Many talents were admired about Larry Bird, one of the basketball players who revitalized the NBA in the 1980s. Statistical but also intangible, such as his capacity for dedication, his resistance to physical pain, his tenacity. Looking back, these intangibles can also be traced back to their ancestors. His family participated in almost every major war in US history, starting with independence and ending with Korea.
The passage of history could have led Larry (a native of French Lick, Indiana, USA) to the war of his generation, that of Vietnam. But mandatory conscription in the country ended in 1973, when Bird was 17 years old. At 2.06 meters tall, his war was going to take place on the basketball courts.
Some basketball courts to which he returned after a one-year hiatus, after rejecting a scholarship from Indiana University. During that time, his father, Claude Joseph Joe Bird Jr., took his own life.
Joe (1926-1975) was a construction worker. He is known, and has been portrayed in both biographies and series (the latest, Winning Time, broadcast on HBO), as a veteran of the Korean War. But he was also a member of the Second World War, in the US Navy.
Before the start of this race, the US Congress approved the establishment of military service for those over 21 years of age, which was expanded to 18 after the country was thrust into conflict following the attack on Pearl Harbor.
In September 1944, at the age of 18, Joe Bird was drafted into the US Navy. He received no medals and honors, and barely made it to Seaman First Class: his role included administrative duties and general deck duties. He was lucky, no doubt. A few months earlier, his recruitment might have taken him to Europe: specifically, to the beaches of Normandy. However, the demons of war led him to alcoholism, an indirect cause of his suicide.
Joe Bird Jr. obtained a posthumous benefit from his time in the North American Navy. Without enough money to buy a headstone, Mike, Joe's oldest son – and Larry's brother – asked the institution for a bronze headstone for his father, with a cross, as a World War II veteran.
Joe Jr.'s recruitment rhymes with that of Joe Sr., Larry Bird's grandfather. Claude Joseph Bird Sr. was born in 1894 in Orange County, Indiana, and participated in World War I after the U.S. entered the conflict. Although there was no mandatory military service, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Selective Service Act in May 1917, which initially required the conscription of men between the ages of 21 and 30 (Joe Senior was then 23 years old).
With no dependents and, according to his registration form, “with a tall and strong build,” Joe Sr. trained in the barracks in Orange County, Indiana. The US had to organize an army hastily, and those barracks – barracks – constituted a kind of military academies.
Later, some of them served as a prison for prisoners of war (German survivors of the U-Boat shipwrecks, for example), who, while they remained prisoners, worked on the construction of roads and other infrastructure. In History of the Use of Prisoners of War by the US Army, George G. Lewis and John Mewha state that this solution was chosen after considering returning them to neutral countries in the conflict.
Samuel B. Bird, great-grandfather of Larry Bird, was one of the lucky ones in the saga, since in his life he did not participate in any conflict. He was born in March 1865, as the American Civil War was coming to an end; a contest that his father, Samuel Bird (the basketball player's great-great-grandfather) experienced from the beginning.
Samuel (1817-1893), born in Tennessee, moved to Indiana in the mid-1830s. When the Civil War broke out, Indiana joined the Union unwaveringly and, due to its geographical position, did not have major war fronts. Samuel Bird, however, went to look for them.
In December 1861, already 44 years old and with three daughters, he registered as a volunteer in Valeene, Indiana, and was included in Company F of the 59th Indiana State Infantry Army. An army that, incorporated with other unionists from the southern United States, developed its activity in Tennessee, precisely, Mississippi, Missouri and North Carolina.
In the states of the North/South border, the fratricidal war led to the creation of two armies, the Unionist and the Confederate, with the former largely outnumbered. States like Indiana, far from the front lines, were ideal for supplying men to those resisting on the front lines of combat.
After participating, and surviving, in different battles, some as relevant as Champion Hill (decisive defeat of the Confederates), Samuel Bird re-enlisted as a war veteran in January 1864. His Army, the 59th Indiana, joined again the conflict, participating in the siege of Savannah (Georgia) and in the Carolinas campaign. The 59th Indiana besieged Raleigh and was at Bennet Place, the place where Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston surrendered his troops to William T. Sherman, ending the campaign in the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida and, de facto, to the civil war itself.
The Anglo-American War, fought half a century earlier (1812-1815), did not affect the Bird saga. One of the documents collected in the US National Archives from the War of 1812 mentions Samuel's father (and Larry Bird's great-great-grandfather), Joseph Bird, as a “farmer” and defines him as a “respectable and harmless young man.” .
This was not the case with his father-in-law. Joseph Bird (1789-1860) married Sally Newberry. Her father, Alexander Newberry (1739-1799?), was an Irishman born in Ballyhaise who emigrated to the United States in the late 1760s. Established in North Carolina, the beginning of the War of Independence led him to take up arms and join the Rowan County Regiment, a militia that was organized for the Anglo-Cherokee War of 1758 and which took up arms again in 1775, already as an official militia of the patriots (as those who fought for independence were called).
As a war veteran, the new country granted Newberry 20 acres of land in Greene County (then in the extinct state of Franklin, now in Tennessee) and recognized him in 1784 a debt of eight pounds and ten shillings for the help given to the Army. on July 4, 1781, as recorded in the National Archives.
The Birds' war story, however, does not end with Joseph Bird or Alexander Newberry. Because Joseph was the grandson of Colonel William Byrd III, a Virginian of English origin and owner of a slave plantation of almost 180,000 acres, which ended in ruin due to his love of gambling and lack of skill in managing his business.
From his second marriage to Elizabeth Carter, John Carter Bird (1750-1830) was born, Joseph's father. According to the Virginia State Encyclopedia, Elizabeth died at just 26 years old, with suicide the most likely cause.
Byrd, however, complied with the Army from high ranks. He participated in the war against the Cherokees (the same one that involved the Rowan County regiment) and, with the rank of commander, he commanded the 1st Virginia Regiment, succeeding none other than George Washington, with the that shared another space: the House of the Burgesses, seat of government of colonial Virginia. Despite his military prestige and his political influence, once retired from the Army, William Byrd maintained a high pace of life not at all in line with his income.
Colonel Byrd married for the third time (one of the children of his third marriage would be a judge on the Ohio State Supreme Court, nominated by Thomas Jefferson) and, at the beginning of the American Revolution, in July 1775, he offered his services to the British King George III, hoping to regain his name and fortune. It didn't work, so in December of the same year he applied as commander of the 3rd Virginia Regiment, which would fight for American independence.
In 1777, ruined and without hope, he took his own life. As would happen, almost two hundred years later, his descendant Joe Bird, father of Larry, the basketball player who has the history of US war in his blood.
