The fall of 1952, the first semester of my sophomore year at Dartmouth, had been a train wreck. Nothing had gone well: Because of thigh injury I couldn’t play soccer after I made the varsity first team, I had pledged the wrong fraternity, I was living alone in tin hut in Wigwam, I had received a draft notice to show up in January 1953, and I knew my father was dying.
I headed home to Washington at the end of the fall semester sad, confused, beaten and probably depressed. That Christmas vacation I partied with a vengeance. One deb party after another, and all were a blur–too much champagne and beer erased my memory.
Also, in an ongoing compulsion to get laid, I had begun seeing a cute little Filipina girl named Lynn who I had met when Jim Rill and I had worked at the Republican National Committee the previous summer. After Eisenhower won the election, Lyn was rewarded with a job as a secretary in the White House. She had an apartment in a large building overlooking the Potomac River in Alexandria. I’d go there every evening there wasn’t a deb party. We’d hang out and have wonderful sex.
Induction
I reported to the Army in mid-January, I believe to Fort Meade in Maryland. One of the first things that happened after checking in is that you get a physical exam. When asked to strip my penis (standard procedure), to my surprise a small drop of thick yellowish liquid came out. After I got dressed, I was interviewed by a doctor who said I had gonorrhea and was asked who I had had sex with. Naturally, I was reluctant to name Lynn, but the doctor said that it was important to know so that they could trace the source and then help cure her. I gave them Lynn’s name, address and phone number.
Several days later I got a call from Lynn. She was furious and asked if I had given her name to anyone. I lied and said, “Absolutely not.” Of course, she didn’t believe me and that was the last contact I had with Lynn. Once again, I had not been honest and had not taken responsibility for my actions. It had happened once before when I had gotten my first girlfriend pregnant (but that’s another st0ry). It took me probably another 60 years to develop the honesty and self-awareness to take responsibility and be accountable for my behavior.
Later in my life, just after I turned 40, I had the same droplet of thick, yellowish liquid coming from my penis. I went to a doctor and he did a test. When the test came back, the doctor said it was a urinary tract infection that was brought on by having too much sex. So I figured that the incident in the Army when I had identified Lynn had been almost certainly a urinary tract infection that had been misdiagnosed. My only thought at the time was “poor Lynn.” I still wasn’t able to take responsibility for lying to her.
Basic Training
From Ft. Meade I was sent to Fort Knox, KY, for basic infantry training. I was put in a company that consisted of a mix of Puerto Ricans from New York City, hillbillies from Appalachia in West Virginia, guys from rural Pennsylvania, and several others from Brooklyn. In a company of 150, I was one of two men who had attended college.
I remember little of the day-to-day routine, but I do remember learning how to make a bed with hospital corners and a tight top blanket. It had to be so tight that the corporal in charge of the barracks could bounce a quarter on it. I also remember being named a squad leader, which meant that when we would march to classes, it was my duty to double-time (run) to an intersection and stand at rest, arms akimbo, to stop traffic while the company passed. Because the squads were organized alphabetically, my squad had last names ending in W, X, Y, and Z and was the last squad in the procession. Therefore, when we marched to classes in the morning after breakfast, the entire company would pass on by, and my squad was at the tail end of the procession. The third or fourth time I was the last person in the procession, I realized that all the officers and non-commissioned officers (sergeants and corporals) were at the front of the line, so instead of joining the others and marching to class, I would peel off and go the library and read Faulkner and Hemingway (I thought I wanted to be a writer. I didn’t necessarily want to write, but I wanted to be and act like a romanticized concept of a writer). Of course, I was eventually caught and stripped of my squad leader title.
This rule-breaking was another example of my irresponsibility, rebellion, and belief that rules were made to be broken or only applied to others, not me. I had been so spoiled by mother, Ese, Aunt Margaret, and Sal that I thought I could do no wrong. I had no moral compass. My only thought was about what pleased me, what was rebellious, not what was right. I was rebelling against my father’s tight authority like most teenage boys do. At 20, my frontal cortex that controlled judgment was certainly not fully formed yet, and wouldn’t be until I was in my 60s.
In 1953 America was involved in the Korean War, which is why the draft was instituted and why I was in the Army. I thought it was my patriotic duty to fight the country’s war as my father had done in World War I and II. He had told me stories of heroism in WW I, and I was very proud of him. Therefore, about halfway through basic training, I asked for permission to see the captain in charge of the company. When I saw him, I saluted and when he asked what I wanted, I said I wanted to volunteer to go to Korea. I think he was shocked and asked, “Why?” I told him that my father had served in both world wars and that I thought it was my patriotic duty to fight for my country. He said he’d make note of my request.
The final part of the 16 weeks of basic infantry training was to participate in mock battle maneuvers and to bivouac for a week in the field. You had to dig and sleep in foxholes. After a couple of days, I came down with a horrible case of poison ivy. I remember going back to the barracks and spending an agonizing night alone before being admitted to the base hospital. In the hospital, I was treated for poison ivy and given cold oatmeal baths. I remember talking to a guy in the bed next to me. I learned that his name was Lou Glickfield, that he lived in Washington, D.C., that he had gone to the University of Maryland, and that he had tried out for the football team, which was at that time ranked in the top five in America.
I don’t remember why Lou was in the hospital, but my sense is that he was faking it to get out of going on maneuvers. Glickfield was a tough guy–smart, charismatic, and rebellious. He and I hit it off very well because we had so much in common and both hated the regimentation of the Army. Because in 1953 basic training lasted 16 weeks, we had both been inducted in January (my date was January 15) and we were in the last two or three weeks of training. It was the first weekend in May–the Saturday of the Kentucky Derby. Glickfield knew that there was minimal hospital staffing on the weekends, so he convinced me that we could go AWOL for the Saturday of the Derby and hit the big Derby-day parties. So that’s what we did.
I remember going to the Brown Hotel in Louisville and crashing several parties in our uniforms. We drank heavily, so I don’t remember any details. However, we managed to get back to the hospital for Sunday morning check-in, so we never got caught going AWOL.
When I moved to Washington in 1964 to be sales manager at WTOP-AM, I reconnected with two of my best friends from St. Albans, Nick Kotz and Bob Alvord. We would play handball at the Jewish Community Center at lunch hour a couple of times a week. In one of our handball outings, I ran into Lou Glickfield. We had a warm reunion and I set up a date to play handball with him. I was not a very good handball player and Lou was a killer (I think he was the club champion or close to it). He destroyed me. When I told Nick I had played Lou, Nick asked, “Do you know who Lou Glickfield is?”
I said, “An Army friend.”Nick said, “Maybe, but he’s a convicted felon (https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1995-07-17-1995198126-story.html). He spent 18 months in jail for attempted bribery of Maryland football players. People say he has mob ties.” I didn’t play handball with Lou again; not because he was a convicted felon, but because he was too good a handball player.
I vaguely remember that in Basic Training for some reason, even though I had missed several days of maneuvers, I had completed enough time on maneuvers so that I was able to be promoted to private first class (PFC) and graduate from basic training with my company.
After graduation, the whole company stood at ease in formation as our names were read off alphabetically followed by our assignment: “Ramos–Korea,” “Southard–Korea,” e.g. By the time they got to Warner, everyone had been assigned to Korea. When they called out “Warner,” the assignment was “Austria.” The next several names were assigned to Korea. The last name to be called was “Zucker” and he was also assigned to Austria. Only two out of 150 in the company had not been sent to Korea. Why were Warner and Zucker assigned to Austria?
I had been only one of two in the company who had attended college–the other one was Zucker. Before he was drafted he was in the mailroom at William Morris agency. He was short, overweight, and out of shape, but with several of us looking out for him, carrying his backpack for him on some long marches, he had managed to get through basic training. Zucker was smart and very funny.
When I considered why I was not sent to Korea, my first thought was that it was because I had volunteered. I didn’t consider the fact that when I took the Army IQ test when I was first inducted (and after the medical exam), I had done quite well–a score of 135 as I recall. The next day after I took the test I was called into a room to talk to an officer. The officer said that I had done well on the test and that I qualified to go to Officer’s Candidate School. He said that I’d have to sign up for three years, but that it was a great opportunity. I declined. Next, he said, “You also qualify to go to the Language School in Monterey (spy school).”
“How many years do I have to sign up for?” I asked.
“Three.”
“No thanks.”
Looking back on it, I often wonder how my life would have been different if I had chosen to go to the Language School at Monterey and perhaps have wound up in the CIA. Of course, you never know, but as I’m writing this at age 87 ½, I realize that one of my greatest weaknesses is my inability to follow orders or fit into a regimented routine. I’m spoiled. I hate to be told what to do. I’m relatively undisciplined unless I make a decision without any pushing, then I can be fairly disciplined.
Austria
I was sent to Fort Dix, NJ to wait a couple of weeks before being deployed to Austria. I enjoyed hanging around the pool room in Fort Dix with a couple of pals I made: John Siegel and Johnny Speccia. Both were from Brooklyn. Spiegel was an honest-to-goodness pool shark. He was a superb player, and after he had taken me to the cleaners, we became friendly and I watched him take money from sucker after sucker. He’d play at a table and miss a couple of fairly easy shots, then he’d say to an opponent who he had allowed to beat him, “Wanna play for a few bucks?” The answer of the sucker would always be a greedy,”Sure?”
“How much?” Spiegel would say hesitantly. If it wasn’t enough, Spiegel would up the bet.
Then the two players would each hit a ball and whoever came closest to the near rail would break. Spiegel would invariably win, break, and almost always run the table before his opponent got a shot off. Even if he didn’t run the table, he always won.
The poker and crap games were run by a swarthy, scratchy-voiced guy who everyone called Rat. He was about 6′ tall, thin, with a long, narrow face and a thin, sharp Armenian nose. Gambling was obviously his profession, and all of us steered clear of him because there was an unmistakable air of menace about Rat.
In addition to Spiegel and Speccia, the other pal I made at Ft. Dix was Johnny Murphy. We called him “Murph.” Murph was about 5′ 6″ or 5′ 7.” He was stocky and had a pink Irish complexion, periwinkle-blue eyes, and a dazzling smile. One Saturday night Murph and I got a pass and went into Greenwich Village to go bar hopping. After we had gone to several bars and had more than several beers, Murph said, “Let’s get in a fight. Let’s go beat up a couple of queers.”
I remember being nonplussed. I was a sheltered St. Albans, Ivy League dropout who’d never gotten in a fight in my life. I was so full of beer at that point, that I don’t remember the details clearly, but I have a hazy memory of following Murph into a gay bar, him picking at least one fight, and getting tossed out of the bar. I also vaguely remember wildly running down streets and turning over dozens of garbage cans. This was not St. Albans.
I remember the boat trip across the Atlantic. We landed at Leghorn, Italy (Livorno). I was then sent by train to Salzburg, Austria, where I was assigned to an artillery battalion in the personnel office as a clerk, probably because I could type and write a complete sentence.
I remember thinking that this was probably why I was not sent to Korea as cannon fodder. The Army needed clerks and people to do the vast amount of paperwork to keep an Army going. Someone had to dig foxholes and fight, someone had to drive supply trucks, someone had to cook, and someone had to type up and file personnel reports.
While I was in the personnel office of the artillery battalion, one morning the captain in charge of personnel, my boss, asked me if I could draw. I replied, “Yes, sort of” (Dean Stambaugh at St. Albans had seen to that).
“Go to the weapons/ammunition room of Company C and draw a schematic of what you see? Early this morning, a soldier broke into the room, picked up a carbine and shot himself. We need you to draw a map of barracks and of the weapons/ammunition room.”
I said, “Yes, sir,” and picked up a steno pad, a couple of pencils and headed for Company C. The weapons/ammunition room was sealed off and I was the first person to enter the room after the medics had left with the body of the dead soldier who had committed suicide.
I have forgotten the soldier’s name, but apparently what had happened is that he had received a Dear-John letter from his girlfriend back in the States breaking up with him. The next morning he had broken into the weapons/ammunition room, picked up a carbine, and blown his brains out. There was blood and bits of skull and brains mixed in with pools of blood scattered on the floor.
Drawing a map of the weapons/ammunition room was my only break in an excruciatingly boring routine in the personnel office. After a couple of months of boredom, I made an appointment to see Major Graf Beopel (I’m pretty sure that was his name). Major Beopel was the head of the Austria Occupation Force’s two main channels of communication: The Salzburg Sentinel newspaper and the Armed Services Radio station. I talked Major Beopel into transferring me to the newspaper. For the life of me, I have no idea writing this 66 years after my meeting with Beopel how I was able to con him into putting me on the newspaper. I must have mentioned that at St. Albans I had been one of main writers of The Albanian yearbook, had written press releases for the Republican National Committee in 1952, and how at Dartmouth I had written a story (along with co-author Lou Miano) for and was on the staff of Dartmouth’s humor magazine, The Jack-O-Lantern.
But for whatever reason, I was able to persuade him and was transferred to the Salzburg Sentinel, a weekly newspaper. Reflecting back on it 66 years later, this incident was as persuasive as I have ever been and foreshadowed my eventual career in sales.
The Salzburg Sentinel
When I got to the Sentinel, the publisher was an Army Captain, and, as I remember, the editor was an enlisted man whose family owned the St. Angelo, TX, Standard-Times. I don’t remember his name, but he was a deadly serious, 20+ Corporal with bright red hair who banged out stories on a typewriter faster than anyone I had ever seen. There were three other writers, and I was the fourth. One of reporter’s last name was Cohen, and he had been with the United Press before he was drafted. So, the Sentinel’s staff comprised real pros…and me. I replaced a sports reporter who had recently been sent back to the States for discharge, so I became the Sentinel’s sports reporter.
In the occupation armies in Austria and Germany in 1953, eight years after WW II ended, the troops had little to do besides go on maneuvers once a year–the maneuvers were all show and no blow–so they occupied their time with sports, and the king of sports at that time was football. The general in charge of the Austrian Occupational Forces was a huge football fan. When troops came to Austria to get their assignments, the general made sure that anyone who had played college football was temporarily assigned to Headquarters and asked to try out for the football team. If someone made the team, he was assigned permanently to Headquarters Company and treated like royalty. The football players’ mess was a legend–steak every evening for dinner and all they could eat.
The Austrian Headquarters team played once a week in a league of other U.S. Forces teams in Austria, and I covered every game. The quarterback had been drafted by the Pittsburgh Steelers, the fullback was a giant who had massive legs, was hard as a rock, and almost impossible to bring down. Years later when I saw Jerome Bettis of the Steelers play, he reminded me of the Austrian team fullback. One halfback had been a first-string halfback on a nationally ranked University of Tennessee team.
One day, when I was covering a team practice, the coach asked me if I had ever played football. I told him that I had played guard on offense and linebacker on defense on a high school team, but that we had played a single-wing, not T-formation as the Headquarters team did.
He said, “That doesn’t matter. I need bodies.”
So I made the team. I was not in great shape, but my legs had healed from the thigh injuries I sustained playing on the Dartmouth soccer team. The first practice I remember participating in, I played linebacker and the Bettis-like fullback ran over me like I was a life-sized cardboard cutout. The coach moved me to defensive halfback. I started the next game at that position and things went OK for the first three quarters, but in the fourth quarter I let a receiver get behind me and into the end zone. I was watching the receiver, not the quarterback, and when I saw the receiver looking up, I waved my arms wildly to stop him from catching the ball, which was a foul. But, nevertheless, the receiver caught the ball for a touchdown and we lost the game. My fault.
The other thing that happened during the football season was that the officer in charge of the Sentinel was reassigned and we got a new publisher. The old publisher was a good guy and left us pretty much alone to get the paper out. The new officer was a prick and was pissed because I was on the football team and only showed up for a half-day of work. He reassigned me. I became the new Circulation Director, which meant that I had to take the page proofs to a local printer, watch them set the type, print the paper, and then watch a guy operate a huge paper cutting machine that had an enormous heavy steel blade that when it banged down cut through about a six-inch-high stack of newspapers, which I thought was amazing. But what amazed and scared me even more was the man who operated the cutting machine with the huge, sharp blade. He’d push a stack of papers under the blade and remove his fingers milliseconds before the blade came crashing down, then take a swig of a liter bottle of beer. By the middle of the day and there was a row of four of five empty beer bottles on a ledge behind the cutting machine. I couldn’t watch because I didn’t know how to say “leftie” in German.
As Circulation Director, on Friday morning I had to get up around 4:00 am, go to the printer, pick up about a dozen or more stacks of newspapers, throw them in the back of a jeep, and deliver the papers to Army locations in the Salzburg area. I’m not a lark (an early riser), but an owl (late night person), so I hated getting up early and delivering newspapers in the late fall. Therefore, I went to see Major Beople again. Somehow, I talked him into transferring me to the radio station, which is probably the second-best sale I ever made (the best sale I ever made was getting Julia to marry me).
Armed Forces Radio
Many readers of my musings are familiar with the 1987 Robin Williams movie, “Good Morning Vietnam,” about Armed Forces Radio personality Adrian Cronauer. Armed Forces Radio 34 years earlier was nowhere near as much fun or loose as it was in 1987, but it was a wondrous Army gig for me and was my introduction to radio. The station was located in a Baroque, three-story building that formerly housed the servants of the Schloss Klessheim palace four miles west of downtown Salzburg. The building housed the studios of the radio station and all of the engineers, news reporters, and announcers. No officers were in the building and a Master Sergeant was in charge.
The building was next to a wall that surrounded the Schloss Klessheim. There was a huge hole in the wall next to our building, which we could squeeze through and go into a gasthaus that served beer in dark-green, liter bottles and the best wiener schnitzel I ever remember eating.
I was assigned to several shifts, on most of which I merely introduced radio dramas such as the Lux Radio Theatre which was on 78 RPM records that we cued up on a turntable, did an intro for, and then spun the episode. I also took over a regularly scheduled Country Music show called “The Chuck Wagon” during which I played records chosen for me by the station’s music director because I knew absolutely nothing about Country Music and didn’t like it much. I thought it was hillbilly music. I introduced songs by Hank Williams, Jim Reeves, and Skeeter Davis. I’d say something silly like, “Here’s Hank Williams singin’ in the gear of G” in a fake Southern accent.
Nevertheless, the young women in the Salzburg area paid no attention to the minor details of accents. What they wanted was to meet an American soldier–any American soldier–who would marry them and take them to the Promised Land. All of the announcers would receive a four-inch stack of postcards and letters every day with photos of the girls who desperately wanted to meet us. Desperation was the operable word. Looking back on it now, 66 years later, I feel embarrassed that we took advantage of those hapless, vulnerable girls, but at the time access to multiple young women was just a perk of the job, and the subtleties of empathy, sympathy, or understanding of the superego were bulldozed by the id of 21-year-old, testosterone-fueled lust.
Most of the women I met could barely speak English, and, even worse, had virtually no understanding of American context, culture, and, especially, humor. All my life up to that time I had been a smartass who made fun indiscriminately of everything. I was the caustic class clown at St. Albans who called the boys who studied hard and got good grades “robots” on a purely defensive basis because I couldn’t get good grades. Therefore, what I found most frustrating about most of the Austrian women I met was that they didn’t laugh at or with me. Also, it was difficult to carry on even the most basic, rudimentary conversation with them.
However, I did meet one woman who spoke excellent English, had a good sense of humor, and was well educated. Her name was Fifi von Enfeld. According to Google, “Most, but not all, surnames of the German nobility were preceded by or contained the preposition von (meaning “of”) or zu (meaning “at”) as a nobiliary particle.” Fifi’s family was quite well to do before WW II, but her father had been killed in the war, and the family had fallen on hard times. She was about 5-feet tall, with short-cropped dark hair. She was not beautiful–rather plain–but she was a wonderful conversationalist, fun to be with, and smart. She tutored me in German, and when traveled on the weekends, she would give me a detailed geopolitical history of the many, beautiful places we went. I remember getting a letter from Fifi when I returned to the U.S.A. on emergency leave that she had immigrated to Canada. I was very happy for her. She’d do well.
Paris
In the fall of 1953, while I was at the radio station, I had been in contact via letters with my Mom and Dad and a few pals from St. Albans, especially Tyler Abell. In a letter from Tyler, he wrote that he was going to Paris for Christmas to see his father, George Abell, who lived there with his wife Jane Hamilton Fish and wrote for Time Magazine in its Paris office. What a thrill. Of course I said, “yes.” I got a furlough, packed what civilian clothes I had, and took a train from Salzburg to Paris for the most incredible experience of my young life.
George and Jane welcomed me into their lovely home. They lived in an elegant house in Neuilly-sur-Seine north of Paris. Tyler’s father, George, was one of the most elegant men I had ever met. His family owned the Baltimore Sun where George had started his career and then moved on to write several columns for the Washington Times-Herald in competition with Tyler’s stepfather, Drew Pearson, who in the 1950s was one of Washington’s and America’s most powerful columnist and liberal thought leaders.
Jane Hamilton Fish was a wealthy, scratchy-voiced, elegant, thrice-married alcoholic with bright platinum-blond dyed hair. Nevertheless, she was welcoming and charming to be around before she’d had her fourth or fifth gin or vodka of the day.
George wanted Tyler and me to have the best time that Paris had to offer two 21-year-olds, so he planned every day for us with the help of Art Buchwald, who at that time wrote a column on restaurants and nightclubs, Paris After Dark, for the Paris Herald Tribune. We went to the Folies Bergere, to a left-bank nightclub that featured two folk singers, and a trip to the Paris flea market with the famous humorist S.J. Perelman, who wrote several very funny books, several of which I had read, including Westward Ha!.
George and Art also set us up with lunch with two lovely, upper-class, proper young ladies our same age: Daphne Mayo from New York, and Atalanta Clifford from London and the daughter of Baron Hugh Clifford. We had reservations at a small, upscale cafe for lunch. We met Daphne and Atalanta there, and when we sat down, I realized why George and Art sent us to that particular cafe. The table was set up with utensils, a white plate with a white napkin folded and placed on the plate, and just to the left of the forks, was a roll–a typical French cafe place setting. However, the roll was in the shape of testicles and a penis. Daphne and Atalanta put their napkins in their laps, and when the first course was served, they each reached for their forks and simultaneously saw the phallic rolls. A noticeable blush crept up on both of their creamy, lightly powdered faces, but they continued the conversation without missing a beat. Very classy, very disciplined. Very funny.
We exchanged addresses and phone numbers, and about two months later, I got a letter from Daphne informing me that she and Atalanta were going to be in Kitzbuhel, in the mountains near Salzburg, skiing. I got a weekend pass and met them there. It was the first time I had ever been skiing and was taught to ski by one of the red-hatted instructors. I was a terrible student, and on the third or fourth try down the gentle slope I fell and tore a ligament in my leg. I hobbled back to the Salzburg, went to the Army hospital, and had a cast put on my leg that reached from my toes to my crotch.
St. Moritz
George arranged for us to celebrate the New Year in the tony, postcard-perfect ski resort, St. Moritz, Switzerland. We arrived there in the snow and stayed at the high-end Grand Hotel Des Bains. At the Hotel I met Jean Stein, the daughter of Jules Stein, the CEO of MCA (Music Corporation of America), which at that time was the biggest, most powerful talent agency in Hollywood. Jean was adorable–about 5’2″ with a fabulous figure that made me throb. I don’t remember if it was George or Jean that got us invited to a New Year’s Eve party at the inn at the top of the mountain where the cable car terminated. But the party was fantastic–the best of my life up to that point. The band was fabulous, and we danced our asses off.
I not only danced with Jean, but somehow I found myself dancing with deposed Egyptian King Farouk’s mistress. Farouk’s full title was “His Majesty Farouk I, by the grace of God, King of Egypt and the Sudan, Sovereign of Nubia, of Kordufan and of Darfur.” He was overthrown in the 1952 military coup d’état and forced to abdicate. Farouk had a shaved bald head, a dark, swooping handlebar mustache, and was hugely corpulent–he must have weighed over 400 pounds.
When it was midnight, there were fireworks outside. Tyler and I opened a window so we could scoop up snow that was deep on the sill and make snowballs. When people ask me what Tyler and I did on New Year’s Eve 1953-54, I tell them, “We threw snowballs at King Farouk.”
March, 1954
A the beginning of March, after I got the cast off my leg, I was contacted by headquarters to notify me that my father was seriously ill and that I was being given an emergency leave. I was put on an Army overnight flight to Westover Air Force Base in Massachusetts, which is near Amherst. I had contacted Tyler and Ralph Pagter, who were both pals from St. Albans and were roommates at Amherst College. Ralph had a car, so he picked me up at Westover and took me to Springfield where I got a train to Washington, D.C.
When I had landed at Westover and before Ralph picked me up, I had called my mother to ask her how my dad was doing. She said, “He’s not doing well. He had a coronary thrombosis and is in a coma.” I told my mother to somehow get through to Dad and tell him to hang on, that I was on my way.
When I got home to our apartment, mother and I went immediately to the hospital, I think it was George Washington University hospital, but I’m not sure. When we arrived at the hospital, we were told that my father had passed away. My first reaction was to get angry at my mother for not telling him I was coming because I felt that if he was able to understand her that he would have held on and that I would have been able to say goodbye to him.
It took me many years to forgive my mother–which was a stupid, juvenile, and unkind reaction–because I was painfully regretful that I was not able to say goodbye to my father. I finally resolved the issue in 2013, when I was 81 and at Burning Man. I went to the Temple and wrote on a rafter, “Goodbye, Dad” and then had a cleansing cry in the arms of my pal Tom LaPorte.
I was not sent back to Austria because I had only nine months left in my stint in the service and was assigned to Fort Meade in Maryland for reassignment. My MOS (Military Occupation Specialty) was as a radio announcer, so the Army had to find an open slot in the U.S.A. for that MOS.
I stayed with my mother in Washington and helped her settle my father’s will. He was not a wealthy man, so he left mother a small amount to live on. Clark Equipment gave her a generous death settlement, so she was able to stay in our Cathedral Avenue apartment for another five years until she moved back to live with her beloved sister, Louise, in Ava in the house they were born in.
In 1952, my father had purchased the car of his dreams, a black Cadillac Fleetwood. As a boy, I remember him telling me that “all cars are an approximation of a Cadillac.” He used to have genial arguments with his best friend, Hermy Carson, about the comparative merits of Cadillacs versus Lincoln Continentals. Hermy drove a Lincoln. I remember driving with “Uncle” Hermy when we visited him in Danville, IL. Hermy was very successful–he owned a plumbing supply business–and lived alone in Danville with his Black butler, chauffeur, and handyman, Melvin. Melvin wore a black stocking cap and used to play G-Man with me, and, of course, always let me win. He did fabulous, dramatic deaths when I shot him with my toy G-Man pistol. I loved Melvin.
When my father died on March 6, 1954 (I remember the date because my daughter, Megan, was born ten years later on March 6), I inherited his cherished black Cadilac Fleetwood and drove it back and forth to Ft. Meade. At Ft. Meade, I had to check in and then just hang around, usually reading Faulkner, awaiting orders for reassignment. About once a week, I had to put on fatigues and pull KP duty. So, I’d peel potatoes all day in a grubby, greasy Army kitchen and at 5:00 o’clock wash my hands, put on my fatigue jacket, get permission to leave, and walk to the big black Cadillac Fleetwood, fire it up with a smug fuck-you-Army smirk, and drive home to DC.
Even though I loved the Cadilac, I knew I had to swap it for a more appropriate car for a 22-year-old. I went to Barry-Pate Chevrolet in Washington and traded the two-year-old Cadillac for a new brown Chevrolet station wagon.
While I was waiting to be reassigned, through contacts of my godfather, Bill Westlake, a dear friend of my mother and father from their Chicago days (1929-1935), I made some contacts at the Pentagon. “Uncle” Bill was a Colonel in the Air Force and was well connected. With his help, I scored an interview with a general who was looking for someone to write press releases. He seemed to like me and thought because I had written for the Salzburg Sentinal that I could do the job. The general contacted Personnel and made the case that he needed me and that my mother also needed me to be in Washington.
Logical? Reasonable? Yes. Is the U.S. Army logical or reasonable? Of course not. Writing press releases for a general in the Pentagon was not my MOS. In April, I got my orders to report to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, to fill a job as a radio announcer (my MOS).
Ft. Sill
I drove to Ft. Sill in my new brown Chevvy station wagon, stopping to see Aunt Louise in Ava, of course. When I got to Ft. Sill and showed my orders to Personnel, they said, “Oh, we filled that radio job last week. Let’s see…Oh, there’s a position open as an editor of the Army Aviation School newsletter. You’ll write articles for the newsletter and write press releases. We’ll assign you there.”
My father was very conservative. He hated Franklin Roosevelt, the New Deal, and, especially, big government. He used to say “the only thing the government can do well is grow grass and feed the Indians.” In the 21st Century, he’d be canceled by the political-correctness police on the left. Because I loved him, I’d say he was a libertarian. But he wasn’t too far wrong about the stupidity of by-the-book bureaucrats. When I’m asked about my experience in the Army, I usually say “it was good, useful. I learned what not to do.” My father
However, once I got over my rage at the stupidity and cruelty of not being able to stay in Washington with my grieving mother, I settled into a pretty good routine. Ft. Sill is the headquarters of the U.S. Army Field Artillery School and the Army Aviation School. The aviation school taught pilots of small single-motor Cessna aircraft to spot targets for the artillery. Also, in 1954, it was where they trained helicopter pilots. The main function of the Army Aviation Newsletter was to publish accident reports of the Aviation School plus some announcements of officer movements, reassignments, and graduating classes.
As the editor of the weekly newsletter, I would put into barely readable English jargon-filled accident reports, write a couple of coming-and-going press releases and stories. Very dull, watching-paint-dry stories that took, at most, half a day to complete. In order to break the monotony for me and the poor readers, I started to include a limerick every week. The few readers we had seemed to like the doggerel, so I kept it up–every week a new limerick.
As the editor of the newsletter, I worked in a large, open office that had several desks and the mimeograph machine on which I printed the newsletter. One of the desks was for the officer (a lieutenant) to whom I reported. I rarely saw him because he had nothing to do. One morning, a few weeks after I started, a new lieutenant came in and introduced himself. He said, “Hi, I’m Frank. I just got back from Korea and my tour of duty will be up in two months. They told meI was in charge of the newsletter, but not to worry, that you had it under control.”
As we talked I learned that Frank had graduated from the ROTC at Syracuse and was a DKE. I said I went to Dartmouth and was also a DKE. We laughed and gave each other the DKE handshake. Frank was a terrific guy–obviously a party boy. We really hit it off. He asked how much time it took to get out the newsletter. I told him that it was about a half of a day’s work Monday through Thursday to create the newsletter and a full day’s work on Friday to print it, bundle it, and distribute it. Frank said, “Great! I’ll help on Friday and Monday through Thursday we’ll go flying. It’s too fucking hot to stay in the office.”
And that was the routine the rest of the summer. We’d work in the morning, have quick lunch, and then he’s sign out either a Bell bubble-dome two-seat helicopter or a single-engine Cessna. If we were in the helicopter, we’d often heard buffalo–FT. Sill had one of the biggest herds in the country. If we were in the Cessna, we’d go to 10,000 feet, make wide circles, and listen to Cardinal baseball on the plane’s radio. It wasn’t hard work.
Oklahoma was a dry state in 1954, but that didn’t stop us from drinking. I lived in Headquarters Barrack with a group of wonderfully diverse, bright, and fun enlisted men. We had a very cool Master Sergeant as head of the barrack, and he lived in a house on the base. He taught us how to make beer. We bought a huge clay jar, put in malt, yeast, and hops, mixed it with water, boiled it, covered it up with a tight cloth, and let it brew in the Sergeant’s cool, dark basement.
In two weeks we had beer! We bottled it and partied. Somehow we met several cute, local Lawton girls who liked homemade beer. I remember having a day of sunbathing and partying at a lake near Lawton.
I believe that was the day that I had two or three too many beers and went to a carnival that evening. I staggered into a tattoo booth and chose a big black panther design that covered half of my left arm. Fortunately, it was too expensive so I had to choose a smaller design–a skull with a snake coming out of one eye and into the skull’s mouth. Really delicate.
When I was in Austria, I had contacted Dartmouth about registering for the fall semester of 1954. The Army would l discharge you up to three months early in order for you to register at the start of a college semester. That meant that the earliest I could get out was October 4. I heard from Dartmouth in May that I couldn’t matriculate for the fall semester that started the Tuesday after Labor Day as late as October 4, so, if I wanted to get out three months early, I had to find a college at which I could register as late as October 5.
Aunt Louise contacted a former boyfriend, Bernie Shryock, who was head of Southern Illinois University (SIU) Art Department, and he arranged for me to apply and get accepted. SIU is in Carbondale, about 25 miles from Ava, and was on a quarter semester system, which started the last week in September. Therefore, with Bernie’s influence, I was able to register a week late, which I did, and on October 5, 1954, I was discharged from the Army–the happiest day of my young life.
I drove to Ava the day I was discharged and the next day started my civilian life as a student at SIU.