Two Steaks for the General

The schools closed at noon. Most of the stores locked their doors. At 1 p.m. three big transport planes plumped down at the airport and a thin, tired-looking man stepped out on Georgia soil. Long before, Atlanta's excited citizens were packed along the downtown streets.

A four-star veteran of the European campaign was coming home. General Courtney Hicks Hodges had flown the Atlantic, stopped briefly in Manhattan, then had flown to his native South.

His Georgia neighbors were primed to give him the reception he deserved. His First Army had made history. His men had been first in France, first across the Rhine, among the first through the Siegfried Line. Now Washington made his command the first to be redeployed to the Pacific.

In a drab-colored command car, grinning and waving his thin brown hand, General Hodges rode through Atlanta's cheering streets. With him in the parade of cars rode eight other generals, 19 officers of lesser rank, 22 enlisted men, most of them Georgia boys, all grinning and gaping at the B-29s sweeping overhead (B-29s are a novelty to veterans of Europe).

At Five Points, the city's center, the sidewalks were jammed. Open windows were crammed with heads; flags (including the Confederate) flapped in the breeze. A paper snow storm drifted down and a Salvation Army band blared Onward, Christian Soldiers.

"I Never Thought . . ." Riding in one of the cars, Pfc. Joe L. Vaughan of Greenville, S.C. mumbled abashedly to Sergeant Olan E. Robertson of Tallapoosa, Ga. (who has seen 52 months of service): "I never thought I'd come back at all . . . . I'll never forget this."

At the Georgian Terrace Hotel, Courtney Hodges and his bemedaled and beribboned entourage got out of their cars. A tall, grey-haired woman wearing a bright red hat and a corsage of orchids leaned forward as they passed. She called to the General: "Remember me?" The General's sunburnt face lit up. He stopped to give his wife a kiss--the first time he had seen her in 15 months. Then he climbed the platform to make the first of many speeches.

A battery of 105-mm. cannon rattled off a 17-gun salute. A worried-looking man carrying two brown-paper packages whispered to the General's happy wife. "My name is Hooks. Mrs. Rivers, who works in my store and whose husband has been in the First Army two years, read where you were worried because you didn't have any steaks. So I brought you two steaks for the General."

On the platform the General was speaking in his dry, thin voice: "We feel that we are really home at last, even though there are many of us whose stay here will be brief. . . . To the wounded and to those who remain in Europe--we salute you."

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