In honor of the conclave: There Goes Smokey
How maintenance sergeant Ed "Smokey" Stuever got his nickname
One of the fixtures at reunions of the 712th Tank Battalion, with which my father served, was Ed “Smokey” Stuever. I recorded many conversations with him, and then in 2005 I decided to sit him down and do a more formal interview. Three hours later I had in one place a lot of the stories that were interspersed throughout my dozens of 90-minute audiocassettes.
With the conclave under way at the Vatican, I thought it would be a good idea to relate Ed’s story of how he got the nickname Smokey. The audio clip is from that 2005 interview.
Many of the personnel in the 712th, including Smoky, began their military career in the horse cavalry, some at Fort Riley but most at Camp Seeley in the California desert, and later at the newly built Camp Lockett in Campo, California, near San Diego. Ed, who grew up in Chicago, volunteered for the veterinary detachment at Camp Lockett. I’ll let him tell the story from here, except the earlier versions of the story conclude with “There goes Smokey!”
Aaron Elson: Tell me how you got your nickname.
Smoky Stuever: Oh, back in the new camp Lockett, right away I got in the veterinarian detachment, it was a new detachment formed and so I qualified right away and I got in on that. There was eight of us that worked in the veterinarian detachment. And it came upon one morning the lieutenant, he was our leader, there was also a major that was in charge of the veterinarian detachment but he never hung around, you never hardly ever seen him, he was always at headquarters, but the lieutenant was always with us and he kept us busy and he was a wonderful, great guy, ordinary guy, he was like a regular man, and he never pulled rank, he’d never punish anybody. So one morning he came and he gave each one of us a cigar, his wife had a baby that night before. So we had, we came early at the stables, we’d usually start at 8 o’clock. So we lit up our cigars and were outside the stables chewing the fat and joking and everything, and he’s in there with his bookwork, then he finally comes out and says, “Okay, fellas, it’s 8 o’clock, we’ve got a bunch to take care of, let’s get started. And let’s get this one out of the way, it’s got a stub in its rear left foot.”
And, “Oh, we’d better put him to sleep,” one of the guys says. “There’s a mean one.”
And, oh, I’d dealt with that horse before. I says, “Ohhh, watch my smoke. I’ll take care of this one.”
So I pet the horse and I get down to his back end and I’m petting around its rump and finally I pick up its leg and get it set in my crotch, and I said, “Okay, hand me those tongs.” And by that time it was laying down on me and I turned my head, and the cigar touched the back end of the horse and away I went, flying through the air, and old Thompson says, “Yeah, watch my smoke! Old Smokey.” He hung that bad name on me and I never got rid of it. They just rattled it off day after day, it stuck with me ever since. That’s how I got that stinkin’ name.
Actually, as often as I heard him tell the story, it wasn’t until that 2005 interview, when he was 88, that he indicated displeasure with the nickname. He often spoke as if he embraced it. Go figure.
The Song of Illinois
Coincidentally, when I interviewed Ed in 2005, he had recently visited the town he grew up in, Breese, Illinois. The very first time I met Ed, at the 1987 battalion reunion, I asked him where he was from and he said “Breese, Illinois” (Not knowing any better, I spelled it with a z in the first edition of Tanks for the Memories), and then he said people used to kid him about his uncle Joe Blow from Breese. This is one of those “wait for it” audio clips, like they say on Facebook or Instagram reels, “wait for it.”
Aaron Elson: Okay, this is Ed “Smoky” Stuever, you were in Service Company of the 712th Tank Battalion. We’re recording this at the 2005 reunion of the 712th Tank Battalion. How old are you now, Ed?
Smokey Stuever: I was just 88 September the 8th.
Aaron Elson: 88?!
Smokey Stuever: Yes.
Aaron Elson: My goodness. So when were you born?
Smokey Stuever: September the 8th, 1917. In Breese, Illinois. Breeze Township. That’s out on the farm.
Aaron Elson: Tell me about Breeze.
Smokey Stuever: Breese is a little community about 40 miles straight east of the St. Louis area on Highway 50 near Carlisle Lake, eight miles away, the biggest lake in Illinois, and it’s in an area of great dairying. Most of the farmers in the area milked at least 300 cows each, and it is an area that had the best corn this year that I have seen. It was where I was born and went to a country school. We walked a mile and a half, and on my recent visit there I met some of the people that I grew up with and we went to look for the school. It wasn’t there anymore. It was a eight grades in one room school taught by Joseph Kiefer, he taught us how to sing, pray and have dramatic plays that was used at Christmastime and at time of graduation, and we learned to sing the Song of Illinois, which is quite a patriotic song and I hadn’t heard since I left school, and a lot of the elderly people would like to hear it again, and when I sang some of the words it refreshed their memory.
Aaron Elson: Can you sing it?
Smokey Stuever: Yah, “By the rivers gently flowing Illinois, Illinois, comes an echo rushing through the trees” ... oh, I missed it, I’m a little bit twisted. It went on and on. It was a quite beautiful song, and I’m sure that if teachers would teach the kids to sing the song the elderly people attending their graduation would jump out of their wheelchairs in exuberance.