B0737M5NDQ

by Matthew Rozell

  As soon as we could, we found jobs. Three of us weeded Mr. Bushbaum's yard and garden at fifteen cents each for the full Saturday morning. Ten cents got us into the afternoon movie, leaving five cents for candy. ‘Vaht robbers!’ he roared one day when we gathered the courage to ask him for twenty cents a morning. We did not pursue it further; his was a buyer's market.

  At age fifteen, Bob Burns, McGoosey, Chuck, and I obtained our working papers and began caddying at the Glens Falls County Club. After two years we worked our way up to the highest ‘Double A’ status. That qualified us to advise golfers on which clubs to use, and to carry a heavy golf bag on each shoulder for thirty six to forty five holes on a good day. If we were polite, quickly handed out the proper clubs, and complimented our clients for their solid shots, we could expect a modest tip. As we trudged up and down the hills on those summer days the voices of the Andrews Sisters carried across a lake from a pavilion loudspeaker. They sang ‘I'll Be With You in Apple Blossom Time' ‘and ‘Bei Mir Bist Du Schon,’ and my heart sang with them. We were young, healthy, outdoors, and earning money.

  Between rounds, we sometimes walked through the pine woods to the tenth hole, where we hid in the low hanging branches, over a hill from the tee. As the golfers' drives came bounding over we dashed out, picked up the balls, and threw them far down the fairway. Back in the trees, we laughed as the resplendent bankers, doctors, dentists, and lawyers marveled at how far they had driven their balls. What wonderful clubhouse stories must have followed!

  My friends and I were caught up in building model airplanes and in identifying aircraft of all kinds. We knew the name of virtually every plane in the world, ranging from tiny American Gee Bee racers to giant Italian Caproni bombers. Balsawood kits could be purchased for fifteen to twenty five cents. The models were built from scratch—ribs cut out with a razor blade; stringers glued into notches with airplane cement to form the fuselage; wings and tails assembled, covered with tissue paper, and attached. A World War I Spad, a Sopwith Camel and a tri-winged Fokker took shape on my table, as did a Piper Cub, a Seversky P-35 and a Gloster Gauntlet biplane. The Gauntlet cost a dollar, my most expensive purchase. Tears came to my eyes the night an entire wing burst into flame when I held it too close to the stove to make the doped skin tight enough to impress my friends. It took hours to reconstruct from surplus balsa.

  Our school teachers were dedicated women, mostly unmarried, who demanded that we diagram the structure of sentences properly, recite the multiplication tables without a slip, and remember the outcome of the Peloponnesian Wars. Their right to grab an unruly boy by the ear and hustle him out the door and into the principal's office was unquestioned.

  I was filled with the ambivalence of youth—quite confident at times, but insecure and uncertain at others; sometimes terribly shy, but pleased by attention; gregarious, yet often preferring to be alone; able to lead, but quite willing to follow.

  I dreaded the fist fights that broke out after school or during our sandlot games. Honor required a boy to fight when challenged, so I often found myself taking a longer route home from school to avoid one thug in particular whose major reason for attending class seemed to be to pick fights afterward. There was a chip on his shoulder at all times. It actually came to that. He would place a bit of wood there and dare another boy to knock it off. Of course the other had to; great loss of face would result if he did not. Then the scuffle would begin, starting with wildly swung fists and invariably ending up with the two grappling in the dirt or snow—one, if not both, hoping all the while that they would be broken apart by their friends or a teacher or a mother who happened on the scene.

  Although our gang engaged in pranks, stole apples from trees, and later found ways to sneak into the Strand Theater without paying, we were among the last truly innocent generations in America. We did not drink or smoke, or gamble. Drugs were unheard of, except for the rumor that certain big band drummers used something called marijuana. We did not swear in front of girls or insult them in any way. When an opponent took his foul shots in a basketball game, fans and players alike remained silent and unmoving so as not to disturb him. We fought fair. Two boys never picked on one, nor one boy on a smaller opponent. Kicking was not tolerated. Anyone caught carrying a knife was subject to permanent banishment. Firearms were totally out of the question.

  *

  Over the years our attention shifted from bicycles and ice skates to how we combed our hair, to our clothing, to shaving—and to girls. We watched the movie actors shave—men lathering, screwing up their faces, tugging at a cheek with one hand as the other drew a broad razor through the thick, white cream. We timidly roller-skated with girls to organ music at Brennan's Roller Rink on the Lake George highway, hands sweating and minds groping for a few words of conversation. There were later games of ‘Spin the Bottle’ and ‘Post Office:’ with chaste kisses at stake. We knew next to nothing about sex, even though some of our high school classmates told us they were experts on the subject. Our parents avoided the topic and our schools taught us little. The movies were discreet, songs were discreet, and magazines were discreet. The most salacious material available to us was the silk stocking ads in the Montgomery Ward catalog. Hand holding and kissing were allowed after several dates with a girl, but a boy did not try to go ‘too far’ if he really cared for her. Parental wrath, peer disapproval among the girls and the fear of pregnancy hung over our era.

  Sports brought many rewards. I was not big, but could run fast and far. During my high school years I ran the mile in track, played guard on the basketball team and second base on the baseball team. The eleven starters on our football squad played the full game, on offense and defense. We received only rudimentary football training, had a slender playbook, and did not confuse our opponents with a sophisticated offense. The team photo shows uniforms that did not match perfectly and helmets without face masks. Nevertheless, we were a good, solid team, and went undefeated in my senior year. We beat the fearsome Golden Horde of Granville in a War Bond benefit playoff game before a monster crowd of 2, 100 at Derby Field—with most of the fans standing along the sidelines. ‘Tex’ Bailey, the owner of a village saloon, bet an astronomical fifty dollars on the game, an unheard of amount in those days. He happily pummeled us all the way back to our tiny, cement block locker room.

  The summer before that final season, Bob Burns and I went to work at the Imperial Paint and Paper Company in Glens Falls. We were assigned to the yard gang, where we unloaded by hand railroad box cars filled with knee high stacks of cement bags that weighed one hundred pounds apiece. We stood on a high platform in the oppressive heat and fumes, shoveling heavy, tinsel like shreds of lead into wide vats of acid as the metal dropped relentlessly from a conveyor belt onto a steel plate. We pushed carts of crushed ice up to the paint mixers—men whose hats, overalls, shoes, faces, and hands were red, green, blue or yellow. They must have sweated primary colors. It was at the Imperial factory that the name of Eleanor Baker, daughter of our town pharmacist, first came to my attention. A fellow worker from Glens Falls said he had noticed her and thought she was ‘cute.’ Had I ever thought of dating her? I had not. Her family was high on the Hudson Falls social ladder, while ours was out of sight on the rungs below. But the seed was planted. Eleanor sat in front of me in history class that fall and I finally worked up the courage to ask her to go on a hayride. She accepted and other dates followed. She was pretty, poised, intelligent, and totally unpretentious. Freshly washed, light brown hair fell to her shoulders. She wore soft, baggy sweaters, a pearl necklace, pleated plaid skirts, bobby sox, and saddle shoes. I was hooked. The day after our first date, I dramatically announced to my teammates that I had found the girl I would marry someday.

  Life was good that fall of 1943, except for one thing—the guns of war had been rumbling over the horizon during most of my boyhood, and the sound was coming closer.

  chapter Three

  ‘Ye Shall Hear of Wars’

  The war had come to our s
mall town. Like all of those who would soon find themselves in the thick of it, Andy Doty was forming his youthful impressions of a world careening out of control, and finding his place in the swirling storm.

  Andy Doty

  Hardly a week passed during the 1930s when our school Weekly Reader, the local newspaper the Glens Falls Post-Star, or LIFE Magazine failed to carry news of some far-off conflict. Aggressors were on the march and little stood in their way.

  Japan invaded Manchuria and China, Italy subdued Ethiopia, and the Spanish Civil War ran its cruel course. We were shocked by a LIFE photograph of a naked Chinese baby crying in bombed ruins, by the Japanese rape of Nanking, and by photos of Nipponese soldiers bayoneting and beheading bound Chinese prisoners. An Italian pilot—the son of Dictator Benito Mussolini—casually observed that when his bombs exploded among Ethiopian natives, a ‘beautiful’ pattern resulted that reminded him of the petals of a flower slowly unfolding.

  Hitler came to power in Germany and began building one of the most formidable military machines in history. He annexed Austria in 1938 then demanded that Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland be turned over to Germany—even a 13-year old boy could see war coming to Europe. The major nations made no secret of the fact they had tested their weapons in Spain's Civil War, and Hitler's appetite seemed insatiable,

  ‘Ye shall hear of wars, and rumors of war,’ my father told us fatalistically, quoting from the Bible. Although Matthew went on to say, ‘see that ye not be troubled—for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet’, I understood Dad to mean that war was an inevitable fact of life. I could see no reason to disagree.

  Later in 1938, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain of England returned from a meeting with Hitler in Munich, smiling as he waved a signed agreement he declared had won ‘peace in our time.’ Chamberlain had given Hitler the land he wanted, over the protests of the Czechs. Half a year later, the German dictator scrapped the agreement and occupied the rest of the country.

  World War II broke out on September 1, 1939, after Germany invaded Poland. England and France, finally realizing that appeasement had failed, declared war. Poland fell in a matter of days, the victim of swift panzer tank divisions and Stuka dive bombers.

  A long lull—the so-called ‘Phony War’—followed, during which little fighting occurred. America debated whether or not to take sides. My youthful sympathies clearly lay with England and France, but the memory of World War I was still fresh in the minds of older, wiser men and women. ‘What did we get from the first world war but death, debt, and George M. Cohan?’, the isolationists asked; their cries of ‘Never Again’ and ‘America First’ held strong appeal. Congress passed yet another Neutrality Act as public opinion polls in December of 1939 showed more than two-thirds of the people opposed involvement in Europe's problems.

  An amazing reversal took place during the next six months. German troops occupied Denmark and Norway in April of 1940, paused, and then swept across the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and northern France in a devastating ‘blitzkrieg’ attack. After only ten days of battle, Hitler stood on the shores of the English Channel. Newsreels showed long lines of British troops at Dunkirk, farther to the west, waiting to be evacuated by a flotilla of every English naval or pleasure craft that could cross over to France. England was standing alone, and a surge of pro-British feelings resulted. A survey that May revealed a dramatic shift in public opinion—more than two-thirds of Americans favored active aid to England.

  Shortly afterward, Congress passed the Selective Service Act of 1940, and the nation began arming itself. In the next two years. The Army grew from a force of 190,000 men to 1.5 million. Isolationism had been a persuasive force, but it gave way to America's instinctive support of freedom and democracy. The feeling slowly grew that England had to be saved and Hitler defeated.

  Photos began to appear of raw recruits at the Plattsburgh Army base practicing with wooden cannon, or with trucks bearing signs that read ‘Tank.’ Real equipment was not yet available in any great number. In Glens Falls, a hotel was taken over to house fledgling aviation cadets. We saw the uniformed young men marching to their preflight classes on the way to becoming pilots, navigators, and bombardiers.

  The ‘Battle of Britain’ swirled over England that summer. To pave the way for an invasion of the island, Hitler sent out his bombers to hit military targets and destroy the Royal Air Force. After suffering heavy losses—and not knowing that his Luftwaffe had worn the RAF down to its last reserve squadrons—he changed tactics and ordered the blanket nighttime bombing of London and other cities. That shift saved the RAF. London could absorb the terrible punishment, but the RAF could not have fought much longer.

  ‘This... is London!’ was Edward R. Murrow's dramatic introduction of his nightly radio broadcasts. We listened as Londoners huddled in deep underground shelters, bombs erupted, and smoke shrouded St. Paul's Cathedral. But Hitler had missed his chance to invade England after Dunkirk, and failed to subdue England through bombing. He called off the invasion, and turned his armies and air force south and east in 1941 to attack North Africa, Yugoslavia, Greece, Crete, and the Soviet Union. Britain drew a sigh of relief.

  *

  A Sunday Afternoon

  One Sunday afternoon in December of 1941, Chuck and I came into the house to find our parents close to the radio.

  ‘The losses have been heavy,’ the announcer was saying.

  ‘What's happening?’ we asked.

  ‘The Japs have bombed Pearl Harbor,’ my father said quietly. ‘They sneaked in this morning. We're going to have to fight them.’

  Living in the east and watching Europe, we had not been following events in the Pacific as closely. The United States opposed Japan's expansion into Southeast Asia and had embargoed steel and scrap metal shipments to them. Japan struck back while it was strong and America weak. What made the attack even more despicable in our minds was the fact that Japanese emissaries were in Washington to negotiate peace at the same time their aircraft carriers were slipping across the Pacific toward Hawaii.

  The grim reports continued throughout that day and the next. Eight battleships and three cruisers had been sunk or damaged, 188 airplanes were destroyed, and over 2,400 men had been killed. The next day, newspapers showed sunken battleships at their berths, damaged buildings, and the smoldering ruins of airplanes on the ground. It had been a devastating blow. December 7, 1941, branded by President Roosevelt as ‘the day that will live in infamy,’ propelled the United States into war against both Japan and its allies, Germany and Italy.

  I did not feel great concern at the time. Hawaii was far away and we had faith in our nation's ability to recover. A commonly held view was that the Japanese were poor fighters, possessed inferior equipment, and could be ‘licked’ in a matter of months. We took satisfaction in a popular story that the Japanese once faithfully copied the stolen design of an English battleship, not realizing that the plans had deliberately been altered to make the ship top heavy. When the ship was launched it promptly turned turtle, and floated bottom up in the water—or so the story went.

  The years pass by slowly at age sixteen, so it seemed possible that the war could be fought and won before Chuck and I reached draft age in October of 1943. If not, we would serve without question. We had to do our duty—the nation must be defended, and Pearl Harbor had to be avenged.

  We drifted slowly toward the vortex as the months passed. Red, white and blue service flags began to appear in the front windows of village homes, a star for each son in uniform. In time the village was drained of virtually all of its able-bodied men between the ages of 18 and 36. Everyone was expected to take up arms, and those who did not—the physically unfit ‘ 4-Fs’ and those in essential occupations—were looked down upon. ‘Draft dodger’ and ‘slacker’ were bitter epithets. ‘Why aren't you in uniform?’ older adults demanded of young men who appeared to be of service age. The question could have stemmed from patriotism or jealousy, or both. ‘They're either
too young or too old,’ actress Bette Davis sang in a movie, referring to those who remained behind: ‘They're either too gray or too grassy green—What's good is in the Army, what's left can never harm me.’

  McGoosey Walsh quit school to join the Navy, where he became a radio operator on a submarine in the Pacific. Bob Burns' brother Ed entered an officer's training program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and became a naval gunnery officer. My older cousin, a plumber by trade, was assigned to duty as a mechanic in a P-47 fighter squadron. Eleanor Baker's brother entered an Army Officer Candidate School. Our school’s music director was stationed in Washington, where he led a Marine Corps band and returned home often on leave, resplendent in full dress uniform.

  In time, gold stars that symbolized lost sons, husbands and fathers began to replace service flags in the windows. Chuck Eagle, the center on our football team, worked at night behind the soda fountain at Moriarty's Drug Store. The store also housed a Western Union office. When telegrams from the War Department arrived, it was Chuck's duty to deliver them to village homes after work. Mothers and wives fearfully opened their doors to him those nights. ‘The Secretary of War desires me to express his deep regret,’ the telegrams began, ‘that your son or husband has been killed or wounded, or is missing in action.’ The telegrams seemed to arrive far too often. Chuck hated the task. A total of 126 young men from our sparsely populated county were killed in the war, two dozen of them from our little town. Untold numbers were wounded or captured.

  The wounded began drifting back. Pat DuPell, the big, strong, red haired brother of one of our gang members, came home from the Navy badly scarred, nearly blind, and breathing through an opening in his throat. A depot of depth charges had exploded next to his barracks at an eastern naval base. We were shocked by his appearance. Word came back that Chuck LaFountain, a bright young classmate who had entered the Army Air Force before his graduation, had been killed in the crash of an experimental aircraft called a flying wing.