Testimony of Pilot# 15
Where do we get such men?
…From the farms and the fields of America, grown from boys who labor and look beyond the horizon toward better lives—for themselves and for their families.
The fields of Lewis Alexander Hopkins were red Georgia clay, and he saw the horizon along the backs and between the plow harness of Tom and Golden, the mule and the horse. After a long day, Lewis would trudge back home to a farmhouse with loose-fitting boards that let in the wind, a front porch where the family visited with neighbors, and with the outhouse down yonder.
That’s the way Anne Hopkins began the eulogy for her father, Rear Admiral Lew Hopkins – “from a farm in Georgia.”
Below are excerpts from an interview with her Dad for the oral history collection of Admiral Nimitz Historic Site-National Museum of the Pacific War, Center for Pacific War Studies in Fredericksburg, Texas.