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The good life: Fayetteville resident and Army Air Corps veteran turns 100

Fayetteville Observer - 3/7/2021

Mar. 7—When Fayetteville resident Elmer Hall reflects on his century of living, he has one word to sum it up — good.

"I've had good friends, a good marriage and good children," said Hall, who turns 100 on March 14.

And part of his good life has involved more than 60 years of work and flying.

Hall grew up on Murchison Road in Fayetteville and still remembers going to church in horse-drawn buggy.

"We had wild blueberry bushes down on the creek in the woods," Hall said Thursday. "And you fish and caught fish and had fish to eat and the creeks and the ponds. We did a lot of things different than you do now, and surviving wasn't really that hard."

His father bought the family's first car — a Ford Model-T in 1924 for $285.

Any time a car was purchased it was paid without debt — something Hall said he's carried with him through life.

By the age of 10, Hall was using mules to plow, he was milking the cows and helping out on the family farm.

The "country life," he said, was different from city life, with segregation looking different in his neighborhood.

"You didn't disrespect a Black person, you'd get switched ..," Hall said. "A Black man died in the neighborhood and left the wife with three children — none of them old enough to work ... A Black woman from the Black church and a white woman from a white church formed a committee. The whole neighborhood raised (the kids) ... That was just something the neighborhood did."

As a teenager, Hall said, he started working weekends for an "old man," who was a World War I veteran and operated a small airport with three airplanes near Bonnie Doone.

The veteran taught him to fly when he was 14. At 16, he soloed his first flight and at 18, he received his pilot's license.

A few years later in his early 20s during World War II, Hall joined the Army Air Corps — the predecessor to the Air Force.

He was sent to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, for radio school, and there he met his wife Lorraine on Christmas Day 1942.

Her mother worked at the airbase. His wife had been valedictorian of her high school class and attended college on an academic scholarship, Hall bragged.

The couple married July 16, 1944.

"We got along," Hall said, invoking yet again his life's mantra, "I married well. I married a good woman."

Hall soon transferred to Texas — spending the remainder of his time in the military near Hondo, Texas, flying a Lockheed navigation trainer aircraft.

He explained there was a roster of five pilots who were sent overseas, with names drawn randomly Three pilots deploying while he and another remained stateside.

The aircraft he flew was similar to a C-47 twin-engine, 1,200 horsepower plane, he said.

"I just happened to stay here and never went overseas," Hall said, remembering two friends who died after crossing the channel for their first mission during the war — "the Jones boy that worked at the Carolina Soda Shop and Bill Poole, the son of the man that ran the brickworks."

"I had a good friend from here, Archie Pearsall, he was an engineer and made 35 missions across the channel as a belly gunner and never got a scratch," Hall said.

After three years of service, Hall was discharged from the military as a first lieutenant.

He moved back to the Fayetteville area with his wife in February 1945, and it was here that the couple raised Bob, John, Pam and Ray.

Hall lived in the Van Story Hills neighborhood from 1957 to 2016 and also has been a deacon and Sunday school teacher at Snyder Memorial Baptist Church.

Hall opened an auto machine shop on Winslow Street in 1947 and worked there for 69 years, until having heart surgery about five years ago.

Hall said he's never had other illnesses.

His only daughter died of cancer in 1993; his wife died in 2011.

"I've had a good life," Hall said. "Of my children, I never had any trouble with any of them — never had to get them out of jail, so they've all done well."

As for flying, Hall said, the last time he flew a plane was five years ago near Harnett County.

"Flying isn't hard to do," he said. "It's no harder than driving a car.

"But you have to do it and learn, like anything else."

Staff writer Rachael Riley can be reached at rriley@fayobserver.com or 910-486-3528.

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