Never Say Die

Corporal Jim Newman, home from the war, had dinner in bed. He had chicken & gravy, creamed potatoes, black-eyed peas, tomatoes, buttered biscuits and iced tea. He ate hungrily, flashing appreciative grins at his mother. Looking down at him, at the skinny outline of his body under the sheet, she thought: "The first meal I've cooked Jimmy in five years. Will it be his last supper?" But she smiled back.

Jim Newman had joined the army at 18, served two years at Fort Sill. Okla.; he went to Manila in 1940. Captured on Bataan, he had shrunk from 145 pounds to 92 by the time Cabanatuan was liberated in January. Army doctors fought to save what the Japanese had left of Jim Newman--one of the saddest cases they had seen of starvation, beri beri, tuberculosis. Other survivors of the prison camps gained weight and strength; Jim Newman did not. A fortnight ago the doctors gave up. flew him home to Fort Worth. He would die, they said, in a day or so.

But this week Corporal Newman still lived, still grinned faintly as he opened hundreds of letters and telegrams from newspaper readers all over the U.S. Into his flower-banked room walked a ray of hope, one Connie Nolan of Coleman. Tex. Nolan had gone down to 87 pounds at Cabanatuan, was back to 143, was sure Jim Newman could do it too.

Corporal Newman thumbed his nose at death, took another vitamin pill, some more of his mother's biscuits.

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