Growing Up (28 page)

Joe Louis had given them the courage to assert their right to use a public thoroughfare, and there wasn’t a white person down there to dispute it. It was the first civil rights demonstration I ever saw, and it was completely spontaneous, ignited by the finality with which Joe Louis had destroyed the theory of white superiority. The march lasted maybe five minutes, only as long as it took the entire throng to move slowly down the full length of the block. Then they turned the corner and went back into the alleys and, I guess, felt better than most of them had felt for a long time.

On Lombard Street enlightenment was hard to come by. When war began I followed the news as melodrama. Another encounter between the white hats (us) and the black hats (them). I was shocked by the speed with which the Nazis crushed Europe and occupied Paris and planted the swastika at the English Channel. That fall, carrying newspapers with gigantic headlines that told of the blitz on London, I marveled at the destruction of a civilization I’d thought eternal. Like many military thinkers, I guess, I’d expected a rerun of World War I and was surprised to find the script entirely new. Still, it never occurred to me that the Nazis could win. They were the bad guys.

I was flabbergasted when the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor brought us into the war at the end of 1941. Though by then sixteen, I was still so innocent of the world around me that American
involvement had seemed impossible. And Japan! Why in the world had Japan attacked us? I didn’t know Japan had anything against us. Sitting by the small radio in the kitchen at Marydell Road that Sunday night, listening to the bulletins from Washington, I thought the Japanese attack was ridiculous. A tiny country like that, nothing more than a few specks on the map, a country whose products were synonymous with junk, a pipsqueak country on the far side of the earth—it was grotesque that such a country should take on mighty America. Settling their hash would be as easy as squashing an ant.

“It’ll take about two weeks to finish them off,” I told my mother.

She was less confident. “I hope it’s over before you’re old enough to go,” she said.

I laughed. I was still two years shy of military age. In two years we would have forgotten that Japan ever existed.

By the time I entered Hopkins in the summer of 1942 I knew better. Boys I’d known in high school were already in uniform. Others were registering for the draft. Responding to the speeded-up pace of wartime America, Hopkins was operating on a year-round schedule with no summer vacation. I attended classes there the day after graduating from high school. By my seventeenth birthday that August it was obvious the war would not end in the coming year and probably not in the year after that. My mother had been right to worry. Obviously I was going to have to go. I began to look forward to it with pleasurable excitement.

I had been in love with the romance of flying since first hearing as a small boy about Charles A. Lindbergh, the Lone Eagle, Lucky Lindy, who’d flown all the way to France by the seat of his pants. The pinups over my bed had been Captain Eddie Ricken-backer, Wrong-Way Corrigan, Roscoe Turner, Wiley Post, and Amelia Earhart. Enchanted by the glamour of flight, I cut out magazine pictures of the latest warplanes and pinned them up alongside Captain Eddie and Roscoe Turner. In my fantasies I flew over the trenches on the dawn patrol, white scarf streaming behind me in the wind as I adjusted my goggles and maneuvered
the Fokker of Baron von Richthofen into my gun sights. Now the war offered a chance to make those dreams come true. The country needed flyers, thousands and thousands of them. While my mother worried about my going to war, I worried too. It wasn’t easy to qualify for flight training. I was afraid of being rejected and losing my shot at glory.

There wasn’t much glory in college life. I still rode the trolley to school and carried lunch in a brown paper bag. Most of my friends did, too. The people I gravitated to were town boys, different from the tweedy fraternity-house crowd who wore saddle shoes and cared about lacrosse games and campus dances. We were a raffish bunch of overgrown streetwise kids sprawled in the cafeteria, chomping homemade sandwiches, arguing noisily about politics, literature, history, and economics, seething with intellectual contempt for the smooth fraternity crowd and filled with secret envy for the fraternity boys’ social polish and devil-may-care ways with women.

Though I’d been an academic whiz in high school, these new companions quickly made me feel like a dolt. They were at ease in organic chemistry and integral calculus, understood the treason of Alcibiades, could argue the merits of logical positivism, debated whether Eugene O’Neill or George Bernard Shaw was the greater playwright, explained why Thomas Wolfe was a romantic sentimentalist who would never rank among the great writers. I struggled comically to catch up to them.

I took physics and calculus, thinking they would improve my chances of getting into flight training. After the first semester the calculus professor offered to erase my “Fail” mark if I dropped the course. Discovering that this was a way out, I dropped physics, too, and concentrated on literature, history, and economics, known on campus as “bullshit courses” because their examinations usually posed essay questions permitting a glib writer to bluff his way through. Sometimes I succeeded, sometimes not. The history professor returned my first test paper with the gentleman’s C which Hopkins granted everyone not obviously an idiot and the
scrawled, “You find it so easy to be smart that you don’t bother to work very hard.”

How hard did he want me to work? I was laboring doggedly, yet after six weeks of college I was already six months behind most of my peers. I began looking toward military service as a vacation.

In the spring of 1943, in anticipation of my eighteenth birthday, I applied for enlistment in the Navy Air Corps. It seemed more glamorous than the Army Air Corps. Everybody was enlisting in the Army Air Corps, but the Navy Air Corps was different. It was more dangerous, I thought, therefore more glamorous. Flying off carriers—so hard, so dangerous. Flying over the vast watery desert of the Pacific. So easy to get lost out there, so hard to find a carrier to come back to in that trackless expanse. It took daring, the Navy Air Corps. It took the kind of man who had always wanted to test himself against the great von Richthofen.

I told my mother I was going to enlist. She hid her dread. The training would take fifteen months. She looked for the silver lining. “At least it’ll keep you out of the war for fifteen months,” she said. “But why don’t you try to get into the Army Air Corps if you want to fly?”

“The Navy is better,” I said.

“You can’t even swim, Buddy.”

This was true. I’d spent four years standing in the shallow end of the City College swimming pool without even learning to float. I was mortally afraid of deep water, but in my zeal for adventure I also wanted to challenge that terror. This had been another reason for choosing the Navy.

“Does the Navy take people who can’t swim?” my mother asked.

“They guarantee they’ll teach you to swim,” I said.

The examination was held in Washington and took a full day. I was so fearful of failing the physical that my blood pressure went up. The corpsman who took it said it was too high to suit the Navy. “Have you been eating a lot of potatoes?” he asked.

I ate potatoes every night. Why?

“Sometimes potatoes will drive your blood pressure up,” he said.

“I had potatoes for supper last night,” I said.

He pondered that. “Tell you what,” he said. “Come back here again three days from now and we’ll recheck your blood pressure. But lay off the potatoes until then.”

Three days later, with potatoes out of my bloodstream, I went back to Washington and was enlisted in the United States Navy under orders to report home and await my eighteenth birthday. My only other physical problem was weight. Stripped bare, I now stood six feet two inches tall and weighed 139 pounds. The Navy doctor noting these figures on the record looked up and said, “You’re three pounds overweight.”

To weigh three pounds less I would have had to peel off my skin and get down to bare skeleton. But the doctor didn’t look like a man making a joke. “I’ve always thought I was underweight,” I said.

He winked. “Young man,” he said, “we’re going to put thirty-five pounds on you.” They did, too, but it took a year.

Orders arrived a few days after my eighteenth birthday. I was to report to Washington with a toothbrush and a razor for transfer to a training base. Most of my friends at Hopkins had already left for war. Charlie Sussman, who’d helped me get there, was being drafted into the Army and was raring to go. “It’s going to be a great educational experience,” he told me, grinning happily the day we shook hands and said good-bye.

My mother had never been in an airplane—neither had I—and thought of airplanes as infernal machines which none but a fool or a wild man would step into. She knew that training promised to keep me away from enemy gunfire for fifteen months, but felt that flying an airplane was almost as dangerous as being shot at. Throughout my last weeks at home she did her best to keep a cheerful countenance, but I caught her several times looking at me gravely and hungrily, trying to press her memory indelibly with the image of someone she might never see again.

I left the house before dawn on an October morning. Our
good-byes were said at the door. It was as it almost always was between us in moments of deep emotion. No tears, no clasping in each other’s arms, all emotion thoroughly under control, everything correctly repressed to insure against messy outbursts. She looked up at me and with a quick, tight smile said, “Well, you’d better get going if you’re going to catch that train,” and I leaned down and kissed her briefly on the lips.

“Write me as soon as you get there,” she said, and waved me off up Marydell Road to catch the streetcar. I knew she was worried, but didn’t realize how badly, and didn’t think about it for long. I was too exultant. Boarding the streetcar I had no sense of putting my life at risk. Not a bit. I felt an intoxicating sense of being free for the first time in my life. Adventure. Flight. Freedom. Now at last, all were going to be mine.

By mid-morning I was in Washington and homesick, missing her so much that I telephoned home long-distance, an outrageous use of money in that time. She was so flustered at hearing my voice that she hung up in confusion before we exchanged more than ten words. Late that afternoon I wrote her from the train carrying us south.

“You hung up the telephone so soon I didn’t get to tell you anything. The 6:30 train from Penn Station turned out to be a local and I was lucky to get to the Cadet Board on the stroke of 8. They kept us sitting around for two hours, then we ate at the expense of the Navy at a downtown restaurant. After that they whisked us to the Union Station in a truck that looked too much like the Black Maria. I called you from the station and wanted to tell you I’m headed for Pensacola, Fla., but you hung up too soon. … Please don’t worry. Hold down the fort and keep things running. …”

After twelve hours of my adventure in freedom I was yearning for home.

F
OR
the next eighteen months, while old friends and schoolmates were discovering the face of death on battlefields from Bastogne to Okinawa, the Navy sent me on an extended tour of Dixie. After four months at Pensacola came three months at the University of South Carolina. I was in Miami living the good life at Coral Gables when Eisenhower sent the armies ashore on D-Day, and at preflight school at the University of Georgia when Patton was racing for the Rhine. I was at Memphis waiting to take off on a flight to Arkansas when a mechanic climbed onto the wing and shouted: “President Roosevelt is dead!” Germany surrendered three weeks later and I was sent back to Pensacola. Because the Navy had overestimated the number of flyers it needed to fight Japan, flight training slowed to a crawl. The Navy had kept one of its promises—it had put thirty-five pounds on me—but its promise of glory remained unfulfilled.

By the summer of 1945 we were flying out of Whiting Field. It was a broiling expanse of cleared land in the north Florida boondocks, one of those ugly, barren, temporary training bases that had been nailed together overnight. The South was strewn
with them during World War II. A couple of runways and acres of stark wooden barracks surrounded by a perimeter of back-shadowed piney woods. A water tank on four steel legs. A flag hanging limp in sultry air. Pensacola was an hour away by slow bus. I made the trip to town and back several nights a week on account of Karen, an Indiana girl at the local nursing school. I was in love.

It was a chaste romance. We held hands in the movies and walking the streets. Under a subtropical moon we sat in the grass and Karen confided her dreams, which had to do with owning a horse farm and having a large family, and I talked of mine, which had to do with shooting down Japanese warplanes. We kissed without feeling any fire and went to Walgreen’s drugstore for milkshakes, and she went back to the nurses’ quarters while I rode the bus back to Whiting Field. I considered our love too fine to be fouled by lust and was offended when my roommate Ozzie, awakening as I returned, leaned down from his upper bunk to ask as he always did, “Did you get deflowered tonight, Bake?”

A big part of my Navy career by then had been spent in the struggle to get rid of my accursed virginity. This had been harder than learning to swim or learning to fly. The swimming had been surprisingly easy, thanks to the Navy’s policy of dealing with fear by ignoring it. My fear of deep water left the Navy simply uninterested. On the first day in the pool an instructor with a voice like a bullhorn ordered fifty of us to climb a high board and jump in feet first. The board looked about two hundred feet high, though it may have been only twenty or twenty-five. A line was formed to mount the ladder and jump. I drifted to the end of the line, then stepped out when the splashing started and introduced myself to the instructor.

“I’m a nonswimmer,” I said. “You want me to go to the shallow end of the pool?” At City College I’d spent four years in the shallow end of the pool.