Customer Reviews

Texas Granite: Story of a World War II Hero

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This is a wonderful little book about real people. It vividly brings back those days of young men sent off to remote islands, and the young women who waited (vainly, in many cases) for their return. Mary Hartman bares her soul in recalling what must be a sad episode in her life, the loss of a possible life-mate.

You don't have to be a veteran to appreciate the author's picture of Jack Lummus, sports hero and ill-fated Marine officer. He emerges larger than life in her words, with so much more impact than the references to this Medal of Honor winner in histories of the battle of Iwo Jima, where he fell. Mary Hartman weaves her youthful uncertainty about the future into imagined last hours of her discovered love. It is more than bitter sweet, it is very moving.

What was life like in 1945 for a 19-year old girl from Nebraska, working in the overheated war economy of California? How did these young women meet and relate to the thousands of men working there way closer to the Pacific battlefronts? Read "Texas Granite", and you will be provided with valuable insights into this part of the closing 20th Century.

I read this book in 1997 because of a review of it on National Public Radio. As a 17-year-old freshman, I saw a mesmerizing photograph of Lummus on the wall of the Baylor University administration building in 1947. I may have seen Lummus, without knowing him personally or the other Baylor football players, in 1940 as a kid from the neighborhood playing on the field next to the dormitory.

The book inspired me to apply for and secure a Texas historical marker for Jack Lummus in his home town of Ennis, Texas, in 1999. I researched the project for two years and satisfied myself a vindictive, possessive person offered the only objection to Mary Hartman's book.

There are Medal of Honor winners whose actions can only be characterized as impulsive -- still heroic, but impulsive, like covering a live grenade to save one's buddies.

Harry Truman's citation for Lummus (and my further research) showed Jack Lummus' action exemplified the pinnacle of bravery in the face of great danger. Faced with interlocking fire from pillboxes at the mouth of a bloody canyon, Lummus personally eliminated three of them with grenades, sachel charges and his carbine, twice being knocked down by Japanese grenades, before he stepped on a land mine that mortally wounded him.

Hartman's book also tells of Lummus' love affair with her, a 19-year-old girl from Nebraska who met him in California.

I have no doubt he would have married her had he survived.

Forget TV and the movies long enough to read about a real hero. Get this book.

I went to high school in Lancaster, Texas and Ennis was always included in the football and basketball rosters as teams we played. The Ennis Lions were in our district. When I moved back to Missouri, my birthplace in 1984, one of the first people I met at the local doughnut shop was Mary Hartman. She is my mentor and the first person who really encouraged me to write. Mary was working on this book then, and she was fascinating to watch, always was when she wrote, as she dug and traveled and wrote and re-wrote. She has always been meticulous about her writing research. It was hard also to witness Mary's frustration and grief as she relived the years she was writing about. The result is a fascinating story and Mary did a first class job writing it. You are still my mentor, Mary. I feel that my meeting Mary was one of those coincidences that was meant to happen. Thanks Mary for a great, engaging story.