SOUTH FLORIDA – One of the most revered federal holidays in the United States, Memorial Day honors persons who died while serving the country’s military. John McHugh never went into battle, but he certainly contributed to the war effort.
Although officially launched on August 5 (his birthday) last year, ‘The Forgotten Reaper’s Florida launch will be on June 9 at West Regional Library in Plantation. McHugh, who lives in Fort Pierce, reflects on his time as part of a Caribbean contingent that reaped the onion fields of Elba, a village in upstate New York.
Through notes from his meticulously-kept diary and stories from local newspapers, McHugh gives readers detailed insight into his Elba adventure. He and his Caribbean colleagues went there to compensate for the shortage in American labor caused by the war which the US entered in late 1941.
103-year old Jamaican Author John McHugh
“My brother helped with editing the book and fact-checking to fill in the gaps for Daddy to see that everything was there. He connected with the Historical Society of Elba and the town where Daddy worked at a gypsum plant after working for the onion farm,” Emily McHugh, his daughter, told South Florida Caribbean News. “They provided articles from their local newspapers at the time about the labor shortage, and how they needed help and they also published an article about Jamaicans arriving and saving their crops.”
John McHugh is from St. Ann’s Bay in St. Ann parish, northern Jamaica. A printer by trade, he and three of his friends from that seaside region made the trip to Elba, leaving from Kingston by ship to Cuba, then Virginia. From there, he traveled by train to upstate New York.
McHugh left the US in September, 1945 and returned to Jamaica. In 1956, he and his family moved to the United Kingdom where he lived and worked as a printer for 13 years, before migrating to East Orange in New Jersey.
