Ted Fulps
United States Army Medical Corps
Ted Fulps was born in Oklahoma, and raised on a farm in Missouri. At the age of
eighteen he took off with his guitar, saying, "Milking cows was not for me". Ted
worked the radio stations in the mid-west, playing his guitar and working as a
vocalist. He once worked at the same radio station as Roy Rogers, and was introduced
to him by Walter Cronkite.
Ted enlisted in the Airforce as a mechanic in 1942, but had a reaction to his typhoid shot and so missed out on the Airforce. He joined a group of GI's and went off to become part of the 52 nd general hospital.
"We sailed aboard the luxury liner The Queen Elizabeth" on 6 th January 1943, believing we were going to North Africa. After being chased for part of the way across the North Atlantic by a German Submarine we landed in Scotland on 12 th January.
Ted Fulps pictured at 52 nd general hospital, Wolverley.
Amongst Ted's jobs at Wolverley were to help keep the PX shelves stacked up and serve the GI's, many of whom were patients and came wrapped just in blankets, they had no clothes. "I served two years and a few months at Wolverley, so I had time to get used to the way of life". Ted has many fond memories of those days at Wolverley.
"I sang songs and played my guitar just before "Bob Hope and Francis Langford" appeared on stage to entertain the patients and staff at the 52 nd ". "I played a lot of music with the RAPCATS jazz band and my old Buddy ‘Jack Mundell’ at that time".
"I met my wife in a pub in Kidderminster, she was serving with the ATS at Pike Mills in Kidderminster with the Royal Army Pay Corps". "She had arrived in Kidderminster around the same time that I had arrived in Wolverley. I would throw my Bicycle over the wall in the south west corner of the camp and head off to see her before returning by the same route".
"We were married in Erdington, Birmingham, in October 1944, where Mary had grown up with her parents before joining the ATS". "I returned to the states, Mary joined me shortly afterwards where we have been together for 58 years, and I have continued to make music".
