Joseph R. Grant was born September 21, 1896 in Cherry Hill, Maryland.
He lived in this small community until the Sunday before Thanksgiving, 1917. He said good-bye to his friends in his Sunday School class at Cherry Hill United Methodist Church, as the next day he was set to enlist in the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps.
His friend, Joseph McFadden joined him and they went off together to Wilmington, Delaware to sign up. The following day they were sent to Baltimore, and then off to Columbus, Ohio.
By January of 1918 they were on their way to Kelly Field, Texas. The unit to which he was assigned was scheduled to embark for duty in Russia, with stops at Rich Field, Waco, Texas, and Fort Mason, San Francisco for embarkation. The stop at San Francisco turned out to be a lengthy three months. Years later he would come to realize that the Russian Revolution was the cause for the delay.
Little did he know at the time that this delay would play a very important part in his life.
In March, he was moved to Mather Field, Sacramento, California and by September he was sent to the Aviation General Supply depot in Los Angeles, California. In Joseph’s own words he tells the story of a very amusing incident.
“I went from the Depot in Los Angeles to the hospital at the Balloon School at Arcadia to deliver some records. When I arrived there, the surgeon in charge of the hospital told me I was going to bed for a few hours. Since I felt perfectly healthy, I didn’t know why I should be put to bed in a hospital. He explained that the Inspector General from Washington was coming and there were too many empty beds.
I got into a hospital gown, crawled in bed, and, as the Inspector General and the surgeon passed by cot, I heard the surgeon say “There’s an interesting case.”
As luck would have it one of the nurses there took a fancy to me in the short time I was “sick” and invited me to dinner at her home for the following Sunday. Yes, I went!” This nurse, Miss Margaret Bradley, would in 1922 would become Joe’s wife.
Following the Armistice, Grant was asked to remain in the service and he was dispatched to North Island in the San Diego Harbor.
Thus it was that he served most of his enlistment in the four largest and most interesting cities in California.
In the late fall of 1920, Grant’s mother wrote to tell him that if was interested in taking over his grandfather’s business he needed to becoming home. So in 1921, Joe went back to become an undertaker. In April 1923, he moved to North East Maryland to continue his Uncle Henry Pierson’s funeral business. Joseph Grant would live out the rest of his days there until his death March 15, 1985.
-Cecil Democrat 1981