In 1916, Westmoreland was a busy farming community. 

Teams of wagons pulled by horses, mules, and even an occasional team of oxen plied the muddy avenues of Park Street and Pleasant Grove Road.  The job of street sweeper included the shoveling of profuse amounts of manure from the animals.  In the warmer months, flies were everywhere and only a lucky few had screens to cover their open windows.  The flies spread disease, in particular, many residents suffered bouts of typhoid fever.  Untimely deaths were often caused by typhoid.  

Electricity and air conditioning were non-existent and probably less than a hundred cars could be counted in all of Sumner County at the time.  

In 1916, Westmoreland was a railroad town and eight trains a day passed through the community.  One could amble up to the depot between Park Street and Pleasant Grove Road and buy a ticket that would take them from Westmoreland to any other city in the country served by trains.  Both freight and passenger trains stopped daily in downtown Westmoreland.  Those same trains would travel north out of Westmoreland enroute to Turners Station and beyond, running parallel to the Jackson Highway, and on September 25th of that year, 1916, Fannie Slayton Rhodes struggled to give birth to her first child in a small house near the Jackson Highway within earshot of the railroad.  

The child born that day was a boy.  His parents were Owen Corlis Rhodes and Fannie Burton Slayton Rhodes.  Both parents grew up “hard scrabble”.  Owen was one of five boys while Fannie had ten siblings.  Owen and Fannie named their son Floyd Delano Rhodes, choosing two given names that were popular choices for boys at that time.  

The small family would soon move to the Garretts Creek area where they would attempt to put down roots on a few acres there.  While there, a second son would be born, Hoyd Erron Rhodes, in 1920.  The 1930 census showed that Owen Rhodes owned his farm and under the heading “Occupation”, Owen, Floyd and Hoyd Rhodes were listed as “farmers”.  Floyd was 13 years old while Hoyd was nine.  The Great Depression was just beginning and the opportunity for getting an education was being supplanted by the need for survival. 

By the spring of 1938, Floyd Rhodes was preparing for his graduation from Westmoreland High School.  He was 21 years old.  His graduation was not delayed due to academic failure.  His graduation from high school was delayed as a result of economic necessity.  Because of the Depression, upwards of 30 percent of the working population were unable to find jobs, and many of those who did work suffered huge drops in pay.  Reduced compensation led to shortages in tax collection.  The city of Westmoreland “went under”, unable to collect enough money to provide city services to residents.  It became an unincorporated community.  The county and the state, as well, had to dramatically cut services in an effort to remain above water.  Money was so short that the county’s schools were, at times, completely shut down.  And, often when they were open, boys like Floyd Rhodes were unable to attend due to having to help their families scrape by.  

For a while after his graduation, Floyd Rhodes hung around Westmoreland in an effort to help provide for his parents and younger brother, but his eyes were filled with visions of a better life.  While in school, he had shown a knack for writing and he had developed an avid interest in reading.  In April of 1940, the census taker working in Westmoreland indicated that Floyd was living at home and without a job.  He was listed as a student in college.  

A few months later, on October 16, 1940, he filled out his Military Draft Card in Westmoreland.  The card reported that he had brown hair and brown eyes and stood 5 feet 10 inches tall and weighed 138 pounds.  It also reported that his little finger on his left hand had been cut off at the first joint.  On this card, his place of employment was identified as the Baptist Sunday School Board in Nashville.  Within a short time, Floyd Rhodes had moved to 5th Avenue North in Nashville, just a few blocks away from his job at the Sunday School Board.  

While working for the Sunday School Board, Rhodes became interested in the subject of Theology and the study of religion.  He was soon accepted into the East Tennessee Baptist College, today’s Carson-Newman University,  in preparation to becoming a minister.  Like many, though, his studies were interrupted with the advent of World War II.  Floyd Rhodes joined the war effort on October 16, 1942.  He received his army training in Louisiana before being shipped overseas a year later.  His unit saw heavy action in the campaigns of North Africa and fighting throughout Sicily and up the Italian Peninsula.  Rhodes rose in rank to Corporal and was a member of the 3193rd Signal Service Company.  His responsibilities in the Signal Service included teletype operation.  It was a job that could run from the mundane – relating the anticipated weather conditions for the day – to the dramatic – sending frantic orders of troop movements and battle orders – to the tragic – relating the circumstances of a fallen soldier’s death to a grieving mother.  It was a job that Rhodes took seriously and it was one that afforded him ample opportunity to observe the people of this part of the world and the circumstances wrought on them as a result of war.  

With a writer’s eye, Floyd Rhodes recounted his observations in letters to the folks back home in Sumner County.  Concerning North Africa, he wrote of the beauty of the natural area and the differences of the people, “dressed in sheets”, he said.  He described the houses as being “huts made of stone or straw” and marveled at their use of donkeys and camels for transportation.  “Milk and water was carried in the skins of animals, preferably goat.”  He compared their trains to “Toonerville Trolleys”, a reference to a 1936 cartoon featuring the trials of an engineer and his diminutive rail system.  Floyd Rhodes observed that the rail system of Tunisia and other North African countries was made up of “small rails and small cars…similar to the old street cars once used in Nashville”.  First class passengers sat in covered seats, the seats for second class passengers were uncovered wooden planks, while those in third class rode in cars having no seats, leaving passengers to ride standing up or riding on top of the railcar.  

American cigarettes were coveted by Africans who would pay “as much as one dollar for a pack of Luckies or Camels, but won’t take Raleigh or other lower priced brands”.  

Rhodes referred to Italy as “Sunny Italy” and related that the Romans were “cultivated, gentille, kindly and attractive”.  The city of Rome was possessed of a “rich and elegant upper crust” with “amiabel playboys and sun-ripened hot house girls” preoccupied with “eating and loving” and hoping to renew visits to the island of Capri or the sun-drenched coastal resorts of Positano or Taormina when not trying to locate tires for their Alfa Romeos.  

The effects of war were never too far removed.  Rhodes recounted the morning he and his fellow soldiers awoke to a large gathering of locals who stood with profuse amounts of avocados, peaches, cherries, apricots, and many other trinkets to present as souvenirs in exchange for food.  There was even one gentleman, a barber, who offered free haircuts to the GIs in exchange for food.  Rhodes lamented the devastation and degradation caused by the war and wished that Americans back home could witness what he saw, noting that “the people of America could get into their heads once and for all… we have always enjoyed the best of life and have never had to suffer the pangs of hunger and want” brought on by war.  

In his letters, he wrote of the father who recounted the taking of his eight-year old daughter from his arms by German soldiers as he walked down the street in his hometown.  The man attempted to chase the car but was stopped in his tracks by the soldiers shooting at him.  It was the last the man had seen of his daughter.  

And Rhodes related the story of another girl, an eighth grader whose school had been bombed while attending class one day.  The girl had woken up in the hospital a few days later and was told that all her classmates had died along with her teacher.  Floyd Rhodes walked with the girl to the bombed out shell of the school.  Rhodes said, “That is war.  The people in America have never seen or felt the pangs of any suffering as compared to these people over here.”  He admonished his readers to be thankful and “how proud we all should be of America that it has never felt war and here’s hoping it will never reach the fair land of the free and the home of the brave”.  

He ended one letter to his first cousin, fellow Westmoreland resident Pauline Rhodes, by saying “I am ok, and Italy isn’t bad.  I have a collection of pictures both post cards and movies of which you may be the audience when we all return once more to the good ole USA”.  

For Floyd Rhodes, the return from Europe began in December, 1945 onboard the Army Troop Transport Ship Santa Cecilia.  As the ship made its way across the Atlantic, the troops eagerly anticipated their return stateside, and for those aboard the Santa Cecilia, they were slated to arrive in New York City to a hero’s welcome.  390 veterans were onboard and seasickness was the order of the day.  That feeling was greatly aggravated on Thursday, December 20th when the ship encountered storm-tossed heavy seas.  At one point in the turbulent weather, Floyd Rhodes climbed the ship’s ladder in order to take a photograph from the high vantage point.  Midway up the ladder, the ship was rocked by an exceptionally high wave, forcing the Santa Cecilia to roll violently.  This caused Rhodes to lose his grip and he fell to the deck below.  He was taken to the ship’s infirmary where he was diagnosed with a fractured skull and internal bleeding.  The injuries hampered his breathing and he soon lapsed into unconsciousness.  His condition was precarious and the ship lacked much in the way of needed medical care.  A radio appeal was sent by the ship requesting oxygen tanks in an effort to save the life of Floyd Rhodes.  The ship was still hundreds of miles from the east coast and the seas remained too turbulent for small ships to transport the tanks.  

Newspapers across the country followed the radio reports from the Santa Cecilia as they recounted the desperate efforts to keep Rhodes alive until the ship made it to America.  Army surgeon Captain Martin L. Stein attended to Rhodes onboard the ship.  Captain Stein improvised a suction cup taken from an ear syringe.  This makeshift device was used to save Rhodes from strangulation as blood and fluids from his skull hemorrhaged into his throat.  On Friday, December 21st, a Coast Guard plane carrying an oxygen mask and tank took off from New York but was soon forced to turn back because of the bad weather conditions.  

The Knoxville News-Sentinel reported on Saturday that “day and night Staff Sgt. Arthur Jacobs of Jonesville, Minn., and Pvt. Roger Buck of Washington D. C., medical corpsmen, had struggled to maintain the injured man’s breathing.”  Later that day, a Coast Guard boat “met the Santa Cecilia with oxygen, Jacobs and Black applied it to the unconscious Rhodes, and immediately the man’s struggle for breath eased” reported the Nashville Banner.  The ship docked later that evening at Pier 15 on Staten Island.  Rhodes was transported to Halloran General Hospital.  His parents were advised to come to his bedside.  

The following day, his parents took the train from Westmoreland to Gallatin and then on to Nashville.  When they arrived there at the L&N Depot, they were greeted with a telegram from the United States Army informing them that their son, a veteran of two years combat overseas, had died at New York’s Halloran Hospital from injuries sustained from his fall from the ship’s ladder.  His final journey on this earth was the train ride his body took back to Westmoreland’s Depot.  He was laid to rest at Westmoreland’s Pleasant Grove Cemetery with military honors.  

The students and staff of Westmoreland High School recognized Corporal Specialist Floyd Delano Rhodes, a member of the Class of 1938, as a Distinguished Alumni in 2024. He is buried beside his parents at Pleasant Grove where a large marker commemorates his service to our country.