Postponed Reunion

“The life of every man is a log in which he means to write one story and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.” James M. Barrie, creator of “Peter Pan,” quoted in 1960 Upper Dublin yearbook

 

With vigils, demonstrations, and riots taking place in Minneapolis, Atlanta, and dozens of other cities, the Covid-19 pandemic is suddenly no longer the top news story.  Even so, yesterday Northwest Indiana reported 11 new deaths even as most area communities started reopening.  The elderly have been especially hard hit.  Although obituaries rarely mention cause of death, the number seems to have ballooned. Here’s an excerpt for World War II veteran Otto Henry Loeffler, a lifelong Valparaiso resident:

    Otto was a fine athlete, playing in the Dodgers minor league baseball system, then becoming a first-rate golfer and bowler.  He played a fine hand of blackjack.  Whether rousting his kids up to go fishing or golfing at 5:00 AM, hosting family get-togethers or spending time with Evelyn (late wife of 60 years) or grandchildren.  Otto was full of positive energy.  His last days were spent in the isolation of the 2020 pandemic, which did not sit well with someone who loved the company of his family and a dog on his lap.

R.I.P. Otto.

 

A few days ago good friend Tom Wade left for Connecticut to see his dying brother.  He posted this eulogy on Facebook along with a photo with his big brother:

    My older brother Dan passed away yesterday after fighting kidney disease for more than a decade. He was an extraordinary human being, holding a variety of academic positions and awards and ending up at Yale for the last 34 years. He, along with Carol, his loving wife of 54 years, were longtime warriors for peace and social justice. They ended their wedding in 1966 with a 10 minute plea for ending the war in Vietnam, and were in the middle of the 1968 protests for peace at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. He had a wonderful internal joy about him that warmed all who knew him. He leaves behind his wife and partner in peace Carol, daughters Alyson and Malory, and grandson Luke. Thanks for being such a great example for your little brother, Dano. Love forever bro!    

 

My Upper Dublin “Class of 1960” reunion has been “rescheduled” for October 2021.  As the planning committee put it, nobody wants a solemn affair where masks are worn and old friends must keep six feet apart.  Compared to the momentous events engulfing us during this “plague year,” this is relatively unimportant.  Still, it’s a bitter pill.  I’ve attended every reunion since our twentieth.  I missed the tenth because I’d just begun teaching at Indiana University Northwest and had returned to Pennsylvania the previous week for my mother’s wedding.  The reunions always provide vivid memories and surprises.  In 1980 I smoked out with Gaard Murphy and hubby Chuck in the parking lot, and we’ve been good friends ever since.  I heard Ed Piszak ask Eleanor Smith at the registration desk if Jimmy Lane had arrived and then surprised him when he came up the steps. Still looking young for my age, I was taken aback when some folks hardly recognized me because I’d grown a good six inches since high school.  Lo and behold, I was taller than Suzi Hummel, who asked if I were in touch with Chuck Bahmueller, her next-door neighbor in East Oreland. I danced with a dozen classmates, including Faith Marvill, whom I dated in seventh grade, and Leslie Boone, looking like an absolutely gorgeous high school senior. Dick (“call me Richard”) Garretson got Bruce Allen and me to go into the adjacent bar to watch the Phillies clinch the National league pennant (they’d go on to win the World Series) and tried to persuade us to meet their plane at the Philadelphia airport.  Alas, the team still has a Sunday game.  That’s the last time I saw cool Dick Garretson.  Next day, I talked on the phone with Judy Jenkins for 40 minutes reporting on reunion highlights.

 

In 1990 I mistook Carolyn Aubel for Carolyn Ott and blurted out that I’d had a crush on her in grade school.  Beforehand, Chuck Bahmueller and I argued politics for an hour before sitting with beauties Judy Jenkins, Molly Schade, Suzi Hummel, and Susan Floyd, who asked me to dance to “Proud Mary.”  Judy said she had trouble remembering many classmates.  It helps to get out the yearbook beforehand, I said, momentarily forgetting that because she needed a summer course, Judy, along with a half-dozen others, got excluded from “The Mundockian.”  What administration bullshit!  After a post-reunion gathering (many of us being reluctant to have the night come to an end) Thelma Van Sant gave Bahmueller and me a ride back to our hotel. Just south of U.D. was the Van Sant farm (now gone), where many of us had worked summers and in whose long winding access road made out with dates, in my case once interrupted by Chief Ottinger.

 

1995 began a traditional of reunions every five years.  Seeing Kathleen Birchler, star of the U.D. field hockey team, for the first since graduation, I recalled how at Fort Washington elementary school she competed in soccer with the guys at[LJ1]  recess while most girls (and a lone guy) played house in dirt patches.  Kathleen once beat up a kid a year older than her in a fight, making his nose bleed.  She claimed to have no memory of the incident.  I got Wayne Wylie (who never dances, wife Fran warned me) to boogie with me to the Ramones’ “I Wanna be Sedated.”  He lived on a farm in Jarrettown; on summer sleepovers we’d ride a tractor out into the cornfield, pick corn and his mom would cook up four ears each for us.  Ambrosia. 

 

Favorite teacher Ed Taddei came to our fortieth reunion, along with football coach Frank Gilronan and music teacher Robert Foust.  I confessed that I had misbehaved in his class, and Mr. Foust replied, “You weren’t so bad.”  He must have witnessed worse, forced to teach some apathetic groups just once a week.  Bob Reller came to his first reunion with a comely wife.  I danced to a Motown number with Mary Dinkins, married to a preacher, who sat behind me in Latin class; once I turned around to say something clever to Mary when Miss LeVan whacked me with a ruler. The Temptations song caused Mary to close her eyes and show some soulful dance moves.  Dave Seibold and his wife wowed everyone with ballroom dance moves they must have learned at Arthur Murray studios.

 

For the first time in 2005 Toni attended a reunion. Classmates joked that they’d wondered if I’d made her up.  We were returning from the Jersey shore and had Miranda with us.  We sat at a table with John Jacobsen, who offered to give up his seat when it appeared that we were one serving short.  Still ruggedly handsome, John recalled Fort Washington school teachers Miss Worthington, Mrs. Orr, Mrs. Bytheway, and Mr. Johnson, the latter a weasel of a man with a big Adam’s apple that I’d almost forgotten about.  Sultry Miss Polsky (who could get a rise out of me when she called me Jacques), Mr. Bek (my hundred-pound football coach), and Miss Malkus attended as did two cool classmates who for some reason had changed their names, Tony Tucciarone and John Magyar, who once fought chemistry teacher John Schwering in the hallway.  Vince Curll and I would visit Tony Tucciarone on the way to the movies in Ambler and sample his mom’s delicious homemade bread. Eddie Piszek, full-headed and fit, gave overweight Magyar diet tips.

 

Several first-timers made it to the fiftieth, including childhood pal Jay Bumm and homecoming queen Wendy Henry wearing, unbelievably, her tiara. I tried to ask tenth grade girlfriend Mary Delp to dance, but Skip Pollard’s wife, who’d been her neighbor in Naperville, shushed me away.  When “The Bristol Stomp” came on, Alice Ottinger and I showed off some moves and got an approving smile from Jimmy Coombs; then for good measure we slow-danced. Later cameras came out when Alice danced with old flame Jay Bumm.  Marianne Tambourino and star athlete Percy Herder, who worked at the old high school, came onto the dance floor, and later Phil Arnold organized a Stroll line.

 

In 2015 I chatted at dinner with LeeLee Minehart and her husband Bob whom she met in Afghanistan while in the Peace Corps. Among those stopping to chat at our table were Ed Dudnek and Rita Grasso, who looked stunningly beautiful.  I traded Babe Ruth baseball league memories with Eddie Piszek.  Ron Hawthorn’s dad (Mr. Haw-the-Haw) was our coach and Dave Seibold our star first baseman.  Classmate Freddie Scott played hits from 1960, including “The Twist” by Chubby Checker (I preferred the Hank Ballard original), “Go, Jimmy, Go” by Jimmy Clanton, and “Save the Last Dance for Me” by the Drifters.  Although I needed the help of nametags for a few classmates, I recognized most immediately.  Pat Zollo was bald but otherwise hadn’t changed much, holding forth with humorous stories of wilder days.  Coombs, who looked like he could hold his own in a fight, asked whether I was in touch with Penny Roberts (negative) and I countered with questions about the Fad brothers. Barbara Bitting, married to classmate Joe Ricketts, remained blond and beautiful, Connie Heard more youthful acting than in high school almost.  Susan Floyd showed me a photo circa 1969 of her, hubby Joe McGraw and Terry and Gayle Jenkins looking like hippies. In 1969 I had long hair and a beard, too. As Teenagers Susan and I hung out at Terry and Judy Jenkins’ house and shared many memories. Like so many of my classmates, Susan has aged gracefully.  Let’s hope most of us can rendezvous in 2021.

The Prince

“There you see what it is to serve a prince!  We should be wary of their vacillations of temper.” George Cavendish to Thomas Cardinal Wolsey referring to King Henry VIII in Hilary Mantel, “Wolf Hall” (p.45)

 

Like King Henry VIII, would-be autocrat Trump is loyal to no one but himself and his immediate family but demands total obedience from others.  Still, he has no compunction about jettisoning them if expedient.  Who doubts that his lapdog vice president will be replaced if DT believed another running mate would help him be re-elected?  Ditto even his most obsequious cabinet members. “Prince” Donald Junior (whose half-brother, I kid you not, is named Baron) is his political hatchet man, spreading the most egregious lies and conspiracy theories about political rivals and critical commentators, while palpably unqualified son-in-law Jared Kushner is put in charge of a “shadow” coronavirus task force and the Mideast peace process. In “The Prince” Niccolo Machiavelli wrote that “the first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the people he has around him.”  By that standard our leader fails badly.

 

Machiavelli also said: “It is much safer to be feared than loved because ...love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.”  So far this tactic seems to have allowed Trump to stifle dissent within Republican ranks.  Senator Mitt Romney stands virtually alone in calling out Trump’s outrageous lies and attacks that harken back to the rancid days of Joe McCarthy. He deserves a "Profiles in Courage" award. This from Ray Boomhower: “I do not want to see the Republican party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear.” Margaret Chase Smith, who died on this day in 1995

 

George Floyd

Minneapolis is under the microscope since the killing of George Floyd at the hands of police, one of whom pinned the victim’s neck with his knee for nearly ten minutes while the handcuffed black man, allegedly suspected of cashing a counterfeit $20-bill, pleaded for his life and repeated, “I can’t breathe.”  As usual, Trump has weighed in, calling the mayor a radical leftist and unruly protestors thugs.  It is dismaying to see a small minority looting stores and setting fire to cars and buildings, but incendiary rhetoric by the president is the last thing Minneapolis needs at this time.  I couldn’t help thinking of the late Twin City icon Prince’s song “Purple Rain” (“I know times are changing/ It’s time we all reached out”) and how his music championed the diversity of America.  To see his city in flames makes one weep.  Gary native Ben Clement wrote “Mourning Sickness” to express his grief:

Here we go again.

Waking to nightmares that aren’t dreams.

They’re real. Too real. Surreal.

You saw what I saw.

Not through lying eyes

But, dying eyes. His...dying...eyes.

And his final pleas, “Please!”

Your ears did not deceive. They didn’t lie.

You heard the man. Clearly.

Plaintiff wail. Begging. Pleading. Praying.

Unanswered prayers.

That’s what makes me sick.

The man cried for his mama!

Doesn’t that bother you?

Aren’t you bothered?

Aren’t you disturbed?

Aren’t you sick?

I am.

Every morning when I wake and George Floyd is still dead.

 Coincidentally, the Mayor of Gary is named Prince.  Born in 1964, Jerome Prince graduated from Lew Wallace in 1982 and enlisted in the marine corps.  After a career selling insurance and real estate, Prince unseated 40-year Fifth District Gary council veteran Cleo Wesson. After two terms he was elected to the Lake County Council and later Lake County assessor.  He defeated incumbent mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson by emphasizing the need for economic development.  One of his first appointments was Indiana National Guard Lieutenant Colonel Richard Ligon as the city’s new police chief.  When the current pandemic abates, I hope to interview Prince as part of an effort to update “Gary’s First Hundred Years.”

 

John Fraire shared brother Gabriel’s poem “The Perfect Flour Tortilla”:

Less than four years old

Standing on a chair

Tiny tummy leaning

into the counter

hands on pin

rolling dough balls

into flour tortillas

It is all black and white

Grandma by my side

With her faded flower apron

Short greying hair, eye glasses

Scowl on her face

She snapped orders

For the few things she did not do herself

Never once did she say,

“I love you.”

But I felt it in those hands

That cupped mine

As she showed me how

To knead

and roll

The perfect flour tortilla

Semi-retirement

“This thou perceives, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”

    William Shakespeare, seventy-third sonnet

 

In “Stoner” John Williams on page 45 wrote that superannuated Arts and Sciences dean Josiah Claremont decided in 1920 to hold a reception for soldiers returning to University of Missouri:

   Claremont was a small bearded man of advanced ae, several years beyond the point of compulsory retirement; he had been with the University ever since its transition in the 1870s from a normal college to a full University, and his father had been one of its early presidents.  He was so firmly entrenched and so much a part of the history of the University that no one had quite the courage to insist upon his retirement, despite the increasing incompetence with which he managed his office.  His memory was nearly gone; sometimes he became lost in the corridors of Jesse Hall, where his office was located, and had to be led like a child to his desk.

 

Michael Tollin, responsible for the 10-part “Last Dance” documentary, is working on one about my favorite sports star, Richie (Dick) Allen.  Though 12 years my junior, Tollin, like me, agonized over the 1964 Phillies year end slump but cheered on the National League’s rookie of the year Richie Allen.  In the ensuing years, however, many fans turned on Allen as the team’s overall talent diminished.  Allen had endured racist taunts while playing in Birmingham with the Triple-A Arkansas Travelers but nothing so mean-spirited as the taunts coming from his home stadium.  He took to wearing a helmet while playing first base and occasionally wrote “TRADE ME” in the dirt with his spike.

 

My second chance to root for my hero came when Dick Allen joined the Chicago White Sox in 1972.  Sitting in a fifth-row leftfield seat, I witnessed a line drive off Allen’s bat that was actually climbing when it landed just above me and ricocheted another 50 feet.  His MVP year probably saved the White Sox franchise from moving to Florida. Later in the decade, I got yet a third opportunity to root for Allen as, unbelievably, he returned to the Phillies at the urging of veterans Mike Schmidt, Larry Bowa, and Tony Taylor.  All three seasons beginning in 1977 Philadelphia made the playoffs and only a grossly incompetent manager prevented a World Series appearance.  Replaced by Pete Rose, Allen ended his career in Oakland.  When he announced his intention to retire, I called White Sox owner Bill Veeck to suggest he offer him a chance to return to Chicago.  I got right through to Veeck, who said he’d done that very thing and that Allen appreciated the gesture but preferred to retire to his Pennsylvania horse ranch.  Last year Allen fell one vote shy of entering Cooperstown, baseball’s Hall of Fame.  Let’s hope 2020 is the year.

At age 65 I retired as professor of History at IU Northwest.  The benefits were too generous to turn down, and my stepping down allowed the university to hire a more-than-competent replacement, Nicole Anslover, whose classes I frequently attend as a guest lecturer.  I never actually stopped going in to my office at the Calumet Regional Archives, where I remained an unpaid co-director.  Often receiving are-you-still-here stares, I gradually settled into what amounted to semi-retirement, remaining useful to archivist Steve McShane and staying active as editor of Steel Shavings magazine.  Now that Steve is retiring and the campus remains closed, I have adjusted to writing my blog from home and not missed my pre-pandemic routine as much as I thought.

On the other hand, I’d lose much of my purpose in life if I severed ties with IUN.  On the short term I need to help secure a replacement for Archivist Steve McShane by establishing a relationship with the incoming chancellor and present him with Paul Kern and my history of the university. In fact, it’s in need of an update and if I’m not up to it, at least I can continue to do oral histories to that end.  I enjoy interacting with History colleagues and attending their classes once in a while. Face it, I’m a lifer reader to volunteer wherever I might be needed.

Several former colleagues my age or even older are still teaching, reluctant to give up the soapbox that goes with their position.  Alan Barr recently retired at age 80; he claimed to have asked his English colleague George Bodmer to let him know when it was time for him to stop teaching; they’d ride to the university together from Illinois.  When Bodmer announced his intention to resign, Barr left a semester ahead of him.  While I considered myself an excellent teacher and adjusted my approach to elicit more class participation as students’ diminished attention span seemed to require it, I never became as skilled at it as the generation that replaced my cohort of lecture-oriented professors.  All in all, I don’t regret retiring from full-time duties in the classroom but would regret not being involved in university activities.  My mentors in that regard are “lifers” Ruth Nelson, who after resigning as Bookstore manager, continued as a library volunteer until well into her nineties, and Garrett Cope, who was still doing valuable work in Continuing Education in his mid-80s.

Anne Koehler, who remains a valuable library staff member and shows no sign of slowing down, wrote:

    My parents came over from Germany to visit in 1973. On the way back to the plane in New York City we stopped in Asbury Park, New Jersey. We swam in the ocean, my dad got knocked down by a wave. My husband and I got a hot dog from a nearby vender on the boardwalk. A little later, my father went to do the same. He came back with a sour mien. I asked him what was the matter. He told me that they asked him whether he wanted sauerkraut on the hot dog. He took this as an insult, knowing that Germans were sometimes called Krauts in America. I assured him that it was the normal way hot dogs were being served there. We had a good laugh.

With a German-American friend I used the phrase jerry-built, meaning poorly constructed or thrown together and she told me the phrase was an insult to Germans, sometimes referred to as Jerrys during World War II.  I was surprised to hear that and so I looked up its derivation and discovered that jerry-built came into usage in England during the mid-nineteenth century from the nautical term jury, meaning something temporary or makeshift and built with inferior materials.  Anne went on:   

 In 1977 my father came to visit, mainly to see his half year old only granddaughter Linda. He would take her out in her stroller and observe and photograph local wildlife. There were groundhogs in the bushes. His big desire was to see the Grand Canyon, with or without us. We rented a motor home and took off. Linda got sick and we had to take her to the ER in Springfield, Missouri. They told us not to give her any food or liquid for 24 hours. She got well soon.--Arriving at the Grand Canyon we stood at the rim gazing down into the huge chasm. My father said: "Where is the Colorado River?" We said: "That little blue band down there at the bottom." He refused to believe it at first, saying he had seen videos showing it as a raging river and that could not possibly be it. After pointing out, that we were a mile away from it he finally accepted the fact. I dearly miss my parents and treasure the time with them.

I enjoyed two movies about seniors.  The first, “Being Rose” (2017) starred Cybil Shepherd, whom I remembered as a teenager in “The Last Picture Show” and Bruce Willis’s love interest in the Eighties “Moonlighting” series.  With just months to live and wheelchair bound, she takes off on a trip, meets an irresistible cowboy played by James Brolin and befriends free-spirited Lilly, played (who would have guessed?) by Pam Grier, Foxy Brown in blaxploitation flicks. 

Based on the true story of Melita Norwood, “Red Joan” (2018) featured Judy Dench as an 80-something retired physicist suddenly accused of passing atomic secret to the Russians during World War II.  Flashbacks show Joan as a brilliant, idealistic Cambridge University student who became attracted to two communists who eventually recruit her after she witnesses film of the devastation caused bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  She believed that the best way to avoid another world war was for both Cold war adversaries to have such weapons of mass destruction.

Dench as "Red Joan"

Lovesick

"Making out is one thing that won't change even if civilization fizzles and humanity is reduced to two people." Caroline George, "The Vestige"


In a New York Review of Books essay titled “Lovesick,” 86-year-old Janet Malcolm, who emigrated to the U.S. at age 5, discussed a 1942 best-selling young adult romance novel dealing with a girl’s first crush, Maureen Daly’s “Seventeenth Summer,” a tale of careful love that, to Janet Malcolm, symbolized the repressiveness of mid-twentieth-century America. Malcolm labeled the book “a tract for the sexual ideology of the time, whereby nice girls didn’t ‘go all the way’ and nice boys hardly expected or wanted them to, given their own nervous-making sexual experience.  It encouraged uninformed teenaged girls like myself in our longings for sexless romance.”  Despite the drastically changed sexual practices among young people, “Seventeenth Summer” remains in print, causing one Amazon reviewer to write: “For an 11-year-old girl that daydreams about kissing boys, she’d probably like it.  For an 11-year-old girl that’s already had sex, the book may seem lame.”

 

Janet Malcolm

Former 1990s student Rachel Stevens wrote about being a shy sixth grader at Yost Elementary in Porter when she developed a crush on Mike, “an adorable boy who was in choir with me.” One day they took a walk to a swing set in the park.  Rachel wrote:

  I gave him a hug and he kissed me on the lips.  It was my first one.  I was so shocked and amazed I just stood there weak in the knees from puppy love.  Later I sat in my room in a complete daze.  But soon enough he broke up with me.  I was doubly devastated because he started “going out” with my close friend Christina.  My other friends and I began plotting against her.

 

In 1993 former student Sandra Avila was an eighth grader at Hammond Eggers.  Her closest friend was Amelia, “like me Mexican.” In February she began dating Daniel and Amelia started dating Phil. Sandra wrote (Steel Shavings, volume 31, 2001):

    We were constantly getting in trouble because of them.  One time I turned off all the ringers in my house and my dad called the phone company.  Another time I was at Amelia’s house when Phil came over on his scooter and her mom came out.  We told her he was the paper boy.  On Valentine’s Day Daniel bought me a dozen roses and some balloons.  I had to pop all the balloons and squeeze the flowers in my back pack to avoid getting into trouble.  Daniel was my first love and Phil Amelia’s first love.

 

A Gary teenager during the 1990s, Esther Lewis wrote that her first love, Michael, was her best friend’s brother.  She recalled:

    He’d ask my advice about girls.  We’d talk for hours.  One day I swallowed my pride and told him I liked him.  He told me he didn’t want to cheat on his girl.  He stopped calling me but then out of the blue we started going together.  My friends thought I was above him, but I was most definitely in love; and he and I were sprung.

 

While living in the small town of Roselawn Elizabeth Grzych’s classmates began calling her a “wigger” when she befriended Mackenzie, one of the few black kids in the school.  Elizabeth wrote:

    We’d dance together at school dances and it was no big thing, but kissing was a whole different story.  The first time, we were slow dancing to the Guns N Roses song “November Rain.”  He put his hands in my back pockets and kissed me.  Although only 13, I knew he’d be someone very special in my life.  At first me family didn’t take it very well; but all through the subsequent bullshit, they stuck by me.

 

Candice Bigott met her first love, Chris, at a party; he called the following day after getting her phone number.  Before long, they seemed inseparable. Candice wrote: “We spent the next few weeks in complete bliss.  Then, all of a sudden, Chris had less time for me.  On Valentine’s Day we broke up.  For the next six months, I cried every day.”

 

Interviewed by Jason Hasha, Sam Barnett reveled that his first date occurred when he was in tenth grade at Merrillville High School and she was a senior.  He met her at a dance and recalled:

    I was just standing around the stag line talking and asked this girl if she wanted to dance.  They were playing a crappy song by Journey, but we danced and the whole way home we talked.  I got her phone number.  Next time we got together we just rented a movie, stayed at my house, and made out.  That’s the best because there’s no guilt or responsibility; with sex, you gotta call the next day.  You gotta worry about kids and diseases and what they will think of you.

 

Sexual habits and attitudes have certainly changed since my teen years when “making out” rather than “going all the way” consumed most guys’ desires and fantasies. As a former student wrote in an early Steel Shavings on relationships between the sexes during the 1950s, petting involved simulating sex with one’s clothes on (“dry humping”) and striving to “touch the bases” with little hope of reaching home but hoping to steal a feel at second and third.  Jennifer Long recalled: “Terms like heavy petting and copping a feel were in vogue.”  Brian Gerike wrote: “Virginity was the norm at Gary Emerson, and people gossiped about girls suspected of having sex.”  Frank wrote about parking with a girl at Miller Beach: “After some preliminaries I managed to begin touching the girl’s breasts.  She seemed not to mind, so I took it as a green light and tried to touch her private parts below the belt line.  The next thing I knew, I was getting slapped across the face.”

 

Drive-in theaters, called “passion pits,” were a popular place for making out.  Ray Ballestero told Amy Powers that working at a drive-in, he knew couple were going hot and heavy if the windows started steaming up and the car started shaking slightly.  Linda told John Gibbs that her date at the drive-in tried to get his hand under her blouse and when she rebuffed his advances was such a jerk about it that on their next date she feigned passion and told him to take his pants off and three friends took a picture of his bare ass.

 

Most so-called good girls didn’t engage in heavy petting until they were “going steady.” John Broelman wrote: “Monogamy was the rule; and if sex was occurring, marriage should not be far behind.  Before Helen lost here virginity, she and her boyfriend talked about it for weeks. She was deflowered in a park near their homes.  Six months later they decided to get married.”  Girls who went all the way worried about late periods and unwanted pregnancies that could lead to “shotgun weddings.”  Tim Trzeciak wrote: “Barbara’s older sister got pregnant and married soon after.  Her father’s initial reaction was, ‘Boys will be boys but a girl is damn stupid if she lets him.’ He wasn’t happy about the solution but didn’t make his daughter an outcast.” On the other and, Alice McIlree recalled that a girl at Brunswick Baptist Church was forced to apologize to the entire congregation for becoming pregnant.  It was so humiliating Alice felt ashamed to belong to such a church.

 

Looking back on my generation’s Fifties teen experiences, for the most part, I don’t think we were sexually repressed.  We had access to Playboy magazines and “Peyton Place” and took parental admonitions with a grain of salt.  If many of us remained “technical virgins,” as the saying went, throughout high school and beyond, that didn’t mean we didn’t find as much pleasure in practices short of intercourse as I suspect the present generation of teens and tweens might get exchanging graphic selfies or receiving oral sex. I learned about the latter in eleventh grade from a deck of cards a friend showed me and at Bucknell when a freshman in the communal dorm bathroom showed off bite marks on his dick and joked that his date got carried away.  It took the Monica Lewinsky scandal to familiarize the nation about what my brother-in-law, a long-distance trucker, referred to as lube jobs.

Memorial Day

Annville, PA

“Our nation owes a debt to its heroes that we can never fully repay,” Barack Obama

 

Several Facebook friends posted messages about loved ones who served our country.  Mike Certa wrote this message: “This Memorial Day, I'd like to remember my godfather, Joe Certa, who was killed in action in Korea in 1950. I also want to thank all those who have served their country in the armed forces, whether in war or peace.”  As people flocked to beaches, often not heeding warnings about social distancing, Pat Wisniewski posted a clip of troops landing at Normandy Beach on D-Day and wrote: “Memorial Day is more than just a day at the beach.”  Stevie Kokos remembered his father (below), who served with the 82^nd Airborne and passed away within the past year.

For Hoosiers Memorial Day weekend traditionally means patriotic parades and the Indianapolis 500, often referred to simply as “The Race.”  Once widespread, visiting cemeteries with wreaths of flowers still takes place for many families honoring loved ones.  In fact, initially the holiday was called Decoration Day to honor casualties of the Civil War, with May 30 designated as the date because it was an optimum time for flowers to be in bloom.  Historian Ray E. Boomhower posted this quotation by Hoosier President Benjamin Harrison, grandson of “Old Tippecanoe” (William Henry Harrison) and a colonel during the Civil War” who fought under William Tecumseh Sherman.

    I have never been able to think of the day as one of mourning; I have never quite been able to feel that half-masted flags were appropriate on Decoration Day.  I have rather felt that the flag should be at the peak, because those whose dying we commemorate rejoiced in seeing it where their valor placed it. We honor them in a joyous, thankful, triumphant commemoration of what they did. We mourn for them as comrades who have departed, but we feel the glory of their dying and the glory of their achievement covers all our great country, and has set them in an imperishable roll of honor.

 

Changing Decoration Day to Memorial Day was similar to renaming Armistice Day, commemorating the end of the Great War (World War I) to Veterans Day, encompassing all who served in combat regardless of what war, or, for that matter, replacing Lincoln and Washington’s birthday holidays with President Day. July 4 still  reminds us of when in 1776 the Founding fathers signed the Declaration of Independence, but Columbus Day has been de-emphasized in the wake of revelations about the explorer’s mistreatment of native Americans.  One wonders how long Martin Luther King Day will endure. Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving seem safe in their commercialized form, as does Halloween, which has pagan roots and was banned by New England Puritans but celebrated by Irish immigrants who began arriving in America during the potato famine of the 1840s.

 

World War II was the last noncontroversial war, and those relatively few veterans are succumbing in shockingly large numbers in assisted living facilities.  So, too, are Vietnam veterans, now senior citizens (childhood buddy Paul Curry would be 77 had he survived Vietnam) often receiving inadequate care in veterans’ hospitals and homes.  On this day I not only mourn those who made the ultimate sacrifice in needless wars but those who survived combat but whose nation let them down upon their return and in their old age. Vince Emanuel posted this bitter commentary:

    I used to get angry when people would 'thank me' for my 'service.' These days, it just makes me sad. So many of my friends have died as a result of America's illegal and immoral wars. Millions of our brothers and sisters in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Palestine, and beyond have either been killed or displaced.  I have lost more guys from my platoon to suicide, cancer, and drug overdoses than we lost during the war. Imagine the stress and uncertainty you're feeling in the midst of this pandemic, multiply it by a thousand, add foreign troops kicking in your door, killing, kidnapping, and torturing your family members, then destroying your home, only to have it happen again in a few weeks, and you'll have a small idea of what it's like to be on the receiving end of Uncle Sam's madness. Imagine foreign troops bombing, shelling, and shooting up your neighborhoods just for fun. Imagine those troops mutilating the dead corpses of your relatives and friends, taking pictures and laughing. That's war. That's where your tax dollars are going. That's what I testified to U.S. Congress about back in 2008 (no one cared). That's what's being done in your name while you and your family eat hotdogs and fret about a non-existent baseball season. There's nothing courageous about flying halfway around the world and killing innocent peasants and unemployed workers with mechanized military equipment. There's nothing brave about serving U.S. Empire. That's why 22 veterans kill themselves every day in this country. They're not proud. They're ashamed. - Signed, USMC Veteran (2002-2006) 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, Alpha Company, 3rd Platoon, 1st Squad, 3rd Fireteam.

My late IUN colleague Jim Tolhuizen, grievously wounded when ordered to participate in Nixon’s 1970 Cambodian “Incursion,” never talked about his war experiences until learning I was teaching a course of the history of Vietnam. He began speaking to my students and never brought up his platoon mate Paul’s death but wrote about it for my Vietnam veterans Steel Shavings (volume 39, 2008).  During an R and R trip to Bangkok, Paul had bought the Beatles’s “Abbey Road” tape.  He’d play that tape over and over, and Jim’s last memory of Paul is their squad coming under attack on night guard duty and Paulosing his life trying to retrieve that tape.  After his week in Bangkok, Paul also returned with a photo of a Thai girl who’d been his “escort” and asked Jim to get rid of it should he be killed so his parents and fiancé wouldn’t see it.  Tolhuizen wrote:
    I packed that picture of Paul and his Thai girl away and haven’t seen it in years.  Sometimes I think I should find it and maybe send it to his family if I could find them.  It’s hard to believe anyone would care about the Thai girl anyway.  I don’t know, I made a promise, so I’ll keep it to myself.       

In “They Marched into Sunlight (page 45) David Maraniss wrote about a similar attack in 1967 near Vung Tau: “A squad of Viet Cong guerillas slipped past the listening post and the ambush squad and launched a surprise attack on the night defensive position with machine gun fire and claymore mines, killing one soldier, who had been sitting atop his bunker rather than inside it, and wounding eight others.”

Anne Koehler recalled growing up during World War II in the small farming village of Damendorf in the north of Germany:

    Nearby was the site of torpedo experimentation. They would shoot them into the bay and it was not safe to be on the beach, because some would go astray and surface there. All around the area were barrels which in times of imminent bomber attack would emit smoke to cloud the area and make targets invisible.  We were directly in the flight path of Allied bombers from England to the city of Kiel, where submarines were being built and thus a strategically important target.  We would hear the drone of the engines by the hour during the night. The sky would light in colors over Kiel from "Leuchtkugeln" or flares, dropped to make targets more visible. We called them Christmas trees. (I read once that Jimmy Stewart flew those missions). Sometimes bombers on their return flight would drop extra bombs into the fields nearby. We made a field trip with our school to look at the huge crater. Our village was never hit but toward the end of the war dive bombers flew right over our farm. An anti-aircaft batter or FLAS was on the way to our county seat, the Baltic seaside resort of Eckernfoerde.  I do not recall the end of the war on May 8, 1945, 75 years ago or how it was greeted in our village. I was only 10 and it was my mother's birthday. Prior to that time, I do recall hearing Hitler on the radio. He was screaming and I did not understand what he was saying. Hopefully WWII will be the last world war.


Our weekend routine didn’t change much.  Friday a violent storm left many Lake County residents without electricity or flooded basements, but we escaped except for large puddles in our back yard.  Dace’s family came over and brought homemade egg drop soup and the makings for spring rolls.  Toni provided shrimp, corn on the cob, and other ingredients.  Afterwards, we took pictures with Becca wearing her commencement robe, and I played space base with Dave and James.  I got in some computer bridge, including partnering with Carol Miller.  She had bought plane tickets to visit her son, who’s serving in South Korea, but the pandemic put the kibosh on that.