World War One
In his U.S. Marine Corps uniform, 1918.
Finishing up his public school education with a classics diploma, Jack set off to see a bit of the United States. He joined his sister DeLana and her husband in Colorado Springs in 1915 and attended Colorado College for a year. The next year found him back in Jackson and by 1917 he'd earned a teaching certificate from Union University and served as a principal, bus driver, and teacher in Pinson, TN just south of Jackson. By this time, the lure of the the party going on in New Orleans must have been too much to resist, and he joined his older brother Sid to help him run his business, Weld & White Cotton Brokerage. Jack wrote to his sister Hilda in 1918, "I can do pretty much as I please attending parties and going on camping trips." The U.S. economy was booming, the New Orleans cotton exchange thriving, and as part of a large group of socially networked family and friends, the NOLO party in the late Gilded Age must have been a doozy. But the events in Europe had set off a series of trip wires that inexorably drew the United States into the First World War. The United States declared war on Germany in April 1917. In August 1918, Jack volunteered for the US Marine Corps and traded the party in New Orleans for bootcamp at a mosquito invested Parris Island, NC. Whether seeking to prove his frontier heritage in Tennessee or simply prove he could do it, he was determined to passed the rigorous requirements to earn the Sharp Shooter's badge. This achievement earned him $20 more dollars a month in pay and assured his tour of duty wouldn't be in a mess hall. He arrived in France in October 1918 and the war ended on November 11. He continued to be deployed in France until his honorable discharge in August 1919. He was 21.