From Past Projects
1952, aboard the Mauretania, somewhere between England and New York, a storm in the night:
I had difficulty even making the few steps from my bed to my son’s crib, which had slid across the cabin and was blocking the doorway. Mother had insisted I put netting over the crib, and I had to get the netting loose to pick him up. He was in his little red dressing gown, as well as his night sleeper. I held him tightly in my arms, and somehow we got out of the cabin. We started down the passage and came upon two male passengers. Beyond them I saw a sailor slip right across the hallway, and behind him lots of seawater. Sailors are expert at remaining upright when a ship is pitching, and this was the only time I ever saw a seaman actually fall.
I said to the two men, rather dramatically, “Do we take to the boats?”
The taller of them said, “I don’t believe so, Madam.” Then he steered me back to my cabin, I suppose because he saw the seawater rolling in, presumably from a broken window. We braced ourselves on the edge of the lower bunk bed. The noise was terrific—the clatter of all the crockery and glassware falling in the restaurant, crashing to the floor and breaking. Within the next thirty minutes, those stewards and stewardesses got themselves together in the kitchen and brought us tea and biscuits. No matter the circumstance, the British can always stop for tea.
When our friends picked us up at the dock they asked me, “Weren’t you seasick, with all that pitching?” I said, “No. I thought it was the end. I was far too scared to be seasick.”
Years later, on another trip in 1958, a young Navy officer asked, “Have you traveled before?”
I said, “Yes. I’ve been on the Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mary, and the Mauretania.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes, we had a very bad voyage coming back on the Mauretania in November of ’52.”
He stopped and looked at me. “You mean you were on that trip?”
“Yes.”
He said, “You were in a hurricane. In fact, you were within five degrees of capsizing.” Evidently God and the Cunard sailors preserved our lives.
From My Life on Both Sides of the Pond, 2012
1938, Vienna, the Nazi occupation:
In November, six months after the Anschluss, there came a night when Hitler's troops ruined our businesses, homes, and temples. It was Kristallnacht, The Night of Broken Glass.
Synagogues were destroyed, the windows of the Jewish stores were broken, and the walls and doors were painted with "J" or "Juda" or "Jew." A great many Jews were killed or arrested and taken away.
Papa was gone by then. He went on a trip to find a way to get us all out of Austria. His idea was to go to Hamburg and find a captain of a ship to take us up to England and drop us off there. For now we didn't know where he was or if he had succeeded in his mission, but he had been gone a long time.
The morning after Kristallnacht, the Gestapo came to our door to throw us out of our home. I was thirteen. They gave my mother and me ten minutes to leave, with whatever belongings we could grab. Thank God we were both home, or we could have been separated forever then and there. What precious things did we grab in those ten minutes?
Each other.
From One of the Lucky Ones: The Life of Heinz Gelles, 2012
Late 1930s, weekends in Cos Cob, Connecticut:
In the country, Isobel wore a flower behind her ear. She hosted house parties there, gathering friends from advertising, entertainment, and the arts, in whose circles she and my mother moved. On some of those occasions, Susan and I were left behind in New York. But the weekends when we shared the house in Connecticut with our mothers and their guests were exciting—sometimes even disturbing.
The house party routine started on Friday night and involved an indeterminate number of men and women, some married and some not. The cocktail hour began early, a dinner of exotic food came later in the evening, and the party continued until dawn. Susie and I found the party scene a bit disconcerting, knowing that our mothers were more or less lost to us during that time.
We were glad to be put to bed around six or so in a large linen cupboard. Its shelves were large enough to function like bunk beds. For us, it was as fun as sleeping in any of the enclosed places children love, like a tent or a fort. I slept on the higher shelf, and Susan slept below because she was younger. We spent hours pushing the doors of the cupboard open just enough to see what was going on without being discovered, although I doubt anyone was paying attention to the cupboard or its doors. The excitement of the party made it hard to fall asleep. When we awoke in the morning, we were met with a more or less bacchanalian scene. Some guests were on the floor and some on the couches, some clothed and some not, some alone and others entwined.
Susan and I took these mornings-after tableaux for granted. We would head off to the tiny kitchen, awash in dirty dishes and redolent with stale rye whiskey and old cigarettes, and forage for some breakfast. Often it consisted of leftovers from the adults’ dinner the night before. One of our favorites was key lime pie, which Isobel made with condensed milk in a recipe rich beyond imagining.
From Onward!, 2022
1952, New York City, first look at television:
I was at Kings Points when I first saw television. A classmate from Hawaii worked in the Academy radio station and had a little television set in his room. I didn't have much interest in it.
A little later, New York City stations started coming out and filming us marching around. Apparently our uniforms showed up well on black-and-white television. They shot the film back into the city and showed it on televisions in the window at Rockefeller Center, where NVC headquarters were. They wanted to show people what television was all about.
This is an excerpt from a letter I wrote home around that time, on February 10th, 1952: "I was just up to Walt's room to watch a TV program. His roommate is from Hawaii and I believe from a well-to-do family as he has both a car and a TV set. I am revising my opinion about TV—I won't condemn all the programs as I just saw an hour program with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis and I believe I laughed the solid hour."
In those days...most televisions consisted of a big huge wooden console with television in it. A lot of families ate while watching television, but not ours. When I was home visiting, we were too interested in food. We waited till after dinner, then watched a few shows like What's My Line? with Arlene Francis, Bennett Cerf, Fred Allen, and company; The Milton Berle Show; and To Tell the Truth with host Garry Moore and panelists Kitty Carlisle, Jayne Meadows, and Orson Bean.
It was my opinion at the time that television would make movies obsolete. Clearly, that hasn't been the case.
From Gear Up: A Good Flight, The Life of Bill P., 2010
1938, Missouri, a church fundraiser:
When I was about fourteen, our church hosted a regional conference for over three hundred youths from the area. At the last minute, the person in charge of the snack stand became ill, and my father asked me if I could take it over, with the understanding that I would be able to keep the profits. I was thrilled to have the opportunity and used my forty-dollar life savings to buy the soda and the snacks.
I paid seventy cents a case for pop, most of them from a bottling company that operated here in St. Charles at the time: root beer, cream soda, grape soda, and Coca-Cola from a different source. Then I sold the pop for ten cents a bottle, which amounted to $2.40 per case, so that was a good profit margin. For snacks, I bought all my favorite kinds of candy, which included Milky Way, Butterfinger, Snickers, Baby Ruth, and Juicy Fruit, Doublemint, and Beeman's gum. I also had potato chips.
I set up the stand on one of the screened-in porches, which was perfect—it was outside but gave me cover, and I could lock it up at night. I had paper cups and ice if people wanted them with their sodas, and I got coolers for the ice from the bottling company, at no charge.
I really tried to do it right. I posted my hours and kept the place clean. I couldn't allow bottles and trash to be scattered around, so while the kids were in session, I policed the area. I don't know how many hours a day I put in, but they were very long days. I made over a hundred dollars in five days, and this was 1938. My dad, with his PhD from the University of Chicago, who was conversant in five languages, was making two hundred and twenty-five dollars a month. That hundred dollars made an impression on me that I never forgot.
From A Privilege to Serve: The Life of R. H., 2002
1968, Andrews Air Force Base, coming home from a second tour in Vietnam:
. . . As we reached the gate, a mob of anti-war demonstrators surged up, screaming and throwing things at us, waving signs. The bus driver, a young guy from the Air Force, glared and drove right through them. You could read it in his eyes: “I’ve got a busload of wounded soldiers who fought for this country and if you mock them I’ll run you over.” We knew about the war protestors, but being confronted by them was sobering and strange. No parade, no brass band, just jeers and trash.
A couple decades earlier, soldiers returning from World War II had been greeted with a hero’s welcome; a few decades after Vietnam, guys coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan would also be honored for their sacrifice. That wasn’t the case for us. We were dumbfounded by the hostility that confronted us. More than that, we were angry and sad and disgusted. Some of the guys got quiet; others yelled back at the protestors.
Half a mile down the road we saw a McDonald’s and everybody on the bus went crazy. There’d been a place in An Khê you could go if you were on liberty, with a big sign out front that said “Hamburgers,” but they were made out of water buffalo and bore little resemblance to an American hamburger. Now here we were with a real McDonald’s restaurant right outside our bus windows.
We cheered and made the driver pull over, and it wasn’t until we were in the parking lot that it hit us: none of us had any American money. We had just landed. All we had were MPCs—military payment certificates used for paying soldiers in Vietnam. No cash.
The bus driver, undaunted, jumped out of his seat and walked into the McDonald’s. I don’t know if he bought the food or the restaurant donated, but the next thing we knew, he was passing out hamburgers and fries to everyone on the bus. Some of us had been split open from top to bottom and who knew what kind of diet we were supposed to be on, but we all ate our hamburgers and fries like starving men, grinning and smacking our lips. It was heaven. I can still taste that hamburger today, almost five decades later.
From Silver Wings and a Green Beret: A Vietnam Memoir, C. W. Scherer, 2017
Circa 1940, on a mountain in Myanmar:
Our village smelled liked oil. It also smelled like cooking—mostly the warm, spicy scent of stir fries—and the cheroot that the adults smoked. The area was not exactly beautiful. Because the land was so arid and full of oil, no flowers or green things grew there, save a few tamarind trees. The only animals were the dogs that ran wild on the street, the cows that pulled people’s carts, and the occasional pig or chicken that escaped from someone's backyard. There were no exciting attractions, there weren't street signs or paved roads, just a hundred quiet huts on a hillside. Some of these huts weren’t even permanent houses but simple structures only intended for a couple months of use. The village looked more like a campsite than a town. But it was our community.
At the bottom of the hill flowed the Pin Chaung River, a tributary of the Irrawaddy. During the rainy season, when the Pin Chaung swelled to a fast, gushing current carrying debris and sometimes drowned cows, we children were not allowed near the river. Then, around October, the Pin Chaung became a gentle, safe place to bathe and play. For eight months of the year, it was my Disney World, my Emerald City, and my own giant bathtub.
From Silver Coins, 2021
Circa 1930s and 40s, Kelso, Missouri:
. . . Being poor was a blessing in a different way. Living on the farm and working with Daddy kept us naturally on the straight and narrow. We didn’t have time or opportunity for anything else. The same held true for my wife, going to work as soon as she was old enough and having to save her nickel tips to buy a dress on layaway. Our parents gave us this life because it’s all they had to give. They didn’t sit around thinking, “Let’s give our kids this and not that.” They might have been thrilled to give us a car so we could drive to see a Gene Autry movie instead of walking, but as it was, we learned the lessons taught to us by walking the seven miles. What we had was humility and the ability to work hard; what we needed was money to pay our bills.
Times were tough during the Depression, but they’re tough now, too, because of the ease of modern life. You press a button and you can have anything you want. That it makes it easier to get into trouble, harder to think straight, and darn near impossible to find any peace. Mother Teresa said that America is a place of spiritual poverty: “We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness” and “God is the friend of silence.” It’s very hard to live in the modern world and not fall victim to it. Just knowing that will help you make sense of your own suffering. I hope each of you can find time in nature, look up at the sky and the trees, pet some calves, and feed your hunger for God.
From Don’t Get Kicked By the Same Mule Twice, A Memoir by Charles Louis Drury, 2019
1940s, a farm in central Iowa:
Some nights, however, we didn’t go upstairs and collapse. If the sky was clear, Bernie and I might carry a ladder, a blanket, and my harmonica out to the hayfield. Whatever hay wouldn’t fit in the hayloft was piled into a large stack that stood ten to fifteen high in the field between Uncle Elmer’s house and Warren’s house. Bernie and I leaned our ladder against that haystack and climbed to the top. We pulled the ladder up after us, put down the blanket, lay on our backs, and I’d play my harmonica while we looked at the stars. Bernie recalls, “One night when we climbed up the haystack, there was a full moon. We just lay there, soaking up the fantastic beauty of nature. Luckily, the guineas were quiet that night, instead of their usual screaming and hollering. Maybe they, like us, were enjoying the moon.”
In the countryside of the 1940s, there were no lights anywhere. No lights in the distance, no street lamps on or headlights for miles around, just the utter darkness of an Iowa night. If you’re lying on your back on top of a haystack on a totally dark evening staring at the sky, you get a wonderful look at the stars. There were shooting stars galore, one after another, especially in August during the Perseid meteor shower. I’d play my harmonica until we fell asleep, watching the stars that seemed to be close enough that we could reach out and touch them.
From Glad to Be of Service, 2023
1930s, rural Missouri, on Uncle Lee:
. . . Uncle Lee, my grandmother's brother, never had a house. He lived out of doors near Catawissa in a little lean-to, maybe in a cave sometimes; I think he had a tent once. He trapped and hunted, and sold pelts to buy salt and flour, things you can't make for yourself. He made his own clothes out of deerskin, and now and then his relatives hung a bundle for him in a tree near wherever they thought he was living at the time.
For transportation, he hopped freight trains, and once he got his leg cut off about mid calf jumping off a train. He dragged himself back to his camp more or less on his elbows, built himself a fire, and stuck his leg in the flames to cauterize the wound. The pain caused him to pass out. When he woke up, he saw that his leg wasn't done cauterizing, so he built up the fire again and stuck his stump in it again. That time it did cauterize, and the wound healed, so he saved his own life by doing that.
You have to judge people and events by their time and place, not by your time and place. Take a look at The Grapes of Wrath—you think you wouldn't do some of those things, but you don't really know, since our lives today are comfortable and we have what we need. Uncle Lee lived in a remote rural area in the 30s and had no access to any help whatsoever. His options were live or die. Under those conditions, decision making becomes very simple.
When what remained of his leg had healed, he whittled an artificial leg out of wood and hollowed out a socket for the stump to fit down into. He made an ankle joint so he could walk on it, and hooked the thing to his leg with leather straps. He went right on trapping and hunting and gathering. At family gatherings we kids asked him to see his leg, and if he was in a good mood, he rolled up his pant leg and showed it to us. If he was in an exceptionally good mood he took his sock off, too, so we could see how the ankle articulated.
Uncle Lee was a little short-circuited. But when somebody does something really nuts, if you ask them why, they'll give a reason that makes perfect sense to them.
From You Can't Push Me to Heaven: The Life of Roy Gudermuth, 2002
