Month: April 2017

Sisters

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

“A soldier of the legion lay dying in Algiers,

There was lack of woman’s nursing, there was a dearth of woman’s tears”

-from the poem “BINGEN ON THE RHINE” By Caroline E. Norton (1808 – 1877)

 

We stood at attention in our platoon formations, four or five abreast, ten ranks deep, all in uniform, on a crisp September morning. Our platoon leader stood in front of our formation, back to us. Other platoons were all around us, same uniforms, with their platoon leaders in front of them. We all faced toward the center of the large asphalt covered yard, toward the empty flagpole. In spite of the great numbers assembled, more than a thousand, it was utterly quiet. You could hear birdsong from the nearby park. Shortly, two drummers and two buglers and a lone uniformed young man came into view. The small detachment marched to the military tattoo being rhythmically played out by the drummers. When they reached the flagpole they stopped marching and drumming. The young man took an American flag from under his arm, unfolded it enough to fix the grommets on the flag onto the catches on the rope.

The buglers began to play and the drummers started a slow roll of backdrop as the flag slowly began to rise to its position at the top. The music stopped. We raised our right hands over our hearts and, all as one, recited the Pledge of Allegiance. When we finished, the platoon leaders led us, formation by formation, into the nearby buildings. Once inside, we could hear John Phillip Sousa’s Washington Post March blaring over the loudspeakers as we marched to our assigned positions.

No, I was not in the Army, at least not yet. I was seven years old and beginning my first day of first grade at Resurrection School on Chicago’s west side.

It seemed a bizarre, scary place to this scared first grader. I came from a big family, but they were all in other grades. I was on my own. It didn’t seem at all like kindergarten I attended the year before at nearby Robert Emmett Public School; that school was only a few hours a day, and offered naps and treats and games and playtime. Not at all like today’s kindergarten programs, which feature foreign languages and in which you may be required to defend your dissertation. This was loud, and crowded and scary, with kids of all ages.

My platoon leader/ classroom teacher was Sister Mary Owen, RSM. She was young and pretty; at least I thought she must have been if you could see past the habit she wore. It showed only her face and hands, that pretty face encased in a framed white starched cardboard headpiece. Her dress was black and she wore a starched white breastplate and wore a large black rosary as both a belt and a sort of accessory running down one side. She wore a black veil over her head. This was the official outfit of a Religious Sister of Mercy. There were other flavors of nuns, I would learn, and they had their distinctive outfits, also. Sisters of Providence, Franciscans, Little Sisters of the Poor, and the Sinsinawa Dominicans, who I always thought sounded like a ball club.

We were about fifty kids to a room (we had a class photo every year, and the proof of those numbers is there), the products of the post war baby boom, when millions of G.I.’s, sailors, and airmen came back with pretty much one idea in mind. And millions of lonely women thought it was a pretty good idea, too. Procreation was practically the national pastime in the late 1940’s and early to mid-50’s and it filled classrooms quickly.

Our uniforms were tan shirts and maroon ties for boys, tan blouses and maroon plaid jumpers for the girls. The girls’ jumpers also carried a patch with the Resurrection logo on it. If you were number one or two in the family birth order, you probably wore new shirts, or blouses and jumpers. Come later to the party and you were probably wearing hand-me-downs from an older sibling or a neighbor. Kids mostly carried their books in book bags or by hand, backpacks being reserved at that time for mountain men, soldiers, and Sherpa guides. When the Chicago weather arrived, you hung your coat in the “cloak room” which ran alongside the classroom and, as I recall, where discipline was sometimes distributed to children whose behavior was unacceptable.

———————-

It seemed to this boy that I had entered into a world run by women, which I believe could be said of most elementary schools. The principal and almost all of the teachers were nuns. The few lay teachers were women. And in such a world those things that are important to most women come to define the rules of the day. Things like order. Things like having a plan and then processing in an orderly fashion. Things like discipline. Things like kindness.

I was scared that first day. So many strange faces, and when Sister Owen called the role, asking each student in turn to raise their hand and speak their name, I could only raise my hand, too scared to speak. She let me off the hook and we set about the business of learning our ABCs, mostly reciting after her.

At some point, my nervousness got the better of me and I had an accident, and not the kind any kid wants to have. Sister Owen was quick to spot it. She swooped me up and carried me to the restroom, then known as the lavatory,  dismissing two older boys with a glare, who knew better than to mess with “Sister“. Like a mother caring for her own child, this young woman cleaned me off, asked me if I was OK, soaked my soiled undies and wrapped them in cellophane (who the hell carries cellophane?) and brought me by hand back to the classroom. I was somewhere between mortified and grateful. I’m not sure the other kids even noticed.

At the end of that first day, she handed me a note for my mother, explaining my little accident and telling me to have a better day tomorrow. I joined the orderly procession out the door, feeling utterly miserable and alone. And that is when I saw my oldest sister Maureen at the top of the stairway. She had on her plaid jumper, her black hair in curls and was talking to the girl next to her. My sister was a “good eighth grade girl” as the nuns would say. “Good eighth grade girls” could be depended upon to perform any task from cleaning the blackboards to tutoring slower students, to probably running the whole school, if asked.

She turned her head and saw me at the bottom of the steps and broke into a wide, welcoming smile. It was the kind of Big Sister smile that says, “I see you. It’s going to be OK. I’ve got you.” And I knew then that I wasn’t alone and that there were people there who cared about me. I was going to be OK. She carries that same smile even today and she has always shared it freely with all who need it.

God bless all sisters, those who took vows to earn that title and those who were members of your family. We’re lucky to have had them.

Goodbye to the Singing Bridge and other stories of Sister Lakes

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

If my family has a spiritual home, it must be in Sister Lakes, Michigan, for that was the site of our many annual pilgrimages each summer, usually for two or sometimes three weeks. The tales from these vacations have been retold so many times that you can often hear a groan in the room (usually from a long suffering in-law) when someone decides to pop one open again. Some of those memories actually happened, though they have put on some weight in the retelling. Some sort of happened and have been happily distorted by the re-teller of the tale. And some probably never happened, having been reengineered in the minds of various family members about what should have happened or what they wish had happened. Although I have, at times, been in all three of those camps, I’ll try to keep my telling of this tale as accurate as I can.

Chicago is surrounded by many popular vacation lakes: Lake Geneva in Wisconsin, Cedar Lake in Indiana, the Chain of Lakes near the Wisconsin border, Michiana’s shoreline and the Michigan side of the Great Lake itself, to name only a few. Every family probably has its favorite and thousands of Chicagoans filled all of those cottages each summer, so I am sure that each of those families could tell their own version of a vacation story. The late, great PBS storyteller Jean Shepherd, author of the classic Christmas Story, wrote an unforgettable and seldom seen sequel entitled “Ollie Hopnoodle’s Haven of Bliss” and it touches many of the same summer vacation memories.

Our story was mostly Sister Lakes in Southwest Michigan, about 110 miles from the West Side of Chicago. Six small lakes surrounded by little frame cottages, many built in the thirties and forties. Their names were Little Crooked, Big Crooked, Dewey, Magician, Cable and Round Lake, all within a circle of no more than a few miles. Most of my memories are from Round Lake, where we rented from the Clancy family and a few from Little Crooked Lake, where we rented from the Hayes family. The vacation I am describing here was from about 1957, 1958, or 1959.

Mighty preparations.

Today most people would think nothing of driving 110 miles there and back on the same day, if necessary. I know I’ve done it a few times. But in the 50’s and 60’s the Interstate system of highways we take for granted today was in its infancy. 110 miles took about five hours, not the hour and forty give minutes it would take in an off-traffic period today.  Then, your car was “flying” at a whopping sixty miles per hour, where today eighty-two is the unofficial legal speed limit on the open road.

My mother and father prepared for those five hours as if we were embarking on a trans-oceanic voyage. My dad would have the 1955 Chevy wagon car tuned up, tires looked at, oil changed. That year, he had some friend of his hook up a do-it-yourself window washer, which consisted of a water bag that rode on an inside fender and a metal lever the driver could pull to wash the windshield. When fired, it shot over our windshield entirely and watered the window of the car behind us. We tried to keep from laughing.

My mother began planning meals for ten people as if there was no food for sale east of the Indiana State Line. Do the math for three weeks times three meals a day, factor in the limited refrigeration of the time, and you’ll see her challenge. Our mobile refrigeration consisted of a red metal Coca Cola cooler, and it amazed me how much she managed to fit in there.  And then there was clothing. We had one or two cloth suitcases, but everything else was in duffle bags, boxes, or gym bags.

All of this had to fit in one nine passenger wagon, augmented by the “carrier”, an aluminum deck with suction cups that rode on the roof and which no one really trusted to stay on the roof, but it did for years. Of course, it wouldn’t all fit. My father would enlist someone with a car, that year Frank and Mary O’Brien. Frank was a former fireman pensioned off from having fallen off a fire truck years earlier, and their two children were older than us, so they had the time and they were just giving, warm people by nature. The O’Brien’s were given some of the cargo load, plus one or two kids.

Launching the Mission

The Saturday morning when we left for vacation was the best morning this side of Christmas. Our own personal Wogan Family “Great Getting’ Up Morning”, as it might be called in the Old Testament (Book of Exodus, to be exact). We woke up on our own, early, got dressed, had a sweet roll from Schneider’s Bakery, a rare treat which my father had picked up that morning to mark this great day; it was also to hold us over until we arrived at a real breakfast, still several hours away. Our cousin, Billy, having been given a parole by his parents so that he could escape from his seven sisters, had been dropped off and was eager to put 100 miles between him and them.

My mother would grow more and more frustrated with the lack of cooperation she was getting. Finally, when we heard her say, “We’re Not Going!” we knew we were getting close to launch.

Luggage, boxes of food, bags of clothing, fishing poles, tackle box, golf clubs, dolls, beach toys, blankets and bedding, towels, comic books, and seven or eight children plus one cousin ready to board. My father had no intention of second guessing all these little bladders, so a mandatory bathroom stop was ordered before being assigned a seat.

In the Time Before Safety

It should be noted here that by current safety standards, my entire family should have been wiped out several times over on these trips. There were no seats belts installed in the car, my dad chain smoked his Salem’s out the window the whole way, various kids would stick heads and hands out windows until scolded back in, my mother would usually be holding one of the babies in her lap, and three of us rode in what we called the “poop deck”. This was a plywood bench my father had made by some fireman that could be inserted into the flat bed at the rear of the station wagon. It was attached to absolutely nothing and held in place by gravity and, well, us.

Because air conditioning for cars was still on the horizon, we would open the tailgate window and lock it in the “up” position. Three of us actually fought for the honor of traveling on this suicide bench, spending the entire trip making faces at the people in the car behind us (if it was the O’Brien’s, we behaved) and wondering what it said on the printed side of road signs we passed while looking backwards.

Once at the lake, I can’t recall that we ever owned even a single life jacket, except for a small red and yellow striped one in which a toddler could bob around. My brothers and I would sometimes row across the lake at night to catch frogs, with neither parent aware of our absence, our lack of flotation devices, or our lack of sanity. As long as you were in the rack by the time they got to bed, life was good.

Points of Interest along the route.

It was very important to my father that our little caravan go by his firehouse on Crawford (now Pulaski), Engine 95, or later Harrison St, Engine 113. Dad would slow down, honk a few times and wave, a big grin on his face. The other fireman came out from the apparatus floor to wave back and smile. I think some of them were happy for us, but most of them looked relieved that it was us and not them on this little journey. All they had to do was continue going about running into burning, exploding, or collapsing buildings now and again, a relatively easy choice by comparison.

On to the Singing Bridge. The Congress Street Bridge over the Chicago River sits just east of the old post office. As your tires meet the rippled steel that makes up the part of the bridge that can be opened for boat traffic, they change their noise to a sort of high pitched whine. We would wait for it, and then break into uneven sing-songy nonsense to mimic the tire noise. Great fun. My parents would look at each other, roll their eyes and smile at each other, as if to say “What a collection of idiots we’ve produced.”  A few years ago, the bridge was replaced, and lost its voice to some new kind of construction material. Nothing lasts forever, I guess.

You travelled by way of the soaring Skyway, then the Indiana Toll Road through the steel mills, then off to back roads for a few miles. After a few more miles, you could pick up the Michigan Freeway, the massive super highway under construction from the East Coast toward Chicago, growing closer each year, and now known as I- 90. When the bridges turned blue in color, you knew you were in Michigan.

Finally, near Stevensville, Michigan, we turned off into Ritter’s Restaurant. There we would unload and pile into the long table which awaited us, via my mother’s phone calls days before. Today I have grandsons, the youngest seven, who can sit in a restaurant, scan a menu, and order a meal with the practiced ease of a travelling salesman. Not so with us. We got two restaurant breakfasts per year, one at Easter and this one. My mother, always organized, had learned from our first trip here that it took us longer to order the food than it did for the restaurant to cook it. We would gaze at the menu and ponder its meaning, as if it were written in ancient Hebrew.  So she borrowed the menu from that first trip and the week before leaving, we placed our order with her. She would pull out the list of food selections for the whole group, neatly typed on her trusty Underwood manual typewriter, and hand it to the astonished waitress.

Exit 12 was Napier Avenue, and we began to get excited. You passed little crossings and hamlets like Spinks Corner and Coon’s Curve and migrant worker’s shacks until finally you crested a hill and Round Lake at last came into sight. Nerds that we were, we would cheer and break into applause. It still makes me smile when I crest that hill even today.

The cottage

Clancy’s Camp Geraldine was on the side of a hill facing the lake. It consisted of two buildings, each hosting two cottages, one up and one down. Marshall and Eleanor Clancy and their four sons spent the entire summer in one upper cottage. We thought they were the luckiest guys in the world. P.J. Clancy, the old undertaker from the west side, and his wife Minnie Bell, a true Southern Lady in voice and style and grace, occupied the other upper cottage. We rented the cottage below them.

The main lake road ran right past the doors of the upper cottages and the elder residents sat most of the time at street level on outdoor chairs, chatting, smoking, sometimes cooking, and after four o’clock or so, drinking. Upon our arrival, they would flock over to greet us, my Dad saying his hellos and my mother anxious to survey the inside of the cottage. As we all piled out, we were given standing orders not to go down the stairs empty handed, and also to drop our loads at the door, until my mother could figure out where every item was to be stowed. If the weather was warm, it was hard not to try to get a bathing suit on and hit the lake. Not before your stuff was stowed and not before the car was emptied.

Round Lake

The true heart of the vacation was the water. The water you splashed in, swam in, raced in, rowed over, skied over, fished in, and bathed in. Two hundred acres of water, only sixty feet at the deepest, usually weed choked beyond the beaches, and full of fish and turtles to catch. To look across that lake was always liberating for city kids, for the opposite shore seemed so far away. It did a visual number on you. Your big city life afforded you only a look into the window across the gangway or the house across the street or alley. The only obstructions breaking the water’s surface were the piers, the rowboats, and the white wooden rafts, floating on 55 gallon drums and anchored about twenty feet out from the shore; an early rung on the ladder to maturity was achieved when you could swim to the raft by yourself. And always the surface of the lake itself, still as glass in the early morning, so bright you adverted your eyes in the noonday sun, sometimes wild and surly during a storm.

Round Lake was surrounded by cottages, in some ways as tightly packed as the block of two flats we called home in Chicago, but different. There were wooden piers every twenty yards or so, countless rowboats, motorboats, pontoon boats, and little sailboats tied up to those piers. Almost every cottage had a floating raft, too, something kids could swim out to and play “king of the mountain” as a child and for moonlit romance when you were older.

Round Lake was also the death of sanitation for a few weeks. Our cottage contained only one bathroom with a single toilet and a washstand. No tub or shower. Bathing consisted of taking a bar of soap with you into the water, maybe some shampoo for the ladies, and cleaning up alongside the white wooden pier. My mother believed that kids who spent six to eight hours a day swimming, which was a typical warm weather day for us, had to be clean enough by default. I think she was right.

In Search of the Largemouth Bass

I had no idea what my sisters did for those weeks, but my brothers, cousin and I fished constantly, usually clad only in our bathing suits. The lake coughed up bluegill, sunfish, and perch and bullheads. The fish worked in shifts: daytime for the panfish and perch, then exclusively bullheads after dusk. Almost at any time of day and anywhere you dropped a line you could find fish, but our prize was the largemouth bass, the king of freshwater gamefish. We had a tackle box full of guaranteed bass killers, but invariably we grew too impatient and went back to the trusty gas-station- purchased night crawlers and a bobber. We caught some little bass here and there, the most notable of which might have been the one my brother Bill caught on an improbable rubber frog.  He had bought this pale green rubber abomination earlier that summer via mail order and we needled him and laughed at him for weeks. On the first cast, he caught a largemouth that weighed about two pounds, then a record for us. He became an insufferable “expert” for the rest of the summer.

How inexperienced we were as fishermen was pointed out to me one morning when Old Joe Hayes came off the lake as we got ready for church one Sunday. A relative of the Hayes family we knew from Crooked Lake, Joe went fishing only on certain days when the weather conditions were right. He started out before first light and was done by 8 a.m., using a method he called “spatting” which consisted of dangling an unlucky live white baby frog from the end of a twelve foot bamboo pole. He only fished in front of our cottage and maybe twenty or thirty yards in either direction, an area he called “bass lane”. He got out of his boat carrying a stringer full of five to six pound monster bass that I could only dream about catching.

Cold Weather Plans: Deer Forest, Driftwood, the Roller Rink, and the Bowling Alley.

There may be no greater challenge to parents than what to do when the weather turns too-cold in a too-small cottage full of too-bored children. One answer lay in nearby Coloma, Michigan. Deer Forest was a sort of demented amusement park built especially for those “too cold to swim” days. Its main attraction was a lightly wooded forest inside of a fenced-in enclosure full of small deer, ranging from fawns to yearlings. For five cents you could buy some dried corn in a Safe-T-Cone (a popular ice cream cone then) and walk into the enclosure. The deer would immediately swarm in and mob you, knowing you had food. If you held your cup of corn behind you, you would find out the deer already knew this trick and send one or more of their number behind you. Your cup of corn would disappear in one toothy deer gulp. Preschoolers would scream and grade schoolers giggled and laughed, as did parents watching their kids alternately laughing, crying, or shrieking. The deer didn’t care; they only understood free food.

Deer Forest had also never heard of the ASPCA. It featured caged displays such as the Dancing Chicken and the Piano Playing Duck, both live, both standing on metal plates that passed low voltage through their feet if they didn’t dance or play for you. They had all sorts of tired, tied up animals like ponies, lambs, and one honest to god ancient reindeer. They had a Santa’s Workshop in which you could meet with a perspiring Santa and add your Christmas wish to his book. One lady ahead of me in line had written that she hoped the owners would be jailed for creating this awful place.

Driftwood was within walking distance of our cottage, and hence a daily visit. It was a two story structure on the lake consisting of the owner’s apartment on top and one of the cheesiest gift shop-pinball hall-soda fountain-vacation sundries places you could ever hope to see. For me it represented illegal fireworks and comic books. It stands there today, having passed from owner to owner, but somehow always the same. It was always noisy with the sound of pinball machines, teenage music, and kids. I can still taste the ice cream.

The bowling alley and the roller rink were across the street from our cottage. The bowling alley was a late comer; the Ramona Roller Rink appeared to have been built before time existed, an old dried wooden construction, painted green and white. The roller rink was all about being a teenager, so we had no business there. Besides, only girls roller skated in our world.

There was another and sadder world intermingled, yet separate from all of this. We were too young to know or care much about the people we called “berry pickers”, but they were there. These were the migrant workers from Mexico who followed the crops; July and August found them in strawberry and blueberry country. We passed their low tarpapered shacks on the way in from the city, and we might see them washing clothes at the Laundromat, but beyond that, they stayed invisible. While we were families of blue collar workers, perhaps without a lot of material wealth to show for it, they were the true working poor.

We didn’t know that they couldn’t use the lake, nor were they welcome in the Silver Creek Catholic Church we attended, nor were they allowed in the bars or stores. Their children did not attend schools. You can find them toiling there still today, but the living conditions are a little better and the social barriers are mostly gone, reduced but not eliminated in the long struggle for equality and civil rights of the sixties, seventies, eighties and beyond.

—————-

Tolstoy once wrote that “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” We were and still are a happy family, like most families, I suppose. Our individual and collective memories of those family times bind us together and give meaning to that happiness. My kids have their own memories from the same lakes in later years, but those memories belong mostly to them, as mine do to my brothers and sisters.

Round Lake, indeed the whole area of Sister Lakes seems to change more slowly than the rest of the world, certainly slower than bustling Chicago. The old red hay barn across the lake that framed so many long ago sunsets is finally itself gone now. Some of the humble pre-war cottages have been replaced by 6,000 square foot year-around “McMansions”. Some of the new powerboats are too big for the lake they are on.

But it does slowly change, and, I suppose, will someday go the way of the Singing Bridge. Still, the memories can make you smile and keep you young.

 

 

 

The Flying Cowboy. First Responders to the Heart.

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

The Italian authorities were going from village to village in the valleys and gorges below the mountains along the Amalfi Coast. They were asking the same questions of everyone…did you see anyone fall from the mountains? Where did you see it? When? Finally after a few days a little boy in one of the villages told them he had seen a man in an American cowboy hat flying through the air one day recently.  There was no flying cowboy, of course, but what he had witnessed was how our new acquaintance Murray had met his death on a beautiful September day in 2007.

Until then, it might have been the best vacation we ever took. Five days in Rome with our more seasoned travelling friends, Dennis and JoAnn, acting as our tour guides. We saw the soaring architecture of the Vatican and several dead popes lying around in their glass caskets, the Coliseum, the Sistine, the Palatine Hill, the Tivoli Gardens, Trevi Fountain and those great open piazzas that seem to show up every few blocks. And everywhere the warm, friendly and incredibly hospitable people of that good country. There was no part of Rome that seemed dangerous and no restaurant that wasn’t delicious and memorable. We walked and walked.

The second part of our trip was further south, past Naples, in the region of the Amalfi Coast. It was a hiking tour and we were tagging along with part of a much larger group of American Airlines employees who had arranged all of this. After an endless train ride with about thirty stops, our group met in a decent little hotel in San Angelo and met our hiking guides. They were English, mostly retired engineers, and were in great shape for this work. Each day offered a different hike and you could assign yourself to easy, medium, or hard trails. Being a guy, I assumed we would try medium, but that only lasted a day. With tongues hanging out, we reassigned ourselves to easy, which wasn’t really all that easy, but we had been training for months in the mountains of Chicago, which of course don’t exist.

We walked up the side of Mt. Vesuvius, down into the lava covered ruins of Herculaneum (also buried along with Pompeii, but less famous) and along an old mountain trade route for mules high over the Mediterranean known as the Walk of the Gods. We walked down the sixty or so stories of the vertical cliff-side town of Positano and had wine and cheese and olives on the beach, only to learn that the single way back up was the way we came down. We slept pretty well those nights.

One of our group was a tall thin attorney from Toronto named Murray. He and his wife Sonia had been on many such hiking trips, but she confided quickly that these trips were all about Murray and his passion for hiking. He was in good shape, always taking the “hard” route and each day wearing his official olive drab hiking pants, shirt and hat, which in the military would have been known as a “boonie hat”, but had sort of the shape of a cowboy hat. Each night he would wash his sweat soaked outfit in the bathroom sink and hang it out to dry for tomorrow’s adventure. He took his hiking and I guess his life pretty seriously.

Like us, Murray and Sonia were not part of the American Airlines s group to which our friends Dennis and JoAnn belonged. Dining seating was your choice and, as groups will do, they tended to gather with fellow employees to share the dinner table. A loose dinner confederation formed consisting of my wife Maureen and I, Murray and Sonia, a very eccentric but hysterically funny octogenarian woman from the Isle of Guernsey, a retired British Air Force mechanic, and a few others.

Over dinner and a few other times, Murray shared with us that he was not happy with the degree of difficulty of our hikes thus far. He had been on many hikes and this one was not pushing him. It was sure pushing the rest of us, but we listened politely. And so it was on Wednesday that we got the day to ourselves. You could go sightseeing, shopping, or, if you were Murray, seek out that more challenging hike. The guides were against him going alone and tried to talk him out of it, but he had already picked the place and made it clear to them that he intended to go. They made him show the location on a map the night before and warned him that their insurance would not cover any misadventure like this. He was the soul of confidence at dinner that night, his last on earth, and seemed pleased that he would at last be on his own, free of less able hikers and guides.

We spent the day in Sorrento shopping, grateful for the break in the activity. At dinnertime back in the hotel Murray had not returned and Sonia wasn’t worried; she was sure he got held up somehow. Cellphones didn’t work too well internationally in 2007, by the way. By 8 p.m. she was nervous, but still sure it was just a delay of sorts. It had happened once or twice before, she said. By nightfall, about 9 pm. in that region, she was clearly worried. Maureen sat with her in the lobby of the hotel while I made pointless trips to the street every 30 minutes or so to spot him if he should come by. I didn’t know what else to do. Eventually, Maureen told me to get some sleep and that she would be up later, but I awoke alone the next morning. Maureen had sat with her all night, the realization dawning more clearly by the hour that something was wrong. Very wrong.

By morning the tour guides were on the phone to headquarters in the U.K., police were in the lobby and the search was on. The hotel management gave Sonia a private sitting room off the lobby and she asked Maureen if she would sit with her. And sit she did, holding Sonia’s hand much of the time. The rest of the group went on a final hike and, upon returning and learning that Murray was still missing, did what people so commonly do when a near certain tragedy is about to befall someone. They distanced themselves from Sonia and the room in which she and Maureen sat. They weren’t comfortable, and to be honest I couldn’t blame them. It can be hard to know the right thing to say, if indeed there even is a right thing to be said.

Maureen sat with Sonia until on Friday we had to leave for Rome and a flight home; we had a big family wedding on Saturday. She made sure Sonia finally made the inevitable phone calls to Canada that made it official. Murray was missing and they needed to come to Italy. His brother arrived the next day.

It wasn’t until a few weeks later that Maureen found an online newspaper article written in Italian, but it contained the words Toronto, Murray and the Italian word “morte”. We learned from a letter from Sonia a few months afterward what had transpired.  His body had been located after an extensive search by over 500 local police in a remote valley after a child told his story of the flying cowboy. He had changed his mind about where to hike and they thought he might have climbed above the cloud line where the rock is wet and lost his footing, falling more than 200 meters to his fate.

———————–

A few times in our lives we have learned that close friends have suffered the sudden loss of an adult son or daughter. There may be no greater shock and sadness for a parent to absorb. Like in the Amalfi Coast, Maureen has known exactly where to be and what to do. She insisted we go right now to their homes to be with them. There was no argument to be had, her resolve was that strong and that clear.  Every instinct in my body told me not to do this. We’re intruding. We’re not their closest friends. Their family will resent us.  It’s somehow not the right thing to do.

And she was right each time. It was exactly the best thing to do. Our friends were bleeding and we needed to be there not to stop the bleeding, but to bleed with them. Their bleeding would slow, and eventually stop, but that is the function of time passing. And even time can’t remove the scar that would form and always be there. But when the tragedy first strikes and your friends are at their most vulnerable, the shocked and brokenhearted need their friends closer, not further way.

We honor first responders, the police officers, firefighters, paramedics, nurses, and soldiers who run toward danger while the rest of us run the other way or at least move aside. But there are other, less recognized first responders like Maureen. I think of her and those precious few who share this remarkable quality as first responders to the heart.

I have a hundred reasons for loving my wife, and maybe another hundred more for admiring her, but this is where her light shines most brightly. I don’t have the instinct and I surely don’t have the skill set to offer much comfort at those times, but I am lucky enough to be married to someone who does.

A Lonely Hero says Goodbye

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

“Old soldiers never die, they just fade way”-

-Gen. Douglas MacArthur addressing a joint session of Congress upon his retirement.

Fort McCoy sits in southwestern Wisconsin, roughly forty miles east of La Crosse and the Mississippi River, and nestled between the towns of Tomah and Sparta. Today, and for the last twenty or so years it has been the jumping off point for thousands of young soldiers on their way to Iraq or Afghanistan. Units would receive “acclimation” training prior to being inserted into the Mideast warzones.  When it was time to go, the presence of nearby Volk Field made it ideal for quickly deploying whole units without a big city airport scene, crying spouses, screaming children, and the press that would go with it.

It wasn’t always this way. For many years it was only Camp McCoy and the site of Annual Training, the two-week active duty obligation for National Guard units from around the Midwest.  Many a vacationer can recall, and none too fondly, getting caught behind endless military convoys on their way to or from McCoy. “Summer Camp” as it was called by some, could be two weeks of fairly tiring training to keep a military unit in reasonable shape, or it could be a two week beer blast, for the less motivated or well-led units. My unit, the 2nd Battalion of 129th Infantry, was squarely in the former category, thanks in no small measure to the dedication and “hands on” leadership of our commander, Lt. Col. Bernie Taczyk. He was a Korean War combat vet and he brought passion to his posting.  Officers who didn’t like to work or provide strong leadership tended to find other places to billet than under Bernie.

In July, 1979 I found myself in a remote corner  of this post, with about 60 soldiers and non-coms (read sergeants) reporting to  me. We had a virtual wall of wooden boxes containing some 600 high explosive 81 mm mortar rounds and about 300 illumination rounds to be disposed of in a short period of time. You disposed of them by dropping them, one at a time, down the barrels of 81mm mortar gun tubes and firing them at targets about 3,000 meters downrange. The targets were mostly old tank hulls, and, on occasion, the unlucky lost cow. (Note: No animals were harmed in the writing of this story).

That quantity of rounds might not sound too impressive, but when you factor in that each fire mission consumes only about 12 rounds and takes about an hour (much less time in real-world firing, but we were training gun crews here, and it took time), well, you can do the math. The illumination rounds were for lighting up targets at night, lest we get too rested in our labors.

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How did I get there? Glad you asked. In 1971 I was entering my last semester at DePaul University, was engaged to the love of my life, had been accepted for student teaching, and was poised to begin adult life. We couldn’t wait for school to end and our lives to really begin. There was, however, the little matter of the military draft and the specter of Vietnam, which hung over most young mens’ heads like a cloud. By 1971, it was becoming apparent that we were losing, or at least not willing to win anymore. Very few people wanted to go to Vietnam in 1971.

Up until then, the deal was simple: go to college and get a student deferment, which meant you couldn’t be drafted until after you graduated and, hey, it might be over by then.  Don’t go to college and you would likely be drafted within a year of high school. But that year, in an effort to level the playing field, the government ended the student deferment and instituted a lottery. I drew number 161, not immediate draft bait, but not safe either. I decided I would enlist in the Air Force, probably having heard too many of my mother’s stories of her first husband and my brother’s father, Lt. Gilbert J. Finn. He was a B-29 bombardier killed over Japan near the war’s end.

After a series of written tests, eye tests, physical tests, and tests of my patience, I was informed that I would be accepted into the navigator program for B-52 bombers. I was told, and subsequently told Maureen, that our first four years of marriage were going to be in the military. She didn’t return my engagement ring, so that became the plan. When it came time to sign on the dotted line, the contract read six years, not four. I informed the officer of the obvious error, and he informed me that the government was going to invest a lot of money in my training so that I could guide a big airplane full of bombs to the right place and drop them on the enemy, and that I should sign the contract. The meeting did not end well.

So, I found an Army Reserve unit on the Southeast side, did my basic and advanced training in scenic Fort Polk, Louisiana, and returned home. About a year later, my commander asked me if I wanted to become an officer, as a few slots had opened up in the Illinois Guard OCS program. I guess I was flattered to be asked, but that soon wore off as I discovered what a rigorous program it was. We started with about 90 candidates and graduated less than 50. I was one.

The OCS Program, as rigorous as it was, was also the most exciting military experience I had encountered. Helicopters, radios, things that went boom, C-rations and all that. And I was young. After a year back in the reserve unit, I applied for a transfer to the Guard, and was assigned to “ A” company of the 129th, in Elgin, Illinois. The Major who assigned me told me I was to be a mortar platoon leader. I told him I had seen a mortar, but had no  experience with the weapon. He looked at me as one might look upon an addled child and  he suggested I get up to speed.

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It was a hot, humid summer day, and my crews were hard at it, sending fire mission after fire mission volleying out into the impact zone. Far behind us, larger guns were firing their ordnance into the same zone, and you could hear the big shells whooshing overhead. It took a little getting used to.

It was about noon and getting hotter still. I told my platoon sergeant to pass the word on the sound powered phones to stand down and secure the guns, find some shade and get some lunch. The troops didn’t need to be told twice. A few minutes later the sound of a jeep engine could be heard coming our way. “”Visitor,” I thought, “maybe brass”.  Within a short time the jeep rounded a turn and we could see it was a solitary soldier at the wheel, fatigues, soft cap, and no helmet or field gear or weapon. I knew it couldn’t be anyone important, so I returned to some form I had been filling out.

The jeep pulled up a few yards from me and the driver got out. He has an old man, short, very spare in build, wire glasses, and he smiled as he saw me. He wore the two stars of a Major General on his collar.

Now there is one immutable law of the military…..generals do not travel without a small circus in their wake. In that circus will be vehicles, aides, probably an attractive female solider as a personal assistant.  And a few “strap hangers”, probably your own staff officers tagging along to mitigate what you, as an idiot lieutenant, might say or do to embarrass the unit.

His nametag read “Mabry” and he extended his hand, but pulled it back momentarily to return my salute that I launched as, half in shock, I took in his rank. My platoon sergeant, having learned long ago that nothing good happens around generals, began to slink around the side of the field tent we were using to run operations. “You in charge, Lieutenant”? the General asked in a  southern drawl. I told him I was, and asked him if there was anything I could help him with. I wondered if he was lost.

“Tell me what you’re doing here today”, he said, but not in the sort of “cross examination” fashion to which I had become accustomed from previous visits by various ranking officers. I explained that this was a three-day live fire exercise.

He told me that he had been a solider since the beginning of World War II, had served a lot of years, and that he planned to retire from the service in a few weeks. He wanted to spend his last few days around soldiers, and he asked me if I would mind if he talked to my soldiers by himself. Inasmuch as young lieutenants don’t disappoint Major Generals, I pointed out the line of gun crews, now enduring their C-rations and sweltering in the heat. He walked toward the first crew who, predictably, jumped to their feet as they saw the stars. He waved them off and told them to sit back down, and joined them. I could see he was asking questions and appeared to be actually listening. Rare quality in a General.  After a few such visits to the crews, he accepted a C-ration can from one of the men, took out his G.I. issue P38 can opener and consumed  some warm Del Monte peaches. You could see the men becoming impressed with his easy style. Ever more amazing.

He came back to his jeep, shook my hand, and complimented me on doing a good job and for having such fine troops under my command.  He got in, smiled a sort of sad smile, put the jeep in gear and drove off into the dust.  I wished him well and cranked off my best OCS salute.

About forty minute later the circus did appear, this time in the form of three jeeps carrying my battalion commander and most of the senior staff officers. They pulled up, jumped out and began grilling me about the General’s visit. It would seem that the good General had side-stepped convention and not made them aware of his presence. Had he done so, it probably would not have made it possible to do these sorts of informal visits.

Mostly, they wanted to know if I had said or done anything wrong, non-military, or just plain dumb. I told them it was mostly a non-event, although I was still impressed that he travelled alone. They informed me that he was not just anyone, but a recipient of the Medal of Honor. He never mentioned that to me or anyone else, as I would later learn, during our visit.

Now, in civilian life, he would be a hero maybe on the Memorial Day or the Fourth of July parade, but in the army, living Medal of Honor winners are big medicine. You get to be a certified hero 24/7. More incredible, they told me that he won it as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Hurtgen Forest during World War II. High ranking officers are mostly not in the thick of any kind of fight, so this guy must have been something very rare indeed. Al Gore had not invented the Internet in 1979, so I had to wait until I got home to look him up. You can find him easily today on Wikipedia. His full name was George Lafayette Mabry, Jr, and he hailed from Sumter, South Carolina. Read his citation for The Medal and you’ll be impressed. Among other feats cited, he cleared an enemy minefield by walking through it and marking the mines. No, thank you. This was not someone you would want to piss off.

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I think back on that unusual day from time to time, on what McCoy was then, and what it is now. I think about the melancholy General Mabry, closing out his long career, and just wishing to be with young soldiers once again in his twilight. And I think of all the young men and now women, the children of 9/11 who passed through McCoy on their way to their wars, and on their way to dangers most of us can’t even imagine. For guys like me, McCoy was a two week exercise that kept it real, but then you went back home. For the General, it was a long goodbye after so many years of service. For those kids on their way to the Mideast, it was the first step on a journey into the unknown.

Here’s to all those who went willingly or unwillingly to their war, a war either just or unjust, but they went.  Patriots, all. And a few heroes thrown in as well.

Major General George L. Mabry