by Steve Turner
There wasn't a lot for young people to do in Dyess. On weekends the teenagers (over 180 attended Dyess High School) hung out around the Circle, where the main attractions were the movie theater, a roller rink, and a cafe with a jukebox. When Tara asked her father about his first date for her parent book, he replied: "I was sixteen. My dad let me have the car (a 1935 Ford) and I took Evelyn Shaddix to the movies and got her back by 9:30 p.m." Asked about his first kiss, he added: "Evelyn Shaddix in the car, first date. She immediately said, Take me home.' And I did!" To the question, "Who was your first girlfriend?" he said, "Louise Nichols. But she didn't know it."
Louise was a girl in his class, and she admits that they "claimed each other" during their junior year in high school. "It was the way kids do these things," she says. "We were always big buddies. We were always together walking to class and doing all that stuff. I tell you, he was something special! He really was. He was just so comical and everybody loved him. Everybody. He asked me out on a date but we didn't have places to go. There was only the theater or church! So I didn't go out with him at first, but I did later. I just had to give in!"
In his senior year Cash dated fifteen-year-old Sue Moore, who'd been A. J.'s girlfriend until he joined the army at the end of eleventh grade. Innocent and uncomplicated, their relationship mostly consisted of hanging around at the cafe or the movie theater, usually in the company of others. "I thought he was a hunk," she says, "but at that time I don't think you could have said that he was wild about girls. He was just a kind of laid-back person. A nice, lovable guy." The relationship ended after about three months when Sue moved to Atkins, Arkansas. Cash was apparently brokenhearted, and his sister Reba wrote Sue a letter saying that he wanted her to come back. She didn't, and they never saw each other again.
Cash's only other girlfriend during his senior year was Nadine Johnson, who lived in the nearby community of Marie and went to school in Wilson. Her best friend, Joye Leta Wells, was in Cash's class and would ask Nadine to walk her home in the dark on the nights she had to stay late to rehearse school plays. It was during one of these rehearsals that she first met Cash in the school hall.
"He came in and sat in a straight-backed chair that was leaning against the wall," she remembers. "Everybody was laughing and having fun. He was carrying on and acting silly and, suddenly, the chair flew out from under him and he fell. And I thought, 'Oh my! How cute!' We got to know each other, and the night he graduated from high school he asked me for my first date."
Nadine went to the May 19, 1950, graduation as a guest of Joye Leta. Cash sang "The Whiffenpoof Song." Afterward they all went to the cafe at the Circle, and it was there that Cash asked her out. "When he came to get me for that first date, he had a blanket or quilt on the seat of his father's car," she said. "The car had no side windows and the seat was wet with rain."
To Nadine, Cash seemed well adjusted and popular. He was polite and never cursed or drank. Although they were both churchgoers (she belonged to the Church of Christ), they didn't discuss religion, and she even felt that Cash'smother viewed her with suspicion because she wasn't a Baptist. When Cash was in the car with her he liked to sing. In particular, she remembers him singing songs by the Inkspots and, between the lines, he would shout out invocations such as "Do you hear me, girl?" and "Say, Nadine, do you hear me?"
"I think what attracted me to him was that he was so well liked," she says. "Everywhere he went it was, 'Hey J. R. How you doing? You okay?' He had the ,most absolutely gorgeous brown eyes I have ever seen. That's one thing I do remember. And he was so tall and slim. He was quite attractive. An eye-catcher."
At the end of a typical date he would drive her back to Marie. "When he gave me a good-night kiss, he'd stand on the ground and I'd have to stand on the porch to make us level. I'd always be scared to death that my daddy was going to open the door. Dads were pretty strict in those days with their girls. I was a good girl though. I know that. There was never any intimacy. We just stole a few kisses."
After graduating, Cash had no idea of what to do with his life. He always claimed that he had never wanted to do anything other than be a musician, and his mother had impressed on him that he'd been given "the gift" by God, but in 1950 he was ill qualified to earn money that way. He could only pick a couple of chords on a guitar, had taken a few singing lessons in 1948 with LaVanda Mae Fielder of Lepanto, and had sung at church and at school. His only experience of commercial performances consisted of a Louvin Brothers concert and a visit to the Grand Ole Opry during a school trip in 1950.
He started by taking casual day labor. He hitchhiked to Bald Knob, Arkansas, and picked strawberries for three days; spent three weeks in Pontiac, Michigan, working at the Fisher Body Plant; and then did a two-week stint at Procter & Gamble's oleomargarine factory in nearby Evadale. On June 25, 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea and, within days, American troops were involved in their first military conflict since the end of Word War II. In July, Cash drove to Blythesville, Arkansas, and signed up for four years with the United States Air Force. He'd received his registration certificate shortly after his eighteenth birthday. He had to give a first and middle name—initials were not acceptable. He filled in "John Ray."
Joining the air force was a big change from the life he'd known thus far, but Cash always knew that someday he would have to leave his home town. There was no future for young people in Dyess. "When we were young," he once said, "it was taken for granted that we wouldn't live in Dyess when we were grown. It was the aim of every person to get a better job." As his classmate Billy Shaddix (who joined the army) says, "When we was growing up, all we was thinking about was getting out of them cotton fields. All we was thinking about was getting off the farm and doing something different."
3
Leaving Home
CASH'S MILITARYYEARS helped him grow from left Dyess a callow, naive teenager with no clear idea of what he wanted to do with his life. He returned in 1954 as a self-assured and well-traveled man with a definite vision of becoming a professional musician. The USAF had given him pride in his abilities—something he'd never had at school and had certainly never gotten from his father. Military life introduced him to a diverse range of fellow Americans and gave him the opportunity to explore the cultural centers of Europe.
After finishing his paperwork in Blythesville, Cash returned to Dyess, packed a small canvas bag, and took a train from Wilson to Little Rock, where he was inducted on July 7, 1950. From Little Rock he was sent to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, for seven weeks of basic training and then on to Keesler AFB in Biloxi, Mississippi, for a special intercept operator course. While at Lackland his tests indicated he had an aptitude for typing and for distinguishing sounds. Intercept operators were trained to eavesdrop on enemy radio communications in order to transcribe the Morse code signals.
At Keesler Cash met men like Bob Moodie, Ben Perea, and Bob Whitacre, who would later serve with him in Europe. They remember him as a clean-living, affable boy who distinguished himself in his classes. He was quiet, but this wasn't because he had nothing to say, merely that he never spoke before thinking. "He was a very smart guy," says Ben Perea. "When we were learning the international Morse code, he picked it up quite a bit faster than anyone else. He had a sharp mind. He was able to learn things very quickly."
The best students on the radio intercept course were approached by the USAF Security Service, which was recruiting men for the newly formed Twelfth Radio Squadron Mobile (RSM) to be based in Landsberg, West Germany, at the forefront of cold war radio surveillance operations. Those chosen would undergo further intensive training at Brooks AFB in Texas and be subjected to rigorous background checks for top-secret security clearance. Cash, who graduated from Keesler on April 27, 1951, received one of the coveted positions.
During his eight weeks of training at Brooks AFB, he met Vivian Liberto. One Friday night, after a month of training, he and a friend went to St. Mary's roller rink on North St. Mary's Street in
San Antonio and saw her skating. He was attracted, he later said, by Vivian's dark eyes and broad smile. Cash's friend bet him that he couldn't walk her home that night. He began talking with Vivian, and when it was time to leave he joined her on the bus ride home. Though she wouldn't let him kiss her or walk her to the door, she did give him her telephone number.
They dated for the rest of his stay in San Antonio. She was seventeen and from a very strict Italian American family. Her father, Tom, owned an insurance company and was an amateur magician. Her uncle, Vincent, was a Roman Catholic priest. They worried about Vivian dating a Southern Baptist and were probably relieved to learn that he was being shipped to Germany for three years of service.
Cash returned to Dyess for a month before leaving by train from Memphis. From there he went on to Trenton, New Jersey, and finally to McGuire AFB, where he met the rest of the Twelfth RSM for embarkation. Bob Moodie, who was from Rhode Island, invited him back to his family home for a weekend. On the way they stopped off in New York City. While having a coffee during the afternoon, they were approached by a man giving away two theater tickets he couldn't use. They were sixth-row orchestra tickets for the Mark Hellinger Theater on West Fifty-First Street, where a new musical titled Two on the Aisle was playing.
With music by Jule Styne and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Two on the Aisle gave Cash his first taste of Broadway theater. "I think we were given the tickets simply because we were young men in uniform," says Bob Moodie. "I remember we had a great view, and it was a huge theater with probably fifteen hundred seats. The stars of the show were Bert Lahr and Dolores Gray. Afterward we went to Rhode Island to meet my family, and then I had a date with my girlfriend at the time and he had a date with someone."
They left New Brunswick for Bremerhaven, Germany, in September 1951 on the USNS General W. G. Haan, a decommissioned warship now run by the Military Sea Transportation Service. The 10,654-ton ship could carry over forty-seven hundred troops and was capable of a speed of eighteen knots. The twelve men bound for the Twelfth RSM were kept together in an undesirable forward hold. Cash shared a cabin with four of them, including Ben Perea, a Catholic boy from New Mexico who loved to sing. Elsewhere on the ship, in a more comfortable cabin, was the singer Vic Damone, who was serving with the infantry.
"When I first saw Johnny Cash, I don't think we liked each other, because he reminded me of John Wayne, and I didn't like John Wayne," says Perea. "But then we started talking and found that we had a lot of things in common. Neither of us liked going out and getting drunk and picking up girls. We liked to write letters home and talk about our families. He'd just met Vivian and he liked to talk about her, and I'd talk about my girlfriend. He'd talk about his mom as well. He loved her very much. That's when we started singing and harmonizing together."
Landsberg AFB lay just outside Landsberg am Lech, a small town thirty miles west of Munich in the Bavarian region of Germany, with a population close to ten thousand. The town's prison had once hosted Adolph Hitler during his incarceration for treason in 1924, and it was there that he composed his book Mein Kampf, dictating to Rudolph Hess his theories of the supremacy of the Aryan race and the benefits of a Nazi state. In the same prison, three months before Cash arrived, four concentration camp commanders had been executed for war crimes after being tried and found guilty by a U.S. military tribunal in Nuremburg.
Originally built for the Luftwaffe for early bombing raids against France, Landsberg AFB dated back to 1935. Hit four times by the Allies, American forces commandeered the base in 1945 and used it for ammunition storage until they completed repairs. By the time the Twelfth RSM arrived in 1951, it had been upgraded into a fully modernized airbase, complete with tennis courts, a golf course, a gymnasium, and a bowling alley.
The Twelfth RSM couldn't have asked for a more beautiful setting on the Romantische Strasse (Romantic Route), within easy reach of rivers, streams, lakes, and mountains. They had access to sailing on Lake Ammersee, skiing at Innsbruck, and relaxing in the resort town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen in the foothills of the Alps. Neuschwanstein Castle, used by Walt Disney as the model for the castle in the animated movie Cinderella, was a little less than twenty miles away.
The sensitive nature of the Twelfth RSM's mission required that they function as a self-contained unit within their own quadrangle on the edge of the base. Mixing socially with other men at the base was awkward because they couldn't discuss their work. Colonel Glen E. Pennywitt, then a thirty-five-year-old major and commanding officer of the Twelfth RSM in Landsberg, remembers, "We were isolated. We lived in our own barracks and worked upstairs in the attic. We couldn't talk about what we were doing with anyone else. As a matter of fact, there was a base commander who was desperate to see what we did, but he couldn't get up my stairs. We couldn't let him in. People depended on us."
The buildings consisted of four levels. There was a basement for laundry and washing; a ground-floor leisure and eating area; upstairs dormitories; and then, tucked under the eaves, the nerve center—a cramped space where the men worked in three eight-hour shifts a day. "There were no windows," remembers Leo Ard. "The only doors were an entrance and an exit. If there was a fire [you were] gone." The work space contained little more than chairs and desks. On each desk stood an MC88 typewriter and a one-hundred-pound Hammarlund SP600-JX receiver that could cover 540 kHz to 54 MHz in six bands. Between forty and fifty men comprised a shift, known as a "trick."
The operators each wore a set of headphones, tuned in to Soviet broadcasts from both ground and air, and typed what they heard. Because they listened for Morse code signals rather than speech, they earned the nicknames "ditty bops" or "ditty chasers." The hardest part of their job, which required great patience, was calibrating the frequency, or "digging hard." Those who dug the hardest made the best operators.
"Part of the skill was being able to listen to the signal you wanted and to ignore the signals you didn't want," says Rich Collins, who worked the same trick as Cash. "When you got the signal you wanted, what you typed out was the actual letters corresponding to the Morse code. You had no idea what you were writing. Then what we wrote was encoded and passed on to trained analysts. They were better trained than we were. They understood cryptographic techniques and had equipment to help them decode. If we heard actual voices we could record, but we couldn't translate. None of us had any knowledge of those languages."
Cash excelled at this work and gained a reputation within the Twelfth RSM both for his diligence and his speed. Despite a persistent ear infection from swimming in the Tyronza River as a boy, his hearing was acute enough to isolate sounds in the ether. He also had the ability to transcribe quickly. In high school he'd learned to type, and by the time he was in Germany he could type forty words a minute. Impressed by Cash's ability and with the fact that he was "appreciated by and liked by all his companions," Colonel Pennywitt recommended him for promotion to staff sergeant, which put Cash in charge of his forty-man trick. The promotion also meant he could be assigned top-priority work elsewhere. In June 1953 the USAF dispatched him to Foggia, Italy.
The nervous energy that would later characterize his life onstage had already begun to emerge. Cash couldn't sit or stand still. It seemed that he always had to be on the move. "I worked right next to him for a number of months, and the thing that struck me about him was that when you watched him he was always kind of agitated," says Rich Collins. "He smoked and drank coffee excessively, and his legs were always going. It was like he was impatient, nervous, or overmedicated as they would say today. On the night shift a lot of guys would get sleepy, but John was always hyper. I would remember that about him even if nothing else had happened in his life."
Years later, when remembering his youth, Cash would often paint a picture of himself as someone who became morally lax while away from the strictures of home and church. "Once I knew how to drink beer and look for a girl, it was no big thing learning how to drink the hard stuff and look for a fight," he wrote in C
ash: The Autobiography (1997).1 In Man in Black (1975) he spoke of "graduating" from beer to cognac and having "wild times" in which he would see "how good I could curse."2. He suggested that he had become violent, claiming that his nose had been broken during a fight with a paratrooper. In 1971 he told Christopher Wren, author of his first biography, Winners Got Scars Too, that at Landsberg AFB he had attacked two security guards who attempted to confiscate boxes of cigarettes he was smuggling out to sell on the black market. "I invited them both out at once, and I knocked them down a fifty-foot embankment," he told Wren. "I knocked out one's teeth and I broke the other's nose. They ran off."3.
None of these stories rings true with any of the men who served with him. This latter tale even contradicts his later claim in Cash: The Autobiography that, "I've done no direct physical violence to people." An assault on two military policemen would have resulted in a serious investigation followed by demotion or a dishonorable discharge if found guilty. The story of brawling with a paratrooper seems out of character for a man chiefly distinguished for abstemiousness and a peace-loving nature. Everyone who knew Cash points out that whereas it was almost expected that red-blooded American teenagers would go wild on their nights off, Cash distinguished himself with his self-control. "We would all go to German guest houses and have a few beers," remembers Chuck Riley. "If we were drinking in Landsberg, John would come with us. He would joke and do what the rest of us were doing, but if any of us felt like chasing ladies, John would just sit at the table and have another beer."
Similarly, no one can remember Cash's threatening to pistol-whip a lieutenant in Italy—another act of subordination that would have seen him court-martialed—or hurling his typewriter through a window when he got frustrated during a particularly difficult shift at Landsberg. The absence of windows in the work area makes this story difficult to believe.
