Pearl

Down on the shop floor that Monday lunchtime, most of the company, including Dad’s three best friends, listened to the speech on the radio on the foreman’s desk. At 21, with a two-year business degree, Dad was the most junior of junior executives. So he and a dozen others upstairs listened in his boss’s office. Later that same afternoon, Dad and his buddies were together in that office. They told the boss they’d be back again when it was over.

The boss pulled a bottle from a drawer, shared glasses all around, and promised them their jobs would be waiting. Dad was grateful for the drink. Grateful, too, he told me once, that the boss – a crusty old Marine –  skipped his oft-told stories about the Marne River and Belleau Wood. “If I had to listen to those stories that day,” Dad  said, “I’m not sure I’d have kept my nerve.”

By midday Wednesday the four friends were at the recruiting station. By early in the new year they were on a train headed south for basic. Dad had never been outside of Ohio, and rarely far from Cleveland. Biloxi seemed a world away, but it was warm, and Dad always liked the heat. Before long, though, he was headed a real world away. When we think of the war in the Pacific – those of us who think of it at all anymore – we mostly think of the Marines.  But the Army Air Force was there in numbers, too, and if they were spared abattoirs like Peleliu and Iwo Jima, where the Marines traded so many lives for coral rock and glory, that’s not to say the the Army Air Force was spared.

Dad’s troop ship stopped at Colon, Panama. He was one of hundreds of seasick young men in holds converted to barracks, waiting their turn to lock up through the Canal on the way to the South Pacific. Word came that a headquarters clerk at the major Canal Zone air base was down with appendicitis. (In fact it killed him.) Well, even the most junior of junior executives had a skill crucial to a mid-Twentieth Century army – he could type. Dad was pulled off the ship, and sent to France Field, where he would spend the war.

Calm, organized, steady, determined and unafraid of the menial or the unpleasant, by the end Dad was a First Sergeant and the post sergeant major – the highest ranking non-com. Forty years later, when I was a newsman covering the Air Force, I asked Dad how it was possible for a guy to go from boot to Top Kick in less than four years. “Robbie,” he explained, “the only thing we never ran out of was rank.”

The mission at France Field was simplicity itself: Keep the Canal open; keep the ships moving. Planes from the field would hunt down and kill the German U-boat wolf packs and the lesser known, but larger, fleet of Italian subs that operated in the region throughout the war.  (Just because you've never heard of the Battle of the Caribbean, doesn't mean they didn't fight it.)

Dad would say that he spent the war filing paper, fighting off yellow fever, placating officers, disciplining drunken airmen, and playing a lot of softball. A quiet, contented man, Dad often said he had had an “easy war.” He meant that especially when compared to his three friends, who fought the war from inside B-17s over Europe. One of those guys spent years confined in, then escaping from, a series of increasingly brutal German POW camps. One of them rode his plane into a smoking hole in the Dutch countryside and never made it back to claim the job waiting for him, as promised, at W.S. Tyler Company.* If not for some poor guy’s infected appendix, Dad’s war would have been anything but easy. And who can say if three and half years in the Solomons and New Guinea and the Philippines would have sent home the man I was blessed to know as my father or, instead, someone less whole, less gentle.

Dad never regretted the way things happened, never felt deprived of some sort of martial adventure.** He knew he’d been blessed. “I did what I was called on to do,” is how he would put it. “That's war. I did my job; other guys were just called to give more.”

I didn't argue the point with him; never would have, never could have. But as I've grown, and especially in the 20 years since he’s been gone, I've come to understand that he was wrong.

I think of that skinny Cleveland kid, just a few years out of service as an altar boy, standing around the boss’s desk with a drink in his hand, silently praying the old Marine would forego his war stories, lest will and determination fail. I think of a kid for whom the Gulf Coast was far country, signing up to go wherever they sent him. I think of a kid who, as smart as he was with the accounts, could never have figured the value of the note he was signing, but who signed it anyway – and stood ready to pay whatever the tally-man demanded.

And I think, Dad, that you couldn't have given more than that.

* Which isn't to suggest Dad was entirely immune to pride. “The bastards never shut us down, Robbie. They never did.”

** He did have at least one adventure he liked to describe: There was a fire at a remote observation post and Dad was sent to investigate. The Jeep could only go so far before he had to travel by small boat, then hike a day up a jungle mountain. (Faulty generator  not sabotage, as it turned out.) Typical of my Dad was his perspective on that story: “I got back in about three days. Got a shower and hot chow. I thought a lot about those guys in the Pacific who had to stay out in that jungle all the time.”

Balls and strikes

When I was a boy, “social media” meant mostly baseball gloves and footballs. These were the primary means of our interactions with our peers. We played endless games on our suburban streets, in our connected backyards, in neighborhood parks and even – when local school officials were insufficiently attentive to the locks on their gates – on actual ball fields. If we had enough kids – and at the tail end of the Baby Boom, we often did – we’d play 11-on-11 or 9-on-9 as the season demanded. If too many kids were sick or grounded or on vacation, we engaged in endless personnel adjustments to make the games even. Somebody might be the designated quarterback for both sides. Or the hitting team might provide its own catcher. But there was one position that was never filled: No one was going to waste valuable play time being the referee or the umpire.

With the exception of the occasional squabble, our honor system worked a treat. If you stepped out of bounds (that is to say, into Mrs. Scheimann's yard), you stopped where you were. If you missed the tag before Billy Miller made it to the back corner of the Buick, you said so. And if too often you didn't, you were subject to the ultimate sanction: Kids who couldn’t be counted on to call it square – on themselves most of all – found their doorbell stopped ringing, because nobody cared if Mikey could come out to play, if Mikey was a duplicitous sneak.

This notion, that your personal integrity and commitment to fair play were paramount, was inculcated into us at every turn, from our earliest days. You memorized “If” in the fourth grade. They told you George Washington couldn’t tell a lie about his stint as a junior arborist, even at the risk of a licking* – and this when you were young enough that ending up over Dad’s knee was an all too available consequence of your own confessional inclinations. Long before the age of participation trophies, we prized the ones they gave out for sportsmanship.
On the not-so-mean streets of 1960s Cleveland Heights, your rep was as important to you as to any inmate on the prison yard. Simply put, we all wanted to win, but we were taught to revile the idea of winning at any cost, and we did.

  

If nothing else, this grotesque presidential campaign is demonstrating conclusively that this fundamental truth from my boyhood is now passé. It's not the candidates and their legions of professional apparatchiks who demonstrate this. Those sorts have been ever thus, and we would never have let them play with us anyway. Rather, what is worrisome – indeed, what is frightening – are those people whom one respects or even admires who have, more easily than one could have imagined, abandoned all standards, beliefs, and philosophies they once held dear, who have traded their own integrity, all in sacrifice to the singular value of seeing their side win.

They have deemed principles not merely articles to be ignored, but luxuries to be scorned. And if you hold to yours, then, at best you're a fool or a patsy – but more likely you'll be denominated a collaborator.

Their justifications are as they always have been:

"This time is different."

“The circumstances are exigent, extraordinary.”

"Just this much, just this once. . . ”

“The stakes are too high. . .”

“After the coup, we will promptly restore democracy, reinstate civil liberties and release those whom we have interned.”

Oops. Sorry.

That last one wasn’t from this election. It was from every military coup, by every jumped up dictator since Julius Caesar.

And here’s the thing: It's working. Whichever candidate prevails as the prettiest pig at the fair, this declaration of vice as virtue seems certain to win out. And for those who have embraced this anti-philosophy, there's no going back. To paraphrase Robert Bolt paraphrasing Thomas More, once you let your values slip through your fingers – or, as in this election, once you toss them to the dirt – they cannot be picked up again.**

And like the kid who wouldn't take his out, when the election is over, when your chosen, favored, power-hungry narcissist is measuring the drapes for the Oval Office, you’re going to be faced with what I wish I could claim is one of Robert’s Rules, but which I must fairly attribute to Buackaroo Banzai:

Wherever you go, there you are.

To what exigency will you appeal then, when you find yourself with all the time in the world? What lie will you tell then, when there's only you to hear it?

Who is going to want to play with you then?

[UPDATED to add, that this is the sort of thing I mean by winning at any costs. And to say that support of tactics like this isn't theoretical. People I respect have told me this or that candidate must be stopped, and so. . . ]

* They did not, of course, tell us that this story, designed to inspire forthright honesty, was utter propaganda.

** What the theatrical More said was:

                     What is an oath then, but words we say to God?

                      Listen, Meg. When a man takes an oath, he's holding his own self

                      in his own hands like water. And if he opens his fingers then,

                      he needn't hope to find himself again. 

Memorial

Down on the shop floor that Monday lunchtime, most of the company, including Dad’s three best friends, listened to the speech on the radio on the foreman’s desk. At 21, with a two-year business degree, Dad was the most junior of junior executives. So he and a dozen others upstairs listened in boss’s office. Later that same afternoon, Dad and his buddies were together in that office. They told the boss they’d be back again when it was over. 

The boss pulled a bottle from a drawer, shared glasses all around, and promised them their jobs would be waiting. Dad was grateful for the drink. Grateful, too, he told me once, that the boss – a crusty old Marine –  skipped his oft-told stories about the Marne and Belleau Wood. “If I had to listen to those stories that day,” Dad  said, “I’m not sure I’d have kept my nerve.”

By midday Wednesday the four friends were at the recruiting station. By early in the new year they were on a train headed south for basic. Dad had never been outside of Ohio, and rarely far from Cleveland. Biloxi seemed a world away, but it was warm, and Dad always liked the heat. Before long, though, he was headed a real world away. When we think of the war in the Pacific – those of us who think of it at all anymore – we mostly think of the Marines.  But the Army Air Force was there in numbers, too, and if they were spared abattoirs like Peleliu and Iwo Jima, where the Marines traded so many lives for coral rock and glory, that’s not to say the the Army Air Force was spared.

Dad’s troop ship stopped at Colon, Panama. He was one of hundreds of seasick young men in holds converted to barracks, waiting their turn to lock up through the Canal on the way to the South Pacific. Word came that a headquarters clerk at the major Canal Zone air base was down with appendicitis. (In fact it killed him.) Well, even the most junior of junior executives had a skill crucial to a mid-Twentieth Century army – he could type. Dad was pulled off the ship, and sent to France Field, where he would spend the war.

Calm, organized, steady, determined and unafraid of the menial or the unpleasant, by the end Dad was a First Sergeant and the post sergeant major – the highest ranking non-com. Forty years later, when I was a newsman covering the Air Force, I asked Dad how it was possible for a guy to go from boot to Top Kick in less than four years. “Robbie,” he explained, “the only thing we never ran out of was rank.”

The mission at France Field was simplicity itself: keep the Canal open; keep the ships moving. Planes from the field would hunt down and kill the German U-boat wolf packs and the lesser known, but larger, fleet of Italian subs that operated in the region throughout the war.  (Just because you've never heard of the Battle of the Caribbean, doesn't mean they didn't fight it.)

Dad would say that he spent the war filing paper, fighting off yellow fever, placating officers, disciplining drunken airmen, and playing a lot of softball. A quiet, contented man, Dad often said he had had an “easy war.” He meant that especially when compared to his three friends, who fought the war from inside B-17s over Europe. One of those guys spent years confined in, then escaping from, a series of increasingly brutal German POW camps. One of them rode his plane into a smoking hole in the Dutch countryside and never made it back to claim the job waiting for him, as promised, at W.S. Tyler Company.* If not for some poor guy’s infected appendix, Dad’s war would have been anything but easy. And who can say if three and half years in the Solomons and New Guinea and the Philippines would have sent home the man I was blessed to know as my father or, instead, someone less whole, less gentle.

Dad never regretted the way things happened, never felt deprived of some sort of martial adventure.** He knew he’d been blessed. “I did what I was called on to do,” is how he would put it. “That's war. I did my job; other guys were just called to give more.”

I didn't argue the point with him; never would have, never could have. But as I've grown, and especially in the 15 years since he’s been gone, I've come to understand that he was wrong.

I think of that skinny Cleveland kid, just a few years out of service as an altar boy, standing around the boss’s desk with a drink in his hand, silently praying the old Marine would forego his war stories, lest will and determination fail. I think of a kid for whom the Gulf Coast was far country, signing up to go wherever they sent him. I think of a kid who, as smart as he was with the accounts, could never have figured the value of the note he was signing, but who signed it anyway – and stood ready to pay whatever the tally man demanded.

And I think, Dad, that you couldn't have given more than that.

* Which isn't to suggest Dad was entirely immune to pride. “The bastards never shut us down, Robbie. They never did.”

** He did have at least one adventure he liked to describe: There was a fire at a remote observation post and Dad was sent to investigate. The Jeep could only go so far before he had to travel by small boat, then hike a day up a jungle mountain. (Faulty generator  not sabotage, as it turned out.) Typical of my Dad was his perspective on that story: “I got back in about three days. Got a shower and hot chow. I thought a lot about those guys in the Pacific who had to stay out in that jungle all the time.”

Sticks and stones.

Just a quick note to advise all of you engaged in the great exercise of political discourse that you may, evidently, feel free to go back to scurrilous ad hominem attacks, and to questioning the good will, patriotism and sanity of all those with whom you disagree.

It appears the whole more measured, reasonable tone thing is over. It was a sweet two-and-a-half weeks, though, wasn't it?

In post-Tscon discussions about gun control issues (I tend to be opposed, as you will be unsurprised to learn) I have been invited, none too politely, to find another country to call home. The sufficiency of my – how do I put this? – endowment has been called into question. I have been blamed for all three Bush presidencies. (I voted for Dukakis (Lord help me), Gore (not like it counted) and Kerry (yeesh)).

I have been called a pinhead.

I have been called creepy.

I have been called “a stupid, deity-worshipping ape.”

I have been unfriended.

I’ve been instructed to “read the fucking Constitution once in [my] useless life.” It has been suggested that I go “iron my sheet” by someone who – I am just guessing – was not referring to work I did as journalist to expose hate group activity in North Florida.

But my favorite, by far, was when someone called me a reactionary. Very few are the lifetime Democrats who are ever privileged to be called a reactionary. In fact, I’m not sure anyone has called anyone else a reactionary since my sister called my dad one in 1971 – which probably got her spanked, so maybe she was on to something.

Get off of my lawn

Walt Kowalski gave new power to a command as old as suburbia. Sure, he punctuated his directive with what General Patton called “the greatest single battle implement ever devised by man.” But it was the gravel in his voice and the feral gleam in his eye that left no doubt.

My Dad looked a lot like Walt Kowalski. He was a few years older – Walt’s war was Korea; Dad was in the big show. Like Walt, Dad favored a push reel lawnmower. Like Walt, Dad loved his lawn.

But Dad was not a “get off of my lawn” kind of guy. The only guns in the house were an antique revolver in .22 short that I wasn’t supposed to know about, packed away in a shoe box in the attic, and a Damascus steel, double-barrel, open hammer shotgun that my grandfather had used to pot rabbits. The only time I ever saw that shotgun – or any other weapon – in Dad’s hands was the day he gave it to me, broken down and wrapped in a towel.

Dad’s entire notion of home defense played out in his nightly rounds to check all the doors on his way to bed. I suppose you cannot argue with his approach from an empirical standpoint. No home invasions at 3916 Fenley Road. No assaults in the driveway. The Chevy Biscayne was never carjacked, nor the Malibu after that. You’ll be tempted to say that his bridge stood up, so he built it right.

You would be wrong to chalk his choices up to the time and the place (although certainly that could account for the results). What it really came down to was temperament and worldview. It simply wasn’t in Dad to think that anyone in the world would want to do him ill, when he wished ill to no man. Even World War Two couldn’t change that.  Added to that was mid-century variety of undiluted faith in the state, a nearly talismanic belief in the power of the police department number on the pad next to the phone in the kitchen. Blessedly, he passed away never having cause to doubt that faith. 

But as for me, as for now, as for here – with all the love and respect any man can possibly have for his father – I simply know better.