Knowing the later chapters of John Tinsley’s life, it seems only appropriate that his first movie was a Buck Rogers space adventure.

Given the bare-foot poverty of his youth, it is hard to imagine that Tinsley would one day work for NASA, sending astronauts into orbit and to the moon. He didn’t see this first movie until he was 13. In 1937, though only 30-some years away, a moon shot seemed like something that could only be found in a movie of the fantastic like Buck Rogers of the 25th Century.

With John Tinsley’s early education nearing its end, a profession literally involving rocket science seemed as impossible as Buck Rogers soaring into the future.

But John Tinsley was set on a path that would see his future soar.

“Coming up, I was deep in the valley,” he says. “Coming out, I’m on top of the mountain.”

RAISED IN POVERTY

He came into the world on July 23, 1924. The son of Edward Carroll Tinsley and Minnie Fredonia Coram Tinsley, John was literally born in a log cabin in Cotton, Ga. He was one of five children. Soon, he would be raised in poverty.

“When I was a baby still in diapers, my dad and my oldest brother (Theo, 18) died in the same year,” John Tinsley says.

Times were tough with the family’s two oldest males having passed. John recalls never having shoes as a child. He attended school bare foot. He recalls hunger and lean times.

John was 9 years old when his mother remarried. Times would no longer be as lean, but life became more difficult for John.

His step-father did not care for young John. He was merciless in his criticism and expectations of John. The step-father constantly picked on him.

At the age of 15, John washed his hands of his family and school. John Tinsley left home.

He moved to Panama City, Fla. He found a job in the Ritz Theatre. Two years later, he received word that his mother had divorced the abusive step-father. John returned to Cairo, Ga., to support his mother and an older, handicapped sister, Essie Mae.

He wouldn’t be there long. On March 7, 1943, a few months before his 19th birthday, the Army drafted him. John Tinsley was off to World War II.



JOHN TINSLEY’S WAR

The Army trained John Tinsley in special guerrilla warfare. From Fort McPherson, Ga., he traveled west to San Francisco Bay to Hawaii. From there, by ship, Tinsley made his way to India. There, he boarded a British troop ship and continued to Burma.

John Tinsley is a World War II veteran who does not like talking about his experiences in the war.

He does tell one anecdote of Burma with a smile. “The mosquitoes were so big they turned my dog tags over to read my blood type before biting me.” The smile lingers a few seconds then fades before John Tinsley adds, “Burma was hell.”

He was wounded in late 1943. Shells and ammo damaged his hearing. He suffered severe concussions and physical trauma from Japanese mortars. He contracted malaria in the jungle and suffered the effects of mustard gas.

He found himself in an American military hospital in Karachi, which is now part of Pakistan but was then still part of India. Though raised in a church-going family, Tinsley accepted Jesus as his savior in this faraway hospital.

He returned to duty with the Quartermaster Corps, loading planes in India to support the U.S. effort with allies in China. His hearing was too damaged. He could not perform his duties. He returned to the hospital. The Army sent him home on a transport that was almost as slow as his recovery, but what a journey. Tinsley stopped in Cairo and Casablanca, and, on Dec. 31, 1944, he arrived in Miami, Fla., just in time to watch the Orange Bowl. He boarded a C-47 hospital plane and flew to a veterans hospital in Santa Barbara, Calif., where he learned lip reading and underwent speech therapy.

He was asked to speak to a group about the hospital’s programs. Tinsley loved this speaking engagement. From this experience, he would speak to more groups. Now, in his 80s, Tinsley still enjoys public speaking.



INTERLUDE I

In India, Tinsley met a motherly nurse, whom he recalls as Captain Jackson. She helped him early in his recovery in India, and she was important in molding his accepting the Lord there.

Months later, halfway around the world, arriving at another hospital in California, he found Captain Jackson there, too. She was instrumental in preparing his return to the world after the hospitals and after the war. That and preparing his return to a most unexpected of places: School.



BACK TO SCHOOL

“I quit school in the eighth grade,” Tinsley says. “I faced discrimination in school, being poor and bare-footed. I didn’t get my first pair of shoes until I was 11.”

After the war, Tinsley found himself back in school. He was a 20-something-year-old veteran who had been on his own or the head of his family since the age of 15. As an adult, Tinsley found himself in class with a bunch of 15-year-olds.

Tinsley had been discharged from the military on April 12, 1945, the same day President Franklin D. Roosevelt died. As a disabled veteran, he enrolled in Norman Park High School. School officials assigned Tinsley to a ninth-grade class. Following high school, he attended Southern Business University in Atlanta.

He came to Valdosta because he had a brother, Bernard, living here, working in a movie theatre. John went to work in a cigar factory. He would meet his future wife in this factory.

Mary Alice Weldon worked upstairs but walked to lunch through the area where Tinsley worked. A looker, she caught his eye every time she walked by. She wouldn’t give him the time of day.

“I tried flirting, but she paid no attention to me,” he says.

New in town, he mentioned to a co-worker: “I’m a young buck, trying to meet me a girlfriend.” The co-worker asked if he had anyone in mind. Tinsley mentioned the girl from upstairs. The co-worker asked if he meant Mary Alice? Tinsley said, he reckoned he did. A short time later, the co-worker approached Tinsley, saying Mary Alice would go out with him. He gave Tinsley a date and time as well as Mary Alice’s address.