A Company of Heroes (17 page)

David Kenyon Webster described him this way: “120-pound Liebgott, ex-San Francisco cabby, was the skinniest and one of the funniest men in E Company. He had the added distinction of being one of the few Jews in the paratroops. Both he and [Thomas] McCreary, ancient men of thirty, were the company elders.”
¹⁴

There are just two problems with Webster’s description, according to Liebgott’s family. He was a barber by trade, not a cabby. Although he drove a taxi for a short time in San Francisco before the war, it was never his life’s goal or profession, as has been perpetuated. That’s a minor issue. The bigger issue is that Liebgott was not Jewish; he was a German Roman Catholic.

This is the rest of the story about the real Joseph Liebgott.

Liebgott was born in 1915 in Lansing, Michigan, where his father worked for the auto industry. The family soon migrated to Oakland, California, where his father became a barber. Liebgott had one brother and four sisters. He was the oldest, and was very protective of his younger sisters. The children all went to Catholic schools, where Liebgott played soccer and boxed.

The parents both spoke German, as did the children. During the war, he was one of the company’s interpreters. He considered working as an interpreter in Europe after the war, but changed his mind.

After Liebgott graduated from high school, he drove a taxi in San Francisco for a short while, then went to barber college, which was his profession when he enlisted in the army at age twenty-six. He went into the paratroopers to make extra money and put a down payment on a house for his parents with the cash he made in the military. He always looked out for his folks.

Liebgott told few war stories to his children or relatives, but they know he was one of the original Toccoa men, and that just prior to the D-day jump he cut some of the men’s hair into Mohawks. He was wounded three times and received three Purple Hearts, but refused one because he considered the wound “just a scratch,” he said to his son later. He instructed military officials to give the award to other men who had been hurt worse than he. After the war, Liebgott received a partial disability for complications from wounds sustained during the war.

When he first came home from the war, he disappeared for two years. Family members found out later he was living near Yuma, California. His buddies tried to reach him a few times to invite him to reunions, but Liebgott’s father told them “not to mess with him,” said his son Jim.

“Nothing’s really come out about those two years or what he was doing then,” Jim said. “Dad was a barber, and he always told me that if you’re a barber you can go to any city and find a job. So he just took off and worked for a while. I believe it was a period of readjustment for him where he was just trying to find his way.”

Liebgott met and married a woman named Peggy in Los Angeles in 1949. They had eight children together. During his career as a barber, he owned a few of his own shops, but mostly worked for other employers. The family lived in Oakland and Santa Barbara, and he owned a shop in Culver City for a while.

Jim described the atmosphere in the home while growing up as “fun, particularly with eight kids on a barber salary. We didn’t have a lot, but we always had shoes and clothes, and were always well fed.” One of Jim’s favorite memories is whenever his father took the family to the beach. “He had only one day off per week, and he took us to the Long Beach pike, an amusement park with a roller coaster and pinball games. There wasn’t much money to go around, but we always had fun.”

For a hobby, Liebgott liked betting on ponies at the racetrack. He was a two-dollar bettor and never made anything at it. It was always just for fun. He often flew down to the Caliente Racetrack in Tijuana with his buddies. The owner at one of the shops he worked in had an airplane, and every other Sunday they used to fly down to Mexico.

“Dad had good friends,” Jim said, “but as far as I know he never contacted anyone from his service days. I never asked why, but I think that was part of the way he coped. He just wanted to put the war as far away from him as possible.”

The Liebgotts divorced when Jim was about fourteen. Peggy remarried, but Liebgott didn’t. After the divorce, Liebgott stayed in the same area as his family. Liebgott’s granddaughter, Rhonda Kersey, doesn’t remember her grandfather being married to her grandmother. “She was remarried by the time I knew her,” Rhonda said. “Her new husband was really loud, but Grandpa Liebgott was just the opposite, really quiet. Yet when he was around us, he was always laughing quietly.”

Rhonda described him this way: “His hands looked like a man who worked with his hands, sunspots all over. He absolutely loved his grandkids. He had false teeth that he flipped out of his mouth and smiled, threatening to kiss us with his gums. He was a tickler. He never held babies over his shoulder, but always forward in a sitting position, facing out against his stomach, because he wanted them to be able to see everything. As grandkids, he always made us laugh, and there was never any real discipline going on when Grandpa was with us. Sometimes he took us shopping for the whole day. He didn’t have a lot of money—I’m pretty sure all he had was his veteran’s benefits, but there was this idea as a kid that Grandpa always had money.”

As a grandfather, Liebgott excelled in a number of ways. He made all of the bikes for the grandkids by scouring thrift stores for dilapidated bikes. He stripped the bikes down to the frame, fixed and assembled them as good as new. He let each grandchild pick the color of new paint for his or her bike. He did customizations as well. In the late 1970s, he made a bike for a grandson that was metallic orange with a huge banana seat. Everything on it was chrome. “My brother and I never had new bikes from a store,” said Rhonda, “but we were the coolest kids on the block.”

Liebgott had his quirks. “I always knew the specific foods we were going to eat at his house,” Rhonda said. “He had bite-sized candy bars and store-brand soda pop. There was no drinking water at his house, even on the hottest days. It was always, ‘Have a soda,’ and ‘Here, wash it down with another soda.’ He made tuna sandwiches and a delicious cucumber-and-tomato marinade that tasted fantastic. We’ve tried to duplicate this recipe in later years but have never been able to do it quite right.”

He always lived in rental houses, usually older, with “ugly white interior paint and big, bubbly lathe and plaster walls,” Rhonda said. “He didn’t do yard work, but didn’t really need to because the grass was always dead and the yard just dirt.”

Personally, he kept very clean. Inside his house, he always wore corduroy house shoes. He wore his shirt tucked in neatly; his pants were always pressed, and he always wore a belt. All his clothes were perfectly ironed. His hair was perfectly groomed. It was always hot in his house, even when it was summertime and warm outside. “He was a skinny older man,” Rhonda said, “frail in some ways. He must have always been cold. I never saw him wear shorts, even at the beach.”

In Liebgott’s house, everything had its exact spot, as organized as an Army footlocker on inspection day. He was compulsive this way. In contrast to his meticulous personal grooming, his houses were always grimy. For instance, he kept an old, tiny, metal fan, like in a Dick Tracy movie, on his corner table by the front door. If ever the fan was moved, a perfect ring showed underneath in the dust. His hands were always greasy from working out in his garage, and everywhere his hands touched on the walls were black smudges. He never vacuumed, ever.

Liebgott was very thrifty and cut corners wherever he could. He never owned a set of dishes but ate out of empty Cool Whip bowls and margarine pans. He bought pots and pans and even secondhand pens and pencils from thrift stores. Each week he went to several grocery stores to get his shopping done because he only shopped where there were coupons. He created very little trash and even tore paper bags into squares before putting them in the trash. He kept very current with the
TV Guide.
Whenever a page in the
TV Guide
was finished, he ripped the page off and disposed of it. He watched
T.J. Hooker, Knight Rider
, and
Jeopardy,
but he didn’t like
The A-Team
because it was interracial.

“Bigot is a strong word,” Rhonda said, “but if there was a stronger word, Grandpa would have been it. He threw around the N-word like it was nothing. He watched the news a lot and blamed whatever went wrong in the country on various ethnic groups. When I started dating, I dated this guy from El Salvador. Oh my gosh, my grandpa just threw a fit. ‘Does he even speak English?’ he growled. If you’ve ever seen the Clint Eastwood movie
Gran Torino,
that’s how my grandpa was.”

Rhonda was a teenager when her grandfather’s health turned. He had a hernia and got quite sick and dehydrated, the hernia turned gangrenous and he lost the use of a leg. From then on he was confined to a wheelchair, and “he hated it,” Rhonda said. “It kept him from doing all the things he did before. He couldn’t make bikes for the grandkids. He was a different person after that. He [was] determined to adjust to life in the wheelchair and be independent again, but he was very angry about it, very frustrated that he couldn’t move around.”

Liebgott never liked technology. Jim bought him a microwave because he couldn’t reach the stove anymore from his wheelchair, but he didn’t like using the new appliance. “He believed the microwaves would come out and get him,” Rhonda said. “He’d wheel up to it, put the food in and set the timer, then wheel away really fast. If he didn’t wheel away with both hands giving exactly the same amount of pressure on each tire, he’d bump into the cabinets and grouse about it.”

Toward the end, Liebgott lived in a rental that was halfway between his son’s work and home, so Jim often stopped there on his commute home. Father and son watched TV together, and sometimes a war movie was on and Liebgott commented about things he had seen and experienced during his combat days. “That was the most he ever talked openly about the war—whenever the TV was on,” Jim said. Occasionally he talked about the war when he got mad. He said he had done some killing, things that most people never have to do.”

In 1992 Liebgott developed a tumor in his neck near his jugular vein. It pushed against his windpipe and caused pain and complications. Jim took his father to the hospital on Father’s Day. Liebgott died just after that, on June 28, 1992. He was seventy-seven.

“He had been very strict about us not having a funeral for him,” Jim said. “It was just his time to go, he said, and he didn’t want anybody to do any lifesaving techniques on him or anything before he passed. He had a good life, he said, and that was it. Life was over. He was an altar boy in the church, but as an adult never practiced a faith or his Catholicism, never went to church, and never made us kids go to church ever. He never talked about religion or why he had taken the path he did with it.”

Liebgott instructed his family that he didn’t want anybody saying any words over him. He just told them to “burn him.” The family had him cremated. Jim’s younger sister has the ashes, and a younger brother kept his war memorabilia, some letters, and the original Toccoa book.

Representatives from the Liebgott family went to an Easy Company reunion in 2003. “One of the big questions we had was why everybody thought he was Jewish,” Jim said. “It said ‘
Roman Catholic’
right on his dog tags. We asked a couple of the guys and they figured it was because he hated the Nazis so bad. It was just an assumption they made. But I don’t know why my dad hated the Nazis so bad. He was known for being a bit of a bigot, maybe it was just the times he grew up in, maybe it was a reaction to his German heritage, I don’t know.”

How would the family want Joe Liebgott remembered?

“He was an honorable man and a good father,” Jim said. “He always took care of his family, and his family always came first.”

“I know he lived for us,” Rhonda said. “Whenever we were around, we had his full attention.”

 

 

 

When it comes to my dad, I don’t know where to even start. What if my kids were writing a story about me? What would they say? I’m certainly not perfect. That’s the spirit in which I talk about my dad.

In many ways, my father, Robert Marsh, was a good guy. He was a good soldier and a good worker throughout his life. He cared about people. He helped anybody he met. As time went on, most of his family members came to him for help. He took care of both his mother and father as well as three of his brothers in their old age. All that was admirable.

But I saw a different part of his life.

I saw a man who brought the war home with him. He was not the best of persons, not after the war. That’s what he showed me, at least. That side of Robert Marsh affected me most.

Why do I tell you this? My father’s story is about what war can do to a young man. It’s about how war can turn an innocent young boy into a sad, hurting, lonely, and confused adult. The soldiers coming home from today’s wars deserve to live much better and happier lives than many of the World War II soldiers ended up living. Hopefully, they’ll read stories like my father’s and find the help they need, if they need it. If today’s soldiers do that, then the stories that are told years from now will not sound like mine.

I have another reason for telling you his story. I also want to honor my father’s memory. Despite the way the war changed him, I will always love him. My family has a treasured photo of his youngest great grandchild, Alyssa Piatak, standing next to his gravestone. The epitaph we chose for Dad reads: “Gone But Not Forgotten.”

That’s the truth. We all loved Robert Marsh dearly.