No Ordinary Joes

by Larry Colton

  Arthur and his wife, Florence, scratched out a living on a 140-acre farm on the outskirts of Sidney, New York, with a couple of workhorses, a milking cow, pigs, chickens, vegetables, and an orchard with apples and pears. To help make ends meet, Arthur, an eighth-grade dropout, took an occasional job in town. Florence, an Irish redhead, worked from dawn to dusk, fixing meals, washing clothes, milking the cow, and feeding the pigs. Being pregnant, which she always seemed to be, didn’t slow her down. After each birth, she’d be back at work the next day, picking potatoes and cleaning the barn.

  Like her husband, she’d dropped out of school before the ninth grade, but she loved the written word and she read to her children every night, including the poetry of Longfellow. She sometimes wrote poetry herself but rarely shared it. Arthur thought it a waste of her time. She also read the Bible a lot, especially after two babies were stillborn. She found comfort in the Scriptures.

  As the Depression spread across the country, the Vervalins were unable to sell their milk, buy feed for their animals, or keep up with their taxes. They lost the farm in 1930 and moved fifty miles west to Binghamton. Some of their friends and neighbors suspected the move had as much to do with what had happened to Beulah that muggy day in June 1928 as it did with the Depression. Arthur couldn’t stand looking at the river anymore. He never talked about it, but the kids knew that down deep he blamed his wife. If she’d heeded his warning, Beulah would still be alive.

  After the move to Binghamton, Chuck missed the farm, especially the horses and riding on the tractor. There were now ten kids in the family, and times were tough. Even so, Chuck was energetic and quick to adjust. His mom signed him up for Boy Scouts, and he set his sights on making it all the way to Eagle Scout, earning half the necessary badges in his first two years. His other passion was baseball, and he and his friends cleared a makeshift diamond out of a farmer’s pasture. They had only one ball and bat among them, the bat held together by screws and electrical tape.

  He was also popular, in large part because he always took the dare. When a pal challenged him to shoot a rubber band at the backside of his teacher, Mrs. Sabercool, he did it and got caught. The principal took the belt to him. Even when he wasn’t at fault, he was one of those kids that trouble seemed to find. If somebody threw a snowball and hit a passerby, Chuck got blamed. When a buddy threw a rock through a neighbor’s window during a game of cowboys and Indians, Chuck got the belt.

  In 1935, when Chuck was fourteen, the Vervalins moved again, this time to a tenant farm just outside of Dundee, New York, in the Finger Lakes area, population 1,000. Dundee was only five miles from Seneca Lake, where summer yacht folks in fancy slacks vacationed, but to Chuck the lake seemed as distant as New York City. The family had moved to Dundee from Binghamton when natural gas was discovered in the area and Arthur got hired to head the purification plant, making him one of the lucky ones to have a job in the depth of the Depression. But his luck was short-lived—a coworker turned him in for drinking on the job and he got fired.

  After that, Arthur worked a series of jobs for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the largest New Deal agency, which employed millions across America during the Depression to work on buildings, roads, and other projects. Sometimes he’d go off to Binghamton or Elmira for weeks or even months at a time, sending part of what little money he made back home. Chuck wasn’t up on politics, but he heard his mother give thanks many times to President Roosevelt and his New Deal.

  To Chuck, it was his mother who held the family together. Although she was usually soft-spoken and gentle, she was resolute, and sometimes showed a glimpse of a fiery Irish temperament. She never took a day off from caring for her family, even when she was sick. Chuck loved the way she read to him and his siblings, especially the westerns of Zane Grey. It provided an escape from the hard times and his father’s absences. He also appreciated the way she could stretch the little food they had, whether it was by making a big pot of soup out of milkweed or baking bread out of the buckwheat that grew on their property. She was adept at improvising, as when she brewed a home remedy for cuts from the leaves of plants that grew along the road.

  Chuck did what he could to help. He especially liked going out to hunt or fish for food. He’d learned to shoot at an early age, and had a 16-gauge shotgun to go with his .22. He’d killed a lot of different animals for dinner—squirrels, woodchucks, rabbits, and even raccoons. He scrounged for whatever jobs he could find, such as selling magazines, but many nights he went to bed without anything to eat, or at best a bowl of beans and a little cornbread the neighbors had brought over. In school he’d get so hungry he couldn’t concentrate.

  Another job he had was picking berries. The Dundee area liked to think of itself as the berry capital of the world, with thousands of acres of blackberries, raspberries, and thimbleberries, and Chuck thought of himself as one of the best pickers around. He was a wiry 5 feet 6 inches, 120 pounds, and tireless, even on the hottest, muggiest days. On good days, he made a buck, turning all his earnings over to his mom.

  Working so many jobs meant he had to quit the Boy Scouts. It was a hard decision. He loved earning his merit badges—he had thirty-four of them—but he knew he’d never make it all the way to Eagle Scout because he didn’t have the time, and he knew he could never pass the lifesaving test. He could swim, but not well enough to haul somebody to safety.

  One day, just after he’d turned fifteen, Chuck was walking home with his dog at dusk, feeling pretty proud of himself, his .22 rifle in one hand, two dead rabbits in the other. He knew his mom would make a good meal out of the rabbits, hopefully a stew. It had been a week since the family had had any meat on the table.

  Chuck walked down the quiet main street of Dundee, passing the hardware store and lunch counter where two of his sisters worked. Down a side street, he saw a commotion at a WPA work site where construction workers were digging a water line. He figured his father most likely would be there. Approaching the small crowd gathered around the WPA work site, he heard his father’s muffled voice. A friend of his father’s pointed toward a ditch, four feet deep and two feet across. Chuck moved closer, peering down into the ditch. Mounds of freshly hoed dirt were piled to the side, and down inside the ditch, covered in dirt and wedged in too tight to move, was his dad, all 300 pounds of him. From the look of it, he had been drinking, had tried to jump over the ditch, and hadn’t made it. In trying to extricate himself, he’d gotten so twisted around that it looked like it would take a major excavation effort to free him. Embarrassed, Chuck backed away from the crowd.

  At dinner that night, everyone ate rabbit. Except Arthur, who didn’t get out of the ditch until after midnight.

  The family moved again in 1936, this time into town, with the ten kids squeezed together in two small bedrooms. The house was a big black box with chipped paint, no front yard, and a rotting outhouse out back. But the house didn’t embarrass Chuck as much as his clothes did. Although none of the boys at school dressed like Ivy Leaguers, Chuck would wear the same shirt three or four days in a row, or until his mother did the laundry again. His only pair of shoes had holes in the soles, and he stuffed cardboard in them to keep his feet dry.

  He got teased about his clothes, and he fought back. Fistfighting was a popular sport with the boys in Dundee, a town with not much to offer in the way of entertainment. Chuck was smaller than most boys his age, but he had a reputation as a scrapper, somebody who didn’t go around picking fights but who wouldn’t back down.

  Chuck wasn’t much of a student. Reading came hard for him, and he’d been held back a grade when he was nine. He frequently skipped school, usually to go fishing or hunting. But he was still popular, mainly because of his sense of humor and the pranks he pulled: hoisting an outhouse up a telephone pole; setting two skunks loose in a school restroom; coaxing a cow into the school and tying its tail to the school bell; dousing so much moonshine on another kid in class that the boy smelled like the town drunk—a smell Chuck knew well. Trouble
was, he never learned the art of stealth.

  He had, however, learned the art of being generous. On Christmas Eve 1938, Chuck, now seventeen, and his sister Ynez sat at the kitchen table using newspaper and yarn to wrap their presents to the family. Like every other Christmas at the Vervalins’, this would be a lean one. But unlike the other kids in the family, Chuck and Ynez at least had presents to wrap. Ynez had saved a few dollars from her job at the library, and Chuck had squirreled away money from his paper route. He’d bought each of his sisters a small dispenser of talc and a California orange.

  Wrapping his gifts, he daydreamed, as he often did. He thought about traveling. He’d never been to New York City, let alone California, and except for the time he’d made it to Ithaca traveling with the town baseball team, fifteen miles from Dundee was the farthest he’d been from home.

  Baseball was one of his escapes. Chuck had developed into a good third baseman, lettering on the varsity his sophomore year, one of only two kids from the team to be picked to play with the older guys on the town team. It had taken him months to save up enough to buy a glove. Sometimes he’d leave the house at seven in the morning to walk to an afternoon game in the next county. He still wasn’t very big—5 feet 6 inches, 135 pounds—but he’d gotten strong from a summer job lifting seventy-pound bags of cement. He took special pride in having a good arm.

  He fantasized about getting a tryout with a pro team, but his real dream, and he thought about it every day, was to be a harness race driver, and maybe even own his own pacer or trotter. Harness racing was a popular sport in New York, and his plan for the coming summer was to travel the racing circuit and hang around the tracks and stables, maybe getting hired to help with the horses. His father, on the other hand, told him he should start thinking about joining the service when he turned eighteen.

  As he continued to wrap his gifts, his mind drifted to girls, especially one named Irene Damien. Not only was she really cute, she liked him too. They passed notes back and forth in class, flirting like crazy. But there was a problem. Her parents had forbade her to go out with him. They thought he was too unruly.

  Undeterred, he had persuaded his friend Ernie, who was pleasant and polite, to go to Irene’s house, make nice with her parents, and then escort her to the movie theater, where Chuck would be waiting. Ernie would hang around until the end of the date, then escort Irene back home, her parents never suspecting. The plan worked repeatedly, but other than a couple of harmless games of spin the bottle, Chuck never got past first base. But that was okay. The good girls of Dundee knew their boundaries, and the boys accepted them.

  On Christmas morning, all of Chuck’s sisters beamed as they opened their gifts. The last to open her gift from Chuck was Ynez. Peeling away the wrapping paper, she gasped. It was a doll he’d rescued from the doll graveyard, repainting its face and body and dressing it in a salvaged flowered cloth napkin. Ynez reached out to hug her brother. He shied away. Boys, he’d learned, weren’t supposed to show affection.

  Sitting on the hard wooden slats of the boxcar, Chuck was beginning to wonder if riding the rails across country was such a good idea. The hobo sitting across from him spit another chaw of tobacco on the floor. Chuck tried not to notice. He felt his stomach churn, not from the puddle of spit but from not having eaten in two days. The train rolled into Fort Wayne, Indiana.

  It was September 1939 and German armies had just invaded Poland. Great Britain and France had declared war. According to Chuck’s dad, America would also be in it soon. Chuck had dropped out of school after his junior year to make money. Not that he needed it to take his sweetheart Irene to the movies; she’d moved a hundred miles away. Despite letters back and forth, it might as well have been a million miles.

  Riding the rails had seemed like a good idea when he and his new buddy Preston Dumar decided to hitch a ride to Seattle. He’d met Preston while working with the trotters and pacers at a county fair in Dundee, and when Preston invited him to his home in Erie, Pennsylvania, Chuck jumped at the chance, making the trip in the horse trailer with the animals, sulkies, and hay. Soon after he got to Erie, Preston claimed there was lots of work picking apples and pears out in Washington State, so Chuck signed on for that trip, too. It sounded like a great adventure. Not only would he get to see the country, he might just be able to save up enough in a couple of years to buy a horse to race himself.

  As he’d hoped, Chuck had become known around the tracks, taking whatever odd jobs he could find. He cleaned stalls, shined the sulkies, washed the horses, bandaged their legs, and exercised them in their morning workouts. Some days he got paid 50 cents; some days he got nothing. At night he slept in the stalls with the horses. He had notions of becoming a driver, a job in which size, weight, and age were not restrictive factors. What counted was a driver’s skill and courage to guide the horse and sulky in the tight quarters of a high-speed race, and he knew he could do it. It appealed to him that some drivers were also trainers, and some even became owners. He wanted to be all three.

  As the train stopped in Fort Wayne, Chuck considered getting off and heading back to New York. Preston had failed to mention the hobos and the spit and the wind rattling through the boxcar. Or the hunger. They’d left Erie with no food and 25 cents between them.

  This wasn’t Chuck’s first extended trip from home. When he turned seventeen, he’d been hired by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the New Deal public works program providing employment and training for men in projects related to conservation and natural resources. He’d spent the winter and spring working on a crew at Watkins Glen State Park, helping to haul rocks, build a retaining wall, and trim bushes. Out of his $33 monthly paycheck, $20 went home to his mom. Having money in his pocket and a guaranteed three square meals a day suited him. He even liked the Army-style regimen. Now, the way Preston told it, he’d make even better wages picking apples, and there was some good horse racing out west, too.

  As they hopped off the train, a hobo warned them to watch out for the yard cop. It was too late. The cop had already spotted them. After a quick lecture on how stupid and dangerous it was for them to be riding the rails, he gave them a choice: they could spend two days in the dingy little jail on the yard with rats and hobos, or they could catch the next freight back east. Ten minutes later they were on a train heading east. Chuck was thrilled to be going home.

  Chuck slipped his pipe into his pocket, grabbed his tattered suitcase, and stepped off the train at the Buffalo station. He was a baby-faced eighteen and a high-school dropout. He was also freshly enlisted in the Navy and on his way to boot camp. The pipe was meant to make him look older.

  It was October 1940. President Roosevelt was running for an unprecedented third term against Republican Wendell Willkie and had just delivered on his promise of military aid to Winston Churchill, sending fifty used American destroyers, many that had served in World War I, to help replace the alarming number of British ships sunk by German U-boats. The president had pledged to make the United States the “great arsenal of democracy” in the fight against Hitler. At the same time, he’d imposed an embargo on oil and steel to Japan in response to its aggression against China, as well as its entering into the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy and its moving troops into Indochina to build air bases for possible attacks.

  At home, the first peacetime conscription in the nation’s history took place in 1940. Over 16 million men, ages twenty-one to thirty-six, signed up. The standards weren’t high—an inductee had to be at least 5 feet tall and 105 pounds, had to have at least half his teeth, and could not have flatfeet, a hernia, or venereal disease. Nevertheless, almost 50 percent of the applicants were rejected, and hundreds of thousands of others were turned down because they could not read or write.

  Chuck hadn’t enlisted out of patriotic duty or the wish to be a hero. His father had convinced him that America would be pulled into the conflict, and the sooner Chuck enlisted, the better his chances of getting a good assignment. His father said that
the military would make a man out of him and that it would be a good career. That made sense to Chuck. But what appealed to him even more was the money. His only hope of buying a horse was the steady paycheck the military offered. And the idea of eating three square meals every day—“three hots and a cot,” as the saying went—seemed like a luxury. In the two weeks prior to enlisting, he’d eaten beans and cornbread every night, and nothing at all during the day.

  Leaving the depot, he headed for a hotel in downtown Buffalo, where he would stay for three days while he was being processed before boot camp in Newport, Rhode Island. He checked his wallet to make sure his money was still there. Before leaving home, he’d sold his shotgun and several chickens he’d raised in the backyard. The $14 he’d gotten in exchange was his total net worth.

  Originally he had tried to enlist in the Marines. More than anything, he liked the uniforms, especially the ones with the red stripes down the blue pants. But he was only 5 feet 7 inches and 135 pounds, and the sergeant said he wasn’t big enough to be a Marine. “Go down the street and try the Navy,” the sergeant suggested. Chuck passed the physical, and a couple of days later a Navy recruiter came to his house to tell him he had been accepted and would be called up in six months, maybe a year. The call came the next week.

  Entering the hotel lobby in Buffalo, he noticed three young recruits sitting in a corner, passing around a bottle of wine in a brown paper bag.

  They seemed much older. Chuck pulled his pipe from his pocket and headed to the desk to check in.

  He didn’t regret his decision to enlist, but he was nervous. Despite his mischievous ways in high school, he didn’t drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes, and he was still a virgin. Smoking a pipe was just about the boldest thing he’d done until then.