirit and determination to kill every German they saw."

Moore later told about psychiatrists from Washington who came to listen to his lectures and told him he was all wrong about hating the enemy. "'Have you ever seen your own men killed in battle?' I asked them. That ended the argument right there."

While at Fort Benning, the Moore family grew to four with the birth, just a day after the Japanese signed surrender terms, of Robert R. Moore Jr. He is still Bobby to family and friends who knew both Bobs when he was growing up in Villisca.

Some friends and family wonder if Bob Moore didn't later regret not staying in the Army for a career. "He lived for the military," Bobby said.

But the military was winding down after the war, and Moore wanted to get back home, to be near his mother and to run the family store. He did, though, return to the National Guard, retiring in 1963 as a brigadier general.

The Moore Bros. drugstore, with its soda counter and luncheonette, was a popular gathering place, for adults to swap war stories or for children to come on their lunch hour, after school or after a game (Moore treated athletes to free milk shakes after victories).

Admiration for Moore was not universal. Some resented him, either because of the lingering bitterness over the ax murders or because of wartime issues - his strong leadership style, his early return from the battlefield or the glory he received when other local troops were taken prisoner.

Moore "absolutely ignored" those who had differences with him, Bobby said.

But to most in town, Moore was friendly and outgoing. He was an accomplished story teller and a light-hearted practical joker. He was intense and enthusiastic in working with children as a Little League baseball coach and a Sunday school teacher.

"He loved children. He really did," Bobby said. "And children loved him."

He would hold an ice cream cone out to a young customer, then suddenly pull it down a few inches as the child reached for the cone, leaving the kid with a handful of ice cream. They would both laugh and Moore would make a fresh cone.

A favorite trick for children was to "blow up" his arm. Moore would put the tip of his thumb into his mouth and blow hard, slowly flexing his powerful biceps as if it was inflating.

Like her father, Nancy was gregarious. Bobby was the quieter child, more like his mother.

Dorothy Moore helped her mother-in-law run the drugstore while Bob was at the war, and helped out at the store after Bob and Bill returned from the war to run it. But mostly she was content taking care of her family and her house.

"I never walked in there that she wasn't dusting the floors," recalled Elaine Gillespie, a childhood friend of Nancy's, now of Glenwood, Iowa.

Dorothy enjoyed her bridge club ("She had some card sense," recalled Zoe Dunn of Villisca, a fellow bridge club member). She liked to chat on the phone with other ladies around town or settle in front of the TV to watch Lawrence Welk or game shows. Her husband traveled extensively after she died, but she didn't need to see the world.

When she went out, she always wore a nice dress, with her hair perfectly styled, and she was almost always smiling.

"In that era, the ladies were very proper," Bobby said. "I think Mom just kind of fit into that profile."

But she wasn't aloof. She would sit in a drugstore booth with Nancy and her friends and listen to their stories and troubles, no matter how trivial. "We girls just thought she was one of the girls," Mrs. Gillespie said.

The Moores bought a home just down the alley from the drugstore and remodeled it, putting in a sun room and a dining table that was like a large restaurant booth. Above the piano in the living room hung a large painted portrait of Nancy as a little girl, her dark hair in braids, her hands folded demurely in her lap.

Nancy took piano lessons for nine years, an interest she would carry into adulthood, playing favorites such as "The Old Rugged Cross" and other hymns and show tunes. She sang with the glee club and other choral groups and made the all-state chorus.

She had less enthusiasm for her studies, getting mostly C's. That wasn't good enough for her father. "He sometimes would get a little stern with her," said Debbie Parnacott, Nancy's daughter, who lives in Gladstone, Mo. "I think he expected a lot out of her."

The Moore children adored their father - when he wasn't drinking. Bobby said, "When he was good, he was really good."

The summer before Nancy's senior year of high school, she began dating Jim Watt, from the nearby town of Nodaway. They became engaged at Christmas in 1954. In spring of 1955, they graduated from high school and Watt flew to California for Air Force basic training. He came back on a 10-day leave, and Moore walked Nancy down the aisle for her wedding on Aug. 19, four days before her 19th birthday.

After three years in the Air Force, the Watts lived in Villisca, Council Bluffs and Omaha before settling in Gladstone, just north of Kansas City. They had three children, Debbie, Patrick and Michael.

Though more women of Nancy's generation were starting to juggle home and a job, she was happy choosing the same career as her mother - full-time mother and housewife.

Story Continued