Many of Dad’s letters were written with a serious overtone. On the subject of “terror tactics now being used against the United States and our people,” he wrote to President Ronald Reagan shortly after the Iranian hostage crisis was resolved, suggesting the president deport all college students from hostile countries who were studying in the United States.
I have observed students from Iran who are presently attending the University of Southwest Louisiana, and they were certainly vocal in their support of Iran when our fifty citizens were held in that country.
Personally, I am weary of being the “nice guy” and having to suffer at the hands of these third-rate nations. While I do not see an answer to this horrible problem [of terrorism], I am satisfied words and threats are not the answer.
A newspaper picture showed a mother distressed by her son’s departure overseas for a stint in the military. The mother was “being comforted by a covey of ladies,” as Dad wrote to the editor, and continued:I am confident that some kind soul will see that [the serviceman] gets this unsettling picture of his mom. When he examines her obvious agony, his performance as a serviceman will no doubt be impaired.
Perhaps if all moms would write cheerful letters and bake a few cookies, it would make the life of a serviceman more endurable. Some thought might be given to some volunteer work with the Red Cross. Anything would be better than weeping in concert.
. . . I urge you to refrain from publishing any recitation of weakness which will be counterproductive for our servicemen. You failed to ask the usual insipid question, “How do you feel?” I will answer this question, she feels like hell, just as I do.
Honor and Integrity
Daddy spent his last years in Mississippi. He was apart from our mother then, but they were in close contact and weekly traveled back and forth between Mississippi and Louisiana to spend time together. One of our sisters, Tracy, lived in Pass Christian with her husband and two children where Dad resided. Dad just adored his grandkids and spent a lot of time with Tracy and her family. They communicated on a daily basis.
One morning Dad didn’t call Tracy, which was highly unusual. It was two days after his birthday. After ten a.m., the children’s nanny, Miss Lillian, tried phoning Dad and found his phone busy. Dad always took his phone off the hook at night and was an early riser, so this was unusual. Miss Lillian loaded the children into her vehicle and drove over to check on Daddy and found his newspaper still on his front door step. She opened the door, as she possessed a key to his condo, and Tracy’s five-year-old son, Charlie, raced into Dad’s bedroom and attempted to wake him. Dad had suffered a stroke during the night. An ambulance was called and he was rushed to the hospital. The family all got in cars and boarded planes to get home immediately.
We were first told by the neurologist that Daddy had a good chance of pulling through, and our hopes were high that Daddy would quickly recover, but within hours of being admitted he suffered another stroke, this one massive. Daddy lasted three more days and died April 19, 1997, at age seventy-six.
His funeral wasn’t a sad affair in the least. Everybody told jokes and laughed, recalling pranks he had pulled, things he had said, stories that had taken on lives of their own. You couldn’t talk about Daddy without smiling. He had become a local legend.
Dad was cremated. His ashes were kept in an urn at our brother’s home until our dear mother passed away in 2009. We knew that Dad would be happy nowhere but with Mama, so his ashes were placed in her coffin, which now rests in our family plot.
What would we want people to remember about our father? His honor and integrity. Both of our parents, despite their faults, lived their lives this way. Once, they were talking about selling their home. Mama was at a social function when she saw a neighbor who was also a real estate agent. She mentioned that they would soon be selling and would call this realtor when they were ready to list. Nothing more was said or formalized. Soon after that a separate party approached our parents, and the house sold without ever hitting the market. After the deal was final, Dad made out a check to their neighbor the realtor. When Mama asked Daddy the reason for the check, he responded with, “Mama, you told him you’d list it with him.” Mama quickly understood and dispatched a check that day.
Ties to the Band of Brothers
Dad is sometimes credited as being the vital link between Stephen Ambrose and the Band of Brothers, but this is perhaps over-told. They weren’t neighbors, as has been reported, but lived about fifteen minutes away from each other in Pass Christian, Mississippi.
In 1988 during the annual Easy Company reunion in New Orleans, Ambrose’s assistant at the University of New Orleans heard there was a group of WWII veterans in town. The assistant dropped by the hotel and asked if he could speak to the men. Many of them happily complied and sat for brief interviews. Many recommended he should speak with Gordon, since he lived just an hour away. (Dad was out of the hotel when all this took place). The assistant gave Dad’s contact information to Ambrose and from there a relationship ensued. Prior to Dad’s initial meeting with Ambrose for the book, he arranged for Lipton, Guth, and Dick Winters to join him for a collaborative interview.
Dad and Ambrose became fast friends, but Dad never sought to take advantage of the friendship and always respected Ambrose as an author and historian. They had lunch once in a while or met occasionally for coffee. When any of the men came to the coast to visit, Dad called Ambrose and his wife Moira, and they all got together for a seafood boil of whatever was in season. Dad was always grateful to Ambrose for choosing Company E as his subject out of all the outstanding military groups that served in WWII. Dad did not live to see Band of Brothers become a media phenomenon, but we’re confident he’s pleased and proud to see his brothers be revered and honored as all men who have fought for our freedom should be.
9
HERMAN “HACK” HANSON
Interview with Karen Hanson Hyland, daughter
I was lucky, growing up, that my dad talked about the war. He didn’t shy away from his experiences. He described the war as something he was fortunate to live through. Because of that, life was a party, he always said, and he was going to have a good time. That was his philosophy, anyway.
He talked most about the war during the years I was in high school. I’m the oldest child in the family, and after work he sat at the dinner table and talked while my mom cooked dinner. He talked mostly about Bastogne. Everybody was so cold and thin, he said. It was bitter cold. He needed to wrap his feet with paper—anything a man could find to wrap around his feet or stuff into his shoes to try and stay warm. He talked about trees exploding from the constant shelling—tree bursts, he called them—and how scary that was: pieces of trees as sharp as arrows flew at you. He talked about digging foxholes with the men and sleeping in a hole in the ground. He talked about how the guys were special and about how they were his brothers.
Easy Company veteran Frank Perconte was a childhood friend of Dad’s, and he and his wife came over regularly after the war. They talked about a lot of things together, and almost always, somewhere during the conversation, the war would come up. I remember a few of those stories too, but I wish I had been a little bit older so I would have paid more attention to them. Isn’t that always the way it goes?
Anyway, this is what I know of my dad’s life.
One of the Older Men
My dad was born in Joliet, Illinois, on January 3, 1917, which made him one of the older Easy Company men. His family lived on Ottawa Street. His mother’s name was Artillia, but everybody called her Tillie. She had emigrated from Germany and we have relatives still over in Germany to this day. My grandfather was born in Sweden and immigrated to America. So my dad was a first generation American.
How did my dad get the nickname Hack? Actually, he had two nicknames. Hack was his first nickname growing up. I’m not sure how it came about because there were a number of people who also called him Henry back then. After the war, most people called him Hank.
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p; Dad was the middle child. His parents were very strict. Dad grew up as a hard worker and loved sports. Golf was his favorite and he also loved baseball. They played pickup games in the neighborhood constantly.
Frank Perconte moved into the neighborhood when he was about ten, to the same street as my dad, and from then on they were best buddies and basically did everything together. That neighborhood was very tight. Families went on picnics with other neighborhood families and played sports with each other. Both Frank and Dad loved to play practical jokes. Dad seemed to have the lighter temperament. He loved to tease, he had a real charmer personality, and was very sociable and had a lot of friends. He valued education and always wanted to live life to the fullest and be the best at whatever he did.
Dad and Frank both graduated high school and went to work at Gary Steelworks. They carpooled together, although Dad only went one way with Frank. Dad went to Roosevelt University in Chicago during the evenings and took the train home. He studied journalism in college and got his degree after the war through the University of Missouri. Unfortunately we don’t have any of dad’s writings, journals, or letters anymore. Where they lived was right near the Des Plaines River. Not too long after the war ended, the river flooded, swamping their house and destroying all his writings.
Shot Twice
Dad didn’t think he was going to get drafted, being older, but serving his country was still something he wanted to do. After the war started, Frank and Dad were at the movies one day at the Rialto Square Theater, and that’s where they saw one of those shorts that described the paratroopers. They decided to do that and enlisted together. Their serial numbers were consecutive, only one apart.
Dad craved adventure and thought that jumping out of an airplane would be a fun thing to try. He said he always enjoyed the actual experience of parachuting—not into combat, but simply the rush that came from jumping.
Dad and Frank were two of the first four privates in Easy Company along with Skinny Sisk and Carwood Lipton. When Frank and my dad enlisted, they both started out in 1st Platoon, but because they played so many pranks on the other guys, they ended up getting separated. My dad went to 2nd Platoon, and Frank stayed in the 1st.
Just before D-day, when Dad was in England, his father passed away. Dad talked about that with us—how hard it was to lose a parent and be so far away from family. He really wanted to go home but wasn’t able to, so he got away for a while by himself and tried to grieve in private and make sense of it all.
He jumped on D-Day and for Operation Market-Garden in Holland and for the “third jump”—off the truck in Bastogne, as the men say. He found it astonishing that the Dutch were so grateful to be liberated.
He was right there in a foxhole in Bastogne when Joe Toye and Bill Guarnere lost their legs in the shelling. The shelling was so bad, he said. Many of the men were so upset at what had occurred before their eyes. He and Carwood Lipton helped keep the men together and pulled guys back into their foxholes until the shelling was all over. He talked about that quite a bit.
Dad was shot twice. Both times, luckily, no major organs were hit, so he was able to be patched up and sent back in. He was present in every single battle and was one of the few guys who made it all the way through the war from the first day in Toccoa to the end. He had scars from his shrapnel wounds, and as a kid I was always intrigued with his scars. The skin was pulled together and folded over in a little flap. One scar was up in his chest area, the shoulder, close to his heart. The other was lower. The bullet went right through him, leaving both an entry and exit wound. The first time he was shot it happened at the tail end of Market-Garden. The second time he got injured was just as they were pulling out of Bastogne.
Dad talked about the concentration camps, about how he had a hard time reconciling that with his German nationality. He wondered how these things could be going on and be attributed to his people. He had a really hard time coming to grips with that.
Sergeant Chuck Grant was a really close friend of Dad’s. In Berchtesgaden, Chuck was shot in the brain by a drunken replacement from another company, and I know Dad had a really hard time with that. He (along with several of the other men) beat up on the drunken GI, and Dad even pulled a gun on him. I know that’s one of the incidents my family worried about. How was it going to be portrayed in the series?
In the book, it mentions that it was my dad who pulled the gun,12 but the series attributes it to Ron Speirs. I think the way that scene was ultimately portrayed was handled well. It showed the confusion and anger of the moment. Here, the men had made it all the way through the war, but one of their friends was gravely injured in an accident that could have been prevented. Dad said the drunken replacement was taken to a regi-mental guardhouse for discipline, and that’s the last they ever heard of him. Fortunately, Sergeant Grant slowly recovered, although he had some problems talking and he was partially paralyzed. After the war he attended some of the reunions and lived until the 1980s.
Almost every family vacation, we went to visit one of my dad’s war buddies. They were like extended family to us. When we were young we didn’t quite understand the connection all these people had to us. We visited Popeye Winn, Joe Toye, Walter Gordon—those are the ones I remember visiting. We went to the reunions as kids, and then even after my dad died, my mom insisted that we go. Easy Company is like family to us. We know quite a few of the kids as well as the men. My mom helped plan one of the national conventions for the 101st in Chicago. The main hotel was being renovated, so my mom booked all the Company E guys in a different hotel across the street. The guys had such a good time like that, just being together so much as a group. Everybody just hung out in the hospitality room morning to night, swapping stories. That was really when they started having the separate company E reunions, and not worrying about being part of the larger 101st ones.
Dad never saw himself as doing anything special in the war. He was just doing his job with the guys around him, he always said.
Pancakes at Breakfast
When Dad came back after the war, he finished college, then began to look for a job. He was a little older than most of the returning GIs and found that he was put at a disadvantage because of his age. Sears, Roebuck had an entry-level job open, but it had a maximum age limit, and dad was older than the limit, so on the application he fudged and said he was seven years younger. He got the job. He worked for Sears, Roebuck his whole career, in their catalog division, and ended up being one of their vice presidents.
Dad worked in downtown Chicago. He held the very first meeting in the Sears Tower while they were still doing the excavation. He took a bunch of people down to the basement with hardhats and a card table and set up the meeting. Only the hole was dug then. But he did it for fun, to say that they had the first meeting there.
Shortly after the war he met my mom, Jean Newman. She came from Fremont, Nebraska, and had moved to Chicago with a couple of her girlfriends after they graduated from college. They wanted to try life in the big city for a little while. The other girlfriends moved back to Nebraska, but my mom stayed in Chicago where she worked at a printing company. Years later, she worked as a kindergarten assistant and then as a travel agent.
My parents lived in Chicago when they were first married, then moved to Oak Park for a few years, then after my sister was born we moved to Lombard. There were six kids in my family altogether. We kept moving out to the suburbs like everybody else. By the time my youngest sister came along we had moved out to Lisle.
Mom and Dad had a good marriage and got along well. Mom adored Dad, and vice versa. Mom was a member of the DuPage Symphony Orchestra and played several different instruments. She was very smart and got A’s all through high school, except for gym. She was one of those people who are so smart that they almost lack a little common sense, and my dad could always play a good joke on her. Mom wasn’t quite as fun-loving as he, but they went out every Saturday night to dinner or to go dancing. Weekly, they had people over to the house for barbec
ues and to play cards. Mom and Dad were big bridge players. Cards were always a big part of family life and vacations—wherever we stopped, they always held bridge tournaments.
As kids, we just adored Dad. We couldn’t wait for him to get home. He was a lot of fun. My favorite memories of him all involve little things, like him taking us out for ice cream. He loved to sing and would good naturedly torture me with his songs. He sang “Sugar, Sugar,” and “Knock Three Times.” On Sunday mornings he cooked breakfast for us, big pancakes shaped like the initials of our names. He made up silly little nicknames for all of us. He called me Karrie, or Karriebrook, because one of the clothing lines in the Sears catalog was named that. My sister’s name is Amy, and Dad called her Amy Pamey Button Bright. My brother Mark was Marker Parker. My brother Kurt was Dirty Kurty, because he liked to play with his Hot Wheels cars in the dirt. The nicknames sort of petered out with the younger ones, but Dad always teased us kids. When my little sister was young and had to go to the bathroom, Dad said, “You know, when we were in the war we didn’t get much toilet paper—so you can only use one sheet.” He drove us around to our activities in the family station wagon. I was in Job’s Daughters, and Dad always took me and my friends to the meetings. Afterward he got us ice cream. I know all my girlfriends adored him. He was just that kind of person, very sociable, always the life of the party, although he could be firm when he needed to be. He expected much from himself, and he wanted all of us to do our best. We didn’t want to let him down. It meant a lot to us to have Dad proud of us.
A Company of Heroes Page 12
