BRAGGS — Fran Barker and Pat Isbell heard the story their entire lives: Homer Bell spent several years of his childhood in Braggs, attending Braggs’ school. He left this area with his mother and sister for Germany, his mother's homeland.

In 1944, several people reported seeing a teenage Homer Bell among a busload of German prisoners of war who were being held at Camp Gruber.

Homer Bell, the boy who had lived at Braggs, was a traitor to his country and a member of Hitler's Army. At least, that was the story.

And that's all it is — a story — Bell's family says.

Contrary to the legend, Bell was an American patriot, having entered the Marine Corps in 1946 and retiring from the U.S. Army in 1966, his family said.

“He would be turning over in his grave if he heard someone say it (the story),” said his widow, Mary Ann Bell, of El Paso, Texas. “It's not possible.”

Neither she nor Homer Bell’s sister, Eleanor Kathryn Bell Steele of Phoenix, Ariz., had ever heard the POW story until contacted a few months ago by Barker.

“He wasn’t no POW thing in Braggs like they said he was,” Steele said.

Homer Bell was in Germany, but that was during his U.S. military career, she said. While stationed there, he did go to his mother’s hometown area and was unsuccessful in finding any of her family members.

The story about Bell going to Germany and coming back to Braggs as a POW was published in the Muskogee and Oklahoma City newspapers in 1944.

The stories stated the family had gone to Germany in 1937 when they left Muskogee.

Not true, Steele said.

She doesn’t recall everywhere they lived after they left Muskogee. However, records from Roswell City Schools in New Mexico show Bell was enrolled in the Missouri Avenue School from Jan. 6, 1940, to Jan. 20, 1941. A notation on the report states the family left town on that date. Bell also was enrolled for a time at Roswell’s East Side School in 1941.

Steele said her family never went to Germany when they left Muskogee. She recalls that they were living in Roswell when Homer Bell grew tired of picking cotton with the family and enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps.

Bell’s U.S. military history was uncovered by a Washington Post researcher, who found that Bell had died in El Paso in January 2008.

He is buried in the Fort Bliss, Texas, National Cemetery at Fort Bliss, Texas. The cemetery record shows he retired as a staff sergeant, having served in World War II, Korea and Vietnam.

His name is listed on the Braggs veterans’ memorial monument — third from the top in the far left column of names.

The Washington Post was researching a possible story on Bell’s German POW background at the suggestion of Barker, who now lives in Winchester, Va. She and her sister are compiling Volume 6 of the Braggs history book series.

They had received permission from the Phoenix to republish an item about Bell from a history blog written by Wally Waits.

Waits repeated the story as reported in the Aug. 31, 1944, edition of the Muskogee County Weekly Phoenix. He had added to that account a recollection by Muskogee resident Karalee Smith Cason, who said her parents always told her they saw Bell on a POW bus, stopped at a traffic light in Muskogee.

Cason said she was only a few months old at the time, but she remembers hearing her parents say they were walking along Okmulgee Avenue near Spaulding Park when one of the prisoners yelled at them from an open window on the bus. She said until Waits found the story in the 1944 Phoenix, she didn’t remember the man’s name, only that it started with an “H.”

The Phoenix story said that Braggs residents saw Bell among the POWs.

A similar story appeared in the Sept. 2, 1944, edition of the Daily Oklahoman. That story quoted an unidentified Braggs resident, saying he passed a German POW work crew, and one of the men said to him:

“You won’t remember me, but I’m Lee Bell’s boy,” he reportedly said.

A second unidentified man was quoted in the Oklahoman as having said he saw a prisoner who identified himself as Homer Bell and said he had gone to school in the nearby red brick school, not the stone one that existed in 1944.

The Oklahoman story stated that a check of POW records at Camp Gruber showed no Homer Bell listed.

There also is no prisoner named Homer Bell listed on the roster of Camp Gruber prisoners that Barker obtained from the National Archives, she said.

According to the two news stories, the Bell family moved to the Braggs area sometime in the 1930s.

Lee and Christine Bell met and married while he was serving in Germany during World War I, and Christine Bell worked as a waitress at W.M. “Shorty” Matthews’ cafe on South Main.

The newspaper accounts of the day quote Matthews as saying he last saw Lee Bell when he dropped off a truck at Matthews’ cafe and told his wife goodbye. He said he was going to work with a railroad gang.

“I never saw him after (t)hat, and I think she never did,” Matthews is quoted.

Steele said her father remained in the family picture for some time.

The Roswell school records state that Homer Bell’s father was a painter.

The 1944 Phoenix story states that Christine Bell came in to the restaurant one day with a letter notifying her that her parents had died in Germany, leaving their estate to Christine and two brothers. She didn’t have the money to get to Germany, and Matthews advised her to write to her brothers and ask for tickets.

“After a while, the tickets and money came,” the story states. “Presumably, they got to Germany, and Homer, whether by desire or compulsion, became a soldier in the German army. At least that’s the way Braggs people reason it.”

Their reasoning is wrong, Steele said.

“My mother never got to go back to Germany,” she said.

Steele remembers having attended school in Braggs and later at Sacred Heart Catholic School in Muskogee.

She remembers she and her brother lived with their mother in a small downtown hotel room and that her mother earned 50 cents per day working for Matthews.

“I remember he did buy us things,” Steele said when asked about the newspaper accounts that Matthews had once bought her a dress.

“I know one thing he did was he gave us food,” Steele said. “We were so poor.”

Mary Ann Bell said she didn’t meet Homer “Bill” Bell until after he retired from the U.S. Army. He was working for the U.S. Department of Justice when she met him. He took a second retirement from that job. They were married for 28 years.

In their years of marriage, he never mentioned having been at Camp Gruber. He told her about having looked for his mother’s family while stationed in Germany with the U.S. military, and he told her about his former marriages.

“Bill was easy-going, slow — everybody talked about what a slowpoke he was. He was just a slow, easy-going guy,” she said. “He never got riled up about anything. He was a wonderful husband to me.”



About Gruber’s POW camp



Camp Gruber’s Prisoner of War Camp was located one mile north on the west side of Oklahoma 10, across the road from Camp Gruber. It opened May 29, 1943, as a base camp for branch camps in Bixby, Okmulgee, Haskell, Morris, Okemah, Porter and Weleetka. It had a capacity of 5,750. During its time, it confined up to 4,702 prisoners. It was the last POW camp in Oklahoma, closing May 1, 1946. There were eight escapes and four deaths reported.

Source: okielegacy.org/WWIIpowcamps.