Inspire, Fall 2005

He wondered why people called her “Pud.” She explained that when she was born and her brother saw her for the first time, he said, “She looks good enough to eat,” which led to the nickname “Pudding.”When she was five years old, a serious bout with scarlet fever took the curl from her hair and resulted in noticeable weight loss. When she finally emerged from her room after five weeks of quarantine, her brother declared that they’d have to shorten the nickname to “Pud” because she didn’t look so good anymore! Soon Pud and Lloyd were discussing life as teachers and a future together. Lloyd was looking at two more years at Miami University. Pud would continue teaching. Their plan was to marry when he graduated. Her head was filled with lesson plans and wedding plans and, of course, Lloyd. On December 7 of the year Pud graduated from Cedarville College, she awoke to the news that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. Lloyd was in the coffee shop at Miami University when he heard the news on the radio. He and his buddies were ready to go defend their country right then, but they continued in school another year before enlisting in the Marines. The wedding plans had to be revised. So Pud and Lloyd planned to be married during his first furlough from basic training in San Diego. He would come back to Ohio and they would have a church wedding with their friends standing up for them, as she had always wanted. Three times the furlough was scheduled, then cancelled. Lloyd knew he might be shipped out at any time. So Pud decided to go to him. Lloyd wouldn’t know if he would get leave until the last minute. Following a two-day train trip to California, her only recourse was to haunt the bus depot and train station in San Diego, searching the faces of thousands of servicemen emerging from buses and trains. It was a day long before cell phones and e-mails, but God was working in their behalf as He always had, unbeknownst to them. After three days of watching the flood of servicemen, Pud waited for the last train. One man stood by the last car. He looked the right height, she thought, but he was thinner, and he looked older, but there he was! They were married January 10, 1944 in Santa Ana, California and had three weekends together before Lloyd shipped out February 15. Like so many others, they began the long separation of loneliness and anguish that war brings to a young generation. It would be two years, February 14, 1946, before they would be reunited. Three months later, Lloyd’s First Marine Division was ordered to attack and take control of the Island of Peleliu, a little chunk of sand and coral in the South Pacific. A key part of the island hopping campaign to regain the Philippines, Peleliu claimed more American lives per foot of soil gained than any other battle 24 Fall 2005