When Taylor was discharged from the Army in 1956 he really had no where to go. He worked it out so his actual discharge would take place at Ft. Jackson thereby at least getting him back to a part of the country he knew, even though the memories were not fond.
Taylor had, like millions of other men, been through six-weeks of basic training hell at Ft. Jackson. After that the Army had not been a bad stint. He spend his entire two year hitch near the Baltic Sea, guarding a border crossing at the northern most point along the line between East and West Germany. The only part he hated were the two winters he was there. He never wanted to be cold, or at least that cold, again.
Lying in the dead center of South Carolina just to the east of Columbia, the area around Ft. Jackson had nothing to offer Taylor except being in the South. After two nights in a transition barracks, and within a couple hours of being formally discharged, he stood at the counter of the Seaboard Coast Line Railroad in Union Station, downtown Columbia.
“There’s either the Meteor or the Comet,” the clerk offered.
“What’s the difference,” Taylor asked.
“The Silver Meteor comes through at 1:38pm and the The Silver Comet at 11:58pm. Where did you say you were going?”
“South,” said Taylor. “Give me a ticket for...” he paused as he pulled a small stack of neatly folded ten and twenty dollar bills, and then finished his sentence, “...for wherever thirty dollars will get me.”
“Can do,” said the clerk, pleased that he now had something specific to look up. “Jacksonville for twenty-four fifty. How bout that? Unless you really want to spend all thirty, in that case I can get you to St. Augustine via the Florida East Coast Line, but you have to change trains in Jacksonville and will have a layover of...” the clerk looked up at a chart over the window and continued, “...of an hour for the Comet or with the Meteor you have to wait until the next morning.”
Taylor pulled a ten and a twenty from the stack, handed the money to the clerk, and refolded the rest, sliding it back into his pocket.
“Did you want the Comet or the Meteor?
“Which ever is the next one.”
“Then the Comet it is,” the clerk said as he set about writing up the ticket.
Taylor was more than unsure about what he was doing, but he really had nothing else to do. He had grown up on a small farm in East Tennessee during the Depression and years of World War Two. By eight years he was the youngest of four brothers. His mother died he was only a year old, some thought from complications resulting from Taylor’s birth. Then within the span of a year, his two oldest brothers, both in the Army, were killed, one in North Africa and the other at the invasion of Italy. As soon as his remaining brother turned 18, in 1944, he joined the Navy and died during the Battle at Leyte when the destroyer he was on sank. The loss of three sons in three years turned Taylor’s father into a man with less and less ambition about his farm and himelf which untimately resulted in his death when Taylor was 18. With everything gone, Taylor joined the Army, and now that too had come to an end.
“Here you go, said the clerk. Boarding will start as soon as the train arrives at 11:36pm. You’ll like St. Augustine. My wife and I have been there a couple of times, always in the winter. Very pleasant.”
The last words of the clerk fell on Taylor’s back as he walked away to find a corner to wait the nearly six hours for the Silver Comet to whisk him away from now and straight into then.