Comeal Andrews of the 93rd obsessed his grandniece, Judith Baker. From her much loved Grandfather, she heard about this brother of his all of her life. She knew he served in World War II and lost his life. But that’s all she knew.
Judith contacted researcher Chris through our website https://www.93regimentalcan.com and Chris helped her locate army records that told her the story.
In 1944, still with the 93rd Engineers, Comeal operated heavy equipment on Adak in the Aleutian Islands. On June 29 of that year, Comeal was standing between his earth mover and a parked army truck when a student driver rear-ended the truck, driving it forward into the earth mover and crushing Comeal.
Judith remembered playing with her brother on the living room floor—maneuvering toy soldiers and toy vehicles. Grandpa walked in as, giggling, they pushed two trucks together with a soldier caught between them. She never understood why their innocent play made her Grandpa so mad…
Judith had another story…
A fancy classic car parked behind a wall in Grandpa’s barn. She peeked at it between the boards and Grandpa shooed her away. One day, hanging out with Grandpa, she watched him make contact with a friend at a local junk yard; watched in shock as the friend put the fancy car in the crusher and turned it into a block of junk.
A few years passed and Judith, now a teenager, found herself travelling south with Grandpa to visit relatives in Louisiana. The road from Battle Creek, Michigan to South Louisiana is pretty straight—basically one long freeway. But Grandpa didn’t follow that route. On the way home, Judith, the family navigator, realized that Grandpa’s roundabout route avoided Mississippi.
When she asked him about that, he swore her to secrecy and shared the story of the family’s escape to the north.
Judith’s family, including Comeal, came out of Southern Louisiana. Sharecropping there in the 1940’s and 1950’s differed from slavery only as a legal technicality. Judith’s grandpa wanted desperately to get his family north to a better future. He had got them to Mississippi where they worked on two different plantations owned by members of the same prominent family. Those Mississippi planters kept them as firmly under their thumbs as Louisiana planters would have.
The “Mister” had a fancy automobile—a classic mid-1950’s gas hog, laden with chrome and graced with massive tail fins. One night a desperate Grandpa piled his family into the Mister’s car and headed north to Michigan.
Grandpa couldn’t risk getting pulled over in Mississippi.
A Readable Study of the great migration north