Dr. Hunt Tooley to address Grayson County Historical Society Oct. 11

Grayson County, Texas -- On Tuesday, October 11, 2022, the Grayson County Historical Society will be honored with the presence of Dr. Hunt Tooley, a professor of history at Austin College in Sherman, Texas.

T. Hunt Tooley is Chairman of the Department of History at Austin College. He received his Ph.D. in history at the University of Virginia. Dr. Tooley has written three books which includes The Great War, Western Front and Home Front. As a historian, he studies war, revolutions, and peace in the modern world.

Dr. Tooley's talk will be the "Doughboys into GIs: From the Great War to D-Day". Doughboy was a popular nickname for the American infantryman during WWI and was still in use as of the early 1940s. From what I have read supposedly the nickname came from the troops getting rained on and the clay on their uniforms turned into doughy blobs. A slang word by the German soldiers for our American soldiers was called Ami and in WWII our men were called GI Joe.

The start of the war was the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, June 28, 1914 and ended with the German signing an armistice agreement with the allies on November 11, 1918. WWI was known as the War To End All Wars because of the great slaughter and destruction it caused. There were 20 million deaths and 21 million wounded.

With the bloodshed on the battlefields of the Western Front and the difficulties its soldiers had for years after the fighting had ended it inspired many works of art. Below is one of the poems by a Canadian doctor Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae.

To you from failing hands we throw
the torch: be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die,
We shall not sleep,
though poppies grow in Flanders.

This poem was published in 1915, the poem inspired the use of the poppy as a symbol of remembrance.

All members, guests and one interested in the great history of the Doughboys are welcome to attend. Our meeting will be Tuesday, October 11, 2022 and we meet at Frontier Village in the Judge Vaughan Room located at Loy Lake, Hwy 75 south exit 61. Our meeting starts at 6:30 P.M. with the door opening about 6:15.