Claude’s Blog
This blog is dedicated to the newly published book “Sunny Side Up: Memoirs of the Depression and World War II” by Claude Swanson Kidd.
“Sunny Side Up” was written when Claude was 84 years old. Claude grew up during the Great Depression on a tobacco farm near Mt. Airy, the North Carolina town after which Andy Griffith’s television hometown Mayberry was modeled. At age 19, Claude enlisted in the U.S. Army and was among U.S. troops who invaded France during the D-Day invasion of 1944. He fought in the hedgerows of France in the Battle of Normandy.
Captured by German soldiers during the Battle of Mortain, Claude was sent by railroad to Germany, where he spent more than six months in a prisoner of war camp before being liberated by the Russian army and traveling by foot across war-torn Poland and Germany to rejoin U.S. forces. This book is the story of his remarkable trek through two of the most significant events of the 20th century - the Great Depression and World War II.
The book began as stories which Claude told to his daughter, Cindy Coffey, over a 15-18 year period as they traveled on business. Cindy wrote many of the stories down. The Kidd family asked historian Donna Rouviere Anderson to conduct further interviews with Claude, supplement his account with additional research and pull his chronicle together into this book.
This blog will be updated about once a week and will include excerpts from the book, news about its publication and tips from Claude on his favorite interests - gardening, beekeeping, and antique tools. Please check back for more information.