No Place Like Home

A slim, boyish-looking sergeant walked last week into the shabby front room of a shack on Pittsburgh's gritty North Side. He sat down, and with grave deliberation pulled off his boots, then broke out a plug of tobacco. "First chance I've had for a good chew since I got back," he said. Technical Sergeant Charles E. ("Commando") Kelly was home.

This heart-warming moment was an instant of quiet in three days of hubbub and hero worship which began as soon as his seven brothers (six in uniform) pummeled a welcome on his back at the airport. "Commando" quickly settled one point in the hubbub: whether the dilapidated alley home was a fit place for a returning Congressional Medal of Honor winner. (City officials had first offered a new apartment, then engaged a $55-a-day suite at the William Penn Hotel when they learned that the Kelly home had no electric lights, no bathroom plumbing and little paint.) Said Kelly: "What's good enough for Mom is good enough for me."

But after one night at home, with his boots off, his chew of tobacco, and his brothers celebrating over beer in the kitchen, "Commando" and family transferred temporarily to the William Penn. There followed parades, gifts, interminable speeches by civic officials, a night appearance in a local park with 10,000 fans pushing through police lines, a tour of the city in an open Packard. From the sidelines the hero could hear shrieking girls awarding the ultimate in bobbysock tributes: "He's nicer than Frankie."

Through it all Commando Kelly remained calm but not displeased. At week's end he had sold his life story to the Saturday Evening Post for $15,000 and movie rights to a story about his family for $25,000. He sank the $15,000 into a trust fund for his mother, and arranged to buy her a house.

No Pick, No Scat. In Broken Arrow, Okla. (pop. 2,074), another hero home from the wars had a welcome colored by Indian atmosphere, and flavored with country feasting. He was Lieut. Ernest Childers (himself three parts Indian and one part Irish), who, like Kelly, had earned the Congressional Medal of Honor in Italy. For him, too, there were parades, speeches, and a lunch in the basement of the Methodist Church. But Childers' homecoming was most memorable for a reminiscent evaluation of his fighting qualities given by his 55-year-old half brother, Walter Childers. Said Brother Walter: "He would never cause no trouble, never would take none. Not very bad about fighting, not pick one and wouldn't scat from one. He's a high-strung, say-nothing fellow."

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