View other columns by Mark Kennedy
Five Hooie brothers from Pulaski, Tenn., served their country in wartime. All five returned home safely.
The common thread was a laminated four-leaf clover passed down from brother to brother over a span of time that lasted from the early years of World War II in the 1940s to the Vietnam War era in the mid-1960s.
The last living Hooie brother, David Hooie, who now lives in Miami, Fla., sat down with us this week to tell the story while visiting his sister, Frances Newton, of Tyner, Tenn.
David placed the four-leaf clover, now brown with age, on Frances’ kitchen table along with a photo of him and his four brothers, Leldon, Paul, Billy and Hillard, who was known to all as “Bud.”
By 1942, the U.S. military had grown to almost 4 million service people, and World War II’s Pacific theater was becoming engulfed in fighting.