Tom Brokaw

by The Greatest Generation

  It’s been a much better life for Charles Briscoe than he expected when he was moving around the Dust Bowl with his parents as a teenager. What he learned then, however, served him well. He learned to work. As he says, “If you’ve got a job, there’s a way to do it. As a farm kid I didn’t have anyone to ask; I just had to figure it out. So when I went to Boeing, that’s just what I did.”

  It’s a way of life for him. Now in his eighties, Briscoe is still fixing what’s broken. “I buy run-down houses and remodel them and rent them. Anything that needs to be done, I do it—the plumbing, the electrical. I roof ’em, I do the Sheetrock, patch the holes, all of that.”

  Briscoe teaches his children and grandchildren by example. “The kids nowadays,” he says, “their parents buy them fancy cars and depend on someone else to keep them running. When all my grandchildren wanted cars I bought five hail-damaged cars—we get a lot of hail in Kansas. I got them for about three thousand dollars each instead of ten thousand or fifteen thousand dollars. I welded a finishing nail in each of the dents, bent it over, ground it smooth, and filled it in with body putty. By the time we finished, the cars looked brand-new. I had my grandchildren help me so they’d learn that if you want something badly there’s a way to get it.”

  DOROTHY HAENER

  “A number of my men friends said it wasn’t a place for women. They said I’d be too nice. I had to fight them.”

  IN OTHER FACTORIES converted to wartime production, other children of hard times were finally making a good wage. Many of them were women, able to take their place on the factory floor only because the men were needed in uniform. One of them was Dorothy Haener, a strong-willed young woman from a hardscrabble Michigan farm run by her single mother. Dorothy says she developed a sensitivity at an early age to how women were treated in the workplace. Recently she told a niece “how disturbed I was when my eighth-grade teacher was fired because she had been married the year before.” That was not an uncommon practice in small-town America and in the rural areas. Teaching jobs were reserved for single women and men who were “heads of household.” In the reasoning of the time, a married woman would not qualify as a head of household.

  Once Haener graduated from high school, she went to work at a Ford Motor Company plant in Willow Run, Michigan, where production was already underway on the B-24 bombers that would be so critical in the war in Europe. Haener makes it clear she was not motivated by patriotism alone. “What people forget now is that people went to work because they wanted to live. Years later, when the women’s movement came along, I heard people talking about work that was ‘meaningful’ to them. I consider myself lucky that eventually I found work that was meaningful, but I was always willing to work for just wages.”

  It was while working as a B-24 parts inspector at Willow Run that Haener began to reevaluate her life. Until then, she says, “I had always expected to get married and raise a family, something modern women’s organizations don’t like to hear me say, but that’s the way I was raised.” Working nine-hour days, six days a week alongside men in the plant, however, made Haener realize she could have an independent life. She was proud of her work and happy with the money she was earning.

  In the summer of 1944 that life ended for Dorothy Haener. She was laid off when Kaiser–Frazier Industries took over the plant to prepare for the postwar years. It had no room for women. Kaiser declared it would hire the best of the returning servicemen—and who was going to argue with that? Haener thought there was room in the plant for men and women. After all, she’d done her job well. Why should she be penalized?

  Her efforts at getting hired back at her old wage were unsuccessful. She went to work in a toy factory for much lower pay. She assembled cheap toy guns and plotted to return to the Willow Run plant and her old salary.

  In the fall of 1946 she was hired back at Kaiser–Frazier but in a clerical position at a lower wage than what she had earned during the war. She quickly found a new calling: union activist. It was the beginning of the glory days of the United Automobile Workers union under the enlightened leadership of Walter Reuther, and Dorothy Haener became an eager acolyte.

  She began by organizing the office workers and engineers, motivated by her anger at having been demoted summarily from parts inspector to secretary and by the wage gap between those on the production line and those working in the offices. “I can’t speak for why the engineers organized,” she says, “but for the women it was simply a matter of money.”

  Haener’s success as an organizer of her colleagues and her passion for fairness won her a following within the ranks, and soon she was elected a trustee of her UAW local. She’d also gotten to know Walter Reuther, who admired her skills so much that he brought her into the national headquarters as an organizer of engineering and office staffs around the country.

  Although Reuther was an articulate and committed champion of equality across all lines—race and gender—not everyone in the labor movement shared his philosophy. Haener learned that she was most successful when she didn’t single out women as an issue. She says women had to be smarter and better dressed to hold their jobs, but “if you played the equality thing too much,” she says, “you turned off men. The message played best when I focused on better pay and control of the workplace.”

  At headquarters she was also an important force in raising the place of women within the UAW at every level, including the establishment of a separate women’s department for the union. Irving Bluestone, then an administrative assistant to Reuther, is now a professor of labor studies at Wayne State University and he remembers, “Dorothy was actively outspoken and put pressure where pressure needed to be placed.”

  Sometimes she did that by personal example, often meeting resistance from her male colleagues in the labor rank and file. She decided to run for the powerful bargaining committee within the UAW, the elite group that goes head-to-head with management in hammering out the terms of a new contract. Many of her male colleagues opposed the idea of a woman on that critical committee. It was the labor movement equivalent of a woman in the cockpit of a fighter jet.

  “A number of my men friends said it wasn’t a place for women. They said I’d be too nice. I had to fight them. Finally I won in an open-caucus vote and I lost some male friends over that. They wanted women around but they didn’t want them to have any responsibility.” It still hurts Haener to discuss personal attacks leveled against her by her male colleagues. They raised questions about her morality and whispered slanderous rumors about her personal life. When she asked a union lawyer for advice, he told her to ignore them and devote all of her energies to her union commitments.

  Later, one of the men in the anti-Haener movement came to her and apologized for his role. That eased the pain some, but the larger lesson for Dorothy was that women would have to go through those kinds of experiences if they wanted an active role in the union movement. That’s what she wanted, and she was devoting her life to it.

  Haener never married for largely that reason. “By the time the war ended,” she says, “I was too independent to get married.”

  Haener met Betty Friedan, the author of The Feminine Mystique, when Friedan was touring the country for President Kennedy, assessing the issues of women and equality. As a result of those early meetings Haener became a founding member of the National Organization for Women, NOW. She’s no longer on the board, and while she does feel that NOW has filled a need in promoting equality for women, she believes that it and other women’s organizations have come up short in pushing hard for equal pay.

  “We’ve made some improvements,” she says, “but we still have a long way to go. So many of the younger generation don’t know how far we’ve come. . . . They don’t realize that what’s given to them in the law can be taken away when the law isn’t enforced.”

  Dorothy Haener got into the labor movement because she felt cheated on the job and in her paycheck when the war came to an end. It’s what keeps her going now. “Wages affect women more
than anything else,” she says. “Take child care. We pay women who take care of children less than we pay people who take care of animals.”

  The war years gave Dorothy Haener a chance to earn a good wage, to contribute something to her country, and to learn a good deal about herself. She not only became a seminal figure in the postwar women’s movement, she also chaired the Michigan Civil Rights Commission in the eighties and testified several times before Congress on the issue of equal pay for equal work.

  She’s now retired but she hasn’t given up her long fight; she volunteers to walk picket lines in the Detroit area when needed and discusses with her nieces the continuing need to make sure women are treated fairly on payday. She’s confident they understand. After all, one of them is now an engineer at General Motors and a mother. Dorothy’s niece has maternity leave and child-care benefits. The bitter experience of her aunt Dorothy more than fifty years ago and how it changed her life paid off for Dorothy’s niece, and for thousands of other women who are just now beginning to take their place alongside men in the workplace and at the pay window.

  HEROES

  “Hero” is a description tossed around lightly these days—like “star” or “celebrity”—another significant difference between the closing days of the twentieth century and the century’s middle years, World War II. During the war the use of the phrase “You’re a hero” was likely to bring on the quick rejoinder, “No, I’m not; I’m just doing my job here—like everyone else.” The fighting men and women were so dependent on each other and shared so many common experiences they were embarrassed to be singled out.

  Some acts of heroism, however, were so breathtakingly conspicuous, so daring and vital to the military mission, they could not be overlooked or turned aside. In many instances they changed forever the lives of those who were decorated. Others who were decorated returned to the lives they would have had without the medals and the attention.

  If there is a common thread among the major medal winners, it is the same modesty expressed by Army nurse Mary Louise Roberts Wilson when she received the Silver Star. Almost to a person they have said to me, “I didn’t win this medal. I merely accepted it for all the people who were with me.” Nonetheless, they did win it, and the very qualities that led them to take great risks to save others served them well once they returned home.

  Bob and Wanda Bush, wartime portrait

  BOB BUSH

  “Everyone should learn the meaning of that famous little four-letter word—work.”

  BOB BUSH has been married to his high school sweetheart, Wanda, since 1945, when they were both eighteen. They have three grown children and the comfortable lifestyle that goes with Bob’s great success in the lumber and building supply business in the state of Washington. He has one blind eye to remind him of that day on a ridge on Okinawa. He went to the aid of a gravely wounded Marine officer that day, one of the deadliest days in the fight for control of the Pacific, for the planned invasion of Japan.

  He has something else to remind him of that day: the Congressional Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest commendation for battlefield valor “beyond the call of duty.” There were 440 Medals of Honor awarded during World War II, 250 of them posthumously.

  When Bob Bush earned his medal he was fulfilling a promise to his mother. As he left for basic training as a Navy medic the year before, when he was seventeen, he told her, “Mom, I’m going into the service to help people, not to kill them.” Bob knew that was important to his mother, a single woman who worked as a nurse in an Oregon hospital. They had already been through so much together, mother and son.

  They lived in the basement of the hospital in which Bob’s mother worked and money was very scarce. But at an early age Bob had a flair for commerce. As a teenager, when he saw how hot and sweaty it was for the men working in the holds of the ships in the harbor at Raymond, Washington, his hometown, he brokered a deal with a local grocer to supply the workers with cold soft drinks. It was a profitable enterprise and Bob learned lessons early in how to fill a need, arrange credit, and most of all, provide good service.

  By 1943, however, when he was in high school, the war was raging and he wanted to be a part of it. So he dropped out of school to join the Navy medical corps. He reported for basic training in Idaho, and less than a year later he was on an amphibious assault vehicle loaded with Marines, going ashore at Okinawa for what everyone knew would be a long, brutal battle against the Japanese forces dug in on the island. It was a critical piece of geography for the Allies, as they made their way toward the Japanese mainland.

  Bush now remembers shouting at one of the Marines to tell their landing-craft driver, “Slow down! We don’t have to be the first onshore!” Getting ashore, however, wasn’t the problem. Gordon Larsen, the man who made me laugh when he fixed our furnace, was an eighteen-year-old Marine on Okinawa and he recalls that landing day was the first of April. As he says, “I thought it was an April Fool’s joke. There were no Japanese to fight us.”

  The main Japanese force had retreated from the advance to the south end of the island, where they were well armed and holed up in caves, prepared to make this a very costly campaign for the invaders. As the Americans moved south toward the Japanese positions, the fighting became so fierce and so unrelenting that it has a special place in the storied history of the U.S. Marines.

  Thirty-two days into the campaign to take control of Okinawa, on May 2, 1945, Bob Bush was attached to a rifle company of Marines on the attack over a ridge against heavily fortified Japanese positions. Bush was constantly on the move, going from one downed Marine to another to patch them up and get them evacuated.

  Then he was called to help a Marine officer gravely wounded and lying in the open on a ridgetop. Bush didn’t hesitate. He went directly to the officer’s side and began administering plasma just as the Japanese attacked the position. His Medal of Honor citation describes what followed:

  Bob Bush, wartime portrait

  Bob Bush and company

  In this perilously exposed position, he [Bush] resolutely maintained the flow of life-giving plasma. With the bottle held high in one hand, Petty Officer Bush drew his pistol with the other and fired into the enemy ranks until his ammunition was expended. Quickly seizing a discarded carbine, he trained his fire on the Japanese charging point-blank over the hill, accounting for [the deaths of] six of the enemy despite his own serious wounds and the loss of one eye suffered during the desperate defense of the helpless man.

  Bush finally drove off the Japanese and made arrangements for the evacuation of the Marine officer. He refused aid for himself until he collapsed from his wounds as he walked off the ridgetop. More than a half century later, he told me in a cheerful tone, “I remember thinking as the Japanese were attacking, ‘Well, they may nail me but I’m going to make them pay the price.’ ”

  Bush was shipped to Hawaii for treatment of his injuries and as soon as he was patched up, he was sent home. He’d been in the service just one year, six months, and twenty-two days but he’d seen enough of war to last a lifetime. He’d earned his right to get on with his life. As the Navy plane carrying him back passed over the Golden Gate Bridge, Bob Bush made a pledge to himself. “I was going to put everything west of there behind me. I was eighteen. I had to get back to school in the fall. I had the girlfriend back home in Washington.” He knew a lot of young men were interested in Wanda and he wanted to get back to win her hand.

  Wanda Spooner, a petite beauty, was eighteen as well when they were married that summer. She quickly got a notion of what life would be like with the charming and ambitious young hero back from the war and ready to take on the world. Their honeymoon was the long cross-country train ride to Washington, D.C., where Bob was to receive his Medal of Honor from Harry Truman, who had been president just a few months, following the death of Franklin Roosevelt.

  Suddenly, these two love-struck teenagers were on the south lawn of the White House, surrounded by the president, his cabinet, and the l
egendary military leaders of the day. Wanda was getting a lot of attention from the generals and the admirals, and one of the White House organizers told Bob as they went on to a reception at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, “Don’t worry about Wanda. The admiral will keep his eye on her.” Bob recalls saying, “Yeah, but who’s going to keep an eye on the admiral?”

  Bob Bush shaking hands with President Harry S Truman

  Bob Bush on the job

  Wanda was excited because after the Washington ceremonies they were scheduled to go to New York for a parade and an all-expenses-paid tour of the Big Apple. “But Bob told me we were skipping that. We had to go back home so he could finish his schooling and get on with his business plans.” A frivolous weekend in New York, however tempting, just was not in Bob Bush’s plan for life.

  Once back in the Northwest, Bob finished his high school requirements, enrolled in a few business classes at the University of Washington, and talked to his friend Victor Druzianich, another veteran, about buying a small lumberyard. Bob figured that with all of the veterans coming home it could be a promising business.

  They named their company Bayview and they were off to a fast start in southwest Washington, buying lumber directly from the many sawmills in their area and selling it to contractors and the growing number of homeowners with money to remodel or expand. In fact, business was so good they were working seven days a week and figured they could prosper even more if they could somehow add an extra day.

  They had learned in their military training how long they could go without sleep and still function, so they developed a plan. Every other week one of the partners would work a full twenty-four-hour day, driving through the night to Portland to pick up an extra truck-load of lumber. That demanding schedule went on for seven years.