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DA CRUZ / SCOTT FAMILY HISTORY
For Peter and Amy
Last update:
Mon Oct 28 14:39:48 2024
(NY time)
IMPORTANT: Don't click on any links until this page is fully loaded,
which might take several minutes.
THANKS
to da Cruz cousins Danny, Lina, Rif, Raimundo, Luzia, Helena, and
Fafita; to Lund cousins Sandy and Betty Rae and to Minnesota historian Dana
Yost, and the nice people of Minneota, Minnesota; to ex-sisters-in-law
Christine and Lori and ex-mother-in-law Consuelo. And to Army buddy Roger
Anderson. For Virginia, to George Gilmer, Russell Hill (son of Harry), and
Jimmie Walker. And more recently to Pam Ives and her Mom Ruth, to my
stepsister Shawn Maxwell for several hair-raising stories about my father,
and (again) to Army buddy Roger for his photos of Germany 1963-65.
For faster loading you can access individual chapters
here.
Note to posterity: The online tree referenced just above was built at
familyecho.com, a site which will
surely disappear one day. The public read-only version is stored in my
Columbia University "personal Web" space
(columbia.edu/~fdc/),
which also won't last forever.
If I distribute this history on some kind of removeable media like
memory card or DVD, the formats and encodings (HTML5, UTF-8), and the media
themseles, will eventually become obsolete, like 8-inch floppy disks.
But whatever digital form this history is distributed in, it will also
include a plain-text "dump" of the tree in GEDCOM
format HERE.
GEDCOM format itself is documented
HERE
and HERE.
When the Family Echo tree has stablized, I will see if I can also put a copy
of it on Ancestry.com.
View the history online
The family history is online so family members (or anyone else) can see it
and help with it. Here is an index to the online material, which also
includes an explanation about how the family tree works:
The history is best viewed on a screen at least 740 pixels wide. It can
also be viewed on smaller screens, cell phones even, but although the layout
is "fluid" it looks best at full width. The text does not expand for
wider screens because then the lines would be too long to read. I don't
apologize for this. The optimum size for reading matter was settled
centuries ago — there's no reason to think cell-phone or "phablet" or
smart-watch screens (or 12-foot wide TVs) are an improvement over the
printed page. Nevertheless, wider screens are better because some images,
if you click on them, bring up bigger copies of themselves that can be wider
than the text.
Anyway, for this document to survive for many generations I'll probably have
to have it printed because no digital media or encoding or markup language
will last that long. This, however, is still a digital edition with
hyperlinks that you can follow, and where you can click on images to see
larger versions or expanded info, something that is not possible in a book.
It occurs to me that mine is the last generation that will be able to
compile a history like this. The reason I can do it is that until about
1995 (ubiquitous Internet, email, cell phones, digital cameras), people took
pictures — snapshots that were printed on paper and often mounted in
family albums. They wrote letters to each other and kept them. They had
files of important papers. Now everything is digital and ephemeral and the
newer generations are increasingly nomadic, shedding all belongings as
they move from place to place.
Details
This document is written by hand using no "authoring tools" whatsoever and
is completely self-contained, not relying on any external libraries or
stylesheets or software; only a web browser. The "source code" for this
document is in the
file family.html,
file which, in case Web browsers cease to exist, consists mainly of
plain-text prose intermixed with HTML markup and links to photos and other
material. This is straightforward HTML5, a mature and stable standard that
should last for some time, but no guarantees. As of 16 October 2019 the
character encoding is Unicode UTF-8, the universal character set, to allow
text in all languages (including German, Norwegian, Portuguese, Arabic, and
Russian) to be mixed in the same document.
Images that you see here are in JPG format and are all local and mostly in
the same directory ("folder") with the HTML. Each one can be clicked on to
see a nonscaled (usually larger) version. There are also some external
pages such as photo galleries, linked to from this page, that are stored in
the same directory or in subdirectories of it. There is no Javascript
anywhere except in the Search dialog, the Validate link on the bottom, and
the family tree. In short, this work is designed for maximum portability
and longevity but, again, there can be no guarantees. I have tried to keep
offsite links to a minimum, but there are still quite a few. Naturally, any
of them can (and eventually will) stop working.
After my father and mother died I started to wonder about all kinds of
things and had questions only they could answer, but it was too late. Since
the same thing could happen to you guys, I thought I'd write some things
down in advance.
I started his around 2000 as a big plain-text file and had been adding
stuff ever since to the point it was pretty disorganized and repetitious.
This is the new improved version begun in 2017. First I wrote a
program to convert the plain
text to HTML and now I'm editing the HTML version directly, adding
images and links, etc, but mainly reorganizing and consolidating, and
writing programs to do that too; for example, extracting chapters.
Desk tag
I write this, by the way, at my big grey Steelcase desk that was originally
at the Manhattan Project at Columbia, and still has the original Physics
Department property plate from the 1940s. I don't know whose desk it was,
but it was at the Thomas J. Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory at
Columbia University (originally located in the Physics building, Pupin
Hall), founded in 1945 by IBM and the War Department to do the final
computations for the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I tell
the story in the 1939-45 section of my Columbia University Computing
History:
When I was laid off from Columbia they let me keep the desk (which I had
been sitting at since 1974) because Columbia has absolutely zero interest in
history; the corporate management that arrived in 2005 spares no effort to
wipe out everything that is old (including people) and to be on the "cutting
edge" of "scholarly entrepreneurship". Fine, I love this desk.
In my life I have been a military brat (my Dad was still in the Navy for my
first 13 months of life, and worked for the Navy for the next four years); I
lived on Army bases as a teenager, have been in the Army myself, had Secret
and then Top Secret security clearances and then had them revoked. I lived
5 years in Germany. I was "military" for 13 years out of my first 24 (Dad
in the Navy; Dad working for the Navy; living on an Army base in Germany;
being in the Army on active duty and then reserve).
I've been in jail three times. I have a bachelors and
a masters degree from Columbia U and was also suspended for a semester. I'm
an engineer! I developed (with others in my group) a communications
protocol and software that was used all over the world and I wrote and
published several books about it. I've authored Internet RFCs and am
responsible for 18 of the characters in Unicode. I was an Instructor at
Columbia for about five years. I crossed the ocean four times on ships.
I've lived in the country, the suburbs, and in cities. I've been
in 20 or 30 countries of North America, the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, and
Asia, but so far not South America. I have been in Fascist countries
(Franco Spain several times) and Communist ones (East Germany and the Soviet
Union). I was a disk jockey on the Armed Forces Network. I was a taxi
driver, and in the Army I drove jeeps and trucks and armored vehicles. I
played the guitar in lots of bands and was a full-time musician for about
six months in Washington DC after the Army. I was a long-distance
runner for 40 years and ran the NYC Marathon in 1985. Due to my life's
experiences, especially in the first 21 years, I'm one of the few people
able to read Gravity's Rainbow and understand most of it.
I have been competent in Latin, German, Russian, and Spanish but lost most
of the Latin and Russian over the years. My Latin was good enough that I
read Caesar's Gallic Wars and Virgil's Aeneid; I read tons of books in
German including Faust, Der Zauberberg, etc, and I read a play of Pushkin in
Russian (when I was in the USSR about 30 years later some of it came back
temporarily). I can still understand German pretty well but if I try to
speak it, Spanish comes out. I taught myself Spanish starting in the 1990s
by watching telenovelas and reading books; now I can read and write 98%
fluently, but conversation is more of a challenge. Can also read
Portuguese, Italian, and even French somewhat because of Spanish and Latin.
(In the late Sixties I wanted to learn Spanish and signed up for it in GS,
but the professor was such a racist elitist asshole I boycotted the class
and took an F… That showed him! Later he became Dean of the
whole school...) Since moving to the Bronx in 2012, I use Spanish
frequently because of the large Dominican and Puerto Rican populations.
In 2019 I wondered if I could still read a German after about fifty years of
not using it. I picked up a book, Nach Mitternacht by Irmgard Keun,
and stared at the first page for about an hour until I felt the long-buried
German section of my brain bubbling up to the surface and within a day or
two I was reading it with almost total comprehension. Since then I've been
reading other German novels and histories, mostly about the postwar period:
Hildegard Knef's autobiography, Der Geschenkte Gaul, Peter Ortmann's
Berlin epic, Berlin Mitte und die Welt - Wie sie einmal war, Horst
Bosetzky's Kalte Engel... Speaking or writing German, of course, is
a whole other thing!
I was 3 days old on election day 1944, when FDR won his fourth term. I was
born when the Rosies were still riveting, turning out bombers and tanks and
ships by the thousands; the songs on the radio were about men going off to
war and women working hard in defense plants so they could come home soon.
I was alive during the Battle of the Bulge, the Soviet liberation of eastern
Europe and the concentration camps, the Yalta convention, the surrender of
Germany, and the dropping of A-bombs on Japan, and for the next 20 years of
atmospheric A- and H-bomb testing.
Atomic bomb
They used to show the blasts live on the
Today show. Years later, in the mid-1960s at Columbia when I worked in the
Engineering School and Physics Department, I knew physicists who had worked
on the A-Bombs in WWII, including Bill Havens and Chien-Shung Wu, and also
met I.I. Rabi, James Rainwater, Luis Alvarez, I forget who else. Also
Herbert Goldstein who was one of the developers of radar. And later I was
close friends with a 1930s-40s computer pioneer, Herb Grosch, who was in
charge of the last-minute A-bomb calculations. They were done at Watson Lab
on 116th Street (the Casa Hispanica building), which had the most powerful
computing capacity on earth in 1945. He didn't know what the calculations
were for until afterwards, he just programmed them:
The population of the USA when I was born was 184 million; in 2018 it's 326
million, about double. Of the world, about 2.5 billion in 1944 and over
7.7 billion as I write this.
All my grandparents were born in the 1800s, the oldest one in 1869 if you
can believe that. My father was born during World War I. The flag had
48 stars until I was 14. Africa, the mideast, and South Asia were still
mainly European colonies. Major League baseball was still segregated. I
remember when the last Civil War veteran died, somewhere around 1960. I
remember the Berlin Airlift, the Korean War, the trial and execution of the
Rosenbergs, the Army-McCarthy hearings (when we first got our TV, my dad
made my mom take notes in shorthand and then transcribe them), the
assasination attempts on Truman, the Puerto Rican nationalists shooting up
the US congress, and of course the assassinations of JFK (who I met once),
RFK, MLK, and Malcolm X. I saw RFK and his family all the time because I
passed his house in McLean VA on the way work in my 1962 summer job.
I should have seen MLK when he gave his Beyond Vietnam speech at
Riverside Church in 1967, but I was working and/or had classes that day.
Admiral William Halsey
During WWII (I actually remember this) my parents were bringing me in the
baby carriage up Constitution Avenue to the Navy Department, where my father
worked (and my mother had also worked until 1944), when Admiral William
"Bull" Halsey came over to admire me. He bent down to take a look and I
remember a lot of white hair, a gigantic red face, and gold braid all over
the place, blotting out the sky. The Navy Department
building where both my parents worked in the Signal Intelligence Service
[a.k.a. Signal Security Agency] where they first met and throughout the war
was on the National Mall between the Lincoln Memorial and Washington
Monument (see photo); it was torn down in the
1960s.
It
and the adjoining Munitions Building were the Pentagon before there
was a Pentagon (the War Department moved to the Pentagon in 1942, leaving
it entirely to the Navy). I remember the Navy Building very
clearly, I went there lots of times until 1946.
The Good War
There's a fair amount of World War II nostalgia in this story. I was born
in it, all the adult family members that I knew in person —
Mom,
Dad,
Uncle Pete,
and my
grandmother Gus — were in it, as were the
parents of all my friends — combat veterans, land, sea, and air;
nurses, Rosie-the-Riveters... The small community where we lived
(Chesterbrook, Virginia) sprang up in 1946 to
meet the demand for cheap GI-Bill financed homes for the flood of new
postwar families. Every house was full of WWII memorabilia. Overhead, the
thunder of WWII piston-engine military aircraft (we lived near the Bolling and Andrews
Air Force Bases). Was World War II the "Good War"? In many ways (the
well-known ones) it was, but in many others it wasn't: the carpet-bombing of
civilian populations centers, the Japanese internment, the A-bombs, racism
in the Armed Forces, the failure to deal with Holocaust, etc. Nevertheless,
it pulled the people of the country together like nothing else before or
since. American soldiers saw themselves as the good guys,
were welcomed as
liberators all over Europe and were welcomed back home after the war
with unprecedented goodwill and rewards for their service: GI home loans,
GI-bill college educations, free medical care... In the USA, the early
postwar years were like a paradise compared to what came before and, for
that matter, what was to come. The early postwar was a good time too; for
example the integration of the armed forces and eventually the schools. And
the American occupation of Germany where Black soldiers were treated like
human beings for the first time (and the American schools and housing were
integrated from Day One).
References...
Life's Picture History of World War II, LIFE Magazine (1950) (pictured
above). This was the only coffee-table in our house from when I was five
years old until I left home in 1963; it weighs almost six pounds.
Studs Terkel,
The
Good War, Pantheon Books (1984). An oral history of World War; the
title is not without irony.
David Swanson,
Leaving
World War II Behind, Ingram (2020): "If you, like me, thought that WWII
was the exceptional ‘good war,’ think again. David Swanson brilliantly cuts
through the myths surrounding WWII, and in the process cuts through the fog
of all wars." —Medea Benjamin (CODEPINK).
Film:The
Best Years of Our Lives (1946), multiple-Oscar winner directed by
William Wyler,
who was deeply involved in the War, about three returning combat veterans
and their adjustment back to civilian life.
Film:Let
There Be Light [US Army PMF 5019] (1946), John Huston's remarkable
documentary about the treatment received by returning veterans with PTSD in
Army hospitals, a level of care that is inconceivable today, when veterans
returning from our neverending forever wars are left to drink and drug
themselves to death. Suppressed until 1981.
Then vs now...
I had a long long section here about how much things have changed in
my lifetime but I moved it out, you can see it here if you want.
I was born Francis da Cruz Jr on November 10, 1944, at the height
of World War II, in Georgetown University Hospital, Washington DC,
which makes me a War Baby, not a Boomer. And a military brat. This was
just five months after D-Day, about six months before VE Day, and nine
months before VJ Day and the end of the war. Unfortunately I missed
the New Deal by 16 months,
strictly speaking — it ended in mid-1943 — but not really: the
era of massive federal spending to achieve full employment carried through
to the end of the war, and beyond.
Mom & Dad wedding portrait March 1944
My mom & dad, both in the Navy, were married March 14, 1944, at the
Naval Receiving Station Anacostia, Washington DC, both in uniform, both
still in the Navy. Mom was 100% Norwegian; Dad's father was Portuguese and
his mother descended (on both sides) from German/Swiss immigrants in Maryland.
Dad, Mom, and Uncle Pete all served in WWII, as well as many of Mom's
brothers and in-laws (and her oldest brother-in-law served in WWI). My dad
was a Radioman Petty Officer First Class (PO1, E6, 3 stripes) and my mother
a WAVES Radioman Third Class PO3 (E4, one stripe). WAVES = Women Accepted
for Volunteer Emergency Service but it looks like a plural noun, so it's OK
to say "My mother was a WAVE". (Uncle Pete, by the
way, was an enlisted man in the Marines who rose to Platoon Sergeant (E6,
equivalent to my dad). In the Army I was a Specialist 4 (E4)... No
officers in this family!) (Except
cousin Danny.)
My mom: Vivian Maxine Lund, born Minneota MN, March 5,
1922, died July 26, 2002. Minneota is a tiny town where most people were
(and are) Norwegian or Icelandic. My Mom's family was Norwegian and
Norwegian was spoken as well as English; she still used some Norwegian words
and phrases when I was a kid. Diseases: lymphoma, polycythemia, strokes,
embolisms, staph infections. She was a heavy smoker most of her life.
Cause of death: strokes, hundreds of them. On the death certificate it says
Cardiorespiratory Arrest due to Atrial Fibrillation.
My dad: Francis Fuller da Cruz, born Lawrence KS,
April 1, 1918, died 1991. I have no idea where the Fuller came from. The
only association it has for me is the "Fuller Brush man" (door-to-door brush
salesmen). He had lung cancer several times, colon cancer, and multiple
heart attacks from 50-some years of super-heavy smoking and drinking, but
wound up dying from gangrene.
My brother, Dennis da Cruz, born Washington DC April
10, 1949, died July 22, 1978 (lymphoma). Dennis was named after Dennis the
Menace (really).
The Talking Mule
The Menace
My dad named me after himself (except for the Fuller part, thank goodness).
His dad named him, ironically, after St. Francis of Assisi. I never
liked my name, not only because it sounds like a girl, but also because when
I was a kid there was a series of dumb movies called "Francis the Talking
Mule", which, of course, became my name in elementary school too. Not until
Pope Francis did I start feeling a little better about it. (When we moved
to Arlington and I met Ludwig, he was the one who
decided I should be called Frank.)
Although the New Deal ended just before I was born, nevertheless I grew up
in it. The GI Bill (Servicemen's Readjustment Act) was signed into law by
FDR June 22, 1944 (while I was in utero) and it allowed my
impoverished father to buy a house in 1947, and it even helped me through
college, 1966-70. Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson continued and
sometimes even strengthened or added to New Deal programs, for example
Medicare and Medicaid. This was the era of the greatest security that
working people of the USA had ever known. From the end of WWII until
somewhere in the 1970s, most people had secure employment, the necessities
of life were affordable, and the stress level was low. For most people
it was possible to enjoy life.
Next-door neighbor Denny Neier, 1958,
with Japanese and German souvenirs.
I was raised in a World War II culture since both my parents and my uncle
were veterans, my grandmother had been a Navy Reserve nurse, and all the
families around me were also veterans, much like you guys were raised in a
1960s culture even though it was already the 80s. When I was growing up
there were WWII artifacts around the house like, for example, toilet paper
with the Fuehrer's face on each sheet, LIFE Magazine issues from the 1940s,
assorted Morse code equipment. Neighbors' attics were full of Japanese and
German battle flags, helmets, rifles, bayonets, belt buckles, etc. I went
to school in military-surplus Quonset huts; we had a Victory Garden; my
parents spoke in nautical jargon: overhead = ceiling, deck =
floor, head = bathroom, below = downstairs, rack
or sack = bed, hit the deck = get out of bed, chow =
food, skivvies = underwear,
swab = mop, shove off = leave, etc. Navy meat meant
"the more you chew it, the bigger it gets".
Religion… My father's father was a Catholic priest who left the
priesthood and my grandmother was a Catholic convert, so they were both
nominally Catholic. I don't know if my father or uncle were ever baptised,
but my dad constantly made anti-Catholic remarks. He never told me that
both of his parents were Catholic and that, therefore (by birth at least) he
was too. His brother, on the other hand, chose a Jesuit university
(Georgetown) to finish his long-delayed bachelor's degree. But none of them
were particularly religious. And my own brother was baptised as Catholic at
the end of his life.
Both my family and Uncle Pete's family believed that my grandfather had been
excommunicated, but it turns out he wasn't. Raimundo says, "Daniel não foi
excomungado mas foi muito hostilizado pela Igreja Católica porque nos seus
estudos e escritos substituía a fé em Deus pela ciência e passou a ser muito
hostilizado pelos meios católicos que até aí frequentava. Não é tanto para
escapar ao regímen de Portugal mas da Igreja e ambientes católicos
fanáticos. Penso eu. (That´s what I think)". In English: he was harassed by
the Church because in his studies and writings he replaced faith in God by
science, reason, and logic... so just walked away.
Grandad 1910
In any case, not too many people can say their grandfather was a Catholic
priest! Going further back, super-Christian Portuguese and Spanish names
such as da Cruz and dos Santos were given to Jewish and Moorish
families who were forcibly converted during the Inquisition (but of course
these are not the only ones with such names); my Portuguese relatives all
believe they are descended from Jews. However, the da Cruz name did
not appear in the family tree until 1842, so I don't think we can thank the
Inquisition for it. Anyway, my DNA test showed 1% "North African" genes and
nothing Jewish (1% means a Great-Great-Great or Great-Great-Great-Great
grandparent). My mother's side is, of course, 100% Lutheran (Protestant)
as were almost all Norwegians, since Norway was forcibly converted in 1536
when it was conquered by Christian III of newly Lutheran Denmark (before
that many or most Norwegians had been Catholic since about the year 1000).
Mom wanted us to go to church (and we did for a few weeks) but more as a
continuation of a Lund family tradition than anything
else; she never talked about the religious part at all.
Washington DC 1944-45
19th Street 1945
19th Street 1945
My dad was in the Navy when I was born. He had been living with his mom in
Arlington, but in June 1944 (while Mom was still pregnant with me) he got an
apartment at 312 19th Street NE Apartment C in DC, between C and D Streets,
way over by the Anacostia River, 4 miles along Constitution Avenue from his
job at the Navy Department — the same distance but in the opposite
direction from my grandmother's house where he lived before. Our apartment
was in a small building, like a townhouse, in an area that in later years
was 100% Black, but now it's all yuppified (the only people you see in
Google Street View are yuppies).
Me and Spencer 1945
Light switch
Even though we lived there only seven months when I was very little, I still
I have memories of the place. One of them is of the light switches, which
were composed of big fat cylindrical buttons, arranged vertically. When you
push one, the other one pops out. The button for "on" had a pearlish face,
the "off" button was black. Operating the switch made a very distinctive
noise. I remember my Mom turning the light off after putting me to bed in
the crib. The other memory is of another baby my age, named Spencer
Hawkins. We lived on the second floor and there was a back door with a big
stairs to a back yard. They would put my playpen right up against Spencer's
so we could "play" together. He would reach in and grab the little bit of
hair that I had and pull my head up against the bars with all his might.
This happened every time. I never wanted to go down there but didn't know
how to talk so couldn't explain it.
312 19th St NE in 2017
I looked in Google Street View (Oct 2017), and I see 312 is a 2-story row
house. It's painted a pale yellow now but if you look closely you can see
it's made of brick, and the house where I lived then was definitely brick as
you can see from the other pictures. The last time I saw it in person was
in 1988 (it was not yellow then) and the house I'm seeing in Google now
certainly was not built since then. It's only 2 blocks from Anacostia Park,
on the river of the same name, so probably my Mom took me there to play as
an infant.
Gus's House Arlington VA 1945-47
Gus's house in 2012 (Google)
Mom and me at Gus's house 1946
After her marriage with my grandfather failed,
my grandmother Gus moved back to the Washington
DC area and lived in a series of apartments until in 1940 she married
somebody called Jake (Benjamin L. Jacobs) and they bought the house in
Arlington VA on the NW corner of Glebe Road and North 23rd Street, where she
lived out her life and where I was conceived — my dad showed me the
exact spot in 1988, an upstairs bedroom under the gabled roof — and
where I lived as a toddler. Gus and Jake were together a couple years, he
took off, and they divorced. According to her death certificate Gus was
Mrs. Jacobs until her divorce (1946) and then took back the name
da Cruz.
In any case, Dad moved back in with Gus (and presumably Jake)
in 1941 when, in his second Navy hitch, he was assigned to Navy Department
headquarters in DC. Pete also lived there for about a year in 1940-41 when
he was going to George Washington University, then went off to the war, then
moved back in with her in the mid-1950s when he resumed his college
education at Georgetown University on the GI Bill. About Jake... Dad writes
in a 1941 letter to Gus after spending a week's shore leave with her, "I was
surprised, in a way, at what a nice old guy Jake is. I don't hardly know
what I expected, but whatever it was, he certainly surpassed all my
expectations."
When Dad, Mom, and I lived with Gus in 1945-47,
Glebe Road was lined with substantial 1920s-vintage white frame houses;
I remember going trick-or-treating along there as a child. I used to play
with the little girl two houses over in her backyard, Laura Schmidt.
Inside Gus's house 1946
Windup Victrola
The house was mail order from Sears,
a Sears Modern
Home, most likely a
href="https://searshomes.org/index.php/2011/07/02/wonderful-world-of-westlys/">
Westly which cost $941.00 at the time
(see other
images). Being in Gus's house was like traveling back in time.
Ornate upholstered furniture, piano (she could play it), art-deco lamps,
Persian rugs, heavy velvet draperies, and a gigantic hand-cranked wooden
victrola like the one in the picture, with a tinny
little speaker built into the tone
arm, which used bamboo needles. As
noted elsewhere in here, Gus had thousands and
thousands of 78rpm records of 1920s pop music in her attic. Many of these
old records could only be played with bamboo needles; a metal one would ruin
them.
Gus bought me a rocking chair
Dad and me at Gus's house 1946
The house is still there as of 2020 but considerably renovated.
The huge backyard was sold off in two pieces; the farthest half in 1956; a
new brick house was built there, and later the rest so now there's barely
room for a lawn table in back. You can still see the back porch where I
used to sing Zipidee Doo Dah in 1946, my favorite song when I was 2. I'm
not kidding, I remember this clearly. The original backyard was full of all
kinds of things… gourds (another quirk of Gus and her sisters,
collecting gourds), a plum tree, all kinds of ceramic pots and shards, a
gang of ducks, her cat Tiger (who lived outside with the ducks and ate
mice), various other pets, twisting vines, huge flowering bushes, a
vegetable garden, various ornate settees… It was like being in a
Gaugin painting.
Gus's scandalously lush back yard
Gus and me in back yard
Gus had a tenant living the basement. The radiator in the kitchen had
a big hole for the water pipe and I could look through to see the tenant's
apartment. One time I dropped all my Tinker Toy sticks down the hole. This
was when I was one year old; I remember it clearly.
Another memory… Once when we were there she had mice under the front
porch. So she filled one of those old fashioned metal flit guns (yes, I
have a picture of it) with DDT and put
on her grey WWI gas mask and went under the
porch on hands and knees to "fumigate" it. I was so impressed by the gas
mask she gave it to me. It was very antique-looking, with a long canister
that stuck out in front. Of course it never occurred to me to ask her about
her experiences in WWI (my Dad was born to her during that war), but she was
indeed a Red Cross nurse during both World War I and the 1918
flu. And World War II.
As you came down Gus's stairs there was a Mona Lisa reproduction on the
facing wall, and the bathroom to the right that had an etched-glass window
so people couldn't see inside. On the sink was her tube of Ipana
toothpaste, a top brand then, now long forgotten except in crossword
puzzles.
For years I used to have a dream about my grandmother's house; I was very
little, crawling up the narrow red-carpeted stairs (as a baby) towards a
room at the top of the stairs and coming into a bright light with some kind
of intense feeling. This was long before my dad ever told me I was
conceived up there; I always pictured the act taking place on the grass next
to the Reflecting Pool in DC, between the Lincoln Memorial and the
Washington Monument, where my Mom's barracks
were in 1944 (WAVE Quarters B, West Potomac Park) (but now that I think
about it, that would have been in February, a bit chilly for frolicking in
the grass).
The area around Gus's house in the 1940s was like small-town America in a
Frank Capra movie. There was a small cluster of old-fashioned stores two
blocks away at "the corner" (intersection of Lee Highway and Glebe Road, Lee
as in Robert E) — hardware, barber, drug store, a small Safeway
supermarket, a very small movie theater (the Glebe Theater), Peoples Drug
Store (soda fountain), and best of all the "Dime Store" — Libby's 5
and 10 Cent Store (actually Robertson's) — that sold toys, candy,
comic books, "notions", and other cheap things like a mini-Woolworth's owned
by a lady named Libby who was very nice to children (or, it turns
out, at least to white children). When I was 9 and 10
years old, whenever we went to visit my grandmother, she'd give me a whole
dollar and I'd go to the Dime Store on my own and come back with a load of
toys and comics (which in those days included the comic book called
Mad, which later became Mad Magazine).
As noted elsewhere, after Gus died we moved to a brick house directly behind
her house but three short blocks away. It didn't occur to me before, but
the house we moved into in 1956 didn't exist when we lived with her in
1945-47. I wonder what was back there then! (Later... now I know; see
the 1943 Franklin Survey plat maps.)
After a gap of some 22 years, I visited my Dad in 1988, and he took me on a
nostalgia tour in his car… The 19th Street SE apartment in DC, Gus's
house.... He walked up to the door and knocked on it, a youngish
prosperous-looking man answered, dad explained he used to live there in the
1940s and his mother was the original owner; the man invited us in to look
around. This was when dad showed me where I was created. The place didn't
look very familiar inside, the man said they had done a lot of renovating.
Dad mentioned that he and Pete had remodeled the basement so Gus could take
in boarders. The man said, "So YOU were the ones! That was the worst
wiring job I ever saw!" (Dad blamed Pete for it.)
From an email to George Gilmer, December 2015,
about how I happened to have grown up in Virginia:
Your family goes back pretty far in the area. Mine all came from other
places. The "anchor" was my father's mother (Gus) who lived in Arlington on
Glebe Road at N.23rd Street. She was born in Maryland but after she got
married she moved to Kansas with my Portuguese grandfather, and that's where
my Dad was born. But when she and my grandfather broke up she moved back to
the Washington area to work at Georgetown University Hospital as a nurse.
My Dad joined the Navy in 1937 and sailed the seas until the USA got in the
War and was assigned to Navy Dept HQ in DC and lived with his mother in the
Glebe Road house, met my Mom at work, I was born, etc. Anyway it seems like
he always wanted to live somewhere close to his Mom, so sometimes we lived
in her house, we lived in an apartment in NE DC for a while, moved back to
her house, then to Chesterbrook. When she died in 1955 we moved to a house
that was only 2 blocks from her house (we would have moved to her house but
my father and my uncle couldn't agree who would get it so they sold it). My
Mom, as you know, came from Minnesota. The only American side of the family
was my father's mother, a family that had been in Maryland since the 1700s;
everybody else was recent immigrants.
So in short, Gus was the anchor. Even if she and my dad didn't get along
and he thought she was crazy, he always wanted to be around where she was.
Danny (my cousin who grew up in Lebanon) says, "It's a
real shame we didn't get to know Gus directly, although Dad [Uncle Pete]
talked to us about her with fondness (and also left us the impression she was
a quirky force field around which they gravitated)". Danny's sister Lina (also
my cousin, of course) says, "Dad loooooved Teita Lenore and made us love her
... by talking to us about [her]". He loved her so much that Lina's middle
name is Lenore! Danny and Lina's cousin Rif (Rifa'at Haffar, son of the
sister, Najwa, of Gus's daughter-in-law Leila), upon reading this, commented
"What a wonderfully disruptive creature she must have been!".
In 1947 my dad bought a small house on a quarter-acre of land just two miles
from Gus's house in Arlington. The house was on Kirby Road in Fairfax
County in a place that everybody called Chesterbrook but that wasn't on any
map. Our mailing address was RFD 2, Falls Church, Virginia. The area was totally
rural except for this brand-new small development of cheap houses built for
returning veterans, plus some older and larger houses along the
short stretch of Kirby Road between our house and Old Dominion Drive. My
dad got a GI Bill loan for $7000 to buy the house and paid back $90 a month.
The closest "town" was McLean (in those days just a crossroads with a few
stores).
New (July 2024):
CLICK HERE for aerial views
from 1953 and 1960.
View down the hill - GI-bill cinderblock cubes, late 1940s
There was a dense forest in front of our house and another forest down the
hill, behind the cluster of GI Bill houses. Up and down Kirby Road were old
family farms, pastures, animals, and more forests. All gone since the
1960s. I have a whole website about this place with photos and stories;
click here to see it.
It pains me to say it, but our little working-class GI-Bill housing
development was the beginning of the process that gentrified the whole area
out of existence.
Tyson's Corner 1950s
Bond Bread door
McLean (pronounced "mclane"), which is now a metropolis, was just an
intersection with a feed store, a Safeway, a gas station, and a junk store;
Tyson's Corner had a rickety old wooden diner with a Bond Bread
screen door (a fixture of rural Virginia in the mid-1900s) and cows grazing
on the land around it. I'd go there on my bike, five miles there and five
miles back, just to get an ice cream soda. All of these places are now
glass-and-steel metropolises complete with highways and cloverleafs.
Our back yard (and the Walkers')
At first we had the house but no car, no TV, no phone, no toaster, no
washing machine. We saved scraps of soap, grew our own vegetables, got milk
and eggs from the farmers. When milk ran low, my Mom would cut it with
water. The milk came straight from the cows up the road; it had a layer of
cream on top.
The road our house was on was a dirt road until about 1955. When the road
needed work and when it was finally paved, the work was done by chain gangs
of Black prisoners.
Manassas battlefield - Click to enlarge
Our house was only 3 miles from Washington DC, years before the postwar
suburban explosion wiped out the Civil-War era farms and expanses of forest
and open fields. The area was originally settled by newly freed slaves in
the 1860s. Of course Indians lived there before that; the tribes in that
area were Manticore and Powhatan, but I don't recall anybody ever finding
any trace of them. Not too far away is the well-preserved Manassas
battlefield, where the farmhouses and fields are unchanged and the look
(aside from added statues and historical markers) is pretty much the same as
the farming area community in which the GI-Bill houses were embedded in
1946-47. Apropos of Manassas, I was with Russel Hill when, plowing
with his tractor, he turned up a Confederate belt with brass CSA buckle.
Harry and Avis 1960s
Harry Hill mid-1950s
The Hill farm 1950s, barn at right
The Hill Farm
Just up the road a couple hundred feet was the Hill farm: Russell and Avis
Hill and their son Harry, who was one my major childhood friends, and Avis's
mother Helen Walker; Avis grew up on this farm, Russel grew up on another
farm down the road. Harry was like Huck Finn, always getting into trouble.
The farm was 40 acres, usually fallow but sometimes Russell would plant a
crop of tobacco or rye on the least-recently-used quarter of land. I
remember tobacco drying in the barn, of which you can see a piece in the
photo; it was bigger than it looks. There were other outbuildings too, and
all kinds of rusty old plows and harrows and rakes and rusted hulks of 1920s
pickup trucks and old school buses scattered over the land. But he did have
a working tractor; I used to ride on it with him. I spent a lot of my time
there. Avis would often give me lunch (invariably Campbell's tomato soup
and piece of toast). One day when we were sitting around the kitchen table
at lunch, Russel sees something in a tree out the window, grabs his shotgun
(which is leaning up in the corner right next to him) and shoots
it...BOOM!!! "Goddamn crows!" It happened in a second and I could
hardly hear anything for the rest of the day. He was always playing tricks
on me, like getting me shocked on electric fences, giving me whisky to
drink, etc. But on the positive side he showed me how to make apple cider,
how to get walnuts out of their husks, how to use a plow, how to play Edison
cylinders, how to castrate a horse (he had a special tool for that), how to
painlessly kill a litter of unwanted kittens... (Not that I ever did the
last two!)
The Hill farm by our house belonged to Avis's family, it's where she grew
up; her mother (Harry's grandmother) Helen Walker still lived there. Russel
grew up on a much larger Hill farm down the road. After we moved away he
and Avis sold the farm to real estate developers for a lot of money, enough
replace the farmhouse (on the corner he kept) with a much larger new house,
and also to buy a much larger farm in Warren County VA. Russell died in a car
accident 1966 and Avis died in 1995.
The Walkers
Nolan Walker
Mary Walker, Mom
Jimmie Walker 1956
Our next-door neighbor on the other side was the Walker family: Nolan, Mary,
and their son Jimmie. Nolan was a Navy WWII veteran who had a janitorial
business and Mary had been a Rosie the Riveter. Jimmie (like Harry) was a
couple years younger than me. Jimmie and I made contact by email after 60
years and he turned out to have a nearly perfect memory, plus he had a lot
of knowledge of the history of the area. Mary is the one
who rescued my mom from the washing machine,
and also probably saved Mom's life one of the times when
she tried to kill herself.
To the southwest, Kirby Road was lined with farms.
These were much bigger than the Hill farm, maybe 80-100 acres, and they had
barns and other outbuildings, livestock, live-in farmhands, grazing land,
fields for corn, rye, or tobacco; pigsties, chickens, goats, ducks, and
geese. Many of these farming families were related to the Hills. I would
estimate that those farmhouses dated from the 1860s to about 1900; they were
wooden, painted white, with a big front porch. Some had outhouses rather
than bathrooms with plumbing. I remember being at one of the farms when
they were digging a well — the old-fashioned way: with a shovel. The
farmer with his shirt off about 20 feet down in the red clay and still no
sign of water.
Farm animals roamed free (no confining them into tiny boxes for their whole
life, as is done now) — cows went out to pasture in the morning and
"came home" to the barn at night, where they were milked the next morning,
usually by the children. The farm ladies used the expression, "til the cows
come home". They didn't actually come home by themselves; the kids
would go out bring them in, so the expression actually meant either "never"
or "forever", depending on context. There was always a big shade tree where
the cows could lay around in the shade on hot summer days, when the
temperature could go to 105, and there were electric fences to keep the cows
in the pasture, and within it big well-worn salt licks for their enjoyment.
For us kids, the cows were fun to play wish but also a little scary when
they chased us.
Chickens lived in a big airy coop where they could run around and it didn't
get all stinky. Rabbits lived in hutches that they chewed their way out of.
Pigs had their own big area for wallowing. Geese, ducks, dogs, and cats ran
free and the roosters crowed at sunup (and a course of dogs chimed in). The
main meal was served at noon, all the family and the hands around a long
table heaped with fried chicken, mashed potatoes, greens cooked in hamhocks,
and home-baked biscuits, with fresh-made lemonade to drink. The farmers
— Black and White alike — helped each other out, shared
equipment, and socialized.
When I was about ten I bought a bicycle for $40 that I had saved up from my
25¢/week allowance and 75¢/hour wages digging postholes and I went all over
the place on it by myself, on the country roads, past farms and fields,
along forest paths, to distant towns just to get some little treat.
When Little League started in 1956, sometimes the practices or games were
miles and miles away and I'd bike there. It was a good bike, it was like an
"English racer" (i.e. thin tires and frame) but instead of handbrakes, which
I thought were stupid, it had pedal brakes. There were big hills where I
could go down at 40mph (I had a speedometer). I never wore a bike helmet,
never even heard of such a thing. Ditto later in life when I had bicycles
in NY, you guys had helmets for when Mommie and I took you on long rides
sitting in baby seats on the backs of the bikes… around Central Park,
over the GW Bridge to NJ, etc. Sometimes we'd go with Howard and Lita and
Sarabecca.
Howard was my friend (and boss) from work, our families were very close
from before you guys were born until 1984, when they moved away. Howard
died in October 2022, I wrote a eulogy for him
HERE.
Aside from the bike, the other thing I used money for as a kid was buying
plastic models of WWII airplanes and gluing them together. No, I wasn't a
glue sniffer. Later on, after we moved to Arlington, Ludwig and I blew them
all up with cherry bombs.
C&O Canal
Hopfenmaier Rendering Plant
My father commuted to DC every day to work, there was a
WV&M bus that
stopped about a half mile away on Old Dominion Drive. I remember some
things about DC in those days, the most interesting was a canal (the
Chesapeake and Ohio [C&O] Canal) near Key Bridge, built about 1825,
which was still in operation when I was little. It is just wide enough for
a barge. The barge was pulled by mules on the tow-path alongside, the mules
driven by Black men, like a scene from the antebellum South. (Just
downstream of Key Bridge was the uninhabited Roosevelt Island, where my dad
said he used to take women for sex in the woods during the War.)
(Hmmm… perhaps including my Mom!) Also on the Potomac at K Street
was the Hopfenmaier Rendering Plant that converted dead animals into
fertilizer and put out a horrific stench (a holdover from the days before
cars; it's where all the dead cart horses ended up). Cars traveling along
the freeway had to roll up their windows, it was a DC ritual. Gus
had a lot of jokes about this place but I can't remember them.
Postwar margarine
My mom baked bread because we couldn't afford to buy it at the store, and we
made toast in the stove's broiler because we coudn't afford a toaster. If we
had meat, it was usually Spam. More often we'd have beans... Navy beans of
course. Sometimes we didn't have anything for dinner except toast and milk.
Mom would put a slice of toast in a bowl and pour hot milk over it; she
called it Graveyard Stew. To me it was a wonderful treat. It also had a
pat of margarine (I never even heard of real butter until after I left home).
Margarine came in a plastic bag. It was white and there was a little red pill;
you had to squeeze and massage the bag to make the margarine turn yellow.
Mom always
gave us a hot breakfast because it was "the most important meal of the day":
eggs, bacon, toast, applesauce, and milk. She saved the bacon fat in cans
and jars and used it for cooking instead of oil. Sometimes we had oatmeal,
and on special occasions pancakes or waffles.
One of the main compulsions I still have from those days is to never to
waste food (or soap... we used to save the tiniest slivers of soap and
combined them into new bars, a habit left over from wartime rationing).
Sometimes they couldn't afford coffee (or it was still scarce) and drank
Postum.
Mom made our clothes (and her own) herself and washed them in a tub a with a
washboard and brown soap. If she needed to make a phone call she used the
neighbors' phone. We didn't go anywhere. This existence made my mom pretty
depressed. But at the time I didn't think any of this was unusual because
it was all I knew. Little by little my dad earned more money; I remember
the big milestones: a real toaster, a Maytag cast-iron washing machine (with
a power ringer), in 1950 a new Ford, and finally about 1953 or -54, a TV (so
I lived the first 9 or 10 years of my life without television, and then
another five years while in Germany, and another 2 years after the Army, so
about 17 out of my first 24 years with no TV).
For health care there was a dentist, Dr. Cooksie (I barely remember him) and
a husband-and-wife medical practice, Dr. Willard and Dr. White, in Arlington
close to my grandmother's house. If I got sick with measles or mumps or
chicken pox (I had all those) my Mom would call from the neighbor's house
and Dr. Willard would come in his car. For measles they had to make the
house dark inside for a week. When I was five, evidently Dr. Willard told
my parents that I needed to have my tonsils and adenoids out, and to be
circumcised. Standard practice in those days except circumcision was
normally done a birth, not at age 5... Ouch! (in a 1949 letter from Dad to
Pete announcing the birth of Dennis, he says "We had this boy circumsized,
and I curse the Navy doctor who was too bored to perform the same assistance
to Bubba" [me]). A visit to or from Drs. Willard and White was $5.00. I
had to go every six months to have the wax removed from my ears... it built
up until I was just about deaf. But after I was 10 or so it didn't happen
any more.
Mom used Norwegian words in everyday speech but I didn't know they weren't
English. The main ones I remember are "takk skal du ha" (pronounced
tuks-guh-duh-HA) meaning thanks very much, "skærk" (not sure of the
spelling), meaning crust of bread (as in "eat your skærks!"), "hutfeduma!"
meaning "Damn it!". She also called a head scarf a "babushka", I don't know
where she got that! My dad, on the other hand, never showed any sign that
his father was Portuguese.
Radio/phonograph console 1946
Before TV we'd do different things at night. Often, just read. Or play
checkers. In summer we'd go out in the yard and watch the sun go down, or
wait for the big storm to come. In winter, we'd listen to radio
shows… Dragnet, Gangbusters, The Whistler, The Lone Ranger, The Green
Hornet, The Shadow, The Great Gildersleeve, Death Valley Days, Duffy's
Tavern, Our Miss Brooks, Fibber McGee and Molly, Grand Central Station,
Inner Sanctum, Captain Midnight, Tom Corbett Space Cadet… I remember
all of these from the late 40s and early 50s. We had a
big wooden radio and record player
console with cloth over the speakers; Dennis and I would lay on the rug
next to it to listen, picturing the action in our heads.
Movies in those days were creative, made with live actors, original scripts,
original ideas, usually based on real life, not comic books. There were
hardly ever sequels (with some exceptions like the Thin Man and Tarzan
series). Going to movies was fun, not painful. Admission was a dollar or
less, there were no ads, theaters were lushly decorated, clean, and
comfortable, there were ushers, and there was a huge velvet curtain that
opened when the show was about to start. The show consisted of a newsreel,
previews, sometimes a travelogue, on Saturday afternoons a serial ending
with a cliffhanger, a Disney or Warner Brothers cartoon, and then the
feature. After we moved to Arlington when I was 11,
the Glebe theater was just a couple blocks away
and kids got in for a quarter. I saw all the famous monster and science
fiction movies there: Creature from the Black Lagoon, This Island Earth,
Forbidden Planet, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Incredible Shrinking
Man, Godzilla, some of them about space, others about about monsters created
or awakened by atomic testing.
Reading the Sunday Comics 1952
Another source of entertainment were the comics in the daily newspaper,
which was delivered to our door… L'il Abner, Steve Canyon, Terry and the
Pirates, Superman, Little Lulu, Moon Mullins, Mighty Mouse, Gasoline Alley,
Beetle Baily, Archie, Batman, Popeye, Red Ryder, Lone Ranger, Tarzan, The
Phantom, Tom and Jerry, Hi and Lois, Nancy, Dick Tracy, Pogo, Prince
Valiant, Smilin' Jack, Dagwood and Blondie, Joe Palooka, Little Orphan
Annie, Micky Mouse, Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge, Snuffy Smith, The
Katzenjammer Kids (which was set in German West Africa), Flash Gordon,
Captain Midnight…
Our TV arrived about 1954. Early TV included (evening) the variety shows of
Sid Caesar, Ernie Kovacs, Milton Berle, Martha Raye, Ed Sullivan…
Late at night were old movies and also the Tonight Show with Steve Allen,
which was a tremendous improvement over its successors. Kid shows on
Saturday morning were Froggy the Gremlin (Andy's Gang), Sky King, Cisco Kid,
Watch Mr. Wizard… And of course cartoons, mostly from the 1930s. We
also had some Confederate-themed TV shows in Virginia like The Gray Ghost
and Mosby's Raiders. There were a few kid shows in the evening too, just
before dinnertime: the Lone Ranger, Zorro, Robin Hood, and Superman. And
later, the Wonderful World of Disney, which almost caused the extinction of
the racoon when they showed Davy Crockett in four episodes in 1955
("Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee, kilt him a bar when he was only
three...")
Maytag washer
ANYWAY… Mom wasn't totally alone in the house all day because I
didn't start school until 1950, and Dennis not until about 1955. But I
think it must have been during the brief time that Dennis and I were both in
school, before we moved to Arlington, that she was alone in the house doing
the wash, feeding the wet clothes through the power ringer, when somehow her
arm was pulled into the ringer up to the shoulder and there was no way she
could get it out. Finally our next-door neighbor Mary Walker heard her
calling for help and freed her. Her whole arm was black and blue after that
but eventually it healed OK.
Pressure cooker
Another awful accident was a pressure-cooker exploding in her face. I only
remember that it happened, but not the details. Anyway, no permanent
damage. (Pressure cookers were the 1940s-50s version of the Slow Cooker,
but much more dangerous; she would buy cheap tough meat and put it in the
pressure cooker with potatoes and cabbage for a long time and it would come
out tender.)
There was no kindergarten, let alone pre-K, where we lived. But my Mom
wanted me to learn to read and write and do arithmetic starting when I was 4
or 5, so while Dad was at work she'd spend a few hours with me each day
reading from books. For arithmetic she made flashcards, and for
handwriting… When she was a girl penmanship was very important, and
she did have beautiful handwriting. As a child she had to spend hours every
day practicing overlapping curliques on lined paper, so I did some of that.
Thanks to all these lessons, I was pretty advanced when I started school and
usually did well. (My Mom was so quiet and self-effacing that as a child I
never appreciated how many technical skills she had; I knew her as "just a
Mom".)
Chesterbrook Elementary School
and the churches
The Methodist church early 1950s
Chesterbrook School with Quonset hut (demolished in 1978)
I went to Chesterbrook elementary school on Kirby Road grades 1-6.
The first three years it was a small schoolhouse with some WWII surplus
Quonset huts added in back. Because of the postwar baby boom and the
mushrooming DC suburbs, there were two grades to a room, and there were two
shifts, morning and afternoon, so there were four classes in each room each
day. One year my class was in the basement of the whites-only Methodist
church. Mostly farm kids went to Chesterbook school then; probably half the
kids were in the 4-H Club, which in those days was mainly about raising farm
animals, growing vegetables, canning and preserving, etc. Once a year there
would be a fair at the school where the 4-H kids would bring the calfs or
pumpkins or jam in hopes of a blue ribbon.
The photo on the right, taken on the bridge over Old Dominion Drive, shows
the Methodist church (1920) and to its left, the house of county Sheriff
Carl McIntosh, who was married to Russell Hill's sister Jesse. Harry and
Jimmie and I used to hang out there sometimes and Jesse would put us to work
shucking corn or shelling peas on the back porch while Carl entertained us
setting off firecrackers he'd confiscated from juvenile delinquents.
View from Chesterbrook School in 1952
The photo at left shows the view across Kirby Road from the school about
1952. At left in the photo, the Black First Baptist Church of Chesterbrook;
built in 1866, it is almost certainly the oldest building in the area. Far
right, the single-story building with green roof is the old abandoned
Stalcup's Chesterbrook market that closed some time between 1920 and 1940.
You could look inside and still see the ancient merchandise among the dust
and cobwebs), and I think I even remember rocking chairs still on the creaky
porch front porch. Left of the market, a white frame house, which might
have been the Odd Fellows Hall at one time, which
also served as a school for the Black
children until about 1940. Both of these buildings are gone today.
Down the hill, the houses and farms of African-American community,
descendents of freed slaves. At least one white family lived there too in
the early 1950s, the family of a classmate.
The First Baptist Church was founded in 1866 by Reverend Cyrus F. Carter to
serve newly freed African slaves in the area. Reverend Carter was born a
slave in Port au Prince, Haiti, in 1815 and he had been enslaved for some
time in Lancaster County, Virginia. He was emancipated before the end of
the war and served as an ambulance corpsman for the Union Army
[Source:
African
American Historic Resources in Fairfax County, Mary Ruffin Hanbury
and David W. Lewes, 16 December 2022].
Both churches are still there but the simple frame houses beyond the
Methodist church have been replaced by mansions and condo complexes — the
same that happened to Hall's Hill, the Black
community in nearby Arlington — as have the houses down the hill and,
for that matter, along the entire length of Kirby Road. Chesterbook is no
longer a modest community of slave descendents and returning veterans.
Left of First Church (not visible in the photo), the house of an old guy who
kept a cow tethered by the front porch (but apparently not when this photo
was taken). The cow was a source of fascination to all the schoolkids
because its horns were growing downwards, curving around towards its big
eyeballs, closer every year. When I moved away in 1956, the points of the
horns were a quarter inch from the eyeballs. This still worries me.
4th grade at Chesterbrook School 1954
Virginia witch face
One of my most enduring memories of Chesterbrook School comes from the huge
maps in each classroom that could be pulled down, like windowshades, to
cover the blackboard — a USA map, a world map, and a map of Virginia.
Usually the Virginia one was showing and all I could see when I looked at it
was a big scary witch face! Every day, year after year. And speaking of
windowshades, the classrooms also had blackout shades left over from WWII
that could make the room totally dark, perfect for showing movies, which
happened from time to time; they'd wheel in an old movie projector and show
some US Department of Agriculture or Health educational film. The best part
was when it was over we'd all scream to show it backwards in fast motion
instead of rewinding it directly reel-to-reel, so that way we'd see people
running around backwards, taking food out of their mouths with a spoon, even
a slimy baby calf being sucked up into its mother's butt.
Chesterbrook School 1953 annex, Quonset huts, incinerator
In 1953 to accommodate the growing population, they added a new wing with
lots of classrooms and a cafeteria. The first few years I brought lunch but
started eating in the cafeteria in 4th or 5th grade; I think it cost a
quarter. Good southern home-style farm cooking, cooked by ladies from the
nearby farms… Mashed potatos, fried chicken, fresh string
beans or greens…
Corn fritters
One day they made corn fritters (kind of
like zeppolis but made with cornmeal and with corn kernels mixed in, served
with powdered sugar or syrup, crunchy on the outside and soft and chewy on
the inside); they were so good I pestered my mom for weeks to make them, and
finally I guess she found the lady who cooked them and got the recipe.
Another thing about school cafeterias in those days was they never served
meat on Fridays; either it was no meat at all, or else fish. I don't think
that happens any more but it used to be universal.
Smithfield hams
When I brought lunch it was always the same: a Smithfield Ham salad sandwich
on homemade bread (we couldn't afford store-bought). Fresh farm milk in the
thermos with some Bosco syrup. Smithfield Ham Spread came in a tall thin
jar, like an olive jar but flattened (they stopped selling this decades
ago). It had a very strong taste; Mom mixed it with mayo and chopped
pickles. It was so good I wouldn't trade with anybody. (We never bought a
real Smithfield ham, the big one that comes in cloth bag, that would cost
way too much, but I remember Russell Hill had one hanging in one of the
outbuildings; however, I did buy one myself decades later as present for
Granpa; best gift I ever gave him.)
Scrapple, eggs, and syrup
Which reminds me, another treat we had at home sometimes (because it was so
cheap) was scrapple, which is pig scraps mixed with cornmeal and peppery
spices, fried in an iron skillet so it gets a crunchy crust; I didn't think
it was known anywhere north of Maryland but one day I found it in C-Town on
125th Street and made it for Amy (there's a Law & Order episode
where Lt. Van Buren is sending some detectives to Baltimore for some reason
and asks them to bring her back some scrapple). It's the perfect
accompaniment for grits and fried eggs with soft yolks, and you can pour
syrup on it.
A 17-year locust
A pile of dead locusts
Also in 1953… A plague of locusts! 17-year locusts (cicadas). For
about a week, they were so thick you could barely see across the street.
They were big and fat, about 2 inches long, with big bulging red eyes and
they crashed into you constantly whenever you went outside. And they were
loud! Walking to school through a dense cloud of locusts was like bumper
cars. As they died off, there were insect corpses piled up everywhere
giving off a putrid stench. I imagine this had been going on for thousands
of years, but that was the last time. After that, all the forests were
leveled to make way for suburbs, and those had been the trees where they
deposited their eggs. (I can't believe nobody took pictures of this.)
I used to get horrible cases of poison ivy, I can't even describe how bad.
For example my fingers would fuse together, my eyelids would swell shut, it
would be all over my body… Anyway, once I had a case so bad in second
grade I was out of school for two weeks, and when I came back I was so
far behind that they just put me in 3rd grade and that's how I skipped a
grade.
Me, Jimmie, Harry at a nearby farm
Back of Hill farm
Chesterbrook was totally rural when we moved there, except for our little
clump of postwar GI-Bill houses. The school was a short walk
from our house down Kirby road, which wasn't even paved when we first moved
in and of course had no sidewalks. Beyond the school and the First Baptist
Church, the Kirby Road bridge over Old Dominion Drive, then the Methodist
church and down the hill from it, the "new" Chesterbrook market and Bray's
Esso, the gas station that sponsored my little league team (1956 was first
year ever of little league in the area, a sign of creeping suburbanization).
Sámi marking knife
The operational market was the old-time kind where the man behind the
counter wore a white apron; you told him what you wanted and he got for you;
no self-service. Sometimes a farmer would bring a pig to be butchered,
or a hunter would bring a deer, and the market would sell the meat.
Once he gave me fair-size piece of deerskin, with hair on one side and
gooey bloody chunks on the other. I had the Sámi ("Lappland")
knife Uncle Pete had given me, and George Gilmer and I spent many long
days trying to clean and cure it before we gave up (these short knives
were actually used for cutting notches into the ears of reindeer to serve as
ownership marks, not for cleaning pelts).
In early years my mom shopped by calling up the market from the neighbor's
phone and reading her shopping list; later a guy named Frank, who had
several fingers missing, would drive up in an old rusty pickup truck with
the order. After we had a car, we drove to McLean to shop at the Safeway
supermarket (not very super), where a week's groceries for four cost $25.
Little League game 1956
Bray's Esso Little League team 1956
Segregation
It was the segregated South, but the lines were not super-firm.
For example, in the house behind ours was where my friend Ricky James lived.
His dad was white but his mom was Jamaican and Ricky (second from left, back
row) was somewhat brownish but went to the white school, as did a number
of other kids (e.g. two rightmost kids in back row) who were not exactly
white but were not black either. Also for part of one year I had a Black
teacher in our segregated white school. Go figure. Also the stores weren't
segregated; I never saw Colored and White signs on anything except when I
went further south, like to Charlottesville.
While the school and churches were segregated, the farms were not. A
prominent farmer, Lewis Hall, was black and his family and Hill family were
good friends and frequent visitors. I went with Harry's family sometimes to
the Hall farm on Cottonwood street about a mile and half northeast of us
along Kirby Road, when they visited and Harry and I played with their
children, who were a bit younger. It's solid suburbs now of course.
The Gilmer family
George Gilmer 1954
George Gilmer 1958
Beedee (center) 1952
John Gilmer 1945
One of my friends in Chesterbrook was George Gilmer. He and his sister
Beedee (real name Virginia, like her mother) already lived there when we
arrived in 1947, right down the hill behind our house. I had not yet
reached my 3rd birthday.
Cinderblock cubes a few months later
Gilmer house and car January 1947
At first I was more friends with Beedee (George was a year older, Beedee a
year younger). Beedee had only one eye but so many there had missing parts
this didn't seem odd to me. She usually wore a patch over the missing eye,
but sometimes she took it off. There was a partially formed eyeball in
there somewhere but it was covered with skin. She had numerous operations
but it couldn't be fixed. I thought she was cute. Anyway I played with
both her and George and their mom used to drive us to school on rainy days,
at first in her 1939 Chevy then later in her new 1952 one. She was one of
the few working mothers in the area, a social worker. George's father had
been commander of a Coast Guard cutter during WWII in the Pacific Aleutian
Islands and in the Atlantic on the Murmansk run; after the war he worked
for the USDA.
Gilmers' house, top center, 1955.
What's interesting about George is that, with only some relatively minor
gaps, we have been friends all this time and he helped me a lot with the
Chesterbrook part of this history, and he and his wife Connie
also photographed
New Deal sites around Hampton Roads for me in 2017. Plus in the 1990s
George did C-Kermit builds for me on some oddball computers at his job.
Virginia, Beedee, George 1950
We are different in every way: he's right-wing, I'm left; he's religious,
I'm not. He's a bluegrass fanatic and I... well, as Stan Freburg would say,
"too piercing!"
(he also likes Black country blues and both Black and white
gospel music). But we get along fine and discuss things on a pretty calm
and friendly level. He's married to his lifelong sweetheart, Connie, and
after running an auto repair business for many years, and then working in IT
for a decade or two after that, he and Connie retired to the Gilmer's
ancestral lands (which George bought back from Coors) in Elkton, Virginia,
where Patsy Cline came from, and they built a gigantic log house, which is
surrounded by farmland. They are close to the Shanendoah River, Blue Ridge
Mountains, and Skyline Drive. They have a large extended family of
children, grandchildren, etc. They're active in the church, and perform
country-music duos (voices, bass and guitar or mandolin) at church and
local bluegrass get-togethers. Mrs. Gilmer died just weeks after her 100th
birthday in 2017. Beedee moved to England decades ago and never came back.
John Gilmer died in 1995.
Gilmers 2017
George died Thursday, April 9, 2020, in the Coronavirus pandemic. He is
survived by his wife Connie, and his children and grandchildren. As Connie
said, "George left us to be with his Lord this afternoon. He put up a good
fight but it was too much for him. I will miss him so much but I know he is
with Jesus. But God is faithful and I have much support from our family."
The 2017 photo shows a family gathering at George's and Connie's home in
Elkton. George, his mom Virginia (age 99), and Connie are in the second row
from the top. Click the image to enlarge it and to see George's caption for
it.
A lot of other families beside the Jameses lived in the house behind ours.
Once there was a family of (what everybody called) hillbillies: man and wife
with 10 ragged dirty snotnosed kids ranging in age from infancy to about 10.
Every night in the summer the whole family would sit in a circle in the back
yard, all of them smoking cigarettes except maybe the babies, while the dad
sang and played guitar. That was the first time I ever saw a guitar. I'd
go there sometimes and he'd show it to me. In retrospect, he reminds me of
Hank Williams or Woody Guthrie.
Mona Joseph 1955
Mona and son Philip
Another family was Nick and Mona Joseph and their little boy Philip. I
don't know where Nick was from (he was not a southerner) but he hated
fascism so much that he couldn't wait for the USA to get in the war, so
(like
about 9000 other Americans)
he joined the RCAF in 1939 or -40 and flew combat missions throughout the
war, starting in North Africa. While there, he met a French Algerian
("Pied-Noir") ballerina, Mona, and they got married. Eventually they
settled in the house behind ours. Nick decorated the house with war and
aviation souvenirs, like a real (wooden) fighter-plane propeller, and he was
full of war stories. He worked at National Airport and took me there
sometimes; he took me in the flight control room, let me sit in airliner
cockpits like the big 4-engine DC-4s at night with all the lights glowing.
Mona was one of those people who knew how to do everything, you had to
admire her. She spoke French, English, and Arabic and/or Berber. She
showed my Mom how to make her Algerian dishes, so without knowing it I grew
up eating Algerian food (when we could afford the ingredients): lamb cooked
with "french style" string beans and tomatoes in sauces like the Lubee in
Samad's with Magreb spices like cinnamon, cumin, coriander, and nutmeg. I
always remember Mona in the backyard swinging wet lettuce around in a wire
basket to dry it for salad, the droplets shooting out in great arcs and
catching the setting sun.
Country life
Chesterbrook being rural, kids' lives were pretty rough compared to most
kids today. I got in fights with other kids all the time. Bullies always
picked on smaller kids, they'd take my hat or my lunchbox and I'd have to
fight them to get it back. Once in a fight at school, I knocked a kid down
and his head hit a rock; he got a concussion and had to go to the hospital.
I was in big trouble for a long time.
I was stung by bees and wasps almost daily, bitten by dogs, shot with BBs
and once by an exploding shotgun shell. One time
some older kids jumped me when I was taking a shortcut through the woods and
tried to rob me at knifepoint but somehow I fought them off without getting
cut. They wanted the $10 Timex watch my grandmother Gus had given me (they
didn't get it). Anyway it was such a common occurrence that I came home
bruised and bloody, my parents barely even remarked on it. I broke my nose
lots of times, which is why it is so lumpy and misshapen now; fights,
football… And once at Fort Knox I dived off a high board and smashed
my face onto the pool bottom; I was unconscious underwater for some unknown
number of seconds, I woke up and everything was red, swam to the surface.
Speaking of insects, we used sit out in the back yard at night and the most
amazing kinds of bugs would swarm around the single yellow lightbulb over
the back door: gigantic moths, creepy monster mosquitos, ... and in the
grass, big fat black beetles the size of a golf ball with pincers and
lobster claws… Across the road, the woods was full of box turtles and
snakes, stickbugs and praying mantises. And hummingbird moths... a moth
that looks like and mimics a hummingbird. The creek in the woods had crawfish.
The ditch in front of our house was full of frogs and tadpoles (and mosquito
larvae of course).
Other common injuries in the country involved the shins. Geese on the farms
always went for kids' shins, chomping down with their tiny sharp teeth. But
even more annoying were the old rusty barrel hoops lying hidden in the
grass… when you step on one, it flips up and whacks you with its sharp
edge right in the shin. This was similar to stepping on a rusty nail,
another common occurrence. You were supposed to get a tetanus shot when
this happened so I didn't say anything about it.
And playing, we did things so dangerous I can't believe I didn't get killed.
We totally ran wild, no such thing as adult supervision. One thing I
remember was, when they started to clear the forest to build the new
suburbs, they put all the trees in a huge pile, 30-40 feet high. On a day
when nobody was working we went there, climbed up on it, and discovered we
could slide down through the interior, zooming down through dark twisty
passages. It's only blind luck that I didn't impale myself on some broken
branch that was pointing in the wrong direction.
Sledding on the farms in the winter could be tricky too. Once there was a
deep snow that buried the barbed wire fences and I crashed into one at full
speed with my face; I could easily have lost an eye or two.
Another time, I climbed on a bulldozer that was left in place overnight in
front of the house when they were paving Kirby road and fiddled with the
buttons and levers until it started and I was heading down the road but my
dad noticed and caught up with me and turned the thing off. Good thing too,
I had no idea how to steer it or to stop it.
Another time I fell out of a tree from about 30 feet up, but wasn't hurt too
bad. But then another time I was swinging at the Hill farm on an
ancient tire swing that hung from a big tree branch that was 30-40 feet up
and the branch broke off and landed on my head. I was unconscious for a
while and when I woke up I had lost all memory of recent times, I could only
remember things from years before (this was after I had moved to Arlington,
but I didn't remember that I had moved). Harry's Mom Avis very gently and
patiently helped me recall everything.
Hill farm in 1900
Going to Harry Hill's house or to any of the other farms was like going back
to 1900 or even to 1860... wooden Victorian houses with blown-glass window
panes (when you look through them everything is wavy), kerosene lamps, and
cast-iron hand pumps instead of faucets at the kitchen sink, to bring up
water from the well. But aside from the old farms, the 1940s and early 50s
seemed modern and solid to me. There was music on the radio in the daytime
and dramatic shows at night and on special occasions we could go to the
movies.
The first movie I saw was Song of the South in 1946, with Uncle
Remus, Brer Rabbit, and Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah. This must have been at the
Glebe theater in Arlington when we were living
with my grandmother Gus, it was just a couple blocks away. It's never been
released since then because it's full of stereotypes, but it's kind of
sweet, not vicious. A lot of people thought it sugar-coated plantation life
during slavery, but actually it's set during Reconstruction.
I remember going to another movie in 1949, after we had moved to
Chesterbrook:
an Esther
Williams extravaganza in color. The whole family went in our brand-new
1950 Ford, purchased probably around October 1949, when Dennis was about six
months old. The theater had a special glassed-in balcony for families with
new babies (crying, breast-feeding, changing diapers...) — this was,
after all, the post-war baby boom. It was the State Theater
in Arlington; I read somewhere it was the first movie theater to have air
conditioning. After the movie we went to the drug store next door and sat
at the black marble soda-fountain counter on red leather revolving stools
and had ice cream treats. It must have been a birthday.
Aside from that I remember seeing other movies with my parents and Dennis in
the baby balcony at the State, mostly black and white — first-run
movies with stars like Humphrey Bogart, Ida Lupino, Johnny Weissmuller
(Tarzan), Marilyn Monroe in her early noir roles…
The Chesterbrook community swimming pool
Chesterbrook pool site about 1953
Opening ceremony 1954
Chesterbrook pool 1955
Chesterbrook pump house 1953
By 1954 several new middle-class housing developments had sprung up, so
there was enough money for everybody (i.e. all the white families) to chip
in and buy an abandoned piece of land adjacent to
the pump house on Kirby Road and across from
the school and to build a community swimming pool. This was done almost
entirely by volunteer labor, but children had to be paid; I dug postholes
for 75¢ an hour — my first paying job at age 9. Once it opened, I'd
go to the pool every summer day after school and on weekends. I learned how
to swim there, and after a year or two I was on its competitive swimming
team, along with George Gilmer, Brian Adams, and some other friends. After
we moved to Arlington, I bicycled there for swim meets and practices.
Photos by my father. In the 1954 photo (infrared) you can see a band
at the far end, with a big string bass. In the 1955 photo you can see
the new wing of the school peeking through the trees at far right, above the
car. It was a "swimming club", members-only, with a moderate annual
membership fee. At some point after we moved away in 1956 it opened its
membership to Black people. Click each photo to read more.
My mom and dad liked the pool too, but they weren't good swimmers. Mom swam
with her face in the water, so could go only as far as she could hold her
breath. My dad could do the crawl properly, and he'd do a lap or two but
with no joy, as if only to show everyone how it was done. Whereas I did
every kind of stroke including invented ones, swam on the surface and
underwater, splashed, played, dived off the low and high boards, and always
had great fun.
Arlington Ⅱ 1956-59
4839 N. 23rd Street 1957
We moved from rural Chesterbrook back to
suburban Arlington (4839 N.23rd Street, two blocks from my grandmother's
house) in 1956. We moved because she left her house and all her stuff to
her sons Dad and Pete, who couldn't agree how to divide it up, so they sold
it and my dad used his half of the proceeds to put a down payment on a brick
house built in 1948, which cost $22k. The house was small with a tiny yard
(0.13 acre), a shady screen porch, and eventually a finished (by my dad with
me helping, in knotty pine) basement. It had a cherry tree in the front
yard; we'd get buckets of yellow cherries every Fall. Most of the families
around there were military, but unlike in Chesterbrook they were officers
rather than EMs, but they too had attics full of war souvenirs: Japanese
battle flags, swords, bayonets, German and Japanese rifles and pistols, Nazi
stuff, etc. Most them worked at Fort Myer or Fort Belvior in VA and they
often took me to the bases with their kids to go swimming. Just a few
blocks away was the house of the founder of the American Nazi Party, George
Lincoln Rockwell. Sometimes his people would stuff flyers and leaflets in
our mailbox. He was assassinated at an Arlington laundromat in 1967 by a
disgruntled ex-party-member.
Enlarged house 1998
In 2012, according to Google Street View, the house and the entire
neighborhood were exactly as I left them 50 years before, except our house
had been considerably enlarged in 1998; the original house is intact
except for the west wall, where a new wing was added. The white fence my
dad and I built was gone and there was virtually no yard left. The house
sold for $1,175,182.00 in 2016 and by 2020 it was valued at $1,327,182.00.
Air show Andrews Air Force Base 1957
During the years before we went to Germany, my dad took us to air shows at
Andrews AFB — lots of military planes to climb up into, as well as
fly-bys, fly-overs, bombing demonstrations, and simulated dogfights. At
first everything was WWII… piston-driven radial-engine propeller
planes, fighers like the Thunderbolt, Hellcat, Corsair, Mustang — when
those things fly right by right in front of you just above ground level at
500mph they are LOUD! — the PBY Catalina seaplane, and the B-17,
B-24, B-25, and B-29 bombers. Living near DC, I would also see these planes
flying overhead all the time. The air shows were an opportunity for the USA
to intimidate the USSR with our military might, and I always saw a Soviet
contingent there.
Felix Ludwig Carrera 1959
My parents were friends with some of the people across Columbus Street, and
I was friends with Ludwig Carrera (Felix Ludwig, named after Mendelssohn and
Beethoven), who lived on our side of Columbus Street but across 23rd Street,
two houses over (south); he and his brother and sisters had a big impact on
me, they were kind of like the Glass family in JD Salinger. Ludwig was my
best friend in junior high, and then again in senior year when I came back
from Germany early, and we also went to UVA together, a disaster for both of
us. Later he was in the Army in Vietnam, I saw him a couple times after
that but we never talked about it; I have a feeling it wasn't good. We lost
touch. I can't find him now. I searched for him in Google many times (how
many Felix Ludwig Carreras can there be?) and all I ever found were some old
police records. Update: In 2022 Ludwig found me, thanks to this
family history; we're back in touch and I'll fill in the blanks later.
The Hall's Hill Segregation Wall
As on outsider, I am absolutely not qualified to write about Hall's Hill;
the following is a brief sketch of the schizophrenia of North Arlington
when I lived there 1956-59 and 1961-62, and the unease I experienced with a
WALL between human beings just across the street from our house, especially
in 1961-62 after returning from 2.5 years on
an Army base in Germany among people of all
races, religions, nationalities, cultures, and economic status and attending
an integrated, diverse high school there. Information on Hall's Hill has been
hard to find until recently but now we have some excellent sources; see
the References section below.
Hall's Hill on Lee Highway near Glebe Road 1950s
Houses on N. Columbus Street 1956
Behind the houses along the other side of Columbus street was a high
wall (not visible in the photo from my bedroom window but just behind the
houses on the right). It separated the white neighborhood from Hall's Hill,
an area settled by former slaves after the Civil War. Virginia was
segregated from the first arrival of African slaves in 1619 until the
mid-1960s. Black and white people had separate neighborhoods and separate
schools and many other impediments to normal life. During and after World
War II, the increase in government jobs in Washington resulted in new white
suburban tracts throughout formerly rural North Arlington. New Black
arrivals moved into enclaves like Hall's Hill, which was walled in to
prevent any contact between white and black residents. It is the only Black
enclave I know of that was
completely surrounded by a wall.
Hall's Hill 2020 (Google) - Click to enlarge
Wooden Hall's Hill wall segment
Hall's Hill Masonry wall segment
On the modern Google map at left, I traced the outline of Hall's
Hill as best I can, given that I've never seen a proper map of it. Towards
the upper center of the map, the circled A marks
my grandmother Gus's house on the corner of
N.23rd Street and Glebe Road, where I lived 1945-46, and the circled B marks
the house on N.23rd Street and Columbus Street where we lived 1956-59 and
1961-62, which just is 200 feet from the Hall's Hill wall.
Hall's Hill Segregation Wall historical exhibit
Crenellated top of Hall's Hill wall
I know the wall went along the backyards of the houses on Columbus Street
from Lee Highway all the way to N.26th Street because I saw it. Other
sources [4,5,6,12] confirm that it
enclosed all of Hall's Hill. The wall was constructed between 1930 and
1940 by the white occupants of each house on the dividing
line[4,5,12]. There were only two openings
between Hall's Hill and the outside world: N. Edison Street and
N. Dinwiddie Street, which both opened onto (Robert E.) Lee
Highway, one of Arlington's main thoroughfares and shopping streets. In the
heydey of segregation, the roads within Hall's Hill were all dead ends.
Some of them still are, but since gentrification set in starting about 1979,
some of the roads have been connected to the surrounding streets, as can be
seen on the Google map.
Peoples Drug sit-in 9 June 1960
Cherrydale Drug Fair sit-in with Nazis
Hall's Hill residents had access to the shopping area at the intersection of
Lee Highway and Glebe Road, and were welcome at the Safeway supermarket on
the corner of Lee Highway and Columbus Street and (as I recall) also the
High's Ice cream store next door to it as well as the nearby hardware store.
They could shop at Robertson's 5&10 but if black children or teenagers
showed up unaccompanied by an adult, the proprietor (Libby) would follow
them around to make sure they didn't steal
anything[1]. They could also shop at Peoples
Drug Store but could not eat at the lunch counter; this sparked some sit-ins
in 1960, plus "pushback" from the American Nazi Party and its Führer, George
Lincoln Rockwell, who lived nearby[11]. I was
in Germany during this period.
Evans Coffee Shop about 1960
Glebe theater 1945
Hall's Hill residents were not welcome at the barber shop, nor
Glebe theater (1945-72), nor Evans Coffee
Shop[14,15] (1939-1980, "plantation-style
menu") a snooty place decorated with animal heads and historical memorabilia
and frequented by DAR and Daughters of the Confederacy families.
Nevertheless, Arlington (which until the mid-1930s was home to a thriving
KKK chapter[1,5,7,8]) fancied itself more
genteel and "tolerant" than the deep south (including non-northern Virginia,
e.g. Charlottesville), so we did not have "White" and "Colored" signs all
over the place, people could sit anywhere they wanted on the WV&M buses
(at least in the early 60s when I was riding them), and Blacks did not have
to step off the sidewalk to make way for whites. There were, however, cross
burnings over the years including at least one when I was living there in
1958[9].
John M. Langston School 1942
Hoffman-Boston High School
Hall's Hill residents were hardworking Arlington county taxpayers. Their
local taxes were supposed to go towards the same things white people's taxes
did: water and sewer service, paved streets and sidewalks, gutters, street
lights, trash collection, police and fire department protection, and so on,
plus (from 1954) Supreme-Court mandated separate-but-equal schools. But for
decades water came from wells, bathrooms were outhouses, roads were dark and
not paved until well after WWII, there were no sidewalks and no drainage,
the police never came unless they were looking for somebody and the fire
department would not come at all (so Hall's Hill formed its own volunteer
fire department). As to education, Hall's Hill had its own Langston
Elementary School[13] (at the center of
the map where it says Langston-Brown
Community Center). It was extremely convenient but, at least until
1953[2], had only four rooms. The closest high
school for black teens was Hoffman-Boston: five miles away with no school
bus or public transportation. Getting the Arlington County government to
meet its responsibilities in all of these areas was a struggle over many
decades of which I, who lived practically next door, was completely unaware.
And all this is not even to speak of the decades-long struggle for school
integration, in which, even after Brown-vs-Board-of-Education, Virginia was
a notorious foot-dragger[1,2,5]. When I
graduated from nearby Yorktown High School in 1962, it was still all white.
Present-day Wall tourists
Marker (click to read)
By the time Hall's Hill finally had paved roads, running water, and all the
other services it had fought so long and hard for, white people started to
move in and today they are in the large majority. Many of the streets are
reconnected and the wall is mostly gone except for some sections that serve as
tourist attractions. And now, as a New Yorker since 1966, I watch in stunned
disbelief as the same thing happens here to Harlem....
Harlem!!!
Acknowledgments...
...to Cathy Hix, Annette Benbow, and Jessica Kaplan of
the Arlington Historical
Society (AHS) and to Frank O'Leary, former Arlington County Treasurer
and even more former high-school buddy at the Army high school in Frankfurt,
Germany, for connecting me with the folks at AHS. And to Wilma Jones for
writing the book that so badly needed writing!
Article: Sophie
B. Vogel, The
Integration of Reed Elementary School, Arlington Historical
Magazine, Vol.11 No.1, October 1997, pp. 32-41, accessed at the
Arlington Historical Society website 15 January 2021. This is a PDF file
that starts with a 1963-64 map that, on the mid-to-lower extreme right,
shows bits of Hall's Hill where the dead-ending
of the streets is clearly visible. It notes that in 1925 the John
Langston School at 4864 Lee Highway was established to provide separate but
equal education for the children living on either side of Lee Highway. It
also says that additions were added in 1953, 59, and 64. It also notes that
the process of integration of Arlington schools began on February 2, 1959,
when four Afro-American students were enrolled at Stratford Junior High by
Court order. Four years later, in 1963-64 [the year after I graduated from
nearby all-white Yorktown High School], all secondary schools in the county
were integrated. No action was taken to desegregate at the elementary level
until 1966 — twelve years after Brown-vs-Board-of-Ed; I came back to
Yorktown that year, after the Army, to pick up a transcript and found an
integrated school.
Book: Plat Book of Arlington County,
Virginia, Franklin Survey Company, 2006 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia PA
(1943).
Article: Hall's Hill Area Due for Renewal,
Northern Virginia Sun, 23 February 1965: "...Negro community of 1650
persons, 322 houses, three churches, and a school... The community is cut
off from Glebe Road by dead-end streets and from any entry on the south side
by four blocks of solid fences and walls running along North 17th Street."
(Thanks to Cassandra Ellison of the VCU Center on Society and Health for
sending me the article as a PDF.)
Article: Janet Wamsley, The
K.K.K. in Arlington in the 1920s, Arlington Historical Society,
Arlington Historical
Magazine, Vol.10 No.1, October 1993, pp.55-59.
Article: "Fiery Cross Set Up in
Arlington",
The Washington Post and Times Herald, 23 June 1958, p.B2: "A burning
cross was found yesterday in a cemetery adjoining a Negro church in the 5000
block of Lee Highway, Arlington County Police reported ... made with 7- and
5-foot building timbers ... Reported by the Rev. John F. Monroe of the
Calloway Methodist Church." Thanks to Jessica Kaplan of AHS for this, who
also said "Saundra Green, a long time resident and historian of the area,
had one burned on her front lawn during this period as well."
Report: A Guide to
the African American Heritage of Arlington County Virginia,
Department of Community Planning, Housing and Development Historic
Preservation Program, Second Edition (2016). Covers Hall's Hill on
pages 12-22 and the Peoples Drug Store lunch counter sit-in on p.57.
Article: Mark Jones,
Sit-ins Come to Arlington, Boundary Stones (WETA history site),
22 June 2014. The first photo shows Gwendolyn Greene at the counter of
the Peoples Drug at Lee Highway and Old Dominion Drive, which is about
500 feet from Hall's Hill. The Cherrydale Drug Fair was about a mile
to the east on Lee Highway.
Article: Nellie C. Stewart, History of
Langston School (origin unknown, written some time after 1960;
Wilma Jones found it among her mother's papers)
[audio]
Obituary: Bayard
Evans, Restaurateur, Washington Post, September 8, 1980:
"Its furnishings included a much-admired array of historical memorabilia,
including weapons, portraits and tools that predated the Revolution, as
well as a collection of items that related to Robert E. Lee."
There are examples of segregation walls that do not totally enclose the
Black enclave; for example, the wall erected in Detroit when a new white
subdivision was constructed on empty land next to an existing Black
community, the The
Detroit Eight Mile Wall (Wikipedia, accessed 26 January 2021).
Another example is
the Liberty
City wall in Miami.
Book: Arlington Historical Society, Arlington,
Images of America series, Arcadia Publishing (2000). Has a few photographs
of and words about Hall's Hill.
Junior High School
Our part of Arlington (except for the stores) is one of the only areas were
I lived as a kid that is still mostly intact. Another is 19th Street SE in
DC, the first place I ever lived (1944-45).
But Chesterbrook and all of rural Northern
Virginia is gone, and so is Frankfurt, Germany,
as I knew it.
Williamsburg Junior High School
Williamsburg JHS jacket 1957
Worms for sale
Anyway, in Arlington I went to Williamsburg Junior HS, very suburban, a
big shock for a country boy. I was an 11-year-old hick, and the suburban
boys my age were already partying and dancing and dating, some of them even
having sex. I was extremely shy. It was not a happy time, but Ludwig and I
and some other kids hung out, listened to R&B, played ball, etc. Some of
our friends were hoods who wound up in reformatories. One summer I was on a
softball team that traveled around northern Virginia on buses; I was good at
baseball but I could never get used to softball. The "worms" in the color
picture... I made them at home and sold them in school; I must have sold
100 of them. I forget what I charged; something between 10 cents and a
dollar. Speaking of school and to show how times have changed, every year
we had a shop class (wood, metal, plastic), a music class, and an art class.
Jamestown church 1957
Williamsburg VA 1957
In 7th grade we had a big class trip to Colonial Williamsburg and Jamestown,
we stayed there several days. Williamsburg is kind of like a theme park but
Jamestown was more interesting even though it was just old ruins in the
woods by the river; it wasn't all corporate.
By the way, from elementary school through my Masters Degree I did very well
in school. Except in Arlington. The culture there was toxic; only sissies
got good grades. All my friends had total contempt for school and I went
along with them through junior high, and then senior year after Germany, and
got pretty bad grades too. But in Frankfurt there was no stigma at all
attached to doing well in school, you could be cool and get good grades at
the same time, and I did.
And of course Arlington schools were strictly segregated, much more so than
rural Chesterbrook, which was kind of loose. The small-minded cliquishness
was oppressive. One day after school a classmate invited me to his house.
There I saw some books with funny writing on the spines, I said "what's
that?", he said "It's Hebrew, we're Jewish... Pleeeease don't tell anybody!"
Anyway, fast forward to 2020. The area is mostly the same except
for the businesses along Lee Highway and Glebe Road. Ludwig's house (2243
N. Columbus St) is still there, exactly the same. Ludwig's family was one
of the few non-military ones; his dad was an Italian barber who rarely
spoke. His mother was Austrian, about a head taller than his father and
highly cultured. An Odd Couple, united by their mutual love of classical
music. Also odd (it only now occurs to me) because they both came from
Fascist countries, fleeing most likely; I never thought to ask them about
it. There was a big piano in the living room with busts of Beethoven and
Mozart. Ludwig's dad played violin in an orchestra. As traditional in
Italian families, Ludwig's dad made a pasta dinner every Wednesday. There
was always a huge tin of olive oil on the kitchen floor by the door,
probably something like 10 gallons.
Science fiction and space travel were a big part of popular culture when I
lived in Arlington, and in 1957 when Sputnik (the first earth satellite) was
launched I saw it cross the night sky. By contrast, the nineteen-teens and
twenties always seemed quaint and flimsy and long ago to me, even as a
child. The 1930s were not that long ago then; it was when my parents were
teenagers and young adults. For me, "modern times" begins in 1936; you can
see it in the movies — suddenly they are sharp and clear; cars and
airplanes are sleek and solid, not rickety old boxlike contraptions; people
look and talk normal, and the jazz and swing music is not that tinny cutesy
stuff from before.
Up until about the mid-1960s, there was constant fear of nuclear war stoked
by the government, school, news, and movies (most horror films were about
monsters that were mutations from fallout from A-bomb testing). Every town
had an air raid siren. For kids there were constant air-raid and "duck and
cover" drills in school. Everybody was expected to believe that the
missiles would come at any moment and only a strong military could save us.
The greatest threat actually came from the USA, which came close to
launching nuclear strikes several times since WWII, e.g. to wipe out the
Soviet Union after VJ Day, and in Korea when the war started there in
1950, and even after Eisenhower became President.
Nike missile 1957
In the early 50s, anti-aircraft guided missile batteries started popping up
all around Washington DC area: the new Nike surface-to-air missiles
[video], you could
see them all over the place; the picture at left is by me. Guided missiles
were a new thing. The USA was using its German scientists to show us how to
make them. There's a 1954 John Wayne movie, High and Mighty (the
very first disaster movie, I think) that has a brief scene of American
scientists experimenting with guided missiles and the missile they were
experimenting with was a Nazi V-1 "buzz bomb" painted bright yellow.
Speaking of rockets, I read a lot of science fiction as kid in the 1950s,
books as well as those paperback-book size like magazines Fantasy and
Science Fiction, Analog, If, and Galaxy (the first "adult" book I read
was The Martian Chronicals by Ray Bradbury around age 10). But
never, not once, not even in their most wild imaginings, did any of these
imaginative writers ever foresee that space exploration would be outsourced
to private for-profit companies! (Recent headline from corporate media:
"2021 could be a huge year for space; what's to come from Elon Musk, Richard
Branson, and Jeff Bezos!" Hurray for selfish, greedy, arrogant billionaires!)
Aside from science fiction, I read a lot of adult books as a kid. You could
buy paperback books ("pocket books") at the drugstore for 35 cents. I read
books by Steinbeck (Grapes of Wrath, Travels with Charlie), Remarque (All
Quiet on the Western Front), James Jones (From Here to Eternity), Graham
Greene (The Quiet American), D.H. Lawrence (Fathers and Sons), Mark Twain
(Letters from the Earth), McKinley Kantor (Andersonville), Leslie Charteris
("The Saint" mysteries from the 1920s that Uncle Pete was addicted to), and
other authors including John O'Hara, Leon Uris, Irving Stone, Herman Wouk,
Evelyn Waugh, Pearl S. Buck, Somerset Maugham, Daphne du Maurier, John
Hersey, Nevil Shute, Robert Ruark… either I bought them at random or
they were laying around the house.
My dad: Francis Fuller da Cruz, born Lawrence KS, April 1, 1918, died
January 31, 1990. Six feet tall. Called Frank or (by Pete) Fran or (by Gus
and Mom) Roach. I have no idea where the Fuller came from. The only
association it has for me is the "Fuller Brush man" (door-to-door brush
salesmen). He had lung cancer several times, colon cancer, and multiple
heart attacks from 50-some years of super-heavy smoking and drinking. Cause
of death: Metastatic Carcinoma of Lung, Gangrene, Cardio-Pulmonary Arrest.
Dad's home in Bozman MD 1925-27
With his brother Pete (Daniel), my dad had a chaotic childhood, shuttling
back and forth between his mother, father, and assorted relatives in Ohio,
Kansas, DC, Maryland, and who knows where else. He said his father had
little time for him, even when he was staying with him; they barely spoke.
The places I heard about most were Frederick MD, which is north of Virginia
on the mainland, and Bozman MD on the Eastern Shore (i.e. the peninsula on
the other side of Chesapeake Bay), which we visited once in 1951... a big
farm house full of crazy people, including an old toothless "retired sea
captain" (Captain Dave) who looked and talked exactly like Popeye and sat on
a stump and whittled, cursed, and spat all day. I don't know if these were
blood relatives or what, but if they were, it was on my dad's mother's side.
The place was a chicken farm with a huge stinky shambles of a henhouse about
a mile long. In the town itself, such as it was, he showed us the old
gray-painted wooden schoolhouse he attended in the 1920s.
On the other hand I have a photo taken in 1977 of some nice suburban-looking
brick houses near the water labeled "Visit to our former home Safety Beach,
Bozman, Md. Home of Sarah & Lockwood Hardcastle" (Edmund Lockwood
Hardcastle 1911-1985, Sarah Richards Edmond 1915-1992). Lockwood was a
farmer and sailing enthusiast; he died at 73 in 1985; that would make him
only 13-14 when Dad and Pete were there. There is no apparent blood
relation between Gus and Sarah or Lockwood going back 3-4 generations. They
were not school friends either because Sarah was only one year old when Gus
was in nursing school. Bozman is nowhere near Frederick (124 miles today,
but in those days there was no Chesapeake Bay bridge). Nobody on either
side of the Hardcastle tree going back to 1820 ever lived anywhere but
Talbot County MD, which is where Bozman is (across the bay from Frederick),
nor can I find records of any Ragers in Bozman. So I have no idea how or
why Gus chose to bring the kids there.
Dad in DC 1928
I see from one of his photo albums that he moved from Lawrence to a white
2-story house in Oxford OH in 1918 when he was 4 months old. Later he lived
a small bungalow at 15 West Withrow Ave in Oxford. The latter is still
there, at least as of a Google Street View in 2013. In 1924 Gus left Daniel
and (I believe) took the children with her. So back on east coast, Dad went
to elementary school in Bozman MD, which is on a peninsula of a peninsula of
a peninsula of the Eastern Shore on the far side of Chesapeake Bay; this was
in at least the 3rd and 4th grade (1925-27). He took us there once in
1951, that's how I recognized the photo. I guess he was living with some of
Gus's relatives and maybe with Gus herself. By 1928 he was living at 1705
Kenyon and 1649 Irving Streets NW, "My mother sublet from Mary McKenna" (who
was Gus's Godmother). He told me once that this was a Black neighborhood
and all his friends then were Black kids; they used to play together in
vacant lots and alleys, but it doesn't look very urban to me. Anyway, he
and Pete went back to his Dad in Oxford, Ohio, around 1928.
According to Audrey, at one point when he was living
with his father and stepmother Louise (neé Burk) in Oxford —
he hated Louise.. One day he tried to kill her with an axe because
she told him to wash the dishes; Pete had to fight him to keep him from
doing it. Then they sent him away (and presumably Pete too). But to where?
And when was this? There's no way to tell from the information I have (some
of which is contradictory; on his CIA application he claims to have gone
through all 12 grades of school in Oxford, but he has report cards from
Bozman, Talbot County, Maryland, for 3rd and 4th grade (1925-27).
Dad went to William H. McGuffey High School in Oxford 1931-35 and graduated
in 1935 (and I have the report cards). Oxford is where Miami University is,
where his father taught. There are newspaper articles (the Hamilton, Ohio,
Journal News) showing him acting in various school plays, 1931-33.
He has the 1935 class picture, and then pictures from the 50th reunion in
1985. He played varsity football in high school; his coach
was Weeb Eubank, who
called him Bidge; Eubank later became a famous college football coach and
then an even more famous NFL one (Browns, Colts, Jets); he and dad
corresponded during the late 1970s. That summer he worked as a farm hand in
College Corner, Ohio. He said it was the hardest work he ever had in his
life and the best food. He claimed to have grown six inches. Maybe I
should have done that! Id've been six feet like him (Pete was 6'2"... even
Dennis was taller than me).
Follow the Fleet 1936
Navy 1937-1946
After two years of post-high school drifting around, his father got him
admitted to the University of Maryland and made him go there in Fall
1936. Dad hated it, so in his own words: "One cold winter night a friend
and I caught a movie in Hyattsville, Md. 'Follow the Fleet' persuaded me
that the Navy would be more interesting than deciphering Chaucer. On 5
August 1937, I signed up for four years". In fact, he was close to flunking
out, his first-semester grades were CEFFBB; I suspect he didn't want to face
his dad, to whom intellectual pursuits were paramount.
What did he do for the months between deciding to join the Navy and
actually doing it? Checking his government job applicion I see he worked as
a "blanket laundryman" in a warehouse in 1936… Waiter and boat tender
at a summer resort on the Eastern Shore in 1936. Office assistant in an air
conditioning company in 1937… In another album I find that he lived
at 505 18th Street NW in DC, Sept 1935-early 1936. Then
he lived at 1807 California St NW, 3rd floor, right front, in 1936 and 37.
And THEN in August 1937 he joined the Navy. But in any case, without the
movie he might have done something else, so in that sense I owe my existence
to Fred and Ginger, and so do you guys.
USS Omaha in Havana Bay 1938
Dad on the Omaha
Radio crew - Dad top row center
From 1937 to early 1940 he was a radioman on the USS Omaha, a cruiser built
in 1916 that could launch a biplane from a catapault, docking in
Villefranche (France, near Nice on the Riviera) and in Naples.
Fascist bombing of Caldetas, Spain, January 1939
When the Omaha was sent on a rescue mission to the south coast of
Spain towards the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939, he took photos of
Fascist aircraft bombing the village of Caldetas.
CLICK HERE to see a
photo gallery. Coincidentally, I passed through Caldetas in 1964 but wasn't
aware of the connection.
Mussolini Forum
We had an oil painting of the Omaha with Naples and Mount Vesuvius in
the background in our living room. Besides ports in Fascist Italy (where
dad took the photos at right), the Omaha put in at Villefranche, Marseilles,
Tangiers, Algiers, Casablanca, and other Mediterranean ports, as well as
Havana and who knows where else. And (I didn't know this until 2016 when I
came across a note in one of his scrapbooks) he was also on
the USS
Denebola, a destroyer tender built in 1919, from April 1940 to August
1941: Norfolk to Chesapeake Bay to Halifax NS escorting Lend-Lease
destroyers partway to England; then Guantánamo, Norfolk, Bermuda. None of
this was combat but there were U-Boats in the Atlantic sinking American
ships even though the USA was not in the war yet. This was in his
first hitch. According to a 1941 letter to his Mom Gus, he couldn't wait
to get out.
He was released from the Navy in October 1941, about 9 weeks before Pearl
Harbor, and worked in Kann's department store in DC for $120 a month in the
"heavy toys" department as Christmas help.
World War II
WWII Navy Radiotelegraph console
WWII Navy Radioman
No sooner had Dad begun to adjust to civilian life Pearl Harbor was
bombed. I don't know if he was called up or reenlisted, but he was back in
the Navy in January 1942 (just weeks after Pearl Harbor) and was not
discharged until December 2, 1945, when I was about 13 months old.
In both hitches he was a radioman (Morse-code operator), which means
sending messages on a code key, and receiving incoming code messages on
headphones and simultaneously transcribing them onto paper using a manual
typewriter; he and my Mom could both do this at 120wpm (more about this
in the Mom chapter). When I was kid,
sometimes they talked to each other in Morse code.
National Mall 1943 with barracks (L)
and Navy Department building (R)
During the War, his second hitch, he worked at Department of the Navy
headquarters at 18th and Constitution in DC (seen from the Washington
Monument in the photo; Navy building at right, now long gone). He lived
with his mother on Glebe Road in Arlington and commuted by WV&M bus. My
Mom worked at Navy HQ too, also as a radioman, which is how they met. The
Navy HQ building was right alongside the National Mall, which goes between
Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument; my Mom lived nearby in temporary barracks. When the CIA was
created after the war, some of these barracks became their offices and my
Dad worked in them. I went there with him sometimes. On one occasion he
and his pals were shooting into the ceiling because they heard rats
scurrying around.
Dad's brother, Uncle Pete, on the other hand,
was a Marine who saw action on land, sea, and/or air in the Atlantic and
Pacific. Gus wrote on May 2, 1941:
Another war is raging, god how scared I am ... I hate war today as I did
when I was a Red Cross nurse [in WWI]. It is so futile and unprofitable.
& yet one must fight for freedom or become a slave [i.e. to Nazis].
Today I am a Senior Nurse in the Navy Reserve Corps ... Francis is in love
& engaged to a lovely child named Olive Whittle [of Baltimore]. Became
engaged last nite. Tomorrow [illegible] see her [illegible]...
Mom and Dad 1944
WWII medal and Navy dogtag
Navy Dept ID
Zeke letter postmark
This was the first and last I ever heard of Olive, but before the
War was over, my dad and mom were married and I was born, somewhat short of
9 months later, so when he was released from the Navy December 2, 1945, he
had a family to support and couldn't go back to school like (he said) he
wanted to, and always had a chip on his shoulder about it since he thought
he was smarter than everybody else. My Mom didn't go to college either.
Shortly before his discharge, while we were living on 19th Street in DC, he
wrote to Mom's brother Zeke in Los Angeles asking for a job in his beer and
wine distribution company. But that didn't work out so he stayed on at his
Navy job at the Naval Communications Section of Navy Department headquarters
in a civilian capacity until 1949. He had also considered staying in the
Navy but Mom said no; she didn't want to be left alone for years at a time
when he shipped out. Apparently he listened to her in those early days.
Incidentally, the only medal he received was the World War II Victory medal,
which was given automatically to everyone who served during the war; he
didn't even get a Good Conduct Medal (perhaps because by getting Mom
pregnant, he removed her from service about two years prematurely). I'm not
aware of him ever attending any reunions with his Navy mates.
Fairfax County, Virginia, 1947-1956
..Plow that Broke the Plains
Our new house 1947 and The.....
While he was still at the Navy Department, he got a VA home loan and bought
the house in Chesterbrook, Fairfax County, Virginia, and we moved from Gus's
house to the new one. I think his annual salary was in the $2000 range, so
after house payments and tax there was virtually nothing left. Dad borrowed
a hand plow from Russell Hill and turned the back yard into a vegetable
garden so we could grow our own food, and in the house Mom did the work of a
frontier wife: scrubbing, sewing, baking... At least she didn't have to
make her own soap.
In late 1949 he started applying for other jobs. He applied at both the FBI
and the State Department and didn't hear back from either. Then he applied
to the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency and was accepted due both to
his Navy experience and skills, and also because at first they were
(according to him) desperately short-staffed. He was hired in 1949 and
worked there until they pushed him out in 1973 at age 55. He never talked
about what he did there. The highest rank he achieved was GS-13 (like a
major or lieutenant colonel in the Army, i.e. a mid-level officer). His
first job was processing new employees (photos, fingerprints, etc) and
disposing of classified trash (a job I also had some years later… two
or three times!)
1-inch high Morton salt shakers
After Dad's income improved, the Victory Garden (that's what we called it)
shrunk to just a corner of the backyard and I was in charge of it. I grew
tomatoes, onions, and some other things, I forget. When the seeds were
planted in the Spring I had to scare the crows away for a few days. When
the tomatoes were ripe they were so good, so juicy, so perfect. Sometimes
I'd just go out and pick one and eat it like an apple, hot from the sun,
with a little salt, the juice running down my bare chest. Kids didn't wear
much clothes in the summer, usually just underpants with dead elastic, held
up by a clothes pin. The salt was from the tiny Morton Salt shakers they
used to make for school kids to carry in their lunch boxes. The main
thing I regret about living in the city instead of the country is that I
can't grow my own tomatoes.
During the 1950s the CIA sent my dad all over the place; I pieced together
some of it from his scrapbooks; almost all these places places had coups
or other turmoil in that timeframe:
Belem, Para, Brasil: 2 June 1957
Recife, Pernambuco, Brasil: 3-4 June 1957
Rio de Janeiro - 5 June 1957
Aunción, Paraguay - 6-9 June 1957
La Paz, Bolivia - 9-12 June 1957
Guayaquil, Ecuador - 12-15 June 1957
Quito 15-18 June 1957
Bogatá Colombia 19-21 June 1957
Mexico City 23-27 June 1957
Monterrey (date not given)
Beirut, Lebanon, February 1958 (just prior to the US invasion)
Amman, Jordan: 14-15 February 1958 (short-lived federation with Iraq)
Jerusalem 15 Feb 1958
Baghdad 18-19 Feb 1958 (US Embassy)
Kuwait: 19-21 Feb 1958
Nicosia, Cyprus: 22-25 Feb 1958
I don't think he was a covert agent or assassin though; I think he just
provided "logistical" support to those who were — agents in the
embassies and consulates posing as diplomats: wiring, bugs, surveillance,
sweeps, secure lines, etc. Although he certainly was mean enough to be an
assassin.
Frankfurt, Germany, 1959-61
IG Farben Building Frankfurt 1955
The whole family was sent to Frankfurt, Germany, in February 1959. Dad
worked in the I.G. Hochhaus (I.G. Farben building; before the Pentagon, the
world's largest office building) on the 7th or what Pam's Mom Ruth calls
"the spook floor"; at least part of his work was scanning for bugs and
tracing all the wires left over from Nazi times — we arrived less than
14 years after the war and there were still plenty of Nazis looking to make
a comeback. The IG Farben company played a key role in the war and is
heavily featured in Gravity's
Rainbow; the building was returned to
Germany about 1995 and is now Campus-Westend
of Goethe
University.
A note in one of his albums says that he and another CIA friend installed an
alarm system in the house of Allen Dulles (founder of the CIA) and then they
watched a football game with him. In another note he left behind, he says
he spent two weeks in 1950 bugging every room
in Ashford
Farm in Easton MD, a mansion used by the CIA until 1979 to hide people.
And in another, he did "audio countermeasures" for Camille Chamoun, the
Lebanese president, in February 1958, shortly before the US invasion (after
many years of Maronite Christian rule, there was a Muslim uprising and
Chamoun asked the USA to come and crush it). Dad was exactly the kind of
guy that Richard Nixon would have used to install an illegal recording setup
in the White House. I don't know that he did, but his scrapbooks are full
of Watergate newspaper clippings.
While we were in Germany dad got in trouble over an office affair and
we were sent back in summer 1961, a year early, after which they gave him
mostly scut work like security-clearance background checks (where he goes to
visit family and friends and neighbors of job applicants) and they also loaned
him to the TSA as an air marshall. He had a badge and sometimes carried a
gun. At one point they assigned a highly-publicized Soviet defector to him,
who was in his custody — illegally — for months. Eventually
they pushed him out, maybe for being a drunk, maybe for his temper, maybe
for the affair, I don't know (later it turned out there was a specific
reason they fired him, having to do with the Russian, see
below).
After I left home
I left home in 1962 for UVA, dropped out after one semester, spent a few
horrible days at home and walked out and joined the Army. Shortly after
that Mom left Dad and took Dennis with her to California. Within 2 or 3
years she and Dad were divorced. A few weeks after I returned from Germany
in early 1966 I saw dad in his new apartment, it was a nightmarish episode,
not to be repeated for decades. When he moved to the apartment all the
stuff I had left behind and all of Uncle Pete's stuff that were in the attic
of the Arlington house disappeared — 1950s baseball cards that
would probably be worth big money today, my big acoustic f‑hole
guitar, my Framus electric guitar from Frankfurt, Uncle Pete's travel
notebooks and WWII combat drawings...
Dad and Audrey 1967
In 1967 dad married Audrey Elsie Doney (Audie), a 1940s beauty queen and
(G-rated) pin-up girl who, after marrying Dad, became a successful attorney.
I was invited to the wedding but didn't intend to go; though I remember
joking with Peter Marsh and some other friends who had motorcycles that we
could go down as a motorcycle gang.
They lived in her house at 5927 Oakdale Road in Chesterbrook Woods,
Virginia, by then a very posh suburb of DC, until he died in 1991. I got to
know Audrey in the 1990s and she is the source for a lot of the information
(and some of the scrapbooks) that I have. He was nice to her at first but
wound up heaping abuse on her, beating her, and in the end, planning to kill
her.
Audrey's daughter Shawn writes in February 2020 of several incidents from
the 1960s:
I went to my Mom's after moving from NJ to Maryland... it was the first time
in a long time I was close enough to my Mom to go over and spend her birthday
with her.... I wanted it to be a surprise so my children and I went over with
a cake that was lit on the front porch.... I was hoping she would open the
door..... but it was the housekeeper, Mrs. Brown. She pointed me to the
back screened porch where mom and your Dad were sitting. He was not happy I
just stopped by without calling and at one point he had my mom in the
kitchen yelling at her while she was backing up until she couldn’t back up
any further. I walked towards the kitchen sharply calling his name about 3
or 4 times..... he finally stopped terrorizing my mother and he came towards
me at which time I told him to come on... I will call a cop in a
heartbeat... he stopped and went to the bedroom and returned yelling about
the kids being back there and they could have gotten his gun as he was
waving it around... he was not pointing it at us but I thought it best we
leave.
I met your brother and we hung out one weekend. He was very nice but as a
14 year old, I had no filter. So when your Dad asked me how I liked him the
day after he left, I said "he was very nice and he is gay"..... from that
day on.... your Dad hated me!! Dennis was sweet and I thought he may have
had a hard time dealing with your Dad but I was 14 and didn’t really know
and didn’t ask.
One evening I was sitting at home when I get a call from your Dad. He had
NEVER called me before so I was instantly suspicious. He asked if I had
spoken to or seen my mother. I said no, why? He said they had a little
tiff and she walked out and he was just looking for her. Well, now I was
extremely worried so I left home and went out looking. I went to her office
in Fairfax and when she wasn’t there, I went to her house..... all was quiet
and she wasn't there either. I waited until 11:30 and drove home. I couldn’t
sleep and continued to worry until she finally called me. She said they had
argued and he shoved her hard into the kitchen counter and she thought her
rib was broken. It turns out that she had the two bottom ribs broken on one
side. She did not want me to make a big deal of it as she felt she could do
nothing about it at that time.
(this one is probably from about 1990...)
She also told me that his boss at the CIA called her and said that he needed
to let her know that Frank was telling people in the office that he was
going to kill her. He told her he couldn’t do anything about it until he
actually acted on it. I thought how insane was that comment!! For me it
goes to show how crooked they were way back then. They take care of their
own no matter at whose expense.
The next time I saw Dad was in 1988 when I spent a few days with him (Audrey
was away somewhere, I didn't meet her then). He had stopped drinking and
smoking, was calmer and more philosophical. We also saw Uncle Pete, who had
moved from Beirut because it wasn't safe for Americans there any more, to an
apartment in Alexandria. Three years later when dad was dying I went there
again and stayed with Audie for a week. We'd visit him in the hospital each
day and then do other stuff, driving all over northern VA. During this
visit she was in high spirits because Dad was gone from the house and was
never going to come back.
Dad's personality
I normally think of my dad as a monster: bitter, violent, cruel, brutal, and
he was BIG, six feet tall with big muscles, huge hands like John Wayne.
And the classic authoritarian who sucked up to his superiors and bullied and
insulted everyone else. We were all scared to death of him. But he had
some good points too. For one thing, he was very handy, he could fix
anything, he could build things, and he taught me all of that. He spent
endless hours in the back yard teaching me how to play baseball when I was
10 and 11. We did a lot of work together, which I enjoyed… building
the community pool, building the addition on the Chesterbrook house,
putting a wood fence around the Arlington house and converting its basement
into a kind of man cave with knotty pine walls, tile floor, and bar. (By the
way, he never did any of these things with Dennis.) Also I seem to have
inherited his mania for taking pictures and keeping records. Without his
scrapbooks I never could have put this thing together.
Dad's father Daniel was not a warm person and not
especially involved with raising his children, even though he and Pete lived
with him in Oxford for most of their young
lives. Dad's mother Gus was warm, gentle,
loving, jolly, and funloving. But she raised them only until 1928, when Dad
was 10. After that Dad and Pete lived with their father and second wife
Louise, by all accounts the classic evil stepmother. But I believe their
father let them spend some summers with Gus and/or her relatives(?) on the
Eastern Shore of Maryland. There was a sepia photo (now lost) that used to
be on our wall of him and Pete on the beach when they were in their teens.
The way I recall things, dad was a fairly nice guy up until some point in
the early 1950s, when he turned mean and abusive and alcoholic. In 1976 my
brother told me that that dad had told him that he was one of the unwitting
subjects in the CIA's experiments with mind-altering drugs
(Project
MKultra) in the early 1950s. If true, this would explain a lot (Peter
points out that the Unabomber was an MKultra victim too; Whitey Bulger was
another), but not everything because he is known to have had quite a temper
even as a teenager (see story). Also, a fellow
student at McGuffey High School in Oxford OH had this to say about him to
investigators during his 1949 CIA employment background check:
[He] was ironic at times, appeared rather antogonistic towards the other
students ... expressed his point of view very strongly and, at times, a
little too strongly.
Happy family 1949
Happy Mom 1950
MKUltra was launched in 1953, and that's just about when things turned ugly
around our house. The Wikipedia article mentions "Substances which will
promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness; materials which will promote
the intoxicating effect of alcohol; materials which will cause
temporary/permanent brain damage; substances which alter personality
structure ... They also administered LSD to CIA employees, military
personnel, doctors, other government agents, and members of the general
public to study their reactions. LSD and other drugs were often administered
without the subject's knowledge or informed consent, a violation of the
Nuremberg Code the U.S. had agreed to follow after World War II. The aim of
this was to find drugs which would bring out deep confessions or wipe a
subject's mind clean and program him or her as 'a robot agent.'
... Long-term debilitation and several deaths resulted from this."
And he was always a racist, as can be seen from some of the commentary in
his 1930s scrapbooks and his 1930s Navy journal. Nevertheless, in our
family photos from the late 1940s and early 50s, we look like a genuinely
happy family. Even Mom looks happy.
But from the mid-1950s on, he was prone to bouts of rage and violence
— especially scary in a man of his size and strength — and drank
enormous amounts of alcohol. Once I saw him drink two cases (48 cans) of
beer on a hot summer day while mowing the lawn (with a push mower, of
course). In later years he would routinely guzzle two fifths of gin
every night (a fifth is 4/5 of a quart, so two of them is bit over a quart
and half). While growing up I saw him throw up, pass out, smash things,
bellow like a bull, cry uncontrollably, beg for forgiveness, it never ended.
He beat us all the time, with huge hands, fists, knuckles, sticks, belts (my
Mom never did). Where he got this idea of disciplining children escapes me,
I can't conceive of either of his parents inflicting physical punishment,
or Uncle Pete either for that matter. By the same token I don't understand
how he came to be such a racist; his father was not only not a
racist, he was a member of the NAACP. And his mother was the nicest person
in the world; I never heard her say a bad word about anybody.
A junior high school classmate of mine, Frank Dodd Jr., and his little
brother James (ages 13 and 11), had a father very much like mine, a drunk
who beat them every night. On January 24, 1957, they killed him with his
own gun while he was passed out in his easy chair. It was a big item in the
news that resulted in Dad being nice to us for a couple weeks.
In his sixties my dad had numerous heart attacks and all kinds of cancer
— lung, bowel, you name it, lots of times, until only small pieces of
his original organs were left. Finally he took the hint and stopped
drinking and smoking, joined a church of all things (he had always ridiculed
religion) as well as the Masons (another longtime butt of his jokes), and
tried to make himself into an all-American suburban nice guy, and some people
say he had his moments of kindness. But he still believed "the niggers"
would come swarming over the hill one day to burn, rape, pillage, and kill,
and he had the guns he would use to drive them off (like a kind
of George Blessing in reverse).
Arlington Hospital where Dad died in 1991
Also both before and after he stopped drinking, he frequently beat Audie
senseless, once even breaking her back. By chance, the woman he had fallen
for in Germany decades earlier, who he wrecked his career over, happened to
live a couple blocks away, now happily married. He would sneak over to spy
on her, Audie would catch him out, confront him, and he'd go ballistic and
come after her. Every time Audie would get ready to leave him, he'd get
cancer or have a heart attack, and she would stay on until he recovered, a
sequence repeated until he finally realized he would die, and then he let
her know that he was going to kill her first so she would not have to face
living without him. But he collapsed before he could do it, and was on his
deathbed at Arlington Hospital. That's when I went down and stayed with her
until we knew he would never leave the hospital where I saw him and said
goodbye. What finally killed him was gangrene. Everybody was relieved; he
had seemed like Rasputin, horrible and unkillable.
It's hard to believe that dad and Pete were brothers; Pete was always so
calm, relaxed, good humored, patient, open, tolerant, caring, inquisitive,
enthusiastic, empathetic... And dad was just a big boiling cauldron
of anger and hatred and cruelty. Looking back I realize he had extreme,
intense emotions that swung wildly back and forth and that he couldn't
control. I suppose today he might be diagnosed as bipolar and there would
be a pill for him.
Audrey Doney and my father married in 1967. She was born in 1927 in Beaver
Meadows, PA. I never met her until dad was dying in 1991. I spent a week
with her and she was very nice. He courted and married her under false
pretenses; she was a lawyer and he barely got out of high school, but he
claimed to have tons of education. Their marriage deteriorated pretty fast
but she stuck with him to the end. After dad died she retired, sold the
house, lived alone in a trailer on a beach for a while, then married a guy
named Johnny Lipes (Wheeler Bryson Lipes) who she was happy with; they moved
to Corpus Christi TX, then to North Carolina. He had been her boyfriend
when they were students at George Washington University 40 years earlier.
Johnny Lipes
Johnny Lipes died in 2005. He was famous
for having performed an appendectomy as a 22-year-old high-school
dropout pharmacist's mate — definitely not a doctor — in 1942 on
a submarine (the USS Seadragon) in WWII. Although he saved the guy's life,
the Navy was going to court-martial him but he became an instant celebrity
and the Navy backed off and then just two months before his death in 2005,
Lipes finally received the US Navy Commendation Medal. The appendectomy is
dramatized in the 1943 movie Destination Tokyo with Cary Grant; the
character Pills (played by William Prince) is Johnny Lipes.
Audie sent me some of the material about my father's side of the family,
baptismal certificates, death notices, etc. She had tons of my dad's stuff
(tools, for example) but I didn't feel like taking it; he did not die
gracefully. In later years, she sent me his photo albums and papers by
mail.
After Johnny Lipes died in 2006, she moved back to northern Virginia, to an
assisted-living place:
Goodwin House
Bailey's Crossroads
3440 South Jefferson Street Apt 1036
Falls Church VA 22040-3129
1-703-578-7560
We had a long phone conversations once or twice a year about family history
and many other topics. In a talk we had in 2006 she told me
the following (I've also filled in some of the blanks myself):
Daniel da Cruz [Dad and Pete's Portuguese father] was "given to the church"
at age 14. He got malaria in Mozambique and went to Georgetown University
hospital for treatment, where he met Gus, fell in love, etc. Anyway, the
marriage didn't work out and somewhere between 1928 and 1934 he married
Louise Burk, a teacher. My dad hated Louise and one day tried to kill her
with an axe because she told him to wash the dishes; Pete had to fight him
to keep him from doing it.
As Audrey said, "That's when they sent him away." When? To where??? This
can't have been in 1925 when he arrived in Bozman; he was only seven years
old! (I should have asked... too late now.)
Gus hated Louise too; once she went there and threw a brick through the
window. I asked Audrey why dad always said Gus was demented, and that was
the example she gave.
The way Pete met Leila was that her father was a professor at the American
University of Beirut [where Pete was teaching].
Then in 2007:
Audrey told me that Gus killed herself because she had terminal cancer. Now
I know why she had the dogs euthanized and killed the ducks. She also told
me Dennis was crawling out of his bedroom window to meet a guy 15 years
older (?) starting at age 9 (I find this hard to believe). Dad took Dennis
to a movie (in Times Square) the night we were in NYC in 1959 and had to
physically rescue him from a bunch of men who were trying to get their hands
on him (Audie says, but I suppose it's plausible, Times Square was like that
then). When Dennis was staying with Dad and Audie he had an affair with an
American University professor, who came to dinner one night with disastrous
results. Audie's daughter, Shawn Elizabeth Hall (the surname of Audie's
first husband), born in 1950, had a Puerto Rican [or Mexican?] boyfriend and
had some babies with him. One night they came to surprise Audie on her
birthday, with a cake, etc. Dad (drunk), chased them away with a loaded
pistol. Later Shawn broke with Audie and they hadn't spoken in 19 years (as
of 2007). [Shawn herself has a slightly different version of this story;
see above]
I haven't heard from Audie since 2007. Her daughter Shawn tells me that as
of early 2020 she is still living at Goodwin house but suffers from Lewy
Body dementia, is weak and is unable to carry on a coherent conversation,
but happy and pleasant to be with.
Dad "retired" from the CIA at age 55 in 1973. Audie said he was actually
fired by the Director, James Schlesinger, in the wake of the "family jewels"
episode. According to my dad (in a scrapbook he kept about this) about 1000
were fired in all. A letter from James A Wilderotter, Associate Deputy
Attorney General, dated Jan 3, 1975, subject "CIA Matters", lists some CIA
transgressions, and the very first one is unlawful detention of a Russian
defector for 2 years in the mid-1960s; this was dad's assignment. As of
September 2016, the Family Jewels are online in a 702-page searchable PDF:
Yuriy Ivanovich Nosenko, an officer of the KGB, defected to a representative
of this Agency in Geneva, Switzerland, on 4 February 1964. The
responsibility for his exploitation was assigned to the then SR Division of
the Clandestine Service and he was brought to this country on 12 February
1964. After initial interrogation by representatives of the SR Division, he
was moved to a safehouse in Clinton, Maryland, from 4 April 1964 where he
was confined and interrogated until 13 August 1965 when he was moved to
specially constructed "jail" in a remote wooded area at XXXXX. The SR
Division was convinced that he was a dispatched agent but even after a long
period of hostile interrogation was unable to prove their contention and he
was confined at XXXXX in an effort to convince him to "confess."
This Office together with the Office of General Counsel became increasingly
concerned with the illegality of the Agency's position in handling a
defector under these conditions for such a long period of time. Strong
representations were made to the Director (Mr. Helms) by this Office, the
Office of General Counsel, and the Legislative Liaison Counsel, and on 27
October 1967, the responsibility for Nosenko's further handling was
transferred to the Office of Security under the direction of the Deputy
Director of Central Intelligence, then Admiral Rufus Taylor.
Nosenko was moved to a comfortable safehouse in the Washington area and was
interviewed under friendly, sympatheic conditions by his Security Case
Officer, Mr. Bruce Solie, for more than a year. It soon became apparent
that Nosenko was bona fide and he was moved to more comfortable surroundings
with considerable freedom of independent movement and has continued to
cooperate fully with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and this Office
since that time. He has proven to be the most valuable and economical
defector this Agency has ever had and leads which were ignored by the SR
Division were explored and have resulted in the arrest and prosecution
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX He currently is living under an alias; secured
a divorce from his Russian wife and remarried an American citizen. He is
happy, relaxed, and appreciative of the treatment accorded him and states
"while I regret my three years of incarceration, I have no bitterness and
now understand how it could happen."
My dad's name isn't mentioned anywhere in the Family Jewels but given his
brutal temperament it's not unlikely that he was the hostile interrogator
(although he himself says, "I was this fellow's original jailer. Stuck
with him, off and on, for several years. Always treated him correctly; some
did not."). In May 1973, David H. Bree, Chief, Soviet Bloc Division, writes
of Nosenko that "Although his present attitude toward the Agency is quite
satisfactory, the possibility exists that the press could cause undesireable
publicity if it were to uncover the story."
The reason this was such a big deal was the connection to the JFK
assassination. A classified (SECRET//NOFORN) article,
"DCI
John McCone and the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy" by
Davide Robarge, in Studies in Intelligence (an internal CIA magazine),
Vol.57, No.3 (September 2013), pp.13-18:
No Counterintelligence matter of McCone's tenure was so fraught with
potential for conflict as the defection of KGB officer Yuri Nosenko in early
1964 and the ensuing controversy over his bona fides. By claiming to know
about the KGB's dealings with Oswald, and by extension a Soviet role in the
Kennedy assassination, Nosenko became potentially the most important
defector in history. The conclusions of several senior operations officers
that Nosenko was a disinformation agent led McCone to approve Nosenko's
detention and hostile interrogation, beginning a protracted, much debated,
and ultimately futile three-and-a-half-year effort to "break" him.
This goes on and on but does not mention my dad by name. In the end
everybody agreed the USSR had nothing to do with assassination; on the
contrary, we now know that JFK had opened up a "back channel" (through Pope
John XXIII) with Khrushchev for making peace and backing off on the arms
race.
For what it's worth, one of my dad's photo albums contain some photos from a
"farewell luncheon" May 25th, 1973, for a bunch of people, including
himself, presumably all fired from the CIA: Linda Bender, Tom Carroll,
Charles Diller, David Glass, Newt Sprow, Michael Sydorko, Charlie Waskey.
His scrapbooks also contain a lot of newspaper clippings about Watergate, as
if he knew or was involved with those guys too.
Acknowledgments to Cousin Sandy (Lund) Stout (my Mom's brother Zeke's
daughter) for countless photos and stories, "1940" author Dana Yost, Cherri
Schmig at the Minneota Mascot for sending numerous clippings, and
Allyson Breyfogle and Jeremy Frie at the Minneota public school.
Carl Lund and
Baby Vivian 1922*
Mom in 1946
Vivian Maxine Lund, born (at home) Minneota, Minnesota,
March 5, 1922; died July 26, 2002, in Indio, California, at age 80, stroke.
Height: 5'4".
Her father: Carl Nicolai Lund, born September 8, 1869, in Winchester,
Wisconsin. Deserted the family somewhere between 1924 and 1930. Died in
1936 of cirrhosis of the liver in Long Beach CA. Mom's parents were both
pretty old when she was born.
Mom's mother: Hannah Engeborg Johnson, born July 4th, 1883, Nordland
Township, Minnesota; died Sept 30, 1954 in Minneota, Minnesota. Her
Norwegian name Johanna Ingeborg Jansen is listed on her death certificate.
I never met her, but my mother went to see her in Minneota when I was 9 or
10. Hannah and Carl were married in Wisconsin on April 12th, 1902, lived in
Minneota until 1905, then in Streeter, North Dakota (where Carl's parents
lived), and returned to Minnesota, living in several towns until settling in
in Minneota about 1920.
*
There is some doubt about this identification. My Mom told me that the
man in this picture was her father. Below
you will see another man identified by other family members as Carl Lund.
At this writing (September 2018), it remains a mystery.
Lund family residences
Within any given town, they might also have moved from house to house. For
the most part we don't have addresses, but I know from my mother that she
lived in at least two different houses in Minneota after she was born in 1922.
Here's a map of the main places, click the image to enlarge it:
Where the Lunds lived 1869-1954
(Carl came from Winchester WI; my
Mom lived only in Minneota)
Years
Town
Authority
1869
Winchester, Winnebago County, Wisconsin
1870 census; marriage of Carl's parents,
birth of Carl
1877-1899
Minneota[1], Lyon County, Minnesota
Birth of Hannah in 1883[2] and all her brothers and sisters.
1900-1904
Minneota, Minnesota
1900 census, birth of Polly and Mabel, Polly marriage record, Hannah
obituary
1905-1912
Streeter, North Dakota[3]
1910 census, births of Clarence and Marvin, Hannah obituary
1913-1920
Underwood[4], Otter Tail County, Minnesota
1920 census; Births of Ella, Raymond, and Gislie; Hannah obituary
1920-1954
Minneota, Minnesota
Birth of Vivian, Doris, and Shirley, and death of Hannah[5].
At least two different houses during this period.
[1]
In census, church, and other records, the names Nordland, Eidsvold, and
Minneota seem to be used interchangeably; Minneota is village at the border
of Eidsvold and Nordland townships, in Lyon County. Nordland township
should not be confused with the town of Nordland, which is about 100 miles
north of Minneapolis. The use of different names for the same place (and
the same name for different places) can make it seem that the Lunds moved
around more than they actually did. The records between 1875 and 1900 show
Hannah's parents living in Nordland, Minneota, Nordland, Minneota,
Nordland... I suspect they were not moving every year, but that Nordland and
Minneota were names for the same place used by different jurisdictions.
John and Martina Johnson lived in Minneota until their deaths in 1925 and
1929, respectively.
[2]
Minnesota Births and Christenings Index 1840-1980; In Hannah's case also
confirmed in church marriage record
(hvor født = birthplace = Minneota). All of
Hannah's brothers and sisters were born in Minneota or Nordland.
[3]
This is where Carl's parents lived. Carl's father Peter died in 1908,
and was probably in decline in 1906, so I imagine the family moved to
Streeter to help out. Clarence and Marvin were born there.
[4]
They are reported at different times as living in Underwood and in
Maine Township, which are next door to each other; they might have moved
or it might just be a variation in reporting jurisdictions. Hannah's
obituary says they lived in Underwood but doesn't mention Maine.
[5]
Personal knowledge, Mom's birth certificate, and Hannah's obituary.
So Carl was in Minneota for some reason, met Hannah, they went to Carl's
family's town to get married, then came straight back to Minnesota to live
in Minneota for four years. Why Minneota? Because that's where Hannah's
family (parents, brothers, and sisters) had lived since 1875. Meanwhile
Carl's family moved from Wisconsin to North Dakota and Hannah, Carl, and
children went to live on their farm for four years, then they came back to
Minnesota and lived in Otter Tail County (Underwood and/or Maine) for 6-7
years until finally settling in Minneota.
Norwegian names
Lund was a common place name in Norway; it means "grove of trees", and there
are countless places that fit that description. It was chosen as a surname
upon entry to the USA, since Norwegians did not have surnames until the law
of 1923 but our Norwegian ancestors came between 1842 and 1868. Usually
they picked some variation of the current generation's patronymic, or else
the name of their town or farm. Since, as far as I can tell, there is no
town named Lund in Hedmark, it must have been the name of Peder's farm.
Traditionally Norwegian people were called name
son-of-father's-name, or name
daughter-of-father's-name, such as Jan Jansen or Kristin Jansdatter.
Strictly speaking, the father's name is in genetive (possessive) case, like
Peders, so if Carl had been born in Norway, he would be Carl Pedersen,
i.e. "Carl, Peder's son". It might also be Petersson, but usually a single
's' is used in Norway, whereas in Sweden the suffix is usually "ssen".
Norwegian immigrants to the USA who kept
the patronymic as a last name would often change it to 'son' to be like
English. And then, if the name had an English equivalent, that would often
be substituted, so Pedersen might become Peterson. For women, "datter" or
"dotter" is used instead of "sen" or "son". But any daughter patronymics
that survived immigration
either died out or were subsumed by marriage. Meanwhile,
although most names of immigrants and their offspring were anglicized, there
were exceptions in our family like Carl's half-sister Ragnhild, which sounds
pretty Wagnerian to me.
How to spell "Lund"
The original Hope Lutheran Church, where many Lunds are buried
Norwegian family records were kept in the Ministrialbog for Minneota
Norsk-Evang. Lutherske Menighed, 1872-1910 (Ministry Register of the
Minneota Norwegian-Evangelical Lutheran Fellowship) at Hope Lutheran Church
in Minneota. This is a journal written in Norwegian by hand.
Wherever the name Lund appears, it seems to be spelled "Lünd" (with an
umlaut), and is transcribed that way in the digital version of the
register. But it is not an umlaut; it is a convention in Norwegian
handwriting (as it is in German) to put a line over the letter "u" to
differentiate it from the letter "n". If you look carefully, you can see
all the u's have a mark on top, which can look like a macron, an
umlaut, a breve, or a tilde (so the shape doesn't matter). There is no word
"Lünd" in the language, and for that matter there is no letter "ü" in
Norwegian orthography. Strictly speaking, there is no umlaut at all, but
Norwegians often write 'ö' instead of 'ø'.
Children
of Carl of and Hannah Lund
I include this now because their names are used freely from here on
and "you can't tell the players without a scorecard."
Joy movie theater ticket booth (Minneota),
Draftswoman (PT&T San Francisco), radiotelegraph operator (Navy
Washington DC),
medical/legal secretary (Long Beach)
Served in the Navy in WWII (Lloyd Poehler died in Guadalcanal 1944)
‡
Served in the Army in WWII (Raymond in the Army Air Corps; Harold was
in WWI, not WWII)
††
Served in Merchant Marine in WWII
(Clarence was Chief Cook and was still at sea as late as 1955)
(All military Lunds and spouses were enlisted, not officers)
Notes:
Name, Spouse:
Names are links into the
family tree.
Schooling:
Highest grade achieved comes from the 1940 census. Since the number is
self-reported, it's not necessarily accurate. I can't find the census for
Ella or Raymond because I don't know where they lived in 1940. Zeke
reported 7th grade but his daughter says he only finished 4th. Doris and
Shirley were still in school in 1940 but I don't know how long they stayed
after that. Hannah herself finished 8th grade. That Raymond had 4 years of
college is from his USAAC service record; I don't know if this was before
the War or after on the GI Bill.
Occupation:
My information is very sketchy. For example after Mabel's husband died in
WWII, what was her source of income? How did Doris and Shirley live?
(Zeke's daughter Sandy said Shirley was on welfare.)
Left:
All the kids except Doris and Shirley left Minnesota as soon as they had
a chance and most of them went to California, mainly to Long Beach and
Anaheim. Polly was the first; she stayed in San Francisco. Mabel went to
Casper, Wyoming, and stayed there her whole life. Doris and Shirley's young
daughters drowned in 1960 while playing together in Minneota, and I suspect
they didn't want to leave them behind.
Years: Dates of each marriage. Italics means a guess based (for
example) on the birth of the first and/or last child. //// means until the
death of one of the partners. Vivian was never actually married with Frank
Rider and I'm not sure of the exact year they first got together.
Carl Lund
Carl Lund 1913 (age 44)
Carl Lund (?) about 1930
My grandfather Carl Nicolai Lund. The photo on the left turned up
recently and is clearly the same person as
the man in Mom's scrapbook, who my Mom told
me was her father. The studio portrait on the right was passed down by Ella
and is believed by some family members be Carl. But these are two different
persons; leaving aside the total lack of resemblence, you can see that the
younger Carl has a free earlobe while the older one has an attached earlobe.
Luckily we have another,
verified, photo of
Carl from 1892 in which the face, the shape of the head, and the earlobe
match the 1913 photo.
Anyway, whatever he looked like, Carl Lund wound up as a drifter,
alcoholic, and eventually a derelict. On the 1900 census he's listed as a
blacksmith; in 1910 as a farmer (on his parents' farm in Streeter, North
Dakota); in 1920 a farmer (in Otter Tail County, Minnesota); on my mother's
birth certificate his occupation is listed as "laborer". At some point
between 1924 and 1930 Carl walked away from the family. My cousin Sandy,
Mom's brother's Zeke's daughter, says "Carl, from what my dad said was
almost never home, he was a blacksmith and traveled with the builders
... spent most of the time in the tavern and when he left Hannah with all
those kids he told the owner of the General Store that when they had eaten
all of what the house was worth he could have the house."
In 1930 Carl was living with daughter Mabel and her husband Lloyd and their
baby girl in Casper, Wyoming, occupation "None", marital status "Divorced".
He had left Hannah and the three youngest children — Vivian, Doris,
and Shirley, who were still in school — and was mooching off his
second child and her husband. To Hannah, Carl was as good as dead; she
listed her marital status as "Widowed" on the 1930 census. Just as the
Great Depression kicked in, she had to find a way to house and feed the
three girls. I don't know the whole story but somehow she held it all
together at least until 1940, when my Mom left home.
Mabel and Lloyd must have kicked Carl out because he made his way somehow to
Long Beach, California, where several other of his children lived, including
Sandy's father Zeke. The next thing I know is that he was found dead on the
beach, January 27, 1936, liver failure. Sandy says, "Ella at age 95 still
cried about her dad... she just remembers he bought her a red dress. I don't
think she saw him [when he came to Long Beach]. Ella loved him for the good
memory of a new red dress. They were poor and everyone had to work to
support 10 kids. Seems if anyone knew he was in Long Beach we would have
heard Dad say something about it and Carl was never mentioned." Certainly
Mom never knew what happened to him because Frank Rider hired a detective to
investigate, only to find out that he died on the very same beach that their
apartment looked out on.
Carl's Norwegian family
Betsey and Peter Lund about 1885
Our Norway towns
Carl's father:Peder Nicolaisen, born 1841 in Løiten (now
Løten), Hedmark, who became Peter Nicolai Lund when he arrived in the
United States in 1868. Carl's mother:Bergit Høljesdatter,
born Gransherad, Telemark, in 1834, who arrived in the US in 1842 and
became Betsey Lund when (after a first marriage) she married Peter
Lund.
Peter and Betsey met in Wisconsin, were married in 1869, lived in
Winchester, Winnebago County, where they had four children: Carl Nicolai
(1869), Martha Oline (1871), Eliza Elise Sophia (1874), and Melvin Bernard
(1878). They also had Betsey's four children from her previous marriage to
Knud Hanson, a Norwegian immigrant and Union soldier who had died in 1865 in
Andersonville prison camp in Georgia: Ragnhild (1857), Caroline (1858),
Anna Maria (1861), and Henry (1863).
Betsey and Peter Lund family 1880
Betsey and Peter Lund family 1892
These extraordinary photos showed up on EBay, cousin Sandy found them; the
most amazing part is that they came with captions saying who everybody is;
Click the photos to see the captions. Carl is on the left in the 1880 photo
and third from the left, top row, in the 1892 photo.
I have to say that the Peter (Peder) Lund in these group photos appears to
have a normal body, whereas there is an authenticated photo (right) of Peder
Lund in the book Wisconsin My Home[8], and he
is very small. The book says Bergit "..was a tall woman and ... he was a
short hunchback ..."; elsewhere she says "this small Norwegian man, who had
been so crippled with some kind of rheumatism when he was eleven years old
that he had a big bump on his back and chest. Both his head and arms were
the same size as any other grown-up man, but his legs were so short that I
don't believe he could have been over four feet tall. Because of this
deformity his parents in Norway had educated him very well ... [he soon
married the [Civil War] Widow Hansen (Bergit)] [and] there were four
children [including Carl] born to this union, and a better father, husband,
and stepfather has never lived, I am sure."
Peder was a prominent figure in the in the Winchester Norwegian community:
church klokker (sextant) and bell-ringer, hymn leader, town assessor
(of Winchester), parochial school teacher (where children learned not only
the Lutheran religion but also to speak, read, and write Norwegian),
night-school teacher, farmer, story-teller, and comforter of the sick and
dying.
I'm inclined to believe the man in the group photos is indeed Peder Lund,
not only because he is identified as such in the photo legend, but also
because Sandy ran the photos at the top of this section through a
face-matching app with an 81.37% look-alike score.
Hannah Lund
Hannah Lund 1940s
Hannah Lund 1930s
Hannah Lund
(standing) 1902
My grandmother Hannah Engeborg Lund, born Ingeborg Johanna Johnson
(anglicization of Janssen, her father's patronymic), raised ten children in
conditions of unremitting chaos and hardship, as far as I can tell. Carl was
not a good husband; he was never home, he drank up much of whatever money he
managed to earn, and he deserted the family when my Mom was somewhere
between four and eight years old and Doris and Shirley were very little.
I know little about the early years, but Sandy says her father Zeke (who was
born in 1909) remembers living in a sod house; that's like a hole in the
ground, typical of many newly-arrived Scandinavian immigrants who settled in
northern plains states, where there are few trees; this would have been in
either North Dakota or Minnesota, nobody is left alive who can say for sure.
He remembered "having only flour and water to eat and if they were lucky
they could sprinkle cinnamon on it for flavor." My own Mom had a similar
story about eating snow.
Despite all this, and despite the fact that all the children except Doris
and Shirley had gotten the heck out of Minnesota at the earliest possible
moment, most of them without finishing school, Hannah was much loved by her
children. Mom, like all her brothers and sisters, couldn't wait to get out
but when she was still on the cross-country train she was already
homesick...
I am more than 3000 feet above sea level in the Rockie Mts. It's 11:30 now,
Sunday morning. It's all very wonderful. We stopped in Denver this morning
and met some of the Jack B's wife's relations. Harold [Polly's husband] is
shaving. There hasn't been time to write so I bought this [foldout postcard
mailer] for 25¢. Harold's been feeding me so much I'm stuffed. There is
snow on the mts. Now we're going thru an 11 mile tunnel. Will be in
S.F. 9:35 Mon. nite. Tell all the kids hello I miss Viola [Doris] all
ready. Phyllis Knight bought stockings in Marshall [Minnesota]. I had
dinner over to Blanchette [Polly's married name]. I can't write its so
bumpy. I'm afraid I'm going to be lonesome.
Postmarked June 11, 1940, in East Portal, Colorado, addressed simply to
"Hanna Lund, Minneota, Minn" (notice the touches of "Fargo" dialect towards
the end). I guess Polly and Harold must have come out from San Francisco to
meet her halfway somehow.
So now it was just Hannah, Doris, and Shirley left in Minneota, less mouths
to feed but also less people to earn money. The offspring who went west,
I'm not sure how they all managed it, but Zeke worked his way across; at one
point as a logger and others as a farm hand. Later on, in the 1940s and 50s
the ones who had money like Polly and Zeke were able to send money to
Hannah in Minneota and also to brothers and sisters down on their luck.
Hanna's marker
We (da Cruz's) were still pretty poor while Hannah was alive, but
somehow my Mom got plane tickets to go see her in March 1954 when she was
dying, the first visit since she left home. Maybe Polly sent her the money.
I have postcards from Mom when she was there; she sounds happy being where
she grew up and with her family and friends. Ella went to Minneota after
Mom and stayed with Hannah until she died. Somehow Hannah's funeral and
burial were paid for and an obituary was printed in the Minneota
Mascot:
Mrs. Lund dies; Rites Held Monday
Mrs. Hannah Lund, a resident of this community for years, died at her home
Thursday of last week after a lingering illness of several months. ¶
She was buried here Monday afternoon following services at Hope Lutheran
Church. ¶ Rev. Ott Dale officiated at the funeral rites, with the
following acting as pallbearers: ¶ Arby Furgeson, Orrin Hanson, Henry
Johnson, Irving Johnson, and Richard Lund. ¶ Hannah Engeborg Lund, a
daughter of Mr. and Mrs. John B. Johnson, was born on July 4, 1883, in
Nordland township. ¶ At the time of her death she was 71 years old.
¶ On April 12, 1902 she was united in marriage to Carl N. Lund and they
first made their home in this community. ¶ In 1905 they moved to
Streeter, N.D., and later to Underwood, Minnesota. ¶ They returned to
Minneota in 1920 and since that time this has been Mrs. Lund's home. ¶
To this union 11 children were born of which 10 are living. ¶ She was
preceded in death by her husband, one son, parents, five brothers and
sisters. ¶ Mrs. Lund is survived by her 10 children: Palma
(Mrs. Harold Blanchette) of San Francisco, Calif.; Mabel (Mrs. Mabel
Poehler) of Sheridan, Wyoming; Clarence, Marvin, Raymond, and Gislie of Long
Beach, Calif.; Ella of Glendale, Calif.; Vivian (Mrs. Francis da Cruz
of Falls Church, Virginia; Doris (Mrs. Earl Jasperson) of Storden, Minn.;
Shirley (Mrs. Leonard Hasel of Minneota. ¶ She is also survived by two
brothers, Andrew Johnson of Ivanhoe, Gislie Johnson of Minneota; and two
sisters, Mrs. Theo Furgeson of Minneota, Mrs. Carl Wigness of Fessenden,
N.D.; 16 grandchildren and seven great grandchildren.
Hannah's Norwegian Family
Hannah's father:John Bjorn Johnson, birth name Bjørn Jansen (or
Janssen) in 1852 in Sauherad, Telemark, Norway
(see map); arrived USA
1861, died 1925.
Hannah's mother:Martina Halvorson, born Simonine Mathene
Andersdatter in Bamle, Telemark, who took the surname
Halvorson (her father's patronymic) when she arrived in the US in 1861, and
became Martina Johnson when she married John Bjorn Johnson in 1875. They
lived in Iowa and Wisconsin before settling in Minnesota, and had 12
children.
John Bjorn Johnson
Martina Halvorson
Children of John Bjorn Johnson and Martina Halvorson
Name
Dates
Born
Died
Bernard Johnson*
1875-1953
Minnesota
Minnesota
Anne/Anna Johnson
1877-1961
Minneota MN
Lincoln MN
John Johnson
1878-1925
Nordland MN
Nordland MN
Stener Johnson
1880-1907
Nordland MN
Hendricks MN
Johanna Ingeborg Johnson**
1883-1954
Minneota MN
Minneota MN
Andrew Johnson
1884-1960
Nordland MN
Hendricks MN
Joseph Martinias Johnson
1887-1946
Nordland MN
Lyon County MN
Julia Clareth Johnson
1890-1946
Nordland MN
Stettler, Alberta
(baby girl)
1892-1892
Nordland MN
Nordland MN
Ella Andrea Johnson
1893-1945
Nordland MN
Todd MN
Tilda Nellie Johnson
1896-1982
Nordland MN
San Leandro CA
Selmer Adolph Johnson
1898-1945
Nordland MN
Fort Dodge IA
Gislie Louis Johnson
1900-1984
Nordland MN
Sioux Falls SD
Bear in mind, Nordland and Minneota are most likely the same place.
* Bernard and his wife Annie Kass were close with Hannah her whole life.
** Johanna is Hannah.
Summary of Mom's Norwegian immigrant grandparents
Norwegian name
American name
Born-died
Arrived
From
Relation
Peder Nicolaisen
Peter Nicolai Lund
1841-1908
1868
Løiten, Hedmark
Carl's father
Bergit Høljesdatter
Betsey Lund
1834-1926
1842
Granserad, Telemark
Carl's mother
Bjørn Jansen
John Bjorn Johnson
1852-1925
1861
Sauherad, Telemark
Hannah's father
Simonine Mathene Andersdatter
Martina Halvorson Johnson
1859-1921
1861
Bamle, Telemark
Hannah's mother
So all of Mom's grandparents were immigrants from southeastern Norway, three
from Telemark and one from Hedmark, and both couples met in the USA.
Meanwhile on Bergit's side we have 4 generations of documented ancestors
before her going back to Hans Olsen (1696-1740) and Gunlov Såmåldatter (born
1696) and on Simonine's side (Hanna's mother), five generations going back
to Jon Nilson (1710-1763) and Live Knudsdatter (1713-1750).
Minneota
Minneota station and grain elevators 1908
Minneota aerial view 1938
Minneota Main Street (before it was paved)
Minneota is a tiny town on the Yellow Medicine River in the plains
of southwestern Minnesota. It grew up around a railroad station built in
1877 for the coal-burning trains to take on water from the river for their
boilers, and was incorporated in 1881 in the middle of a vast flat landscape
of farmland and featured huge grain elevators and warehouses where the
farmers brought their crops and livestock be taken to market on the train.
In 1938 the town was a grid of 6 by 6 streets (give or take) and only the
main street (1st Street) was paved. Farmers brought goods to town in
horse-drawn wagons, and there were still hitching posts in front of the
stores. The town ends abruptly at the farmers's fields, there were and are
no suburbs. To this day, houses in Minneota have no fences, and it's not
much bigger than it was then.
Inside The Big Store
Minneota Big Store
Although the population was only 1065 in 1940, Minneota had six grocery
stores, three hardware stores, the Big Store (a 1900-era department store),
five churches, five agricultural businesses, five cafés, four auto dealers,
two gas stations, a drug store, a jeweler, a bakery, a pool hall (Dero's), a
Public school and a Catholic school, and the Joy movie theater (where my Mom
was cashier), plus a doctor, a dentist, a vet, and an undertaker. This is
because Minneota served the nearby towns (which had very little in the way
of retail) and the farms scattered over a vast expanse; it was the only
place to buy stuff for hundreds (thousands?) of square miles to the west,
north, and east. The larger town of Mashall was 12 miles to the Southeast,
but if you were coming from the north, why go an extra 24 miles to Marshall
and back if you could buy what you needed in Minneota?
Farmers & Merchants Bank
Bank clock
Minneota's population was Norwegian, Icelandic, and Belgian: some
immigrants, others children and grandchildren of immigrants. The Belgians
were Catholic Walloons (Dutch speakers); the Norwegians and Icelanders were
Lutherans, with separate churches. The Norwegians and
Icelanders went to the public school, the Belgians to the Catholic school.
In 1940, the average annual family income was under $900, far below the
national average. 24 Minneotans worked for the WPA that year. It was
normal for families to have lots of kids; 41% of the population were
children. Telephones existed but not everybody had them; phone numbers were
two digits. The town had electricity but it was only just beginning to
reach the farms through an electrical cooperative funded by FDR's Rural
Electrification Administration. Even today, 20% of Minnesotans get their
electricity from cooperatives.
Dana Yost points out that "Minnesota was well ahead of the rest of the
nation as far as number of co-operatives and still is ... Minnesota was,
indeed, a state with socialist tendencies from the 1890s up to World War II,
largely as off-shoots of farm activist organizations, labor unions,
etc. Interestingly, the left/socialist organizations started in more rural
areas than urban ... From 1915-1920, an anti-banking, anti-big business
organization known as the NonPartisan League had more than 50,000 members in
Minnesota. It started as a farm-activist group but supported flat-out
socialist policies in many areas and supported the state equivalent of
nationalizing grain elevators ... (it gave) rise to the Farmer-Labor
political party, which remains intact today in Minnesota as part of the
Democrat-Farmer-Labor Party." Minneota itself had a gas-and-oil cooperative
and a dairy co-op.
The Depression was as hard on Minneota as it was throughout the midwest:
drought, farm failures, food shortages, lost jobs, and even an uprising of
foreclosed farmers, but Minneota survived. My Mom was only seven years old
when the Depression started, and hard times were all she knew during her
formative years.
References -
Source material and recommended reading and viewing...
Haugen, Einar, The
Norwegian Language in America, Indiana
University Press (1969). The growing problems in communication between
Norwegian immigrants in America and their relatives back home.
Rølvaag, Ole Edvart, Giants in
the Earth, Harper (1924-25).
A novel about Norwegian immigrants to the upper midwest in the late 1800s.
Rølvaag lived near Minneota.
Moberg, Vilhelm, The Emigrants series of novels (The
Emigrants, Unto a Good
Land,
The
Settlers,
The
Last Letter Home, 1951-61). About Swedes rather than Norwegians
but the same experience. Also available as two excellent (if depressing)
films: The Emigrants (1971), and The New Land (1972).
Oleson, Thurine,
Wisconsin My Home, University of Wisconsin Presss (1950), 2012 edition.
This is the autobiography of Thurine Oleson (1866-1990), as told to her
daughter Erna Oleson Xan. Peder and Birgit Lund lived next door and
appear throughout the book.
The Lunds in Minneota
Baby Mom
Mom, Doris, Shirley
Mom in 1937
Minneota winter
Mom had a whole photo album of Minnesota and her time in the Navy, but it
disappeared after she died.
There were
photos of the house, of her as a little girl, and even of a snowfall so deep
that people went from place to place through snow tunnels... treasures she
had preserved her whole life. Luckily, on a visit to Big Bear in the 1980s,
I took black and white photos of all the pages with a film camera. But
un-luckily, almost all of my photos-of-photos were overexposed and
washed out. I've done my best with Photoshop to rescue the faded ones
you see in this section.
When Mom was born in 1922, the Lunds lived in a
modest two-story house on South Jefferson
Street which was big enough for Hannah, Carl, and the seven children (only
Polly had left home, and Doris and Shirley were yet to arrive). Carl was
presumably still contributing something to the support of the family, but I
don't know the details. Even so, Mom said her mother was on welfare ("home
relief") and took in laundry but that still wasn't enough to pay the rent so
the kids would have to miss school to babysit or do other chores to get some
money. Ella, for example, was farmed out as a live-in babysitter in
faraway places for weeks and months at a time. Of course no food went to
waste; nobody was a picky eater. Even in later life, when Mom ate an apple,
she ate the whole thing, core, seeds, and all. When she ate chicken, she
ate the bones too.
Minneota Public School
Minneota Joy Theater
By the time Mom was a teen, no later than 1935, they moved to
a tiny one-room house with one bed for everybody,
right across from the school. The rent was $10 a month. Carl and seven of
the children had already left home, so it was just Hannah, Mom, Doris, and
Shirley. Mom worked as a cashier at the Joy movie theater ("Hollywood
glamour available year-round"), which allowed her to stay in school and
eventually to graduate.
Vivian Lund 1940
Minneota HS class of 1940
I know that Mom was popular in high school, acted in school plays, was a big
fan of Swing music, liked to dance, and probably had boyfriends. Dana Yost
says there were none of the normal kinds of teenage hangouts in Minneota,
such as a drug store or soda fountain, but the Big Store had an "opera hall"
upstairs with a dance floor, where touring bands sometimes gave dance
concerts. For any real nightlife they'd have had to go to the Blue Moon in
Marshall, 12 miles away, but I don't know if Minneota teenagers drove cars
in those days. But in any case, the April 1940 Mexican-themed Junior-Senior
prom was the event of the season and I'm sure it was a big deal for Mom.
The photos are from the from the Minneota Mascot, high-school
graduation issue, June 1940; Mom is 4th row, 4th from the left, full-size
cutout to its right. The accompanying Mascot article noted that "First
choice for school queen and generally accepted as the class beauty, Vivian
Lund says that everything is 'Jake' with her and has been for the last
decade." ["Jake" is 1940 hep-cat talk.]
Mom's houses
First house
House at 111 South Jefferson Street
I was interested to know if the houses where Mom lived were still standing.
A breakthrough came when Sandy spoke with Betty VanMoorlehem (born in 1931),
daughter of Mom's brother Clarence. Betty said the Lunds' first house was
at 106 South Jefferson Street; the house that is there today, although very
small, does not match Mom's photo at all. So I looked around the immediate
area in Google Street View and across the street I found the house shown in
the color photo, at 111 South Jefferson Street, right next door to Hope
Lutheran Church. It seems to be a perfect match; look at the configuration
of the roof, gables, and second-story windows. Clearly there have been
considerable additions since then (and the chimney moved) but this could be
the house where Mom was born, and Doris, and Shirley.
Newer house the same address
Second house
Betty said the second house, the one by the school, was at 400 East 3rd
Street, on the corner with North Jackson Street. The color photo from
Google Street View shows the house on that corner as of 2013; clearly it
bears no resemblence Mom's photo. Betty also said that later (after Mom and
Doris moved out), "Shirley and Hannah also lived in the little house north
of Bill Holm's house. She remembers that Hannah would give Shirley a nickel
and Shirley would go down to Meger's Cafe and drink pop while other girls
their age would be working for someone to raise money." Sandy, repeating a
story of those days passed down by one of Mom's little sisters, said that
this house "had no running water...they were very poor...she hated to go to
school because she could smell how bad she stunk."
The girls who drowned
The search for the girls
A melancholy postscript on the Lunds of Minneota. Doris and Shirley still
lived there in 1960; Doris was married with Earl Jasperson and they had five
children; Shirley was married with Leonard Hasel and had four children,
including one from a previous marriage. One day Doris's 8-year-old
daughter, Judy Ann, and Shirley's 4-year old daughter Cheryl went out to
play and never came back. They fell into the Yellow Medicine River and
drowned. CLICK HERE to read the
story in the Minneota Mascot. It was a blow that Doris and Shirley never
recovered from and, I suspect, the reason they never left Minneota.
San Francisco
Polly, Mom 1940
All of the Lund kids but the last two left home as soon as they had a
chance. Polly was the first to leave at some point between 1920 and 1927;
she got a job at Pacific Telephone & Telegraph in San Luis Obispo as a
telephone operator, transferred to San Francisco in 1935, and rose through
the ranks to become important enough to be able to bring some of her sisters
and brothers to California and, in some cases, got them jobs there too. My
Mom for one, who went there right after she graduated high school in 1940
and became a telephone company draftswoman, a job Polly arranged for her,
and she lived with Polly for about a year.
Besides her PT&T job, Mom also got training as a private secretary,
learning typing and Gregg shorthand. When the USA entered World War II in
December 1941 she wanted to do her part so, while still working, she joined
the American Womens Voluntary Service, sold War Bonds, and also went to
night school in radio communications. There was talk that the armed
services would open up to women and she wanted a head start. By this time
she had moved out of the house of Polly (who, Mom said, treated her like a
slave) and lived at the YWCA. As soon as she finished her training she
signed up for the just-created women's branch of the Navy, the WAVES (Women
Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) November 14, 1942. Her hometown
newspaper, the Minneota Mascot, published an article about it (this,
along with most of her Navy pictures, were in a scrapbook I do not have, but
later I obtained a copy of the article from
the people at the Mascot, which still exists and has all its back issues in
binders). She had her six weeks of Basic Training at the US Naval Training
School in Cedar Falls, Iowa — not
at Lehman College as I had
fantasized (Lehman — Hunter in those days — is near my Bronx
apartment and was the only WAVES basic training center from 1943 onwards.
Then they received advanced training in their assigned specialties at
Oklahoma A&M, Indiana University, University of
Wisconsin at Madison, Smith College, Miami University of Ohio, Georgia
State Collge, Burdett College, etc [11].
Waves in Cedar Falls 1943
Waves Radio School 1943
Mom's semiautomatic paddle code key
After Basic Training in Cedar Falls, Mom went to Navy Radio School at "RS
NYD Washington DC" (Radio
School Washington
Navy Yard) in Anacostia. She excelled as a military code operator.
Just like my dad, she could transcribe incoming Morse code onto a clunky old
manual typewriter at 120wpm, and nobody could transmit code faster than she
could; for this she had a special side-to-side code key with all kinds of
springs, balances, counterweights, and adjustment points... it's called a
"semiautomatic paddle key"... purely mechanical but she could make it
"autorepeat" at lightning speed, which took enormous skill. We had it
in our house when I was little and they gave me Morse code lessons on it. I
never saw it again until October 2024, when cousin Danny discovered it in a
long-forgotten storage locker in Washington DC and sent it to me. The cable
would plug into a console like the ones shown on the left side of the center
photo above and (better photo) HERE.
Mom Navy portrait 1942
Mom Navy pictures (and Dennis)
She was so good that she was assigned to Navy headquarters in Washington DC,
nerve center for the naval war in all theaters, where she worked as a "Radio
Wave"; as a recruiting poster said, "receiving dispatches direct from the
battle fleet ... an important link between the men who plan strategy ashore
and those who carry it out at sea." She met my father who wound up there
too, having some five years experience as a radioman on ships such as
the USS Omaha (CL-4, the one built in 1916).
Unfortunately I know next to nothing about my Mom's years at the Navy
Department, except that she lived in temporary barracks near the Reflecting
Pool, between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument and close to
the Navy building. One interesting thing about the WAVES, though: it was
the
only branch of US military
service that was fully integrated in WWII (but starting only in December
1944). The framed pictures are of Mom in the Navy in Washington DC.
I don't have copies of them.
Mom's chevron
Wedding day
Wedding portrait
My mother and father were married March 14, 1944, in Washington DC in
their Navy uniforms, most likely in one of the Navy buildings, perhaps
the observatory (right photo). Mom's chevron is not fully visible
in the wedding photo but you can see it at left: World War II US Navy
WAVE Female Rate 3rd Class Radioman.
She was released from the Navy May 10, 1944, two months after getting
married, because she was pregnant (official reason: "Convenience of the
government"). If that had not happened, her enlistment would have ended
March 2, 1946 (six months after the Japanese surrender on September 2nd,
1945 — all wartime hitches were for "duration plus six months").
Fifty-some years later she received a citation from President Bush (W)
thanking her for her service. I know that her time in the Navy was a high
point of her life; she had a lot of friends — it was like going to
college and living in the girls' dorm — and she was doing important
war work. In later years she was proud to display the photos of herself in
uniform. My great regret with her, as with all my family, is that I never
asked them about their lives.
References -
Source material and recommended reading and viewing...
Mundy, Liza,
"Code
Girls - The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War
II", Hachette Books (2017). My Mom was not a code breaker as far as I
know but she transmitted messages they had encrypted and received encrypted
messages for them to decrypt. Chapter 6, "Q for Communications", is
about the WAVES codebreakers and the buildings they worked in.
WWII Women Cracking the Code, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum:
"A major part of the WAVES’ job was building and operating the Navy
Cryptanalytic Bombe, a 2.5 - ton electromechanical device developed to
break the four-rotor enigma messages from German U-boats. Six hundred WAVES
worked three eight-hour shifts, seven days a week at the National Cash
Register Company (NCR) in Dayton, Ohio, where they learned how to solder
and connect wires, read electrical diagrams, assemble rotors, and build 121
of these machines with no idea what they were building or why. It was
tiresome, tedious work that allowed no room for error. After the first
successful Bombe run in May 1943, the WAVES traveled with their Bombes by
rail back to the Navy Annex in Washington, DC, where they operated the
machines through the end of the war." The Navy Annex was about four
miles north of the Navy building (see this page).
Munch, Janet Butler, Making Waves in the Bronx: The Story of the U.S.
Naval Training School (WR) at Hunter College, City University of New
York (1993).
Major General Mari K. Eder, The
Girls Who Stepped Out Of Line, Sourcebooks (2021). Chapter 12: Code
Secrets. More about the WAVES who worked in Signals Intelligence during
World War II.
After the Navy
Mom & Dad on a date, DC Aug 1947
Mom was a housewife for 20 years. Like many postwar mothers, she didn't
have a job; she stayed home all day to take care of the house and kids. I
don't think I knew any women who had jobs when I was a child, except my
teachers (and my friend George Gilmer's
mother who had been social worker before marriage, and then worked in a
church office and then at AG Bell, Alexander Graham Bell Society for the
Deaf). In those days, even a meager salary from one single 9-5 job was
enough to support a family, even with a house and a car. My dad got out of
the Navy in 1946 and had bought a house by 1947
(with a GI loan, of course), supporting a wife and one child and making
mortage payments on one paycheck. Three years later, a second child and a
car. He left the house for work at 8:30am and got home 5:30. The whole
time I lived at home (until 1962), his salary was the only income.
Mom did a lot of things with me when I was little… she taught me
to read and write, she made flashcards for math, and sometimes we even
played together (I remember some races, and I remember a dough fight we had
once when she was baking bread). The only time she ever asserted herself
with us was when we refused to eat something; she could never let food go to
waste.
I reconnected with childhood friend Jimmie Walker in 2014 (after 58 years).
One of the first things he said to me was "[your Mom] used to just appear
with a platter of orange slices or other goodies. She was like an angel
— perfect in every way. All the other boys wanted a mom like Vivian
da Cruz. I think of her often and remember how very beautiful she
was." It's true; back in those days there used to be chain gangs of Black
convicts working on the dirt road in front of our house; she'd bring them
orange slices and big pitchers of cold water. George Gilmer, who I've known
since 1947 said "I always thought that your Mom was one of the prettiest and
nicest Mom's in our neighborhood."
At some point in the early 1950s my father's personality changed. I
remember him being pretty normal when I was little; I liked him, I wasn't
scared of him. He and Mom got along well and even had some funny routines,
like long conversations in Navy jargon or Morse code. But now he was angry
all the time, yelling at us, beating us, and he subjected Mom to withering
verbal abuse every night when he came home, especially over dinner. Then
after dinner he drank until he passed out. So that was Mom's (and our) life
for about ten years.
In October 2018 Danny sent me scans of letters from Dad to Pete, 1941-1959.
In them he speaks admiringly and at length of Mom. Throughout the first
five years of marriage, the only anger he expressed was towards greedy
money-hungry doctors and wishing for "socialized medicine". Just before
Dennis was born in April 1949, Dad and Mom were already planning on a third
child, a girl to be named Delores (not Maritornes, he joked — a
character from Don Quixote, which he had just read, probably to
impress his dad, who was a professor of it and even had published a
translation, which was no doubt the one Dad had read). Mom's first suicide
attempt was in mid-1953. Dad concluded it was because the house was too
small and that's why he built the addition.
My Mom was the typical stoic Norwegian. She put up with dad's abuse and
other hardships all that time, never complaining, but withdrew; she didn't
talk about herself, she never expressed opinions, and after things got bad
around the house, she never expressed any emotion, never laughed or cried;
she wasn't affectionate, she just did her cooking and cleaning and sewing
all day every day and put up with Dad. When I read "Giants in the Earth", I
pretty much recognized my Mom in Per Hansa's wife, Beret.
Mom & me 19th Street 1945
19th Street 1945
Chesterbrook 1951
Haircut 1952
Mom & Dennis Chesterbrook 1952
At Gus's house 1952
With Aunt Polly 1952
Although I never saw dad hit my Mom (Audie, Dad's second wife, whose back he
once broke, told me that he did), he was unremittingly cruel to her,
eventually driving her to try to kill herself at least four times between
1953 and 1959. After each of these incidents (Dennis and I would come home
from school to find her unconscious from pills or in a bloody bathtub),
Dad would commit her to a mental hospital for months of shock treatments,
which — even at the time — I didn't think was right because she
wasn't crazy, just miserable. In July 2014, Jimmie Walker said:
I will fill in what I remember. Apparently, she tried using the sleeping
pills twice. Early one morning, you and Denny came over to my house and
asked if I could help you wake up your mom. You had tried pinching her,
shaking her and yelling at her to no avail. When I could not wake her, I ran
back home and woke-up my mother. She ran over and then called the
ambulance. Then I recall the time she got a razor blade, locked the bathroom
door and cut her wrists in the bathtub. Her life must have been a "living
hell" because of him. One time he physically abused me and left marks on my
chest and stomach. My dad marched next door and rang the door bell. When
your dad opened his front door, my dad said "Frank, if you ever, ever, touch
my son again, I will mop up this sidewalk with your bodily remains!" He
could have done it, too, because I've heard stories about how my dad beat-up
six guys at once inside of Coppicks Bar in Vienna.
Six months after writing that, Jimmie was dead.
Frankfurt, Germany, 1959-61
As described in the Frankfurt chapter, Dad was
sent to work in Frankfurt for a few years in 1959, bringing Mom, Dennis,
and me along. We lived in a German apartment for a few months and then
moved to Army housing.
Mom passport photo 1961
Mom tried to kill herself again shortly after we arrived. Looking through
one of dad's albums I find this comment:
One night in Frankfurt, about July 1959, the whole gang decided to attend
the "Merry Widow" ... Henri was in Paris translating for Eisenhower (when
Krushchev chewed him out) and my spouse was in the rubber room at the 97th
General Hospital. So I escorted Betty.
Nice guy. Anyway as a result of being strapped down and electrocuted so
many times over so many years, and who-knows-what mind-numbing drugs, there
was very little left. She had no emotions, no opinions, no engagement,
no curiosity, she just went through the motions of living. The only thing
that kept her going was her secret plan to escape, and finally she did it,
but both she and Dennis were wrecked for life by that monster. I don't say
that because Dennis was gay, even though that might well have had something
to do with my dad's bedtime romps with him every night when he was a child,
but he couldn't function in life; he couldn't graduate from high school, he
couldn't earn a living as a musician no matter how talented he was, and he
just bounced around from one situation to another where somebody else took
care of him. And if you think about how my mom was when we went to visit
her, she never really had anything to say. Once she was free of dad, the
pressure was off but she was empty. If you asked her how she was doing,
she'd say "Everything is wonderful!". And it was.
But what I didn't know was that she had been truly happy in the hospital.
She had long breaks from Dad and she made good, deep friends there. One day
some of her hospital friends paid her a surprise visit when I was home (and
dad wasn't). Suddenly she was a person I had never seen before: lively,
laughing, joking, saying outrageous things. It was the only time I ever saw
her so lively and animated; I imagine that's how she was in high school and
the Navy.
In later life I wondered why Dad turned so mean and brutal, especially since
his mother and father were good people, and his brother was a charming,
easygoing guy. According to Audrey, when he got Mom pregnant he had no
intention of marrying her, but was ordered to by his CO, a random event
to which all of us owe our existence. Audie says that's why he hated Mom so
much, that she "trapped" him, condemning him to the life of a poor working
stiff with no chance of becoming a big shot.
In 1976 my brother Dennis told me that that dad had told him
that he was one of the unwitting subjects in the CIA's experiments with
mind-altering drugs (Project MKultra) in the early 1950s. All I know is
that he was angry and full of hate until about his 70th year when he calmed
down a bit, but he had abused his own body so badly and for so long that he
would only live another couple years.
Me at Mom's hospital, mid-1950s
I've never had analysis or psychotherapy, but I do try to
figure stuff out. Is there some part of me that resents my mom for trying
to abandon us so many times? I don't think so but I do know that every time
she disappeared into the mental hospital for a month or two and we only had
dad around, it was pretty frightening. Dennis and I both believed he could
kill us at any moment. I had nightmares for decades about that, even when
we lived on 118th Street (I was in my 30s and 40s).
Trip to Norway, 1960
Mom and Dennis in Norway 1960
As noted in another chapter, in the summer of
1960 while we were living in Germany, my dad took us all on an epic road
trip that included Northern Germany, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Despite
his cruelty towards my mother, he wanted to fulfill her dream of seeing her
ancestral homeland; she had a storehouse of Norwegian lore and she told us
many stories of the Norwegian countryside when we were children that were
passed down from her grandparents, all of whom emigrated from Norway. But
she had no idea where her family had lived. Anyway we covered a lot of
ground and she was able to experience many aspects of the country thanks to
my dad, for which he deserves credit.
Long Beach, California, 1963-80
Free at last! Dennis and Mom
in Long Beach, 1963
Soon after I joined the Army 1963, one day while my dad was at work my mom
took Dennis and flew to California (Dad said she cleaned out the joint bank
account, Frank Rider said there was no joint bank account and she had been
saving pocket change for years until she had enough). In her quiet way, she
freed herself and Dennis from his brutal domination and she put 3000 miles
between them. From there she obtained a divorce, and probably got some
restraining orders too. At first she stayed with brother Zeke and his wife
Sally and daughters Sandy and Mary in Anaheim.
In late 2018, Cousin Sandy sent me a six-page typed letter Dad sent to Mom
in August 1963, shortly after she left him. It's threatening, sarcastic,
cruel, and — given the degree to which he had abused her for so long
— delusional. As though he is the aggrieved party, not Mom. It
confirms my impression that the reason he hated her so much is that starting
around 1952 or -53 she "denied [him his] marital rights" for reasons I can
only imagine; this leaves open the frightening question of whether he forced
himself on her after (or before) that. He describes his marriage to "an
impractical and ignorant woman" (and elswhere, "emasculatory") as "nineteen
years of almost unremitting horror", even though the horror was all Mom's,
Dennis's, and mine. He refers to her "appetite for gin and tranquilizers",
which is news to me... and this from a man who was drinking two
fifths of gin each evening by himself. He describes his ideal woman as
one "free of small-town inhibitions" and "who has come to realize that a man
is man and a woman is a woman; that they are not equal and never will be;
that one leads and the other follows; that
that is why she was born and
fashioned as she is." He ends on a semi-conciliatory note: "I must say in
all truth that I write this in some sorrow. In spite of the fact that we
got off to a shaky start [i.e. that he was ordered to marry her by
his Navy CO], you were a beautiful and devoted girl, nubile and all a man
could ask for. A wonderful mother, too. But somewhere along the line you
got off track and never quite succeeded in getting back on."
After staying with Zeke, Mom got an apartment in Long Beach and went to the
Career Training Institute there (and perhaps also Long Beach Business
College) to become a medical stenographer and secretary, and then was the
office manager of an orthopaedic practice for 10 or 15 years.
The photos above were taken shortly after Mom arrived in California in 1963.
At first she had a small apartment (first photo) with Dennis. Some of her
brothers and sisters lived in the area, and they appear in the next four
photos. The second photo is Mom with Polly's husband Harold Blanchette.
The third is Mom with Zeke's wife Sally. The fourth photo is of Ella, Mom,
Zeke and Zeke's daughters Mary and Sandy, and fifth is Pug with his wife
Ruth.
In the building where she lived she met Frank Rider, a divorcée who worked
as a legal aide; his strategy for meeting women was to spend a lot of time
in the laundry room, which is how they met. He looked like Dean Martin with
blond hair. Frank was too young to have been in the War, ten years younger
than my mother; he worked in a defense plant as a teenager, zooming around
on his bicycle delivering stuff between the buildings. I think it was a
shipyard in or around Vancouver WA where they built Liberty ships.
Apartment in Long Beach
They decided to live together and rented a large and luxurious apartment on
a high floor of a high-rise right on the beach, with a big picture window
and a balcony overlooking the beach and the ocean. Mommy and I visited them
there both before and after you guys were born.
At Laguna Beach 1976
I got out of the Army in 1966 but it was 10 more years before I saw my
mother. In 1976 after Judy and I got married we went to see Mom and Frank
Rider in Long Beach. They met us at the airport and Mom gave me such a huge
hug, I never knew she had so much strength. That was the closest she ever
came to expressing her feelings with me in person (after we got back, she
wrote "I can't tell you both how much your visit meant to me, and to Dennis.
It was one of the happiest times of my life. I have played the tapes [of
Dennis and me making some music together] over and over, hope they don't
wear out. I think you two are a great combination. I love my
daughter-in-law, and I am very excited about being grandmother" [Judy's
unsuccessful first pregnancy].) As you can see, she and Judy got along
great and Judy and Dennis were also crazy about each other. Frank Rider
rubbed Mommie the wrong way at first because he kept making little jibes
about New York City, but as the years went by I think we all adjusted to
each other pretty well.
Judy, Peter, and my Mom in 1978
Frank Rider & Peter
Mom in 1978
On that first trip, Dennis picked us up in his 1959 Cadillac, possibly the
biggest car ever made, and with the biggest fins. It was kind of a wreck
but he was proud of it. He drove us all over southern California
including San Diego, San Simeon, and Laguna Beach where Mom found a shop
that sold a kind of Norwegian flatbread called lefse she used to have as a
kid. When we got to her house she made it for us; you have steam it or
something until it becomes flexible and spongy (kind of like injera,
Ethiopian bread, but chewier) and that you can roll stuff up in it.
Frank Rider and Mom
Dennis and me 1976
Dennis and me in Big Bear 1976
By 1976, Mom and Frank had also rented or bought a small cabin in Big Bear
in the San Bernardino mountains near Big Bear Lake and we went there too on
this same trip. We'd go for long walks up the mountain...
the air was pretty thin, it was at 10,000 feet. I fixed Frank's putt-putt
motorcycle that hadn't worked in years and took Dennis for a ride around the
lake, about 10 miles. He didn't want to drive it himself because he had had
a serious and traumatizing motorcycle accident at some point (I don't
remember the details) but he trusted me to drive.
Death of Dennis, 1978
Dennis 1968
I tell the story of Dennis's death in the Dennis
chapter but, briefly... In early 1978, he had some strange symptoms,
saw a doctor, and it was a cancer that had metastasized all over his thorax,
every organ was involved; it was inoperable. Judy and I and 4-month-old
Peter flew to Long Beach, and found that the oncologist was optimistic and,
indeed, after two weeks of chemotherapy his cancer was in remission, but he
would need to continue chemotherapy for a long period. He hated the chemo,
the nausea, the hair falling out, and all the other side effects, so when
the cancer came back six months later he declined treatment and died at 29
years of age on his own terms. This was devastating blow for my Mom but,
always the stoic, she soldiered on for another 22 years. One consolation
for her was that she was finally a grandmother. And within 18 months, she
was a grandmother again!
Big Bear, 1980-1995
Grandma Vivian Big Bear 1980
Flight to Big Bear 1981
When Mom and Frank retired about 1980, they sold their Long Beach apartment
and moved to a much bigger cabin in Big Bear, where Mom's favorite pastime
was feeding the racoons, chipmunks, and birds. Frank made a modest living
doing real estate deals, maybe one a year. On one of our visits, Mom and
Frank hired a small plane to fly us direct from LAX to "Big Bear X", as Mom
called it. I don't know if you remember, it was quite an adventure... We
went up and up and up and then just landed without going down again. And
that's when Mom met Amy, her second grandchild. She came alive when
you guys were there.
Peter and Mommie in Death Valley
At Big Bear Lake
Disneyland 1980
Another time we had to drive across Death Valley.
At Big Bear 1986
At the big cabin 1986
We always had fun at Big Bear. Once we went to a rodeo, remember? That was
the time Peter rode on the legendary horse, Buttermilk. On that same trip,
we also went to Disneyland, where Peter and I went on Dumbo about 500 times;
it was the only thing he wanted to do, especially after that red-eyed
monster popped out in front of him in a dark tunnel on the Magic Mountain
ride!
We went again in 1986, when Amy was a sentient being, so this visit and the
one in 1990 are the ones she remembers Granma Vivian from. But on this
occasion Mom decided to bring out the family slides that my father had taken
in the 1940s and 50s and that he sent her when Dennis got sick. As we
watched them she got more and more upset and drank a lot of wine and finally
passed out. She was mortified the next day and very angry with herself for
losing control and as far as I know, she never did again.
Oregon 1990
Oregon beach 1990
Oregon beach - motel in background
Oregon diner 1990
Mom & Amy 1990
The last time we saw my Mom and Frank we went to stay with them in a place
they were renting in Gold Beach on the Oregon coast. There was no direct
flight to anywhere near there so we flew to Los Angeles and drove 500 miles
up the coast highway. It was pretty nice, we went through Castroville
(Artichoke Capital of the World), stopped in Bodega Bay (The Birds), we went
along Big Sur, went in the redwood forests... It took us three days; the
first night we stayed in a seedy old motel like in the Bogart movies in
Santa Rosa; the next night we slept in the car; no motels had vacancies. I
guess the most famous thing we did in Oregon was drive 160 miles north to
get giant 12-inch-diameter hamburgers at the Big Wheel... Twice! This
episode was the basis for Amy's Lehmen College application essay (the Big
Wheel is still there; it's in Waldport). We also went to Eugene one day.
We talked about going to Crater Lake but it was too much.
In 2018 cousin Sandy Stout (Mom's niece) told me "I noticed you were in
Oregon in 1990. I believe that was probably the year we went to that same
restaurant in Astoria and by happenstance saw your mom and Frank there. My
parents were visiting me in Washington State (we live 20 minutes from
Vancouver Wa and 45 min from Portland). That day we drove out to the coast
and ate in that same restaurant with the red leather booths. When we walked
in we saw Vivian and Frank and couldn't believe it. That was the last
time I saw her. It took her a few minutes to put things together because it
was such a serendipitous meeting. She couldn't believe what she was
seeing. Neither could we! There was a picture of all of us together that my
parents had. It would be cool to find that picture."
Indio, California, 1995-2002
Mom loved Big Bear and liked to walk around the area, which is truly
beautiful, but the hills were steep and she could only go very slowly and it
made her more and more tired as time passed. Eventually she saw a doctor
about it and was diagnosed with a blood disorder called polycythemia,
similar to sickle cell anemia, that was aggravated by the 10,000-foot
altitude. As the symptoms grew worse the doctors told her she had to get
out of the high altitude.
They moved to Indio CA in 1988, which is 13 feet below sea level and
hellishly hot and arid. Nothing to do and too hot to go outside, they just
stayed inside in the air conditioning. Mom and Frank were both in bad shape
and most of the outings were to doctors and hospitals. There was an
excellent hospital there that Bob Hope had paid for himself and then made
extensive use of, that Mom also used.
Mom died a slow death. It started in 1982 when she had a stroke while
riding with Frank Rider in a bus in Mexico. Ever since then she had more
strokes, plus a bout of cancer (lymphoma) in 1990 that was totally cured and
never came back. But the strokes persisted and increasingly affected her
memory, speech, and strength. Then in 1992 she had an embolism in her
femoral artery, which was resected in a big operation. Later the site
developed a staph infection and had to be resected again, and again, and
again, until this was being done almost monthly, for the rest of her life.
Meanwhile the strokes came more frequently, until by late 2001 she could no
longer communicate. Finally in late 2002 she had a huge stroke and,
according to her living will, nature was allowed to take its course and no
fuss was made; there was no burial, no service, no trace of her is left
except us (she wrote me a letter a couple years prior, expressing her wishes
very clearly while she still could). Frank Rider loved her very much and
was kind and attentive always; he stayed by her through her 20 years of
medical nightmares, including dementia in the final years, up to the very
end. There was no funeral or burial; Mom didn't want any of that, no fuss,
no "spectacle", as she wrote in her letter. She was cremated and the
"cremains" released to Frank Rider. Here's her obituary from the Palm
Springs Desert Sun:
Vivian da Cruz
Vivian M. da Cruz, 80, of Indio died July 26, 2002, in Palm Desert. She was
born March 5, 1922, to Carl and Johanna Engeborg Johnson Lund in Minneota,
Minn. She was a medical legal secretary for the Orthopedic Group. She
served in the Navy. She is survived by her companion, Frank Rider of Indio;
her son, Frank of New York; her sister, Ella Lund of Orange County; and two
grandchildren. She was preceded in death by her son, Dennis in 1978
[see full obituary].
Mom was the nicest person in the world; she never had a bad thing to say
about anybody. She wasn't prejudiced or narrow-minded. She was kind and
considerate and loved children and animals (except bluejays). She never got
angry, never argued. She never spoke of herself or her past and did not
show her emotions. And on top of all that, she was intelligent and highly
competent: she mastered mechanical drawing, shorthand, typing, and Morse
Code, as well as everything it takes to administer a medical practice. And
she was a tireless correspondent; I still have a stack of her letters over a
foot deep. I loved her a lot but (now that it's too late) I only wish
I knew her better.
I also wish I had gone to see her before she died, despite her wishes. But
at least after 20 nightmarish years with my father she had almost 30 good
years in California. Frank and my Mom were together until Mom died but they
never married; Mom said "once is enough". He treated her like a queen and
was crazy in love with her right up through her dementia and then her death
and even after that. After the nightmare life my mom had with
Frank #1, Frank Rider was just about the best thing that could have
happened to her: gentle, considerate, soft-spoken, and adoring.
I stayed in touch with Frank after that. In late 2009 he was diagnosed with
terminal kidney disease. He decided not to have dialysis; he didn't have
that much to live for to go through so much agony and expense to prolong his
life. Instead he went to Puerto Rico to relive a trip he made there once
with Mom, which he said was the best time of his life. I spoke to him in
Jan 2011, he said he only had a couple months left. But a year later he
called and he was fine, the kidney problem just went away by itself. He was
living in an assisted-living place in Oroville CA, near his first wife,
Nancy Crowe. After that I had a long talk with him about once a year. The
kidneys finally quit and he died February 17, 2017, in Enloe Hospital (CA)
of kidney failure and is buried in Vancouver WA, where he grew up. He also
had a son Rick I never met, who (last I heard) buys fruit in South
America and sells it in Asia, and who was married to Sara (who I talk to by
email); they had two sons and divorced in 2012.
The day Mom died I sent you guys an email that is a kind of epitaph,
click here to see it again.
My brother Dennis was born in Washington DC on April 10, 1949, so I was
4½ years older. I remember one day when my Mom was pregnant and she
took took me downtown (i.e. into DC) for some reason, which would have
involved walking about 1/2 mile to the bus (I don't recall any other time
she did this and I don't remember what the purpose of the trip was) but
I do remember being on some cold and windy street corner in DC where she was
telling me that a baby was coming.
Me and Dennis 1957
Dennis and friends 1957
Me and Dennis 1954
When they brought Dennis home he slept in a dresser drawer. I started
school that year and he and Mom were at home on weekdays for about 5 years.
There were no other kids his age in area; I don't think he had any friends.
When we moved to Arlington in 1956 he was 7 and made some friends in the
neighborhood including Dee-Dee Faron (behind him in the middle picture) and
Maria Carrera, Ludwig's little sister, and he was in the Cub Scouts and had
some friends there too.
Three years later we moved to Germany and he was still in elementary school,
coincidentally in the same class with a guy I came to know 60 years later,
the one who sent me all the
pictures of
Berlin in 1961-62. When we lived on Raimundstraße, he made friends with
the kids in that building and he picked up German pretty fast from them as
well as in school.
Dennis 1963
Dennis about 1970
When we came back to Arlington he went to Williamsburg Jr High School, where
I had gone some years before. I should mention that it was only in that
school year, 1961-62, that Dennis and I stopped bickering and became close.
My dad had bought him an old upright piano, and we would play music together
in the basement all the time. He liked West Side Story (the music is pretty
complex) and we could do the entire repertoire. Also around that time he
started to play Chopin completely by ear. I was in a rock band, and one of
the other members could play a kind barrelhouse boogie-woogie New-Orleans
style like Fats Domino or Allen Toussaint — a white high-school
junior, I have no idea where he picked that up — and would come over
and use the piano sometimes, which fascinated Dennis. Anyway by September I
was off to UVA so I only saw Dennis a few more times before I left for Basic
Training, and that was when Mom took him to California, so I didn't see him
for 13 years although we stayed in touch the old fashioned way —
letters, envelopes, stamps.
Recital program 1967
At the piano 1967
Dennis went to high school in Long Beach, where he organized an
anti-Vietnam-war strike. He was expelled and never went back or got a
diploma, or so I always believed. He turned out to be a blazing piano
prodigy and could have become a top classical pianist. He favored the
romantics: Liszt, Chopin, Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikowsky, but could
also play Bach and Scarlatti, and much else besides; see
the program.
His funeral eulogy says he "took a year off from high school simply to
practice the piano" and that eventually he graduated from Long Beach
Polytechnical High School, but the recital program says he was going to
receive a high school diploma from the National Guild of Pianists. My
impression from spending time with him in the 1970s was that he never got a
diploma. There's nobody to ask now.
He had started out, to his everlasting mortification, on the accordion
(see photo); dad got him lessons in
Germany when he was in elementary school. But in California Mom recognized
his talent and got him a top piano teacher, Joanna Hodges, under whom he got
about as good as anybody can get, until finally after years of recitals, he
was scheduled to make his professional debut at the Hollywood Bowl in front
of the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra performing Tchaichowsky's Piano
Concerto Number 1; posters were up all over the city, programs printed,
etc.
But a panic attack made him cancel the engagement at the last minute. After
that he worked odd jobs (piano tuning, remodeling houses, in a funeral home,
etc), or just living from the "kindness of others" until he died. Anyway,
one night he took Judy and me to a church — he had the keys to it
— that had a huge pipe organ, like in a cathedral; he fired up a head
of steam and then played Bach's Toccata & Fugue in D minor for us, from
memory, barefoot. Flying fingers and toes... Yikes! When he had visited
me in NY in 1966 I took him to St. John the Divine to see if they'd let him
play the organ but they just laughed... the waiting list was a year long.
So instead we went downtown to the Steinway showroom and he played a big
Steinway grand for an hour, attracting quite a crowd.
I never knew Dennis was gay until after I was in the Army; my dad wrote to
me, like it was the worst thing that could ever happen. But I think dad had
something to do with it. Once we moved to Arlington and Dennis and I had
separate bedrooms, dad would go into Dennis's room every night to "put him
to bed", which involved prolonged sessions of tickling in the bed. I never
actually watched them, but I couldn't help hearing them and it drove me
nuts. This went on for years and years. At the time I didn't understand
what bothered me so much about it, it was just creepy, it made me want to
get the heck out of that house. One night when dad was totally drunk, he
got in my my bed with me, which creeped me out beyond words but he didn't do
anything, he just passed out and snored all night.
I found some letters from 1966 where Dennis was worrying about being
drafted. He opposed the Vietnam war and wanted to know about going to Canada.
I got advice about that from the War Resisters League and sent it to him (at
the time the WRL had no confidence in the Canadian government, but in fact
it did harbor US draft resisters until President Carter pardoned them in
1977). In any case he avoided the draft somehow.
Harpo Marx hair
In 1976 (before Peter and Amy were born) Judy and I went to see my Mom and
Dennis and Frank Rider in Long Beach, CA. Judy and Dennis really hit it
off. Shortly after that Dennis came out to stay with us for a week or so
and he met everybody, Granma, Granpa, Christine, and Lori, Mama Lori and
Floyd. Floyd took 8mm movies of all this but I never found out what
happened to Floyd's movies after he and Mama Lori split up. He took
millions of movies of the whole family, all the aunts and uncles and nieces
and nephews and cousins. I think Floyd is dead.
Dennis 1978
In 1978 Dennis (who was in very good shape, he ran and worked out all the
time, had a body like in the magazines) started to feel bad, his stomach
was sticking out. He thought it was constipation or gas or something but it
didn't go away and it was growing, and felt hard. Finally he went to the
doctor. They opened him up and found his whole thorax was one big cancer and
there was nothing they could do, every organ was involved; they just sewed
him back up.
Uncle Dennis and Peter 1978
Mommy and I and 4-month-old Peter flew out from New York as soon as my Mom
called with the news. By the time we got there, the oncologist had seen him
and was optimistic and put him on all kinds of chemo. We stayed with him
through this for a week or two, Dennis was a good sport about it and had all
these cravings, would only eat things that were white, like cottage cheese
and yogurt and white bread (with no skaerks). Finally the doctor said the
cancer was all gone and everybody celebrated, and Mommy and I and Peter went
home.
Dennis celebration 1978
Actually the celebration was kind of a disaster. Dennis's friend Bob took
Mommy and me to this big gorgeous expensive Mexican restaurant and we
stuffed ourselves. When we got back to Mom and Frank's house, Mom had
cooked us a gigantic special dinner, she spent hours on it, and we couldn't
even take one bite.
Judy and me at Dennis's house
While we were in Long Beach we met Dennis's friends, notably Bob who he
lived with in a quaint little cottage decorated to look like something from
Elizabethan times, tapestries and all, that Dennis made himself (see
picture, in which the dark recorder on the red table by the duck had
belonged to my grandfather; I guess Bob still has it... Note
famous photo of Dennis and me on the mantle).
The cottage was a guesthouse in the backyard of a larger house (mansion),
and the rent was affordable. Bob was a paramedic, one of the very few
people other than my Mom I met in southern California who had a regular
full-time job.
At Dennis and Bob's cottage
Bob and Judy in 1978...
Six months later Dennis was dead at 29; the cancer came back but he refused
treatment. Nobody knows how the cancer happened, but it could have been an
early form of AIDS, or maybe from the embalming chemicals at his
funeral-home job or the massive amounts of drugs he took (Quaaludes, LSD...)
While on his deathbed he was baptised by his longtime friend Father
Shemanski — a Catholic priest (I met him a few times) — but then
joined the local Lutheran Church, either to please Mom or because of
the huge pipe organ he liked so much.
My Grandfather Daniel da Cruz
and his family in Portugal
My dad's dad: Daniel da Cruz. Born Manuel da Cruz Narciso, Vilar,
Portugal, 1 March 1880. Changed his name to Daniel da Cruz June 7,
1926, when he was naturalized at the Hamilton County Court House, Hamilton
Ohio, Certificate of Naturalization Number 2 238 576. Died 26
December 1966 (of shock caused by coronary artery disease; he was a heavy
smoker). His ashes were deposited in River of Adonis in Lebanon (the
Abraham River in Mount Lebanon) by his second wife, Louise.
NOTE: I found this notation in one of my dad's albums: "As the
investigations of my brother in 1986 and 1987 revealed, both he and I were
citizens of Portugal, a fact neither of us knew in in 1949" (when he filled
out his government employment form).
João da Cruz Narciso
João da Cruz Narciso
Son of João da Cruz Narciso and Joana Maria das Dores.
Paternal grandfather: Joaquin Narciso.
Paternal grandmother: Maria da Encarnação.
Maternal grandfather: José Maria das Dores
Maternal grandmother: Delfina da Conceição.
Neither of João's parents had the name da Cruz. Most likely, the
parish priest suggested the name in honor of
São João
da Cruz
(Saint John of the
Cross), Catholic Saint and Carmelite friar and priest of Marrano (Jewish
converso) origin associated
with Teresa of
Ávila
(Santa Teresa
de Jesus), with whom he cofounded the "Shoeless Carmelites" (Ordem dos
Carmelitas Descalços), and with whom he shares the distinction of now being
among the
36 Doctors of
the Church named by Roman Popes since the beginning of the church, an
honor they share with Thomas Aquinas, Saint Augustine, the Venerable Bede,
and Hildegard von Bingen.
João inherited the name Narciso from his father, Joaquin Narciso. I don't
know the names of Joaquin's parents but probably "Narciso" comes from São
Narciso de Gerona, Bishop of Gerona in Catalunya in the 4th Century,
martyred around 307AD, known for the
Miracle of the Flies (o Milagre das Moscas), which occurred 1000 years
after his death when a horde of insects rose from his tomb to drive out
French invaders.
Portugal was occupied and ruled by North African Arabs and Berbers from 711
to 1249 and therefore most Portuguese (like most Spanish and Sicilians) have
North African blood. According to Ancestry.com's analysis of my DNA, I am 1%
North African so my father was 2% (because he married a Norwegian)
and his father 4% (because he married a German).
About Portuguese surnames
Surnames that have prepositions (da/de/do/das/dos) or conjunctions (e)
prefixed, such as "da Cruz" and "dos Santos", are similar to
German surnames with "von": attempts to seem aristocratic (some of our
relatives in Portugal say in many cases it's a snobbish or pretentious
affectation). Anyway, if you are born with the surname "da Cruz",
that is your offical name you are filed under D, not C, just as in the USA.
But where we would say "the da Cruz family", Portuguese and Brazilians
say "a familia Cruz". Our
cousin Luzia
Machado gives some examples from her own family and beyond:
[Husband] Artur's full name or register name on the identity card is Artur
da Rocha Machado. However, everybody knows him as and calls him "Rocha
Machado" and he often signs his name simply as Artur Rocha Machado. My
son-in-law is Hugo César de Amorim and he probably does the same. My
grandson is also "de Amorim" and at school everybody calls him Amorim (to
differentiate him from the other Franciscos).
These last weeks a scandal arose here, revealed in our newspapers, about a
woman whose name was Paula Brito Costa. She founded some years ago an
institution to take care of children with rare diseases, a very worthy
initiative, that unfortunately surmounted her founder. After being Paula
Brito Costa, he began signing her name as Paula Brito "e" Costa and this "e"
is even more stylish than de or da. Portuguese (but also human...)
miseries!!!
Portuguese names have some other peculiarites too. For example, it is not
unusual for brothers or sisters to have the same first name. For example in
our family, my grandfather's sisters were Maria, Maria Rosa, and Maria José.
His own birth name was Manuel da Cruz Narciso and he had a brother with
exact same name. He also had a brother, Francisco Maria, with a different
surname: dos Santos; this was because Francisco was born on All Saints Day.
I should also mention that (as you can see on the family tree) it is fairly
common for a person's name to have six or more words. Example: father's
surname Santos, mother's surname Oliveira; child's surname might be
Oliveira Santos. This child marries another person who also has a double
surname derived the same way, say, Machado Morais, and their child's
surname could be Oliveira Santos Machado Morais. Or it could be Santos
Morais. Or whatever else the parents decide. There are no fixed rules as
far as I know. See this this
page for a concise summary.
My father and my Uncle Pete told me about our family in Vilar; they both
went to visit in the 1950s (and Pete as recently as 1989), and then cousins
Danny and Lina visited them often starting in 1992. The pictures at left
were taken in 1953, which was the only time Daniel went back to Portugal
after his departure in 1911. The two women are his nieces, my father's
first cousins: Luzia and Madalena. The second picture is a large family
group that includes four of Daniel's siblings. Click each picture to find out
who's who.
Maria José
Maria José painting
Daniel had three brothers (Francisco, Manuel, and Celestino) and three
sisters (Maria, Maria Rosa, and Maria José). All used the surname
da Cruz Narciso except Francisco, whose surname was dos Santos
because (as noted previously) he was born on November 1st, All Saints Day.
They all married and had children except Maria José (1887-1974), who became
a nun and teacher of art, music, and languages in Portugal, England, France,
and Morocco; one of her paintings (courtesy of Luzia Machado via Cousin
Lina) is shown above; to see a brief history of her
life, click here. Anyway, if Daniel had
remained a priest, he wouldn't have had children either and we would not
exist. He was the only one who emigrated, dropping "Narciso" from his name
and spawning the American da Cruz family consisting so far of 12 direct
descendents, 9 still living.
Vilar in the 1950s
Vilar is is about 60km north of Lisbon in the Provincia of Estremadura,
Distrito of Lisboa, Coselho (county) Cadaval, Municipio Cadaval, Freguesia
(parish) Vilar. It's a very small town in a fruit-growing region. There
are several other towns called Vilar, so Vilar-Cadaval can be used to
specify this one. Photo at right taken by either Dad or Pete in the 1950s.
In Vilar, the da Cruz Narcisos were a farming family, mainly vineyards but
also vegetables, fruit trees, chickens, turkeys, ducks, and rabbits for home
use and sometimes for sale. As Daniel's
nephew Raimundo, who grew up in Vilar, recalls, "Our
village was deeply Catholic. Most of the adult population was
illiterate. Their culture and ideology were whatever the priest dispensed in
masses and sermons. The dictator Salazar was held up as a saint. My
grandfather João lived in our house and died in 1940 at the age of 92. He
was very religious and when he could no longer go to church he prayed at
home."
References...
Joaquim Claudino, Humberto Germano, Sérgio Claudino,
Cronologia do Vilar
(1148-2020), PDF, in Portuguese, 29 pages (2020).
Sent by Luzia, who says "They say that your grand-father was the first to
get a Ph.D. in the parish and that the first name of Vilar was Santa Maria
do Vilar, something that I didn't know, as well as that the actor António
Vilar was from Vilar and his name was a tribute to his motherland. You will
realize, Frank specially, who understands portuguese, that your grand-father
wasn't the only one to resign from the religious life, to found a family. In
1955-1959, Padre Carlos who had a "cousin" with him, resigned. And in
1965-1969, also António Morais, who was a modern priest, did the same. But
what they don't say is that he found a family with our cousin Zita (Luzia
Maria, Fafita's sister). People loved him and were indeed shocked, specially
the parents, uncle Dinis and aunt Margarida, who were very catholic. Zita
and Fafita were at that time studying in Lisbon to be kindergarten teachers
and some time later he married Zita. They have 3 daughters in common. As
Zita is hardworking, she also studied psychology later." Luzia points out
that an interesting facet to Vilar's recent history is that
"many families in Vilar received Austrian children, including my parents. I
wasn't born and my brothers were small children and the little girl was with
my parents few weeks. She had some disease and to my mother's great regret
she went for treatment for fearing of contagion. As far as I know, most of
these children even after being adults maintained warm relations with their
adoptive families."
Daniel and the Church
Daniel da Cruz 1910
According to official documents, my grandfather entered the Convento
Franciscano at Varatojo (in the Torres Vedras area about 26 miles NNW of
Lisbon) as a novice under the name of Manoel Maria da Cruz at age 18 in
1896 and was given the novice name Daniel da Virgem Santíssima. He took his
first vows a year later under the name of Daniel da Cruz. He began his
studies of philosophy and theology at St. Barnardino College (about 43 miles
NNW of Lisbon), continued at the Convento Fransicano Montariol in Braga,
about 25 miles NNE of Porto. In 1901 the Portuguese government issued a
proclamation perceived hostile to religious institutions, and Daniel along
with some of his fellow seminarians transferred to Braga Theological
Seminary in Seville (Spain). He was ordained there as a priest in 1904. So
first he was a monk (Frie, Fr.), then he was priest (Padre, Pe.). A monk is
supposed to take the name of a saint, and it turns out that in the Roman
church, Daniel from the Old Testament is indeed a saint.
Random page
Em terras de Gaza
As a Catholic priest, Daniel served as a Franciscan missionary in
Mozambique [Portuguese East Africa] from late 1906 to early 1908 at the
Congoene Mission in Chai-Chai (now called Xai-Xai) in Gaza province. During
his stay there he devoted himself to scientific research rather than
religion, learning about the people, their language and customs and beliefs
and technology and diet as well as the flora and fauna of the area, and
published a series of articles in the Franciscan journal Gazeta das
Aldeias, even after he returned to Portugal. This material was the
basis of a book published in
1910, Em
terras de Gaza, Porto: Gazeta das Aldeias (1910), 312pp, 90
illustrations. The University of California had Google digitize this book
for its Hathi Trust
(see publication list). I skimmed through all
the pages; it's gorgeous and very well done; an
ethnological/sociological/musicological/botanical/nutritional
study, not a religious tract, with tons of photos, diagrams, even sheet
music; professional design, and no trace of superiority or racism.
Daniel in the United States
Oxford Ohio 1933
In 1911 Daniel left the church of his own volition. He was not, contrary to
family legend, excommunicated. Rather, it seems that he became more
interested in science than in God, which is apparent in his publications
in Gazeta das Aldeias as well as about 50 articles in another
Franciscan journal, Voz de S. Antonio, which cover diverse
topics, none of them religious: entomology, ornithology, botany,
agriculture, public health, seismology, etc. These articles are available
online
here,
and probably did not overly endear him to the Church. In any case he
emigrated to the USA in 1911…
Incidentally, he sailed to the USA on
the Lusitania
("Portugal"), a HUGE ocean liner like the Titanic, which would be torpedoed
and sunk four years later by a German U-boat, killing 1200 out of 1900 on
board and providing the USA with an excuse to enter WWI (look it up, there
are two sides to this story). The Lusitania docked in the Port of New York
August 4, 1911.
… where he went back to school and received his PhD in Botany at
Catholic University in Washington DC in 1915. His Ph.D. dissertation
was A
contribution to the life-history of Lilium tenuifolium. At the end
there is a brief bio:
Daniel da Cruz was born at Villar [sic], District of Lisbon, Portugal, March
1st, 1880. He received his early education in the public-school course of
Villar and in the two years' preparatory course at St. Bernardino College.
He joined the Franciscan Order, September 1896, at Varatojo, and pursued
courses of Philosophy and Sciences at St. Bernardino and Montariol, Braga,
Colleges, being graduated at Montariol in 1901.
He began his course of Theology in Sevilla, Spain, the same year, and was
graduated in 1905 at Braga Theological Seminary, whither he had returned in
1903. He was ordained to the priesthood in July, 1905, sent to the
Mozambique, Portuguese East Africa, Missions, October, 1906, and was
appointed Professor of Sciences in the Franciscan College of Leiria [which
is in Portugal] in 1910. He came to the United States, entered the Catholic
University of America October, 1911, and pursued the courses of study in
Biology, Botany, Chemistry and German under the following professors and
instructors: Dr. J.J. Griffin, Chemistry; Dr. T.V. Moore, Philosophy;
Dr. P. Gleis, German; Prof. J.B. Parker and Mr. G.J. Brilmeyer, Biology, to
whom he expresses his appreciation for their sympathetic guidance of his
studies.
At some point before 1917 he met my grandmother Gus (Lenore Rager); the
family story was that he was in the hospital and she was his nurse. They
were married June 7, 1917, in Kansas City, Missouri, during the period when
they were traveling from one university town to another while he searched
for a teaching position. Anyway grandfather had a tough time finding a
professor job the first two years of his marriage. Every time he was hired,
when they found out he was an ex-priest or atheist or troublemaker or a
semi-communist and/or brother of a real communist who had fled Portugal for
his life, they fired him. So he moved around a lot in those two years. In
1918 he wound up at the University of Miami in Ohio where the president
(Raymond M. Hughes) told him his job would be safe and he would never be
asked to resign because of his past, and indeed he worked there until he
retired in 1946.
My father was born to them on April 1, 1918, in Kansas, shortly before
Daniel landed his Oxford job. On September 12th, Daniel registered in
Oxford for the World War I draft but, since the war was almost over and
he was 38 years old, he was not called up. The second and last child,
my Uncle Pete, was born in Oxford in 1921. Daniel
was on the faculty of Miami University as a professor of Spanish,
Portuguese, and Romance Philology. He wrote books on many topics including
politics and history plus at least one Portuguese language textbook that I
remember seeing as a kid, plus an annotated edition of Don Quijote
(see publication list) plus a Spanish textbook
that I found in the Library of Congress catalog (it has since disappeared),
as well as works on diverse topics including astronomy. My grandmother left
him in 1924. In 1927 he obtained sole custody of the children in a divorce
decree, and took them back into his house in 1928. At some point while
still in Oxford he married his second wife, Louise Burk, who would be with
him until his death.
Upon retiring, Daniel moved to 1603 West Kiowa Street, Colorado Springs,
Colorado, for his health — asthma, probably brought on by heavy
smoking — and lived there with Louise until he died at 86 in 1966.
The house is still there as far as I know. In Colorado Louise worked as a
teacher at the Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind. In the 1970s, she
went to Portugal to meet Daniel's brother Manuel ("Ramon", as she and the
American branch of the family called him) and the rest of the family; more
about this below. She died in 1990; I never had any
contact with her.
Daniel and Dennis 1956
Daniel came to visit us once in the mid-1950s, so I knew him very briefly.
All I remember was when he arrived he picked me up and gave me such a strong
hug it almost broke all my bones, and then he was quizzing me about what I
was studying in school; I had the impression that he fixated on schools,
education, and learning above all other things. He also talked a bit about
Mozambique and I recall he went into some detail about tapeworms. I was in
6th or 7th grade. He was going stay with us for a while, but he was gone
within a few hours. My father said it was because he did or said something
that made my mom very upset (he didn't say what) and she demanded he be sent
away. But that doesn't sound right to me: Mom got along with everybody and
she never demanded anything, and even if she had my dad would would have
ignored her, or worse. I never asked either one them for the real story.
Too late now!
Uncle Pete and his father 1960
Thanks to Uncle Pete, who used the Freedom of Information Act to get a
confidential 14-page 1946 FBI report, we find that granddad was definitely
Reddish, something my Dad never bothered to mention. Daniel backed the
Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, organizing support and raising
funds in the USA and belonging to the Committee for United American Spanish
Aid, which published anti-Fascist
pamphlets such as this one. He also
was a member of the NAACP (viewed by the government as a subversive
organization in those days), and he was a self-proclaimed atheist. He was
an outspoken advocate of the working class and critic of the American way of
distributing wealth. All this is in the FBI report. It was almost, but not
quite, enough to get him into trouble during the postwar Red Scare (the FBI
report, however, is not very thorough — they didn't know about his
controversial writings, they didn't know he had been a priest, they didn't
bother to look up the Aid Committee to find out it was on the Attorney
General's List of Communist Organizations, and they didn't know about his
radical brother, so who knows what else they didn't know!… But then,
they also didn't think my Dad had a drinking problem...).
When I was kid, we had a book by him on our bookshelf called
Spain Begs Your Pardon (1940). I never even bothered to open it. In
later years I assumed this must have been about the Spanish Civil War and I
wanted to get a copy. Eventually I found it at Miami University. It was
just a manuscript, not published (I thought it was published because the
copy we had at home was hardbound). Just before I left Columbia I got it on
interlibrary loan and scanned it into a PDF
(see publication list). It turns out to be a
comparison of Spain and Portugal versus England as colonial powers in the
New World. Spain and Portugal were awful, of course, but he shows how
England was infinitely worse. So "begs your pardon" is ironic. The book is
dedicated to the Spanish Republicans.
Another of his unpublished tracts was Faith of our Fathers (1964), a
scathing takedown of the Bible that he originally wrote as an Xmas [sic]
present for Pete and Leila. He sent me a copy of it when I was in the Army;
I brought it back with me and had it in my apartment at 109th Street where
my dog ate it. I'm not kidding. Judy had given me a puppy for Christmas,
and it grew pretty fast. Since I was always in class or working, it went
crazy locked up in the small basement apartment. One day when I came home
and opened the door, the entire apartment was full of feathers and paper
shreds up to the ceiling; the dog had demolished all the pillows and
mattresses, plus many of my books and records. Faith of Our Fathers
was in shreds. Many years later it turned out that my cousin Danny had his
father's copy, which he scanned for me
(see publication list).
My grandfather sent me the manuscript upon learning of my 1965 application
for release from the Army on moral, ethical, and pseudo-religious grounds as
a consciencious objector because I did not want any role in the slaughter
that was going on in Vietnam and, in fact, I wanted to be entirely free of
the Army so I could work to stop the war. Army regulations required that I
be questioned by a chaplain to see if I was sincere, and my grandfather
thought I had been mesmerized by the priest I spoke with, when in fact all I
needed was to get his signature on a piece of paper (if the truth be known,
the priest did not understand why I would not want to "kill a Commie
for Christ" but I convinced him that I would not, and we ended by agreeing
to disagree). Despite the misunderstanding, my grandfather's words in the
letter he sent with the manuscript reflect his own life experience. He said
my situation reminded him of:
...a phase of my own growing pains which cost me many years of undescribable
suffering and disillusionment. It is a phase of life that overtakes a great
number of young men of your age [20] as a result of the sense of guilt which
in most cases is nothing more than the realization of one's inadequacy,
which the ministers of the church are quickly inclined to exploit on behalf
of their own pet ideas and preoccupations. Of those who yield to their
insidious, though powerful, temptations, only rarely do they come out of
their ordeal unscathed. Such conversions are the sour fruit of the
emotions, of the surrendering of one's will and future destiny to the
rapacious ambition of someone whose real interest is not your salvation but
his own glory and the benefits accruing to his own class.
I am sending you a manuscript on the Bible, which I expect to have published
before very long, which manuscript is the result of 60 years of research. I
was only 17 years old when certain doubts about the genuineness of the Bible
as the word of God made me start a study of the sacred book, and of what I
found I give a few samples in the manuscript. The first criterion of Truth
we were given, no matter by whom, was our Reason.
In 2018 cousin Lina went to visit the family in Portugal. Raimundo's sister
Helena told her that she had spent six months with Daniel and Louise
(probably in the 1960s) and said that Louise was jealous of them speaking in
Portuguese all the time and that Daniel wanted to come back and die in Vilar
among family; he had asked her to look for a house for him. Whether she did
or not, he died before he could have moved.
Voz de Stº. Antonio,
Monthly Illustrated Magazine, 1895-1910.
Numerous articles by Daniel da Cruz, sometimes signed as
P.ₑ D. da Cruz,
others simply as "D.C." or with a pseudonym such as Lucano. Many of
these articles are profusely illustrated. Need index.
Gazeta
das Aldeias —
articles published in different issues, early 1900s, need index.
Em terras de
Gaza, Daniel da Cruz da Associação Missionaria Portugueza e
ex-missionario de Chai-Chai, Bibliotheca Geographica e Colonial, Porto
(1910), 312 pages, my grandfather's ethnographic study of the Gaza
province of Portuguese Mozambique. As of March 2021, this is
available in reprint, both paperback and hardcover, from Alibris.com.
El
ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, edited with
introduction, notes, and commentary by Daniel da Cruz and
J.W. Kuhne, Miami University of Ohio (1922); with illustrations of
Gustav Doré. Searchable PDF.
El Procurador Yerbabuena, The Century Company NY (1931);
co-author: Willis Knapp Jones (vocabulary and commentary on the work by Juan
Gualberto López-Valdemoro y de Quesada, Conde de las Navas, 1897) [listed
in New York Times Latest Books Received, November 15, 1931].
Spain Begs Your
Pardon, my grandfather's unpublished 1940 manuscript comparing
Spanish and Portuguese colonization of the New World with Britain's,
with a dedication to the heroism of the Spanish Republicans. This one
can be ordered from Amazon or AbeBooks, it seems to be a paperbound
scan of the original manuscript.
Coisas do Outro Mundo, an
unpublished treatise written in Portutuese in 1953 for his brother Manuel
and his family, typed with hand-drawn illustrations and some photos pasted
in. Raimundo scanned the front matter and some of the pages with
illustrations, which I have gathered into a PDF file. As the author says in
the preface, "The other world of the title refers to the rest of the
Universe not included in the compass of the little corner that we inhabit,
as well as the time before the six thousand years it is supposed to have
existed. The magnitude of this other world, compared to our planet, exceeds
the vastness of the oceans compared to a droplet of water suspended in the
air on a misty morning... and by ten million years for every second of those
6000 years. Everything that gives us the measure of how small is, for us,
the panorama offered by Nature that defines us and of which we are an
integral part."
É a Biblia a Palavra de Deus?, a critique of the Bible in
Portuguese, typed manuscript with hand-drawn illustrations, 1954, dedicated
(in handwriting) to his brother Manual and nephew Raimundo and sent to them
in Portugal. Raimundo scanned some pages, and I did the best I could to put
them together into a single PDF file, which is HERE. And HERE is a
transcription of the book's summary in Portuguese and (translated by me)
English, side by side.
Communing with the Stars, unpublished manuscript (1955) (to be
scanned).
Faith of Our
Fathers, an expanded critique of the Bible written in English, a typed
manuscript dedicated to his son Daniel (Uncle Pete) and daughter-in-law
Leila, 1964, and sent to them in Lebanon. He also sent a copy to me in
Germany, while I was in the Army.
Daniel's brother Manuel was born in 1897, 17 years after my grandfather.
Family legend says he was involved with the founding of
the Portuguese
Communist Party (PCP, founded 6 March 1921); within a matter weeks he
had fled to the USA because the Fascist police were after him. So far this
story can't be confirmed or denied but the timing tends to confirm it.
He was in the US for 15 years: May 1921 to October 1936, using the names
Raimundo and Raymond and living in different places, including the large
Portuguese outposts in New Bedford and Fall River MA in the 1920s, and at
175 Bleeker Street in Manhattan in the 1930s; see
letters from that period. My father, my uncle Pete, and Daniel's second
wife Louise all called him Ramon.
Although my grandfather's role in Manuel's American sojourn remains unclear,
I do know that Manuel visited him in
Oxford at least once, in 1934. My father and Uncle Pete met him and
remembered him well and referred to him as Uncle Ramon.
Manuel Fall River 1924
Manuel in USA 1928
Manuel in USA with friend
Manuel in USA
In 2003 I contacted the PCP asking for information about him; they were
eager to help but couldn't find any records; small wonder given the
confusion over his name, which, at the time, I thought was Ramon da Cruz.
In 2014 I came across a handwritten letter
from my grandfather's second wife Louise (the one my father tried to kill
with an axe), who made a pilgrimage to Portugal in 1971, five years after he
died. The letter is gushing and scatterbrained but there are a few facts in
it. She visited with Ramon (Manuel), who was 74 and in failing health but
(she says) spoke excellent English even though he hadn't used it in many
years. Manuel had his wife Ilda with him when Louise was there. Their two
children had already left home; daughter Helena was in Orléans (France)
expecting her first child (actually she and her husband Jaime were in exile
from the fascists), and son Raimundo, they told her, was working as an
engineer in Germany (but in reality had gone underground in Portugal as a
leader of the antifascist revolution that finally succeeded in 1974). She
ends the letter with some fantasy about how Dad and Pete are in "direct line
and descent from a Portuguese Queen". She seemed to be totally unaware that
she was in a fascist dictatorship ruled by force and terror. About the
supposed connection to royalty, Raimundo (next section)
says:
Francisco Maria dos Santos and part of his family were monarchists and some
of the sons or daughters investigated the family origins and "discovered"
that they descended from the queen Carlota Joaquina of Bourbon (1775-1830),
wife of king Dom João VI. But of illegitimate descent and not the king. I
do not know the foundation of this story that persists in the family. Since
the descendants did not come simultaneously from the queen and the king I
did not interest myself completely of the subject :-) Carlota
Joaquina de Bourbon was the eldest daughter of the King of Spain, Carlos III
and was "sold" at 10 years of age by the court of Spain to the Portuguese
court to marry João who was 18. She was a woman of strong character who
conspired against her husband, the King, also tried to be Queen of Castile.
With the invasion of Portugal by Napoleon in 1807, who wanted to replace the
King (an ally of England) the Portuguese court fled to Brazil and only
returned to Portugal in 1821.
Louise also mentions in passing that "Carlota (NY) and a friend met us for
the 2 hours wait between planes in NY before we boarded TWA for Lisbon."
Raimundo says Carlota Nobre
Santos is a relative, about my age, daughter of Diniz, granddaughter of
Daniel's brother Francisco, in other words my second cousin. She is a
sister of Fátima/Fafita, pictured below. I
don't know if Carlota was living in NY or was just visiting.
About his father's political history Raimundo says:
About my father's political activities in Portugal I know nothing.
Nevertheless he referred to his brother Daniel as a man with progressive
ideas but that's all I know.
I also don't have much information about why he went to the USA or what he
did there. But the family referred to his radical ideas and his
estrangement from the Church; these were condemned in the village and
resulted in political and religious persecution.
Portugal experienced a period of great political instability and major
political and religious confrontation during the First Republic —
the Republican revolution of 5 October 1910 that overthrew the monarchy until
the military coup that established the dictatorship in May 26, 1926, and
that installed a fascist regime that lasted 48 years, until 1974.
Vilar, as well as most of the rural country outside Lisbon and Porto, is
deeply conservative and dominated by the Catholic Church that was against
the Republic — and consequently the Republic was against the Church
— each side persecuted the other. It is in this context of political
and religious harassment that Manuel flees to the USA.
My father never sought to force his polical or religious beliefs upon his
children, but knowing them, and what he told us about America, were a window
through which we could escape from the ultra-conservative, political and
cultural environment of Vilar.
Then when I was 60 I noticed a collection of the American Communist Party
magazines that were half hidden in some stacks of books. My father had
brought them from the USA (at some risk to himself). He also told me about
his participation in demonstrations in defense of Sacco and Vanzetti.
Raimundo also found a 1933 letter to his father from a comrade, F. Lourenço,
who had gone to Siberia to help build the New Russia. So that's another hint.
We have a cousin, Raimundo Pedro Narciso, six years older than me, a leader
of the anti-Fascist revolution in 1974 and in the late 1990s was a Socialist
member of Parliament in Portugal. Danny met him once; see
his travel diary. I saw him on the PCP and
government websites when was a Communist/Socialist deputy in Parliament; I
emailed him in 2003 but never received an answer. Then the government went
back to right wing and all traces of him disappeared for a long time, but I
looked again on the Internet in 2017 and see quite a bit, such as a long
2014 interview with him about his life and times and politics and struggles
here
and another
here.
Plus he's on Facebook.
And German Facebook.
And Google+.
He might be IS one of the kids in that
group picture. His father is Daniel's
brother Manuel. Raimundo studied engineering at the Instituto Superior
Técnico Lisbon and in 2000 wrote a book about the Portuguese antifascist
revolution:
Narciso, Raimundo, 1938-
ARA, Acção Revolucionaria Armada : a historia secreta do braço
armado do PCP / 1a ed.
Lisboa : Publicações Dom Quixote, 2000.
(Series: Caminhos da memoria ; 27)
and another book Álvaro Cunhal e a Dissidência da 3ª Via, of which
I don't have the details. The Wikipedia page for the ARA is
here,
and there is 2004 interview with Raimundo about ARA
here.
Raimundo says of himself:
Fui membro do PCP de 1959 a 1990 e membro do seu Comité Central de 1972 a
1988. Em 1989, ainda no PCP mas em processo de saída, criei com amigos e
outros dissidentes, um Movimento político "Instituto Nacional de Estudos
Sociais" que reuniu a elite da intelectualidade de esquerda portuguesa, e em
1992 criei com outros uma associação politica "Plataforma de Esquerda" que
fez um acordo como o Partido Socialista então dirigido por António Guterres,
actual SG da ONU. Fui então deputado do Parlamento de 1996 a 2000.
In short he was an orthodox Communist revolutionary for about 20 years but
then got tired of the squabbling between the PCP and other left-wing groups
which prevented them from winning elections — the same thing that
happened in Germany in the 1930s, which was the direct cause for Hitler
coming to power.
Finally in October 2017, I found a way to contact him and we have been
working on this project together ever since. He has photos, documents, and
a vast memory. He filled in 90% of the Portuguese side of the
family tree and shared many treasures.
His sister Helena's daughter, Helena Mascarenhas, says:
[My mother Helena] and my father [Jaime] went into exile (France) because of
the dictatorship in Portugal. Five years after, the revolution happened (25
of April of 1974) and they were able to be back ... Meanwhile I was born (in
France in 1971) :-) My uncle Raimundo Narciso gave some years of
his life to fight very hard against our dictatorship, and fortunately he was
never caught by the political police, otherwise maybe he wouldn´t be among
us. After the revolution, he participated on the construction of our
democracy and he keeps on doing that. My mother and my uncle Raimundo, two
persons which I admire a lot, are both very courage.
In March 2018 Raimundo resurrected and reworked an extensive website from
his days in the post-revolutionary government, the purpose being to explain
to the people exactly what he was doing as a Deputy in Parliament and
Secretary of the National Defense Commission, what we today would call
"transparency"... Raimundo invented it! See
it here for as long as the
link lasts.
Portuguese Family Today
These are some photos I received from Raimundo, Luzia, Fafita, Helena, and
Danny in 2017-2018:
Jean-Luc, Lina, Raimundo 2018, by Helena
In Spring 2018, cousin Lina and her husband Jean-Luc traveled to Portugal
to see the family, an odyssey that Lina describes
here
(narrative and photos). This is another photo from the occasion, taken (in
Óbidos?) by Helena Mascarenhas, my second cousin.
Below: Views of present-day Vilar by cousin Raimundo:
Vilar today
Vilar today
1. Raimundo with wife Maria 2017
2. Helena+Helena 2016
1. Raimundo Narciso, my father's first cousin (and my first cousin
once removed), and his wife Maria Machado in 2017.
2. Raimundo's sister Helena Maria (right) and her daughter Helena Mascarenhas
(left). Read more about Raimundo and his family in Raimundo's
autobiography.
Luzia Machado (center) and her family 2018
Alfonso October 2019
Alfonso, Dina, Francisco
The family of cousin Luzia (a.k.a. Juca) Machado, born Maria Luzia Moço de
Oliveira Santos. Luzia is granddaughter of my grandfather Daniel's brother,
Francisco, which makes her my second cousin.
Left to right:
Hugo César de Amorim (son-in-law of Luzia and Artur);
Dina Machado Amorim (daughter of Luzia and Artur);
Luzia;
Artur Rocha Machado (Luzia's husband);
and in the middle: Franciso (son of Dina and Hugo).
Selfie by Hugo, January 2018.
Luzia says, "Me, Artur, Dina, Hugo, Francisco, we live all at Lisbon
(Telheiras) and very close. In fact we only need to bend the street corner
to be in the house of each other." The second picture is of Dina's and
Hugo's son Alfonso Rocha Machado de Amorim, born 03 April 2019, and third is
Dina with her two children in 2019.
Artur and Zeca
Zulmira and Dina 2016
Left: Artur (Luzia's husband) and José de Oliveira Santos (Zeca), grandson
of my grandfather's brother Francisco, which makes him another second
cousin. Zeca lives in Estoril.
Right: Zulmira (Mi) de Oliveira Santos, wife of Zeca, and Dina Maria,
daughter of Luzia. Photos by Danny da Cruz at Luzia and Artur's house,
Lisbon, 2016.
1. Francisco, Fátima, Joana
Santos family 2019
Santos family 2019
Santos family 2019
1. Fátima Santos Nobre (Fafita) with her husband Francisco
Lobão Rasquilha, who live in Elvas, Alentejo, celebrating the 5th birthday
of their granddaughter Joana, June 17, 2017, in Sintra at the home of her
paternal grandparents. Fátima is daughter of Diniz and granddaughter of my
grandfather's brother Francisco, which makes her my second cousin, too.
The other three photos are from 2019.
Luzia Machado wrote on March 11, 2018:
Hi Frank, Olá aos primos e família
I've been postponing my message to you, because I didn't get (not yet) the
information on my grandparents dates (birth and death). I've been in contact
with Carlota and I even called the sacristan in Vilar, but they didn't get
that information. Anyway it is online at:
Tombo.pt but it will
take some time to look for in the old books. I'll do it in some more time,
unless some cousin may want to help me...
The register books begin with the year of 1860, because before that date
occurred in Portugal the French invasions and the register books were
destroyed in the church of Vilar. Several battles took place in the west
region in those years with the Napoleon troops: Roliça, Vimeiro, Linhas de
Torres Vedras and Portugal won those battles with the help of the old allies,
the English? I remember my father saying that at that time the French
troops transformed the church of Vilar into a horse stable. Later, a priest
who went to Vilar (Padre Bento), had the "bright" idea to demolish that
historic church, which was according my father, a small one, but beautiful.
Answering to one of your last questions on the wine-growing in Vilar, I'll
say that in the family nobody lives from agriculture now and I would say that
very few families live there now exclusively from agriculture. When my aunt
Luzia died, all cousins agreed to sell her properties to a family that already
cultivated her lands. Me and my brothers we had already sold our properties to
the same family some years before. But they are specialized, one of them is an
agricultural engineer, he has vineyards and produces wine by modern
procedures. Other property owners take their grapes to the cooperative cellars
in the area. Even when I came to Lisbon (1971/72) I seldom heard the nostalgic
sound of the hand presses during September, that I heard when I was a child.
On the other side, many vineyards were transformed into orchards, in
particular of pears (it's the case of ours and our aunt's properties)
with a kind of pear called "pêra Rocha" which is very good, very
appreciated and exported to other European countries.
I would like to introduce you now a new generation of cousins: my nephew,
Zeca's son, João Miguel and Carlota's daughter, Alexandra (the same name
as Lina's daughter). Next time I'll send you a picture of the other
Zeca's son (Paulo) and Lino's sons (Marco and Valter)
João Miguel is IT engineer (like Hugo, my son-in-law, who is computer
engineer as well). João Miguel lives near Porto and Alexandra is veterinary
doctor and lives in Vilar. About Alexandra, she's an enthusiastic ecologist
and hard-working woman, like her mother, Carlota. She gets in on a
portuguese ecologist movement - Quercus, and has on youtube several videos
(Alexandra Azevedo) on wild food, where you can see her (left).
I send you also Alexandra's daughter, Carlota's granddaughter
Laura Varges, who studies marketing and communication, performing a Nina
Simone song (right).
João Miguel and family
I send you a selfie with João Miguel's family and a view
from Porto and send their full names (to complete the tree): from left to
right João Miguel Mendes de Oliveira Santos - Daniela Pinto Teixeira
Oliveira Santos (older daughter) - Suzana Alexandre de Pinho Teixeira e
Silva (wife) and Mariana Pinto Teixeira Oliveira Santos (younger daughter).
I send you also some photos we took last month at Andorra and Spain. My
grandson wanted to see snow, something we don't see here in Lisbon. On the
way back to Lisbon we stopped at Tordesilhas, where I was disappointed to see
such a historic and medieval small town so abandoned. But history doesn't
generate funds, at least at that place?
Andorra
Snow in Iberia
Tordesilhas
Tordesilhas Treaty House
About the treaty
And finally I would like also to ask you when do you introduce us your close
family, the final consignees of the family tree?
Kisses to everybody/ beijinhos a todos(as)
Luzia (Juca)
OK, here we are: Amy and me one day in Queens NY, and a recent
photo of Peter:
Amy and Frank da Cruz
Peter da Cruz
In 2020 Luzia sent this photo from Christmas 2019 at her house in Santa
Cruz:
Hugo, Dina and the children, her nephew Paulo and his family, Paulo's
wife Diana and the girls, Leonor and Mafalda, me, Artur and Zeca.
And approximately the same group in 2022 (from Luzia).
Mercedes Jatel
and family in British Columbia
Mercedes Jatel (left) and family in 2018
In May 2020, my second cousin Mercedes Jatel,
born Maria
Mercedes Nobre da Costa in Lisbon in 1942, noticed this history and
contacted me. She is estranged her her family in Portugal (except for
cousin Raimundo and his family) and lives in Naramata, British Columbia.
She is a granddaughter of my grandfather Daniel's
sister Maria
da Cruz Narciso. She emigrated to Hamburg, Germany, in 1964 and
there she had a son Solomão (Sol) with another Portuguese emigré, João
Martins, a military officer who had fled the fascist regime in Portugal. In
1971 she emigrated again, this time to Ontario, Canada, and there she
married a Czech emigré, Karl Jatel, and had two more sons, Nelson and Ruben.
Now she and Karl live in Naramata, British Columbia, and her name is
simplified to Mercedes Jatel. The photo shows a birthday celebration in 2018;
"first at the left against the wall is my husband Karl; next to him is our
son Nelson and next to Nelson is Sol. Across from Karl is his wife Mercedes
(me), next to me and across Nelson is his fiance 'Tanis' Norwegian from the
part of her Mother (nice coincidence like you and your Mother), next to her
and across Sol is his wife 'Janice'; they had 2 children: 'Kaitlyn Megan
Martins' 28 years old, is a nurse in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
By the way, my son Sol with wife and children lived in Halifax,
Nova Scotia, for 20 years, 3 years ago was transferred to Victoria, British
Columbia."
My dad's mom: Lenore Susan Maria Rager, born August 23, 1896, in Frederick,
Maryland; died November 15, 1955, in Arlington, Virginia, by her own hand.
We knew her only as Gus, supposedly from her middle name Augusta, but
Augusta was not her middle name. She is my only "American" grandparent; all
the others are immigrants or children of immigrants. Of course she is
descended from immigrants too — 100% German/Swiss — but
farther back.
She grew up with her family in Frederick: three brothers and five sisters;
Gus was the youngest. They lived in a series of small townhouses in
Frederick, and in high school Gus (along with her sisters and maybe her
mother) helped the family make ends meet with a dressmaking business.
In 1916 at age 20 she entered Georgetown University Hospital School of
Nursing in Washington DC, where she graduated the same year in a ceremony
mounted by the Sisters of Saint Francis. She was baptised in the Catholic
Church as a condition for acceptance into the program. As to her "forced
conversion" (as Dad and Pete called it), I don't think she thought twice
about it; all the years I knew her she never said a word about religion.
In 1917 she formed a relationship with one of her
patients, Daniel da Cruz, a Catholic and
former missionary priest from Portugal. Daniel couldn't find work in DC so
he took Gus with him as he searched for a teaching position, traveling
together before they were married, just as the United States entered World
War I:
Marriage of K.U. Instructor
Daniel da Cruz, instructor in Portuguese in the University [of Kansas] and
Miss Lenore Rogers [sic] of Washington D.C., were married June 7 in Kansas
City [Missouri].
At present Mr. and Mrs. da Cruz are on their honeymoon trip in Missouri.
They will be at home after July 1 at 1117 Vermont Street.
Mrs. da Cruz is a graduate nurse and while in training in Washington,
she nursed Mr. da Cruz through a serious illness contracted in
Portuguese South Africa. She was appointed to one of the Red Cross units.
She chose marrying instead of going to France however. Mrs. da Cruz
already has offered her services to the Lawrence Red Cross.
—Lawrence, Kansas, Journal-World, 11 June 1917, p.3.
Dad was born 10 months later, on April 1, 1918, still in Lawrence, Kansas,
while Gus was a World War I Red Cross nurse. Daniel finally found a
permanent place at Miami University of Oxford, Ohio, and Dad's brother Pete
(Daniel Jr.) was born there in 1921. Gus adored both her children,
whereas (as my father told me) their father didn't pay much attention to
them; he was always buried in his newspapers, books, and journals.
In 1924 Gus walked out on Daniel and (this part is yet to be proven) took
the children with her. I don't know what the problem was but I suspect it
was a clash of personalities — Daniel was an intellectual interested
only in concepts, science, philosophy, history, literature, and politics,
and he was rather stern, humorless, and pedantic. Gus was interested in
people, animals, and real life.
Me, Dad, and Gus 1945
Gus, Pete, and Dad, Eastern Shore about 1928
From 1925 to 1927 the kids lived in Bozman, Maryland, with a family named
Hardcastle; exactly how this came about and how the Hardcastles are related
to Gus or anybody else remains a mystery. Gus might have lived there too
because pictures taken there during those years are in her scrapbook, but
it's also possible that she lived in the DC area to be able to work and
traveled back and forth to see the kids; but that's less likely because I
can't see how she could get from DC to Bozman in the 1920s unless she had
car (I don't know if she ever had one). Meanwhile, back in Oxford, Daniel
filed for divorce:
LEGAL NOTICE FOR DIVORCE
Lenore Da Cruz, whose place of residence is 1649 Irving Street, N.W.,
Washington, D.C., will take notice that on the 5th day of April A.D., 1927,
Daniel da Cruz filed his petition in the Common Pleas Court, of Butler
County, Ohio, being case No.34,463, praying for a divorce on the grounds of
willful absence for more than three years.
Said defendent is
required to answer or otherwise plead on or before the 22nd day of May A.D.,
1927, or said petition will be taken as true and the prayer thereof
granted. —Hamilton, Ohio, Journal News, 7 April 1927,
p.14.
The divorce was granted later in 1927 with Daniel awarded full custody
of the children. Even then Gus hung on to them for at least another year,
1928, when they lived in Washington DC.
Gus, me, and Pete 1948
Between 1927 and 1940, while working as a nurse, she lived in various
Washington DC apartments: In 1933 at 1820 K Street NY, Apt 7H, in DC. In
1935 at 505 18th Street NW, Apt 5. She went to Oxford at least once to see
the children and had a terrible fight with Daniel's second wife Louise and
smashed a window. In May 1940 she married a man named Benjamin L. Jacobs,
known as Jake, born in 1862 and 34 years her senior. According to my father
he bought her the house in Arlington, Virginia. The 1940 Census shows them
both living there. Jake walked out on her in June 1942 and
had the marriage annulled, accusing her of fraud, but:
RICHMOND, Oct 6.—(AP)—The Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals
today granted a writ of error to Lenore da Cruz Jacobs from a decree of
the Circuit Court of Arlington County which found her marriage to Benjamin
L. Jacobs to have been based on fraud and annulled it.
—
The Staunton, Virginia, News Leader, 6 October 1944, p.1.
So the courts exonerated Gus; then she sued him for divorce on the grounds
of desertion and the court ruled in her favor; divorce was granted in
October 1946 after four years of separation. What really happened we'll
never know but Jake died in 1948 and she kept the house. I lived there with
her from 1945 to 1947 and I never saw any trace of Jake in the house or in
her photo albums either. Dad and Pete lived there at different points while
he was there so they knew him and mentioned him occasionaly (not around Gus).
I don't remember what they said but Dad expressed a favorable opinion
of him in a 1941 letter.
Gus as Georgetown nurse
Gus was a nurse at Georgetown Hospital when I was born in November 1944. I
would like to think she was in attendance and might even have delivered me
herself; it would be in character. Dad lived with her in her house starting
around 1942 when he was assigned to Navy Department headquarters in
Washington and Gus was a Senior Nurse in the Navy Reserve Corps. He married
my Mom in March 1944 and they got an apartment in DC in June, which was the
first place I lived, if only for a few months. My crib was a dresser
drawer. But there wasn't enough money to pay the rent and feed everybody,
so the three of us moved back with Gus in January 1945.
In April 1947 we moved to our own house 3 miles away in Fairfax County and
we would go to Gus's house on weekends. She was good at everything she did,
and cooking was no exception; she made huge dinners and always baked us
delicious pies. I loved going there. One of my favorite treats was when
she put the leftover pie scraps in little ceramic cups and baked them in the
oven and poured cream over them... just for us little guys. My Mom had
never learned to cook, so Gus got her started during the years we lived with
her.
Sometimes I'd spend whole days with Gus, just the two of us. She would take
me on the bus into DC where we'd ride around on the trolley or go to one of
those old-time Chinese restaurants where you sit in a private booth behind a
beaded curtain. Or to an amusement park on the Maryland side called Glen
Echo (1891-1968; her sister Alice Lauretta — Aunt Al — lived
near it). Gus was the relative I was closest to and now that I think of it,
the only one (besides Uncle Pete) who ever showed me any affection. ('m
sure my Mom did too in the early days but I can't remember it; my impression
is that she suppressed all emotion as a survival mechanism against my
father's endless abuse.
Dad, Gus, me, and Dennis, 1952
Gus did not have a car so if she wanted to pick me up for a day of fun she
had to take a bus for 2½ miles and walk another half mile, and then
walk back with me to the bus stop so we could go to DC or Maryland. Then to
bring me home and then get herself home, the same thing in reverse. But she
was up for it! Always in a good mood (even when I threw up on the roller
coaster). Similarly, for us to visit her: the same walk and bus ride.
After we got our first car in late 1949 it was much easier and we went to her
house every weekend. Or drove there and brought her back to our house.
Once it was for a big nighttime weenie roast at the Walkers' house next door
when I was maybe six years old. Nolan Walker had
built a big concrete incinerator-fireplace-grill in the back yard and he
invited the whole neighborhood to the inauguration. In addition to cooking
things on top, you could bake potatoes and ears of corn by burying them
under the fire. For fuel, Nolan just used trash. Turns out there was a
shotgun shell in the trash and it exploded and I got a load of buckshot in
my butt! Wow, did that hurt... As a country boy, I was used to pain, but
this was something else. I probably jumped six feet in the air and then ran
around like my pants were on fire, which is what it felt like, or maybe they
were. Gus caught me, calmed me down, took me inside and dug the pellets
out, joking with me all the while, dressed the wound, and made me feel good
enough to go back to the weenie roast. She was always able to make
everything better except at the very end.
Gus and Mom in Gus's back yard, 1952. Mom wearing a
dress she made herself. Both looking at my father
as he takes the picture. What are they thinking?
Toward the mid-1950s my father became increasingly angry, cruel,
domineering, tyrannical, and abusive with my mother and us kids, and Gus
knew it. He began to speak disparagingly of her when not in her presence.
But during our visits he behaved himself. I never saw her criticize him,
nor them ever arguing or fighting, but I imagine she must have tried to
help him privately, especially after my mother's suicide attempts began, and
I further imagine that this would only have made him more angry.
Our bunkbed
In October 2018, Danny sent me scans of some letters from the 1940s, some to
Gus from Dad when he was at sea in the 1930s, others as late as 1948, and it
is evident that in those days, he adored and doted on his mother. About
1950 Gus bought the bunk bed that Dennis I slept in, as well as curtains for
our house. At one point dad expresses genuine concern for her health and
the sacrifices she was making to buy stuff for us babies. In the late 1940s,
she was renting out not only the basement but also the upstairs. But by 1952
Dad writes contemptuously of her ("I must question Fate that puts real
property in the hands of women who are too stupid or mulish to take proper
care of it..."). He is also harsh with Pete, taking him to task for his many
supposed faults. It would seem that his later antipathy toward Gus was part
of his overall transformation.
Gus, Mischa, and toy pugs 1954
In the years before her death, Gus was having a casual romance with a
Russian emigre named Mischa, a self-styled aristocrat who had fled the
revolution and made his living with various hustles such as managing a
gigantic wrestler known as the Swedish Angel whose real name was Tor Johnson
and who appeared as a monster in some Ed Wood movies in the 1930s-50s.
This might have lasted a year two and then Mischa was gone.
Gus's death
Gus killed herself just after I turned 11. Shortly before this she brought
me into her dark bedroom, onto her big spool bed,
heavy red velvet drapes drawn, and she was holding me with all her strength
and crying and crying for what seemed like forever, saying "It's all over,
it's all over!" I thought it was because my Mom had tried to kill herself
again and was in the hospital, but now I know that was only part of it; 50
years later Dad's second wife Audrey told me Gus had terminal cancer. I
realize now that she was crying not so much because she was about to die
(she had seen more death and suffering as nurse in WWI, the 1918 flu, and
WWII that she accepted it as part of life) but because then she would not be
able to protect us from Dad — she was the only one who could make him
behave.
Gus's farewell note to her children
Last photo of Gus
I believe she was set on her course when she had Pete (who was living with
her) take some final photos where she is wearing makeup and what looks
like a brand-new dress, in the house with her pets trying hard to look
jolly. To me, the last photo is the most moving; she's looking in the
mirror as if to say goodbye to herself. Pure speculation
on my part but it feels true. The photos are at the end of the
Gus gallery.
To see a transcription of the letter,
CLICK HERE.
Meanwhile, around the same time she decided all the ducks in her backyard
had to die. She took me with her as she decapitated them one by one with a
hatchet without explaining why. The headless bodies ran around and some
flew for a minute or two before being still. One even flew over the fence
into a neighbor's yard. I had no idea why this was happening and only now I
realize that she was organizing her death, and I imagine she knew I'd figure
it out eventually. And then later, after the final photos were taken and we
weren't there, she took all of her pugs (and I guess her cat too) to a vet
to be euthanized. No loose ends.
Gus died November 15, 1955, not even 60 years old. Uncle Pete called on the
phone and I picked up the upstairs extension at the same time dad picked up
downstairs and I heard the news; in Pete's words, she "swallowed some
goofballs". The death certificate says suicide by barbituate poisoning, a
lethal quantity of Seconal. Later that day dad broke the news to me and
Dennis separately. It was awkward for me because I already knew, but it was
also creepy having him bring me into a closed room to speak with me alone.
He did the same with Dennis (who was only about six), who told me years
later that he thought dad was going to eat him.
Strangely, I don't recall being upset about Gus dying. I don't think I
understood what "dead" was; nobody I knew had ever died before. If there
was a funeral I don't remember it, but I recall being at the place she was
interred; it was raining hard and I was looking through a glass window,
that's all I remember. I knew she killed herself because I overheard the
phone call, but my Mom tried to do that all the time; I thought it was
normal and all women did it, and then they always come back after a stay in
the hospital. But after Gus was gone, family life became increasingly grim;
she never did come back and as the years and decades pass, I think of her
more and more.
Afterwards
Shortly after Gus's death, we went in her attic to see what was there and
found hundreds of stacks (each taller than me) of 78 RPM records, not vinyl
but shellac (and some of them on cardboard), probably ten thousand all
together. I took a few of them at random, all the rest went to the dump.
The ones I snagged were "Jazz-age" popular music. Here are the ones I
remember:
Black Bottom,
Arden-Ohman Dance Orchestra, Brunswick, 1926, shellac.
Ro-Ro-Rollin'
Along, Bert Hirsch Orchestra, Hit of the Week, 1930. 10-inch
cardboard record with song pressed into resin on one side. Hit of the
Week records were made from 1930 to 1932 and sold only at newsstands,
price 15¢
(click
here for more about these records).
I left them behind when I went in the Army. By the way, making shellac
records was an extremely complicated and labor-intensive process,
see
video (or
try here).
This one is worth watching so if the URLs go bad, do a video search for
"how shellac records are made" (without the quotes).
I wonder if Gus also bought records by Black artists like Louis Armstrong,
Bessie Smith, Alberta Hunter, Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, King
Oliver, Sidney Bechet, Don Redman, Sy Oliver, Kid Ory, Fats Waller... It's
hard to imagine they wouldn't have been in those stacks of thousands and
thousands of records.
Gus's house in 2023 (Google street view)
I last saw Gus's house in 1988 (see story), and
even went inside. It had been considerably renovated and the large backyard
was sold off piece by piece until there was nothing left. But as of October
2017 the house was still standing, as were
most of the other frame houses to its north along Glebe Road, and it is
still there in 2023 as shown in the photo at right.
Gus's ashes are buried at National
Memorial Park, 7482 Lee Highway in Fairfax Country, Virginia; Block II,
Lot 1480, Space 14. I went there once as a teenager; my high-school friend
Ludwig drove me in his 1953 Buick. Her grave was marked by a simple brass
plaque in the grass, flush with the ground, no headstone.
Looking back, I think I had more feelings for my grandmother than I did for
either of my parents. She wasn't withdrawn and silent like my mother, and
she was never superior, stern, angry, critical, judgemental, or bossy
— let alone violent or racist — like my father. To cite just
one example: as you can see from the photos, Gus was very particular about
her posture but she never told us children or anybody else to straighten up
or sit up straight. She didn't lecture us, she showed us by example how to
be a good person. She was never anything but warm, loving, jolly, kind,
generous, energetic, positive, and always a joy to be with.
Questions
Was Gus still working up until her death? She must have been; how else
could she live? So how did she commute? In 2023, Google Maps shows various
combinations of buses and walking between her house and Georgetown
University hospital, about an hour each way with a mile's walk on each end
(see Google map). Quite a haul, but she never
complained about anything.
Did she ever have a car? I don't remember one, but she had a garage behind
her house that appeared to have been well used. Today the garage is gone
and a new house sits on its site, very close to Gus's house, which previously
had ample yards on both sides and even ampler back yard, which can be seen
in this photo and (along with the
garage) in the 1943 plat map (northwest corner
of Glebe Road and N.23rd Street).
Rager family about 1900; Gus is the
little one in the white dress.
One of eight children, Gus had sisters Bessie India (Aunt Bess) (born Jan 5,
1891) and Alice Lauretta (b. Jan 15, 1889, Aunt Al), whom we saw frequently,
plus several more we never saw: Eloise Eleanor "Boomie" (b. March 8, 1894),
Lydia Catherine "Kate" (Mrs. Hamilton Geisbert, born 1886, died 1958; Dad
was a pallbearer at her funeral in Frederick), and Helen (Mrs. Harry
C. Edmonds), and two brothers: Arthur Blessing (1881-1926), and
Isaac Maynard (1885-1913); all but Gus lived in Maryland, most of them in
Frederick. In this photo, taken there about 1900, we see:
Back row: Arthur;
Middle row: Alice, Kate, Isaac, Helen (face obliterated), Mother Susan;
Front row: Bessie, Lenore (Gus), Eloise.
Gus noted in one of her scrapbooks that Eloise married Captain George
H. Gillis of North Abington, MA, November 1, 1919.
Rufus Rager ~1890
Susan Boyer ~1890
Rager map
Their dad was Rufus Albertus Rager, 1849-1912: Gus's dad, my father's
grandfather, my great-grandfather, and you guys' great-great-grandfather.
Rufus Rager was born May 20, 1849, in Downsville, Washington County,
Maryland; his parents were Rufus and Lydia Suman Rager. Rager is most
likely an anglicized form of the common German names Räger or Röger, but I
can't find anything about Rufus Sr's parents (a friend, Alex Bochannek,
notes that the surname Rager, while uncommon, is found in many parts of
Germany, with the greatest concentrations in Baden Würtemburg (mainly
around Stuttgart), and Bavaria (Augsburg, Nürnberg, Munich, and the
Deggendorf-Regen area;
see map from kartezumnamen.eu). Self-educated,
Rufus Jr. was county surveyor for Frederick County, Maryland, and had a
brother and four sisters. His wife (Gus's mom) was Susan Loretta Boyer, son
of Jonathan Boyer.
In July 2018 I found a way to access the Frederick County newspaper
archives. For a small town, it had a lot of newspapers! During the time
the Ragers lived there — about 1880 to 1923 — they were in the
papers hundreds of times. In those days, small-town papers reported every
single thing that everybody did: who was visiting who, who was sick, who
moved, who acted in the school play, who went to visit a relative, who came
to visit... Rufus was a real striver, auto-didact who joined every
fraternal organization, taught himself civil engineering and surveying, ran
for office many times and had numerous businesses and offices all over town,
was "director" of the volunteer fire brigade, and on and on. He had so many
children I thought they must have lived in a big house in the country but
no, at the time of his death they lived in "downtown" Frederick in a
two-story storefront from which the daughters (including Gus) ran a
dressmaking business.
Rufus was apparently not very robust; the newspapers report various periods
when he was laid up with rheumatism for extended periods and other ailments.
On November 8, 1912, he had a stroke that paralyzed him, rallied just enough
to communicate with family and friends, then gradually lapsed into
unconsciousness and died on December 1st. After that his son Isaac left
home to join Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, following the example of his
brother Harry who had traveled with Pawnee Bill's Wild West Show, and once
sued the local hospital for $10,000. Harry had since come home but died in
April 1913. The mother Susan moved with the daughters to a smaller (or
perhaps just cheaper) house nearby in July 1913. Gus had moved out by 1916
to attend Georgetown University nursing school in Washington DC. Susan
moved to Baltimore once the nest was empty and died there in 1923, but is
buried in the family plot at Mt. Olivet Cemetary in Frederick, which is
Section 00, Lot 19. Jonathan Boyer is there too, as well as Catherine
J. Blessing Boyer, Arthur Blessing Rager, and Gus's brother Harry.
The Ragers lived in who-knows-how-many houses. The 1900 census says 45 West
Fifth Street (which has to be a mistake; there is no 45, it must have been
25) with ten residents (with their ages): Rufus A 52,
Susan L 45, Arthur B 18, Helen V 17,
Isaac M 15, Lydia K 13,
Allie L 11 (Alice), Bessie I 9,
Eloise E 6, Susan L Rager (Gus) 3. In either
1906 or 1910 they moved into 119 West Fifth Street. They were living at 324
North Market Street in 1912 when Rufus died. In 1913, the mother Susan
moved herself and girls 340 North Market Street. So these were four of
Gus's childhood homes, all but the first small rowhouses, and all within a
few blocks of each other.
25 East 5th Street
199 East 5th Street
324 North Market Street
340 North Market Street
With all the moving and Rufus's job-changing and money-making schemes, I
have the feeling that the Rager kids' childhood was pretty chaotic. The
other interesting thing is the complete absence of any mention of church or
religion in any of the newspaper articles, even the obituaries and funerals.
Maybe Rufus was like grandfather Daniel's brother Manuel: the village
atheist. Which jibes with how I remember Gus, she never mentioned religion
and as far as I know never went to church. Anyway who knew we had
uncles in Wild West shows???
Susan Boyer's father
was Jonathan
Boyer and her mother
was Catherine
Blessing (1828-1908). Catherine's parents
were George
Blessing Jr. (1794-1873)
and Susan
Easterday (1802-1884). Blessing Jr. is the earliest ancestor who we
have photos of (photos date are approximate). He would be your
great-great-great-great-grandfather (4GGF). His parents were George (Georg)
Blessing Sr. (1763-1821) and Juliana
Easterday (1765-1824), thus Blessing
Jr. married his first cousin. These weren't the only first cousins who
married. Digging back through the generations all the way to early 1700s, I
see the Blessings and Easterdays (Ostertag in German) marrying each other
all the time. There are whole books written about these families, such as
History of the
Easterday Family by Levi Fast M. Easterday, Lincoln, Nebraska, 1908,
which says:
[The Easterdays are not] Blessing, but they are related to all the Blessings
because all the Blessings are part Easterday. This for the reason that the
wife of the Senior Blessing was Julia Easterday. It is true that all the
descendants of Christian Easterday are part Blessing, for the reason that
his wife was Julia Blessing.
The earlier intermingling of the Blessing and Christian Easterday families
by marriage has been a matter of tradition and comment. It is a remarkable
fact that the fathers of the George and the Susan, above referred to, each
married the sister of the other. Thus George Blessing and Susan Easterday
were doubly first cousins before their marriage, the father of Susan being
Conrad of "the seven brothers" [sons
of Christian
Ostertag/Eastday] and the mother of George being Julia of "the three
sisters." The maiden name of Susan's mother was Barbara Blessing. The first
name of George's father is unknown to the writer. The only honor claimed by
the writer in this connection is that his grandfather, Christian, and the
"Hero of the Highland" were second cousins, the grandfather of the one and
the grandmother of the other being brother and sister.
As you might imagine this poses some challenges for our family tree
software. Also see
this
page.
As noted, Blessing Jr. was known as "the Hero of the Highland" for driving
away a Confederate raiding party July 6, 1864. That same month, George
himself writes, in response to a newspaper article (text found at
findagrave.com,
as was the 1855 photo and the names of his children and parents):
Messrs. Editors of the Examiner:
Your statement of the barn-yard fight of the 9th instant, is not
correct. The facts of the dreadful scene are these:
On the morning of that day a Company of Calvary, commanded by Major Harmon
and Captain Walker, came in sight of my farm, where they detailed five to
come and steal my horses. As they rode up, I gave my son two guns and I took
six and went in the name of the Lord God of Hosts to meet them, and as they
rode up in haste we fired upon them in quick time, one was mortally wounded
(he died at Middletown), the other so bad, they rode under the overshoot of
the barn where we had a cross-fire on them. As they were retreating I fired,
killing one on the spot and took the other prisoner. The balance got back to
the Company, which was from forty to sixty strong, and before I had
re-loaded my guns they returned, nineteen in number, and had pressed in
their service four of my neighbors as guides, and marched them in advance. I
gave my son two guns and another young man one, but they both retreated. I
then took four guns, and went to a group of cherry trees; as their guides
came up I halted them under pain of death if they did not stand. One of them
broke off and ran. I fired on him, without effect. As soon as he reached the
Rebels, they opened fire upon me to their hearts content; the splinters from
the trees and fence flew in my face, while some of the balls fell at my
feet. I had three guns, which I held back (Unreadable word) sure work. After
firing some fifty shots they rode off, leaving their dead and wounded in my
hands. They sent word that they would bring up a battery and shell me. I
sent word back that I had their wounded man in the barn, if they chose to
burn him up they could do so. A little before night, Cole's Calvary, under
command of Lieut. Colonel Vernon, came in sight. I thought it was the Rebel
battery, and I took the dead Rebel's carbine and concealed myself in a
bramble bush close to the lane to make that the closing scene of that bloody
day. When I saw my happy mistake, I crawled out; they gave me a hearty
cheer, rode up to the house, helped to bury my dead, and staid over
night. Thus closed the most tragic scene in the history of my life. I am 70
years of age. I do not wish to correct your error to boast, but I do it to
encourage our soldiers and people to fight better and look to God for a just
victory.
Yours, &c.,
GEORGE BLESSING
Speaking of the Civil War, Gus's mother's father, Jonathan
Boyer (who was married to George Blessing Jr.'s daughter Catherine),
was a Private in the 173rd Pennsylvania Infantry and died from wounds
suffered in the Battle of Gettysburg; Catherine received a widow's pension.
Tom Blessing Civil War photo
Solomon "Tom" Blessing
Samuel "Sam" Blessing
John Philip Blessing
Incidentally the 1855 Blessing photo (the year is approximate) was
by John
Philip Blessing, who, along with his brothers Samuel and Solomon, were
among the first professional photographers. They are grandsons
of Philip
Blessing, brother of George Blessing's
father, Georg
Johann. Although they were all born in Frederick, for some reason they
moved to Texas and Louisiana to set up their photo studios. Then the Civil
War broke out, and being in Texas, Solomon ("Tom") found himself a Private
in the Confederate Army, was wounded four times, and took some photos like
the one shown. After the war they got together and opened Blessing's
Photographic Temple in Galveston that had a copying and enlarging department
that could produce all sizes of portraits, from miniatures to life-size, as
well as portraits in oil painted from photographs to reduce the traditional
lengthy sittings. In the Civil War photo, the soldier in middle is holding
a cast iron skillet in one hand, used to make the
Civil War
Cornbread in the other.
Nellie Blessing
George Blessing Jr.'s little brother Abraham
was father to journalist, writer, and lecturer Nellie Blessing Eyster, who
is somewhat famous as a social reformer and defender of native Americans and
of Chinese immigrants. She's my 6th cousin 4 times removed and you guys'
7th cousin 5 times removed. You can
read about
her in Wikipedia. According to the article her maternal grandfather,
George W.
Ent, was a captain in the Maryland Militia at Fort McHenry (which is in
Maryland) in the war of 1812.
Digging deeper
Rager family tree drawn by Rufus A. Rager 1896 or later.
Bottom
line:
1881 Arthur B; 1883 Helen V; 1884 Isaac M; 1886 Lydia C;
1889 Alice L; 1891 Bessie I; 1894; E. Eleanor; 1896 Lenore.
I have a barely legible copy of Gus's family tree, handwritten for her by
her father, which traces the family back to his great grandparents,
Eleanor
and Peter Suman
(more about Peter below).
It's hard to read but here is how I interpreted it: the circle in the upper
right of the left page labeled HUSBAND, which contains "1727 Peter Suman
1781", is connected to the circle in the upper left of the right-hand page
labeled "Wife" that contains "Eleanor 1818", 1818 being the date of death.
Peter Suman and Eleanor had 11 children, one of whom was Albert
Suman with no dates given. Albert married Mary
Lantz and they had seven children between 1817 and 1823, one of whom
was Lydia
Suman, born in 1821, who
married the
first Rufus Rager and produced seven children
including Rufus
A. Rager, Gus's father.
Anyway, it turns out that if you type the name and dates of a person who
lived long ago into Google, you are likely to find them on a number of
genealogy sites: ancestry.com, findagrave.com, myheritage.com, wikitree.com,
familysearch.com, genealogieonline.nl, and so on. The longer ago the person
lived, the more descendents who might be interested in their genealogy. I did
this first for Peter Suman and filled in all the illegible names and missing
dates from the handwritten tree, plus I found Peter Suman's father-in-law,
Michael Miller
(Johann
Michel Müller), born in 1692
(note: the German name Michel is pronounced MEE-shel). That's on the Rufus
Rager side. His wife, Susan
Boyer has a lot of ancestors too, going back six generations to families
named Spiess and Ostertag in what is now Germany, all the way to
a Johann
Daniel Heuss, born in 1673 in Bad Homburg (a town near Frankfurt that I
visited from time to time 1959-61).
Isaac Suman plaque
Col. Isaac C.B. Suman
One of Lydia's brothers (which makes him my 3-great uncle) was
Isaac
C.B. Suman, born in Frederick County in 1831 and enlisted in the Army
(for the second time) upon the outbreak of the Civil War as a Private in
Company H of
the 9th
Indiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment and quickly rose to Captain, then
Lieutenant Colonel, and finally Colonel and commander of the Regiment,
known as the "Bloody Ninth" because it was in so many battles, including
Shiloh, Stones River (where he was shot twice), and Chickamauga. After the
war he was promoted to General by President Grant, but he turned down the
promotion because he had already left the Army. He was known as a strong
opposer of slavery, unlike his father, Albert
Ellsworth Suman, Revolutionary War veteran, slaveholder, and my
great-great-great grandfather. Isaac's sister Mary
Elizabeth, who lived 94 years, liked to claim that her and Isaac's brother
Albert fought on the Confederate side, but apparently she invented the
story.
The Blessings and Easterdays were
intertwined in ways that can't be shown in the family tree at Family Echo;
for example, Conrad and Juliana Easterday are brother and sister. Conrad's
daughter Susan and Juliana's son George married each other. That's just one
example of many that go all the way back to when the two families were still
in Germany, when the Easterdays were Ostertags.
Deeper Still...
Or... Who knew our German ancestors were really Swiss?
Perhaps not all of them but...
Müller Haus in Schwarzenmatt
A more recent view
Me in Switzerland 1964
In April 2019 I was contacted by Carole Pfisterer, who is my fourth cousin
via Michael
Rager (father of Rufus Rager Sr.), and who got me interested in
following up the Rager branch in more depth (and height, and width). Thanks
to some clues she unearthed in church and property records, I was
able to trace the Ragers back several more generations and to satisfy
myself that they were overwhelmingly German or (surprise) German-speaking
Swiss. It turns out the latter were among the "Pennsylvania German
pioneers", focus of a great deal of research and genealogy, almost on a par
with the Mayflower passengers in terms of
attention. Johann
Michel Müller (a.k.a. Michael Miller), my 8-great grandfather on the
Rager side, was born in 1655 in the tiny Alpine village of Schwarzenmatt,
Canton Bern, Switzerland, in a wooden house constructed in 1556, a house
that still stands and, in fact, can be rented by tourists as a holiday
chalet.
Note: In this section I use "Germany" and "Switzerland" as shorthand
for the corresponding areas of the Holy Roman Empire, which were then
kingdoms, duchies, bishoprics, principalities, cantons, etc.
Pietists
It seems that some of our Swiss family — notably the
Müller
and
Berchtol
clans — belonged to a post-Reformation dissenter sect called the Swiss
Pietists or Brethren (Brüder), also called Dunkers, who believed baptism
should be a choice of fully conscious adults — the "Anabaptist heresy"
— for which they were persecuted by both secular and religious
authorities. Brethren were also pacifists and were opposed to bureaucracy
and record-keeping, which is why it's often difficult to trace their births,
deaths, marriages, and residences. The movement began in the Swiss village
of Zollikon (near Zürich), where some of our family were born, for example Salome
Huber, mother of Müller Senior (also born there). The co-founder of the
movement, Jörg Blaurock, was burned at the stake along with other movement
leaders; others were executed by drowning or beheading. This went on from
about 1520 into the 1700s and it became increasingly clear that the Brüder
were not welcome in Switzerland.
Thirty Years War
Nine Years War
Meanwhile throughout the 1600s Germany suffered a series of calamities
including the Thirty Years War (1618-1638), a French invasion in 1674, the
War of the Palatinate Succession ("Nine Years War", 1688-1697), and a
Bubonic Plague epidemic which among them left some parts of Germany
virtually empty and begging for German-speaking immigrants to come and
repopulate the devastated landscape and reestablish its agriculture and
economy. As enticements, German rulers offered concessions including tax
exemption and religious freedom, which attracted Swiss of all faiths, but
above all the Brüder and Mennonites, who needed a safe place to live.
Possible Müller door
Steinwenden aerial view
Rheinland-Pfalz
The result was a wave of emigration of German-speaking Swiss to Germany in
the early 1700s; in the case of our family, to the Rheinland, where they
settled near Kaiserslautern (where I
lived 1963-64), mainly in Steinwenden and Krottelbach. Johann
Michel Müller "Senior" emigrated from his chalet in Schwarzenmatt
to Steinwenden where he raised a family and lived out his days. His
son Johann
Michel Müller "Junior", born in Steinwenden in 1692, married
Susanna
Agnes Berchtol (granddaughter of Swiss emigrants) in 1714, and the
family joined the Brethren. Their daughter, Eleanor
Beauford Müller, my 4-great grandmother, was therefore 100% Swiss,
making me 1/32 Swiss.
But the Müllers and Berchtols are not the only Swiss branch of the family. John
Lantz, father
of Mary
Lantz, who was the mother
of Rufus
Rager Sr.'s
wife Lydia
Suman, was born in Switzerland and emigrated to Lancaster County,
Pennsylvania. So that's another 1/64. And the great-great grandparents
of Michael
Rager (father
of Rufus
Rager Sr.)
were Tobias
Anspacher and Elizabetha
Winsler, both born in Canton Bern, Switzerland. They migrated to
Germany in the early 1700s (were they Brethren?) and the family remained
there until 1749. And that's another 1/256, making me (at least) 5% Swiss.
Port of Philadelphia 1730
The Swiss settlers enjoyed 25-50 good years in Germany, but then the
concessions that brought them there were rolled back by the ruling
German families and the Swiss were subject once again to religious
persecution and heavy taxation. So at the age of 35, after his parents had
died, Johann Michel Müller (Junior) took Susanna and their 7-10 children up
the Rhein, which flows north, to Rotterdam and sailed from there to British
America on the Adventure, docking in Philadelphia on October 2, 1727.
Later, in 1749, the Anspachers
and the
Ragers
sailed to Philadelphia too.
Amish in Lancaster
They all settled in the Lancaster PA area, known for its Mennonites and
Amish as well as its Brethren (the three are very similar). Georg and
Barbara moved to Virginia but Conrath stayed behind and
married Eva
Maria Anspacher, at least half Swiss. (Incidentally John Lantz's
wife Christina
Kreider, lived to be 111 years old and her great
granddaughter, Mary
Elizabeth Suman Bower lived to 96).
Shortly after these settlers arrived they found themselves in the middle of
a border conflict between Pennsylvania and Maryland called Cresap's War
(1728-38), the two colonies disputing claim to the lands where the Brethren
had settled and built their farms, making their lives impossible. In 1728
Pennsylvania militias ran the settlers off and burned their homes. In the
1730s, militias of both states started to demand rent, and to jail them.
Some settlers resisted, but not the non-violent Brethren. The harrassment
and violence was to last until the Mason-Dixon line was drawn in 1767.
Michael Miller
(as Johan
Michel Müller II is now known) saw the writing on the wall and started
buying up land in Frederick County, Maryland. By 1752 he, along with a
large group of Brethren and other Swiss Germans (and actual Germans), had
moved to Frederick, already settled by other Germans who arrived in Maryland
directly through the port of Baltimore — a few at first, then
en masse starting in 1752.
Michael's son-in-law,
Peter
Balthasar Schumann, my 4-great grandfather (4GGF), was born in
Schriesheim in Baden-Württemburg (just north of Heidelberg) in 1730, and he
was a member of the Dunker Church, i.e. the Brethren. He emigrated to
Pennsylvania in 1749, shortened his name to Suman, and settled there with
his wife, my 4-great grandmother, the aforementioned Eleanor Beauford
Müller. Theirs was another family forced by the border war to move from
Pennsylvania to Frederick County in the 1750s.
French and Indian War
These and many other German and Swiss settlers remained in Frederick
except for 1756-1758 when they piled their belongings
into 350 wagons and vacated their lands to get out of the way of the French
and Indian War! Müller Junior didn't return until 1762. Nothing is known
of this episode due to the Brethren's total lack of record keeping, but
clearly life in the New World was a challenge. Where did they go? How did
they live? What did they find when they returned? Who died and who
survived?
Peter Suman's execution
Peter Suman's death sentence
Chastising a loyalist
Once back in Frederick the Millers and Sumans and the rest enjoyed about
fifteen years of relative calm. Then came the American Revolution, which
put Brethren and other pacifist sects in danger once again; their religious
beliefs would not permit them to fight but there was no Consciencious
Objecting in those days. At the height of the Loyalist scare, my
4GGF Peter
Balthasar Suman (I am descended from his son Albert, 1763-1842) was
charged with being a loyalist — treason — and along with six
supposed co-conspirators was indicted, arraigned, and tried in a military
tribunal that found them all guilty. On July 25, 1781, Peter and the others
were sentenced as follows:
"You shall be carried to the gaol of
Fredericktown, and be hanged thereon; you shall be cut down to the earth
alive, and your entrails shall be taken out and burnt while you are yet
alive, your heads shall be cut off, your bodies shall be divided into four
parts and your heads and quarters shall be placed where his Excellency the
governor shall appoint."
Peter and two others were executed as
indicated August 17, 1781, and the land where his wife Eleanor [my 4GGM] and
their 11 children were living was confiscated. Did Peter's refusal to join
in the uprising make him a loyalist? The charges against Peter remain
controversial to this day, but who cares; some Brethren, Mennonites,
and Quakers in the area might indeed have been loyalists by reason of their
faith, which forbade both keeping of slaves and killing[26], at a time when the
colonists had reason to believe the British would abolish slavery.
Grossnickle Brethren Church,
Ellerton MD
As to Peter's situation, it seems to me there were significant numbers of
Brethren in Frederick County, as can be seen by the number of churches
called "Church of the Brethren" there:
Catoctin, Ellerton, Fredericktown, Johnsville, Libertytown, Middletown,
Monocacy, Monrovia, Mountandale, Myersville, Sabillasville, Thurmont,
Urbana, Walkersville, Wolfsville...
Among our own ancestors, Brethren were found among at least the
Schumann/Sumans, the Müller/Millers, the Blessings, the Boyers, the
Grossnickles (who had their own church!), the Studebakers... Then consider
the other pacifist sects in the same county: Mennonites, Quakers, even some
Amish. These are people who take the Bible literally and disdain worldly
authority; the Bible says "Thou shalt not kill", the end, Punkt. Frederick
County must have seemed like a seething hotbed of subversion to those
favoring war. What better way to break the resisters' will than a show
trial ending in unimaginably horrific public executions? In fact, the
outcry upon the first three executions was so overwhelming that the
remaining four defendents were pardoned and the Suman farm was returned to
the widow Eleanor (albeit fifteen years later).
Pennsylvania and Maryland
Anyway it turns out that many Brethren and other Swiss Germans remained in
Pennsylvania or resettled there after the border war, and it is probably for
this reason that births and deaths in these families (Müller/Miller,
Schumann/Suman, and finally Rager) seem to alternate between Maryland and
Pennsylvania over the 1800s. For example, Michael
Rager (Conrath's grandson, born in Lancaster in 1780) married Elizabeth
Gittinger (born in Maryland of mixed German and Swiss descent) and they
had 12 children that we know of between 1809 and 1833, shuttling back and
forth between Lancaster and Frederick; five of them born in Pennsylvania,
seven in Maryland, never more than two in a row in the same state. Thus the
Lancaster Ragers and Frederick Ragers are not the two separate families they
might seem. The map shows the well-trodden path between the two, about three
days each way by horse and buggy.
In the end, a good chunk of our heritage is indeed "Pennsylvania Dutch"
(a term that includes Germans and Swiss but not actual Dutch).
I would like to trace the Rager line farther back than Conrath and his
parents (German father Georg Michael, Swiss mother Barbara Wurtzin), if only
to find out the original spelling of the name, because "Rager" doesn't seem
to be a proper German name. More likely it would be Räger/Raeger, or
perhaps Reger (like the composer Max Reger, and as Conrath is listed in one
genealogy I saw) or even Röger. On the other hand, the verb ragen
means to tower above, so a "Rager" might be a tall person but
I don't see the word in any dictionary. And no, the Ragers were not
abandoned Hessian soldiers; the first Ragers arrived in America in 1749,
twenty-seven years before any Hessians were imported by the British.
Going back a bit farther, it turns out the Müllers weren't always Swiss.
Johann Michel Sr.'s paternal grandfather Daniel
Müller (my own 10GGF) was Alsatian, and his grandma, Daniel's wife Magdalena
was Bavarian, and her ancestors back to the 1520s were from
Württemburg (where I lived in 1965, in Stuttgart; by the way, in this line
we have some X-great grandmothers with operatic names like Walpurga
and Apollonia).
On the other hand, Johann Michel Sr.'s mother Salome
Huber's family is Swiss all the way back to 1525, so Johann Senior
is still "mostly" Swiss. Anyway, the distinction doesn't matter much given
that the German-speaking countries and boundaries have been changing
continuously over the past half-millenium. So for genealogy purposes I
think it makes more sense to understand "German" as an ethnic/language group
rather than a nationality, and in that sense Gus is just about 100% German.
Hermann Guth et al., Palatine Mennonite Census Lists
1664-1793, Family History Library (Salt Lake City), "a unique source
for genealogical researchers as it lists where many of Swiss-German
immigrants lived in Germany prior to emigration to America".
The
Anabaptists and Persecution Against Them, Daniel Hason website,
accessed 4 May 2019. "Hundreds of Anabaptists were deported or emigrated
northward down the Rhine River into parts of southern Germany. An
estimated 1,661 Anabaptists fled from Canton Zurich in the 1650s. Seven
hundred helpless and impoverished Swiss Anabaptists were driven from
their homeland in 1671. By 1700 few of them were left anywhere in
northern Switzerland."
Pennsylvania
Dutch, Wikipedia, accessed 4 May 2019. "[A] wave of settlers from
Germany, which would eventually coalesce to form a large part of the
Pennsylvania Dutch, arrived between 1727 and 1777 ... The immigrants ...
who were known as the Pennsylvania Dutch included Mennonites, Swiss
Brethren (also called Mennonites by the locals) and Amish but also
Anabaptist-Pietists."
German
Marylanders Timeline, GermanMarylanders.org, accessed 5 May 2019,
according to which Frederick, Maryland, was first settled in about 1732. In
1735 about 100 families from the Palatinate (Rheinland-Pfalz) by way of the
Chesapeake Bay, landing at Annapolis or Alexandria, settled at Monocacy and
Frederick Town. In 1748, 2800 Rheinland emigrants arrived, settling
mainly in Frederick Town. In 1777 the British garrisoned a Hessian regiment
in the town during the war. After the war, with no way to return to their
homeland, the men of the Hessian regiment stayed on and married into the
families of the town, strengthening its German identity.
Edward
T. Schultz, First
Settlements of Germans in Maryland, Frederick County Historical
Society, 17 January 1896: "It is known that before the year 1750 a large
number of Germans and their descendents had found their way into Maryland
via the settlements in York and Lancaster counties and settled on the
lands contiguous to the settlement of Monocacy ... The favorite route of
the German immigrants was to the port of Philadelphia, thence to Lancaster
County, where large settlements were made at an early period. From here
they spread into other sections of Pennsylvania, and into Maryland,
Virginia..."
Steve Shook, A
Porter County Civil War Officer: Colonel Isaac
C.B. Suman, 1 February 2017. Isaac is my 3-great uncle.
The second half deals with the horrific end of my 4-great grandfather, Peter
Balthasar Suman, and a dirty secret of my 3-great grandfather Albert Suman.
Brumbaugh's Men
and the Revolution in Hagerstown, Jacob's Estate,
jacobbrumbaugh.wordpress.com, accessed 6 January 2020. Explains how all
free adult males in Frederick and Washington counties of Maryland were
required to join the militia to fight the British, and how the Brethren,
Mennonites, Moravians, Quakers, and other pacifist sects would be labeled
Loyalists and prosecuted if they refused. It also mentions that the topic
of consciencious objection came up at the Second Continental Congress and
systems of fees and fines was proposed but the issue remained in flux,
colony by colony, town by town.
The
Pacifists (in the American Revolution),
America in Class, Making the Revolution, Rebellion: 1775-1776,
americainclass.org, accessed 8 March 2020.
Ronald J. Gordon, Who are the
Dunkers?, Church of the Brethren Network (1998, 2013), website accessed
19 October 2020.
Gus's sisters
Back to my own lifetime!
Bess and Bill house 2019
Bess and Bill 1950s
Gus's older sister Bess and Bess's husband Bill Middleton (an aristocratic
landlord) lived at 3194 Westover Drive SE in Washington DC in what
seemed like a mansion to me ("a lovely home in a private and
prestigious enclave minutes from Capitol Hill ... 4 beds, 3.5 baths...").
It's in the small slice of DC south of the Anacostia River, on a high
hill just off Pennsylvania Avenue overlooking Southeast DC and adjoining
Maryland — a spectacular view, especially at night. It was not a
child-friendly household. For example on the coffee table there were
cut-glass receptacles for hard candies and Brazil nuts ("niggertoes") but
nobody was allowed to touch them.
I lived with Bess and Bill for a week or two in summer 1961 when we came
back from Germany and our house in Arlington wasn't ready. They were
confirmed antisemites and racists, to the extent that's all they ever talked
about. They may have passed this on to my dad (uncle Pete not so much); he
certainly didn't get it from his own parents. It was a rude reintroduction
to the country I had just returned to after 2½ years in the
multiracial multicultural virtual paradise of the Frankfurt, Germany, Army
base. One day they heard that a Jewish family was moving onto their street,
so they instantly sold their house and moved to (would you believe) Florida,
where Bill died in 1968 and Bess in 1980.
George Booth cartoon
Aunt Al (Alice) was like the cartoons in the New Yorker about those crabby
old people who live in the messy rickety house with yapping dogs and mangy
cats and lightbulbs hanging by frayed wires, surrounded by overgrown weeds
and rusty tin cans. All she cared about in the whole world was her precious
mutt Bobo. She had hundreds of cast-iron and ceramic "niggers", her
favorite decorative motif, both in the house and among the weeds outside.
She had a live-in boyfriend, John, who just sat there in his stained and
torn T-shirt and never said a word. He only had one ear; Al had bitten the
other one off. I never knew it until now, but she had been married at one
point, she is Alice Perry on the 1940 census, which also shows that as of
June 8th of that year, the house at 26 Conduit Road in Glen Echo Heights
(Maryland) was actually Gus's; the two of them lived together then. Conduit
Road is now MacArthur Boulevard and the house numbering has changed so there
would be no way to find this house except from old plat maps. But anyway it
close to Glen Echo Amusement Park. From Virginia we would drive across
Chain Bridge and turn left on George Washington Parkway (now Clara Barton),
which went along the Potomac to Glen Echo.
The three sisters had one quirk in common — they painted strange
designs reminiscent of Gaugin or Rousseau — twisting vines, devil
faces, fantastic animals — all over every surface in their houses:
walls, tables, chairs, lamps, vases, pianos, plates, everything. Aunt Bess
had covered a basement wall with a huge mural of a Mexican vaquero in a
gigantic sombrero studded with thousands of real sequins, surrounded by
cactuses and gaudy desert flowers. I wish I had taken pictures but I
didn't, nor did dad.
My father always said his mother was "demented" but I never knew what he
meant by it, except for how she painted designs on everything — maybe it
was because, unlike her sisters, she wasn't an over-the-top bigot. I don't
recall her ever saying "nigger" or for that matter, a bad word about
anybody. Although I imagine she didn't care much for Hitler.
I deliberately—to the extent I did anything deliberately in my late
teens and early twenties—stole from him. I wanted to be like the
polymathic, swashbuckling, self-assured, charming, somewhat subversive
hard-ass that I saw him to be. And now as I read your story, I am enjoying
a morning of self-congratulatory triumph at having, to some extent, been
like Dan. And at realizing that my teenage suspicion that this would be an
interesting life turns out to be the case.
—Rif Haffar (his nephew), January 2018
Uncle Pete in 1940
My dad's brother: Daniel Pattee da Cruz (Pete), born Nov 17, 1921, Oxford
OH, died January 5, 1991 (cancer), George Washington University Hospital in
Washington DC, buried in Arlington National Cemetery: Area 63 Columbarium
CT3. This is at the extreme east end near the Pentagon. His Mom, Gus,
called him Pete and we did too, but everybody else knew him as Daniel or
Dan. Pete called my dad Fran (my mother and his mother called him Roach).
Dad and Pete 1934
Pete grew up with Dad in Oxford OH, but also in other houses with other
families, at least in Washington DC, Bozman MD, and (in the 1940s) Arlington
VA with their mother, my grandmother Gus. I'm
pretty sure, but not certain, that they were kept together the whole time.
I know they were together in Bozman and in Oxford, but Dad was 3½
years older. Dad was a pretty poor student; I think Pete must have been a
better one — he went to Miami University in Oxford right after high
school (unlike his brother, who worked at odd jobs for two years before his
father made him go to the University of Maryland, where he lasted
exactly one semester). At some point before 1941 Pete transferred from
Miami to George Washington University in DC and lived with Gus but (as he
wrote to me in 1964) "I flunked out of school before the war".
In the late 1930s he and his friends had been anti-war, believing it was all
just another big boondoggle for the arms industry, like WWI, but later he
changed his mind and enlisted in the Marines in May 1941, several months
before Pearl Harbor. In his own words (from a 1965 letter):
I recall with utmost clarity an all-night stag party of a bunch of us
young-bloods just before we were to enter the university. We were all
classmates. The date was September 1, 1939, and toward morning we heard
on the radio that the Germans had invaded Poland. By daybreak we had
taken a solemn oath, one and all, that war was hell, that we would all
refuse to go, and that nothing would change our minds. Within three years
everyone of us was in it.
Pete's basic training platoon Parris Island 1941
Private 1942
Platoon Sergeant 1947
Uncle Pete was my hero as a kid. He was handsome, adventurous,
good-humored, demonstrative, curious about everything, spoke many
languages (so it seemed to me as a child, but his son Danny adds: "none too
well, but a passable ability in several"), and always was full of energy and
enthusiasm and stories of his adventures. He had the good looks and to some
extent the manner of fellow WWII veteran Paul Newman, although in fact (he
told me himself) he patterned himself on Simon Templar, The Saint (a
series of books by Leslie Charteris... the early ones, not the later ones).
North American B-25 Mitchell medium bomber
His academic career was put on hold by World War II (inscription found in
one of his books by Danny in May 2019, given to him by his mother Gus for
Christmas 1941: "Merry Christmas to my darling. Be brave. Ma"), where he saw
combat on land, sea, and air in the Atlantic and Pacific as an enlisted man
in the Marine Corps. He flew in the front bubble
of B-25
bombers as a navigator-bombardier...
Danny says his dad had a story about a training flight where "they got lost
above the clouds somewhere over Georgia and they had to bring the plane down
below the clouds and close enough to ground to read highway signs, with
binoculars I presume, to get their bearings."
Consolidated B-24 Liberator
By the way — and Danny disputes this — I think he also flew in
B-24s because he told me so when I was 10 or so while admiring my plastic
models of both planes; I definitely knew the difference. I remember he
mentioned that bailing out from the front compartments could result in being
chopped up by the inboard propeller, which makes sense if you look at where
the emergency exits are. Jumping out of the rear exits is safer but if the
ship is damaged or on fire that might not be possible. Of course the pilot
could also stop the engines and feather the props... Oh well, too late to
go back for clarification.
Pete also sailed on
the USS Texas
and the USS
Augusta where he was severely injured in a 5-inch gun explosion, and he
fought on Guam where he got "jungle rot", a skin condition that lasted for
many years (and eventually had an operation after which his whole head was
wrapped in bandages like a mummy, I saw him like that but don't have a
picture). He was also on Okinawa and Iwo Jima. I'm sure there's a lot more
to his war record but that's all I think I know.
USS Augusta
Atlantic Conference
USS Texas
The Ayes of Texas
His experiences on the Texas and the Augusta provided the background for his
Ayes of Texas novels. The Augusta, by the way, is the same ship where
Roosevelt and Churchill had their first face-to-face meeting in August 1941
and issued the Atlantic Charter, the document that established the principal
that every country had the right to rule itself, which spelled the eventual
doom of colonialism (this was after the gun explosion). Danny notes:
It was also the flagship of Admiral Ernest King [standing,
second from right, in the second image] at the time,
and Dad fondly remembered Admiral King putting his coat on Dad's shoulders
one cold night when he was on duty as his orderly. It was later General
Patton's flagship during the invasion of North Africa.
When he was injured in the explosion my dad found out about it in a
comminique that arrived at his code station at the Navy Department. He told
Gus and Gus went to meet him when the ship came back, and nursed him until
he was ready to live the horrors of Pacific islands; I don't have any
stories about this, neither does anybody else — he didn't talk about
it much; I vaguely recall some graphic descriptions of the jungles of Guam,
but not the details. He was released from service in 1947 as a Platoon
Sergeant E6 (three stripes and a
rocker). To see what the war in the Pacific islands was like for US
Marines, see the HBO "The Pacific"
miniseries (2010) produced by Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, and Gary
Goetzman.
Portugal 1951
After that, he traveled around on his own, with no money — he rode a
Vespa with a sidecar all over Europe (including in Portugal to find our
family there). According to family legend, he stayed with nomadic Sámi in
arctic Scandinavia for a year, traveled with nomads in the Iraqi desert
(probably during or after his State Department assignment there), worked as
a copper miner in Mexico and/or Butte, Montana, lived with Hopis in the
southwest, worked as sharecropper, as a taxi driver in DC, etc — wrote
lots of books, spoke (or at least studied) lots of languages (Spanish,
Arabic, Caddo, probably French, maybe some Sámi, who knows what else). He
even lived in Harlem for a while on or near Riverside Drive at some point, a
short walk from where we ourselves lived when he visited us in 1979.
Pete and me in 1948
Pete oiled up
During his wandering years, Pete would show up at our house unexpectedly
every so often, on a Vespa or in some kind of modified jalopy with the seats
ripped out, so he could sleep in it, wearing a ragged old olive-drab Marine
T-shirt and dogtags, or dressed like an Arab or an Eskimo or a bomber
crewman, bringing us exotic presents from strange lands — chunks of
copper ore from Mexico, elaborate Arab garb for whole family, an ornate
curved dagger from Iraq that had been a murder weapon,
a reindeer-marking knife from Sápmi
("Lappland") that I still have… Penniless, he would stay with us for a
few weeks or months until he launched his next adventure. Danny found the
"oiled up" picture, neither of us has any idea what's going on in it, but I
don't think this was the jalopy I remember because (a) it's not a jalopy;
(b) it's not grey and beat-up as I remember it; (c) the license plate does
not look American; and (d) someone is sitting in a passenger seat but the
jalopy I remember didn't have one.
Pete coins (click to see labels)
Every time he came he gave me coins from the lands he visited
(including pre-Israel Palestine, the dark coin below center), and also
little tutorials about the latest language he learned, which sparked my
lifelong interest in languages and linguistics, which I almost majored in,
thanks to him. Although I didn't quite major in it, I did spend a year with
a truly inspiring linguistics
professor, Erica
García. I talked about her so much with Mommy's and my
friend, Ricardo
Otheguy, that he was inspired to study under her and became a well-known
linguist himself.
Pete and my mom were very fond of each other, sometimes I think they both
secretly thought that she married the wrong brother. I remember on one
visit he put a lot of time into trying to teach her to drive. Unlike my
dad, he was patient, gentle, and encouraging with her, but even so
it didn't work out, she was terrified of driving. I don't know why because
she tackled all sorts of other challenges with no fuss — Navy Basic
Training, riding horses,
learning to cook, learning to make our clothes from scratch, etc.
Diplomat pose 1952
After five years of traveling the world on a shoestring, Pete applied for a
post at the State Department so he could get paid for doing the same thing,
was hired there in 1952, and bought himself a new wardrobe he thought to be
commensurate with his new status. This was an occasion that called for a
photo session at Gus's house; the image at left is just one of many photos
taken that day (see gallery), shortly
before he was to travel to Baghdad and assume his new rôle as Press Attaché
at the US Embassy. Danny says:
My dad was a foreign service officer, but on information/press and not
policy — to the best of my knowledge. Somewhere in the recesses of my
mind I think past attendance at one or two "communist" meetings or talks, in
Oxford, OH I think, together with the frantic anti-communist witch hunts in
the 50s eventually led to him leaving or being drummed out of the service
[in 1953]. This would be ironic, of course, because he was a chronic critic
of the commies.
This jibes with what Pete once told me himself about having been involved in
antiwar activities during the runup to the US entry in WWII. I'm not sure
how his later aversion to communism came about (after all, without the USSR
the Allies would have lost the war in Europe), but it is the main theme in
his 1980s Texas books. Danny found the source of "communist"
allegation was Pete himself, something he wrote in a personal history
statement in a government job application:
In the fall of 1938, while editor of my high school paper, I attended a CP
meeting in Cincinnati to hear Earl Browder speak and write a report on it.
The report, in editorial form, was not favorable.
Danny says:
I think the years between the war and the mid-fifties were years of what
would be called these days 'finding himself' — I don't think he
ever did, as he was always searching for some interesting adventure,
learning something new (piano and flying in his sixties, for example) or
attempting some great endeavor. Even in his last few months, when he was in
pain with bone metastases and bed-ridden, he was hatching grand schemes or
working on new book outlines. He was itinerant during the years between the
war and the early- to mid-1950s, looking for adventure, chasing dreams,
looking for employment... probably quite hard years, as I have found (in
much less desperate circumstances) when I aimed for something different
outside the mainstream. He did a very wide range of jobs, in different towns
all over the country and Europe (taught English in Madrid, movie extra in
Sweden, and lots more), never for long. I think he was meant to live in
another era, not a world of corporations and pensions.
Amen!
Finally after six years of military service and about eight more years of
knocking around, he resumed his formal education in the mid-1950s, enrolling
at Georgetown University in Washington DC and living with his mother.
It turns out the "living with Hopis" story (and they weren't actually Hopis)
is rooted in a research project for his degree in Linguistics in 1956, when:
Georgetown undergraduate student Daniel Da Cruz traveled to Oklahoma in the
company of his linguistics
professor, Paul
Garvin. While Garvin worked on Wichita, Da Cruz woked with a Caddo
woman named Sadie Bedoka Weller. In 1957 he finished a senior essay on the
phonemes of Caddo, but he did not pursue linguistics further ... Other
Caddo speakers have contributed to our knowledge of the language in a
variety of ways, but Mrs. Weller stands out as the most important of all
Caddo consultants. She was born in 1901 and died in 1970.
—Michael D. Picone and Catherine Evans,
New Perspectives on Language Variety in the South: Historical and
Comtemporary Approaches, University of Alabama Press (2015), ch.3.
The Caddo Nation is a
confederation of tribes from Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas
(more
info here). The Caddo people were removed to Indian Territory in 1859.
They are also known as Kadohidacho, Hasinai, Hatsinai. Danny has a November
2017 email from emeritus linguistics Professor Wallace Chafe at UCSB that
says:
I never met your father. When I first met Sadie Bedoka Weller in 1959 your
father had already been there, and Sadie mentioned him often and fondly. My
understanding was that your father had been an undergraduate at Georgetown
and that he came to Oklahoma with his professor, Paul Garvin, who was
himself working on the Wichita language. In 1957-58 your father
tape-recorded a number of sessions with Sadie and used the material as the
basis for a senior essay on the phonemes of Caddo. It was called "A Revised
Analysis of Segmental Phonemes in Caddo"[1]. He was
kind enough to give me all his Caddo tapes before he went to Lebanon. I
eventually digitized all his recordings and they are now living on my hard
drive. I continued working with Sadie through the 1960s, until she died in
1970. I became involved in a number of other projects after that, and only
recently got back to pulling together a description of Caddo that I hope to
publish in another year or two. What your father did was quite valuable, and
I will certainly give him full credit for it.
GU graduation 1957
The recordings, 30 of them in all (on which you can hear Uncle Pete's
voice), are now available in the University of California Language Archive:
Pete graduated Magna cum Laude from Georgetown University in Linguistics in
1957, 20 years after graduating from high school. His mother Gus had died
in 1955 and his father Daniel was 77 years old and 1600 miles away in
Colorado Springs, but my Mom, Dad, brother Dennis and I came, and I was the
official photographer at age 12 (see
more photos in the gallery).
References...
Daniel da Cruz, A Provisional Analysis of Segmental Phonemes in
Caddo, Submitted to the Institute of Languages and Linguistics of
Georgetown University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the
Degree of Bachelor of Science in Linguistics, May 1957. Sent to me by
Professor Anthony Grant, Edge Hill University: "As a linguist interested in
Caddo, with a close friend who lives in Oxford OH (and who also has
Portuguese ancestry) I was intrigued to read your family history. I've
known about Daniel's Caddo work for decades (and have a copy of his senior
essay), but I hadn't fully realised the same Daniel da Cruz was the
thriller-writer. ... And his teacher, Paul Garvin, is one of my linguistic
heroes. ... Here's the paper. Your uncle must have given it to Paul G and
Wallace Chafe (RIP, a nice man), Wally passed it onto Lynette Melnar, who
gave it to me. I'm delighted and honoured to return this treasure to the
family. Most of it is from Sadie, some from a lady named Eva Luther. Wally
Chafe incorporated this into his book on Caddo which appeared in autumn
2018[2], a few months before he died in February last year."
Wallace Chafe, The Caddo Language: A Grammar, Texts, and
Dictionary Based on Materials Collected by the Author in Oklahoma Between
1960 and 1970, Mundart Press, ISBN 978-0-9903344-1-5 (2018).
Leila Shaheen, born in Lebanon, 1927, died in Beirut 4 November 2023.
Daughter of father Nikula Chahine (1897-1984) and mother Hanneh Khoury
(1906-1985). "Chahine" is the French spelling. Other parts of the family
use "Shahine". All three are transliterations of the Arabic
شاهين.
Men who Made America (1962)
By Fall 1957 Uncle Pete had wound up in Lebanon, established himself as an
English professor at the American University of Beirut (AUB), met and
married Leila, and raised a family. He published a book Men Who
Made America, an ESL reader for use in his classes
at AUB. He also juggled other gigs there to supplement his income; he was
the Lebanon rep for various US publishers, he was editor of Middle East
Journal, he was well-known lecturer, he worked for Aramco as a writer...
There are dozens of articles by him; 26 of them are listed
below, or you can
search Google for
aramco
"daniel da cruz" see what else there might be. He wrote me in 1964 that
"I've been working on articles for an oil company publication called Aramco
World. The prestige is nil but the pay is about half as good as the top
magazines — and altogether I wrote fifteen articles for them on Middle
Eastern subjects ranging from Arabic calligraphy to the history of the
Trans-Arabian Pipeline and underwater archaeology"). He was also the Middle
East correspondent for various newspapers and magazines including
Business Week and Air Transport World,
and published articles in
Readers Digest, National Review, and numerous other well-known
outlets. And as a stringer for an international news agency he covered the
Six Day War as well as the insurrections in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan
in the 1958-1970 timeframe (see 1971 World Wide
Lecture Bureau flyer). Once when he was researching advances in
telecommunications (for a New York Times article, as I recall) he
stumbled upon some articles I had published in Data Communications
magazine and called me up from wherever he was at the time.
Leila mid-1960s
Leila was a prominent business executive; I met her several times, once when
I was in high school in Germany and once in the Army, also in Germany; she
had the beauty of Sophia Loren and spoke (it seemed to me) an infinite
number of languages — Arabic, English, German, Italian, Spanish,
French, ... Pete was smart but I thought Leila was smarter. They were
truly a striking couple. Btw, Leila is pregnant with Lina in the 1960 photo
at upper left; she made a note of it on the back. Danny says:
She was an accomplished woman in her own right. In business, she was
editor-in-chief
and head of a publishing company that for many years of put out
Arabic translations
of American DC comics — Little Lulu, Superman, Spiderman,
Batman... — these were among the few interesting/fun texts kids could
read and enjoy in the Middle East back in the 60s and 70s, when most other
publications were dry or religious. (An ex-employee of hers put together a
paean to the Arabic version of Little Lulu, which I helped him convert to a
website — not much there
but here's the
link). She, her mother and her sisters were always very active in
serving the YWCA and the American University of Beirut hospital, and mom
volunteered there a day a week up until her mini-stroke earlier this year
(she's much better now). She was the member of the World YWCA Executive
Committee and also wrote a small history of the YWCA in Lebanon, and about
her experiences as the long-time work on the committee. Her sister still
runs the institution in Lebanon, helping poor women from all denominations
make a living for themselves and avoid predation.
In 1947 Leila witnessed the partition of Palestine. From her journal:
Palestine, Nov 30, 1947 - Saturday. Went out sight-seeing for the last time
in the old city. Had a lovely time - All over the walls & going in thru
all the gates. That night the partition of Palestine was decided by the
U.N.O. and everything was spoiled.
Dec 24th - Left Palestine for the Lebanon. The trip was very pleasant until
we had to go back from the British Nakoura to Haifa to renew the cholera
injection certificates. Shooting in the Hadar area in Haifa. Otherwise all
was safe except for the tension.
Danny explains (2018-01-14):
This entry relates to her brief time teaching in Palestine. After graduating
from the American University of Beirut in spring 1947, my mother went to
Palestine for the summer to kick back a bit and visit the family. She spent
time visiting the country and the relatives, and by the end of summer she
had an offer to teach at the Friends School in Ramallah (a Quaker school set
up in the 19th century and still going strong). Both our grandparents
(Palestinian grandmother and Lebanese grandfather) taught there, I suppose
just after the First World War. In fact, they met there and the hitch was
facilitated by the headmistress. Anyway, the head of the school still had
very good memories of my grandmother and were in touch, so she offered my
mother a job teaching high school, which my mom took.
By the time of partition a couple of months later, strife from both sides
had begun and things were unsettled enough that the school closed. As she
was planning to go to Beirut at Xmas to spend it with her family, she headed
back — hence the [second] entry.
Naqoura used to be the main crossing between Lebanon and Palestine on the
coast. I understand she was turned back from there for not having cholera
shots and had to get them in Haifa. Mom said this morning that there was
shelling between both sides in and around Haifa when she was there.
As of August 2020 at age 93, Aunt Leila still lived in Beirut in the same
apartment where she and Uncle Pete raised Lina and Danny. She survived
the August
4th Beirut explosion with some flying-glass wounds to her arm and leg
and the apartment has broken windows but is still habitable.
Finally Lina reports that Leila "died in her sleep in her bed at home"
Saturday, November 4, 2023, "as was her wish. Mariam, her companion who has
been living with us for over 40 years was with her and Danny and I flew in
last night. Mom had not been doing well for a while and the last few months
had been rough on her. Danny and I were here last month and spent quite a
bit of time with her. She has been ready to go for a long while and her
quality of life was greatly diminished. We are both relieved that she is
finally at peace and no longer suffering. Danny’s son Amin was here too,
having decided to come here to study Arabic and do an internship but he and
Danny both left a few weeks ago when it was evident that things might heat
up in Lebanon. So far, it looks like no one has an appetite for another war
and we hope that that remains the case."
Pete and Leila had two children, Lina born in 1960 (while we were in
Frankfurt) and Danny born in 1962 — my first cousins (the only ones I
have ever met; I also have dozens on my mother's side); both are trilingual
Arabic/English/French (and Spanish in Lina's case, "barroom level for me",
says Danny). They grew up in Beirut with the constant bombing, shelling,
shooting, and rock throwing of the 1960s and 70s that I used to see on the
news every night, I was particularly worried every time in the TV news I saw
an artillery shell slam into one of the high-rise apartment buildings like
the one they lived in. Danny notes that Leila "was wounded in 1976 in our
kitchen during a mortar bombardment. She was hit in the face, and smaller
shrapnel in the neck, arm and torso (Dad called them his & hers
wounds). A fantastic plastic surgeon and close friend and neighbour was the
guy who took them out, and you can't tell looking at her that this all
happened (I still have the mortar fins and the shrapnel that hit her)".
Family in exile 1978
Civil war in Beirut 1970s
Shortly after this the family left Beirut for 9 months of exile in the USA
(Leila spent part of that time in Paris), as Pete put in a letter to me,
"our year of the refugee, actually nine months, after 19 months of nonstop
shooting got to the kids, especially after Leila got hit by six shrapnel in
our kitchen." In a letter to my brother Dennis Pete writes (of Lina and
Danny):
...they have both gained experience in hospital work under stress during the
more active days of the civil war, when the bombs were falling around us,
and they acted as nurses for the ghastly casualties who streamed in,
sometimes up to 175 a day, so that the regular medical staff — what was
left of them — couldn't cope with the load without volunteers like Lina and
Danny.
We were considering, before we were offered a house and car rent free by a
childhood friend of mine in Oxford, to go to California, very probably,
coincidence, in Long Beach. My wife Leila has a first cousin with children
the ages of ours, and it would have been good for them to have as
companions. In retrospect, I rather wish we had gone, as it would
have given them the opportunity of meeting your mother and you, the fresh
air of California, and the sea which we missed.
In a 1979 letter to my dad, commenting on the gas lines in the US,
Pete says:
I filled in Los Angeles after waiting for half an hour, and could happily
predict the future from what grousing I saw. I find the Americans
hopelessly spoiled, and wish them the worst ... They were not concerned for
the many many years the Arabs were forced to accept one cent per barrel
royalties for their oil, so they should shut up now. After all, nobody
dictates to the U.S. the price they put on the wheat they sell the Russians.
Anyway, let 'em cry — I love it ... Anyway, you still have it soft.
In the war, which still goes on, less noisily to be sure, we have a lot
tougher time of it than the Americans. We get water every other day --
sometimes, and electric cuts are frequent and for about eight hours at a
time. I can see the Americans sticking that little inconvenience
without revolution.
Pete and Peter 1978
Uncle Pete visited us at our West 118th Street apartment in Manhattan in
1978, shortly after my son Peter was born. Pete was a runner — the one
who got me interested in it. On this visit he told me about how he ran
through the war zones of Beirut every day. Within a few days I had started
running too and didn't stop until nearly 40 years (and one marathon) later
when my kneecap came loose.
I met Danny for the first (and so far, only) time in 1997; he was in NY for
some business. He's a lot like his dad: polyglot, world traveler and
adventurer, enthusiastic and ready for anything. He gave me some old family
albums he found in his dad's apartment, which are the source of much of the
information in here, and many of the photos. He has lived and/or traveled
everywhere and knows the Portuguese side of the family.
Wedding picture 2002
Rula, Rakan, Danny, Amin 2017
Danny 2014
Danny looks a lot like his Dad and he's a lot of fun. He and Rula
Al-Chorbachi (who is Iraqi) were married in 2002 and have two sons, Rakan
(2003) and Amin a.k.a. Nino (2005). When I met him he had a goatee
exactly like Pete, same voice and mannerisms too, it was like he really was
Uncle Pete.
Danny USNA 1980
Danny as USNA cadet and Pete 1980
Danny is a USNA graduate, he was in the US Navy for six years after the four
years at the Academy starting around 1984 as an officer; then he was an
international business consultant in London and later co-founded a
sustainable energy project development company, Sindicatum. In 2009 he
moved to Bahrain to start a joint venture, SCCMENA — Sindicatum
Sustainable Resources Middle East and North Africa (in Bahrain):
http://www.sindicatum.com,
but when the business couldn't compete with heavily subsidized oil prices in
the Mideast countries, he went to work for the bank that financed his previous
business. As of 2017 he lives in Bahrain; has also lived in London,
and (of course) Beirut and spends summers with his wife Rula's
family in Cambridge MA. Rula is an architect, cohead
of non-profit artists'
collective. The kids are music (trumpet, piano, guitar, drums) and
sports (soccer, basketball, capoeira) fanatics. Of his current (Nov 2017)
situation, and of Lebanon, Danny says:
Work considerations aside, we are nearing the point where we want our kids
to experience life in Europe or America. It's been hard to decide what a
natural home for us would be at this stage, apart from London, so we're
living with indecision while we examine options. It crosses my mind that
Portugal is a place I'd like to spend time in, but since I still need to
work it might be easier to do so in a primarily English-speaking
country. Maybe later on in life we might make Portugal a base. Regrettably,
and much as I love the place, Lebanon is not easy to think about for the
long term because of the chronic political uncertainty and the regional
forces that push and pull on the country.
I was in Beirut a few days ago to visit my mother and everyone is expecting
another war between Israel and Hezbollah (they always are, mind you), which
would mean another huge setback to the country if it happens. It's
already struggling to cope with 1.5-2 million Syrian refugees, a stagnant
economy, a destroyed middle-class, and a kleptocratic and feudal government
made up of every sect and party. Those in power take every opportunity to
stir their people against other groups, yet the politicians themselves are
friendly towards each other and make money together. Sad, as our President
Trump would say :-) (Don't get me started on him…).
Danny is one of the major contributors to this history and to the
family tree.
Lina moved to Berkeley, California, in July 2008, after having lived in
Lebanon, Bahrain, Japan, Dubai, Saudi Arabia, and who knows where else. She
is married to Jean-Luc Lamirande, who retired at 51 from Unilever, with two
daughters. In 2010 they came to see Amy and me at my West 112th Street
apartment and we spent an evening looking at old photo albums and talking a
mile a minute, because we had whole lifetimes to talk about. I took them
to Samad's deli around the
corner so they could "talk Lebanese" for a while, and then we went for a big
banquet at Symposium (Greek restaurant), around the next corner. Their
daughters Adriana (born 1993) and Alexandra (1995) are very cool, super
smart, funny, and (like their mother, uncle, and grandmother) speak English,
French, and Arabic fluently (the Arabic I saw when we were at Samad's).
Here's an exchange I had with Lina about her Dad:
> I think Dad was a real right-wing Republican now that I
> look back at his politics and his point of view on things. Maybe
> right-wingers then were not as bad as they are now, at least I
> wouldn't want to put him in the Fox News/Paul Ryan camp, maybe Tea
> Party, though.
>
It's true he had a lot of right-wing positions, but I'd put him in the class
of World War II veterans who came away from the experience with the sincere
belief that the USA truly was the good guy, and so went along with a lot of
the later stuff (e.g. Vietnam) because of that faith. In that he was
probably just like Jimmy Stewart or Clark Gable. In most things I looked up
to him; he valued diversity and respected other cultures, he was not a
racist (unlike his brother), he didn't reject science or history like
today's right wing, and he had a sense of humor. And curiosity! And unlike
any of today's rabid war hawks he had actually served in the military and
seen combat. And plus, he had a realistic view of the Muslim world, not the
grotesque caricature that predominates today. He had some pretty strong
views on Israel's role in the disasters of the world over the last 60 years,
based on first-hand experience. My son Peter, by the way, is a big fan of
your Dad, they'd get along famously. Not only about Israel but he also
bought and read most of your dad's books.
Btw, I'm not sure if he was (or always was) a Republican. When I told him
about my feelings on the Vietnam war, he said he used to be like me, he was
a protester against getting involved in a European war for the benefit of
war profiteers, but eventually came to be a big supporter of the war
(obviously) and I presume also of FDR.
So Adriana, Alexandra, Rakan, and Amin are your second cousins.
After Lebanon
Uncle Pete left Lebanon in the 1980s after his kids were grown up because it
had become too dangerous for Americans to be there; the last straw was when
he was kidnapped and friends of the family, particularly their surgeon
friend Dr. Samir Shehadi, who wielded influence over the PLO at the
time by virtue of all the lives he saved as a trauma surgeon, secured his
safe release. Although the Shaheens were politically unconnected they had
the affection and respect of many Beirut families through their educational
and non-profit work. Leila remained behind; all her family was there. Her
father was a long-time professor of physics and astronomy at the American
University of Beirut.
Boot (1987)
In later years Pete was an adjunct professor of anthropology at the Miami
University of Ohio and the University of Wisconsin, and wrote right-wing
science-fiction and adventure novels, nonfiction books, and magazine and
newspaper articles. His best-known nonfiction book was "Boot" about Marine
Corps boot camp, which he re-did in 1985 at age 64, 44 years after doing it
the first time in 1941.
But in reality, Pete's politics didn't fit any particular mold. As noted,
like many WWII veterans, he went through the rest of his life with the firm
belief that the USA was the good guy, and therefore its adversaries —
primarily the USSR — were the bad guys. He disagreed with my attempt
to leave the Army in 1965 when the Vietnam "situation" turned into a
full-scale war and at the same time the USA invaded the Dominican Republic.
He wrote me a long letter on the topic,
but (unlike those I received from my father) they were always affectionate
and full of humor, noting that "my father told me that, as I was prepared to
take the consequences of my acts, I was jolly well free to do anything I
cared to do, with the proviso I didn't come crying later on when the
consequences proved unbearable. I have so far been fortunate not to have to
moan to him, although on more than one occasion my mother bailed me out when
things got too sticky."
Nevertheless, he remained strongly anticommunist all his life, as his novels
make abundantly clear. It is one trait he shared with my father, who was
appalled when I
was invited to
the USSR to lecture on my work, but Danny says "I remember my father
telling me about your trip, with some pride". Later on, both Pete
and my dad admitted that I had a point about the Vietnam war. In any case
Pete was not totally Rah-Rah-America as you can see from this
November 11, 1981, Huntington WV Herald-Dispatch article about a
series of lectures he was giving at Marshall University:
Life in Lebanon means bombs blasting outside your kitchen window, bullets
puncturing the plaster and no police or army to protect you from gangs
roaming the streets.
...
He watched his children transported to school in convoys to avoid
kidnapping. His family automatically moved around the house to
escape the shaking of explosions, and he could point out the
bullet holes in his walls.
In an interview yesterday, the Middle East expert said foreign intervention
has caused the chaos in Lebanon by supplying arms and magnifying minor
outrages and incidents into excuses for war. He said major powers were
using Lebanon as a testing ground for their weapons and armies with little
concern for the inhabitants. They have brought their dirty laundry to air
in Lebanon," he said. "Living over there you see daily the failure of
American policy abroad. The Arabs are getting stronger, so the U.S. feels
it must pour more support into Israel," he said. "They're just stockpiling
gunpowder. The higher the pile gets, the more likely it is to go off."
He concluded that the United States should withdraw from all diplomatic,
political and military intervention and concentrate on commericial relations
with countries that offer an equal exchange of goods. With the United
States exerting its influence on the Arab nations, da Cruz said Israel
could be persuaded to reach a "reasonable" agreement. Such an agreement
might include provisions for an independent Palestine.
covered the six Day War as well as insurrections in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and
Jordan, in all of which the American involvement was deep and disastrous
— and avoidable. To avert a Mideastern version of the Vietnam
folly, he favors strictly reciprocal American commercial and cultural
ties with both Arabs and Israelis — but the least political and
military involvement possible.
He has expressed this viewpoint far and wide; even the National
Review (July 15, 1969). I'd say Pete would be 100% in alignment with
most of today's left on the Middle East, Israel, and Palestine, and with
great deal more knowledge to back it up. He also would have noticed that
the collapse of the USSR did not exactly turn the world into a peacable
kingdom; quite the opposite: without the protection of the USSR, countries
like Syria and Iraq were defenseless in the face of US interference and
aggression.
Pete and Leila in a Fado house 1989
Both Uncle Pete and Danny (and for that matter, my dad) have been to
Portugal to visit the family there, but until May 2003 I was never able
to find out details. Danny told me of cousins in Portugal named Luzia
Machado and her brothers, Lino and Zeca Santos, and their second cousin
Raimundo Narciso [see Danny's travel
diary]. Finally in 2017 I found a way to contact Raimundo, and now
all the doors are open.
At Pete's apartment 1988
Pete and me 1988
I last saw Uncle Pete at his apartment in Alexandria VA in 1988. He lived
alone in a high-rise with a balcony looking out over the great void that is
modern suburbia. He was as charming and lively as ever but he had a
catheter with a urine bag, and had to keep taking his blood pressure every
five minutes. As I recall, he had been treated for prostate cancer in
Beirut and had been exposed to an overdose of radiation and had been
suffering from it ever since. Anyway, he was super-enthusiastic because he
had bought a big electronic piano and was learning to play it; I didn't
realize it at the time, but he was taking up where had left off 10 years
earlier, when he and Lina were taking piano lessons together in Beirut that
were cut short by the civil war. As you can see in the second picture at
right, his walls were festooned with photos of his family; it must have been
bitter, living in exile. We stayed in touch by phone after that; he wanted
to collaborate on a novel about computer hacking but then he stopped
calling. He lived well, but he told me he never earned more the $20,000 a
year in his whole life. I believe it was a matter of pride.
Uncle Pete lives on in Google, his books, and his
progeny and those whose lives he touched. Many of his books and other works
contain capsule biographies. Pete himself wrote the following one for the
program of an Arab/American seminar:
Professor Daniel da Cruz has lived and worked in the Middle East for more
than 30 years, as a diplomat, businessman, educator, journalist, lecturer
and author. He spent six World War II years as a U.S. Marine volunteer in
the three war theaters, ashore, afloat and aloft.
A magna cum laude graduate of Georgetown University's School of Foreign
Service, he has been variously a census enumerator, magazine editor,
editorial consultant for the Arabian-American Oil Company, judo master
— he holds a Second Degree Black Belt of the Kodokan Judo Institute in
Tokyo, taxi driver, farmer, public relations officer for Texaco, salesman,
chief Middle East correspondent for a leading American news agency,
publishers' representative, vice-president of a major New York advertising
agency, slaughterhouse skinner, captain of a Texas security organization,
American Embassy press attache in Baghdad, copper miner, member of the
English faculty at the American University of Beirut, and Adjunct Professor
of Anthropology at Miami University.
Professor da Cruz has written hundreds of articles on Middle Eastern
politics, economy, military affairs and culture for the Washington Post and
other major U.S. dailies, the Reader's Digest, the National Review, Time,
and Newsweek.
He is the author of 17 published books, a number of them highly reviewed,
among them the winner of a Special "Edgar" in the
best-mystery-novel-of-the-year category. His latest non-fiction work [Boot]
was a Main Selection of the Military Book Club.
There's a great deal I don't know about Uncle Pete's life but even from
these scraps and fragments it's clear that he lived life to the fullest and
had a range of experience few could equal. His nephew Rif (Rifa'at Haffar,
son of Leila's sister Najwa) said, "He had a huge influence on me, this
irreverent iconoclast who startled a family steeped in Ottoman and Imperial
British propriety. And he kept on startling us for as long as he lived. I
miss him and think of him often."
There's one more thing I'd like to mention about Uncle Pete: he was intensely
loyal to all family members whatever their quirks or faults, notably
including his brother (my father), who was bigoted, cruel, and brutal; his
father, who was aloof and unfeeling; and even me when my politics took a
turn directly opposite his. (He did, however, draw the line at stepmother
Louise; Danny says he had "nothing good to say about her. For him, she was
a quintessential horrible step-mother, and he complained about her driving
him and Fran hard with housework and generally making their life
unpleasant. One anecdote I remember is my dad feeling shame and anger when
Louise wouldn't let him bring a Jewish friend of his into the house.")
Of my Dad, Pete wrote in 1965:
He's never had the talent for putting things in the most gentle phrasing;
with him it's better to concentrate on meaning than tone. Though certainly
you doubt it, all he has to say is for your own good and in your own
interest. You should know by now that every father seems a clod to his
son — until he becomes a father in turn and realizes he's saying the
same things he heard a generation before. Remember, he has his troubles too.
In my case, when I applied (unsuccessfully as it turned out) for early
discharge from the Army as a conscienscious objector, Pete strongly
disapproved, writing (toward the end of a
7-page letter):
You took your first steps from your mother to me. And in the East, my
adopted home, the conception of family is somewhat different from that in
the West, where it seems to be a collection of people who occasionally sup
together and retire at the same time after the TV is turned off. As far as
I'm concerned you are my nephew and you can call on me for anything I can
provide whenever it is possible, whether you get out as c.o. or not.
In fact, I saw him a few months after that; we spent a week together and the
c.o. topic didn't even come up. I don't have a copy of my reply to his
letter but it probably said something along the lines of "World War II
was a fight to save the world from German Fascism and Japanese imperialism,
but Vietnam was a poor country that posed no threat to us or anyone else,
and only wanted to be left alone; there was no justification for the United
States killing Vietnamese people," a sentiment he came
to agree with in later years.
Texas on the Rocks, Del Rey / Ballantine (1986)
(inscribed "For Frank, herein you will learn more than you want to
know about the aqueous Armageddon. Love, Uncle Pete, May 2, 1988")
My dad's job takes us to postwar West Germany for two and a half years.
We lived in US Army housing and I went to the Army high school for 9th,
10th, and 11th grades.
Also see (onsite)...
Frankfurt aerial views
and WWII bomb damage
(Click image strip
to see gallery)
Family history: Army 1963-66 (me in Germany again)
*
Frankfurt High School published its own yearbook, Focus, for the
first time in 1960-61. Prior to that, different American schools in Europe
shared the same yearbook, with a chapter for each school. The 1959-60 and
1958-59 yearbooks, both called Erinnerungen, came in two parts;
Frankfurt High school was the first chapter in Part B. Other schools in
Part B were Heidelberg, Kaiserslautern, Mannheim, Munich, Nürnberg, and
Stuttgart. The Part A yearbooks covered Augsburg, Baumholder, Berlin,
Bremerhaven, Karlsruhe, Orléans, Paris, Poitiers, Verdun, and Würzburg. The
two Erinnerungen PDFs listed above come from the Berlin Brats Yearbook
Archive, which goes from 1947 to 1994. Ironically Erinnerungen
was the title Albert Speer chose for his book whose English title is Inside
the Third Reich.
Also see (offsite)...
Frankfurt American High
School (fhs63-66.org) Alumni Association, 1963-1966 [disappeared]
The Abrams
Building and the American Experience in Frankfurt, a 30-minute video
production by the US Army V Corps with Hessischer Rundfunk on the occasion
of the withdrawal of US forces from the area in 1995. It focuses on the
Farben building (which the Army called the Abrams building) from its first
conception in the 1920s, through its construction, its role in the War, the
bombing of Frankfurt, the allied entry into Frankfurt, Germans living in the
rubble, soup lines, the Sperrgebiet (when the whole area was enclosed in
barbed wire 1945-1948), the construction of American housing and
facilities, the Berlin Airlift, AFN Frankfurt, formation of the
Bundesrepublik in 1949, and the Cold War. The first 20 minutes are mainly
archival footage from 1930s-50s, with a little borrowing from the 1948
film, Berlin Express. The video ends
with interviews with Germans and Americans upon its closing in 1995,
including
Leslie Spear, who was born in Frankfurt in 1948, graduated from
Frankfurt High School in 1967, and liked it so much there that she stayed on
and worked in the Farben building until it closed in 1995; she died in
Frankfurt five years later.
Im Herzen
Frankfurts - Die neue Altstadt, HR Fernhsehen / Hessischer Rundfunk
(accessed 20 July 2021). A 44-minute German-language video on the
2012-2018 reconstruction of a portion of the Frankfurt Altstadt, which
had been destroyed in the war. Also see this
Wikipedia page.
Book: Elkins, Walter, et
al. Amerikaner
in Heidelberg 1945-2013, Verlag Regionalkultur Heidelberg (2014), ISBN
978-3-89735-806-5 (auf Deutsch). Kind of like a coffee-table book
with lots of photos. If only there were a book like this for Frankfurt!
Film:
Berlin
Express, Jacques Tourneur, 1948: extensive footage
of the Hauptbahnhof, the IG Farben building, and the ruins of Frankfurt.
I have a gallery of screenshots here.
"You should write a book about your theory that the only golden age that
this country ever experienced was in the military outposts overseas. A
totally new idea." —Heidi Laird, email, 26 October 2023
Heidi
Laird is a German expatriate who grew up in Frankfurt during the
Nazizeit and the early postwar. She fled to the USA as soon as she was old
enough and has been here ever since. Now a retired clinical psychologist
and author of the books The
Frankfurt Kitchen and Letters
from Jenny, she looks on with horror as 1930s German history
repeats itself in the USA 90 years later.
Germany occupation zones
US forces in 1959
At the beginning of 1959 (for me, the middle of 9th grade at
Williamsburg Junior High School in
Arlington, VA) my dad was sent to Germany
and the government paid for the whole family to go. Germany was still
carved up into US, Soviet, British, and French occupation zones, although
technically the occupation ended in 1949. By the mid-1950s, the French zone
(mainly the Rheinland) existed only on paper; it was full of American
military bases, such as at Kaiserslautern where I would be stationed as a GI
just four years later, and many others including Baumholder, Zweibrücken,
Pirmasens, and Bad Kreuznach. Berlin was in the middle of the Soviet zone
which became a distinct country, the German Democratic Republic (DDR) or
"East Germany"; Berlin itself was still divided into Soviet, American,
British, and French zones. The geopolitical events of this period lent an
intensity to our experiences that now, six decades later, still has
not faded:
10 November 1958
As we were packing up to leave Virginia for Germany, Soviet Premier
Khrushchev gave a speech demanding that the Western powers withdraw from
West Berlin because they had violated the Potsdam agreement by rearming
West Germany and bringing it into NATO.
25-26 September 1959
Camp David summit where President Eisenhower and Premier Khrushchev
de-escalated the Berlin situation.
1 May 1960
The U-2 Incident, in which an American spy plane was shot down over the
Soviet Union, and which reignited US-Soviet tensions and re-escalated the
Berlin situation.
17 April 1961
The Bay of Pigs Cuba invasion.
4 June 1961
Vienna summit between Premier Khrushchev and the new American
president, John F. Kennedy, in which Khrushchev renewed his insistence that
Western forces leave West Berlin.
July 1961
President Kennedy, unwilling to abandon West Berlin, prepares for war by
calling up reserves and doubling the US military draft.
Sunday 13 August 1961
Stacheldratsonntag — Heavily guarded barbed wire is strung
along the East-West Berlin boundary line, which would soon become the Berlin
Wall. This marked the end of the Berlin Crisis of 1958-61 and averted World
War III.
President Kennedy visits Berlin and says "Ich bin ein Berliner".
22 November 1963
President Kennedy assassinated.
During each of these incidents, US forces (our parents and, starting in
1963, myself) were on high alert, expecting either nuclear war or a massive
armored ground invasion of West Germany at any moment.
On February 9, 1959 (give or take a day or two), we drove from Arlington,
Virginia, to New York City, which I had never seen before, and stayed at the
Dixie Hotel on 42nd Street, just off Times Square, which in those days was
100% drugs and prostitutes and peepshows and pickpockets (Times
Square, not the hotel, but the hotel was pretty sleazy too). My mother was
scared to even leave the room so I didn't see much of the city; only 42nd
Street and the view from the hotel window (second photo). We were on a very
high floor and couldn't see much through the filthy windows but I remember
we had a view of the light-blue McGraw-Hill building (where I would go many
years later when I published some articles in their magazine, Data
Communications). I don't remember this part, but my brother told me
that dad took him to a movie at a sleazy Times Square theater and it was a
traumatic experience for him, creepy people grabbing at him, etc (I took
Peter — at his own insistence — to what might have been the same
theater 30 years later to see a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie, Blood
Sport (his idea, not mine), and it was still just as sleazy).
SS America
SS America tag
Pier 86, 42nd Street 1959
NYC from SS America 1959
Promenade & deck chairs
On the deck 1959
SS America interior
The next morning we drove straight to Pier 86 at the west end of
42nd Street, where the Intrepid is now. We boarded our ship, a
luxury liner in fact: the SS America (1939, christened by Eleanor Roosevelt,
served as a troop ship during WWII), occupying two first-class cabins, all
expenses paid by the CIA. Dad rented out our Arlington house while we were
gone and we took the car with us, a brand-new 1959 Studebaker Lark station
wagon, which they hoisted with a crane and lowered into the hold. I
remember as we left, we passed under the Verazzano Narrows Bridge, which was
only about half built and seemed a mile above us, the construction workers
looking like ants hanging from strings; 25 years later I would run across it
in the NYC Marathon.
The crossing was great fun, Dennis and I ran wild all over the whole ship.
Ping-pong was an interesting activity because the ship's rocking caused the
table to move out from under the ball. Swimming in the small indoor pool
was even more interesting… Just when you dived in, the water would
slosh over to the other side of the pool and you'd land on the bare bottom
and then, while you tried to recover your senses a huge tidal wave came down
on top of you. Dennis and I shared a cabin; he got seasick and I didn't. I
was always playing tricks on him to make him feel even more seasick like in
the Fred and Ginger movie Shall We Dance.
Bremerhaven 1959 - Was ist los???
Bremerhaven Feb 1959
After a week at sea we docked briefly in Cobh and in Southampton (so
technically I have been in Ireland and England even though we weren't
allowed to leave the ship), then finally debarked in Bremerhaven on February
16th. We waited for the car to be unloaded, then got in and started to
drive south. We had only gone a few blocks when the car stalled and
couldn't be started… And we were on train tracks! And a train was
coming!!! Seriously, we got out and pushed and saved the car and ourselves
just in time. Turned out the gas tank was full of water from condensation
in the hold. We got that fixed and then drove to Bremen where we had our
first German meal in a Gasthaus — sausages and black bread, and Fanta
to drink — then on to Frankfurt (via Hanover, Kassel, Fulda, and
Hanau), where we were going to live for three years.
Frankfurt Römerplatz 1945
Only
partially repaired in 1959
Germany was still a poor country, still marked by war and full of amputees;
the Wirtschaftwunder had not fully bloomed yet. Most people didn't have
cars, or if they did, they were the extremely cheap postwar "microcars" like
the Messerschmitt (basically a fighter
plane cockpit with a lawnmower motor over three little wheels).
Dennis & accordion
German accordion teacher
Huge numbers of Germans depended on the American occupiers
for their living: working as Putzfrauen (cleaning ladies), cooks,
nannies, or prostitutes; giving music lessons to American brats
(like Dennis's accordion teacher shown at right), working as B-girls in
bars, working on the base in the PX or Snack Bar, or trading on the black
market. Most Germans got around on bicycles or (in the country) horse-drawn
wagons. Some German amputees had wooden wheelchairs with a big lever on
each side; the rider pushed and pulled the levers to power the wheels. They
could go fast, I even saw them zooming down the Autobahn.
In general Germans were extremely friendly and polite. They greeted you
when you passed them in the street or when you entered a store and there was
always a lot of hand-shaking. But clearly they had mixed feelings about
Americans and about themselves too. Almost everyone over 30 years old had
been a Nazi (NSDAP, Hitler Youth, BDM...), or supported them, or went along
with them — with some notable exceptions[1,2]
— and everybody over 30 had been involved in the war in one way or
another. Few ever talked about it, unless to claim they had served on the
Russian front. Germans were infinitely more friendly and jovial than (say)
the French or Belgians or Swiss. They loved to drink, sing, and have big
festivals, they invited you to their homes. But walk down any street, and
you could imagine it festooned with Nazi flags not so very long
before.
Still, the penalty for Gemans for merely critizing Hitler and Nazism, let
alone taking any form of action, was death or concentration camp. Contrast
with Trump-era USA where some 40-50% of the population is openly racist,
antisemitic, misogynistic, xenophobic, etc, of their own free will. The
Nazi Party received only 37% of the vote in the election of 1932 (the one
that launched Hitler's Führer career), suggesting the 63% of German voters
were antifascist, whereas Trump received 46% in 2016.
References...
German Resistence to Nazism, Wikipedia (accessed 17 February 2023):
"[D]uring the height of Nazi Germany, unlike the more coordinated efforts in
other countries ... [t]he German resistance consisted of small, isolated
groups that were unable to mobilize widespread political opposition."
The City of Frankfurt am Main had been mostly
leveled by Allied bombing but was largely rebuilt by the time we
arrived. There were modern office buildings downtown but no skyscrapers.
In every town and city the church or cathedral (Dom) was supposed to
dominate the skyline, and in 1959 Frankfurt it still did and no matter where
you lived, you could always hear church bells. Beyond downtown, there had
been less destruction so buildings were older, although where I lived you
could still see walls that had been raked by machine-gun fire. "AMI GO
HOME" was written on walls all over the place. There was not actually any
perceptible anti-American sentiment in daily life; the graffiti was mainly
just from kids. If you went downtown at night (like to
the Jazz Keller), it was dark and
quiet and there were rabbits hopping around the streets.
27 Raimundstraße in Frankfurt 1959
Raimundstraße: our car with US Forces plates
Klaus-Dieter, Dennis, 1959
Michelle 1959
At first we lived "on the economy" in a German apartment
at 27 Raimundstraße, right over a loud bar, Rudi's, second
floor far left in the left-hand color photo, with Rudi's beneath it. No
kids my age lived there but there was a family with two kids Dennis's age,
Klaus-Dieter and Michelle Böhm, children of the building's super, Herr Böhm;
they became great friends; Dennis learned German very fast playing with
them. If you click the left-hand color image to enlarge it you can see
Dennis (red shirt) with them and a third person, don't know who, on the
balcony next to ours.
German coins in circulation 1950s-60s
Our first day in the German apartment, my dad went to work and my mom was
panicked, she didn't know what to do. She sent me out to buy food…
There was a Lebensmittel (a small food store, like a bodega) up the street.
I didn't yet know where the PX and commissary were. I went in and bought
black bread, unsalted butter (the only kind Germans use), sausages, mustard,
milk, eggs, salt and pepper, etc. I knew a little German already from
phrase books. I was struck by the fact that food wasn't packaged at all.
If you wanted (say) five eggs, you just picked them up one by one. You also
had to bring your own shopping bag or basket (I don't remember what I did
about that). I managed everything OK, I understood numbers and basic
phrases and the money — 1 Mark had 100 Pfennig and was equal to 25
cents, pretty easy to deal with. Sixty years later (as I write this),
"zero waste" stores like this are starting to pop up in the USA (about time!).
Walking to the Lebensmittel I was struck by how clean everything was. In
those days, at least, Germans were fanatics about cleaning everything. Every
morning early everybody would be outside sweeping the sidewalks and streets
with those old kinds of brooms like in fairy tales. They also washed
sidewalks and steps and cobblestones. Nobody left trash behind, not only
because they were neat but there wasn't much to discard.
A German forest
German forests were different too. In the USA forests have all kinds of
underbrush growing between the trees and there are fallen branches and
rotting tree trunks. In postwar Germany, the forest floor was perfectly
clean, a beautiful carpet of green grass. Germans scrounged everything else
for fuel, kindling, or food.
German farms in the Rheinland
In fact the whole way Germans use land is completely different. In the USA
everybody is an individual, on their own. So American farms are isolated
from each other: a house surrounded by its land, far from any other house.
In Germany they put all the houses together in a little town that might also
have a church and a Gasthaus and maybe a shop or two. Everybody lives
together. If a family has a milch-cow, it lives in a room of their house,
not in a separate barn. So if you look at the German countryside from the
air you see little clumps of buildings surrounded by vast amounts of
cultivated land with no buildings, as in the aerial view in Rheinland-Pfalz
near Kaiserslautern. This way the people are closer to each other and they
can share resources more easily, so not everybody had to have a car or a
pickup truck or a tractor. Some of these little towns are 500 or 1000 years
old and they have a distinctive farmyard smell.
When I lived in Germany there were hardly any suburbs, and never had been.
You could be in a town or a city, or you could be in an agricultural area
or a forest. The boundaries were sharp, you could literally step out of
the city into the country.
German bathtub
German toilet with shelf
German apartment buildings are different too. In the staircases at night,
the lights go on only if you push a button, and then they go off
automatically after one minute; you have to push the button on each landing
as you go up the steps. Doors have latches instead of knobs. Bathrooms
don't have stand-up showers or shower curtains; toilets have a "continental
shelf" instead of a bowl and the water tank is up on the wall with a pull
chain. Supposedly the reason for the shelf is to prevent splashing and to
allow "inspection".
1959 PX transformer box
Germany, like the rest of Europe, uses 220V 50-cycle current, so if we
brought anything electrical from home we needed a transformer for each
thing. Electric clocks were no good even with a transformer; they only
showed 50 minutes per hour due to the lower frequency. We didn't bring a TV
either because in those days AFN (Armed Forces Network) didn't broadcast TV
and all you could see on German TV was Fußball games. The Army European
Exchange System (EES) made transformers at their facility in Gießen and sold
them by the thousands at the PX so we could use our radios, record players,
and toasters.
Raimundstraße 1959 (panorama stitched from several photos)
Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof 1960
Our German apartment looked out over Raimundstraße, which was
paved with cobblestones and had trolley tracks, with the Number 17 trolly
(Straßenbahn) running on them, which consisted of one or two cars made of
wood (at least on the inside). Frankfurt did not have a subway until the
late 1960s. The 17 went to the Hauptbahnof, the majestic but war-blackened
Bismarck-era main railroad station, where you could transfer to any of the
other trolley lines, some of which went to neighboring cities like Höchst or
Offenbach or even up into Taunus mountains. The seats near the trolley
entrance were reserved for Schwerbeschädigte, badly damaged people —
war casualties, amputees, who were a large segment of the population.
Frankfurt Straßenbahn Nº17 at WAC Circle
Trolley tickets early 1960s
The trolleys had a driver and conductor. The conductor would walk up and
down the aisle selling and punching tickets — "Noch jemand bitte?"
— it was pretty much an honor system but fares were so cheap there was
no point in cheating. Some of the other trolley lines were starting to get
sleek modern metal trolleys where you had to stop at a ticket desk when you
entered, like on the Nº.11 to Höchst (this trolley line still exists
as of 2023).
When standing up in a crowded trolley, or even walking around in downtown
Frankfurt, I towered over all the Germans. I guess this is why I never
thought of myself as short until recently (I was 5'6" then, less now!). In
countries like Germany and Japan, it was only the postwar generation that
started to grow taller, supposedly due to the influence of the American
occupation on their diets.
Henninger beer bottle from 1960
Limonade bottle
from the 1960s
Frankfurt Trinkhalle 1960
(yearbook photo)
Raimundstraße Trinkhalle and Binding beer truck, 1959
Across the street from our apartment was a Trinkhalle, a kiosk similar to a
NYC newsstand except it sold beer and schnapps as well as snacks like
Gummi bears and soft drinks called Limonade (four syllables) in big glass
bottles: sparkling mineral water with fruit juice, normally citrus (somewhat
like Orangina), or German sodas such
as Fanta or Florida Boy.
There was also German Coca-Cola with a lemony taste. As for alcohol,
anybody could buy it, even little children. German beer was so much better
than what we can get here that I can't even describe it. It came in
half-liter bottles with ceramic tops (Bügelverschluß) like on the big
Grolsch bottles. My dad had a wooden case of Henninger Bier delivered to
our apartment in Frankfurt every week, much like New Yorkers used to get a
case of seltzer delivered every week in the old days. If he didn't drink the
whole case within a week, it would spoil. Seriously, it would turn into big
globs of slime. That was the difference, local beer was unpasteurized.
Once you boil it, it doesn't spoil but all the taste disappears. That's why
European export beer and all American beer is so tasteless.
Other features of Raimundstraße that I remember include a fenced-in yard
with a big sign in English that said "BEWARE SHARP DOG", a Kino (movie
theater) that played the Horst Buchholtz - Hayley Mills film
Tiger Bay[3]
every single day for the whole time I lived in Frankfurt (and
there were always long lines to get in), a Tastee-Freez shop, and D'Angelo's
Pizza, the essential local hangout for us FHS kids.
References...
Verkehrsplan der Stadt Frankfurt von 1956,
Verlag Richard Schwarz KG (1956), from
www.tramfan-ffm.de. Frankfurt map showing Straßenbahn (trolley) lines
as of 1956, which were very close if not identical to those of 1959-61,
before the subway and light-rail system was built starting in 1963 and
opening in 1968, replacing many of the trolley lines, with further expansion
later. On this map the trolley routes are shown as solid blue lines with
blue numbers such as 17; at an Endstation (terminus) the number is circled.
The map does not show the Platenstraße housing area or the American high
school, indicating the "plat" content of the map (buildings, etc) dates from
1954 or earlier.
Horst Bosetzky, Alfred Gottwald und einem Mann an der Kurbel,
Noch
jemand ohne Fahrschein? Straßenbahnerinnerungen, Berlin,
Jaron Verlag (1997), about German trolleys in the postwar (but in Berlin,
not Frankfurt).
HiCoG building architectural rendering 1951[1]
- click to see gallery
In May 1959 we moved to American housing in Platenstraße, the housing area
just across from our first apartment; I could even see it from my
Raimundstraße bedroom (left photo). Our new address was 2231
Platenstraße, apartment on 3rd floor all the way to the left.
Platenstraße was medium-rank housing; for NCOs (sergeants) and company-grade
officers (lieutenants, captains) and their civilian equivalents who had
families. There was a higher level housing area for field grade officers
(majors and colonels) called HiCoG[1] ("High
Commissioner of Germany"), a.k.a Carl-Schurz-Siedlung, a few blocks away and
there were also some Platenstraße clones (Hügel, Von Steuben) nearby to the
northeast (see map). And then,
near the high school there was a little neighborhood
of private houses for generals. For unmarried
officers there was the BOQ (Bachelor Officers' Quarters). Married enlisted
men ranking below some level of sergeant lived "on the economy"; i.e., in a
German apartment. Unmarried enlisted men lived in the barracks.
Picture window and balcony
Our Platenstraße apartment
Platenstraße buildings 1960
The Platenstraße apartment was palatial by NYC standards: two
or three bedrooms, one or two baths, big living room, nice kitchen with a
cutout onto the dining room so you could eat at the bar or at the table.
Fully furnished, picture windows on both sides with ample views of the other
buildings and a balcony, plenty of closets (which were virtually unknown in
Germany, where they use a piece of furniture called a Schrank the way we use
closets). The windows of all the buildings were lined up so perfectly that
if everybody had their curtains open you could see through them all at once.
The buildings were arranged face-to-face and back-to-back. Our apartment
was directly opposite the apartment of a friend of mine; we used to have
balcony-to-balcony snowball fights in the winter. I don't know what the
rent was, or even if there was any at all! (Apparently
not, see below).
The attic of each building was a huge empty room, 250 feet long, that could
be used for parties or playing; usually they had at least ping-pong tables.
And in the basement there was not only a common laundry room but also
private storage rooms for each apartment. Every building had its own
parking area, free of course. Almost all the American families had American
cars, but there were also a few small cars (mainly VWs) and one guy, a
sergeant and father of the pianist in our
band, had a 16-cylinder 1937
Cord* in perfect condition; it would be worth millions now. I saw it
every day, wish I had taken a picture of it. Obviously it was a horrendous
gas-guzzler, but since we Amis paid only 10 cents a gallon for gas, so what?
Germans paid ten or twenty times that, and had 10 or 20 times less money.
Another Platenstraße resident had
a Nash Healy
("America's first postwar sports car"), a combination Nash Rambler and
Austin-Healey.
A notable feature of American military housing — both family housing
like Platenstraße and HiCog in Frankfurt and also barracks for unmarried
soldiers — was that (at least after about
1952) it was completely and totally integrated. In contrast with
most civilian neighborhoods in the USA,
where
residential segregation tends to predominate even where schools were
integrated because friends are most likely to live near each other.
*
Greg Cagle points out that there were no 16-cylinder Cords in regular
production, but Dickie's dad once opened the hood and showed me the engine;
he liked to joke about how just starting the thing used a whole tank of gas.
This was sixty years ago as I write this, so who really knows.
History:
Restricted areas and requisitioned German housing 1945-55
Soon after the US Army took charge of its sector of Germany in 1945, it
encountered a lot of discipline and morale problems among the troops, not to
mention a low reenlistment rate (and a high VD
rate)[12]. To address the situation, the
authorities decided to allow married soldiers to have their families join them
in Germany. The first dependents arrived in April 1946 via troopship with
no place to put them, so they were housed in requisitioned German homes. In
Frankfurt, the American occupation requisitioned about 3700 apartments in
Ernst May's
historic and un-bombed 1920s Weimar-vintage
Bauhaus-style "socialist"
Römerstadt complex on the north bank of the Nidda river about 4km NNW of
the Farben building, between Heddernheim and Praunheim: at first to
temporarily house freed Polish slave laborers, then American paratroopers,
and then until the mid-1950s it was home to American military families
complete with snack bar, PX, fire house, chapel, movie theater, and parade
ground: a fenced-in and guarded area for about the first five
years[14,15,16]. Displaced tenants were paid
monthly rent for their apartments, which came out of German war reparation
funds[20,p.481]. Americans started starting
moving out of the Römerstadt and other requisitioned German apartments in Fall
1950 with the opening of the 420-unit HiCoG housing
area[1], but it would be five more years before
enough American housing was available to free (almost) all the requisitioned
units.
History: The big Sperrgebiet
IG Farben building with barbed wire fence
Guarded compound entrance
Das Große Sperrgebiet
A much larger fenced-off zone, das Große Sperrgebiet (the Big Restricted
Area)[18], was created in April 1945 for American
use and lasted until June 1948: 2.4 square kilometers enclosed
in barbed wire and protected by armed guards. Germans were not allowed to
enter except with an Army-issued permit. It went from a block south of the
IG Farben building, north to Am Dornbusch, west to incorporate Grüneburg
Park and the Palmengarten, and east to Oeder Weg. The western part included
the IG Farben complex; the eastern part included a lot of apartment
buildings, from which the German tenants were evicted, allowed to take only
their clothing, sheets, blankets, pillows, and cookware, and were not
allowed back in until 21 June 1948, when the barbed wire was taken down.
But they weren't able to move back into their apartments until Platenstraße
and the other American housing areas were ready about 1955.
The first American elementary school opened
in the Sperrgebiet in Fall 1946.
History: Newly-built American housing 1955-1995
Between 1950 and 1955 as US occupation forces expanded due to heightened
Cold War tensions, the demand for American housing was growing at the
same time that German political and public opposition to requisitions was
reaching a boiling point. The occupation had little choice but to construct
its own housing and return the requisitioned units to their renters
or owners[20].
HiCoG, which opened in 1950, was the first purpose-built American housing in
Frankfurt; it was constructed from bombing
rubble[20].
In May 1954, the Stars and Stripes announced the aquisition of land
near the Farben building and other locations in Frankfurt for the
construction of housing[17]. By 1958 about
20,000 housing units had been created[11,12]
including Platenstraße, Hügel, and Von Steuben in the IG Farben area.
Platenstraße housing did not exist yet, as can be seen in the 1946 Große
Sperrgebiet map above and the 1954 aerial photo at right. But by the end of
1956 both the street and the housing were fully
realized[5]. The apartments were constructed to
American specifications (bathrooms, closets, kitchens) by German contractors
and — like all American housing in Germany built before 1957,
including HiCoG — it was paid for out of German War Reparation
funds[11]. Platenstraße housing comprised 41
buildings with a total of 777 apartments, making it the largest US Forces
housing area in Frankfurt[4], and the same design
was used all over West Germany. The units ranged in size from 80 to 115
square meters (861 to 1238 square feet). Traditional construction, not
prefab, because had it been prefab it would have been called
Plattenstraße :-) (in German, Platte is a prefab panel and
Plattenbau is prefab construction). The housing area is named after the
street that runs through it, which, in turn, is named after poet and
playwright
August von Platen-Hallermünde.
When Platenstraße housing (along with Hügel, Von Steuben, and others in
Frankfurt) opened about 1955, the Römerstadt, Sperrgebiet, and other
requisitioned apartments were turned over to the City of Frankfurt and
displaced former tenants were free to move back into their old apartments,
and some did[16,17].
History: What was the rent?
Numerous references discuss postwar dependent housing, and all state that it
was "subsidized". But to what degree? What did an Army family pay for rent
in Platenstraße or HiCoG? I don't remember ever hearing any talk of rent
when I lived there as a teenager, neither does anyone else I know. Nothing
shows up in Google or any of the books or articles in the
References section below. Maybe rent was never
discussed because there was nothing to discuss! Greg
Cagle[5], who (like me) lived there in the 1950s
and 60s as a dependent, found the following entry in his father's diary from
January 1964:
... I’d have to pay for shipment of my car, there was no way out of that. I
would have to wait my turn for family quarters. The quarters were
rent free.
Robert Paul says, "I can confirm that
we consulate families paid no rent for the housing in Frankfurt. I recall
my parents' discussing how they could save money by being posted abroad."
History: Elvis at Platenstraße
Elvis at 2238A Platenstraße 1959
On another historical note, on January 18, 1959, PFC Elvis Presley of the
1st Medium Tank Battalion, 32nd Armored Regiment, 3rd Armored Division in
nearby Friedberg paid a visit to the Marquette family at 2238A Platenstraße
and their six-year-old son Robert, March Of Dimes poster child for the
1958-1959 campaign against polio, arthritis, and birth
defects.[4]
This was the second of three visits he made to Robert; on this one he is
accompanied by Czech/German actress
Vera Tschechowa
(at left in the photo), only a few weeks before I arrived in Frankfurt.
Platenstraße and HiCoG today
Thanks to Ruth Schlögl and Joseph Röder von Diersburg of
the Frankfurt University of
Applied Sciences, who were working on an Audio Guide to
Platensiedlung[9] in July 2021, for sending the
photos and information in this section.
Aerial view 2021
Redensified north buildings in 2021
Platenstraße-South buildings in 2021
Shortly after the American base in Frankfurt was vacated in 1995, most of
the American housing in Frankfurt was transferred to the City of
Frankfurt, which manages it and rents the apartments as good-quality
affordable housing through management companies such as
ABG[2] and Bundesimmobilienagentur BIMA. The
Platenstraße housing area is now called Platensiedlung (Platen Village).
Rents are subsidized, normally set at 35% of net income. Some of the
apartments are designated "social housing" for people with low incomes.
Others are for employees of the Federal Government of Germany. A typical
Platensiedlung
rent might be 9 Euros/square meter, significantly lower than market rate
(and less than half what I pay in the Bronx, which is the lowest-rent
district in NYC). In many of the former U.S. housing areas the average age
is comparatively young since there was a complete change of tenants in 1996
and many young families moved in. Nevertheless, there are also a lot of old
people. A large number of people with foreign roots live together at
Platenstraße and in Frankfurt as whole, where the proportion of foreigners
is about 17%. Buildings south of Platenstraße (the street itself; see old
map at C-12) remain as they were in the 1950s
and 60s; in the northern part a "redensification" project has added
two stories to each building[2,6,7,8,9].
HiCoG is now now known by its traditional name, Carl-Schurz-Siedlung;
Americans still live and work there, this time those attached to the US
Consulate, and the buildings are being renovated
too[3]. Reputedly the new American acronym
for the former HiCoG buildings is AMCONGEN.
References...
(American housing in postwar Frankfurt)
Modernisierung der Platensiedlung, Wohnungsbaugesellschaft ABG Frankfurt
Holding website, accessed 14 July 2021. So far 650 new apartments have been
created.
Germany,
eDiplomat website, accessed 14 July 2021: "The Carl Schurz Siedlung is a
combined housing and office complex, conveniently located in Frankfurt and
within walking distance of both the Consulate Office Building and the RSC
[Regional Support Center]. Transportation to and from Consulate facilities
is not provided. The Siedlung has over 300 apartments in 25 three-story,
walk-up buildings. Each building has two stairwells with six apartments
sharing each stairwell ... Frankfurt is renovating and upgrading its
apartment buildings to improve facilities and institute energy-saving
measures. This project is ongoing and while in progress, the flexibility of
housing assignments will be limited, as entire buildings need to be reserved
for renovation."
Gregory A. Cagle,
Scenes
from an Automotive Wonderland: Remarkable Cars Spotted in Postwar
Europe, McFarland & Company (2018): "...it's parked in front of
our apartment building in the Platenstrasse American housing area in
Frankfurt on December 9, 1956." Later I found evidence that Platenstraße
opened in 1955: "Die Housing Area Platenstraße war die Größte Wohnsiedlung
der Amerikanner in Frankfurt. 1955, zehn Jahre nach Kriegsende, zogen
die ersten US-Bürger dort ein..." (Inga Schulze, Warum
Frank aus N.Y. nicht von Frankfurt lassen kann, Frankfurter Neue
Presse, 22 June 2006).
Video: Frankfurter
Projekt baut alten Häusern Zusatz-Stockwerke, n-tv Nachrichten,
26 Juni 2019 (accessed 18 July 2021). Early stages of redensification
of "Platenstraße North". It looks there is a lot of prefabrication
involved so now maybe it's Plattenstraße after all!
Video: Platensiedlung
aktuell, November 2020, ABG Frankfurt Holding,
Youtube (accessed 18 July 2021), shows
Platenstraße Nord" (where I lived) with new upper stories, construction in
progess.
HALLO
Platensiedlung!, Ruth Schlögl, Natalie Heger, Thyra Jones;
Forschungslabor Nachkriegsmoderne,
Architekturstudiengänge der Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences,
23 July 2021.
[Facebook]
[Instagram]
[Map]
CLICK HERE to hear the Audio Walk (37 minutes,
in German)
Donald A. Carter, Forging
the Shield: The U.S. Army in Europe 1951-1962, U.S. Army Center for
Military History (2015), section "Settling in for the Long Haul", pp.127-137:
the story of behind dependent housing. Briefly, it was for both the morale
of the soldiers and to convince the Soviets that the US occupation was not
a prelude to invasion.
Heidi Laird, The
Frankfurt Kitchen: Forty-One Stories of Growing Up in Post World War II West
Germany, Fulton Books (2021), pp.92-93. The author, a German born
in Heidelberg in 1941, lived in a Römerstadt apartment for several years
starting in 1949, when it was full of American families; she notes that the
Americans gradually started moving out that same year. "Frankfurt Kitchen"
(Frankfurter Küche) refers to
the unique Bauhaus
design of the Römerberg's kitchens. Laird eventually emigrated to the
US and became a clinical psychologist in San Benardino, California.
Read an interview with her
here.
James Quigley, "Land acquired for
1,834 New NACom Billets", European Stars and Stripes, 19 May
1954, p.2: "Northern Area Command recently completed the acquisition of land
in the Frankfurt area that will be used for housing construction projects
scheduled to begin soon. The land is located in the Gibbs, Drake, Edwards,
and IG Farben Complex areas, as well as adjacent to the HICOG housing
development and the Hoechst cemetery. Plans call for the construction of
103 buildings which will include 1,854 housing units. The acquisition of
suitable land for housing construction will now allow the US Army to release
sooner German housing currently under requisition."
FHS dorms (right) and "Quonset" huts (Silver City)
My brother and I went to the American Army schools —
9th-11th grade for me, Frankfurt High School; elementary school
for Dennis. The FHS student body was 900 and included kids like me who
walked to school, kids from farther away (the Drake-Edwards or Gibbs or
Atterberry Kaserne, or neighboring towns and cities like Aschaffenburg,
Babenhausen, Bad Homburg, Bad Nauheim, Bad Vilbel, Bonames, Butzbach,
Büdingen, Darmstadt, Friedburg, Gelnhausen, Hanau, Höchst, Langen,
Mörfelden, Oberursel... or the Rhein-Main air base near Wiesbaden) who
arrived in 25 big olive-drab Army buses each day; kids from even farther
(e.g. Bad Godesberg, Gießen, Fulda, Kassel, Wildflecken) [apparently, at
least Fulda and Gießen got their own American high schools in later years]
who lived in the dorms all week but went home on weekends, and kids from
REALLY far away like Moscow, Damascus, Warsaw, Helsinki, Lisbon,
Tunis... (children of diplomats or attachés in places where there were no
American schools); they stayed in the dorm all semester and ate three meals
a day in the cafeteria. Although 900 sounds small to a New Yorker, it was
far too many for the original 1954 building so we also had some "Quonset
huts" for the overflow (strictly speaking these were Butler Buildings; real
Quonset huts are half-cylinders, but it's the same idea: prefab temporary
buildings made of corrugated metal that can be erected in a few
hours)[9].
Me in 1959
Frankfurt High School aerial view 1960
When I started school in the middle of the 9th grade, it was an eye opener:
instead of all white suburban kids like in Virginia, there were Black kids,
Puerto Ricans, Hawaiians, Mexicans, Filipinos… and even the white
kids were from all over, with every kind of background and accent. Plus
people were from all social classes from aristocracy (children of
ambassadors or generals) to dirt-poor. It was the complete opposite of my
junior high school in Arlington, where everybody was exactly the same:
white suburban middle class Virginian.
Some of the FHS kids in 9th grade were hoodlums like in Blackboard Jungle,
with leather jackets and collars turned up and ducktails and
switchblades but there was never actually any fighting. My friend Joe
Caranci always spent Geography period carving things into his desk with his
switchblade and one day when the teacher said something about it, he cut off
the teacher's necktie and threw his briefcase out the window (that was my
only Blackboard Jungle class). And yes, there was a Geography class; in
those times everybody learned what all the countries in the world were, and
something about them.
Miss Costello's Latin Class in Silver City
Creative writing story 1961
In reality, it was an excellent school, and the best thing about it was that
if you did well in class, there was no social stigma as there was in
Virginia. Consequently I got high grades the whole time I was there and had
good relationships with many of my teachers, for example Miss Costello, my
Latin teacher for two years who ran the class like a Marine drill sergeant
but in reality was a sweetie. Or Miss Rotter who taught AP English and
encouraged me to write down any crazy thing that came into my head. I could
do that and still be a cool guy. She was also
the Radio Club adviser in 1960-61. Or
Mr. Thompson (more about him below).
The Lovings of Virginia
To top off the differences from "back home", there were interracial
couples… This was at the exact same time as the huge uproar in
Virginia — in Central Point, not far from where I had lived —
about the
Lovings[11] (a white man and black woman who
married and were prosecuted for it), that went all the way to the Supreme
Court. Honestly, we all felt so lucky not to have to worry about any of
that... Imagine, living in a diverse community with no racial barriers in
the late 1950s and early 60s. We knew how precious a gift this was; we
lived in a virtual paradise safe from all the ugliness and brutality of our
own country.
In 9th and 10th grade I was friends with a girl named Carolyn Parker. We
sat next to each other in class; I helped her with her homework (she didn't
really need help, it was like a game). We just enjoyed each other's
company; she was very sweet and soft spoken. I guess I had a crush on her.
But that was 1959-1960 and it simply didn't occur to us to see each other
outside of school, or if it did, we were probably both thinking about how
our parents (or in my case, just the one) would react. Plus we were both
pretty shy. She "rotated" before my junior year which was when I started to
have a social life. But I still remember her.
Speaking of rotating,
I quickly realized that another big difference between a military base and
everywhere else I had ever lived is how easy it is to make friends. Because
kids are so diverse, there wasn't the kind of cliquishness I recall from my
junior high school in suburban Virgina. And because nobody stayed in the
same place more than two or three years, military brats grew up learning how
to make friends rapidly and how to be openminded and honest and not play
games. I never felt more comfortable with people in my life than I did
there, and never had so many friends, not before, not since.
Another facet of life as a kid on a military base is how the
parents are so conscious of rank: who's more important than who, who can
socialize with who, who can go to which club (Officers, NCO, EM)...
whereas the kids instinctively rebelled against all that and we all
developed a healthy antiauthoritarian streak. For example if a General
found out his daughter was dating a Sergeant's son he would almost certainly
order her to break it off and that would only make the relationship stronger.
Frankfurt Base Facilities
WAC Circle: Frankfurt PX, Commissary, and Snack Bar, 1960
Meanwhile, there were endless facilities on the base for service members and
their families. The Post Exchange (PX, center in the photo) was like a
department store that sold clothing, records, books, pots and pans, etc,
(and of course, transformers) at no markup or even subsidized, in
recognition of the low military salaries. The Commissary (right of the PX
in the photo) was like an American supermarket for food shopping, also
nonprofit and subsidized. The Snack bar (left) was a huge cafeteria
featuring approximately the same fare as a Burger King or IHOP. There was
also a "Class VI store" somewhere, that's Army-speak for a liquor
store. Behind these buildings was a gas station where gas was 10 cents a
gallon. Scattered all over the base (after 1948 it wasn't a fenced-in
base[6], just buildings and neighborhoods all over the city) were countless
smaller snack bars, field houses, clinics, athletic fields, running tracks,
dispensaries, clubs, and so on[7]. Barracks for soldiers were fenced in,
however; they were called Kaserne since many of them were old Wehrmacht
barracks (Kaserne) with swastikas chiseled off the gates (♪♫ Vor der
Kaserne, vor der großen Tor... ♪♫).
Medical care was free and universal, school was free and excellent, and
housing was free or heavily subsidized. Ordinary working people of all
ranks could live modest, comfortable, and relatively secure and stress-free
lives without being millionaires and billionaires or working 100 hours a
week. Our parents (or more often than not, just our fathers) did their
40-hour-a-week jobs (and we did our jobs by going to school), and the
government took care of us. No wonder we liked it so much over there, it
was Socialism! [1]
In January 2024 Pam Ives came across a two-page
1960 Army Times article[2]
clipped by her parents that describes the Frankfurt base facilities in great
detail. If you think it sounds like Paradise on Earth, you're not
far wrong!
References...
Strictly
speaking socialism
includes public ownership of the means of production; the Frankfurt
Army base experience was more like "market socialism" where private
companies exist, but the essentials of life such as housing, health care,
education, and secure retirment are provided by the government at no or
low charge. This was the dominant form of government in postwar Europe
and Scandinavia and, to some extent, other countries like Canada and
New Zealand, but lately is eroding due to the wave of right-wing backlash
sweeping the whole planet. US military bases sometimes crossed the line
into true socialism, like when the Army set up factories in Germany
(and elsewhere) to produce
ice cream for base residents.
I don't remember much about 9th grade, it was only a few months. In 10th
grade, Bob Engs was pretty much my main outside-of-school friend. Bob was a
year older but we had the same birthday. He was also a year ahead of me in
school and president of his class, a super-achiever. He lived far away in
the industrial city of Höchst, about two hours away by trolley*,
dominated by the huge Höchst AG chemical plant that spewed out toxic black
smoke, the air was always thick with it; in those days if you took a color
picture of Höchst it would still come out grey. The chemical plants
employed thousands of Turkish "Gastarbeiter" under horrible conditions, we
never saw them because they weren't allowed to go into town. My dad was
scandalized about Bob, but said it was OK for me to have black friends as
long as we were in Frankfurt, but not in Virginia. My brother's best friend
was also black. My parents were pretty impressed I could navigate the
trolley system from city to city, negotiating the hair-raising transfer from
the #17 to the #11 at the free-kill zone in front of the Hauptbahnhof.
The Engs family returned to the USA at the end of the 1959-60 school year,
ending up in Fort Eustis VA, near Newport News; I visited them there in
1962. Bob had a long and distinguished academic career and died in
2013 at age 69[12].
*
Mary Frances Keller '61, now Mary Fran Archer, who made the trip
every day, says 30 minutes.
Army
& Air Force Exchange Service, Europe, Walter Elkins'
U.S. Army in Germany website,
accessed 7 July 2020: The European Exchange System: "The mission of EES is
service to the troops in Europe. Basically, this means providing services
and goods at minimum costs and in the most pleasant, courteous, and
efficient manner possible."—Col. Charles L. Redman, QMC, EES
Chief. EES was responsible for PX's, commissaries, liquor stores,
snack bars, delis, laundries, dry cleaners, barber and beauty shops, photo
processing; watch, radio, and shoe repair; florists, tailor shops, photo
studios, gas stations, car repair garages, libraries, athletic fields,
service clubs, teen clubs, service shows, as well as central butchers,
bakeries, dairies, and ice cream plants (such as
the massive one in Grünstadt)
that supplied the commissaries and
snack bars. There were also EES service stations and snack bars on the
Autobahns. Also there were mobile PXs and snack bars for troops in the
field. In Germany the large majority of employees at EES establishments was
German.
The
Bald Eagles Echo, Fall 1995:
26 pages devoted to the closing of Frankfurt High School and
the whole American base in Frankfurt.
Julie Decker and Chris Chiel, Quonset
Hut, Princeton Architectural Press (2005).
"A somewhat unprecedented byproduct of the USAREUR dependents’ school system
was the 'melting-pot' role it assumed far beyond the borders of the United
States. Both staff and student body were composed of persons from all 48
states, and the territories, as well. People from all walks of life, all
races and creeds, and representing the full range of sectional backgrounds
and interests, met in the classrooms, bringing with them the uniqueness that
was theirs and taking away, certainly, a fuller knowledge and deeper
understanding of the totality that is the American
people." —[10,p.113]
Starting in 1946, the US Department of Defense Dependents Schools (DoDDS)
made schooling available to children of military, consular, and other
American families in Germany and other occupied
countries[7]. So the correct way to refer to
these schools is DOD or DoDDS schools, but we always called them Army
schools. Why? Because (1) there was no Navy, Air Force, Marines, or Coast
guard in Frankfurt, it was all Army; and (2) the sign on our school said
"U.S. ARMY FRANKFURT HIGH SCHOOL" as seen on the inset, that comes from the
far right of this photo. Other
American school signs in Germany also said U.S. Army, such as
this one in Kaiserslautern.
An interesting facet of the American elementary and junior high schools was
that German language instruction was given to all
students[16,17] in a required daily class. My
younger brother Dennis took German at Frankfurt Elementary #1, as did
Robert Paul
(see report card), Greg Cagle, and other
slightly younger informants who were in Frankfurt the same time I was.
Similarly for American schools in France, but French instead of German.
German language was taught by Germans; one of my informants
has an autograph from "Ruth Geise, Deine Deutschlehrer). The same is true
for American elementary schools in elsewhere in Germany such as the one
in Kaiserslautern, confirmed by another informant who was there in the
late 1950s.
At Frankfurt high school when I was there in 1959-61, Latin, German, French,
and (from Fall 1960) Russian were offered as
electives. Checking the 1977-78
yearbook I see that Russian had been removed and Spanish added.
High School...
Friedrich-Ebert-Reformschule, which would become
the first Frankfurt High School in 1946.
Photo: frankfurt1933-1945.de.
The first Frankfurt High School (FHS) was at Am Bornheimer Hang 46 in
Bornheim, about 2.5 miles (3.8km) east of the Farben building. It
was built in 1929-30 as the Friedrich-Ebert-Reformschule[1,2] and designed by
Ernst May, who was
also responsible for the revolutionary Römerstadt apartment
buildings described above. This school building
was the first of its kind in Europe and drew visitors from many countries.
During the war it served as a military hospital, an officer's school, and
temporary housing for bombed-out families. From May 1945 to September 1946
it was billets for American occupation troops. It became Frankfurt's
American high school in Fall 1946 and served in that capacity through Spring
1954.[3] A protected landmark, it's still
there as
the Charles-Hallgarten
Schule[4,13,14] for special-needs students,
grades 1-10.
Frankfurt High School Siolistraße 1959
In Fall 1954, Frankfurt High School moved to its newly constructed home at
Siolostraße 41, just north of the IG Farben building. It was in operation
from Spring 1954 through Fall 1995 when US forces left Frankfurt
after 50 years. It was one of few American high schools with dormitories
(Nürnberg, Kaiserslautern, and Munich also had them but I believe they were
5-day only, whereas Frankfurt was both 5-day and full-term). It went from
9th grade through 12th grade through
Phillip-Holzman-Schule and athletic field
2014[15]
1959-60, then 10th-12th until it closed in 1995. The school's name was
changed to Frankfurt American High School (FAHS) only in 1961-62, the
year after I left. When closed it was returned to the City of Frankfurt and
became the Philipp-Holzmann-Schule; it has since been considerably
remodeled, expanded, and improved. In April 2014 a former FAHS student
(Otis Pate, class of 1985) visited the Holzmann campus and posted a
rhapsodic 7-minute
video of it on Youtube (screen shot at left). By 2020, however, the
at-least-80-year-old
athletic field was sacrified to make way for another new school, the
Adorno Gymnasium (academic
high school), address: Miquelallee 160.
Junior High School...
Frankfurt Junior High School
Frankfurt (American) Junior High School opened in Fall 1959 at 381 Homburger
Landstraße at Drake Kaserne[5,17] to relieve
crowded conditions at the high school and the elementary schools, taking
over 9th grade from the high school and 8th and 7th grades from the
elementary schools. It was convenient to residents in the Drake-Edwards,
Gibbs, and Betts areas but students who lived in the Farben building area
(Platenstraße, Hügel, Von Steuben) and elsewhere had to ride big olive-drab
Army buses every day. The junior high school closed in 1995, along with all
the other American military schools in Frankfurt. The building still exists
as of November 2021 and houses the IKS Interkulturelle Schule
Rhein-Main, a state-recognized private vocational and preparatory
school.
Elementary Schools...
Elizabethan School
The original Frankfurt Elementary School, the Elizabethan
School[9,10] — in German
Elisabethanischschule — at Vogtstraße 35-37, was about half a
mile east of the Farben building. Founded in 1876 as a high school for
girls in another part of the city, it moved to Vogtstraße in 1908. In 1942
it was converted into a German military hospital. In 1945 it was
confiscated by American forces and opened in 1946 as a school for grades
K-8[6,11]. It was in the Sperrgebiet, the
fenced-in American restricted area around the Farben building 1945-48
described above. The school was returned to the
City of Frankfurt in 1954 and lives on today as the
Gymnasium
Elisabethenschule, a co-ed academic high school.
Frankfurt Elementary School #1 in 1960
Frankfurt Elementary School #1 at 2201
Platenstraße[5] (photo by my father) opened in
1953, as part of the same project that created the high school and the
Platenstraße, Hügel, and Von Steuben housing areas, serving grades
K-8[6]. Students from areas such as Oberursel,
Bad Homburg, Höchst, Fischstein and Rödelheim were bused in daily.
Frankfurt Elementary School #2 (a.k.a. the Atterberry School) at 358
Friedberger Landstraße[5] in the Betts housing
area near Atterberry Kaserne also opened in 1953[6].
The city of Frankfurt was located in the US Army Northern Area Command
(NACOM), one of six Cold War commands in 1952-1965, covering a large part of
the American zone of Germany (which by then had also subsumed the French
Zone). In addition to its military role, NACOM "also act[ed] as landlord
and corner grocer, city administrator and recreation supervisor for the
complete community of servicemen, wives, children and civilians. Along this
line there are [as of 1963] 82 chapels, 51 service clubs, 71 libraries, 74
theaters, 69 bowling lanes, 70 gymnasiums and 602 other sports
facilities. In addition there are 72 education centers for the American
community plus 45 elementary and high schools with an enrollment of 33,000.
There are 72 housing areas and 100,000 troop barracks spaces to maintain
plus providing utilities for more than 200 separate installations. The 12
main posts directly under NACom are: Giessen, Frankfurt, Heidelberg,
Wuerzburg, Bamberg, Fulda, Hanau, Bad Kreuznach, Baumholder, Pirmasens,
Kaiserslautern and Karlsruhe. The 12 sub-posts are Mainz, Schweinfurt,
Darmstadt, Bad Hersfeld, Bad Kissingen, Wildflecken, Kassel, Gelnhausen,
Worms, Aschaffenburg, Kitzingen and Wertheim."[8]
Federal
Republic of Germany Post Report, US Department of State, U.S. Government
Printing Office, 0-281-540-2013, April 1979. Frankfurt am Main section:
pp.33-37. This is written for consular personel and their families, where
housing, school, and other policies might differ from those for military
families.
The Dependents'
School Program of the U.S. Army, Europe, 1946–1956,
Headquarters, United States Army, Europe, Historical Division (1958),
118 pages (non-searchable PDF). Page 9 has the photo of the Elizabethan
School captioned "The Elizabethan School—first American elementary
school in Frankfurt and headquarters of the Dependents' School Service".
Host Nation Studies: An International Language and Culture Program for U.S.
Elementary Students in Overseas Schools, International Journal for the
Historiography of Education (IJHE) Jahrgang 4 Ausgabe 5, October 2014
(abstract). "In 1946, the first U.S. schools for military dependents opened
their doors in post-war Germany to provide education for children of
American personnel on foreign soil. The school system, originally known as
the 'Dependents School Service' (DSS), offered a special subject within
its curriculum: Native German teachers were hired to teach the language
and culture of the current host nation to U.S. elementary and
middle-school students."
Yearbooks,
Frankfurt MS (formerly JHS) Archives, American Overseas Schools
Historical Society archives. Not a complete set, but they reveal that the
school had several Germans teaching German, and no other languages were
taught. The 1988 yearbook identifies the school as "Frankfurt American
Junior High School which is a Department of Defense, Dependent School
located on Drake Kaserne, Homburger Landstrasse 381, 6 Frankfurt/Main or APO
New York 09039-0005".
The morning of Friday, September 2, 1960, an 8-inch Howitzer round crashed into
a 3rd Armored Division encampment at the Grafenwöhr tank range, killing 15
soldiers and wounding another 28, one of whom died later.
We were in school that day and it was announced over the PA system. The
fathers of many of the students were at Graf at the time, and when the
announcement was made the details were still not known. Everyone was
worried, scared, upset. I remember big silent crowds in the halls, I think
they must have let us out early so we could be with our families. Nine of
the dead were PFCs and probably not old enough to have kids in high school.
Three were sergeants (two of them SFCs) and could have been old enough but
their surnames don't match anyone in
the 1960-61 FHS directory. The rest
were SP4s and SP5s, and only one of them, Earl Johnson (an SP4, therefore
probably pretty young), had a surname also found in the directory (seven
times). In any case I don't remember that any FHS parents died, but there
were also 27 wounded (later I checked the list of wounded against the FHS
directory too, and no matches there either). Anyway there was deep anxiety
throughout the school for at least the whole day. The photo was taken by
SSG Lowell Fox of the 3rd AD, one of six sent in by his son Farley in
2008 (see gallery)
(decode Army ranks here).
References...
Howitzer Overshot Kills 15, Injures 27 at Grafenwoehr,
Stars and Stripes vol.19 no.138, Saturday, 3 September 1960, page 1:
"Fifteen 3rd Armd Div soldiers were killed early Friday [September 2],
and 27 injured when an 8-inch howitzer shell with an incorrect powder
charge overshot its mark and landed in a camp area after a morning roll call
... The shell smashed into three tents occupied by soldiers. It tore
through one tent, exploded in the second, and sent fragments hurtling into
the third."
3rd
Armored Division, Cold War, Wikipedia (accessed 6 March 2021):
"Throughout the Cold War, the division headquarters company, the 503rd
Administrative Company, 503rd Adjutant General Company, and 503rd MP Company
were based at Drake Kaserne, with 143rd Signal Battalion and other support
units stationed across the street at Edwards Kaserne in Frankfurt
... subunits were based in other Kasernes [in Kirch-Goens, Butzbach,
Gelnhausen, Friedberg, and Hanau]", which are all places where FHS students
lived (see
directory).
11th grade at Frankfurt High School and Pam Ives 1960-61
1961 yearbook photo
Look: saddle shoes!
In 11th grade I made tons of new friends, started going out
on the town and drinking beer (and anything else I could get my hands on -
cognac, Schnapps, Jägermeister...), having all kinds of fun. Maybe too much
fun because now I recognize that, for the two full years 1961 and 1962 I
drank to excess almost every day. At first it was some combination of
dulling the stress and oppression of "life with father" and the fact that
drinking in Germany was easy, cheap, legal, fun, and everybody else was
doing it. Later, back in Virginia, where it was not legal, I still did it.
The compulsion faded after I left home.
I often felt that my time in high school in Germany was the best time of my
life. It was such an adventure to be in postwar Germany, still pockmarked
with the scars of war, still relatively poor, still full of people who had
been Nazis, and with Elvis stationed just down the street. And on the base,
to be among people of all races, nationalities and social classes after
living in racial and economic segregation up until then. And my first love,
Pam Ives.
Pam 1961 in FHS gym
Pam 1961
Nürnberg souvenir
Cheerleader portrait
Even in 11th grade I was still shy around girls and had only been on a
couple awkward dates. Pam was in 10th grade and a junior varsity
cheerleader. We clicked instantly, we were inseparable; we did everything
together, she was funny and she was fearless. And (as she says herself)
kind of smart-ass. We always enjoyed each other, never argued, no egos, no
drama, just romance, affection, and tons of fun. Everything was hilarious
to us. We went on long trips in Army buses to away-games in places like
Mannheim and Nürnberg (and then didn't bother going to the games), we went
up in the Taunus mountains and drank ourselves silly with no idea how
we would get back. I would go to basketball games just because she was
cheerleading. She came to the radio station
with me on Tuesday nights sometimes. I'd meet her
in HiCoG every morning, where
she lived, to walk to school together.
Jazz Keller
Storyville
We wrote notes and slipped them into each other's hall lockers. We went to
the Teen Club after school and then again after
dinner at home, when it became like a night club: lights low, dancing to the
jukebox or a band... and everybody forming
little groups for sorties into the neighborhood or downtown —
restaurants, bars,
Storyville,
the Jazzkeller — then coming
back to the Teen Club to share our adventures. Typical corny teenage stuff
but I was never so happy before or since (until recently).
About the Jazz Keller...
Heidi
Laird (author of Frankfurt
Kitchen) recalls "being able to sit up close to famous Jazz musicians
who had just given a concert at the Festhalle and were showing up at the
Jazz Keller to unwind and relax in an informal setting among friends. I
remember seeing Coleman Hawkins up close, and the Modern Jazz Quartet and
Ella Fitzgerald and Jerry Mulligan, all legendary, almost mythical. And
there were the
Mangelsdorff
brothers ... There was a wonderful bass player
named Oscar Pettiford who died within a year or two of my meeting him..."
The time we went to Nürnberg we wandered around the city and stumbled onto
the Luitpoldhain, which is where big annual Nazi rallies were staged from
1933 to 1938. Spooky!
Pam's Prom book 1961
Prom night April 1961
The Casino Officers Club seen from I.G. Farben
You can see how ridiculously happy I was in the pre-Prom photo, in
which the other two are our friends Joe Martin and Genell Roberson, and in
which Pam is wearing the dress her Mom made for the occasion. Joe had his
dad's car that night. The Prom was a very big
deal, held not in a crepe-paper-decorated school gym like most proms but
in the Officers' Club, the "Casino" part of
the I.G. Farben
complex and probably a major "venue" for the Nazi elite during the war.
It was in the Casino's enormous, elegant ballroom. Honestly I don't
remember much about it (was there an orchestra? Was there food?) but Pam
and I danced and danced. And then as the Prom wound down we drove to
a classy nightclub downtown with a stage show and had fizzy mixed drinks
with umbrellas instead of beer steins. We stayed out very late, culminating
in a Prom breakfast at 3:00 or 4:00am in the main Snack Bar, which they kept
open for us. It was a night like in a 1940s Hollywood movie. Pam is the
only one I ever danced with.
A Prom-related incident resulted in a bump in our relationship (my fault)
and before it could be fixed the school year ended and Pam's family rotated
back to the States, Pan Am Flight 73, Frankfurt to NYC, July 2, 1961 (just
after her 16th birthday). I would have been devastated by this if it were
not for the fact that we were being rotated too! A year prematurely, due to
a f**kup by my dad. I was devastated anyway; back in
Virginia I missed her like crazy. We stayed in touch by mail. A year
later she was thinking about college, wanted to major in psychology, wanted
to come to the east coast somewhere but said her grades weren't good and
probably she would wind up at Iowa State ("Anything! Anyplace! Just to
leave home!"), wished we could talk about it and do the things we used to
do, and closed by telling me not to do anything crazy like getting married
(like Tom McCaffrey did in while still in high
school, which is why she mentioned it)
or... Joining the Army! But then her
father was transferred to Fort Leavenworth and I left
for UVA at the same time, and then the Army,
and then my Mom left my Dad and my Dad lost the house — the
address Pam was writing to — so we literally lost touch.
Forever. Or so it seemed!
Maps of Our Frankfurt
Our part of Frankfurt in 1961:
Falk-Plan No.119, Falk-Verlag-Hamburg (undated but purchased in 1961)
- Click to enlarge
This is a piece of a German map from 1961 showing the part of Frankfurt we
inhabited. Click on it to see a full size version with notations in pencil
that I made at the time. At C-12 I have the Platenstraße housing area
circled and building numbers penciled in, plus I drew in the baseball field.
A line is coming out of 2231 showing the shortcut I used to take to school,
which is in the upper left of D-10 marked FHS, north-northwest of the IG
Hochhaus (I.G. Farben building, shown in red). The Teen Club (TC) is on
Siolistraße right across from the school. In E-11, WAC Circle at Adickes
Allee and Eschersheimer Landstraße is circled: the PX, Commissary, and big
Snack Bar. Pam lived in Carl Schurz Siedlung, a.k.a. HiCoG; her house is
circled by the lower left corner of D-11. Our hangouts are also indicated:
D'Angelo's is on Raimundstraße near Am Dornbusch indicated as DA's in D-12.
Kurt's (with the jukebox that
played Milord) is
at bottom center of D-12. Some other places I don't recall are indicated
there too: D.S. and 7-Up, then just below the lower right corner of the same
quadrant, the eat-in family Italian restaurant, Bologna. Then going south
on Eschersheimer Landstraße (E-10 and E-9) was bar country: Stark's,
Frank's, Bodega's (indicated as BO's), Leon's, Torrero, and finally the
Straw Bar. These were the places we could walk to.
The Straw Bar, unlike the other rowdy dives just listed, was sedate and
civilized, owned by a nice lady. Nobody knows why we called it the Straw
Bar; it wasn't labeled that way. A bunch of us guys and girls would go
there and sit around a large round table playing Hearts all night, drinking
white Mosel Wein out of Römers (photo at left) rather than the customary
Bier in Steins, in deference to the ladies, much more refined and
sophisticated.
We also frequented some other places not on the map, e.g. in Ginnheim. The
next map shows the hangouts we went to by trolley.
Frankfurt Bahnhof
area in 1961 - Click to enlarge or
CLICK HERE
to see the whole map (big).
Ristorante Santa Lucia 1961
Maier Gustl's 1956
This is another part of the same map that shows the Hauptbahnof area,
directly accessible by Straßenbahn Nº17. Various hangouts are indicated
near the Bahnhof (C-D 5-6): Maier Gustl's on
Münchener Straße (a huge and rowdy Bavarian beer hall complete with Oompah
band), and next to it Santa Lucia (Italian
grotto restaurant up a flight of stairs), Maxim's (which I don't remember).
"Little Maier Gustl's" was as quiet and sedate as the big one was loud and
chaotic and it had the best Ochsenschwanzsuppe.
The yellow area in front of the red Hauptbahnhof was the free-kill zone
where all the trolley lines met up in a huge chaos and you could transfer
from one line to another if you were lucky.
Other things to do in Germany
Besides drinking in bars? On base, there was every conceivable kind of
recreation for us, either free or very cheap — a movie theater
(25¢), game rooms, a roller rink, the
post library, craft shops, music rooms (where you could check out any
musical instrument and practice on it), libraries, athletic fields, judo
classes, bowling alleys, a baseball team (the Vikings), the Teen Club, plus
a huge selection of after-school activites... No end of fun. And to top it
off, we were in Germany! So there was even more fun to be had off base...
We could go to nearby Grüneburg Park or ride all over the city on the
trolley, all the way to the Taunus mountains for pocket change, go swimming
at the German pool in Oberursel (swimming was the only amenity
not found on base).
The Platenstraße area in Frankfurt was like Smurf Village; everybody lived
in one place and it was just a couple blocks from the high school and main
PX. When you walked to school in the morning you'd bump into all your
friends. You could go outside any time, around the corner to the ball field
bleachers (a popular hangout) or a couple more blocks to the Teen Club and
all your friends would be in one of those places or the other. We'd just
hang out or decide to go somewhere together, there was no end of escapades
we could have in postwar Germany.
Plus there were part-time jobs for teenagers, bagging groceries in the
Commissary for tips, setting pins in the base bowling alley for 10 cents a
frame, and working the concession stand at the movie theater. In those days
bowling alleys and pool halls were everywhere. I never bowled much, but I
played pool quite well, starting in the Teen Club up through Army discharge,
six years of solid pool playing. After that I think I played pool 3 times
total, once with Granpa who used to be a pool hustler (I did pretty well,
but he won of course — this was at the marina
in Kinapic).
The Teen Club
Frankfurt Teen Club 1960 looks like a dump but inside it was magic
At the Teen Club, one room had a grill with
hamburgers and french fries and a soda fountain, with tables and chairs and
a nickel jukebox with good music in it. At night the lights were turned
down low for dancing. The songs that take me right back there
(mid-1961): Blue
Moon by the Marcels,
Mother In Law by
Ernie K. Doe,
Chain Gang
by Sam Cooke,
This is Dedicated to the One I Love by the Shirelles,
Gee Whiz by Carla
Thomas, Who's Loving You by
the Miracles, and
Suddenly There's A
Valley by The Drifters.
Framus Hollywood 1958
Teen Club band 1961
Meanwhile, back in the Teen Club there was also a stage
where my first rock band used to play for
evening dance parties. I played a German electric guitar, a red 1958 Framus
Hollywood (the one on the left in the color picture) that I got at
Musik-Hruby on Marbachweg in Dornbusch, the same street where Anne Frank was
born in 1929 and lived as a little girl... In 1961 the Teen Club was
totally unsupervised, the only adults there were the German ladies who ran
the soda fountain and grill. We'd go out drinking in bars, come back to the
Teen Club, go out again, come back... The way I remember it, this was just
about every night. For the record, everybody's favorite local spot for
drinking and eating was D'Angelo's, a tiny hole-in-the-wall pizza place on
Raimundstraße (just on the edge of the American housing complex), run by
Marco and patronized exclusively by Frankfurt High students (as opposed to,
say, GIs or Germans). Marco's pizza was the best I ever had in my life (Pam
says it was strange). It cost one Mark per slice, and he'd also make a
custom pie in any size at all... decades before anyone had heard of a
"personal pizza".
Elvis at the Teen Club?
Autographed Elvis record
Postcard front
Autographed postcard back
In November 2021 I had email from a person who was in Frankfurt 1958-1961,
about the time as me; she said "I was particularly interested in your
memories of the teen club. Although I never actually got to go there, I had
an older sister in high school (graduated in 1959 I think) who spent a lot
of time there. In fact, my stepfather was a volunteer there. I have in my
possession a 45 RPM record in its jacket, and a post card photograph of
Elvis, both signed by him. My recollection is that he actually visited the
teen club at least once, which is where she obtained his autographs. My
sister is deceased, so I can’t ask her. Do you have any memory of one or
more visits by Elvis? Although I liked some of his music and movies as a
teen, I was never really a fan." I don't remember but if any readers do,
please let me know! The record, "A Big Hunk 'O Love", was released in 1959,
about a year before my Teen Club days. The postcard photo was taken before
November 27, 1958, when Elvis was promoted to PFC. He made SP4 on June 1,
1959, and Sergeant E5 February 11, 1960, and was one of those ranks when he
recorded the record. He was discharged March 5, 1960.
Armed Forces Network
NACOM Chronicle 1960
Höchst Castle - home of AFN Frankfurt
AFN entrance with Dennis and Mom
Bob Engs
was in the Radio Club at school (and also the president of it
of course) and convinced me to join in 10th grade (1959-60). We had a
weekly show, "Teen 20", on AFN Frankfurt, at the time the most powerful
radio transmitter on earth at 150,000 Watts. It was kind of a silly show
but the experience was magical. The station was in an actual 12th-century
castle in Höchst
(Schloß Von
Brüning); every Tuesday after school we'd ride in a big olive-drab Army
bus, about 12 of us. Everybody would take turns in each job: engineer,
director, announcer, writer, sports news, DJ... So, for example if I was
the sports reporter I'd have to go to the games and take notes, even away
games in Heidelberg, Karlsruhe, Mannheim, Wiesbaden... If I was DJ I had to
know how to cue records and segué from one to another while talking, watch
the sound levels, making sure there was never any "dead air", and finish
exactly on time, cuing the closing
theme: Sleep
Walk by Santo and Johnny. The real AFN staff, merry-prankster
enlisted men who had worked in radio before they were drafted, taught us
everything. We had sound-proof studios with director's booth,
super-expensive Telefunken microphones, control consoles, and 16-inch
turntables, it was unbelievable amounts of fun.
AFN console
AFN 16-inch record
AFN Library sign
Frankfurt library
The "Frankfurt library" photo shows my Teen-20 friends Mike Sanborn
and Stephanie Smith retrieving a 16-inch vinyl record for a show in 1960
(another photo shows the card catalog
used for finding records).
AFN had the largest music library on earth, all on 16-inch vinyl records.
Not just music but also radio shows (dramas, comedies, soap operas, variety
shows) from 1942 to 1980.
I don't know if it has been preserved, but it
would be an incredible resource for music historians and archaeologists.
Later I found out that when AFN converted from vinyl to casette tape in 1980,
all the vinyl records were supposed to be destroyed. There were about
25,000 distinct records, each holding about 30 songs (or other types of
audio), of which apparently about 20,000 have been found and archived
(see References).
The selection was comprehensive; there was never even one single obscure
R&B song from the 1940s or 50s that I couldn't find.
An AFN record and a 12-inch LP
The black-and-white "AFN 16-inch record" photo above doesn't quite do
justice. 16 inches is like a large pizza! I happen to have a 16-inch AFN
disc from 1945 (no, I didn't walk home with it from AFN, I found it recently
in EBay) and took some photos. The one at right shows it alongside a
standard 12-inch LP that I bought at the Frankfurt PX in 1959. Click the
image for more views. It may come as a surprise that AFN was using
33⅓rpm records during World War II, especially if you read the
Wikipedia page[11] that says LPs weren't
invented until 1948. But it was the LP (long-playing record) — not
33⅓rpm — that was invented in 1948; the early AFN 16-inchers
are NOT long-playing except in comparison to the 10-inch records. As you
can see, the 16-inch record shown here has only three songs on the side that
is showing (Jo Stafford); the other side (Red Norvo Quartet) has
four cuts; a typical music LP has six or seven. When I was at AFN in
1959-61, the 16-inch pop music disks had about 12 cuts per side. See and
read more in the accompanying photo
gallery.
1960-61 Radio Club
Elvis interview schedule
In 11th grade I was president of the Radio Club. We were a close group
and enjoyed ourselves immensely. Aside from playing music (not only
teenager music but also recordings we made of school choirs and orchestras),
doing high-school sports news, and so on, we sometimes interviewed
celebrities who happened to be on the base, like the singer Joni James (I
still have a vinyl Christmas album of hers). I'm pretty sure we interviewed
Elke Sommer ("America's Sweetheart") and we almost interviewed Bridgitte
Bardot; it fell through at the last minute. But the biggest interview
we almost had was... Elvis. It was scheduled for December 7,
1959, at his house in Bad Nauheim (click the second image to see proof).
But Colonel Parker wound up nixing it so we did all the other stuff on the
list instead.
Before leaving the topic of Elvis, he was filming parts
of GI Blues while I was there; there was some location shooting
near me. This was kind of a joint Hollywood-Army production, and the Army
did things the Army way. For example, painting the tires of Army Jeeps and
trucks black and painting the grass in front of Army buildings green. I saw
this. Just two years later I'd be doing it.
Consulate General 2017
97th General Hospital 1960s
Anyway since I was now well-known at AFN, they asked me to take over a show,
"Bedside Rock", previously hosted by Roger Norum (also of the FHS Radio
Club, who had just graduated) at the 97th General
Hospital, a US Army hospital originally built for the Luftwaffe in 1941;
it was almost solid swastikas inside and it was enormous; the photo shows
only a tiny part of it (click the image to see more views). After the US
Army pulled out of Germany in 1995, they kept the hospital to serve
casualties in all the wars they'd be having in the mideast but later that
role was taken over by the hospital in Landstuhl and the 97th is now the
American Consulate; the red crosses on the roof to ward off bombing attacks
dated from the Luftwaffe days and were still there until the early 2000s,
when they were painted over with light grey paint so you can still see where
they were (second image, from Google Maps).
Strassenbahn No.13
Nº13 schedule
Owing to its vastness, the hospital had its own internal
closed-circuit AFN "Bedside Network" station and I had the whole studio and
record library all to myself every Thursday evening; this was the highlight
of my radio career. I'd take the No.13 trolley after school to the hospital
— Raimundstraße to Marbachweg, last stop at the far end of the
Hauptfriedhof — eat dinner in the hospital snack bar, and then go up
to the studio. I played rhythm and blues from
late 1940s and early 50s plus a lot of jazz, and I also talked about
whatever I felt like and invited anybody who might want to stop by and chat
on the air. Since hospital workers were on duty and most patients were
bedridden, I mainly got mental patients which made for lively discussions!
I had no bosses, no supervisors, no reports to make, nothing. It was great
fun with no pay.
The Story Of
American Forces Network (AFN) (video), The Big Picture, Army Pictorial
Center. A 30-minute film from 1963 about the history of AFN in Europe; it
includes footage of the studio and record library where I worked in the
Höchst castle just outside of Frankfurt.
On The Air Over There, AFN Europe:
Part 2 The Castle Years, 29-minute video about AFN Frankfurt at the
Höchst castle... End of the War, Nürnburg trials, Berlin Airlift, Elvis,
Beatles, Berlin Wall, JFK (there are three other parts to this series).
Peter and I were watching one of his favorite movies recently (summer
2015), The Warriors (1979), in which one gang is chasing the members
of another gang all over the NYC in the middle of the night. I told Peter,
"you know, I had a night like that once", and described it to him. Peter
said I had to put the story in here so here it is… When I was in high
school in Frankfurt we used to go out drinking almost every night (not just
the guys, the girls too, but this night was just the guys, about four of
us). We went to random places, bars, Gasthauses… So we went in a bar
on a dark side street that was very dark inside, sat at the bar and were
drinking. One of us, Tom, goes to the bathroom. A bit later he comes out
and says, "Let's get outa here", and hurries us out. We're walking (maybe
staggering) down the block and suddenly a whole swarm of guys busts out of
the bar and runs at us, like maybe 20 guys. So we we start running too, and
they chase us through all the dark streets, yelling and cursing. Eventually
they catch us and they restrain me and the other guys except Tom, and they
beat the crap out of him, I mean REALLY… One ear was half torn off,
teeth missing, eyes swollen shut, face unrecognizable, blood everywhere…
(at least that's how I remember it). Then they leave. We take Tom in a
taxi to the dispensary (Army word for small clinic on the base). They sewed
him up, put bandages all over. Very painfully he explains what happened.
When he went in the bathroom, the guy at the next urinal made a play for his
parts so Tom clobbered him and left him on the floor. The place turned out
to be a gay bar, but we barely even knew what "gay" was!
Food and drink
Most of the German places we went to for drinking also served food,
sometimes just Butterbrot (chewy German black bread with unsalted butter or
cheese), or soups… Bouillon mit Ei (chicken broth with a raw egg in
it) or my favorite, Ochsenschwanzsuppe: thick, dark, and rich oxtail soup
served with chewy Brötchen — white bread rolls but much tastier and
crustier and chewier than American ones. And for a whole meal there was
Wienerschnitzel, Jägerschnitzel (which is Wienerschnitzel with mushrooms and
gravy), Zigeunerschitzel (spicy "Gypsy" Schnitzel), Leberknödel (liver
dumplings), Rouladin (flank steak rolls with stuffing), roast
chicken... these would be served with a delicious kind of subtle marinated
"soft" salad that I've never seen anywhere else, and potatoes (or in
Schwaben, Spätzle, where also in the Weinstuben, Westfälischer or
Schwarzwälder ham would be served with the wine). Also in some places you
could get a charcouterie that was an assortment of meats and sausages on a
bed of Sauerkraut soaked in champagne (Mommie had that once at the Goldener
Hecht in Heidelberg and it made her very silly).
On the street there were Bratwurst vendors, flame-grilled Bratwurst with
Brötchen and German mustard, and later on (when I was in
Army) there were a lot of Yugoslavian food stands and the things they
sold were called Ćevapčići
(phonetically chee-WOP-chi-chi) (Wikipedia)
and (phonetically) DZHI-vich, which were both super-spicy, I think this was
the first fiery-hot food I ever ate. And then besides these, there were
Chinese and Italian restaurants that were uniformly excellent. A sit-down
meal in a German restaurant never cost more than 4 Marks (one dollar) when I
lived there.
Waitress with twelve big beer steins
Henninger Bier Stein
Binding Bier Stein
German Gasthauses (Gasthäuser) served beer in half-liter and liter steins,
and serious beerhalls like Maier Gustl's
in Frankfurt and the much larger Hofbräuhaus in Munich also had
five and even ten liter steins. The waitresses could carry five or six
one-liter steins in each hand and they did this all night; it was pretty
amazing (see
video). At the Hofbräuhaus in Munich you could earn a 5-liter
or 10-liter pin if you drank that much in one sitting (I could have done
that, but only went there once, very briefly, and it was kind of a zoo).
Founded 1040 AD
Beer culture in Germany was unique. Each town or area made its own lager
beer with a distinct taste, following the Reinheitsgebot (Purity Law) that
dates from the early 1500s and says that beer may contain only water,
barley, and hops. Note: no preservatives, no chemicals, no flavorings. Of
course big cities might make several brands. There weren't nationwide
brands because the beer was unpasteurized and it might spoil before it
reached some distant destination by truck. Many German brewing companies
have been in business for hundreds of years, in some cases
a thousand years. When I lived
there, each bar, restaurant, and Gasthaus served only one kind of beer.
Besides lager, by the way, there was also a completely different thing
called Weizenbier, or wheat beer, served with lemon and usually found only
in Gasthauses frequented by old men; it was famous for causing fart storms
so Weizenbier establishments were not for the squeamish. The main Frankfurt
beers were Henninger, Binding, and Frankfurter Brauhaus, but others were to
be found.
Mr. Thompson
Mr. Thompson teaching Russian
Reading Pravda
Gift from the class
When I was in 11th grade, a math and science teacher offered a brand-new new
Russian class, which I signed up for as soon as I heard about it. He had
taught himself Russian, I don't know how. It was the best class I ever had
in any school. His name was John Thompson, he was a WWII and D-Day Normandy
Beach veteran, Battle of the Bulge, etc, something he never mentioned and I
found out only 50 years later. He had a great fondness for the Soviet
Union, probably owing to their part in the victory over Germany and he had
us learn and sing Soviet songs, listen to Radio Moscow, and read Pravda
(and, for fun, Krokodil). Bear in mind, this was in a US Army school! We
had no textbook; he typed out the lessons on Russian and English typewriters
and mimeographed them, even painstakingly adding two-part harmony sheet
music in the case of the songs, such as
Полюшке
поле: the marching song of the Red Army.... by
hand, with the aid of only a ruler. He liked to
talk about the USSR… One day he said, "In the USA we have a lot
Полюшке
поле
Берёза
Метелица
rights, but the Soviet Union has one right that we have never had: the right
to work!" I had to think about that for 30-40 years before I got it. Bill
Fedor ('62) tells me that the next year (1961-62) "Russian II at FAHS
ushered in Nina Potopova's Russian I and II textbooks that Mr Thompson
purchased in Düsseldorf for DM4.20 each." Thanks to Bill for the song
scans!
Jerry's mug
Jerry Jacobs (front)
John Thompson was so enthusiastic and he worked so hard; he loved what he
was doing. Besides Russian he also taught physics, math, biology, and
photography. True, he was kind of a hardass (and he looked the part, like a
Prussian)... He didn't appreciate kids fooling around in class; he could
throw chalk at anybody in the room and hit them square in the forehead. One
night my friend Jerry Jacobs and I stumbled out of a bar, literally
falling-down drunk. Mr. Thompson happened to be walking by just then and he
helped us get home like he was our best friend. The people in the picture
are Jerry, Johnny Johnston (alias DJ, "Drunkard Johnston", a self-bestowed
nickname), and me in the photo booth at the PX. The color picture shows the
Binding Bier mug from Little Maier Gustl's that Jerry sent me for old times'
sake shortly after I rotated but after 60-some years of washing now it's
just a dull gray mug, no logo.
Mr. Thompson left FHS in 1962 and died in 2009, about ten years
before he could have seen
these Youtube videos, which I know he'd have
enjoyed as much as I do!
Family Trips while living in Frankfurt
One good thing my Dad did while we were in Germany was to take us on lots of
trips. As a teenager in high school I was kind of embarrassed to be
traveling around with my parents, but in retrospect I'm glad we did.
Our first trip was to Berlin in early 1959 which was in part still in ruins,
like you can see in movies
like The
Big Lift and
One
Two Three. The flight to Berlin was on a Douglas DC-4
(4-engine propeller driven airliner, the
civilian version of the C54 cargo plane used in WWII and in the airlift).
This was my first plane ride. I remember looking out the window and
thinking East Germany looks the same as West Germany, just a lot of farms and
little towns. But traveling across or over East Germany was a tricky
business, there could be no deviation from the approved route. So…
At some point the pilot came back into the passenger cabin and saw Dennis,
who was a cute little 9-year-old, and asked him if he would like to fly the
plane. Dennis said OK, my Dad said OK, so the pilot took him into the
cabin. Next thing we knew this huge aircraft was peeling off to the
right and in a steep dive. Then it recovered and the pilot, his face
drained of blood, brought Dennis back to his seat without a word.
Landing at Tempelhof airport in Berlin was an adventure in itself. The
airport was in the middle of the city and as the plane makes its descent
there are apartment buildings on both sides, sometimes so close you can
see in the windows. Tempelhof (which dated from 1927 and claimed to be the
world's oldest operating commercial airport) lasted until 2008, when it was
closed and converted to a "green space".
Helmstedt checkpoint 1963
For the record, it was also possible to go to Berlin by auto. You could
cross into East Germany at Helmstedt/Marienborn (the
nearest to Frankfurt of several crossing sites) and take a special route
that was totally unmarked; if you lost your way you'd be detained. Another
way to go was by a sealed train like the one Lenin rode in. Anyway while in
Berlin I took some pictures with my Brownie Hawkeye that are now famous from
having been published in several books, including a photo similar to the first
one below left but no family (obviously I didn't take that one because I'm
in it).
Brandenburg Gate 1959
East Berlin 1959 (pre-Wall)
Reichstag 1959 (burned out since 1933)
Soviet War Memorial
Memorial inscription
Red Army soldiers
1936 Olympic Stadium
Olympic Stadium Eagle
In Berlin I saw the not-yet-walled-off
Brandenburg Gate, the burnt-out Reichstag, the 1936 Olympic Stadium (where the
swastikas had been chiseled out from under the eagles), the Soviet War
Memorial, and Spandau Prison where Rudolf Hess, Albert Speer, and Baldur von
Schirach were serving their Nürnberg sentences (Karl Dönitz had been
released several years before; Speer was released in 1966 and published
"Inside the Third Reich"; after Hess died in 1987, the prison was demolished
to prevent it becoming a shrine). I saw the bust of Nefertiti at the Berlin
museum. I crossed into East Berlin by myself because my father couldn't go
there and bought some snacks at a Trinkhalle. I paid with Deutschmarks
and got change in Ostmarks made of
aluminum. In the Stadium photo I'm standing where Hitler stamped his
feet when Jesse Owens won the 100 meters.
I was still in Germany when the Berlin wall went up, 13 August 1961. I was
riding in car on the Autobahn with some people (can't remember who or why),
the radio was tuned to AFN, there was a newsflash.
Berlin
1961-62, photos from Robert Paul, a Frankfurt Elementary schoolmate
of my brother Dennis, who visited Berlin in
1961 and again in 1962 with his family.
Stunde Null
(Zero Hour), early postwar Germany and Berlin, Wikipedia, accessed 25
February 2020.
Book: Hildegard
Knef, The
Gift Horse, McGraw-Hill (1971). Life in Berlin in the Nazizeit and
the early postwar: an intense, fascinating, and unique narrative. Out of
print; used copies can be found at Amazon, Alibris, and EBay. It's better
in the original German, if you can read it (and find it),
as Der
Geschenkte Gaul.
Victor Grossman, The Wall 30 Years Later, November 2019. Was
East Germany really as bad as all that?
Victor Grossman books,
a review by me of two books about East Germany by Victor Grossman.
Trümmerfilm
(Rubble films), Wikipedia, accessed 25 February 2020.
Film: Die
Die Mörder sind unter uns (1946), the first postwar German film and
the first Trümmerfilm (rubble film), shot in the Soviet Zone of Berlin and
starring Hildegard Knef and Ernst Wilhelm Borchert.
Film: The
Big Lift with Montgomery Clift and Cornell Borchers, about the Berlin
Airlift, filmed in the rubble of West and East Berlin in 1950. It was
originally going to star Hildegard Knef, but Borchers was substituted at
the last moment for reasons Knef relates in
her book.
Film: The
Man Between, a British rubble film starring James Mason, Claire Bloom,
and Hildegard Knef. Filmed mainly on location in East Berlin in 1953
and directed by Carol Reed (who also directed The
Third Man),
Film: One,
Two, Three with James Cagney and Horst Buchholz, filmed in
West and East Berlin in 1961, just before the Wall.
Joseph Kanon, The
Good German, Picador / Henry Holt and Company, 2001: 482 pages of total
immersion in Berlin just after the European war ended in 1945; see the New
York Times review. It was made into a film of
the same name in 2006 that looks like it was filmed on location in 1945
but that twists the plot and characters beyond recognition.
High in the Bavarian Alps, Berchtesgaden and
Obersalzberg where we saw the ruins of recently blown-up houses of
Hitler, Goering, and Bormann, along with their secret bunkers and tunnels,
Hitler's Kehlsteinhaus (Eagle's Nest), from there to Salzburg in Austria to
see Mozart's birthplace, with a stop in the salt mines that you enter by
sliding down a wooden ramp about a mile long.
Holland
Madurodam
The Venice of the North
Wooden shoes
Once my Mom took me and Dennis to Holland on a bus tour, that was the only
time she ever did anything like that, being in charge on her own. Aside
from that, Bonn (to see the birthplace of Beethoven, my dad's idol), plus
countless castles and museums all over Germany. Neverending castle visits
are pretty boring for teenagers. The Holland trip was kind of cool though;
click on the Madurodam picture to enlarge it and look at it until you notice
something odd.
About Holland… It was the first place I ever saw besides Army bases
that was totally diverse. The parks were full of children of all races
playing together, everybody intermarried, etc. I thought it must be the
most progressive, enlightened place on earth, and maybe it was. Until it
became the first capital of Islamophobia in the 2000s.
Evacuation Dry Run
Evacuation story 1960
Another trip we took was a mandatory one for every Army family: a practice
run for evacuating from Germany in case of a Soviet attack. You have to
leave at an appointed time and only then do you find out the route and
destination. It was on back roads, not the Autobahn, so it's hard to
imagine all the 100s of thousands of American families trying to get out at
once. Anyway we drove almost all the way to France on picturesque two-lane
country roads. Still, this was 1960 and we were always expecting to be
vaporized at any moment, hence my little Creative Writing story at right.
But our most epic trip — 2000 miles driving! — started with
Hamburg (300 miles from Frankfurt), where I took a famous picture (left) of
the street where the Beatles were playing before I had even heard of them
(the photo has since been used in some books*); this was in the
Reeperbahn district of Hamburg on the street called Die Große Freiheit. The
color photo was taken by my dad at the same time; I include not only because
it's clearer and higher resolution, but it's taken from an angle where the
sign for the Beatles' first Hamburg spot, the Indra Club*, is visible
towards the end of the street (click on the photo to enlarge it). They had
only started playing there a few days before. He took us to the Reeperbahn
not because of the Beatles, obviously, but because this is one of the places
he came for sex while in the Navy.
Then up through Denmark — Aarhus, Aalborg... In one of these
"Aa" towns we stayed at a small family hotel where my father told the owner
that I played the guitar which prompted him to give me a huge pile of
classical sheet music (with swastikas on every page).
From Hirtshals — the very
tippy-top of continental Western Europe — a four-hour ferry ride to
Kristiansand, Norway... It was dark and cold and foggy so my family stayed
inside but I was on deck at the rail, there was a girl there about my age
and we tried finding a common language for communicating... Not Danish, not
German, not English... Russian! A fleeting moment in life. We landed in
Kristiansand about 8:00pm on a Saturday night and the place was totally
dark, everybody was asleep, not even the street lights were on. No signs on
anything either. We had to bang on doors until somebody told us where to
find an inn, Mom remembered her Norwegian a little bit, then we banged on
the inn door and the grumpy inkeeper came down carrying a candle and wearing
one of of those sleeping costumes like in Dickens movies.
Frogner Park, Oslo
Frogner Park
We visited lots of spots in the countryside... Arendal, Brevik, Larvik,
Drammen... as well as Oslo, spent almost a whole day in Frogner Park
with the surreal statuary of Gustav Vigeland.
From Oslo to Sweden on the
only connecting road at the time, a one-lane dirt road through the mountains
and forests (at one point we met a car coming in the opposite direction, and
as there was no shoulder we had to back up several miles before it could
squeeze past us). In Sweden we visited Jönköping, Linköping, Örebrö,
Stockholm, and Nyköping (in that order I think) and spent a lot of Kroner
and Øre, and learned that if we got into an accident and were lying in the
ditch we had to holler "Hjeyelp, Hjeeyelp!", which Dennis and I did at every
road stop. In those days hotels in Europe were mostly pensions, family-run
small establishments and the rooms did not have baths; normally one bathroom
was shared by all the rooms on each floor, or even the whole building.
Furthermore, the shared bathroom didn't have a shower so bathing meant,
literally, taking a bath. Inevitably, other guests would be pounding on the
door the whole time.
Little Mermaid Copenhagen
The Scandinavia trip was an adventure… it was the first time I ate
yogurt, or even heard of it. Besides that the only good thing I had to eat
was big bowls of berries with milk — blackcurrants, lingonberries,
bright-orange cloudberries… One restaurant we went to, what they
brought to eat when we asked for a "sandwich" (the only word we could say
that they understood) was a slab of black bread with a raw whole fish on it,
with a raw egg over the fish and whole peppercorns embedded in the egg
slime. I couldn't imagine taking even one bite. My mom ate it though,
scales, bones, teeth, eyeballs, and all. It's how she grew up; she never
wasted food. Anyway, she liked it.
Stave Church
Stave Church side view
Houses with sod roofs
In Norway Mom mostly wanted to see the countryside because her family
were peasants and she heard lots of stories passed down from her
grandparents. We saw the wooden Gol stave church (stavkirke), built
about 1200; it impressed me a lot, it looks like cross between a Chinese
pagoda and huge Viking ship and it was amazing to me that wood can last so
long. Perhaps because stave churches are built without nails. Elsewhere we
saw houses with sod roofs (pictured), but not the ones with flowers and
shrubs growing on top and goats up there grazing, like she had always told me
about.
Oslo Olympic ski jump
Viking ship prow
Viking ship in Oslo
In Oslo we went to the Viking museum that had a perfectly preserved
Viking ship that had been found in the water just outside. And the 1952
Winter Olympic stadium where we went up to the top of the ski jump. On the
way back we stopped in Copenhagen for a few days, the only part I remember
is the Tivoli Gardens one night where I wandered around on my own and saw
the Delta Rhythm Boys performing in a tent. Speaking of vocal groups from
the 1930s and 40s, once I also saw the Ink Spots at the Frankfurt Officers
Club.
Ragna Thiis Stang, The Art of Gustav Vigeland in 48 Pictures,
The Vigeland Museum Series Number 1, Johan Grund Tanum,
Oslo (1957).
Other trips
Köln cathedral
Rothenburg
I have to hand it to my dad, he spared no expense nor effort to
take us everywhere. When I sat with him at his deathbed, it was the main
pride he had in his life. I had to agree with him. I can't even remember
all the other trips... Heidelberg, Köln (Cologne), Rothenburg (an ancient
walled city that people still live in)... Rothenburg was untouched by the
war, but Köln was flattened, all but the
cathedral, like Frankfurt. Of
course every cathedral we visited, we climbed up to the top on ancient stone
steps worn down smooth and contoured over the centuries. The photo of
Rothenburg is probably the most-photographed spot in all of Germany. There
was also a barely remembered trip to Switzerland, where there was some kind
of expo going on in Luzern.
A trip we did NOT take, my Dad's idea of "bonding"… He wanted to take
me to Villefranche to the brothel he frequented when he was a sailor in the
1930s. No thanks.
Leaving Germany
We were supposed to stay in Germany until I graduated from high school in
1962. But my dad was caught having an affair with a woman in his office and
we were sent back a year early, in June 1961. This was a terrible blow to
me, I loved living there, I had never been happier anywhere else. I really
did not like Arlington and knew I would like it even less after finding out
how much better life could be. I tried to convince him to leave me behind,
I could be a dorm student, but no dice.
Diane Sutton
I had to give up the Radio Club and my radio show at the hospital; I turned
it over to a friend, fellow FHS-er and Radio Club member Diane Sutton.
She was surprised and a little apprehensive but I took her along a few times
and showed her how to do everything, and she did it and she was fine.
On the SS America 1961
SS America today
Now it was our turn to rotate. We traveled back the same way we came,
on the SS America, but from Le Havre (France) this time instead of
Bremerhaven. We drove there, of course, from Frankfurt, stopping in Verdun
for lunch where I was surprised to find out my dad spoke French!
I don't think he ever studied it in school; he just picked it up from
prostitutes when his Navy ship's home port was in Villefranche in the 1930s.
Anyway, some of my Frankfurt friends were on the same ship and we got our
old band together and played in the
ballroom and people danced. The voyage was from July 14 to July 21, 1961.
Later years
I visited Frankfurt High in 1963 when I was in the Army stationed in
Kaiserslautern; nothing had changed and there were still people there I knew
(story in Army chapter).
Then again on a Sunday in 1975 with Judy on our belated honeymoon. The
school was open but nobody was there. We went in and wandered around;
everything was exactly the same except there was now a glassed-in computer
lab with
Teletypes connected to an
Interdata 7/16
minicomputer. The neighborhood was unchanged too, except the
Platenstraße buildings, once painted a variety of pastel colors, were all
white.
FHS lasted until 1995, five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and
the end of Cold War, when the US Army pulled out of the area and gave it all
back to Germany. The buildings at WAC Circle (PX, Commissary, snack bar,
etc) were torn down and the space is now occupied by the new Hessisches
Polizeipräsidium. The IG Hochhaus is now a campus of Goethe University.
Frankfurt High School is now the Phillipp-Holzmann Schule; its athletic
field survived until about 2020 when it became the site of the new Adorno
Gymnasium. The American housing areas except HiCoG are now occupied by
Germans, Turks, Greeks, Syrians, and other residents of Germany; the 3-story
buildings are pastel colors again but the
"redensified" ones are white. HiCoG houses
the American consular families.
References...
Farewell to Frankfurt,
Karl Weisel, Soldiers, The Official U.S. Army Magazine,
Volume 50, Number 1 (January 1995), pp.22-23.
Back in Arlington after 2½ years in
Germany, our house was not vacated yet. We had to stay with my dad's
Aunt Bess and Uncle Bill in Maryland for a week or two while the tenant
moved out. The only thing I remember about that is I read the entire works
of Poe because they were in the bedroom where I slept, and I figured out how
to play "There is a Rose in Spanish Harlem" on the piano in the basement.
Then we moved back into our old house on N. 23rd Street. The tenant while
we were gone was a Marine sergeant who had painted the entire inside olive
drab… Including even the fireplace bricks. My dad scraped it all off
and put it back like it was.
Yorktown high school 1962
Me, yearbook photo
I had my senior year at Yorktown HS in Arlington, antiseptic,
suburban, conformist, patriotic, segregated. I did not like
Yorktown or Arlington or the suburbs one bit and cut class and got drunk all
the time, but still managed to do OK on my SATs (despite having a huge
hangover) and graduated on time in 1962. YHS was kind of posh and elite
compared to my Army high school; one measure of this is the Vietnam body
count for each school for classes up to
1962: Frankfurt: 19, Yorktown: 0.
Of course that's a bit skewed since FHS is older but if even if we just look
at the class of the 1962 it's still 4 and 0. Yorktown graduates were
much more likely to go straight to college, which is a draft exemption.
More about this below.
The only good thing about that year was the music: the Shirelles, the
Marvelettes, Mary Wells, Jimmy Reed, Ike and Tina Turner, the Isley
Brothers… It was kind of a renaissance of Black music after the
drought that started in 1957 when 1940s-50s R&B era ended and there was
only cheesy pop music for a few years (and jazz, of course, but that's
another story).
1953 Buick (nicer than Ludwig's)
Almost all the kids at Yorktown had their own cars and drove to school, so I
rode around in cars a lot that year. Ludwig was not at Yorktown (he was
blacklisted and had to go to another school far away), but he had a 1953
Buick, which was like tank. A guy named Pete Washburn was generally
Pete Washburn
acknowledged as the coolest guy at Yorktown and for some reason he thought I
was cool too. Graham Chapman was clone of him. He had a 1950 Ford and
would pick me up in the morning, we'd stop at a diner and have coffee and
hash browns for breakfast which probably made my Mom feel bad because my
whole life she always made us a hot breakfast. A couple times Mom made us a
special breakfast so we wouldn't go to the diner. Pete pretended to be like
a homeless drifter, nobody knew anything about him. He finally showed me
where he lived, a mansion!
1939 Ford Coupe hotrod
Customized 1950 Ford similar to Pete's
The preferred cars for cool guys were the 1950 Ford and the 1939 Ford coupe,
both heavily customized. The Ford had to be painted with grey primer (matte
finish) and have its front grille removed, plus had to be either "raised" or
"lowered" (big wheels in front, small ones in back, or vice-versa). A
special glasspack muffler was required that produced a sort of
Harley-Davidson sound.
Optionally it could also be "chopped and channeled", "bored and stroked",
and/or "rolled and pleated". I never was totally sure what things were but
the first two have to do with the engine, the latter with the upholstery.
The 1939 Ford was always painted Candyapple Red and had its hood off so the
souped-up motor was exposed. Drag races were common, and some guys even
raced at real dragstrips like Manassas Speedway, we went there sometimes to
watch. At the speedway, the mufflers came totally off and the cars were as
loud as 747s. Unlike a lot of my friends, I never learned to be an auto
mechanic or a car customizer. Incidentally when my dad finally advertised
his beloved 1950 Ford for sale, it was bought by a drag racer.
Ludwig was the bad boy of his family, the other three (Nick, Carole, and
Maria) were great successes in whatever they did, but Ludwig always screwed
up and got in trouble. We were inseparable during 12th grade, because we
both had a compulsion to be drunk all the time. We'd drive to DC, buy a
case of beer with false ID, and then drive around Arlington drinking it and
throwing cans out the window until we got sick. Even then, Ludwig would
keep driving and drinking, door open, puking his guts out on the street
while still driving the car. That's how miserable we both were that year.
Once Ludwig's mom loaned him her tiny little red Renault, I don't remember
why. We bought some big 40-ounce bottles of Country Club Malt Liquor
(high-alcohol beer) and were driving around downtown DC after we had already
gone through several of the bottles, looking for a parking space. I saw one
and pointed it out. The next thing I knew we had crashed into the back of
the car in front of us… And it was a Police car! And our car was
full of empty beer bottles! Just then a street guy comes up and says "Give
me the bottles", and we did, so by the time the cops came to the car we were
clean. But the car was totaled. Renaults have their engine in back and
their trunk in front, so we pretty much just squashed the whole front of the
car under the back of the police car, which didn't even have a scratch.
They took us to the station, called Ludwig's mother; Lud was released into
her custody and was in the doghouse for the rest of his life. But since we
weren't caught drinking, there were no criminal charges.
Btw, Maria Carrera was my brother's best friend that year, they were very
close. When Dennis was dying, my dad used his special powers to track her
down at a commune in the mountains of Colorado so she could call him
in the hospital. I don't know what happened to her after that.
Tops Drive-In
Anyway the Arlington car culture was pretty much what you see in movies like
American Graffiti and Remember the Titans, all the males
"cruising" around all the time looking for girls or parties or whatever, and
also pulling into Tops Drive‑In on Lee Highway, one of those places
where you park your car and order stuff through a microphone mounted next to
the space, and girls (on roller skates?) bring your order to you on a tray
that clips to the car window, to the tunes of Sam Cooke, Gary US Bonds, Ike
and Tina Turner, Gene Chandler, Little Eva, the Contours...
Incidentally, the last fight I was involved in was in 12th grade in
Arlington, when my band (but not me personally) got in trouble with John
Glenn, the astronaut and future senator, who had just returned from
America's first space mission. It was in all the papers, you can still find
it in Google (it was February or March, 1962). I guess Peter will want the
whole story so…
Our band had a gig at a junior-high-school girl's birthday party
in her house in suburbs. Our singer (don't recall his name but
he was just like Sean Penn) was quite a handful, and this time he
brought a fifth of whisky and was taking big slugs out of it in
front of everybody; I guess the parents were too terrorized to
say anything. But the rest of us were drinking beer at a pretty
good clip too, but more discretely; we had stored it outside in
the snow to hide it from the parents. About 9:00pm John Glenn
shows up, he's picking up his daughter who is at the party; he
sees what is going on — first the beer cans littering the front
yard, then our singer chugging down whisky between verses — and
throws us out. We didn't even get paid!
Early 1960s Chevrolet Impala convertible
Who John Glenn is
Our piano player had the use of his parents' car, a 21-foot long bright red
Chevrolet Impala convertible. So we were cruising around looking for
something else to do and we found another junior-high-school party in the
parking lot of a church so we pulled in and started playing music. A strange
thing I remember is that on the far side of the parking lot, on top of a
hill, a house was burning down, and we improvised some kind of creepy
apocalyptic accompaniment. What can I say, we were teenage boys. We were
still drinking and throwing beer cans around and who should pull into the
parking lot but John Glenn! To pick up his other child.
Our singer who was blind drunk by this time and pissed off about not being
paid, when Glenn approached us, the singer tried to punch him in face, but
Glenn deflected the punch and spun the guy around and laid him out over the
car hood, like a cop would do. I don't recall exactly what happened after
that; we weren't arrested or anything, I think we just left. But the next
morning it was on the news, and in the papers, and it was in the next issue
of Time Magazine. Drunken Teenage Punks Attack America's Greatest Hero.
And we were in Big Trouble for the rest of the year. Sometimes I even
thought we were being followed, but who knows; it's not inconceivable that
my dad put a tail on us.
Bob Engs 1962
Williamsburg windmill
Bob Engs had been my friend in Frankfurt in 1959-60. His dad had been an
Army Captain but was "RIF'd" down to Sergeant, a very humiliating experience
but he stuck it out so he could retire. Bob came back a year before me; his
dad was stationed in Fort Eustis VA, near Jamestown and Williamsburg and
Newport News and they lived on base. I went there in summer of 1961 before
school started and spent a couple weeks with them. Bob had a summer job at
Colonial Williamsburg in the windmill, I'd go with him and spent the days
grinding dry hominy into grits for the tourists, even though I didn't have a
colonial costume like Bob did; I was like Bob's apprentice from the future.
Each morning we'd turn the mill around to face the wind (it was on a pivot)
and then unfurl the sails so the huge "propeller" (sweeps) could turn in the
wind and drive the massive millstone, but we used smaller muscle-powered
wheels (hundreds of years old and not exactly lightweight) to do the actual
grinding.
Later that year, Mom and I played a trick on my dad, we invited Bob and his
family to our house for dinner, which was a truly surreal experience, when
my dad saw them he almost had a heart attack but he behaved himself while
they were there. But afterwards, you can imagine. Later Bob went to
Princeton (I saw him there after I got out of Army) and he went on to become
a well-known professor of Black History; you can look him up in Google
(Robert F. Engs) and in the Books section of Amazon. I went to his wedding,
and later Mommie and I went to visit him in NJ and it was a very strange
experience, he was mean to both Mommy and to his own wife (a Black woman).
I never saw him again, but he got in touch with me by email in 2008 to
apologize and we exchanged a few cordial emails, and then he died.
High-school graduation night Ludwig and I and a couple other guys went to
Ocean City MD in Ludwig's 1953 Buick for a week.
In those days Ocean City was just a strip of seedy white wooden boarding
houses alongside a 2-lane road, with the beach on the other side of the
road. Every house had a porch on both the first floor and the second floor,
like houses in the French Quarter of New Orleans; we had the upper floor
porch, where we'd sit and drink beer for breakfast before going to the beach
to drink more beer.
Each day we'd drink until we passed out, wherever we happened to be. One
morning I woke up on the beach half buried in sand with a bad sunburn on one
side of my body but not the other. So that was high school.
Having written all of the above, I looked at my Yorktown yearbook for the
first time in 50-some years and found some surprisingly affectionate
inscriptions from several girls I knew including one — Elaine Neam
— who I had known since 7th grade and who I always liked a lot, but
aside from seeing Chloris Kranich* occasionally that year, and a few other
random encounters, I was way too busy drinking (i.e. too much of a
jerk) to have a real girlfriend. Anyway I was just about the only one in
school who didn't have a car, or even access to one, so not exactly a great
catch in the suburban car culture.
But if somehow I had married Elaine instead of
Mommy, Uncle Pete's children would not be the
only ones in the family who were half Lebanese!
*
Chloris was one of Pam's fellow-cheerleaders at
Frankfurt High School in Germany who, like me (but unlike Pam), had rotated
back to northern Virginia ..."to live in Fairfax in 1961. Graduating from
J.E.B Stuart High School, miss Kranich was ... a member of the civil rights
committee and ... organizer of the movement to send ... books to Negroes in
Prince Georges County"** [which had shut down its public schools rather than
integrate them]. Neither one of us could drive so we got together when we
could thanks to friends who drove us. Only when the Internet came along
20-30 years later and old FHSers were getting back in touch did I learn that
she had killed herself in 1965, at home on summer break after her Junior
year at Antioch College in Ohio. I never knew why. This was three years
after we had last seen each other and while I was in the Army in Stuttgart.
**
Northern Virginia Sun, August 10, 1965, p.2: Obituaries.
Vietnam
Art Goldtein
There was a Class of '62 reunion in 2023 (the 61st, I didn't go). One of
the organizers, Art Goldstein, put together a list of classmates who had
died, which included some of my long-ago friends. I wondered if any of
them had been killed in the Vietnam War, since alumni of my previous high
school,
Frankfurt High School in West Germany,
have a list of "fallen
eagles" that shows a total 27 Vietnam deaths from all classes 1950-1968.
But nobody knew about Yorktown.
Trudy Harlow
So I looked up each name in the 1962 yearbook and then also at
VirtualWall.org (the
online list of names from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in DC). There were
8 name matches, but the ages weren't right and/or the Virtual Wall photos
did not match the yearbook ones. But then my YHS classmate Trudy Harlow
wondered if any had gone to Vietnam and returned safely, only to die later
from Agent Orange exposure or other war-related cause. There's a database
for that too: the In Memory
Honor Roll. But this too turned up nobody in our class.
Lynda Van Devanter
But there was a schoolmate from Yorktown class of '65,
Lynda Van Devanter, a sophomore when we were
seniors. After graduation she trained as a nurse, volunteered for
Vietnam duty, then worked at the 71st Evacuation Hospital in Pleiku
(and later in Qui Nhon), and returned with PTSD. In 1983 she wrote a book
about it —
Home
Before Morning — on which the TV
series China Beach
was based, and devoted her life to women Vietnam veterans with PTSD until
she died in 2002 from Agent Orange poisoning.
The CIA
After Ocean Beach I came home I started work at the summer job my Dad got
for me at CIA headquarters in Langley VA, I guess it was an attempt at
bonding on his part. Every time the CIA is in a movie or TV show they
show the entrance lobby with the CIA mosaic on the floor. I walked
over that thing every day for three months. Dad drove me to work a few
times but I told him I'd rather take the bus because it dropped me off right
at the entrance, whereas his parking space was way off in Siberia because he
was so totally in the shithouse.
Some interesting things I can tell you about working there… All the
many long hallways had little concession stands at intervals for newspapers,
snacks, and coffee. The people who ran them were not only blind, but
verifiably blind, with empty eye sockets. I'm not kidding. It was so they
couldn't see or identify anybody who worked or had business there, and they
weren't allowed to cover the sockets, so the covert people could be
confident they weren't being seen. Another thing I remember was the
library… Maybe not the only library, but the one I saw contained
nothing but spy and science fiction novels and comic books; presumably
people who qualify to be spies are not all that imaginative, so that's where
they went to get ideas. My Frankfurt friend
Tom McCaffrey showed it to me; after high school he went straight to a
full-time entry-level job at the CIA.
(He got married while he was still in
high school and lived in an apartment with his wife, Sara, pretty surreal
to me. Btw, Tom was also a heavy-duty Catholic despite his rowdy ways, and
one time "made" me come to Mass with him.)
At the CIA I worked in a project where teenage children of employees —
about 30 of us — were to go through all the CIA's files (on paper in
those days, in manila folders, in thousands of black filing cabinets) as the
first step in converting them to microfilm. We weren't supposed to read or
talk about the documents but of course we did. The sad thing is I can't
remember much, just little snatches, like something about a beheaded frogman
in NY harbor… One thing I do recall, though, was that at least half
of all the file cabinets were about "Red China". I also recall finding out
that the magazine US News and World Report was a CIA operation; it was in
the orientation film.
As to the documents themselves, they were mainly typed on typewriters,
originals or carbon copies, generally written by agents reporting on
activies or incidents or meetings or whatever, often discussing at length
the extent to which a given source could be considered trustworthy. Once
the report was completed, it was sent to (let's call it) the cataloging
department where analysts would check for names or places or terms
(i.e. keywords) that should be indexed, like in a university library card
catalog subject index. The cataloger would mark each such word or phrase
with a diagonal stroke of a color pencil (let's say red). Then the document
would go to the indexing department. Wherever there was a stroke mark, the
indexer would record the word or phrase in a master index (I don't know if
it was cards, or what, it might even have been "computerized"), and then
cross the stroke with a (let's say) blue color pencil, making an X, to
indicate it was indexed (the colors were indeed red and blue but I don't
recall which was which). The result was a huge index on a scale similar to
Google; if you looked up a given word or phrase, you'd get a list of all the
files where it appeared, but I don't know the details of how this was done,
or what the list looked like, or how the information was retrieved, but I
imagine it was like the Butler Library stacks at Columbia University; you'd
ask for a document and someone would deliver it to you.
Creative stamping
Well, none of that was my job, it's just stuff I picked up while doing it.
My job was to decide whether each document could be microfilmed, based on
its condition. If so, it went in the good pile. If not, I had a big stamp,
NOT SUITABLE FOR MICROFILM, wham!, and put it in the bad pile. All of us
did the same thing all day every day. It was pretty monotonous so we made
it more fun by making up silly songs and singing them while stamping the
documents in rhythm ("Not suitable for microfilm, not suitable for
microfilm, not suitible, hardly suitable, it's indisputable, not suitable
for microfilm!").
So it was actually kind of fun. This was before I understood the real
business of the CIA and what the USA was up to all over the world…
That would come 3 years later. Anyway we got to be friends, got together
after work, had parties and adventures, including a big cookout sponsored by
the job. Another reason it was fun is that it was totally integrated,
unlike everything else (except military bases) in Virginia including my high
school, so I felt more at home there, like being back in Frankfurt.
I had a Top Secret clearance as a result of that job — even higher
than Top Secret apparently, because there was a special one called KAPOK
(you can't even find it in Google) — and then later in the Army
it got me assigned to my first computer job, in Stuttgart — I wouldn't
have got the job without the clearance, and my life would have been totally
different. It also qualified me to burn Top Secret trash in a big
crematorium. But then when I applied to be discharged from the Army as a
conscientious objector, that was the end of my security clearance.
My entrance ticket
Clinton meets Kennedy
Robert Kennedy's house, Hickory Hill
(Back at the CIA...) One day they took us to meet President Kennedy in the
White House Rose Garden, where he gave us a little pep talk about public
service. It was called the White House Seminar. Maybe there's a picture of
it somewhere, like the picture of Bill Clinton meeting him under the same
circumstances. We only went to the first event, not the others. I also saw
Robert Kennedy all the time; the bus to the CIA went past his house, Hickory
Hill, on Old Dominion Drive — a grand Virginia mansion with horses,
etc; the kids were always out cavorting with the animals. I earned $600
that summer, which paid for my one-and-only semester at the University of Virginia.
(Btw other presidents I saw included Eisenhower [at a Washington Senators
game at Griffith
Stadium] and Nixon [at an antiwar demonstration in DC where we threw
stuff at his car]… I didn't see Truman but I saw the bullet holes
where some Puerto Rican separatists had tried to shoot him a few hours
earlier; Uncle Pete showed me, this was November 1, 1950.)
University of Virginia...
University of Virginia campus - this part hasn't changed since 1819;
Edgar Alan Poe lived in one of the dorms on the left.
I applied to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville (the
"Harvard of the South") in 1962 with little hope of getting in — and
without applying anywhere else — but both Ludwig and I were admitted.
Like my other Virginia schools it was segregated. Except for four (4) token
Blacks who had private corner rooms in each of four dorms. Nobody else had
a private room. UVA was beautiful to look at, designed by Thomas Jefferson,
whose house looked over it from above, and built by slaves. When I went to
UVA in Fall 1962 it was very much the same as it was when it opened in 1819;
now it's all full of ugly modern buildings. At UVA the college
(undergraduate school) was all-male until 1970.
Charlottesville in 1962
Charlottesville was a typical dusty, poor Black rural Virginia one-street
small town. The bus station was festooned with "White" and "Colored" signs
on waiting rooms, bathrooms, and water fountains. UVA students hardly ever
went into town except to buy liquor. Since they weren't old enough to do
that, there was an old Black guy who stood outside the liquor store all day,
when he saw white boys coming he made a special kind of slow semicircular
wave with a Cheshire-cat smile, like a 1930s cartoon character I can't think
of right now; they'd give him the money and he'd buy the booze for them.
The bar that students went to, the Cav, was not in Charlottesville but down
the road a ways in the other direction, maybe a mile's walk. It was a huge
cavernous chaotic place, like being in a full-time riot. It had the best
hamburgers on earth but the beer, of course, was 3.2 since everybody was
under age, so you had to drink a lot of it.
The area around Charlotteville was a different story: tweedy country gentry
with gigantic white-fenced horse farms with manicured lawns and mile-long
driveways. At some point I suppose they decided that Black Charlottesville
was a blot that had to be erased and in the late 1960s it was bulldozed.
Now it's an upscale hip and trendy destination, suitable home for the
Harvard of the South. Up the road there was another town just like it
except no university: Boston, Virginia, on Route 29: all Black, unpaved, and
dirt poor. I can find no trace of it now but there's another Boston on
Route 522 (I think many of the routes and highways have been renumbered
and/or renamed since 1962).
UVA serpentine wall*
At UVA, everybody was supposed to be in a fraternity. Each
fraternity had its own house (mansion, really), complete with slaves.
Seriously, cooks and porters and maids and janitors who descended from the
slaves originally owned by each fraternity. There was a huge party every
night in every fraternity with kegs of beer and live music usually performed
by Black groups from town who made music like the Isley Brothers ("Shout")
or the Contours ("Do You Love Me"); one of the groups called itself (no
kidding) Ten Screaming Niggers. At a fraternity for medical students,
instead of beer they filled a bathtub with pure medical alcohol and frozen
lime juice, it was called Green Goddamns. Quite literally everybody was
drunk all the time. It was too much for even me; this might have been the
beginning of the end of my heavy drinking. I was the only one who didn't
want to be in a fraternity. I mentioned this to computing pioneer
John
Backus, who went to UVA 20 years earlier; just like me, he didn't get
through the first year and went in the Army; he said the drinking
culture was exactly the same in the early 1940s.
*
Serpentine wall, unique feature of the UVA campus, a clever idea of
Thomas Jefferson that allows a standalone brick wall to be one brick thick,
instead of two or more, without falling over.
Aside from fraternity parties, there were also occasional mixers with girls
bussed in from nearby schools like RMWC (Randolf-Macon Women's College),
Mary Washington, Sweet Briar... I vaguely recall some mixers but no
details. Also, although UVA was all-male, there was a nursing school on
campus with its own (girls') dormitory, target for constant raids and pranks
by the male students, no letup.
Cuban Missile Crisis 1962
I shared a tiny dorm room with the most obnoxious person who ever lived.
Anyway I really was not ready for college and missed most of my classes. To
add to the dysfunction, the Cuban missile crisis happened while I was there;
nobody went to class, we all sat around listening to the radio; we thought
we were gonna die any minute.
It wasn't all bad though; one thing that impressed me about UVA was the
food. There were many places on campus to eat ranging from big dining halls
that seemed more like expensive restaurants with plush comfy booths, to
Army-base-like snack bars with juke boxes, to underground candle-lit caverns
where folk music was performed. The food was uniformly excellent. In fact,
I believe UVA was where I first tasted real butter; I couldn't get
enough of it.
But aside from the food UVA really was no fun. The professors (all but one)
were the snotty aristocratic kind who didn't even try to teach, only to
impress us with how smart and sophisticated they were and what stupid
bufoons we were. The students themselves were obnoxious privileged white
boys who only wanted to party. UVA itself was pretty brutal, its policy was
to flunk out 50% of the freshman class. I dropped out after one semester.
I had paid my tuition and all expenses with the $600 I had earned in my
summer job. While at UVA I saw Peter Paul & Mary, and also Andrés
Segovia, who gave concerts in the gym. Also while at UVA, a guy taught me
the Travis pick so it wasn't a total waste. Plus at the last minute when I
was about to graduate from GS at Columbia and they were hassling me about
some credits, I was able to transfer the ones I had earned at UVA in the few
courses I didn't fail (all my grades there but one were F's or A's). I also
had some credits from the University of Maryland extension in Germany, where
I took some night classes in the Army.
Wendy Sibbison 1967
The most important thing that happened at UVA is that I met Richard Lamborne
("Head") and his girlfriend Wendy Sibbison, who was still in high school in
Arlington but would come to see Richie on weekends. It was because of Wendy
that I wound up in New York and at Columbia, and that I met Judy, and
therefore that you guys exist. As I explain in a later
chapter. But briefly, Wendy broke off with Richie eventually and she
and I corresponded the whole time I was in the Army, and by the time I got
out she was across the street at Barnard and pretty much the only one I
wanted to see and I went straight from from Fort Hamilton to her dorm. We
were never "together", but we were close for many years.
A New Generation
In Virginia in 1961-62, I began to sense the stirrings of something new...
the early beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement, the Nuclear Disarmament
movement, and early opposition to the "situation" in Vietnam. It came to me
mainly through music; folk music at first, then popular music: artists like
Peter, Paul, and Mary ("Cruel War" "Where Have All the Flowers Gone", and
later, "The Great Mandella", about a war resister, as well as freedom songs
like "If Had a Hammer"); Bob Dylan ("Blowing in the Wind", "The Times They
Are A'Changin'", "Masters of War", "With God on Our Side",...); Joan Baez
("Birmingham Sunday", "No Nos Moverán", "Freedom", "Kumbaya", "There but for
Fortune", "Where Are You Now My Son", "Saigon Bride", ...); Martha and the
Vandellas ("I Should Be Proud"), The Staples Singers ("Freedom Highway",
"Long Walk to D.C.", "Washington, We're Watching You", many more), Phil Ochs
("What Are You Fighting For", "I Ain't Marching Any More", "Vietnam", many
more), Buffy Sainte-Marie ("Universal Soldier"), Crosby Stills Nash and
Young ("Ohio"),... Odetta, Nina Simone, Bob Marley, George Harrison,
Joni Mitchell, The Kinks, Tom Paxton, Richie Havens, Sam Cooke, Edwin Starr,
Kris Kristofferson, The Byrds, Country Joe and the Fish, Marvin
Gaye, Aretha Franklin, Jimmy Cliff, Ringo Starr, Cat Stevens, John Lennon,
The Doors, and on and on — many of these artists covering each others'
songs or performing them together at antiwar and civil rights rallies and
demonstrations, sometimes joined by performers from our parents' generation
like Josh White, Barbara Dane, Pete Seeger (who, with Woody Guthry and the
Almanac Singers and the Weavers pioneered protest songs in the 1940s-50s),
Marlene Dietrich ("Sag Mir Wo die Blumen Sind"), and posthumously, Billie
Holiday ("Strange Fruit"). It seemed like my whole generation was rising
against war, racism, poverty, and misery and that as soon as the young took
over, the world would finally be fixed. Anyway I remember being at UVA
during the Cuban Missile crisis, sitting around with Ludwig, Head, and some
others expecting the atomic holocaust to start any minute while listening to
songs like "Cruel War" with a kind of optimism for the future if we could
just get through the next few days. The artists and songs of the early
sixties brought millions of young people into the broad social movements for
peace and justice that lasted into the Seventies.
Listen
to The
Cruel War, it's beautiful and touching, moreso in restrospect, with
hundreds of thousands of us about to be drafted and sent to the meatgringer
in Vietnam (sorry if Youtube bombards you with ads, or the link stops
working, but that's life in the XXI Century). Another almost heartbreaking
video is of Bob Dylan
and Joan Baez singing "With God on Our Side" at at the 1963 Newport
Jazz festival
— it was so hopeful and optimistic, as if it would make a difference
.
The two of them, along with Peter Paul and Mary, Odetta, Mahalia Jackson,
and Marion Anderson sang at the March on Washington... despite the sound
system having been destroyed by saboteurs the night before and hastily
rebuilt by the Army Corps of Engineers that morning.
In the end, of course, the saboteurs won. In a few short years King was
dead, not to mention Malcom X and both Kennedys; a full-scale
near-genocidal war raging in Vietnam, Freda Payne pleading
Bring the Boys
Home. Half a century later, nothing much has changed except
the technology that allows the USA to kill countless people overseas without
drafting hundreds of thousands Americans to do the dirty work in person.
I was in the Army from February 6, 1963, to February 2, 1966.
My dad was furious when I dropped out of UVA, I thought he was
going to kill me, literally. I had really had enough of him so without
telling anybody, I went and joined the Army, and that was the last time I
ever saw my family together. I joined the Army because I knew I would be
drafted anyway, but if I enlisted I could pick where they sent me. And I
picked Germany. Actually it was a bit more complicated… if you
enlisted you could pick an overseas AREA (Asia or Europe) and the BRANCH
(Infantry, Artillery, or Armor) and so, knowing that all the Armored units
in Europe were in Germany, I picked Armor and Europe. For my dogtags I had
to put a religion, so I put Sodothic (a made-up religion) on one, and Taoist
on the other (compare with my father's WWII
dogtags). The other thing with the dogtags is my P-38, explained
below. Hey, didn't I get dogtags made for you guys once
at the Army exhibit at the Addison County Fair in Vermont? (I was 48
years old and they tried get me to re-up!)
Anyway, 1961-62 was just a big gap, a wasteland. I hated Virginia, the
cliquishness, the segregation, my school, the suburbs, the car culture,
everything. I was still angry that my dad had screwed up and got us kicked
out of Germany a year early and all I really wanted was to go back, and I
did. Pretty amazing my plan actually worked, I might have wound up in
Vietnam, which in early 1963 I had barely heard of.
Fort Holabird had a Sphinx
Fort Holabird, Maryland
At the beginning of February I visited a nearby Army recruiting office to
discuss my options, then a couple days later, very early in the morning, I
took a WV&M bus to K Street in DC and then a Greyhound from DC to
Baltimore; had breakfast in a diner on Broadway with a guy I met on the bus
who was also enlisting, then we took a city bus to Dundalk...
Physical exam, signed the papers, took the oath at Fort Holabird*,
6 February 1963
Reception center at Fort Jackson SC (near Columbia) - about a week
Basic training at Fort Gordon GA (near Augusta) - 8 weeks
Company B, 2nd Batallion, 1st Infantry Regiment
(where I saw Cubans training for a second invasion that never happened**),
Military Occupational Specialty: 111 (Infantry)
A week's leave where I traveled around visiting people and spent
a night in jail.
Reconnaisance (scout) training at Fort Knox KY (near Louisville) - 8 weeks
New MOS: 112 (Cavalry Scout) Took an overnight bus from DC to Louisville
that went through West Virginia on 2-lane Route 50 through the Appalachian
mountains to Cincinnati and from there to Louisville on a highway.
It was either at Fort Gordon or Fort Knox, I was invited to go to OCS —
Officer Candidate School — so I could be an officer instead of an EM.
I had zero desire to be an officer.
A week at Fort Dix NJ waiting for ship to Germany.
USNS Geiger (troop ship) from NYC to Bremerhaven Germany - about a week.
About a year and a half (1963-64) at HQ Troop, 3rd Reconnaissance Squadron,
3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, 7th US Army, Kaiserslautern, Germany (Vogelweh
Kaserne, near Hohenecken) with tank range at Grafenwöhr and field maneuvers
up to a month long. I had many jobs there ranging from office work (because
I could type), motor pool, marriage counselor (really), garbage dump detail,
etc. Office work was like Radar in MASH: morning reports,
cutting orders, filling out forms, etc, all
done by manual typewriter. Motor pool was maintenance of jeeps, armored
personnel carriers, and tanks. Also in those days everybody took turns
doing guard duty and working in the mess hall (KP = Kitchen Police about one
day a month), taking garbage to the dump (for this I drove trucks or stood
in the back of them, waist-deep in garbage). Of course everybody also had
to do cleaning in the barracks, offices, and other places — scraping,
sanding, waxing, and buffing wood and linoleum floors, etc. "Policing" the
area around the barracks each morning, i.e. picking up beer bottles and
cigarette butts. We worked Monday through Friday plus Saturday mornings.
Sometimes instead of working on Saturday morning, we'd have a parade,
complete with Army marching band playing Sousa marches and the occasional
improbable sentimental song like "Memories". I did good work, I reached the
rank of SP4 (Specialist 4). Although my Primary Military Occupational
Specialty (PMOS) was Cavalry Scout, I never actually did that after Fort Knox.
I also worked as a "personnel" specialist (716), orders clerk (711), key
punch operator (761)… MOS's have totally changed several times since
the 1960s. The reference for when I was in the Army is US AR 611-201 June
1960, but I can't find a copy.
About a year at 7th US Army HQ in Stuttgart/Vaihingen, Germany, attached to
Command and Control Information Systems (CCIS), Resident Study Group (RSG),
an early computer prototyping project, with a month's "computer school" in
Orléans, France, in April 1965. Not actually *in* Orléans, but in the
forest somewhere a few miles from there, along a dirt road. The school was
a little group of Quonset huts, some for work, others for barracks, and one
as a mess hall. It was almost like camping out. Then back to Stuttgart.
Back to NYC (Brooklyn Navy Yard, Fort Hamilton) by USNS
Geiger sailing from Bremerhaven, a week at sea.
Released February 2, 1966.
Ready Reserves until February 6, 1969 (they never called me up, even though
the Viet Nam war was in full swing).
Service number: RA13786982. In 1963 they said I'd never forget it,
and so far I haven't). RA means Regular Army as opposed to draftee
[US] or National Guard [NG].
*
Fort Holabird closed in 1973, no trace remains except a Holabird
Avenue.
**
About the Cubans… I could hear them speaking Spanish, and their
sergeants and officers spoke to them in Spanish, which just does not happen
in the US Army. We weren't allowed to get anywhere near them but sometimes
it couldn't be avoided. I could see that unlike us, they had no markings
whatsoever on their fatigues — no "US ARMY", no name tag, nothing. I
mentioned this to Tom
Hayden about 2015, when he was writing Listen Yankee, and he put my
story at the end of an article he had written on Cuba and the assassination
of JFK. Tom died in 2016 and his website tomhayden.com is gone as of 2017.
He was a founder and hero of the New Left for nearly fifty years.
Click the image below to see a table of US Army enlisted ranks in 1963-66,
plus some explanation:
Reception Center at Fort Jackson, South Carolina
Fort Jackson SC 1963
I enlisted in Baltimore, which consisted of a physical exam, signing
some papers and taking an oath. Then they put us on a train for Columbia,
South Carolina. So far so good. At the train station we boarded a big
Army bus for the Reception Center at Fort Jackson, still not so
bad. When we pulled in at Fort Jackson, some sergeants came in the bus and
started screaming at us... DICKHEADS! GET OUT! GET OUT! MOVE IT! A
whole week of this, during which we got our uniforms, boots, and haircuts,
and were sent out on work details.
It was quite a shock… The minute you arrive they are yelling at you,
insulting you, and making you run everywhere, dickhead. They shave off all
your hair, and if you have any cavities they pull the bad teeth out. You
have no rights, no privacy; they punish people at random for no reason.
They don't let you sleep, they don't let you rest. They give you good food
and then don't let you eat it... GET OUT! GET OUT!.
At first I thought I had stumbled into some kind of rogue outfit, but the
shouting, profanity, insults, cruelty towards the most vulnerable, the
arbitrary punishment and scapegoating, sleep and food deprivation, etc, were
standard. Some people couldn't take it, but for me it wasn't much different
from "Life With Father". A week of that, then on to Fort Gordon, Georgia,
for Basic Training.
Basic Training at Fort Gordon, Georgia
"Shit, shower, shave, and shine"
Fort Gordon Georgia 1962
Fort Gordon barracks
Carrying heavy duffle bags
Marching, pitching tents
Like at least eight other southern Army bases, Fort Gordon was named after a
Confederate general; all nine renamed in 2023-24[1,2]. I
don't have any original pictures of my Army training, but these from Google
are pretty much how I remember it: the old two-story WWII-era wooden
barracks and M1 rifles... At Fort Gordon, we were treated the same as at
Fort Jackson, but now at least here was a routine. They woke us at 4:00 or
5:00am (or as early as 1:00am if you had KP) and made us stand in formation
outside in the cold February air for an hour or two before letting us go for
breakfast... and maybe even letting us eat it.
Tons of pushups all the time
Every day we had about an hour of calisthenics in the morning, we did
pushups and chinups thoughout the day, went on forced marches carrying a lot
of heavy stuff, and where we were (Georgia) it was up and down hills made of
sand, holding our 9-pound M1 rifles out in front of us for hours at a time.
A forced march alternates between walking and running, and everybody has to
stay in step. Sometimes we ran the whole way, up to 7 miles without
stopping. The first episode of Band
of Brothers (except the parachute part) was a lot like Basic
Training at Fort Gordon... it even looked like Fort Gordon.
First introduction to the M1 rifle
Most of the time, however, was spent in training: military protocol and
terminology, marching, first aid, climbing ropes and walls and barriers,
hand-to-hand combat, stabbing rubber tires with fixed bayonets, rifle drill;
disassembly, assembly, cleaning, and maintenance of the M1, and eventually
shooting them and qualifying in marksmanship. Plus night fighting (and the
Monty-Pythonesque "night walk"), sheltering and concealment, hand grenades,
rifle-launched grenades, a lotta stuff. Some of this was in classrooms, but
most of it was outdoors.
The gas chamber (older photo)
Another noteworthy experience was the gas chamber, where they put you in
concentrated tear gas without a gas mask just to know what it does to you,
and on another occasion deadly chlorine gas (you enter the chamber with no
mask on, holding your breath; then you put on and clear your gas mask
and then you breathe). We had mustard gas rubbed on our skin and we
learned how to inject ourselves in the thigh with atropine (by actually
doing it) in a nerve gas attack. We had obstacle courses, including one
where you had to crawl through mud and barbed wire under (they said) live
machine gun fire 3 feet above ground level.
Back in the barracks after dinner in the mess hall, we'd have to be
constantly shining our brass and polishing our shoes and boots and also
keeping the place clean, because there could be a surprise inspection at any
moment, and the tiniest speck of dirt or wrinkle on a bedspread would result
in mass punishment. At least once we week we had to strip the wax from the
floor and rewax it. Every morning it had to be buffed, but I liked doing
that, the buffer is fun. But with all that there might be only 30 minutes
of free time for the trainees to write home before lights out.
Some of the drill sergeants were pyschos and alcoholics, like Sergeant Goo
(really) who lived with us in the barracks because his wife had thrown him
out, and he would usually pass out on floor some time before lights out, but
before that he'd be telling the sad tale of his life, always ending with "If
the Army wanted you to have a wife, they'd issue you one". Others were
more straight-arrow and super-tough on physical training. One of these had
fought in Korea and he was haunted by how it was the flabby out-of-shape
guys who got killed, so he wanted us to come out of Basic with the endurance
of Zulus. He told us about his time in Korea towards the end of Basic, the
first time he ever sat down with us and just talked instead of barking
orders and insults. His name was Sergeant Swenby (pronounced Svimby). His
favorite saying (when he wasn't showing his human side) was "Only three
things I hate in this world: cold coffee, wet shitpaper, and Got-Damn
Train-ee!" (the 't' in Got represents a prolonged glottal stop). Instead of
saying "everybody" he said "sick, lame, and lazy".
When marching, there was always an NCO (corporal or sergeant) who marched
alongside calling cadence. White sergeants like Swenby used a lot of
glottal stops... Hut Haw Hut Haw Your Left Right Left (the t's being glottal
stops). But Black sergeants were super creative, they'd accentuate the
downbeat, make a poem or a song or a chant out of it, make up crazy words,
etc, it was almost a pleasure to march with them. Sometimes it would also
be call-and-response, like a work song. Thinking back, it was kind of cool
how we evolved from a bunch of clumsy stumblebums into a crack marching
outfit. Sounds dumb for me of all people to be saying that but there was
some satisfaction in it.
Entrenching tool
At one point we were "asked" to buy US savings bonds. I said no thanks.
For that they had me outside all night digging big holes ("six-by's" —
six by six by six feet) with a small folding shovel ("entrenching tool",
standard issue for digging foxholes) and filling them up again. After a
week of that I finally gave in, and later I was glad I did because I had
about $1200 when I got out three years later, which pretty much paid my
first semester's tuition at Columbia. Yes, it's gone up a bit since
then.
Most guys were totally cowed by the cadre, but one guy sticks in my mind, he
was from NYC, probably Brooklyn; Italian or Jewish. If a cadre told
him to "get down and give me fifty" or whatever he'd say "Fuck you, cracker,
YOU get down and give ME fifty!" He didn't take abuse from anybody, it was
a real eye-opener. The amazing thing was, he pretty much got away with it;
he was tough, they respected him. That was one of things that attracted me
to NYC.
An Army rifle range 1960s
Other forms of resistence were not so up-front. One day at the firing
range… It's like a football field, with us at one end and the targets
at the far end. We're laying on our stomachs and shooting at our targets.
Our abusive drill sergeant has to poop. The outhouse is about halfway to
the targets, but on the left side. As soon as he sat down, bullets were
whizzing through the walls just over his head. He came out white as a sheet
and didn't have anything to say for a while. It's a good thing he was
pooping and not peeing standing up!
I'm pretty sure the firing range at Fort Gordon was 500m, the targets were
so far away you could hardly see them. There was also another range where
you had to walk forwards and then shoot cardboard enemies as they popped up.
We had one overnight pass in Basic, so a bunch of us took the bus to Augusta
to (what else) go drinking in bars. In those days Augusta was pretty much
just a one-street sleazy "strip" full of bars and clip joints. There were
six of us, 3 white, 3 black. We probably tried to get into 20 different
bars and not one would let us in. We kind of expected it but still... this
was a town that depended almost totally on an integrated Army base for its
livelihood (yes, they also have the Masters golf tournament but that's
only for a short time each year). Anyway we tried. Then went back to base
for some near-bear at the snack bar. That was the closest I ever got to a
Freedom Ride because I was in Germany during the real Freedom Rides.
The song that sticks in my head from Basic is "Our Day Will Come" by Ruby
and the Romantics. Also "Two Lovers" by Mary Wells; "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah" by
Bob B. Soxx and The Blue Jeans (early Phil Spector Wall of Sound remake of
my first favorite song when I was 1 or 2 years old), and "Walk Like a Man"
by the Four Seasons, not because I liked it but it kept going through my
head during forced marches when I had an untreated bone fracture in my foot.
Also, not a song but whenever we had to "charge", people would always yell
Yabba-Dabba-Doo! (from the Flintstones).
We had a week or two off after Basic. I took a bus from Augusta to
Charlottesville with a stop in Fayetteville NC to see my old friend from
Frankfurt HS, Jerry Jacobs, at Fort Bragg. Called his house, his little
brother answered, Jerry had just been killed in a car crash.
Continued to UVA, met up with Ludwig. He said I was totally transformed,
all tanned, hard, and muscular with my buzzcut. We went on a road trip in
his 1953 Buick (he didn't care much about school). There was a third guy
too but can't remember who, Don somebody?. We drove diagonally southwest
for a date that had been arranged with three girls at Hollins College* in
Johnson City*, Tennessee, friends of Ludwig or the other guy, I didn't know
them. It was a beautiful drive, kind of like rural Vermont, passing through
Lynchburg, Roanoke, Blacksburg, and the rest was pretty much backwoods;
about 250 miles all together. We arrived at Hollins in the evening, picked
the girls up, drove back to Bristol (which straddles the VA-TN border),
bought a case of beer and were drinking it in an empty parking lot in the
dark when the police came and arrested all six of us and hauled us off to
jail. I think this was in the Virginia half of Bristol. We slept, woke up
to a breakfast of hard stale bread, fossilized baloney, and super-harsh
black coffee in metal cups, were taken across the street to the courthouse
where the judge said "Well, y'all look like some nice young boys and girls
(i.e. white ones), I'm gonna let you off with a warning but don't ya'll let
me catch you in here again, y'heah?"
So far so good. Now to drive the girls back to Hollins. They had missed
curfew at school and were afraid they might be in trouble. When
we arrived, the entire road that led from the Hollins gate to the buildings
was lined with people waiting to see the fallen women after their night of
sin (there wasn't any sin, we went straight to jail). We felt awful but
since they were immediately taken into custody there was nothing we could
do, so we left.
Later I found out the three girls were expelled from Hollins. I didn't even
know them. But still, not exactly one of my happier memories. Soon after,
Ludwig dropped out of UVA for the same reasons I did, was drafted or
enlisted in the Army, and wound up in Vietnam**. Although I did see him
once later on, I don't know anything about his time there. I assume he was
in combat because he rose to Staff Sergeant (E6) in only one 2-year hitch.
The other thing that happened when I was on leave was that I bought the
Martin O-16 that I still have, at Sophocles Pappas in DC. April 1963 for
$110 new with my Basic Training pay (I only earned $78 a month but since
there was nothing to spend it on I had more than enough for the guitar).
I've had it with me wherever I lived ever since.
*
All of this is from memory sixty years later. I know for sure that we
went to Johnson City to pick up the girls, and I know we were arrested in
Bristol. But Hollins College was not in Johnson City, Tennessee, it was in
Roanoke, Virginia, and we definitely did not go there! Ludwig mentions a
Sullins College, but it was in Bristol, not Johnson City. If that was the
college where the girls were, why did we go to Johnson City? As far as I
can tell, the only college in Johnson City in 1963 was East Tennessee State
College (now University), which was and is co-ed, but I seem to remember the
college the girls were at was all girls. Oh well, it was nearly sixty years
ago as I write this.
**
Ludwig and I reconnected briefly in 2022 and there's lots more to his
story to be filled in, e.g. that he wasn't drafted until 1967.
Scout Training at Fort Knox, Kentucky
Vacation over, I took an overnight bus to Louisville, Kentucky, where Fort
Knox is. The bus went along Route 50, a winding mountain road through West
Virginia that ends up in the flatlands of Ohio and then the bluegrass
of Kentucky.
Now it was time for 8 weeks of Armored Cavalry scout training, which was
lots of fun. Once you get past Basic they're not mean to you any more and
you have free time and freedom to go anywhere. Fort Knox is HUGE and has
about a dozen movie theaters and free buses that take you all over. One
Sunday, Roger and I went to four movies, 25
cents each.
Jeep training
Machine gun mounted on Jeep
Jeep in water
At Fort Knox I learned how to drive (my parents would not let me drive in
high school, for the very good reason that I was drunk all the time). We
had 1938 Jeeps — the good kind with the vertical grille, not the tippy
1955 ones with the horizontal grille. They had 50-caliber machine guns
mounted on a post; we drove them off the road through every kind of terrain
and through water (and you could even drive them under water with a
snorkel), and across deep ravines over a couple of rickety boards, in thick
dust clouds, shooting blanks from the machine gun and flying through the
air… (one time when I was driving and then stopped the jeep, without
thinking I reached up to the gun barrel to pull myself up and almost burned
my hand off).
M2 .50 caliber machine gun
We learned about azimuths and radians and coordinates, and how to call in
artillery fire. We learned to estimate distances and sizes of far-away
things and how to orient maps and to navigate by dead reckoning, shadows,
and tree-moss. We learned how to classify roads, tunnels, and bridges and
how to blow up bridges and railroad tracks. We learned to fire and take
apart and put back together every kind of gun the Army had: The WWII M1
rifle, the M2 50-caliber machine gun (which is still in use even though it's
100 years old), the M60 machine gun, the M3 45-caliber "grease gun"
(submachine gun), the M-1911 45-caliber pistol, the M79 grenade
launcher… and we also threw real hand grenades. Every boy's dream!
(Seriously, boys are fascinated by this stuff… I never wanted to kill
or hurt anybody, but getting to shoot all these guns… what can I
say?) The firing range at Fort Knox for the M2 machine guns was 500 yards,
five football fields, almost a third of a mile. At that distance, those
guns could knock down big trees.
He looked like this
The only strange thing that happened at Fort Knox was when one of the cadre,
a Corporal Magnus — he looked like the hero of a 1930s Nazi movie,
tall, blue eyes, a mane of blond swept-back hair; a perfect Aryan —
asked a bunch of us if we wanted to join him for "voluntary special
training", a lot of running, sounded OK to me, I liked running. We met
after dinner, ran through the woods, up and down hills for miles and miles,
then we sat down and he explained how we had to be ready to take to the
hills and defend our Freedom when the Communists and Faggots and Niggers
took over the government. That's when I noticed that all the people he
invited where white. I like to think that they were as creeped out
as I was.
My main friend in the Army was Roger Anderson. We were together the entire
time from Reception Center to discharge, which is almost impossible, but I'm
pretty sure it happened. I saw him once later, he spent a week with
Mommie and me in 1972 in Wyoming and Colorado (which were "close" to where he
lived, in Elko, Nevada). We said goodbye to him one night on a mountain
near the Utah border looking down on Junction City, Colorado, the Town that
Glows in the Dark (from Uranium tailings). We stayed in touch by mail for
7 or 8 years after that but then lost touch. In the meantime he became a
medical doctor and married his wife Patsy. I tried to find him lots of
times but he was Google-proof. Then when I started writing this I dug out
all my old letters and found Roger's, was reminded that he got his MD at the
such-and-such a university in 1975, so knowing that plus his name made it
possible to find the last place he worked before he retired but... well,
it's a long story.
Berchtesgaden poster
General Walker Hotel Berchtesgaden
Army bunk and wall locker
Roger's nickname in the Army was Rog-Bod because he was so physical, always
doing improbable things with his body like, for example, hopping up on top
of his wall locker, which was like eight feet high. We had an R&R one
time; the Army sent us to Berchtesgaden for free — ride, hotel,
everything. Roger bought skis and ski-boots and did endless ski-practice
exercises in the barracks to prepare. I figured if I did that I'd probably
break my leg so I just went along for the ride. I think that was the same
trip where a German guy (or Austrian) in a Mercedes offered to take us on a
two-day tour that included Oberammergau and Innsbrück; the price: one carton
of American cigarettes, which we bought for him in the PX for a couple
dollars, but was like gold on the German economy. For me, the highlight of
the trip was a church in Oberammergau that had the bodies of twelve saints
standing erect in glass cases, grotesque skeletons with bits of flesh,
scalp, and hair clinging to them wrapped in spendid bejeweled robes.
Elko on the map
Anyway, Elko is a boom town now because gold was discovered, but in those
days nobody ever heard of it. Nevertheless you could see it on any map or
globe because there was no other town for 500 miles in any direction (well,
maybe just one), so New York, Paris, London, Elko.
Roger's family was Swedish; his dad worked for the railroad. Before Roger
was born, every day his dad would bring home some railroad ties. When he
had enough, he built the house where the family would live. They kept a lot
of Swedish traditions, like Christmas morning his sister Sandra would come
down the stairs with candles on her head. One Christmas she sent me a BIG
box full of home-made chocolate chip cookies and "fattigmankakas*", a kind
of Swedish thing… Let's see if I can describe it… Dough rolled
thin, cut in a longish rectangle, then a slit is made toward one end, and
the other end is twisted and then pulled through it, sort of like a Möbius
strip, and then it is baked until it's crunchy and sprinkled with powdered
sugar. And the packing material was Cheerios, probably ten big boxes of
them! That was one of my most appreciated Christmas presents ever. I guess
that happened when she was 24 or 25 (I was 19). She died in May
2020 at age 78 of aortic stenosis.
Sharon Robinson (in the pictures) was a friend of Mommie's and one of my
favorite people of all time, we used to see her constantly in the 70s but I
don't know what happened to her after that. Once she made me a big thick
knitted scarf that I still have.
*
A word I never encountered again until nearly 60 later when I read
Wisconsin, My Home by Thurine Oleson, University of Wisconsin Press
(1950), about 19th-century Scandinavian immigrants. "Fattigmankakas"
are "poor man's cookies".
3rd Armored Cavalry, Kaiserslautern, Germany
L Troop, 3rd Reconnaissance Squadron, 3rd Armored
Cavalry Regiment, 1963 (I was in HQ Troop - no group picture for us!)
Third Armored Cavalry
fatigue shirt 1960s
Third Armored Cavalry
Regimental pin
At the end of scout training at Fort Knox we found out where our final
posting would be, and mine turned out to be the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment
in Kaiserslautern,
Germany, which is in Rheinland-Pfalz,
about 66 miles southwest of Frankfurt. Roger too. We were sent to Fort Dix
NJ to wait for transportation to Germany. We were there for a week, totally
free to wander around and do whatever we wanted. One day we bought some
beer and went in the woods to drink it in a creekbed. Next day I had my
last and possibly worst case of poison ivy ever. I couldn't use my hands at
all so when it came time to board the troop ship USNS Geiger
(T‑AP 197), Roger carried my duffle bag and guitar along with
his own stuff... and duffel bags are heavy! Thanks, Rog (more about
the Geiger here).
Deuce-and-a-half
As I recall, the crossing was uneventful. We docked in Bremerhaven, took a
train to Kaiserslautern, and rode in the open back of a deuce-and-half
(2½-ton truck) from the Bahnhof to our new base, Kapaun Kaserne
[4,5] in Vogelweh, a suburb of Kaiserslautern,
in what was formerly a rural region that had been the poorest and least
developed part of West Germany until 1950 when the Americans came and built
massive military installations, many of which are still there. The German
spoken in Kaiserslautern was not very different from what I learned in
Frankfurt.
I was to find out only 50-some years later that I am descended from farmers in the tiny villages
Steinwenden and Krottelbach, that were literally walking distance from my
barracks in Vogelweh. They lived there in the late 1600s and early 1700s
before emigrating to Pennsylvania and Maryland.
Snack Bar and barracks
Kapaun Kaserne 1963
When we arrived at the base and piled off the truck, an NCO came to meet us
and the first thing he said was "Can any of you guys type?". I raised my
hand, and poof, my life took a whole new direction. I guess Rog raised his
hand too. Then we were assigned units and quarters.
In the Cavalry you don't have companies (like Company A, Company B), you
have troops, like F Troop and L Troop. And you don't have
batallions, you have squadrons. Roger and I were assigned to "Headquarters
and Headquarters Troop" or HHT, the headquarters of the squadron.
3rd ACR headquarters and barracks
We had regular work we did on normal days, plus everybody had to go out in
the morning and "police the area", meaning pick up all the cigarette butts
and beer bottles that had been thrown out the windows overnight. Then every
so often we had to "move out", sometimes at a moment's notice, to some
faraway place in a forest for several weeks of maneuvers, usually in
horrible weather. On base, there was also night-time guard duty and Kitchen
Police (KP). Plus there were regularly scheduled shifts along the Czech
border in guard towers on opposite sides of a raked strip of bare earth with
barbed wire (the Czech guards would would yell across to us, "Our beer is
better than your beer!"). And once a year in February, the whole Squadron
went to the Grafenwöhr tank range in Bavaria, also near the Czech border,
for tank practice.
In retrospect, one the best features of the 1960s Army was...
NO MEETINGS!
Reference:
Colonel Michael D. Mahler,
Tales from the Cold War — The US Army in West Germany
1960-75, North Georgia Press (2021). Detailed account of the Armored
Cavalry regiments in Germany while I was there: their mission, equipment,
maneuvers, border duty, and Grafenwöhr, from a commander's point of view.
Operation Big Lift
Soon after we arrived was our first deployment,
Operation
Big Lift, October-November 1963. Quoting from the
Army
history page:
The 3rd Infantry Division played the enemy (ORANGE) force. Elements of the
8th Infantry Division, the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, and a
reinforced Panzer Grenadier Battalion from the III German Corps served as
the friendly (BLUE) force. Altogether, nearly 46,000 personnel, 900 tanks,
and hundreds of trucks and armored personnel carriers participated. The Air
Force flew 759 sorties in support as well. Ultimately, BLUE proved
victorious, but not before it was nearly overrun by ORANGE and suffered
heavy damage in the partially choreographed battles.
In a speech slated
for November 22, President Kennedy planned to tout it as proof that the
nation was 'prepared as never before to move substantial numbers of men in
surprisingly little time to advanced positions anywhere in the world.' The
address, however, was never given. Earlier that day the president was
gunned down by an assassin.
I don't know if we even knew Big Lift was such a big deal at the time. All
I remember is being in the mud, mostly in the woods, for weeks and weeks,
relocating periodically to another muddy forest two or three times. If we
were in any battles, I didn't notice (I was probably working in the
Heaquarters tent the whole time). More about the Kennedy assassination
below.
Back on base...
C-ration can
P-38 all-purpose tool (1 inch long)
Shit on a shingle (SOS)
In those days the regular Army was a nice place. They didn't harrass
us much and we got a lot of time off. The food in the mess hall was good
(despite what you might have heard about "shit on a shingle" — creamed
chipped beef on toast — I had that more at home as a kid than
I did in the Army). The breakfasts were especially good. You could have
anything you wanted for breakfast — eggs any style (and any number of
them, like Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke), waffles, pancakes, french
toast, sausages, bacon, toast, buiscuits. But one day a week we had to eat
C-Rations (food in olive-drab cans) because there was a huge stockpile from
1948 that had to be finished. We became connoisseurs of the 1948 vintage,
among the favorites were scrambled eggs with lima beans, cheese with
crackers, "meat" with beans. We opened the cans with our P-38s, just an
inch long, the all-purpose tool and friend found on every GI's dog-tag
chain.
In spite of the good mess-hall breakfasts many of us often went to the Snack
Bar to buy breakfast for a nominal fee, just to be in the presence of the
German girls who worked there, and also there was a juke box. The song that
was almost always playing was "Where Did Our Love Go" by the Supremes.
The mess hall also made special Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners but one
year when we filed in for our Thanksgiving dinner, we got C-Rations! All
the turkeys, hundreds of them, had mysteriously disappeared. Army
Quartermasters ("procurement specialists") were notorious wheeler-dealers,
selling everything from penicillin to Jeeps on the black market. Maybe mess
sergeants too! But they weren't all bad. One time we arrived back at base
at 3:00am, tired, wet, and miserable after being in the field for several
weeks in constant freezing rain. The mess sergeant greeted us with fresh
coffee and a huge batch of hot-from-the-oven home-made chocolate-chip
cookies. This same sergeant was very fond of
his block hat, he never took it off, and
consequently it developed quite a grease stain around the rim (the
standard thing to say about that was "hey, when you gonna get the oil
changed in that hat?"), but the funny part was that every time he bent over
a big pot that he was stirring, the hat would fall into it.
Also Kaiserslautern's main Snack Bar (which was normally just a big
cafeteria) turned into an almost-elegant restaurant one Thursday per month
for Steak Night... dim lighting, music, tablecloths, candles, waitresses
and busboys from the high school, and delicious meals served on china. Rog
and I never missed it!
Me at Grafenwöhr in 1964
Grafenwöhr tank range
I joined the Army just 18 years after World War II; it was essentially the
same Army with many of the same people, weapons, vehicles, and gear (and
C-rations). Many of my sergeants and mid-level officers were WWII and/or
Korean War veterans. In Kaiserslautern, Regimental Sergeant-Major
"Hellfire" Deems was a WWI horse cavalry veteran; his
service number had
less digits than everybody else's. He looked like Joe E. Brown without the
funny faces.
Luxembourg American Cemetery 1964
One time when Roger and I told him we were going to be in Luxembourg while
on leave, he *ordered* us to visit the war cemetery there where a lot of his
friends were buried. We did; Roger remembers that we saw General Patton's
marker there and the Sergeant Major wanted to know all about it. He would
drive us crazy but we liked him. He would say things like "Hellfire there
da Cruz, when was the last time you had a haircut?" Yesterday, Sergeant
Major… "Well, here's a quarter, go get another one." When imitating
him, we'd always start every sentence with "Hellfire there" followed by the
surname of person he was talking to. That was a tradition passed down over
generations of soldiers but in reality we never actually heard him say it.
He was 100% Regular Army, he lived and breathed it. One day at the
Grafenwöhr tank range in midwinter, 30 degrees below zero, he said "Hellfire
there da Cruz, there are some cigarette butts outside the command tent!"
Meaning I should go pick them up. I went but they were under a foot of ice!
I had to "pick" them up with a pickaxe. In retrospect I wish I had asked
him about his experiences; for example, I imagine he might have been in
Patton's 3rd Army in 1944.
One day at Graf I was on garbage duty in a deuce-and-a-half picking up garbage
and taking it to a huge burn pit. We were backed up to the edge of the
pit along with about ten other big trucks, shoveling out the garbage, when a
large amount .50-cal ammunition started going off… belts of M2
machine-gun ammunition, big heavy bullets flying in every direction. All 10
trucks took off like race cars! (Sixty years later burn pits are very much
in the news with so many veterans sick from exposure to all the toxins and
our gridlocked congress unable to appropriate the funds needed for treatment.)
Army coal stove
All this was long before any form of clean energy. At Graf and any time we
went on maneuvers, heat (if there was to be any) was furnished by
coal-burning cast-iron pot-belly stoves. On maneuvers this would be only in
the huge CP and mess tents; we'd sleep out in the cold in our pup tents or
"shelter-half" shelters. Grafenwöhr had primitive concrete barracks with
bare metal cot frames and a pot-belly stove. It was pretty harsh... It was
around 30 below zero the whole month (that's what they said but I don't know
if it was Fahrenheit or Centigrade but in fact it didn't matter, it's the
one place where F and C coincide). We wore super warm clothes all the time,
including "Micky Mouse boots" —
insulated rubber boots that were so big you looked like you were in a
Mickey Mouse boots
cartoon. They did keep our feet warm; so warm, in fact, that when we went
to the barracks to retire for the night and took off our boots, we'd pour
out a half liter of sweat onto the concrete floor. We'd load up the stove
with coal and we'd climb into our cotton-and-feathers sleeping bags on top
of the cold metal racks. Naked! The older NCO veterans of WWII and Korea
said it was a big mistake to wear clothes in the sleeping bag. Then at
5:00am when they woke us up, the stove was stone cold and we had to come out
of our sacks into -30° stark naked, which is kind of shock at first,
get dressed super-fast and go to the mess tent to warm up... giant cups of
coffee in tin mugs for that extra-metallic taste, hot breakfast on tin
trays.
One night at Graf they threw a surprise party for us, turning the huge mess
tent into a giant beer hall and everybody could have all the beer they wanted
for free. Local (northeast Bavarian) German beer. I guess they had a slush
fund for this kind of thing.
Lyster bag
Army mess kit
Army poncho
In the field we didn't have a barracks. Instead, each soldier had
a rubberized poncho about six feet square. In fact it was just a big square
with snaps around the edges and a hole in the middle with a hood; if it
started pouring you could stick your head through the hole and use it as a
raincoat but it was more like walking around in a tent. Then at night, you
and your buddy could snap your ponchos together and you'd have a waterproof
Army field kitchen
pup tent to put your sleeping bags in, hence the term "shelter half". Now
that I think of it, there was usually no mess tent in the field; we had to
eat in the woods from our mess kits, not on trays. Then after eating we'd
have to clean the mess kits by dipping them in a series of 55-gallon drums
filled with boiling water. We brought water with us in big tanks towed by
3/4-ton trucks. Enormous "lyster
bags" were hung from trees for drinking (filling our canteens) and for
washing up in our steel helmets.
The prevailing odor around an Army base or bivouac in those days was coal
smoke and diesel fumes. Strangely enough, it was not entirely unpleasant.
Our barracks were near Hohenecken, a little village that I fell in
love with, especially the Gasthaus of die Oma und der Opa, Gasthaus zum
Rathaus, with the ruins of an ancient (1150-1200) castle looming overhead.
Neither Hohenecken nor the Gasthaus were frequented by GIs, who
preferred dimly lit bars in downtown Kaiserslautern, with B-girls and juke
boxes. The Gasthaus was a family place with the indescribably delicious
home cooking of die Oma (granma). Before or after eating you could walk up
through the woods to the castle, which was not some kind of theme park; it
was just a ruin in the woods — no signs, no fence, no nothing. The
Germans called it Barbarossa's Castle, but it wasn't.
At one point Roger and I registered for a night-school Russian course at the
University of Maryland extension on base in Kaiserslautern High School.
After class we'd go to Oma's to do our homework over a delicious home-cooked
dinner. We would sit at the table by the window in the picture at the
bottom right on the postcard. At the lower left is the larger dining room,
where once we had a unit banquet for 15-20 people and Oma cooked Rouladen
for everybody, which is rolled-up beef with stuffing and gravy.
Army life in Kaiserslautern
My lockers and bunk
Armored Personnel Carriers at river crossing
Birdie driving APC
Tanker boots
PS Magazine
Above: some random photos I took... My corner of the barracks after I had
enough seniority to be by the window, which looks out on the parade ground
and if you magnify the photo you can see two
armored personnel carriers (APCs) parked, then the forest and the foot of
the little mountain that has the castle on it. If you look hard you can see
the wall locker says DACRUZ on the door. And the Martin guitar that I still
have, miraculously, on top of my my foot locker. My bunk is to the left,
made up for inspection (it had to be like this every day except Sunday).
Next, some APCs about to cross a river... they can swim! I drove these
things a couple times, it's fun. Next, my friend Birdie driving an APC.
And then my tanker boots. Being in the Cavalry entitled us to wear these
instead of the lace-up kind, for extra "readiness" in case of Soviet attack;
no tame wasted fiddling with laces.
The color item is a 1964 issue of
Will Eisner's
PS Magazine, the monthly Preventive Maintenance magazine distributed
all over every Army base everywhere, humorously explaining how not to screw
up the multitude of little jobs we had to do, especially in the motor pool.
Kapaun Kaserne motor pool
M60 tanks
M60 tanks on train
APCs in the field, taking a break
Some random pictures I didn't take, from Walter Elkins' US Army in Germany
website; they are all of my unit at the same time I was in it. The motor
pool was where all the vehicles (jeeps, trucks, APCs, and tanks) were kept
and maintained. About once a month I had motor-pool guard duty, where I had
to walk around the perimiter with my rifle all night long, until sunrise. I
always expected some KGB (Soviet) or HVA (East German) stringer to come out of the forest and
start quizzing me about everything, but that only happened in bars.
The M60
tank was the core around which the whole squadron was organized,
everything else was in support of the tanks, which took the place of the
original cavalry horses. One very cold night we loaded them onto flatbed
railroad cars, securing them with heavy chains for the 200-mile trip to the
tank range at Grafenwöhr; my gloves were ragged and torn and it was the
closest I ever came to serious frostbite. The last picture shows a typical
trip to "the field", trips that usually lasted a week or two, living in the
woods for the duration of the exercise.
On war games, we'd sleep in our individual canvas pup tents in sleeping bags
(made of cloth and feathers) on top of inflated rubber mattresses, which
we'd inflate with jeep exhaust. This was a non-waterproof alternative to the
shelter-half method described earlier. I would usually be working in the
big CP tent, morning reports or whatever (simulated casualties). One night
when I was sleeping a pipsqueak second lieutenant threw a live tear gas
canister into my pup tent! You know, to test my READINESS...
On a more serious note, once I was kept back from maneuvers for some reason,
to hold down the fort or whatever. I was on KP in the mess hall, working in
the kitchen, when one of the cooks came and gave me a bucket and a sponge
and sent me to the clipper room at the opposite end, which is where they
wash the trays and cups and bowls, and get to work on the wall and the
radiator. Because it was simulated combat, even those of us who remained on
base were armed and wearing combat gear. Some guys in the clipper room were
horsing around... actually I don't know what they were doing, but a gun went
off and the bullet exploded a guy's head. I didn't even hear it. The MPs
had already come and gone; they had cut out the piece of the plywood wall
that had the bullet hole but left behind all blood, brains, skull fragments,
scalp and hair on wall, floor, and radiator, and I cleaned it up.
Anyway, field maneuvers could have been fun... They start with a huge
convoy of trucks, Jeeps, APCs, and tanks going for hours along narrow
secondary roads through small villages and finally entering a forest
somewhere and making camp. The way I remember it, every single time it was
bright and sunny when we set out, but as we approached our destination there
were huge black clouds looming overhead, and when we arrived it was pouring
erain, and we lived in rain and mud the whole time.
On another big exercise I didn't go on, when an M108 self-propelled Howitzer
was going through a little village, its radio antenna made contact with a
power line, which started a fire, which caused the thing to explode and
everybody in it was killed.
Milk dispenser
Germany was still relatively poor in the early Sixties, and to Germans we
Americans — even low-ranking soldiers — seemed immensely
wealthy. As late as the early-to-mid Sixties, a lot of Germans were still
beggars. A typical incident will illustrate… I was on KP one day, in
the mess hall where there were some milk machines, which were loaded with
six-gallon containers (plastic bags encased in cardboard boxes about 1x1x2
feet) of white milk and of chocolate milk. Apparently we were overstocked
so the mess officer (another pipsqueak Lieutenant) told me to take about 10
of these — sixty gallons of perfectly good fresh milk — out into
the courtyard and dump them down the drain. When I got them outside I saw
there was German family with small children on the other side of the
chain-link fence asking for food. I suggested to the Lieutenant that we
give them some of the milk. He said no, dump it all down the drain. After
some fruitless arguing I told the family in German that the little officer
would not let me give them the milk and started pouring it down the drain
while the family made horrified sounds. After I finished the first box, I
picked up the second box and dropped it at the Lieutenant's feet, where it
exploded. He was soaked with milk and shouting at me in his squeaky voice.
I wish I had a good ending for this story but honestly, I can't recall what
happened after that. I hope I gave some milk to the family, but it would
have been hard to get it over the high fence — each container was over
40 pounds.
Kennedy Erschossen
I was at a bar in Kaiserslautern when JFK was killed, with Roger I think.
Here's how I explained it to my friend George Gilmer (1943-2020):
B-girls, as you know, were just working girls whose job was simple, you buy
them drinks and they sit and talk with you. Of course the waiters bring
them fake drinks with no alcohol, so they can do it all night. I found out
that JFK was killed from a B-girl at a bar in Kaiserslautern. She had just
heard it on German radio, she told us how it happened… his motorcade
was going over a bridge, and he was shot from a boat below. She drew a
diagram on a beer coaster with a ball-point pen. I wish I had saved the
beer coaster. About two minutes later the MPs came crashing in and loaded
us on 3/4-ton trucks back to base. We stayed up all night in the barracks
with loaded guns and full combat regalia waiting for the Soviet tanks to
come rumbling across the Fulda Gap but by midday the next day (Saturday)
nothing had happened, so since WWIII didn't start they un-canceled all leaves
and passes and Rog and I went to Frankfurt to see if anybody was still there
that I knew, and sure enough Virginia Search, who was a cheerleader with my
ex-girlfriend Pam, was there and since her dad was an
NCO she took us the NCO club for lunch, even though Rog and I were only
privates. Then we went to check out the high school and in a Felliniesque
touch there was a circus underway on the athletic field; an elephant broke
loose, crashed down the fence and ran away down Siolistrasse. That night or
the next, I was in a station of the new Frankfurt U-Bahn (subway) when a
newsboy came running down the steps, screaming the headline "Kennedys Mörder
Ermordet!". Kennedy was adored in Germany because he came to Berlin after
the Wall went up and said "Ich bin ein Berliner!" Every shop window had a
shrine to him and this lasted for many years.
Speaking of B-girls, it was said that in Kaiserslautern (which had a huge
proliferation of American military bases), 50% of the German population was
on the KGB or HVA payroll, including probably 100% of the B-girls. It was
not uncommon for a girl to sit down with you in a bar and start asking
questions like… Which Kaserne are you at? Which unit? How many
tanks do you have? What kind? Where is the ammunition stored? I always
answered all their questions.
Das Spinnrädl
Not that I only went to bars in Kaiserslautern; there was also one
semi-upscale restaurant, Spinnrädl (The
Spinning Wheel), dating from 1509, one of the few old buildings in the city
that wasn't flattened by Allied bombing, that we went to fairly often even
though it was a bit pricey. The menu (sorry, no longer online) is written
in Dialekt: Lewwerworschtebrot (liverwurst sandwich), Ofenbraten mit
Speckböhnscher und Schneebällscher (roast pork with bacon bits and
"snowballs"), Handkäse mit Musik (a kind of pungent cheese with onion
sauce that makes you fart, which is the music).
Uncle Pete at Frankfurt Book Fair
At one point when I was in K-Town (as the GIs called it) my uncle Pete and aunt Leila
were in Frankfurt for the annual book fair and I went and stayed with
them there for a week. I had planned to hitchhike around Holland but it was
more fun being with them; they were a truly glamourous and fascinating
couple. At one point Pete and I were walking past a milk bar with Beatles
music coming out (in 1964 you could hear Komm Gib Mir Deine Hand
and Sie Liebt Dich everywhere, as well as the English versions) and
he let on that he was a big fan, which shows how different he was from
his brother. Pete and Leila urged me to come and
visit them in Lebanon; I never did but wish I had.
(I know I said something like this before, but it bears repeating...)
Being in the Army was like living in a socialist economy. You worked, and
in return all the essentials of life — food, clothing (uniforms),
lodging, medical care, even tailoring and laundry — were totally free.
Even college courses in night school.
Furthermore, in those days there were no corporate concessions on Army
bases… no Pizza Huts, McDonalds, Starbucks, big-box stores…
Everything was government and nonprofit. Even the food in the mess hall was
non-corporate, like the famous "government peanut
butter" — no brand names. You were paid a salary but you had no
fixed expenses or bills, so you could use your money for whatever you
wanted. As a PFC (1963) I earned $99/month, and as an SP4 (1965) $185.
Dollars went a long way in postwar Germany, where you could get a good meal
in a restaurant for four Marks (a dollar), trolley fare was maybe 15 cents,
a half liter of beer was a quarter. The stores and restaurants on the base
(PX, snack bar, EM club) were nonprofit and subsidized, and there were tons
of facilities available to use for free: gyms, music rooms, pool and
ping-pong tables, bowling alleys, running tracks… and theaters
that showed first-run movies, admission 25 cents.
Just a few years later the dollar-Mark exchange rate got so bad that GIs
could barely afford to go into town. But staying on the base was still like
socialism with nonprofit subsidized housing for dependents, excellent
schools for dependent children, nonprofit supermarket ("commissary"), free
medical care for the whole family, etc. Not to mention service clubs (that
served alcohol), movie theaters, libraries, etc. Besides military people
and their families, all this was also open to DAC's — Department of
the Army Civilians — such as my teachers or, for that matter, my own
father (DAC was his CIA cover in Germany). If you have ever lived this way,
you see see dog-eat-dog capitalism in a whole different light.
Since all essentials for living were provided, if you lost your entire
paycheck on payday in a poker game (as many GIs did) you could still eat,
have a place to live, get medical care, and have your laundry done. All
without money. (But if you had a family, their food was not free, so it was
bad news for a married GI to lose his whole paycheck; nevertheless, it
happened a lot.)
Gelterswoog
Gelterswoog
On the far side of Hohenecken was a big swimming hole called Gelterswoog
that only Germans went to. One time Roger and I and some other guys went
and spent the day swimming and hanging out, and made friends with a lot of
Germans… I remember heated discussions among them, "Rolling Stones
ist besser!" (pronounced with guttural R and "St" like in "Straße").... "Ne,
ne, Beatles ist besser!", back and forth 100 times (this was like
1964). We all agreed to have a big cookout for dinner, a huge bonfire was
lit using old rubber tires as fuel. I had my guitar and we were all
singing, and it turned out I knew a lot of German songs which they thought
was pretty remarkable, so I played one after another and all the Germans
sang along. Then I started another one, "Ich hatt' einen Kameraden" and a
woman wagged her finger at me in a way that meant "Not that one, it's a Nazi
song". It wasn't really; it was 150 years old but I guess the Nazis had
adopted it so I moved along. (Ironically, I did NOT play "Die Heimat ist
weit doch wir sind bereit, wir kämpfen und siegen.... Freiiiii-HEIT!"
because I thought it WAS a Nazi song but it turns out to be from the German
International Brigades that fought on the Republican side in the Spanish
Civil war, oh well...) Anyway it was a pretty atmospheric night, the huge
bonfire blazing with a thick black plume of toxic smoke hundreds of feet
into the sky… Eventually we wandered back to the base in the dark
through the foggy fields and forests and the hole in the back fence.
DP camp
Forest near Kaiserslautern
Roger and I liked to explore; we'd drive around the Rheinland to towns like
Lauterecken, Landstuhl, Koblenz, Bad Dürkheim, Hochspeyer, Bad Kreuznach,
Worms, Idar-Oberstein, Neustadt, Bingen, Bitburg, Baumholder, Pirmasens,
Zweibrücken.... or go on epic hikes in the forests and low-rise mountains
around Kaiserslauten. One day, deep in a forest (the same day the photo at
right was taken), miles from any paved road, we came upon a Displaced
Persons camp. It was a big clearing with rough-hewn wooden barracks
buildings, a mess hall, and some other buildings — like an Army
Kaserne, but more rustic. Each building was labeled (in English) with a
nationality, like Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, Romania. These were DPs from
WWII. It didn't even occur to me at the time to wonder why there were still
DP camps almost twenty years after the war, but most likely they had been
Nazis themselves, perhaps in the Ukrainian, Hungarian, Romanian, Estonian,
or other SS divisions who might have faced punishment or execution if they
were repatriated. I wonder how much longer they were there, and who was in
charge of the camp — I suspect it was the US Army.
The story of the DP camps is told in
DPs:
Europe's Displaced Persons, 1945–51 by Mark Wyman (Cornell University
Press, 1989-1998). The camps were administered by the United Nations Relief
and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), and by 1951 (or, according to
Wikipedia,
1957, or 1959 at the latest) all DPs should have been resettled or relocated
and all the clamps closed.
Anyway the camp Roger and I saw was in the middle of
nowhere; the country names on the buildings were in English and it had
the look of a US Army post. It seemed to be deliberately isolated
and hidden. By the way, an excellent movie about DPs in postwar Germany
is
The Search, Fred Zinnemann (1948), with Montgomery Clift, filmed on
location in the rubble of Germany with actual DPs.
Theater group
Barnes, Munn, and Stewart
Barnes on a Sunday
In Kaiserslautern I had two sets of friends: one, regular
(non-arty, non-college) guys like Roger, plus some other guys that I made
music with in the barracks (one, in particular, who liked to sing Nat King
Cole songs with me accompanying), and then some "artsy" guys with college
degrees or at least some college (Barnes, Munn, and Stewart) who liked art,
literature, and classical music instead of the standard beer, pool, and rock
or country music. The arty guys had all been drafted, of course, whereas
many of the regular guys (like Rog and me) had enlisted. Munn convinced me
to join the theater group he was in, where I mainly just built the sets, but
I was also the "orchestra" in a week-long production of A Taste of
Honey. Another play we did was The Fantasticks, but they had a
real pianist for that one, not to mention a cast member of the
original show in NYC (as the mummy). For some reason, those songs were
favorites of the Freedom Riders, who sang them in the buses going south. In
New York The Fantasticks ran for 57 years.
"A Taste of Honey" poster 1964
Program page 1
Program page 2
Program page 3
Program page 4
A Taste of Honey was written by an 18-year-old British girl,
Shelagh Delaney; it's about working class
people in the industrial north of England, interracial romance, mixed-race
babies born out of wedlock, gay people, alcoholic mothers, etc, pretty
gritty for its time. It was made into a film that sparked the whole British
New Wave (and the career of Rita
Tushingham), and the Beatles recorded the song too. Kind of
subversive for an Army base, but not surprising since Kaiserslautern
Community Theater describes itself as "non-profit, non-secret, non-violent,
non-militant, non-sectarian theatrical association". The people were a
mixture of all ranks, genders, sexual preferences, and races. And "military
courtesy" was checked at the door.
The mother and daughter in the play were mother and daughter in real life:
Sandi Ramsey (listed as Mrs. Paul Ramsey on the program) and her daughter
Connie (listed as Constance Asbury). The mother was bossy, controlling, and
high-strung and was forcing Connie to act in the play, which made her
miserable and a nervous wreck. Connie was the only girl I had a date with
the whole time I was in the Army and all we did on the date was talk about
her mother. Since I had a somewhat similar experience with my father, I was
able to sympathize. I said just get the heck out as fast as you can, like I
did. Who knows, maybe she joined the Army!
Being in a play while in the Army was tricky because you had to be in bed by
10:00pm lights-out bed check but the play ran until after that and it was
pretty far away. For staying out late, some people used the old
duffle-bag-under the covers trick but it rarely worked. I invented a better
trick... Since our room in the barracks had 15-20 people, it would be easy
to overlook if one of the beds was missing, especially if you rearranged the
other beds so there was no gaping space. So I'd strip my bed, put the
bedding in my wall locker, fold up the bed
frame, and put it behind the wall locker. The OD (officer on duty
who did the bed check) just looked to see if each bed was occupied, but
never actually counted them, heh heh.
Sitges, Spain
1949 VW controls
1949 Volkswagen (nicer than mine)
Well one time the arty guys all went on leave for a week or two on the
Spanish Costa Brava to place
called Sitges. When they
came back they made it sound so good that I went there later with two of my
regular-guy friends (I can't remember who they were) in the green 1949 VW I
bought for $50, which was pretty beat up, doors rusted shut, etc, not shiny
like the one in these photos. You had to get in and out through the
sunroof. Not easy to drive either, you had to double-clutch when shifting
down, synchromesh didn't come until years later. I actually took some
photos of it but the camera was stolen with the film still in it. It had
graffiti all over it, hammers and sickles, peace signs, Workers of the World
Unite in Russian — Пролетарии всех стран, соединяйтесь! — Nobody
ever bothered me about it. Some features of this car: turn signals are in
the doorposts between the side windows, they light up and flip up and down
with a distinctive whacking noise (the proper automotive term is
"semaphores"). Small divided back window. Floor shift. No heater. The
little black thing above the driveshaft bump switches between the main gas
tank to the reserve tank, so when you run out of gas you can still go
another 40 miles. This was in lieu of a gas gauge. At some point in
Kaiserslautern the VW conked out and I took off the USAREUR license plates,
left it on the side of the Autobahn, and hitchhiked back to base. Around
the same time Roger bought a VW of his own, a 1954 — same color
— that even had a heater.
Guardia Civil
To get to Sitges, we drove over the Alps, through Milano and Genoa down to
the Mediterranean coast: the Italian, French, and Spanish Rivieras. The
Italian resort towns like San Remo were pretty awful, the water full of
garbage that stank so bad it was impossible sit in an outdoor café under the
Cinzano umbrella. We stopped in Antibes (or was it San Tropez?) hoping to
catch a glimpse of Brigitte Bardot. It was a long trip, 1300km; we slept on
the beach several times, including once in Spain where we were rousted by
scary-looking Guardia Civil, Franco's fascist police with capes, rifles, and
shiny black tricornio hats. We spent a few hours driving around Barcelona,
a huge, grim, colorless, depressing city in those fascist times, as depicted
in the novels of Carlos Ruiz Zafón (but we did see Gaudi's Sagrada
Familia when it was not covered by scaffolding).
We spent about a week in Sitges, drank way too much — Rioja from bota
(wineskin) and porón, endless gallons of sangría, which I never knew about
before — but in sober moments I joined in playing flamenco guitar in
some of the "caves" frequented by construction workers covered in plaster
dust who knew the intricate compás,
palmas clapping
methods, and also played music with some British proto-hippies I met.
Sitges Spain 1964
Sitges 1964
British friends
While I was in Sitges I made some pretty good ink drawings including the two
on the left; one is a beach scene (in those days Sitges was a fishing
village, hence all the boats on the beach), the other is one of the British
guys I met the caves (you can see a porón on the shelf) with a friend,
probably in was La Taverna on Calle San Pedro. This guy grew up in a pub in
Hastings (third image), was bumming around the Mediterranean coast with a
band; he showed me how to play "Don't think twice, it's alright"... I
didn't know about 9th chords before! The drawings are done mainly with
German Rapidograf drafting pens (see more
drawings).
After Sitges
NSU Prinz (not the same one)
Meanwhile I went on lots of other excursions with the artsy guys. One of
them had bought an NSU Prinz (a tiny German 2-seater that we would cram four
people into) and we'd go to places like Worms, Heidelberg, Koblenz, Bad
Kreuznach, I forget where else. It was so small that if there was a parking
space that was too short to get into by parallel parking, we could just pick
it up and drop it in the space. Also one time we went to the Kaiserslautern
Stiftskirche (built 1250-1350) for a performance of Bach's
St. Matthew's Passion. (I also went to a performance of Bach's
Christmas Oratorio at a big church in Stuttgart, probably with Roger; I
don't remember doing it but I have the ticket stub so I must have.) On
another excursion, I forget exactly where to, Mannheim maybe, in winter with
a lot of snow on the ground, we were walking around when I stepped off the
curb without looking and a car hit me and sent me flying about 10 feet; the
lady driving the car was beyond upset but I was fine, I landed on a big
soft pile of fluffy snow.
Painting of me by Munn (now lost)
Anyway, one day one of my artsy friends came to tell me that they had been
busted for being queer and were being sent back to the States and
discharged. I had no idea they were gay, I barely even knew what gay was.
(Not all the artsy crowd were gay, but all the gays were artsy; also some of
the gay guys had already gotten out of the Army by the time this happened.)
This guy, by the way, was a white guy from Bulawayo, Rhodesia, John Hugh
Stuart-Munn, who had a degree in architecture at the University of Cape
Town. He was active in the anti-apartheid movement and had been arrested so
many times he had to get out so he came to the USA. But was drafted almost
immediately. He said in South Africa they could hold you without charges
for 180 days; for anti-apartheid whites, they'd turn you loose and then
arrest you again as soon as you stepped on the sidewalk, over and over
which happened to him I don't know how many times.)
I spent their last week with them and they showed me their whole world,
parties, bars, etc. A whole secret underground world. Then they were gone.
I realized that, aside from Ken Nicol (next paragraph), they were the only
ones who got sex on a regular basis, or at all. In February 1965 I wrote
letters vouching for their fine qualities as workers and human beings. In
the end, as Munn reported to me later, "We got General Discharges under
Honorable Conditions, and were not reduced to lowest Enlisted Grade, so we
got away almost scot-free and except for a slight stain on our reputations
we are as good as the next man who served out his misery in full." He went
straight to Berkeley where Stewart and Barnes were waiting for him.
"Last Supper" by Munn
Munn by Barnes
In May 2015, one of the artsy crowd (Stewart) noticed my web stuff and
contacted me. He told me Munn had died of AIDS in San Francisco in 1988.
Meanwhile it was only recently that I found out that Sitges is the biggest
gay destination on the planet. If it was then, I didn't notice. Stu sent me
the Last Supper drawing, which would take a week to explain, but you can see
me in it, and Roger, Barnes, Munn, and Stewart. Sergeant Seltzer, top left,
was not only a Sergeant in the US Army and a major wheeler-dealer in a class
with Sergeant Bilko — he was the Mayor of Neustadt! Ken Nicol, butt
cheek seen protruding from the clouds at top, left of center, was the only
one in the whole place who had a girlfriend, Trudi, whose leg is shown.
(The clouds are for people who had already left, the people at bottom were
still there. One of the cloud guys is Poage; I visited him when I came to
NY, he lived in a bombed out building on East 12th Street near Avenue D that
didn't even have any street lights; I went there one night on
my motorcycle.)
References:
3rd
Cavalry Regiment, Wikipedia, accessed 3 March 2020. Wherever the USA
was stealing land from Indians or Mexicans, wherever it was invading countries
that never posed any threat to the USA, the 3rd ACR was there. The only
bright spots were that it fought on the Union side in our Civil War and it
fought the Nazis in WWII.
When a bunch of your friends are "disappeared" by the organization you work
for, it kind of spoils the ambiance. Since at this point Roger and I both
worked at Regimental headquarters, we saw everything that came in, including
a call for volunteers to sign up for "computer training" in Stuttgart. We
transferred ourselves to 7th Army Headquarters. At that point one or the
other of us — I forget — was the Regimental orders clerk (Roger
says it was me), so we cut the orders knowing the CO would sign anything we
put on his desk. Somewhere in January or February 1965 we drove to
Stuttgart in Roger's VW and it was like driving through a 3D Christmas card.
Side trip: Cutting orders
About "cutting orders"... You may have heard the term, but why "cut"? From
the 1920s or 30s up through at least the 60s or 70s, military orders were
indeed "cut". The first image at right is an Army order from 1963, the one
sending me to Fort Jackson after taking the oath in
Baltimore. If you click to enlarge it you can see it looks almost just like
it came from a typewriter, but it didn't.
Anyway, when typing on paper and you hit a key, it shoots up the associated
typebar, which whacks the ink ribbon, which presses the image of the
character onto the paper (similar to a rubber stamp and inkpad). The result
of typing is normally a sheet of paper with typewritten text on it. If you
want extra copies you can use carbon paper, but there's a limit to how many
legible copies you can get that way. If you need LOTS of copies, you can
use either a mimeograph machine or a stencil machine. In the Army we had
stencils (obviously there are more options nowadays).
A stencil is a long sheet of blue waxy stuff, typically 8½×18",
that can be run through a typewriter — just like paper — but
with a different result. When typing a stencil, the type bar whacks into
the waxy stuff, punching (cutting) a hole in the shape of the letter; thus
the orders are "cut". When you're finished typing you put the blue rubbery
sheet around the stencil drum and then you turn the crank around and around
to produce the desired number of paper copies (or if it's an electric
machine, you set the number and push the Start button). The stencil machine
forces ink through the cut-out character shapes onto the paper. Later, if
you need more copies, you can make them from the same master (stencil). A
military headquarters would typically have a room where dozens or hundreds
of stencils were hung up to dry like laundry on a clothesline until they were
no longer needed. You can find a more graphic description of a stencil
machine (Roneo) on p.152 of the WWII historical
novel
Library Spy by Madeline Martin, Hanover Square Press, 2022.
The stencil business was just one aspect of Army orders. Another was that
an order should be as short as possible, and this was done by abbreviating
all sorts of common words and phrases as specified in the Army Abbreviations
and Acronyms manual, as shown in the sample order: "Fol indiv RA this sta on
EDCSA indic AR 601-210 and AR 601-215" (the following individuals enlisted
Regular Army this station on Effective Date of Change of Strength
Accountability indicated in Army Regulation 601-210 and Army Regulation
601-215); "all indiv UNOINDC" (all individuals unless otherwise
indicated); "Asg: USARECSTA..." (Assignment: US Army Receiving Station...");
"Indiv WP via..." (Individual will proceed via...), etc etc.
You can see a 1985 version of the manual HERE.
7th Army Headquarters, Patch Barracks, Vaihingen
Bad Dürkheim Weinfest
Bad Dürkheim Weinfest
We were stationed at a big
former Nazi military complex in Vaihingen and lived in ex-Nazi barracks
(unlike the base at Kaiserslautern, which was postwar) — Patch
Barracks, originally Kurmärker Kaserne, constructed around 1936. Stuttgart
didn't have much charm, but we drove all over the surrounding area on our
days off, mostly liking little rural villages such as Kleiningersheim,
gypsy camps, traveling circuses like Willy Hagenbeck, wine festivals like in
Bad Dürkheim (photos by Roger), and when we had some leave we'd go up the
Mosel or the Rhein, to Belgium, Luxembourg, and Holland. We liked
Kleiningersheim so much we spent a lot of time there, it was a real
country village, the streets were full of manure and hay and chickens, and
the Gasthaus there served huge portions of whatever you ordered, and
it was dirt cheap. It was perched on the hilltop overlooking the Neckar
river, and the slopes were vineyards.
Camping out (Roger's VW)
Schiller College, Kleiningersheim, 1965
Kleiningersheim was also home to Schiller College, a very small
institution occupying a 16th-Century castle (with parts that dated back to
the 11th century; not at all unusual in Germany) and specializing in "spend
a year in Germany" for students from the US and Britain for immersion in
German language and culture. Best of all, at harvest time all the students
and faculty worked full time in the vineyards. I got their literature and I
was seriously considering going there after the Army, especially since it
cost only $1700 for the whole year including room and board and medical
care. But the timing was not right; I got out in February but school didn't
start until September. By the way I also almost went to SUNY New Palz
instead of Columbia because it had trimesters and I could have got an early
release from the Army if I was admitted. Can't remember why I didn't do it;
at the time I had no plan to go to Columbia. Schiller College moved to
Heidelberg in 1983 and now it's like a chain, with branches in different
countries.
Tübingen with pole boats
Another favorite destination was Tübingen, a picturesque university town,
also on the Neckar, about 30km from Stuttgart. Roger and I were fascinated
by the many Stocherkähne (pole boats, punts) moored on the riverbank.
Anybody could take them out, no charge, no bureaucracy, no supervision, no
nothing. On a typical Spring or Summer day the river would be full of
students and other people poling back and forth or just drifting along under
the overhanging willows.
Stone from Dachau camp
Dachau ovens (Wikipedia)
Another time the Army sent us to Berchtesgaden in the high Alps
for a week of midwinter R&R. On the way we visited the Dachau
concentration camp; it's right in the middle of the town, there's no
way the residents didn't know what was going on with hordes of people
arriving by train all the time and nobody leaving, while the crematorium
smokestacks that dominated the skyline constantly pumped out thick smoke.
Berchtesgaden was where Hitler and his friends had lived only 20 years
before. While we were there Roger and I climbed the Kehlstein [1800m] to
the Eagle's Nest (which I had been to with my family when I was 14),
it was the only time I used my expensive German mountain-climbing
boots. We had no idea what we were doing and we nearly killed ourselves
lots of times. We made it to the top somehow, had tea in the teahouse, but
instead of climbing back down we took Hitler's elevator. I still have the
boots but they no longer fit because my feet grew three sizes when I started
running!
Spätzle
Stuttgart is in Baden-Württemberg in the southwest part of Germany
traditionally known as Schwaben, and they speak very differently but Rog and
I adapted. The first thing you notice is that they don't say "Guten Tag",
they say "Grüß Gott", which they pronounce "grease gut" (I read somewhere
that this greeting arose as a presumably safe alternative to "Heil Hitler").
But also they have a lot of unique vocabulary, they leave off the last part
of words, and they use different verb endings and diminutives. Plus they
eat Spätzle (little flour-egg dumplings) with every meal, which were unknown
in the Rheinland, at least to me. And unlike in the Rheinland, there were
lots of cozy, quiet little Weinstuben (wine bars).
My first "computer" job
Card punched by me at 7th Army CCIS in 1965
IBM 026 Key Punch
In Stuttgart they put me to work in the 7th Army HQ Resident Study Group
(RSG) on the Command and Control Information Systems (CCIS) project as
a key puncher, serving a roomful of (what seemed to me at the time as)
humorless suit-wearing civilian contract programmers who sat at their
desks all day filling in Fortran coding forms. I was also in charge of the
giant coffee urn. The boss of the place was a general; I'd never been
anywhere near a general before. When we went on maneuvers I'd do the
keypunching in the woods, in a big truck trailer full of key punches and
verifiers, powered by an automobile-sized gasoline generator on wheels. The
computer was an
IBM
1401, I never had the least idea what it was being programmed for but I
assumed it was some kind of computer-controlled death and destruction, but
no, it was just bookkeeping; many years later I heard from Wade Harper
who was one of the programmers:
It's hard to believe that we had 12 E6's and
12 E7's, 3 Lt's and 2 or 3 WO to program a computer with JUST 8K of
memory. The 1401 was programmed for MRS (Military Report System) in the
field. Which was a simple sequential database on tape. 1 block for each
report. Each Hq office would submit info in card format which was put to
tape as input to MRS. We could hardly program anything with just 8K
ram. Every report had to be the same format. No individual calculations. We
were barnstorming one day and Jodie Powers wondered if we could somehow put
1 or 2K of code on the tape with each block of data. Then we could
individualize each report. So I finally got it programmed and it work very
well. We also programmed stuff for garrison work. I had all the conventional
ammo in Europe. Spurling (because he spoke German) and I think Jerry Cook,
had the marching orders program (in case of war). I don't remember the other
projects. We went around to a lot of Battalion headquarters begging for
work. I stayed in the Army for 20 years. Then worked as a Systems Programmer
on the IBM 360/370 and others until I retired for good in 1996. I was
fortunate to learn computer programming in the Army.
Wiring a plugboard (not me)
Plugboard in place
Anyway I became a wizard at key punching, the fastest ever, because I was a
120wpm touch typer and I figured out how to make program cards for the IBM
026 (i.e. I RTFM'd). I forget what Roger was doing, I think he
may have been a driver for our company commander. Finally they sent me (but
not Roger) to Computer School, which was a collection of quonset huts in the
forest outside Orléans (France), where we learned to program everything BUT
computers! Mainly "unit record" devices (that operate on punch cards):
sorters, duplicators, collators, interpreters, tabulators, and accounting
machines: the big grey mechanical iron boxes from before there were what we
consider to be computers today (Von-Neuman architecture, stored program,
etc). The programming was done by sticking jumper wires into plugboards;
see my
computing history
site for details if you're interested (look for Tabulators and the IBM 407).
I was there for about a month. There was a shuttle bus into town; one day I
saw the play "Jeanne D'Arc" in the 13th-century Sainte-Croix
Cathedral (1945 photo at right from
Lee Miller's War*). She (Joan) attended Mass
there and led a force that lifted the English siege during the Hundred Years
War (the play was in English, but I don't remember which of the 400 plays
about her it was: Schiller, Shaw, Brecht, Anderson...?)
Photos by John Martin:
Me in Stuttgart barracks 1965
Me in Stuttgart barracks 1965
Enjoying a unit picnic 1965
*
Lee
Miller's War, edited by Antony Penrose, Thames & Hudson (2005).
Paris
An Olympia Press book 1960s
Beatniks under Pont Neuf 1965
While in Orléans I would generally take the train to Paris by myself every
weekend where I wandered around and saw everything. I usually stayed in a
miserable pensión on the Rue de la Huchette, which was then just a
stinky little alley, and now is a gaudy tourist mecca, and at least on one
or two occasions I slept under the Pont Neuf, just to be able to say I
did… "Down and Out in Paris"… I hung around the West Bank, the
intersection of Saint-Michel and Saint-Germaine, headquarters of the
Bohemians and Beatniks not long before; the Shakespeare and Company
bookstore, which sold "underground" books (books banned in the US: Olympia
Press etc), sat in outdoor cafés and even met some people that way…
The Luxembourg Gardens, the Tuileries, the Jeu de Paume,
Me at Paris bookstall on the Seine 1988
the book stalls along the riverbank (where I discovered Gustav Doré,
thumbing through some books), eating at street vendors, etc etc blah blah
(my French vocabulary was limited to pommes frites and un fraise de
soisson centimes). I walked and walked until my feet hurt too much to
walk any more and then I rode on the metro. Paris is one of the few places
where I spent time in the 1960s that still looks almost exactly the same,
except for all the gentrification. In 1975 I would come back with Mommie,
and again in 1988 on a Kermit trip where we were taken to outrageously
expensive restaurants such as the one on the Ile de la Cité (near Notre
Dame).
Race and Integration in the Army of the early 1960s
"The army of the 1950s was America's most racially and economically
egalitarian institution, providing millions with education, technical
skills, athletics, and other opportunities"
—Brian McAllister Linn,
Elvis's Army[9].
Fort Gordon, Georgia, unit 1960s
Of course the Army was integrated when I was in it. In fact, it was
FIERCELY integrated. Any kind of racist talk or behavior was severely
punished. It was a revelation to see white redneck drill sergeants in
Georgia excoriating every kind of racism. Also, there was no religious
prosyletizing then. Religion was totally voluntary and was not forced on
anybody. For that matter, there wasn't any jingoism or anti-communism
either. It was totally non-political in my experience. Just people
learning and doing their jobs (or goofing off).
(Obviously racism, jingoism, and anticommunism took off in Vietnam
when the war got big in 1965, but I was never exposed to any of that in
Germany.) (Another aside: I never had a German girl friend or even a date
with any German girl, hardly any of the white soldiers did. Because German
girls preferred Black GIs[8]).
(Drug use and Black Power… I saw no drugs the whole time I was in the
Army, and there was only one Black guy in my unit who was openly hostile to
white people. Things changed pretty fast just after I got out.)
I read an eye-opening book in 2016, "GIs and Fräuleins" by Maria
Höhn[2]. It seems Truman's 1948 order to integrate
the armed forces was met with massive foot-dragging and as late as 1952 most
units, including those in Germany, were still totally segregated.
Apparently there was a lot of racial conflict within the Army up until about
1960. White GIs would go into town and demand that their favorite bars put
up big signs saying "White only, no colored". Other bars took advantage by
putting up "Colored only" signs. This was against German law but they did
it anyway, so effectively there was segregation in the small towns around
Army bases (but not big cities like Frankfurt), and the Army did nothing to
discourage it. Germans justified it by saying they were only doing what the
Americans did. The off-base hostility reached such heights that there was
an all-out race war in Baumholder in 1955 — gun battles in town
between Black and white troops with fatalities — and several others in
Kaiserslautern in 1956-57, only 6-7 years before I arrived there in 1963.
Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957
The segregation and conflict produced such a huge public relations coup for
East Germany and the USSR that the military units were forcibly integrated
and the Army put all the segregated establishments in Germany off-limits to
GIs, thus effectively integrating them; this was a few years before
Eisenhower enforced integration of Little Rock schools with
(apparently all-white) armed troops.
A year after I was in Augusta GA and could not enter any
bar or restaurant with my Black friends,
they did the same for segregated establishments the American
South.
When Black occupation troops first arrived in 1945, Germans welcomed them
and for many Blacks this was their first taste of freedom — to go into
any establishment, to interact with other human beings on an equal basis, to
not have to fear arrest or worse for failing to act deferentially towards
white people. Many thousands of Black GIs stayed in Germany for that
reason, many of them married into German families after discharge.
The stories that were spread about Black GIs getting German girls pregnant
and going back to the States without them are often misleading; from direct
experience I know the Army would send Black soldiers who they learned had a
German girlfriend back to the States. And if the woman tried to follow, the
US Consulate would deny her a visa.
Jutta Hipp about 1950
My very first job upon arriving at the 3rd Armored Cavalry was "marriage
counselor"; I was supposed to make it impossible for GIs and German girls to
marry (by drowning them in paperwork), but I did the paperwork for them so
didn't last long in that role. Anyway applications by Black GIs to marry
German girls were routinely refused by their commanding officers. A notable
example was Jutta Hipp[11,12], a highly regarded
German Jazz pianist who formed a combo just after the war that played in
bars and clubs frequented by American GIs in Frankfurt, Berlin, Munich, and
other cities where she met a Black American GI who was also a jazz musician
who was not allowed to marry her. She named her son with him Lionel, after
Lionel Hampton.
I went through the Army with a couple guys from the Alabama outback, one
white and the other black. They had grown up in the same little town and
had never spoken to one another, but once they found themselves in the Army
together they became inseperable (I remember on long bus or truck rides,
they would sleep cuddled up together). At the end of three years, about to
go back home, they told me they had to say goodbye to each other forever.
References -
Source material and recommended reading...
Grossman, Victor, A
Socialist Defector — From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee, Monthly
Review Press (2019). Defections from East to West were highly publicized;
defections in the opposite direction were hushed up but I was in a position
to hear about them and this book confirms it.
"Every war already carries within it the war which will answer it. Every
war is answered by a new war, until everything, everything is smashed."
—Käthe Kollwitz,
Nordhausen, Germany, February 21, 1944[1]
Bombing Vietnam 1965
Dominican Republic invasion 1965
While I was at computer school in Orléans in 1965 two things happened, which
I learned about from reading the Stars and Stripes and listening to
the Armed Forces Network: February-June President Johnson started massive
bombing of Vietnam and by July he was drafting 50,000 kids a month (many of
them my high-school friends) to fight there, and while this was happening
the United States invaded the Dominican Republic simply because they were
trying to reinstate their first democratically elected president, Juan
Bosch, after he had been toppled in a CIA-backed coup.
When I got back to Stuttgart I had access to all the Army Regulations where
I worked, and one day while reading through them I discovered an obscure
paragraph in the then-current version of AR 635-20, "Active Duty Enlisted
Administrative Separations", that allowed for somebody already in the Army
to become a consciencious objector and apply for a discharge, and I did that
because I did not want to be put in a position where I would have to kill
people who only wanted to be left alone (or to help others kill them by
working in a support role). The regulation stipulated that the only valid
basis for conscienscious objection was religious belief, so I had to write
the application that way. To do this I had to get a Bible and hunt through
it for the good parts (what Jesus said to do and not to do) — no
Google in those days! As noted elsewhere, this
caused my grandfather no small amount of consternation, since he was an
implacable foe of all forms of organized religion, despite (or because of)
having spent his early years as a Catholic priest. If you want to read the
application, there's a semi-legible PDF here. Rereading it now, 50-some years
later, I can see how he might have been gotten the wrong impression.
Nobody in my chain of command had ever seen such a thing before and it took
them months to figure out what to do with it; it went all the way up to
the Pentagon. In the meantime AR 635-20 said I could not be required to do
anything against my "professed beliefs", which I interpreted to include
carrying a gun and saluting, which resulted in quite a few comical moments,
and they couldn't hassle me for subscribing to left-wing and counterculture
journals like Liberation magazine and Evergreen Review.
Once I walked right past a General, looking him in the eye, without
saluting; he didn't say a thing. On the other hand, once I did the same
thing to a pipsqueak 2nd Lieutenant and he went ballistic like in a Warner
Bros. cartoon and started screaming "Post! Post!" in his high squeeky
voice, which was some order he must have learned at lieutenant school but I
had no idea what it meant, so I just ignored him and walked on.
Normally the Army in those days was pretty informal, it wasn't snapping to
attention and saluting and Rah Rah America. I don't remember anybody I
knew, NCOs and officers included (except my company commander), giving me a
hard time about my CO application. Once on maneuvers in the outback of
Schwaben, my platoon was sitting around a campfire at night (campfire =
burning gasoline in a #10 can) roasting C-rations and drinking beer and we
got to talking about the war in Vietnam. My platoon sergeant (picture him
as the actor Brian Dennehy) was a Korean War combat veteran and it turned
out that the war had disgusted him; he said he admired me for what I did and
wished he had done the same thing. Some other guys in my unit followed my
lead and also applied for CO status; I did the paperwork for them.
On the other hand… There were two Hawaiian guys in my unit, Akino and
Barrios. They were straight out of the central casting: fun-loving, gentle,
playful, always in a good mood, always horsing around, not a mean bone in
their bodies. Off duty they wore Hawaiian shirts, sang Hawaiian songs
and played ukuleles — they had Martins and they could do a lot more
than just strum them. Here is a piece they taught me, "Sushi" (if the link
goes bad, look up "sushi ohta-san"):
When the Vietnam war exploded in 1965, I was totally shocked when Akino and
Barrios volunteered to be transferred to the 25th (Hawaiian) Infantry
Division to fight in Vietnam. I said, What do you have against the
Vietnamese??? Akino, at least, was Asian (it's the Hawaiianization of a
Chinese name). They couldn't explain it, they just wanted to get away from
the haoles and be with their own people. I tried to convince
them not to, but off they went. Searching The Wall
(www.vvmf.org) I'm glad to see that
neither of them was killed. (Later I read about the history of the Hawaiian
divisions in James Michener's Hawaii book[2]
and understood it better. But still...)
Just a couple weeks before my hitch was up, my CO application came back
denied. My immediate commanding officer had recommended disapproval
(because he didn't like it), but all the higher level commanders (e.g. of
the 7th US Army) recommended approval, all the way the Pentagon, where the
Secretary of the Army, Cyrus Vance, wrote that the application was "not
favorably considered", no explanation given. But by then I was already
short, i.e. on my way out. So I served my full hitch and since I hadn't
broken any laws or Army Regulations I have an honorable discharge.
As of 2017, there were 58,318 names on the Wall (the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial in the US National Mall in Washington DC): military men and women
who were killed in Vietnam
(National Park Service).
But "for many Vietnam veterans, the horrors of war manifested itself into
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Others suffered from Agent
Orange-related illnesses including: Parkinson’s disease, diabetes,
Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, and cancer" (Vietnam
Veterans Memorial Fund) ...
"Agent Orange is taking a huge toll on Vietnam Veterans with most deaths
somehow related to Agent Orange exposure. No one officially dies of Agent
Orange, they die from the exposure which causes Ischemic Heart Disease
and failure, Lung Cancer, Kidney failure or COPD related disorders" (Veterans
Administration) ...
"However, the wall does not document any names of the estimated 2.8 million
U.S. vets who were exposed to the poisonous chemical while serving and
later died":
Forbes ...
"The Monsanto Chemical Company reported that the TCDD in Agent Orange could
be toxic as early as 1962. The President's Science Advisory Committee
reported the same to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that same year. Studies from
1954 onward confirm the toxicity of both herbicides used in Agent Orange": Military.com.
It was President Kennedy who gave final approval to "Operation Ranch
Hand", the massive effort to defoliate the forests of Vietnam, Cambodia. and
Laos with the toxic herbicide known as Angent Orange. The U.S. Air Force
flew nearly 20,000 spraying sorties from 1961 to 1971 under the Kennedy,
Johnson, and Nixon Administrations: Into
the Wind: The Kennedy Administration and the Use of Herbicides in South
Vietnam, Georgetown University (2012).
Besides American and allied soldiers (e.g. Australian), approximately
400,000 Vietnamese died due to a range of cancers and other ailments caused
by Agent Orange, and approximately 4.8 million Vietnamese people were
exposed to Agent Orange:
Wikipedia.
And in addition to all those directly exposed are their children and
grandchildren, who have a much higher rate of birth defects than the general
population, including mental retardation, cerebral palsy, hydrocephalus,
deafness, missing limbs/fingers/toes, heart defects, blindness, and on and
on:
birthdefects.org.
Total death toll so far: more than six million
(3.8 million war casualties + 2.8 million delayed-action "aftermath" deaths
including not only toxins but also unexploded munitions left behind at
war's end).
Home before Morning: The Story of an Army Nurse in Vietnam, Lynda Van
Devanter, University of Massachusetts Press (1983, with an afterword from
2001). Perhaps the best book ever written about the Vietnam War. The
author was a combat nurse who served in Pleiku and Qui Nhon, and —
coincidentally — had been a schoolmate of mine
at Yorktown HS in Arlington VA, 1961-62
(but I didn't know her). She returned with severe PTSD but eventually
was able to build a life around organizations that helped returning veterans
(especially combat nurses) overcome their nightmares and become functional
again. She died in 2002 from the delayed effects of exposure to Agent
Orange and other deadly chemical agents used by the US forces.
Bring
the Boys Home... Appreciating Freda Payne
Click image to enlarge;
click HERE to read article.
In 1971 Freda Payne
released her second Gold
Record:
Bring the Boys
Home, a beautiful and haunting song that perfectly expressed the
pain felt by loved ones of the hundreds of thousands of young soldiers sent
to Vietnam to fight and kill and die for... what??? It's an intensely
emotional plea... "Can't you see 'em march across sky... All the soldiers
that have died... Can't you see 'em tryin' to get home, just tryin' to get
home?" This was at the height of a war that — unlike today's wars,
which are not even publicized — affected every family in the country
because of the military draft; nobody wanted their children to die for no
reason in a far-away country they'd barely even heard of.
Elsewhere in this history I describe working at
the Armed Forces Network in Germany in the early
1960s. I had great respect for AFN for reasons I go into in
the Frankfurt chapter, but apparently President
Nixon ordered AFN not to play this song. However, Freda says
"Ironically, the soldiers did hear it. And you can’t believe how many have
come to me and said it was the song that got them through the Vietnam
War."[5]
Being short means that you no longer have to do your job because you have
countless offices to go to and get various things checked off. Short-timers
carry a clipboard with all their checkout forms and nobody bothers them, so
in effect their last week or two is like a vacation. But even when you're
not short, a good trick is: whenever you go outside, carry a clipboard and
walk fast, everyone assumes you're doing something important and official
so they won't hassle you.
USNS Geiger
Geiger deck and lifeboats
Bunks in the hold
All these years I thought Roger and I came back to the States together, but
it turns out he left a few weeks earlier. Anyway I was in the hold of the
USNS Geiger with no ventilation over 8 or 10 days in late January - early
February in rough seas, sleeping in bunks ten deep with no air, and
everybody either smoking or vomiting, probably 500 or 1000 people packed
into an airless iron box that was constantly pitching and yawing.
Occasionally they showed movies in another airless iron box that was only
four feet high. The food was not very good; milk came in half-pint cartons
that were frozen solid and everything else was made from reconstituted
powder. (The Bunks-in-the-hold photo is from WWII, but shows exactly what
the bunks were like.)
They let us up on deck a few times when the weather was good and there were
dolphins leaping and playing alongside. When we were were almost in NY, there
was a huge storm with 50-foot waves and near-hurricane winds and the Geiger
was bobbing around like cork. I was so sick I found a way to get out of the
hold and onto the fantail, where there was a little balcony cut into the
stern of the ship. I held on for dear life to the railing and puked my guts
out while at one minute I was looking up at a wave as tall as a mountain,
and the next minute the ship was perched on top of it, and the next it slid
all the way down into the trough, while the vomit blew back into my face.
It didn't matter, I was soaking wet, icing up actually, but at least I was
breathing good air. In four crossings, this was only time I ever was sick.
We landed February 2, 1966. Looking at a map I realized just now for the
first time that we came in through Long Island Sound. I know that because I
remember looking up and seeing a sign that said "125th Street". That must
have been when we were going under the Triborough Bridge.
We landed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard (which was also a naval port throughout
its history) and were bussed from there to Fort Hamilton where I got my walking
papers and that was the end of the Army.
I realize that I owe a lot to the Army. I was pretty worthless before I was
in it, and it taught me some valuable things. Like, if you have to do
something, just go ahead and get it over with, no matter how awful; nothing
lasts forever. And like, don't let big messes accumulate, always be
cleaning things — "Clean as you go"; it was a good habit to get into
that I never had before. Or, do things for yourself instead of expecting
somebody else to do them for you. But being in the Army didn't teach me how
to get along with and appreciate all different kinds of people from all
different places, because I already learned that
in Frankfurt — which was also the Army —
but for most other people it's an important lesson.
The Army of the early 1960s was almost a microcosm of life itself. It did
practically everything to sustain itself except grow food. So we learned
the great variety of tasks required in a society, and we did most of them
ourselves: cleaning house, yard work, preparing food, picking up trash,
taking garbage to the dump, maintaining equipment and vehicles, operating
hospitals, schools, stores, and radio stations (that had no ads!), ... Once
I even spent spent a few days at Fort Knox building a concrete staircase up
a hill. This gave us some respect for people in real life who made their
livings in those ways: sanitation crews, cooks, cleaners, mechanics,
teachers, nurses, doctors, disk jockeys, truck drivers, construction
workers... Conversely, the Army did not include any of our
21st-century gods: hedge-fund managers, commodities traders, arbitrageurs,
leveraged-buyout specialists, stockbrokers, portfiolio managers, corporate
raiders, vulture capitalists, or anyone else who could become obscenely
wealthy without actually doing any productive work.
Kids today grow up in little bubbles as society becomes increasingly
compartmentalized by race, religion, social class, social media, and cell
phones. I wish the peacetime Army — and the draft — still
existed, or something like it — for example, the CCC camps of the
1930s. A few years in a setting like that is a great experience for kids
right out of high school: living and working with diverse people from all
over the country, learning skills, learning to depend on other people and to
be dependable, learning respect for others. Speaking for myself, I was
definitely not ready for college after high school, but after the Army I
was. I knew how to work.
Obviously I don't favor a draft if it is used to send people to wars of
conquest, except insofar as it might spark another 1960s-magnitude
antiwar movement. But some kind of compulsory national service would be an
effective antidote to the anomie and aimlessness of 21st-Century American
young people, especially if the service was focussed on doing work that was
needed (e.g. to fix the infrastructure, save the planet) and helping people
who need help, like in the original New Deal.
At Fort Hamilton a guy named Herbie Bader came to meet me, he was an Army
buddy from Stuttgart, it was a complete surprise; I have no idea how he
knew where and when I was arriving. He was a native New Yorker who spoke
with an old-time Brooklyn accent (Queens, really), fast-talking,
argumentative, big, tough, belligerent, ironic, and funny, always in trouble
in the Army for talking back or fighting — that charming combination
that attracted me to New York. It was a good thing he came because I was
going to see Wendy at Barnard but had no idea how to get there, so he took
me on the subway (looking on the map I see it must have been the R train
terminus at 95th Street, with a transfer to the F and the 2). Except he
didn't know we had to switch to the local at 96th Street, so we wound up
surfacing at 116th and Park. And Hoib said "Oh My God, we're in Spanish
Harlem!!!" and I said, "Look! Mr. Nazerman's pawn shop!" Herb and I had
just seen The Pawnbroker a few weeks before and there was the actual
pawn shop, right on the north end of La Marqueta under the elevated New York
Central tracks. He was panicking (not as tough as I thought!) but I said
big deal let's just walk, and we walked west on 116th Street to Morningside
Park, up the stairs to Morningside Drive, across campus to Broadway, and my
new life started right there. I found Wendy at Barnard and we went straight
to the West End bar, which had been the official Columbia/Barnard hangout
since 1915.
Hotel Paris
Wendy, Jude, and Peter
Jude yearbook photo
When it got late I asked where a hotel was and the only close one was the
super-sleazy Paris Hotel on 96th Street and West End Avenue, where the
elevator operator offered me drugs and prostitutes and the tiny room was
ratty and full of cockroaches. The next day Wendy introduced me to Peter
Marsh and Judy Bryant (Jude), and I slept a couple nights on the floor of
Peter's Hartley Hall dorm room. Then I went to Virginia to find Richard
Lamborne in Alexandria, because we had planned to get an apartment together
in DC (Ludwig was in Vietnam). Later when I moved to NYC I visited Herb a
few times; he lived with his parents in an apartment in Flushing, which was
totally Jewish in those days; now it's totally Chinese. We would always sit
in the kitchen and his father would just keep giving me food. Eat! Eat!
Washington DC...
Richie Lamborne
1715 19th Street NW, Washington DC
Richie still lived at home with his parents, I stayed there with them for
about a week, they were kind of uppercrust and arrogant (his dad was in
charge of the annual regatta on the Potomac river, rich people stuff).
Richie was was called Head because of his big head. We'd go to DC each day
looking for apartments and finally found one in a small townhouse at 1715
19th Street NW, between R Street and Riggs Place, a couple blocks north of
DuPont Circle, in those days Washington's miniscule bohemian section (in
1966, "a simmering bouillabaisse of classes, colors, and types; a ferment of
beatniks, genteel matrons, foreign students, thrill-seekers and curiosity
hunters," according to the National Register of Historic Places). We were a
couple doors from the Ghanaian Embassy and they invited us to all their
parties (now it's the Sierra Leone Embassy). We had a large studio that had
a real fireplace and a kitchen with a bar to sit at and, $100 a month. The
culture seemed to have changed overnight, just out were the Beatles Rubber
Soul, the Stones High Tide and Green Grass, Dylan's Blonde on Blonde, the
Miracles Goin' to a Go-Go, Otis Blue, the Temptations first album…
In January 2020, I was surprised find that the block is virtually unchanged.
Brickskeller
Goya Rangemaster
Right off, I bought a Goya Rangemaster for $300 at Sophocles Pappas, which I
used in all my DC post-Army gigs but when I moved to NYC in August 1966 it
was stolen. It was a good instrument, handmade in Italy; hollow maple body,
rosewood fretboard, single cutout, cherry finish. It had a row of buttons
for selecting different combinations of four split-coil pickups, plus
various other controls. The futuristic hard case was shaped like a right
triangle with its point lopped off, lined with bright yellow faux fur. As
of 2019, this same guitar is selling for $2000.
I worked as a musician in the house band at The Brickskeller (which existed
1957-2010) at 1523 22nd Street NW, just off P Street, near Rock Creek Park
in Washington DC, fronting for name acts that had records out (one I
remember was the bluegrass group, Country Gentlemen), and had other gigs on
the strip along M Street just east of Key Bridge in Georgetown, which was
almost solid bars; this area is pretty much intact but WAY more upscale.
(We used to go drinking there when I was in high school in Arlington, with
our fake IDs, not just in bars but also in Greenwich-Village-like clubs like
the Cellar Door on 33rd Street just off M with little-known folksingers
and beatnik poets; the building is still there but the club is gone.
Meanwhile just west of Key Bridge was a tiny place called Little Tavern,
where you could get 20 miniature hamburgers for a dollar.) Years after I
lived in DC, the Brickskeller became famous for having the largest selection
of beers of any bar on earth, over 1000.
About playing in bands in Washington… Actually I was in two bands,
one in the Brickskeller that played mainly bossa nova, some Charlie Byrd
style jazz and Mose Allison (both Washingtonians), some German jazz
that I picked up in Frankfurt, e.g. Simone 1
(Emil Mangelsdorff, Jutta Hipp); sorry, it's not on Youtbe but
this one is close
(more about the Frankfurt jazz
scene HERE). Plus guitar
adaptations of pieces like So What, Goodbye Pork Pie Hat, In Crowd,
Moanin', etc. And of songs that Dakota Staton sang (Late Show, When
Sunny Gets Blue, ...) And some cheesy cabaret songs like The Shadow
of Your Smile that the lead singer liked (can't recall his name, or his
other songs). Sometimes Richie Lamborne would sit in and we would do Dave
Van Ronk / John Hammond kinds of blues; he did a pretty good imitation and
played blues harp too. Sometimes I'd also do some Bach riffs.
The other band played at bars on M Street and was pure rock… Songs
that I remember are We Gotta Get Outa This Place (Animals), Good
Lovin' (Young Rascals), She Belongs to Me (Dylan, my own
arrangement), Well Respected Man (Kinks)… Nowhere
Man, Michelle Ma Belle… Evening of the Day… The
interesting thing about this band is that the drummer had been James Brown's
drummer and left because the Godfather of Soul was such a tyrant. A third
group at the same time was just me and Wendy and another girl, Tandy, and we
had only one song, Catch the Wind, a little-known Dylan song that
they liked that we did with weird dissonant chords. We "rehearsed" it every
time we got together.
I played in bands in high school in Germany and in Arlington, and then in
the Army too. In Arlington I also had two bands, one rock, the other
"skiffle" (guitar, banjo, washboard, washtub bass, jug, spoons, etc, where
we did songs that we copied from Library of Congress field recordings, plus
some Leadbelly, some Almanac Singers, and once performed at a school-wide
assembly in the auditorium). So I guess my musical career went from 1960 to
1966.
Wait, I just remembered, in the late Sixties some mainly black Columbia
students had a 12-piece Motown/Stax R&B and funk band, Soul Syndicate, a
large group with horns, big sound. I knew some of them
from Double Discovery and they liked how I played guitar.
Just before
1968 happened, they asked me to try out with them. But then
things got complicated and the deal was off. (This comes up because I found
out that the guy who invited me to try out, John Herbert, is at Montefiore,
3 blocks from me, and we got to reminiscing by email… And then after
that I learned that John had been the anesthesiologist at my colonoscopy
that Peter escorted me to!) Image at right courtesy of John, showing Soul
Syndicate performing at
Manhattan's Cheetah
nightclub in 1968.
Anyway life in DC with Ritchie was getting too strange and eventually I
realized he was stealing everything I had and selling it to support a
heroin habit, and I knew I had to get out.
Moving to New York...
Wendy Sibbison
116th Street subway kiosk 1966
Chock Full o' Nuts 116th Street and Bway 1966
The Yumke Man
Wendy Sibbison was a Barnard student and she got
me interested in going to Columbia, so I filled out an application while I
was living in DC with our friend Tandy Martin, where I went to get away from
Richard for a few weeks, and mailed it in. I first met Wendy in 1962 when I
was going to UVA, before I totally left home. I remember her being at our
house and meeting my parents and brother at some point, and me being at her
house and meeting her parents. She had written to me the whole time I was
in the Army and her letters meant a lot to me, so she was the first one I
wanted to see when I got back, and she was. Then while I was living in DC I
would go to NYC all the time on a Greyhound bus to see her and Peter and
Jude.
In August 1966 I moved to NYC all by myself on a Greyhound bus, with what I
could carry. I didn't even know if I had been accepted at Columbia.
Here's what the Columbia U area was like when I arrived:
The transit fare was 15 cents.
Everybody walked between subway cars.
The IRT and BMT and IND were separate.
Some trains still had wicker seats and leather straps.
You put coins in the slot to pay for bus fare and if you didn't
have exact change, the bus drivers made change.
Chase Bank was Chemical Bank (and before that Chemical Corn).
The neighborhood around Columbia was cheap and diverse;
there were bodegas, Dominican beauty parlors, Cuban restaurants,
Jewish diners that served matzoh brei, Greek gyro stands, etc.
There was a subway kiosk in the middle of Bway at 116th Street.
Rents averaged about $100 a month.
Newsstands were Jewish and sold the Jewish Daily Vorvaerts and
the Daily Worker, penny candy and egg creams and
two-cents plain, and proprietors spoke Yiddish.
Taxi drivers were mainly Jewish.
Washington Heights was 100% Jewish.
The Bronx was mainly Jewish, Italian, Irish, and Puerto Rican.
There were still Checker cabs.
The public schools were among the best in the country.
Public housing was a great place to live.
City College was free.
Columbia tuition was low enough I could pay it out of my pocket.
Chock-Full-O-Nuts was on the corner of 116th Street.
There were no chain stores except Chock-Full and Daitch Shopwell.
They still had Italian street festivals in East Harlem.
You could spend the whole day and night at the Apollo for $2.50.
There were tons of movie theaters everywhere with cheap admission.
On Broadway:
103rd St
100th
98th
97th
96th
88th…
Edison
Metro
Symphony
Riviera
Thalia
New Yorker
The Thalia and New Yorker were repertory theaters that showed
Marx Bros, Bogart, Eisenstein, Kurosawa…
The only places along Broadway in 1966 that survived into the XXI century
(as of 2011, at least)
were Columbia Hardware (1939),
Mondel's (1943), Tom's (1940s), Amir's
Felafel, and the tiny shoe repair.
The West End
opened in 1911 and closed in 2006 due to astronomical rent increases.
V&T's Pizza on Amsterdam opened in 1945 and was still there last
time I looked. In the 1980s the West End was a jazz venue.
Columbia made a good first impression on me… In one of my visits
while I still lived in DC, there was a Martha and Vandellas concert in
McMillan Theater… pretty amazing, right? I went with Wendy and some
other people. Eventually I noticed the guy I was sitting next to was an old
friend from Frankfurt High School, Dave Kelston. He lived in an apartment
in a brownstone in the 80s (in those days, a rough neighborhood) and he had
a motorcycle, he took me on some rides and then I wanted one too.
Angela Davis
When I arrived at Columbia and met Columbia students — who in those
days were not clueless narcisistic arrogant bubbleheads like today, but
socially aware, committed, intelligent, knowledgeable, fast-talking,
anti-racist, anti-imperialist, many of them Red Diaper babies — and
faculty — half of them Marxists — I started to understand why
the USA was invading all these countries. Marxist theory was taught in
every sociology course in those days, and International Publishers (USSR
English-language press) had a whole aisle in the bookstore. There were also
a lot of teach-ins going on by people ranging from Lyndon LaRouche (in those
days a Leninist known as Lyn Marcus) to Seymour Melman, an anti-war Columbia
engineering professor who had a Marxist-Melmanist analysis of Pentagon
economics. I read pretty much all of Marx and Engels except Volumes 2 and 3
of Kapital, hung out at Communist book stores (there was one called Taylors
where Papyrus was later on, and another one on 8th Avenue around 155th
Street), read Malcolm X, George Jackson, Angela Davis, Sam Melville, Mao,
Lin Piao, Fernando Cabral, Regis Debray, Franz Fanon, Sartre, Eldridge
Cleaver, etc etc. Subscribed to the Daily World (formerly the Daily Worker)
up until the mid-80s; it was delivered right to our door at 118th Street.
Read Pa'lante and the Black Panther newspapers every week, and have a big
box of them in Mommie's garage, probably just moldy mush by now.
The same day I arrived from DC I got an apartment and a job. What can I
say, life was easier then. There was a sign on College Walk that said
Employment so I went in and they gave me a job at Butler Library. Then I
went to the Taint (the passage between Hartley and Livingston halls, "t'aint
Hartley, t'aint Livingston") where the bulletin board was and found an
apartment in the Ta-Kome building.
601 W 115th Street 2017
Ta-Kome deli 1957-1984
The apartment I got was a TINY room in the Ta-Kome (University Food Market)
building on 115th Street and Broadway, that I sublet from some Columbia
professors, FW Dupee
and George Stade,
who used it during the academic year. Little did I
know I would spend some 40 years of my life on that block. The apartment
was on the top floor (12th) and it had a huge window that looked out over
the Hudson, but the room was so small it only had space for a bed; there was
a tiny triangular bathroom in one corner with miniature toilet and sink and
shower stall and no kitchen or fridge. I was only there for the summer,
until school started. New to New York, one night I had such a strange dream
that when I woke up, like Coleridge, I had to write it
down.
The only time I ever got a telegram
My brother Dennis came to stay with me for a week; I went to the Army Navy
store on 125th Street to buy a folding cot for him to sleep on. We cooked
meals in an electric frying pan on the windowsill, but the view made
everything kind of magic, especially at night with the Circle Line and other
cruise ships going by with music and dancing; you could actually hear people
on the boats talking in their normal voice, some trick of acoustics. I
remember taking Dennis to see Hard Days Night at the Quad Cinema on
13th Street and stopping at the Ukrainian shops. I also took him to a party
at Neil Hurwitz's house at 610 W 115th Street, where he (Neil) still lived
49 years later in 2015, last time I was there.
I checked with GS and found I was admitted, so since my tiny apartment was
rented only for the summer, I went to the Taint and found another place to
live, a room in the apartment of David Stern and Erna Gold at 419 West 119th
Street across from Aki, the Japanese restaurant where "The Mean Man Pushed
the Lady" (Peter's interpretation of painting on the wall). David and Erna
were very nice and smart and funny and good Communists and Erna played Bach
and Scarlatti on the piano. But the place was stinky because they fried
frozen fish every day to feed to their cat. And sharing the bathroom was
tricky. The building had its own 1930s-era telephone system, with a
switchboard in the lobby. David was famous for having turned down a
National Defense scholarship, the first person ever to do that, it was in
Time Magazine. I always wonder if he is the same David Stern who is now the
NBA commissioner but I don't think so.
The Bertha on 111th Street...
The Bertha
Anyway everybody knew I wasn't crazy about living at David and Erna's.
Meanwhile Peter Marsh was living in a three-bedroom apartment at 515 West
111th Street, The Bertha, with Paul Brooke and Paul Nyden. Paul Nyden was
pretty famous left-wing guy, became a crusading pro-labor journalist in West
Virginia. He died in 2018; his kids' middle names are Mandela, Allende, and
DuBois. Anyway, he moved out at the end of the first semester so they
invited me to take his place. Our apartment (1E) was the first one on the
right as you go in the front entrance, with windows looking out on 111th
Street at street level.
In the photo, the four windows to the right of the entrance were our
apartment in 1966-67. The first two windows were Peter's, the second two
were Paul Brooke's. Kitchen, bath, and three bedrooms, about $300 a month
split three ways. It was so easy and cheap for students to find apartments
that there were hardly any off-campus dorms.
Paul Brooke
Paul Brooke's girlfriend was Mommie. I thought he was kind of arrogant and
didn't like how he treated her. This was sort of a mythic place; Jude was
always there, Mommy, Wendy, etc, and of course Froggy. Peter Marsh was
always playing his Chambers Brothers and Mamas and Poppas and Mothers of
Invention records, so those songs always take me back to the Bertha.
My 1956 BMW R26
Me on it 1967
It was while living in the Bertha that I bought a 1956 BMW Motorcycle for
$300 from a guy in Queens. I registered it in Vermont using Peter Marsh's
address because insurance wasn't required there; I never had insurance or
even a driver's license. I took the test about 100 times up on Audubon
Avenue but in those days they just automatically flunked everybody every
time. In the winter I brought it inside the apartment, riding it up and
down the front steps. It wasn't fast or anything, but I rode it all over
the place, all over Manhattan, especially the Lower East Side (which was
like a bombed-out zone in those days), around Central Park (the S-Curve is
awe-sim on a motorcycle), up and down Palisades Parkway in NJ and out into
the Great Swamp. Sometimes I went to Palisades
Park, a big amusement park on the top of the Palisades across from
Palisades Park NJ seen from upper Manhattan
Washington Heights (you could see it at night from Manhattan, all lit up)
to get vinegar-soaked french fries (it closed in 1971). Peter Marsh and I
would go on rides together, he had a 500cc Triumph, which was a serious
bike, not a slowpoke like mine; once we rode up to the Little Red Lighthouse
along paths in Riverside Park in the middle of the night, another time we
went to a biker hangout in NJ but that was a big mistake; we didn't exactly
fit in with Hell's Angels, they made fun of us the whole time.
Bertha Apartment 1967
Bertha Kitchen 1967
Froggy 1967
The three photos at left were sent to me by Peter Marsh in 2024, which makes
them 57 years old.
The first one shows Peter's Triumph in his bedroom. The second shows the
entrance to the cramped kitchen / dining room where various combinations of
Judy, Paul, Jude, Peter, Wendy, (and Patty Chen? anyone else?) and I would
crowd around the tiny table; this was the only common area. The third photo
shows the foul-tempered homicidal cat, Froggy, who came with the apartment
and apparently had to power to shrink Peter's bike down to an
un-intimidating size. My second-least fond memory of Froggy is when he
(she?) attacked me while I was sleeping, bent on severing my jugular vein; I
pulled her off me and tried to throw him full-force out my bedroom door.
That was when I learned an essential lesson of life: Never Throw a Cat.
Anyway when the fall semester ended, our merry band disbanded and gave up
the apartment. I forgot who was going to take Froggy (it definitely wasn't
me), but somehow I had the honor of carrying her out the door. Froggy
didn't like that and tore into me with tooth and claw, shredding my shirt,
my chest, and arms, so I just put him back inside. And as the years passed
and tenants changed, Froggy stayed; every time I walked down that block I'd
see her in the window.
109th Street...
170 West 109th Street 2012
Front door and Pedro's apartment
Basement apartment entrance
170 West 109th Street 2012
Needing a new place to live, I went to Off-Campus Registry (the same place
where I got my first apartment) and found the basement apartment at at 170 W
109th between Amsterdam and Columbus, directly across from the Con Ed
substation, just $70 a month (but Peter Marsh would share it and pay half
when he came back in the Fall, so $35 each). At the time I was the only
person on that street who was not Puerto Rican or Dominican. I lived in the
basement in a condemned apartment, four narrow rooms in a row, a classic NY
tenement railroad apartment. There was no bathroom but there was a shower
stall in the kitchen. The tiny kitchen sink was also for teeth brushing,
face washing, etc. The toilet was outside the apartment, near the boiler.
The kitchen was the only room big enough to hang out in; it had a table and
some chairs. The landlord was an old Irish lady, Mrs. Gavaghan who was
exactly like Mrs. Lift in Throw Momma from the Train. She lived on
106th Street in a huge apartment with her cat, who had its own bedroom and
slept on a king-size four-poster with canopy. My super, Pedro Lugo, and his
family lived right above me; he had three kids, Tony, Papo, and Maria; his
wife was very shy and nobody ever saw her. (Decades later Ivonne said she
knew Tony and Papo, they were much older than she was and famous drug
addicts.) I still had my motorcycle then, I'd take the kids for rides. The
next door neighbor was Mikey the drug dealer. Every night you'd hear people
yelling Mikey, Mikey, Miiiiikieeeeeee… Sometimes they'd come to my
place looking for Mikey (the two buildings were twins and he lived in the
corresponding basement apartment). I didn't have any furniture so I just
brought in stuff from the street (some of it I still have, like the black
chair). Pedro gave me a mattress with bedbugs. I was friendly with the
people who had bodegas and laundries on Amsterdam and would hang out with
them at night.
Iris Chacón poster 1967
Willie Colón album 1967
The street had personality, especially in the hot summer. Half the cars
were up on blocks with their wheels gone and windows broken out, fire
hydrants and Willie
Colón music blasting, the frío-frío man
(a 90-year-old Dominican guy with a rickety wooden cart painted light
blue with a big block of ice)… the famous
Iris Chacón
poster plastered all over the neighborhood... Delicious cooking smells
coming from the apartments… families barbecuing on the street, kids
of all ages everywhere hanging out, dancing, making out… old guys
playing dominó…
One morning as I left for work I saw somebody parking a big shiny silver
Bentley in front of my building. I thought to myself, that's not good.
Sure enough when I got home, it was up on blocks and burnt down to a hollow
black shell. I realized that to park my motorcycle on the street was a bad
idea too so I moved it to the Royal Garage on 107th Street between Amsterdam
and Columbus, $12.50 a month. I sold the bike after about 2 years.
109th Street stories continue below, after Double
Discovery.
Project Double Discovery...
Ferris Booth Hall patio 1967
The summer of 1967 I worked as a counselor in Project Double Discovery,
which was basically a Marxist revolutionary study group (just kidding) (not
really) paid for by the US government and
HARYOU ACT, and it was one of the places where the Weather Underground
was born. We lived on campus in Hartley and Livingston. The ostensible
purpose was to prepare mainly Harlem high-school kids for college. Mostly
Black, Puerto Rican, and Dominican kids but also some poor whites from East
90s and Hell's Kitchen (which were tough areas then) and some kids from
Chinatown.
In the morning the kids attended classes taught by top Columbia professors
like Jim
Shenton, who later directed the program. In the afternoon our kids, in
turn, had to tutor elementary school kids in Harlem. I took my kids on the
train every day to 145th Street and we walked from Broadway over to PS90 on
147th Street, just east of 8th Avenue. Besides tutoring the kids we did a
lot of projects around there, like price surveys in the stores so we could
publish lists of which stores had the best and worst prices for essential
items like milk (in this, we discovered a little-known dark and dusty relic
of the Marcus Garvey days, a nonprofit Hey Brother food market — you
can't even find this in Google). We'd spend lots of time in the Communist
bookstore on 8th Avenue at 155th Street. And for fun we'd go to Bradhurst
Park and Colonial Pool (now called Jackie Robinson). I didn't know it at
the time, but that is one of jewels in the crown of the New Deal in NYC, one
of 11 palatial public swimming pools and bathhouses built in the City by the
WPA in 1936. Anyway just being in Harlem every day that summer was
unforgettable, Martha and Vandellas and James Brown blasting out of boom
boxes… People making their own music on street corners, usually
involving multiple conga drums, everybody out on the street because it was
too hot to be inside… Fire hydrants going full blast long before the
days of sprinkler caps. Shabazz bean pies, egg creams, orange soda;
Sherman's Barbecue… I forget the name of that cheap sparkling wine
that came in fruit flavors and cost a dollar… Oh right, Boone's Farm
Strawberry Hill.
NYC Subway tokens - Click to enlarge
We got almost unlimited amounts of money for activities — cash, big
bags full of subway tokens — movies downtown (whatever movie the kids
voted on, e.g. The Dirty Dozen), lots of times to the Apollo, plus
food festivals, trips to all different places, including one to the Cuban
Consulate — you could not believe how many camera shutters we heard
clicking as we entered. There was also a Kurosawa festival going on in
Ferris Booth Hall and we all went see Yojimbo, Throne of
Blood,
Sanjuro, and Seven Samurai. It was their introduction to
Kurosawa and they ate it up. Mine too except for Roshomon, which I
had seen in high school in Germany, where they showed it in the auditorium
one day.
And speaking of movies, the kids worked as extras in the (otherwise pretty
dumb) Hollywood film Up The Down Staircase, which was filmed at
Benjamin Franklin High School on Convent Avenue at 116th Street in the
uptown Little Italy (Mommy would teach at Franklin for years, starting about
1970). We went to the NY premiere and the kids were screaming with joy to
see themselves up on the huge movie screen. But all of those scenes have
been cut from DVD version.
Other counselors in 1967 included Mommy, Wendy, Howie Machtinger, Teddy
Gold, Mark Naison, Heywood Dotson (played for NBA), Paul Nyden, Paul Brooke.
Eric Foner and Jim Shenton were among the teachers. Just for the record,
the kids in my group were Mike Hall, Michael Alston, John García, Tony
Delbridge, Hollis Jenkins (who always wore a suit!), and Tim Lee (who took
the picture of me on my motorcycle).
109th Street, cont'd...
Max 1967
After Double Discovery, Peter Marsh joined me in the 109th Street apartment
for the 1967-68 school year, which was pretty tumultuous not just because of
the Columbia uprising, but the MLK assassination, the almost-riots in Harlem
only a few blocks away, the RFK assassination, the Nixon victory, etc etc.
At some point Peter and I found Max, a homeless cat, on the street and
brought him (no, her) home.
Peter and I shared the apartment for about a year and had lots of
adventures… For one thing, we both had motorcycles. Jude would come
over all the time, and would usually stay the night (Peter had the front
room, the only room that could be closed). We'd cook stuff but there were
constant assaults of roaches and mice. The roaches would literally jump off
the walls into the cooking pots. There was one mouse that was kind of a
pet, Max didn't bother it, and it would do cute things to entertain us like
stick its little head up through the burner ring on the stove (not when the
stove was on!)
One Sunday morning we heard a lot of commotion outside. A whole caravan of
suburbanite do-gooders had arrived in their station wagons to clean up our
block and paint everything bright pastel colors, improving the ghetto for
the poor people so they will be in a better mood when they see pictures of
flowers and smiley faces everywhere. They did the whole block except my
building because Pedro told them, "You touch my building, I kill you."
Pharmacist's Mate Peter M
Peter Marsh dropped out and left before the school year was over. His grade
point average was not good, and in those days Columbia reported everybody's
GPA to the draft board, and if it was below a certain number you were
drafted, and that's what happened to Peter. This was when the Vietnam war
was at its height, what a nightmare. He did what I did — applied for
CO status — and he was luckier than I was; the application was
approved and he went back to Vermont at some point after the 1968 strike at
Columbia but before the end of the school year (taking Max with him) to do
his alternative service, working 2-3 years in a hospital in Burlington,
where he was like pharmacist's mate (his work costume in the photo). He and
Jude and Max lived on the top floor of Abernethy's at the north end of Pearl
Street, in a gothic apartment that was full of turrets and ladders and
hatches and secret rooms.
Patty Chen 1968
And I had the 109th Street apartment to myself again. That summer I worked
in Butler Library and since I was in the doghouse for being in the strike,
they had me move the entire College Library stacks by myself, I don't know
how many tons of books, and it was like 120 degrees in there… This
was long before the library was air conditioned. I'd come home in the
evening exhausted and drenched in sweat, take a shower, go spend the evening
with Wendy, Jude, and Patty Chen (they shared an apartments in a townhous on
91st Street and then another on 101st Street); we'd cook dinner, drink wine,
and listen to music: Wendy's Stax Review in Paris LP, the
Miracles Goin' to a Go-Go LP, etc.
One night when I came home from work, the entire stoop was covered with what
looked like congealed bacon fat, but a LOT of it, it was several inches
thick and covered the whole stoop. Pedro was scraping it off with
scraper, filling up big garbage cans. He said it wasn't just the stoop, it
was the stairs all the way up to the top (fifth) floor. He'd been scraping
all day. He told me what happened. A guy who lived up there, I never knew
his name… he was huge. He must have weighed 400 or 500 pounds.
Every morning he'd come down and sit on the stoop all day, smoking
cigarettes. I always said hi to him but we never had anything to actually
talk about, he never really talked with anybody. At the end of the day he'd
hoist himself back up to his apartment and, it turns out, drink and smoke
himself to sleep. Apparently he was smoking in bed and the bed caught fire
and melted him and all his fat ran out the door, down the hall, down the
stairs, and out the front door, probably 400 pounds of it.
Judy at 109th Street
Judy at 109th Street
Judy at 109th Street
I kept the 109th Street apartment until Mommy and I got together, which was
in May or June of 1968. She stayed with me there about week but that was
all she could take (vermin, no bathroom, no closets...). The picture on the
left shows some things about the place: the no-view window at the foot of an
airshaft, the kitchen sink that was also the bathroom sink, the adjoining
shower stall right in the kitchen, the bright colors I painted everything.
I wish I had photos of the toilets out in the hall with mushrooms growing
around them. Or all the crazy makeshift gadgets we had for locks and
doorbells, made with ropes and pulleys and two-by-fours and hinges and
buttons.
French New Wave pose
In the kitchen
Judy at 109th Street
Judy and I decided to move to a better apartment, even though it would cost
four times as much. I gave my apartment to Mike Hall, one of my kids from
Double Discovery, just to piss off racist Mrs. Gavaghan. Mike had a pretty
horrible life, he grew up in the Bronx, once his mother locked him in a
closet all summer, later he saw his brother murdered, etc… After PDD
he hung around Columbia for the rest of his life, homeless, usually sleeping
on the Broadway center strip. In later life he had huge dreadlocks, no
teeth, and hobbled around with a cane. He was very smart and a very nice
guy but he just couldn't take care of himself… All the old PDD people
at Columbia watched out for him. Oh right, I almost forgot, once we got him
a job as a kind of "security guard" at Amy's Own Broadway Presbyterian
Cooperative Nursery School when Amy was going there. He was still around
when I moved out of Manhattan in 2012.
Before leaving 109th Street, let's have some more pictures. In the second
one, I still have those two mugs. The left one I brought from Germany. The
right one Jerry Jacobs sent me from Frankfurt but over the years the
Henninger Bier logo wore off, now it's just plain grey.
Me at 109th Street
Me at 109th Street
Herbert at 109th Street
Judy and Herbert
Who ate the mattress???
Amsterdam Avenue 1968
110th & Amsterdam 1968
Judy gave me a puppy for Chistmas, I called him Herbert.
Actually she and Paul Brooke gave me a different puppy first (Paul is
holding him in the picture back in the Bertha section)
but it got sick and died within a couple days, so then they gave me Herbert.
I had him for six months or a year, but it was a real bad idea. I was in
school or working almost all the time and he was locked up in the apartment,
so he'd get crazy and start wrecking things. One day I came home and the
entire apartment was up to the ceiling in feathers; I'm not kidding, when I
opened the door all I saw was white. He had also eaten all my books,
including a hand-typed manuscript of my grandfather's. So eventually I took
him to the ASPCA, whose job (I thought) was to find him a new home.
Anyway, in some of these photos you can see the secretary that I had until I
moved to the Bronx; Peter Clapp gave it to me when he went underground.
Judy and me 1968
Peter Marsh 1968
Expo 67 Montreal (1968)
These are from a trip we in 1968 took to Vermont and Expo 67 in Montreal
(the Expo supposedly ended in September 1967 but it was still there). Peter
and Jude were already living in Vermont in a little house they rented in
Burlington for short while, which is where the first two photos were taken.
103rd Street...
308 West 103rd Street
View from 103rd St.
Mommy and I sublet a studio apartment of a friend of hers at 308 W 103rd
Street, 9th floor, for a few months in 1969 and when her friend wanted the
apartment back, the one next to it was vacant so we rented that; it was a
fairly modern building; we had a separate but tiny kitchen, and one bedroom.
There was an Orthodox synagogue on the first floor. We looked out over its
back yard, where they sounded the ram's horn, conducted various ceremonies,
and pitched their Succot tent in the Fall. We stayed there for about 7
years, during which time I was working and going to school full time,
earning my BS and MS, until 1976, when she was pregnant and we needed an
apartment with more bedrooms.
118th Street...
419 West 118th Street
In 1974 Mommy and I decided to get married and have children. We were
married at the end of 1974 in Mama Lori's house in Queens. All the family
was there, plus Peter and Jude and some of my engineering school friends.
Mommy has the wedding album but I looked really stupid in the 70s with big
stupid hair and beard and 1970s suit.
Long dark hallway
In 1976 we rented the place at 419 W 118th, apartment 51 on the fifth floor,
a 7-room apartment that had a pretty nice living room and study but the rest
was a long, long, long hall with little tiny rooms off it that looked out on
a dark airshaft: the kitchen, bedrooms, and 1930s-era bath, and there were
so many cracks and crevices it was impossible to keep the cockroaches and
mice out. The original rent was $350 and gradually rose to about $850
by the time you guys vacated in 1994.
419 West 118th Street
At 118th Street May 1980
The first baby miscarried at 5 months, but the next two came out OK: Peter
October 7, 1977, and Amy on May 26, 1980. We all lived there until 1988 when
Mommy and I split up, and you guys and Mommie stayed there until 1994. By
that time Columbia had found out I wasn't living there any more (somebody
ratted us out) and had issued an eviction notice and we had to go to housing
court, but Mommy and Rick found the house in Riverdale just in time.
The 118th Street years are documented in
the photo CD I made in 2001. Our next-door
neighbors were the Garcías, Marshall (Mariscal?) and his wife whose name I
forget, and their grandson Max (Peter's good friend) and Max's mother, whose
name I also forget. Peter told me Max died in 2017 of one of several
conditions he was born with.
Hungarian Pastry Shop 1978
Ludi and Peter 1980
This is where you guys both spent your first years: Peter 17 of them and Amy
14. Your baby sitter was Lourdes (Ludi) Charles, and your "nanny" was Holly
Papas (in a neighborhood of white children cared for by black nannies, you
guys were the notable reverse exception). You had all your birthday parties
there except for the time we had one of Peter's at a bowling alley on
Broadway and 230-something in the Bronx very close to where he would live
one day. You played at St John the Divine ("Peacock Park"), the Columbia
campus, Riverside Park, and Morningside Drive. We normally cooked meals at
home but also ate out pretty much, often at Mama's Place (the Greek diner on
the corner), sometimes at V&T on 111th and Amsterdam, Moon Palace on
Broadway at 112th. The Hungarian Pastry Shop was right across Amsterdam
Avenue from Peacock Park and we always stopped in there for treats; it's
still there as of 2020. Around the corner was Green Tree, an old-fashioned
Hungarian restaurant, long gone.
Going to school
Barnard Toddler Center
Both of you started your schooling at Barnard Toddler Center on 120th
Street, even before you turned 2. Then Peter went to Tompkins Hall Nursery
School on Claremont Avenue where Lita Eskin worked. Amy went to Greenhouse
School on 116th Street, then Broadway Presbyterian preschool on 113th. Then
you both went to PS87 on 78th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus for
elementary school. I was pretty strong on sending you guys to public
school, but Mommy would have sent you to private schools if she could have
Earl Carroll
(she applied to one on Fifth Avenue for Peter, Manhattan Country Day School,
but luckily wasn't accepted). I would have wanted you guys to go to PS36 on
Amsterdam and 122nd Street; it was the neighborhood school but Mommy wanted
something more downtown. PS87 had a famous janitor, Earl Carroll, who was
lead singer of the Cadillacs who had a huge hit in 1955, "They often call me
Speedoo but my real name is Mister Earl". After that he was in the Coasters
for 20 years. He died in 2012 at 75. Also Chaka Khan was a school mom, we
saw her all the time (did you know she had been a Black Panther?)
Then you both went to IS44 on 77th Street (which was one of the early
schools that was broken up into mini-schools, like the Science School, the
Computer School, and which was unceremoniously shut down by mayor Bloomberg
in 2009), also between Amsterdam and Columbus. Famous parents or
grandparents there included Peter Boyle (he was the monster in Young
Frankenstein) and Fyvush Finkel from Picket Fences.
Day camp: Ramapo, 1980s. Sleepaway camp: ECCC, Episcopal Camp and
Conference Center, Old Saybrook CT, formerly Camp Incarnation, because
Mommie had started hanging out at St John the Divine some time after 1988
(actually I think it was after Granpa died and she got religion). In 1993
at ECCC Peter snapped his ACLs in one knee while Mommy was away on a trip
and unreachable. I rented a car and drove there (like 100 miles) the next
day to pick up him up, arranged for surgery, and kept him in my 112th Street
apartment, took him to hospital, visited him each day while he was there,
brought him back to my apartment on 112th Street, and even bought an air
conditioner so he wouldn't suffer in the heat. This was over a week or two,
it was super traumatic. The first doctor who saw him (at camp) told him
he'd lose the leg. In the end, he was in a leg brace and in rehab for six
months and recovered OK, but with a huge scar.
Vermont...
Peter and Jude's house
Peter Marsh and Judy Bryant have been my friends since 1966, just off the
boat from the Army in Germany. They've been together since high school and
have a daughter Hannah. Peter is a fanatical Vermonter, with good reason:
it's a beautiful state and the people are almost universally good-natured,
open, kind, and friendly. He grew up in Arlington (near Bennington), where
Norman Rockwell lived and so the Marsh family appears in some of Rockwell's
paintings and Saturday Evening Post covers. As noted earlier, Peter left
Columbia and NYC because of the Vietnam war and the draft and returned to
Vermont to do his alternative CO service in Burlington. Not long after,
Jude joined him there and after a few years they bought a fairy-tale log
house in the woods in a high valley over Starksboro (pop. about 1000). We
went to stay with them every summer for 30-some years, it was a big part of
our lives. The visits diminished after Mommy and I broke up in 1988 because
I didn't have a car, although a few times I rented one so we could go. In
recent years Amy went there with a former boyfriend and Peter went with
Sophia before they split up in 2019. And I went there with Pam in September
2019; they had sold their fairy-table cabin and moved to a house in Bristol
right near Cubbers.
Peter and Jude's house
Creek scene
Bridge over creek
Peter and hammock
Outhouse
Vegetable garden
Big Rock
Clifford's Pond
Clifford's Pond
At Jude's studio
Country fair
Cubber's in Bristol
For the record Peter has been a carpenter (and I think also a woodworking
instructor at the Shelburne Craft School), a house builder (his own business
for many years), a restoration carpenter at the Shelburne Museum, and most
recently a house inspector. And Jude has a been a potter all this time, and
also a pottery teacher at the Craft Center.
Kinapic...
Kinapic is the name of a little colony of "housekeeping cottages" on lake
Kezar, about 5 miles outside of Lovell, Maine, owned by the family of my
ex-sister-in-law Christine's husband Henry. Starting when Peter 8 months old
in 1978, we went there every summer until 1988 (and Mommy continued to take you
guys there after that, right?). Lovell is a tiny town whose only store (an
old wooden house) is a combination diner, convenience store, and gas
station. Steven King lives there, but I don't think we ever saw him. At
first we stayed for a week, but it was so nice that the next year we stayed
two weeks, and after that three weeks. THEN we'd drive across New Hampshire
to Vermont and stay with Peter and Jude another week. Yes, it's hard to
believe but I had FOUR WEEKS of vacation in my job (and of course as a
teacher, Mommy had the whole summer off).
Judy and Peter at Kinapic 1977
Uncle Henry
View of Lake
View of Lake
Dock, boats, diving platform
The voyage to Blueberry Island
Kinapic scene
Granpa, Christine, Granma at Kinapic
Kinapic
Amy
Peter jumping off the dock
Kinapic
Goodnight Moon
112th Street...
605 West 112th Street
No furniture yet - 1988
Mommy and I were together for 20 years (1968-1988) and were also married for
20 years (1974-1994). I moved to 605 West 112th Street in 1988 (not a
Columbia apt) and stayed there until 2012, 24 years, the longest time I ever
lived anywhere. At first you guys came over every weekend, and I would come
back to 118th Street every morning to get you off to school. Eventually you
got older… And summer camp… And college… and
Brazil… and South Africa.... Amy also went to Spain and to Italy on
class trips in middle or high school. (You guys can write your own bios!)
Ivonne García about 2000
Peter's 12th birthday at 112th Street
But we had a lot of fun in those years… You guys would come over for
the weekend and we'd always go to a movie, usually at Leows 84th, and then
eat in a restaurant, usually Broadway Cottage II on 94th Street. Sometimes
we'd go the West Village or the East Village or the Feast of San Gennaro or
Chinatown or other places reachable by subway. Once (twice actually) Amy
and I went to Staten Island on the ferry. After about 10 years, Ivonne
García became part of the family, so there would always be 4 of us at the
weekend gatherings. I used to cook a lot... super salads, eggplant
parmagian, lasgana, various chicken-cutlet extravaganzas, plus every Friday
night we always had a large pizza with spinach and mushrooms from Pizza
Town, which was right around the corner.
Me at the foot of 112th Street
View from 112th Street
On Saturdaysnbsp;we'd always make sure to be home in time for Hercules
and Xena, and then Peter would stay up till all hours watching Headbangers
Ball, then we'd wake up early to watch the Smurfs, while eating our
traditional breakfast of grits, toasted bagels, and soy sausages. The three
of us (or sometimes just Amy and me or just Peter and me) went on some good
trips too… Misquamicut, Cape Cod, Howard and Lita's and Saratoga
Springs (the stinky water), Vermont, a little diner in rural Canada, a zoo
somewhere in Quebec with drooling giraffes… I remember on one trip we
had big black fuzzy dice hanging from the rear-view mirror of the rental
car. If I did that now I'd be arrested.
The Bronx...
277 East 207th Street
Oval Park seen from my window
The purpose of living at 112th Street was so I could walk to work but once I
lost my job, there was no reason to stay there. The rent in my 112th Street
place was $1100 in 1988. It stayed in the low-to-mid 1000s for about 20
years but then a new management company took over and was raising it 20%
every year; it was $2400 in 2011 and it was about to go up again. I was
sick of the increasingly gentrified neighborhood and the whole borough of
Manhattan so I decided to look for an apartment in the Bronx. At first I
wanted to live on Sedgwick Avenue along the reservoir in Kingsbridge and I
looked at some places that were pretty nice, but it was not near any stores
or transportation, and walking there from Broadway was like climbing a
mountain. So I "settled" for the place on 207th Street overlooking Oval
Park. Turns out to be the best place in NY I ever lived.
Oval Park view on a winter night
Once I moved I realized that I was never comfortable among Columbia people
(except janitors, AA's etc, like Freddie Cocco and Terry
Thompson)... privileged, entitled, arrogant, competetive, and increasingly
clueless. Now I'm back among working people, like my whole life up until I
left the Army, and it feels right. I love it here. It's the most diverse
place I ever saw except maybe Woodside, Queens. Everybody is so nice, the
total opposite of Manhattan. Not just nice to me, but also nice to each
other… Dominicans, Black Americans, West Indians, Bangladeshis,
Puerto Ricans, West Africans, Mexicans, Albanians, Yemenis… And a few
very old Italian, Irish, and Jewish holdovers from decades past. No
arrogant yuppies, no masters of the universe, everybody working hard to get
by, mostly families with children, but they're not angry and hateful like
the people who voted for Trump, because unlike them, these people have
always been on the bottom. When they come home from work, they forget about
the job and live their lives. Nobody is an outsider or foreigner here
because everybody is.
This is the first place I've lived since high school that is like Frankfurt,
where there is a common gathering place — Oval Park — where all
the kids go after school and all the families take their children and
everybody walks their dogs.
Amy Peter and Sophia
Sophia
Peter and Sophia at City Island
Then in 2017 you guys moved here too... All three of us living in the
same building!
(until COVID, when Amy lost her job and had to move back in with Mommy).
In August 1966, before I received my acceptance letter, I moved to NYC from
DC. The day arrived I found a temporary apartment (the one in the Ta-Kome
building) and got a job Butler library. I worked there three years,
everything from shelving books to working at the checkout desk to cataloging
PhD dissertations. I started at $1.00/hour and was earning $2.30 by the
time I left in 1969. One day working at the desk a little old man shuffled
in, timidly… It was the library's first ever amnesty on overdue
books, and he turned in a book he had checked out in 1888.
In September I started a full load at GS (Columbia's School of General
Studies, its adult division created originally for returning veterans) and
still worked full time in the library, 40-60 hours a week. I ended up with
a BS in Sociology in 1970, somewhat belated because I was suspended for a
semester due to the 1968 sit-ins and arrests. I paid my way totally by
working, plus a $100-per-month stipend from the VA, and whatever meager
scholarships I could get. Also Peter Marsh and I would go to the Columbia
hospital once a month and sell blood for $10 and some free juice and
cookies.
My undergraduate degree was pre-Internet, pre-computer, purely paper and
pencil, blackboards and chalk, books and libraries and typewriters. The
only exception was one single sociology class that used computers, but I
dropped it because we had to go to the East Side where *the* computer
terminal (an IBM Selectric typewriter) was.
The only computers were mammoth multimillion dollar monsters accessible only
to a select few and even then only by punch cards and printouts, and they
were not networked. There was no email. TV was still broadcast, cable
didn't come until the 1970s. Music was on 33⅓ and 45rpm records and
LPs; there was a record store on Broadway across from Columbia. Although
video recording had been invented, it did not reach the mass market until
the 1970s, so there were no VCRs, no video rental. Anyway I never had a TV
until the 1970s although Peter Marsh and I rented one briefly at 109th
Street for the 1968 Olympics. At Columbia, papers had to be typed on
typewriters. Around every university was a bunch of stores for used and new
typewriters, and Butler Library had coin-operated public typewriters. I
bought a Czechoslovakian manual typewriter for $5.00 that I wrote all my
papers on. Offices had electric typewriters, usually the IBM Selectric. I
have been a good typer since high school, when my dad and mom made me learn
to touch-type. To this day I can type about 120wpm just like both of them.
I imagine my life would have turned out a lot different if that hadn't
happened.
I got straight A's all through freshman year. Sophomore year was 1968, when
I was in Low Library and was arrested twice, etc, so no more straight A's.
My first impression of Columbia was pretty good: the students, faculty, and
staff... A lot of fast-talking New Yorkers, it was "somewhat" integrated
(staff: very; student body: a little; faculty: not much). There were lots
of antiwar demonstrations and pro-Harlem activity. In 1966 and 1967 I was
in a lot rallies and marches against the Vietnam war and/or racism,
including several huge ones in Washington DC. In 1967 I withheld 84% of my
tax bill; click here to see what I wrote to IRS by
way of explanation (I remember typing this in the Bertha with Mommie and
Jude and Peter and Wendy watching over my shoulder). I never heard a peep
from the government about it.
Breaking into the gym site 1968
But it soon became evident that the Columbia administration and trustees
were all in with the Vietnam war and with the ethnic cleansing of Harlem (a
long story I won't go into here because there are whole books about it...
anyway you see how Harlem is today and you can thank Columbia for it). The
final straw was when Columbia appropriated a big chunk of Morningside Park
for itself in order to build its new gym. There were constant
demonstrations over this, so finally CU made a concession, allowing
"community members" (i.e. Black people) into the gym but only through the
back door, a policy that was immediately dubbed Gym Crow. I was at work
when this news came out and a bunch of students went to the construction
site and tried to tear down the fence and the police came and arrested them.
When I came out of Butler Library a near riot was going on around the
Sundial, I joined it, and before long we all marched into Hamilton Hall and
"occupied it" overnight.
Me in Low Library 1968
I have a whole website about
this here, no
need to recount everything that's already in there, but briefly... Early
the next morning the white students, including me, marched to Low Library,
broke open the locked door and moved in to President Kirk's office. As the
days passed, four more buildings were occupied, including Fayerweather where
Mommy was for a while, then after a week we were all removed forcibly by
police. That was the "first bust", involving about 700 arrests.
100 Centre Street
Tom Hayden 1968
I spent the night in the Tombs at 100 Centre Street sharing a cell with Tom
Hayden and few other people. Another item worth mentioning about that night
is that I saw a guy I worked with in Butler who had tried to recruit me to
"blow stuff up" walking the corridors wearing an NYPD badge; I ratted him
out and he was fired from his Butler job.
Peter Marsh in custody
About two weeks later there was an SRO occupation on 114th Street with about
100 arrests, including Peter Marsh (right) , and a few days
after that 138 of us occupied Hamilton again and were arrested. There's a
movie about all this called Columbia Revolts; I'm in it a lot, but
the best part was cut out some time after 1988 (when Peter and I saw it at a
20th anniversary showing), where Teddy Gold and I are sharing a gallon jug
of apple cider. All traces of Teddy were removed from the film after he
was killed in the March 6, 1970, West 11th Street townhouse explosion
where they were building bombs.
I was charged with three felonies and a misdemeanor and spent the next three
years going to court dates on Centre Street and learning about how the
criminal courts work in real life for the accused prostitutes, drug
offenders, etc, who are the large majority of the court's cases. The key
number is 90: the public defender meets the defendent for the first and only
time and spends 90 seconds convincing him or her to plead guity in exchange
for a 90-day sentence; otherwise they'll be at Rikers for 2-3 years awaiting
trial (did you know that 70% of all the people in jail in this country are
awaiting trial but can't afford bail?). So they plead guilty. Next!...
For every hour I spent in the courtroom I'd see 40 poor souls sent to
prison. Anyway after three years and about 30 court dates I ended pleading
to a violation, with no punishment.
French poster
About a month later all hell broke loose in France and afterwards some of
those people came and stayed with me and they all said that we were their
inspiration; they gave me a bunch of their famous posters like the one shown
at left that was on my wall at 109th Street. Then that summer the same
thing happened in Mexico. Mommy and I were there for that, and only by
accident did we miss being in a demonstration that was mowed down by
machine-gun fire.
The Columbia strike lasted the rest of the school year; the University was
effectively shut down. There were picket lines in front of every building,
and I was in them. Our main function was to reason with people who
disagreed with us, rather than to physically block them from going in.
Many were sympathetic, some were hostile, some were belligerent.
I can't speak for the French and Mexicans, but as to why we were so
motivated in those days... On average, the USA was killing 2000 Vietnamese,
Cambodians, and Laotians every single day and destroying and poisoning their
cities, towns, and countryside. People our age were being drafted and sent
over there to murder people who only wanted to be left alone. Of my
Frankfurt High schoolmates, hundreds went to Vietnam and 15 came back in
boxes. And, in the wake of the very recent civil rights movement,
Columbia's behavior towards its Harlem and Manhattan Valley neighbors was
arrogant and predatory.
Interlude within the Interlude
Joanne Tuminski 1968
It's a little-known fact that I had a girlfriend just before Mommie, named
Joanne Tuminski. She was two years behind Mommie at Barnard and lived in
616, the Barnard dorm on 116th Street. I knew her from my library job,
every time she came to the desk she'd stay and talk. Then when I was in Low
Library, she'd come to my window and bring me treats, so after it was all
over we saw each other for a couple months before Judy happened. Joanne was
from Dorchester Mass and her favorite expression was to say something was
"warped", but with her Boston accent. We used to lay on the South Field lawn
and look up at the stars and talk for hours and hours. One day when we were
hanging out together we bumped into Mommie and I introduced them.
Columbia University, cont'd
I was suspended for a semester because I wouldn't apologize to the Dean of
GS and worked full time in Butler, during which time I also was a labor
organizer for District
Council 65, successful enough to force an (unsuccessful) election, but
this got me fired from Butler. The voting, by the way, was at Broadway
Presbyterian (Amy's Own Skoo-well), in the basement.
Mina Karp, Margo Jefferson
After being ejected from the library I got a full-time job in the
Engineering School because Mommy's and my friend Laura Karp whose parents,
Bill and Mina Karp, were 1930s Lefties in
the WPA
Art Project, asked Mina, who worked there, if there was a job for me and
that's how I wound up at the Engineering School. Margo Jefferson also
worked there and we became good friends; later she became
famous as a
journalist and writer, winning a Pulitzer Prize, and has published three
books:
On Michael
Jackson (2006), Negroland:
A Memoir (2015),
and
Constructing a Nervous System (2022).
The job was in the Applied Physics and Nuclear Engineering department in
the Mudd building, which is built around a nuclear reactor that was never
turned on. Nevertheless on the reactor floor there were always radiation
experiments going on so I had to wear a film badge that was checked weekly
to make sure I wasn't radioactive. So aside from office work, I helped set
up the experiments (e.g. making big walls out of lead or paraffin bricks for
shielding) and also was responsible for the liquid nitrogen supply (once I
accidentally dropped a canister and it spilled out over my foot but luckily
I was wearing workboots and still have my foot). The job was informal and
flexible and people were nice so I could take off for class at any time, and
that's how I finished by BA.
Interlude: taxi driving...
I graduated at the end of 1970 (the middle of the school year because of the
1-semester suspension) with a BA in sociology, which turned out to be good
for only one job, welfare inspector, which entails going to public housing
apartments, banging on the door, demanding to enter in and see if they had
anything expensive, the objective being to evict them from public housing
and/or take them off welfare.
Yellow cabs 1970s
So instead of that I wound up doing odd jobs (like illustrations for books
and pamphlets) and then as a taxi driver — yellow cabs, "big boats"
over 20 feet long. Most of the other drivers were middle-aged Black or
Jewish men. Since I was the kid at the garage, I always got the worst car.
Once I actually drove a whole shift in a car that had no floor in back seat.
Another time my car just stopped working at the foot of the big stairs on
231st Street at Ewen Park and I sat there for like 6 hours waiting for a tow
truck, never knowing that one day you guys would be taking those stairs
every day.
Hack license 1970-72
I drove for Inwood Garage in the Bronx. This was when Mommy and I lived on
103rd Street. I'd get up about 4:30am, shower, take the #1 to 96th, take
the #2 to 149th and Grand Concourse, and then the #4 up Jerome Avenue to
170th Street and walk a block west to Inwood Ave where the garage was. The
building is still there but now it's Taxi Cab Partitions Inc. My shift was
6:00am to 6:00pm. At first I'd go straight to Manhattan, but the passengers
there were mostly rude arrogant cheapskate businessmen in a big rush to get
to a meeting or the airport, so I quickly learned to try my best to
stay in the Bronx all day where people were nice and friendly and tipped
much better, even though they were poor, plus the traffic was lighter so I
could make more trips per shift. Many of my Bronx passengers said I was the
only yellow taxi they ever saw in their lives. Once I picked up a group of
three or four gang kids, wearing colors; they couldn't believe I stopped for
them and gave me a huge tip. I remember mainly being on Grand Concourse,
Jerome Avenue, St. Ann's Avenue, and Third Avenue. Since this was before
Internet and GPS, I carried a big foldup map with me.
By the way, a trip to the airport was about a $7.00 fare, so it would seem
like a good thing, but it turned out that to get a fare back from the
airport you had to pay the dispatcher a $10 bribe, so I'd just go on
Queens Boulevard and usually got a fare or two. (I could keep going for
many pages of taxi stories....)
Around the same time was when Mommie and I bought our first car, a used 1963
Dodge Dart. We went to a used-car lot on Jerome Avenue and Grandpa picked
it out. I know we had this car while I was a taxi driver because I remember
braking on Broadway to pick up fares, forgetting that I was not in my taxi.
We had the Dart for years. We bought our next car from Henry, it was kind
of a sports car, eight cylinders, very fast, but paint would not stick to
it, it fell off in sheets. After that we bought another used car that was
stolen the very next day. Then we bought our first new car, a kind of
minivan for our big shopping trips to the Paramus Mall in NJ.
Eventually the same people I had worked part-time for in the
Engineering School offered me a full-time job, which I took. As I
recall it paid $6000 a year. Within a year or two I was programming their
minicomputer (a room-size monster that had 16k of 16-bit-word memory) and
with prodding from one of the professors there, Lee Lidofsky, and also much
encouragement from Herb Goldstein (a world-famous scientist and
mathematician), I earned a Masters in EE & CS on tuition exemption. It
took three years while I worked in my full-time job. I had to take 65
points of "makeup" courses (calculus, physics, linear algebra, statistics
and probability, etc) in addition to the 30 points of engineering because I
had no math or science as an undergraduate. I would have gone on to get a
PhD (was actually admitted to the program) but by then Peter was on the
scene. When the grant that funded my job there ended, Lee got me my first
real programming job, R&D in nuclear medicine at Mt Sinai Hospital while
I was still taking
Columbia U machine room 1974
Howard Eskin + Mr.P
engineering classes, a lot of zooming back and forth across Central Park on
my bicycle. One of my engineering professors, Howard Eskin (pictured with
Peter at his 1st birthday party) who was to become one of my best friends,
along with his wife Lita (who would be Peter's teacher in preschool),
recruited me to come work for him at the Columbia Computer Center. This was
in 1974; I did, and wound up with a 37-year career in computing, data
communications, and networking at Columbia (when such things were relatively
novel and obscure), wrote books, traveled the world, etc etc blah blah.
Judy visiting the PDP-11 room 1975
PDP-11 room 1976, much more crowded (and loud)
When I first went to work at the Columbia Computer Center I was just another
programmer on the huge IBM 360/91 mainframe, which was all punchcards and
printouts. But from Mount Sinai I also had experience with the new
minicomputers from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), and talked them up.
Within a year we had bought our first DEC multiuser timesharing computer, a
PDP-11 with which up to 32 simultaneous users could interact directly. And
poof! I was a manager after just one year on the job. The first picture
above shows a small part of the DEC PDP-11 computer that was in this small room
which was also my office for two years, and where the noise was measured at
75dB.
DECSYSTEM-20 1977... A Biiiiiiiiiig Computer!
DEC Marlboro
Just two years later we had bought a large (not mini) DEC timesharing system
for a million dollars and I was the manager of that one too, and then over the
next few years three more like it, all of them networked together and used
by about 6000 people. Columbia's first computer network, Columbia's first
email, etc etc. We were one of DEC's biggest customers, so important they'd
fly us to Logan Airport on one of their private jets and then from there to
Maynard or Marlboro in one of their helicopters.
The Kermit Project...
Starting in the late 1970s, microcomputers and PCs became popular, all
different kinds, and also the Columbia departments all had different kinds
of computers, both mini and micro. But there was no way for all these
different computers to communicate with each other so we developed the
Kermit file transfer protocol and the original software programs to execute
it. We wrote Kermit programs for CP/M microcomputers, the DEC mini and
mainframes, the IBM mainframe, the IBM PC and (when it came out) the
Macintosh. This was a big deal, all the other universities wanted it, and
when they got it they added new implementations for their own computers, and
before long Kermit software was available for hundreds of different
computers and we were famous and I had written my first book, which was a
best-seller.
Chris Gianone 1987
Kermit machine room
In fact, Kermit software became so popular that we (the systems programming
group) were spending all our time putting it on magnetic tapes and mailing to
places all over the world. No other work was getting done, and the postage
was costing a lot. So I agreed with Howard and the Director, Bruce
Gilchrist, to start charging for the tapes and to use the revenue to hire
a business manager, Chris Gianone (who already worked elsewhere in the
Computer Center), and some tape-makers and shippers, and set up a machine
room in the back of Watson Lab 7th floor for making the tapes.
Me with suit 1987
By 1987 Kermit was such a big deal that Chris and I were teaching courses at
Columbia (and at various corporations downtown) and giving speeches in front
of big crowds at computer conferences and symposia all over the USA as well
as overseas. For this I had to buy a suit! Chris and I published books and
articles both together and separately, and often traveled together; I'd give
the technical talks and she'd make the deals. We went to the Boston area
countless times in our dealings with DEC, which (as Digital Press) was also
the publisher of our books. We also went to conferences in Anaheim,
Nashville, and Baton Rouge (where a modem company seriously tried to hire us
away from Columbia). We went to other conferences in Japan, Germany,
Switzerland, France, and finally the
USSR, and each trip also included side trips to other
nearby places such as Austria, Italy, Hong Kong, Macau, Hawaii... Everybody
(including Mommie) thought Chris and I were an item but we never were. All
that time Chris was with another guy, Louie, who she married in 1997 and
they had kids who are grown up now.
Me in Paris 1988
In Tokyo 1987
Me in Ulm 1988
In Milan 1988
Chris in Japan 1987
Innsbrück 1988
Euro-goodies
By 1990 we were making so much money in shipping fees and book sales that I
was able to resign from my real job (as Columbia's network planning officer)
and do Kermit full time, and even hire a full-time programmer. We came out
with Kermit 95 for Windows 95 and it made millions of dollars for Columbia.
But Windows and the Internet spelled the end of the international
conferences and junkets.
Watson Lab on 115th Street
Where I worked for 37 years
The idea of working at Columbia was that you didn't make a lot of money but
it was super-informal and the benefits were almost unbelievable. For
example tuition exemption for myself (how I got my Masters degree) and for
you guys, about a half million dollars worth. Four weeks vacation. A
defined-benefit pension. Health care. My job was just perfect for me: no
bureaucracy, no meetings, no wearing suits, none of that stupid stuff that
other jobs had, and I could do creative work all day long, plus dealing with
users and helping them with their projects and research. Most of the time I
was there I had my own private office, as did most other people — no
cubicles, no "bullpens", no "scrums"... Imagine, peace and quiet, no
interruptions, but at the same time you could visit other people in their
offices to talk about stuff.
All of that changed in 2005 when CU president Bollinger decided the
university should be run like a corporation and brought in corporate
managers for every department inluding ours. Overnight it turned from the
best place on earth to work to the worst. Nobody was allowed to do their
job any more, all we could do was sit in meetings accounting for ourselves
and setting goals and milestones, doing "strategic planning", recording
everything we do in spreadsheets and dashboards, and on and on. The new
managers who were brought in at every level knew nothing about computing,
software, or anything else we did, so even more meetings were necessary for
all the real workers to explain what they were doing to the clueless
managers. Furthermore "project managers" were brought in to "interface"
between us and our new managers, and to micromanage our supposed work, which
none of us ever had time to do.
Meanwhile heads were rolling; not a week went by without people
disappearing, especially the most senior and the most competent. I was the
only one they couldn't fire because I was paying my own salary from sales of
software licenses. I had been one of the small group of senior managers at
the computer center for 30 years, but now I reported to a young guy 1/3 my
age who used to work for me, and I had to have a "teleconference" with him
every day for a couple hours. But worst of all they decided to starve me
out by not letting me make new releases of our revenue-generating software
products. It took five years, but eventually orders went down to where CU
was having to contribute a few dollars towards my salary, and they laid me
off. Luckily by then I was old enough to retire. Even more luckily, my
last day was the day before Columbia cut back drastically on its retirement
package. It was also the same day as the Washington-DC/NYC
earthquake. I actually felt it, sitting in my office chair, a fitting
sendoff.
What Is Kermit?
For the record, since it's the main thing I'm known for...
From the Kermit Project website:
Kermit is the name of a file-transfer and -management protocol and a suite
of computer programs for many types of computers that implements that
protocol as well as other communication functions ranging from terminal
emulation to automation of communications tasks through a high-level
cross-platform scripting language. The software is transport-independent,
operating over TCP/IP connections in traditional clear-text mode or secured
by SSH, SSL/TLS, or Kerberos IV or V, as well as over serial-port
connections, modems, and other communication methods (X.25, DECnet, various
LAN protocols such as NETBIOS and LAT, parallel ports, etc, on particular
platforms).
The Kermit Project was founded at the Columbia University Computer Center in
1981 to meet a specific
need, and until the mid- to late 1990s, Kermit was Columbia's standard
desktop connectivity software, used universally by students, faculty, and
staff to connect from desktop microcomputers, PCs, Macintoshes, and Unix
workstations to the central computing facilities:
the IBM
mainframes (1963-2017),
the DECSYSTEM-20s
(1977-1988), CLIO
(Columbia's first online library information system, 1984-2003), and Cunix
(our big central Unix-based servers, 1986-present), and to departmental
VAXes, PDP-11s, Suns, and other minicomputers. In the early days of
microcomputers and PCs but before widespread deployment of local area
networks and desktop workstations that connected to them, Kermit software
linked the desktop to e-mail, bulletin boards, file sharing, text
processing, messaging, and other aspects of the new on-line culture that is
now taken for granted, long before the experience was available at most
other institutions. At Columbia, the DEC-20s and the departmental
minicomputers are long gone and the IBM mainframes are now only for
backoffice use, but Kermit software is still used for SSH sessions from the
desktop to CUNIX, and by the technical staff for system and network
administration tasks; for
example, configuring
racks full of HP blade servers as they
arrive, management
of the University's telephone
system, CGI
scripting,
alpha
paging of on-call staff, and so on. Plus, of course, by old-timers who
just plain prefer the safety and efficiency
of text-mode shell sessions for
email and to get their work done; for example, software development and
website management.
Over the years, the Kermit Project grew into a worldwide cooperative
nonprofit software development and distribution effort, headquartered at and
coordinated from Columbia University,
as Kermit software was ported to or developed for more and more computers
and operating systems (see
list). The Kermit Project is dedicated to production of cross-platform,
long-lasting, stable, standards-conformant, interoperable
communications software, and has been actively engaged in
the standards process.
Kermit software is used all over the world in every sector of the economy:
national government, state and local government, academic, medicine and
health care, engineering, aerospace, nonprofit, and commercial.
Although terminal emulation has been largely supplanted by the Web for
online access, Kermit software continues to play a role in other
applications such as remote sensing and data collection, management and
troubleshooting of networking and telecommunications equipment, back office
work, cargo and inventory management, medical insurance claim submission,
electronic funds transfer, and online filing of income tax returns. Kermit
software is embedded in network routers and switches, in cell-phone towers,
in medical diagnostic and monitoring equipment, even in cardiac pacemakers,
not to mention the cash registers of quite a few big-name "big box"
retailers. In 2002 Kermit flew on
the International Space
Station, and Kermit software is the communication method used by
EM APEX ocean floats
(left) supplying realtime data to hurricane researchers and trackers to this
day (the hurricane project entered a new expanded phase in 2010 based on
a new version of Embedded
Kermit).
Since the 1980s, Kermit protocol and software have been used on the
factory floor in programmable die-cutting, press brake, laminating,
flat roll, shearing, metal- and plastic-processing, woodworking, and other
machines. For example, in the manufacture of the Boeing 787, where
Kermit is used to control a Tape
Layer that forms certain body components. You can read more about how
Kermit is used on the factory floor here and here.
In the 1990s Kermit software was used in US Post Office automation, it played a
key role in the 1994 Brazilian national
election (the biggest in the history of the world up to that
time), and it was central to the UN relief
mission to Bosnia, “linking the entire spectrum of the project
operation, from mainframe, minicomputer, PCs, to handheld devices and
barcode readers.”
In the 1980s the robustness of the Kermit protocol suited it ideally
for service in the Green Revolution
in Africa, the joint European-USSR Giotto space
mission, and perhaps most notably in reestablishing data communication
between US research stations in Antarctica and the mainland after they were
cut off in 1986 in a computer mishap during the 9-month Antarctic winter.
In 1988 an international conference on Kermit
was hosted in Moscow, USSR, and Kermit sessions were featured at other
conferences throughout the 1980s in Tokyo, Bern, Paris, Nashville, and
elsewhere.
The Kermit protocol and software are named after Kermit the Frog,
star of the television series, The Muppet Show; the name Kermit is used by
permission of Henson Associates, Inc. Why is it named after Kermit the
Frog? In May of 1981 we already had first implementations of the
protocol working, but we didn't have a name for the protocol or the software
yet. A group of us was discussing it (me, Bill Catchings, Bill Schilit,
Jeff Damens, I think that was the group), without actually caring too much
since we never expected the software to spread all over the world and last
for decades. I happened to be facing the wall that had a Muppets calendar
on it, and since my children were such big fans of the Muppet Show I
said, How about Kermit? Thirty years later (May 2011) I found
the calendar page that I was looking at when I said that, you can see it on
the left and you can click on it to see a bigger image.
About 150 distinct Kermit programs were written by us at Columbia and
elsewhere by volunteer developers, which ran on countless different hardware
architectures, operating systems, OS versions and variants, in about 36
different programming languages; they are all housed at
the Kermit Software
Archive.
K95 Shrinkwrap
Kermit 95 was developed not only to meet Columbia's need for
connectivity from Windows 95 (and later) to the central text-based
services, but also to raise money to support the Kermit Project. Unlike
other Kermit programs, K95 was strictly commercial, available in both a
retail shrinkwrapped version (right) and in
bulk right-to-copy
licenses. From its release in 1995 until mid-2011, over a quarter
million bulk license seats were purchased in over 1000 licenses
ranging in size from 100 seats to 10,000. About 30,000 shrinkwrapped copies
were sold, many thousands more purchased for download from e-academy (site
now defunct), and K95 was site-licensed by over 100 universities as well as
by entire statewide university systems such as SUNY (64 campuses with about
400,000 students).
The Kermit Project was put on a self-funding basis in 1984, and from
then until its cancellation in 2011, it realized $8,894,912.00 in
revenue for the University, plus an equipment grant (the Hermit
Project) valued at $3,000,000.00. Between 1984, when the Kermit
"business" began, until 1998, when the Internet took over the world, we made
31,591 shipments of Kermit software on magnetic media (mainly 10-inch reels
of 9-track magnetic tape); 4679 of them international to 107 different
countries including some that no longer exist such as the USSR and
Yugoslavia, and to others you might not expect such as New Caledonia and
(via Panama) Cuba.
The documents and records (and some artifacts) of the Kermit Project are
housed at the Computer History museum in Mountain View CA, along with oral
histories of the Kermit Project
References...
da Cruz, Frank, and Bill Catchings,
"Kermit: A File Transfer Protocol for Universities",
BYTE Magazine, Volume 9, Numbers 6 and 7, June and July 1984
(our title was "The Kermit File Transfer Protocol" but the BYTE
editors changed it).
da Cruz, Frank,
Kermit, A File Transfer Protocol,
Digital Press, Bedford MA (1987),
ISBN 0-932376-88-6; foreword by Donald Knuth (a Russian edition
was in the works when the Soviet Union collapsed).
da Cruz, Frank, and Christine M. Gianone, Using
C-Kermit, Second Edition,
Digital Press / Butterworth Heinemann, Newton MA (1997),
ISBN 0-55558-164-1 (there was also a German edition).
Gianone, Christine M., Using
MS-DOS Kermit, Second Edition,
Digital Press, Burlington MA (1992),
ISBN 1-55558-082-3 (there were also German and French editions).
Kermit
Oral History Panel,
The Computer History Museum, recorded 6 April 2012 at Watson Laboratory,
Columbia University (the link is to a PDF transcription).
Kermit software was perhaps the main way that Soviet computers communicated
with each other (mainly in ASCII) and with the outside world in the 1980s,
but they wanted Kermit to be able to deal with the muliplicity of character
encodings used by the different Soviet computers for Cyrillic writing and by
Eastern bloc computers with their "extended" Roman alphabets. I spent a
year or two working with them on this, communicating by post and,
sporadically, by BITNET and Usenet through various gateways that would cloak
their identity. Finally we had a workable scheme that could, indeed, be
expanded to any number of character encodings such as those used for
Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, etc, but more to the point for
COMECON countries: most of Soviet Union (Cyrillic, Georgian, Armenian
scripts) pus the unique Roman character repertoires like Czechoslovakia,
Romania, Poland, and Yugoslavia. So a conference was organized for computer
experts from all the COMECON countries (including Cuba) to be held in Moscow
in May 1989, and Christine and I, the "owners" of the Kermit protocol, were
invited as keynote speakers, all expenses paid.
Me in Suzdal 1989
Red Square
USSR coins - click to enlarge
I have a trip report and photo gallery
here (for as
long as the link lasts; hopefully longer than most). Meanwhile here are
some Soviet coins I brought back. The largest is 1 Ruble; the legend
ПОБЕДА НАД ФАШИСТСКОЙ ГЕРМАНИЕЙ
means Victory over the German Fascists.
Judith Maria Scott, born in New York City March 16, 1947.
Judy's mom: Consuelo Lillian Bergen (Granma), born NYC January 17, 1922;
died in the Bronx Saturday, June 22, 2019.
Judy's dad: Ulysses Samuel Scott (Granpa), born Lockhart SC February 12, 1917,
died July 5, 1996.
Mommie grew up in the Bronx, went to public schools in the Northeast Bronx
— PS 78 in Williamsbridge and PS 113 Olinville Junior High School (now
MS 113 Richard Green Middle School), also in Williamsbridge (it's
a New Deal
site, I showed it to Amy; the reason Judy went there instead of JHS 135,
which is closer to the projects, is that she still lived at 1047 when she
entered 7th grade and 113 was the local junior high school, and didn't want
to transfer). Then to the High School of Music & Art when it was next
to City College on 135th Street and Convent Avenue (instrument viola and
violin), then Barnard College where she was when I met her, then Columbia
grad school, then Columbia Teachers College, and much later also Bank
Street, and Union Theological. For all I know, also Manhattan School of
Music and Jewish Theological! She probably has 3 or 4 Masters degrees by
now plus a PhD or two. Was a public school teacher since about 1968 mostly
in NYC but also in Newark and Engelwood Cliffs, and more recently a
principal, retired around 2006? We separated in 1988 and divorced in 1994
at which time she married Rick Levine (your stepfather) and moved to 2708
Netherland Ave (a house) in the Bronx (Riverdale). Rick had previously
lived on 157th Street in Washington Heights, in the big triangular building
("The Grinnell") just west of Broadway, married to Maura with one daughter,
Maya (your stepsister).
1047 E 216th Street at Loconia Ave 2018
Ten-Forty-Seven, closer view
As a baby Judy lived in Harlem on 146th Street (in the picture above, that's
her step-grandfather Carrington Lewis ("Papa") holding her). Then in the
late 1940s, Mama Lori and Carrington bought the house at 1047 East 216th
Street off Laconia Avenue and lived on the first floor with their German
shepherd Bruno. Granpa, Granma, Judy, a German Shepherd, and eventually
also Christine and Lori, lived on the second floor (which had only 2
bedrooms) and, as Christine says, "Mrs. Chambers and her tortoise lived on
the third; we had a pear tree in the back yard and a sunny kitchen window
over the sink, 2 bedrooms, 1 bath."
Judy at the Projects 1970
At the Projects 1979
About 1958 the Scotts (minus their dog, which they had to give up)
moved to the Eastchester Projects near Gun Hill and Boston Roads, the
building at 1245 Adee Avenue, a 3-bedroom unit on the 8th floor facing
front, above and to the right of the main entrance. Before Judy and I
got our first car, we used to go there on the train: The #1 to 96th Street,
the #2 to East 180th Street, and then the #5 to Gun Hill Road, about 2 hours
each way. After Judy, Christine, and Lori grew up and left, the housing
authority made Granpa and Granma move to a smaller unit on the 3rd floor,
which they didn't like as much.
Eastchester Projects grounds 2018
Eastchester - 1245 Adee Avenue 2018
Eastchester - 1245 Adee Ave 2018
1245 Adee Avenue
Adee Avenue 2018, at Throop Avenue
In those days the projects were wonderful places to live and for kids
to grow up. Solid, well maintained, with lots of green space and play
areas, and people of all races living there. Granma and Granpa's friends in
the Projects were not only Black but Jewish, Puerto Rican, and Italian, many
of them old lefties. But when Co-Op City opened in 1973 everybody who could
afford it moved there (eventually including Granma and Granpa) so only
desperately poor people were left in the projects and this made it easy for
public housing to be totally defunded and neglected until now the projects
are nightmarish hell-holes. If you live there and you have no heat or hot
water and your ceiling falls down and your walls buckle and sewage is
gushing out of broken pipes and your kids have lead poisoning and rats are
running wild, the only way to get NYCHA come and fix your apartment is to
get News12 The Bronx to come and do
a story on it, which they do every single day. Even the Sotomayor Houses,
named after the sitting Supreme Court judge who grew up there, are like
that.
Judy's first teaching job in the early 1970s was in Newark, which was pretty
rough then. After that Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem at
116th Street and Pleasant Avenue, right across the street from Rao's, in the
days when the surrounding neighborhood was still Italian (and mobbed up) and
there were still Italian street festivals. Puerto Rican kids from west of
Third Avenue had to walk through hostile Italian turf to get to school (one
of my Bronx friends now, José at the Foodtown Deli counter, was one of those
Puerto Rican kids). How did Mommie get to work, you might ask... We lived
on 103rd Street and West End; just 3 blocks away, on 106th and West End was
a magic bus — the M116 — that went direct to Benjamin Franklin.
Meanwhile, on the NW corner of 116th and Pleasant was a pay phone that
nobody was allowed to use, it belonged to the drug dealers. She taught at
Franklin for many years, then moved to JFK in Spuyten Duyvil and stayed
there a long time too. After we separated I lost track of her career but
she wound up as principal of a school in Englewood NJ, or Englewood Cliffs,
and then retired and devoted herself to getting more and more degrees and
playing violin as she had done all her life, probably starting in junior
high school, which got her into Music & Art, and ever since then has
been in one orchestra or another.
Mommy and me
The Bertha
Yearbook photo 1967
Button, 1968
I first knew Judy in summer 1966, Double Discovery (slightly), and then in
1967 in the Bertha and in Double Discovery again. She
graduated from Barnard in 1967, one of only four African-Americans in her
class. We got together in 1968 a couple months after the Columbia uprising.
At first it was a secret and we went on a trip to Mexico that nobody was
supposed to know about, but we bumped into somebody there who knew us and
and when we got back to New York it was the talk of the town.
Zócalo July 1968
1968 Olympics coin
Mexico City was pretty amazing. The whole country seemed to be designed
around its cultural heritage, from Aztecs and Olmecs to Orozco and Diego
Rivera. At the city's huge central square, the Zócalo, there was not only a
500-year-old cathedral, but also an Aztec pyramid. We went all over the
city, saw a lot of armed police and troops. Once we peeked into the
courtyard of some public building and there were hundreds of fully armed
soldiers hiding in it. This was shortly after the Olympic games when the
big demonstrations were starting. We went to one in the Zócalo and met some
Mexican students; we had a date to meet one of them for a march the next
night but he didn't show up, so we didn't go because we didn't know where it
was going to be. It turned out the police fired on them and killed lots of
people (this was not La Noche de Tlatelolco, that came a few months later);
we saw it on the TV news that night in our hotel room. Anyway we were in
Mexico City for about a week with side trips to places like Toluca, I forget
where else [trips to tiny places in the mountains where we ate some of the
most delicious foods ever, like elote — corn on the cob with gigantic
kernels rubbed with spicy hot fresh-ground cinnamon and lime juice]. No
photos, I didn't take a camera.
La Quebrada - I did that
Then we went to Acapulco on a bus that was full of chickens, goats, and
people who kept giving us things to eat like cactus fruit. In Acapulco we
stayed in a family hotel (i.e. a house) in the Mexican section, $4 a night
for a room, three delicious home-cooked meals a day, lizards on the wall,
and a ceiling fan hanging from a frayed electrical cord. Right on the
beach, but it was the Mexican beach, not a tourist beach. The famous diving
cliff was there: La Quebrada, 35 meters, that's like a 10-story building.
After watching the divers for a while, I tried it myself, pretty stupid
because I didn't know how deep the water was or how it sloshed back and
forth so you have jump at exactly the right time so it's not too shallow,
but lucky for you guys I didn't kill myself.
103rd Street apartment
Judy at 103rd Street 1972
Judy at 103rd Street 1972
Floyd at 103rd Street 1972
Soon after that we got an apartment together at 308 W 103rd Street, near
Riverside Drive, a studio sublet from a friend of Mommy's, and when the
friend wanted her apartment back, we got our own 1-bedroom apartment right
next to the sublet, described above. This was still in
the days when every time I moved into a new apartment, I painted it in
bright colors, and this was probably the most colorful. Also note my
painting of Mommy on the wall in the first picture — the only oil
painting I ever did, not very good.
Puerto Rico 1970
Puerto Rico 1970
Puerto Rico 1970
Top of El Yunque 1970
The next year we went to Puerto Rico, not just San Juan but we rented an old
VW and went all over the eastern half of the island, up in the mountains,
down to Ponce. Also we went to El Yunque on a rented motorcycle, the only
time I ever got Mommy to ride on a motorcycle with me. El Yunque (the
Anvil) is a mountain about 30 miles from San Juan, and the twisty road up
the mountain goes through a huge jungle with waterfalls and exotic birds.
The next year (or maybe it was the same trip) we went to St. Thomas, rented
a car, drove on the left side even though it's the US Virgin Islands, stayed
in a guest house. The part I remember is buying conch, a huge chunk of pure
white meat for a couple dollars, and trying to cook it. Another lady who
was shopping asked us if we knew what we were doing, and advised cutting it
into thin strips, breading and frying it, which I did. It was good, but
really tough, there was some tenderizing step I didn't know about. Our jaws
were so sore we could hardly chew again for a week.
(By the way, all these places were very nice, very safe, very friendly; now,
by all accounts they are pretty dangerous with drug wars, kidnappings, etc.
The only problem I had on all these trips was getting my pocket picked on a
bus in Mexico City, losing the military driver's license I had been using
since I got out of the Army.)
The next year we went to Guadeloupe, which is like Haiti but without the
neverending disasters, stayed in a tourist hotel but also went out into the
town, Point-à-Pitre, and ate in little family restaurants.
Announcement
In December 1974 Mommy and I were married in Mama Lori's house in Queens
Village by a minister picked out by Mommy's family, from Holy Rosary Church
at the far (east) end of Adee Avenue. I don't think anybody had any
connection with this church, it's just that you could see the steeple off in
the distance from the Projects… Turns out to be Catholic, I never
knew that until just now when I looked it up. Just goes to show, nobody in
the family was much interested in church at that point, except Lori who sang
gospel. From the reception (which was in a bar in Queens) we went straight
to East Stroudsburg PA in the Poconos for a few days… by Greyhound!
We had had a car for several years already, I can't remember why we didn't
use it.
Judy, Germany 1975
Judy und die Oma 1975
Luxembourg 1975
In 1975 we went on a delayed honeymoon trip to Europe: Germany, France,
Switzerland — Frankfurt, Taunus, Heidelberg, Kaiserslautern, Bad
Dürkheim, Trier (Karl Marx's house)… Luxembourg, Paris, Verdun,
Dijon, Beaune, Lyon, Valence… Berne, and then some place in the
Italian part of Switzerland… We were close to Italy too but I don't
think we went there. On that trip we went on the wine roads — Rhein
and Mosel in Germany and Meursault in France. Driving and drinking wine all
day! The second photo is of Judy with die Oma at
the Gasthaus in Hohenecken that was my second home
when I was in the Army.
The next year we went on a kind of tour to Spain: Madrid, Toledo, a bunch of
cities. You had to fly from Madrid to each city and back. It was still a
Fascist country. At the time I didn't fully appreciate the horror of the
Spanish Civil War; Franco seemed like a cartoonish tin-pot dictator, I had
no idea he was a mass murderer (I don't mean just the battles, but also
the bombing of civilian populations, the sieges, and that after he won he
had everyone shot or imprisoned who was on the Republican side; since Franco
was anti-communist the American public never heard about what he did). On a
separate trip we stayed a week in Torremolinos on the Mediterranean coast.
On another (I think) separate trip we stayed a week in Mallorca, and the
whole time I was there I didn't realize that they were speaking Catalán and
not Spanish (I learned Spanish much later). On one of these trips we also
took the ferry to Morocco, my only time in Africa, although Mommie spent the
summer of 1972 in West Africa in some kind of program and brought back all
of those masks, country cloth, etc — Ghana, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast,
maybe other countries around there too.
After you guys were born we only went to Maine and Vermont, and sometimes
drove from there to Canada. And a few times to California to see my Mom,
including one visit to Disneyland just after Amy was born.
Peter and Amy
Peter inside
First photo of Peter
Peter's room 1977
Peter was born October 7, 1977. We already had his room ready for him in
the 118th Street apartment. Mommie had wanted natural childbirth and we
went to the Lamaze classes and all that but Peter just didn't want to come
out and her labor dragged out to 25 hours. Finally the obstetrician, Dr.
O'Leary (he's the one who got me hooked on Guinness after he prescribed it
for Mommy, one small bottle every day), gave Mommie spinal anaesthetic and
delivered Mr.P with forceps; see red marks in picture. It was still a major
job to get Peter to come out, nurses were actually kneeling on top of Mommie
to squeeze him out, I'm not kidding. When I got home very late that night
(strangely enough the M104 goes straight from NYU hospital to Columbia) I
drew a picture of it. Ever since I moved to the Bronx I've been looking for
it. The first couple weeks Peter was home we actually used cloth diapers
but Mommie got disgusted and switched to Pampers. By the way when I came
back to the hospital the next morning, it was still Peter's birthday so we
sang happy birthday to him.
Amy's first phone call
Amy in baby room
First photo of Amy
Amy was born May 28, 1980 — also at NYU — with no drama at all;
she just slid right out... She and the backback she brought for Peter.
Everybody came to see her in the baby room at the hospital, Granma, Granpa,
Mama Lori... When we took her home everybody came to see her there too.
The first time she started to fuss, Peter pulled the wow out of his mouth
and stuck it in hers.
This section is kind of skimpy because it's all covered in the Family Photos
CD I made in 2002, now new and improved, which you can see if
you CLICK HERE
Sisters: Christine Joyce (1949), Lori Ellen (1954).
The three sisters 1986
Lori and Judy 1976
Lori 1976
Lori is the youngest. She went to elementary school at PS 121 on
Throop Avenue (2 blocks from home) and to PS 135 (which has
disappeared) for middle school. Like both her sisters she went to the High
School of Music and Art, her instrument was the cello. She went to
Springfield College in Massachusetts for a while and then transferred to
Lehman in the Bronx, where she graduated. Then she had a career in fashion,
following her dad's flair for style and elegant clothing, ending up
traveling the world (e.g. Hong Kong) as a top buyer for famous NYC
department stores, and eventually moved to Chicago to work at Sears
headquarters (world's tallest building at the time), making her the only
daughter who ever moved away. Years later she married Mel Funchess, who I
have not met yet.
Christine 1978
Christine and Henry Wedding
Christine is the middle sister. Short bio (her words): "I graduated from
[SUNY] Cortland. Was a media Assistant at [SUNY] Oneonta. Then taught at
LaGuardia [Music and Art] then at Truman [in the Bronx near Co-Op City]. AP
at August Martin [high school in Queens] then Bronx Science. Summer school
principal at August Martin and Science. Summer school AP at Stuyvesant."
Retired in 2017, saying: "I'm loving my oboe- Have you seen me
in Mozart
in the Jungle on Amazon Prime- It's a new career- got my SAG card!
I'm in three orchestras and two bands- I even play in the band in
Maine!!" Wants us to come to Kinapic. Like Lori, Christine went to PS
121 and PS 135 and then Music and Art (oboe).
The four cousins 1984
David and Peter 1982
Christine was married to Michael (forget last name) in the 70s, then married
Henry W. Deutsch (born two days after me) in 1976; they have 2 sons, David
(1979) and Philip (1983), your 1st cousins. Henry is named after FDR VP
Henry A Wallace, who ran for President in 1948 on the Socialist line;
Henry's sister Eugenia is named after Eugene V Debs, who also ran for
President, but from prison. Eugenia is married to
Bernie Cohen; they have 2 daughters, Lori and Debra. Henry's parents were
Irving and Miriam (b. Fuchs), who ran the Kinapic housekeeping cottages on
Lake Kezar outside of Lovell ME in the summer, where we used to go for
summer vacations from 1977 until 1987 (and I guess you guys kept going there
after that). I think Henry (and maybe Eugenia and/or Bernie) own it now,
Deutsches 2023
and probably sold some or parts of it off, you know this stuff better than I
do. My impression is that Kinapic started out as a kind of socialist Jewish
commune in the 1940s but by the time I knew Irving he was a capitalist
through-and-through.
In late news... David married Tabetha Pate, have a new (2017) baby
Carolina, and live in Houston, where they were flooded out by Hurricane
Harvey. Philip married Jessica Klug and they have a new baby William
(2017); they live in Baltimore. Carolina and William are the first (and so
far only) members of the newest generation on
the family tree. The
photo at left, taken New Years 2023, is from Christine, who writes "David’s
family is on the right. Carolina and Tabetha, are in front of him. Jessica
is top left and is holding William. Philip is in front of her holding
Katherine (Katie). Roo- the french bulldog is between William and David.
William: May, 5½, Carolina: May, 5½ (2 weeks
younger than William); Katie: October, 4".
Consuelo Lillian Scott, née Bergen (Granma or Consie), was born in New
York City Friday, January 27, 1922 (just a few weeks before my own mother)
and died in the Bronx Saturday, June 22, 2019, age 97.
Consuelo's dad: John
Bergen, a.k.a. Alexander Bergen.
Consuelo's
mom: Laura
Wilson (Mama Lori), b.1906 in St.Eustatius (Sint Eustatius, Statia).
Died just short of her 100th birthday in 2006. Mama Lori was a Dutch citizen.
Was she also an American citizen? Who knows!
Grandma was born when Mama Lori was only 15, so they were more like sisters
than mother and daughter. Her father was rarely present, though she saw him
from time to time. He was supposed to provide child support but never did;
he spent all his money on his car. They lived in Harlem. For many of these
years she lived with and was raised by her aunt Louise (Lou). Grandma went
to PS ??? and ... I forget the name of the high school (Julia Richman?)
— it was a trade school for seamstresses. Then she was a housewife,
then she worked as a school aide at various public schools in the Bronx
including Evander Childs on Gun Hill Road.
Reading to Peter about 1980
Like my parents, Granma and Granpa were married in 1944. They lived on
146th Street and Judy was born when they lived there. Mama Lori was married
to Carrington Lewis then, and shortly after Judy was born in 1947, they
bought the house at 1047 East 216th Street off Laconia Avenue and lived
there until about 1958, when they moved to the Eastchester projects near Gun
Hill and Boston Roads: the building at 1245 Adee Avenue, a 3-bedroom unit on
the 8th floor facing front. After the kids grew up and left, the housing
authority made them move to a smaller unit on the 3rd floor, which they
didn't like.
In the early 1970s Granma went to back to school and got a BA from Lehman
College, 120 points plus tons of make-up courses in math and science, which
she had never studied. She retired probably around 1987.
Granma's Co-Op City building
About 1990 Granma and Granpa moved to a very nice apartment in Co-Op City,
920 Baychester Avenue, Building 1A (i.e. the first building), sixteenth
floor, Apartment 16D, with a terrace and a spectacular view all the way to
the distant horizon. When Granpa died in 1996 Granma was alone and was
losing her eyesight, so Lori moved in with her for some years, but then went
back to Chicago. After that Amy stayed with her for about a month.
Eventually her sight was totally gone.
At my work in 2000
Amy and I went to see her in November 2012 and again Xmas 2013. She was
90-91 years old and still totally lucid and in much better humor than when
she first started to lose her eyesight around 2000. She had a series of
ladies who came every day to keep her company, cook and clean, and take her
places (shopping, doctors appointments, and to City Island for manicures and
pedicures; also one of them did her hair). She looked much younger than she
was. When she didn't have anybody with her she "watched" News12 The Bronx
or listened to audio books. Her living room is exactly the same as the one
in the Projects, with the same piano, sofa, upholstered chairs, and
paintings. The same photos of Judy, Christine, and Lori on the piano,
plus framed pictures that I took on the walls including the
famous triptych of Granpa bursting into laughter, and
of Granma with a loaf of bread she had just baked (at first she hated that
picture but eventually grew to like it).
Granma could tell family stories all day, she remembered everything
both times Amy and I saw her. For any given event, she had an uncanny
ability to remember not only who was there and what happened, but also what
everybody was wearing and which day of the week it was. But when Peter went
with David and Philip to see her in Fall 2017 she was seriously diminished,
stooped, thin, fading away. But in mid-February 2018 Christine said, "Saw
my mother today!! She is well and was quite alert, I couldn't write fast
enough!" (because she was asking her questions about the family history).
I was in New Mexico when she died in June 2019. There was a service in
Manhattan at a funeral home somewhere around 145th Street on Thursday June
27th; I wish I could have been there. Christine sent some videos:
Judy, Christine, and Lori
Christine and Henry
Amy and Ronnie Gray
Christine says "The first song was Ella Fitzgerald- The Man I love. The
three sisters 'danced' to that. The last was Tony Bennett- For once in my
life. We all sang "Somewhere over the rainbow" with the minister. Lori,
Mel, Henry and I attended Mayme's 100th birthday party. She was too upset
when Donna told her that Mommy was very ill. They did not tell her that she
passed. Donna and Howard and Deborah were there [and] Annette, Maria, Linda
(from Boston), Shirley, Yvette, Renata (and Brock), Suzon, Aundonielle.
Harold passed a few months ago- Lori and I attended the funeral in SC. Huck
is very ill in DC. From the WIlson side- Leah and Chicky and Butchy..."
Laura Wilson, born 1906 in St.Eustatius, Netherlands West Indies.
Died 2006, Bronx New York, just short of her 100th birthday. In the family
she is known as Mama Lori or Mamilori.
Mama Lori's parents: Ella Schmidt and Donald Wilson (dates unknown but
probably born in the 1880s).
Mama Lori's siblings in birth order (dates unknown): Alice, Donald Jr.,
Louise, Mama Lori, Lillian, Myrtle, Harold and Arthur, all born in
St.Eustatius except Harold and Arthur, who were born here.
Since Mama Lori was born in St.Eustatius she must have been a Dutch
citizen. Christine remembers when she was little and the family went to
Canada, Mama Lori had to show a passport but nobody else did.
Mama Lori was unbelievably sweet and loveable. People said she was like a
little girl, with a giggly musical laugh and a big irresistible smile. When
I first met her in about 1968 she lived alone in an apartment with her dog
in some building in Bronx that was near Boston Road, but nobody can remember
the details.
Judy, Carrington Lewis 1947
John Bergen
Mama Lori's first husband was Alexander John Bergen, born in St. Kitts,
British West Indies, date unknown but probabably in the early-to-mid-1880s.
One of 15 children. In the USA he was in the Army and fought in World
War I, then he was a taxi driver, then a chef, and finally a gardener
at Pilgrim State Hospital in Brentwood, Long Island. At age 15 in January
1922 Mama Lori gave birth to her only child, Consuelo Lillian Bergen, your
grandmother.
John had another marriage, wife's name Ethel; they had a
daughter Marjorie, who would be Granma's half-sister. Christine says,
"John's sister (georgiana) had three children; one, the son Earl, was a
first-class mechanic and my father (and I) spent a lot of time with him and
my dad learned much about cars from him. I recall a feeling and a sense but
can't pull up a face. (I was always dispatched with my dad on Saturday
afternoons and we usually went to garages and such)... Great Aunt Ada,
John's other sister, married a cook who was one of twins. My mother
believes his name was Elvin. She kept her house immaculate and the
pots hung on the wall as shiny as ever."
By 1947 Mama Lori was married to Carrington Lewis, but I don't know when
this marriage started or when it ended. Carrington was in show business
like Mama Lori was herself, and at least two of her brothers, Donald and
Harry, who both had orchestras in Harlem. Donald's orchestra was a regular
at the Renaissance Ballroom, and brother Arthur was in it too, on sax.
Another member was Clyde Eric Nourse who is remembered on the Local 802
website Requiem section, which says "he played with Donald Wilson at the
Renaissance Ballroom in Harlem". As Christine says (quoting her Mom),
"Donald played the violin and occasionally sang (he was only Okay)".
"Don Wilson's Orchestra" turns up constantly in the New York Age, a
Harlem daily, from 1931 until 1958.
Christine adds:
Donald's oldest daughter moved to CA and stayed there. Phyllis called my
mother recently and said she saw her? SHe must be near my mother's
age. Lois (loyce- she was sometimes called) lived with us for awhile, I do
not recall that, but I knew her well. Henry and I used to take her home to
Hartsdale from my mother's house. Married 3 times- I don't think any
children Her last husband died in the doctor's office on the pot in the
men's room. Donald married a 16-year-old woman when he was 65 or so. They
had about 6 children and moved to Long Island. They were all tall and
slender, like him. They must be in their 50s. Bert's brother Stanley was a
VERY handsome man — he took my mother to her prom. Bert was also
handsome but he messed around with the wrong WI woman and she cut him. He
had a scar from his forehead between his eyes, down the side of his nose to
his lip.
Speaking of ballrooms, I don't know if Granma and Granpa ever went to the
Renaisssance (they must have) but I know for sure they went to the Audubon
Ballroom on Broadway and 165th Street, because when Peter was in the
hospital across the street with his knee, it looked right out on the ballroom;
Granma and Granpa stood there looking at it and reminiscing about all the
times they used to go there.
Mama Lori 1940s
St. Louis Woman scene 1946
Carrington Lewis was a featured actor in the racially integrated play
"Stevedore" at the Civic Repertory Theater in NYC in 1934. In 1938 he was
in the integrated cast of the George S. Kaufman / Moss Hart revue
Swing Out the News at the Music Box Theater on Broadway, in which
Hazel Scott also appeared.
In 1939-40 he was a member of the singing group
Josh
White and his Carolinians which made a number of recordings on the
Columbia and Harmony labels (some
can be found on Youtube), and which was featured in the 1940 Broadway
musical John
Henry with Paul Robeson. In 1940 he was also in the radio drama
Green Pastures on The Cavalcade of America.
Mama Lori and Carrington Lewis were in the cast of the Harold Arlen / Johnny
Mercer / County Cullen
musical St. Louis
Woman in 1946, starring Pearl Bailey, Ruby Hill, and the Nicholas
Brothers. Lewis is listed in the cast (as "Waiter") but not Mama Lori; I
suspect she had a nonspeaking singing-dancing role. She might be somewhere
in the second photo. She probably
did more than just this one play but I don't have any more information and
there's nothing on the Internet that I found so far. Anyway, since she was
a singer I would be surprised if she did not sing with the orchestras of her
brothers Donald or Harry. Christine said of the Wilsons, "EVERYONE sang AND
played an instrument, it was the Wilson way!" and that Mama Lori was "a
regular on the chittlin' circuit". I think "Harry Wilson's Orchestra" had
a regular show on WAAM in 1931 (it's listed in the NY Daily News
radio schedules).
Christine says of Carrington, "He was around during all of our childhood.
Momilori put him through school and when he graduated, he walked out on her.
I don't know why he left but it might have been because of her gambling or
maybe that started after he left. He was tall, proud, spoke well and was a
fastidious eater. He never touched food with his hands and I cannot recall
his ever being anything but impeccably dressed. You sat to the table when
you ate and behaved much like Downton Abbey."
Mama Lori 1970
About 1969 Mama Lori married Floyd Jackson, an extremely nice guy who was
the night manager at a parking garage on Sixth Avenue and 46th Street, and
who looked remarkably like Ike Turner, and they bought a house in Queens
Village. Like John Bergen, Floyd loved cars but he also loved Mama Lori and
the family. She would always come to help him with the accounting at the
end of his shift, late at night. She was a genius with numbers, she could
add up big columns of figures in her head and count huge piles of cash at
superspeed. Aside from whatever jobs she had (e.g. as a waitress at IHOP on
34th Street) she was also a numbers banker in Harlem; I used to drop her
at a storefront on 146th Street on the east side of Broadway.
Mama Lori Floyd 1970
Mama Lori and Floyd at their house 1974
Floyd in 1970
Mama Lori and Floyd's house was at 208-15 110th Avenue in Queens Village,
Zip 11429, near Hollis Avenue and Francis Lewis Boulevard, a huge sprawling
area of modest b