Tom Brokaw (8 page)

Ko managed to preserve the plant's assets for his principal creditors, and his lawyers negotiated the settlement of other debts at reduced levels. Continuing to live in the small-town environment with local suppliers still carrying Komak debts on their books wasn't easy, but Wesley and Ruth persevered. He managed to get a job as a quality-control manager at a local electronics company and applied the stock options he earned toward the debts he owed. Finally, at the age of seventy-six, Wesley retired, saying, “I have no regrets.”

He and Ruth now live near their daughters, in Massachusetts. He's editor of
The Glider Towline,
the newsletter of the surviving members of the 325th Glider Infantry Association. It's filled with chatty reminders of coming reunions and pictures of grandfatherly men in baseball caps bearing the regiment's insignia. One caption reads, “The youth of World War II are the senior citizens of today.” A column called “Taps” gets longer with every issue, as it marks the passing of the glider veterans or their wives.

Ko's only regret is that the lessons of his generation are lost on his grandchildren. He was disappointed when his grandson quit the private school he was attending. Now, however, the young man seems to have found a calling as a carpenter, and Wesley is feeling better about his direction.

However, Wesley Ko reflects the common lament of his generation when he says, “Everything comes too easy. Nowadays you just don't make the effort like you did in our day.”

JAMES AND DOROTHY DOWLING

“I ran that department like a business and in military style.”

I
N A WAY
no one could have anticipated at the time, the military training and discipline required to win World War II became an accelerated course in how to prepare a young generation to run a large, modern, and complex industrial society. Nearly every veteran, however painful the military experience may have been, seems to be grateful for the discipline and leadership training they were exposed to at such a formative age.

James Dowling of Smithtown, New York, is the personification of the difficult times of his generation, the heroics of ordinary men in extraordinary situations in time of war, and the priceless contributions of veterans to the development of postwar America.

He's now seventy-five years old, a grandfather, a founder of the Little League in his hometown, a retired highway superintendent, and a vintage car enthusiast. He's proud of his family, his personal independence, and his contribution to his community. If that sounds like a predictable and bland résumé for a man in his mid-seventies, it is also deceptive, for it masks a life of deprivation, struggle, adventure, heroics, and achievement.

James Dowling was orphaned soon after he was born. His mother died when he was only six months old and his father was unable to care for this baby and his four brothers and sisters. In those simpler times, when much of social welfare was a matter of good-hearted people, the plight of James and his siblings was made known in church. The minister announced that someone had to take in these children.

James and Dorothy—home on twenty-four-hour leave

James and two of his brothers were taken home by the Conklins, Clarence and Anna. It was not a formal adoption but the Conklins raised these Dowling children as their own. Conklin was a prosperous builder in Smithtown until the Depression hit. At home the electricity was often shut off. So was the telephone. But what James remembers is that no one gave up. His father took odd jobs and always gave a portion of what he earned to creditors until he paid most of them off. Mrs. Conklin took in sewing. They avoided bankruptcy. It wasn't easy, but at that time in small towns bankruptcy was a disgrace to be avoided at all costs.

Besides, James and the others in the family didn't feel deprived. Everyone they knew was going through similar experiences. The family stayed together and made the best of it. The boys spent their days fishing and clamming, getting what jobs they could.

James was fascinated by the relatively new field of aviation. The Conklins lived not too far from where Charles Lindbergh had lifted off for Paris in
The Spirit of St. Louis.
The skies over Long Island were beginning to fill with the new airplanes coming off the production lines at the nearby Grumman plant.

So when war broke out and James was drafted in 1943, at age nineteen, he immediately volunteered for the U.S. Army Air Corps and qualified for bombardier-navigator training. He promised his hometown sweetheart, Dorothy Owen, that when he returned they'd be married. She had no doubt he'd be back, recalling more than a half century later, “He was a cheerful Irishman with blazing red hair. I knew he'd be okay.”

Dowling was assigned to the 445th Air Wing of the 8th Air Force and shipped to England, where in 1944 he began bombing runs over Germany, striking at the heart of the German military-industrial complex. By his eighth mission he was lead bombardier-navigator, and on his eleventh mission he was in a world of trouble—a long, long way from the innocence of those summer days back on Long Island.

His squadron was involved in a massive bombing attack on an industrial center near the German town of Kassel in September 1944. There were thirty-seven B-24s on the raid when they came under attack from above and below: antiaircraft fire and Luftwaffe fighter planes. Thirty of the B-24s were lost, including Dowling's. He managed to bail out before it crashed, but as soon as he hit the ground he was captured by German troops and loaded onto one of many boxcars for a three-hundred-mile ride. Their journey, like Dr. Van Gorder's, was often interrupted by strafing attacks from American planes unaware that those German trains were loaded with Americans.

Back in New York, Dowling's family and his sweetheart, Dorothy, were notified he was missing in action.

Dowling spent the next eight months in a German POW camp, Stalag Luft One, near Barth, Germany. Shortly before Christmas 1944, English-speaking German broadcasters read over shortwave radio holiday greetings from American prisoners of war. It was a compassionate act on the part of the Third Reich, wholly at odds with what it was doing on the battlefield and in places such as Dachau and Buchenwald.

Two housewives who heard Dowling's name and message to Dorothy didn't get all the details, so they each sent a postcard on December 22 to Dorothy at her home in Ballston Lake, New York. One postcard was addressed, simply, “Dorothy?” Dorothy's sister had heard the broadcast as well. It was the first message from Dowling since his capture. “Dearest Dorothy, I am all right, sweetheart. I didn't get a scratch or anything. Please tell Mom and Dad. Don't worry about me. We'll get married as soon as I get home again. I love you and miss you terribly, sweetheart, and wish that I could be with you soon. I have lots to tell you when I get back.”

A military telegram with the same message arrived five days later, after Christmas. The military message added: “Pending further confirmation, this report does not establish his status as a prisoner of war.” A cautionary note to go with the first word that James was still alive.

As the New Year began, the end was near for the Third Reich. James was liberated by advancing Russian troops in May 1945. He was headed home shortly thereafter. Before he left he wrote to Dorothy, not knowing that the Christmas message had gotten through. The sentiments were the same from this determined young man: “. . . I am alive and well, can't wait to get home and get married.”

James Dowling and company

Telegram to Dorothy Owens, December 27, 1944

Dowling wrote it on a scrap of paper, folded the paper over, addressed it, and mailed it off with no envelope, no return address. Fifty-three years later James and Dorothy still have the note.

H
E STAYED
in the service for another two years, hoping to become a jet pilot, but when Dorothy became pregnant he decided it was time to go home to Smithtown. But now what? Well, like a lot of returning veterans James was willing to take chances, so he went into business for himself with his father-in-law. They started a seafood trucking business.

James would buy from the returning fishing trawlers late in the afternoon, load his truck, and very early the next morning set off for the Fulton Fish Market in lower Manhattan. He'd be back home at nine
A
.
M
. It was a thriving business, but James wondered what to do with all of the spare time he had before the fishing trawlers returned in the late afternoon.

“Since I had my afternoons free I started organizing baseball games for the little kids, including my five sons. I'd buy the bats and balls and before long we had forty or fifty kids in the league. Then some local businessmen decided to start an official Little League and asked me to help. I agreed, as long as the little kids could play.

“We started with four teams and by the seventies we had six hundred boys playing. I was president of the League for eighteen years.” Little League was, in many ways, a metaphor for the postwar years. There were now so many children on the playing fields of America it was no longer feasible just to count on informal pickup games to keep them occupied. Little League baseball was a game of the suburbs, which were beginning to dominate the American social landscape. It was extremely well organized, reflecting the expanding and evolving codification of American life even at leisure.

James didn't confine his community service to the Little League, however. In the early 1960s another veteran, the town clerk, asked him to run for superintendent of highways in Smithtown. He had three hours to decide. After talking it over with Dorothy, he decided he could do a good job, so he ran as the candidate of the Democrats, even though he'd never been registered in either party. He defeated a man who'd been in the job for twelve years.

This was no cushy, eight-to-five assignment. From the development of the interstate highway system down to the gridwork of curb, gutter, and asphalt in new developments, the construction of roads was a vital element in the social and economic expansion of postwar America.

As James remembers, “I came into office at a time when all of the young ex-GIs were moving out of Queens and Brooklyn and into new suburban homes. I met with them. They wanted good services, and that meant good roads.”

Smithtown was no longer a sleepy little Long Island fishing village backed up to potato fields. Although James had never built a road in his life, his military training had taught him how to organize and move men. He had 175 people reporting to him, and a big task ahead. He had to modernize the Smithtown road system so that it would fit seamlessly with the developments now surrounding it and feed easily into the shopping malls that were beginning to take hold at the edge of town.

He was ahead of his time in many of his techniques. When he ripped up an old road, he'd reprocess the old material and use it as a base for the new road, introducing the concept of recycling to highway construction at a time when most old asphalt was simply carted off to a landfill.

Dowling is especially proud of his snow-removal techniques. He saw a major snowstorm as the highway superintendent's equivalent of battle. He had some experience with clearing airfields during winter storms in the war, so he simply adapted what he had learned: he put more trucks on the road, switched to the new, modern snow tires, introduced new hydraulic systems. Smithtown became so well known for its snow-removal efficiency that the state of New York contracted Dowling to teach other municipalities and counties what he had learned. As he said when I spoke with him, “I ran that department like a business and in military style.”

That was not enough for him, however. “I didn't take life for granted,” he says. “The most memorable lesson I learned in the war is that life is precious. I really came to appreciate that when we languished in that prison camp. So I am always looking for things to do.”

In addition to his duties as highway superintendent and in the seafood trucking business, Dowling also ran a bulldozer business and a small restaurant, for a time. “I was always looking for challenges in life. I think the war years gave me that. And anyone who went through the Depression understood what a dollar was and what it meant to find work. I think I passed these values on to my kids and the people who worked for me. One of the young people who worked for me came by later and said, ‘You had a purpose. We came to work every day knowing you had a project for us. You were always looking ahead. You treated us with respect.' ”