We Who Are Alive and Remain (30 page)

We married February 12, 1983. Our daughter, Kerry, was born December 11 that same year. I was afraid she was going to be born on December 7, the anniversary of Pearl Harbor. Kerry is simply amazing. At age ten she got her black belt in karate and at age twelve was Colorado State champion in her division, winning more than thirty consecutive matches. She’s the young woman shown talking about me on the Band of Brothers video series, the segment entitled “We Stand Alone Together: The Men of Easy Company.” She had just finished high school at the time. She went to Denver University and is now a law student at Northeastern School of Law in Boston. Kerry seems to be successful in anything she tries. I am so thankful for my family today.

I got home December 1945, just a day or two before Christmas. On the boat ride home, there were two little Victory Ships and a little flattop in convoy. We hit a big storm; it was terrible. The one little Victory broke in half. They had to load all the people on the other Victory. That’s when I got sick. Everybody was sick. You might stand the motion, but the smell will get you sooner or later. Even on deck they were sick; that’s where I stayed. I was sick for eight of the twelve days it took to get back.

We landed in Newport News, Virginia. I was put in charge of ten to twelve men to get them to Fort Lewis, Washington. Whenever that happened guys would scatter from here to the West Coast—as soon as they saw a liquor store they’d get off the train. So I loaded them on the train and told them, “I got your service records and I’m going to Fort Lewis—I don’t give a damn what you do. Your records will get there—that’s all I can tell you.” I never lost a man.

The first Christmas home, it was kinda scary back home. It’s hard to say. The kid who left wasn’t the kid who came home. I had a pretty rough time of it. I had dreams. I’d be sound asleep and somebody would touch me and they’d end up in the closet, with me choking them. I was pretty dangerous even to touch. I got in fights. I was angry all the time. I didn’t know what it was. I knew I needed help, and the only way to get it was to go back in. A little hair of the dog that bit me to get me straightened out. So in February 1946 I reenlisted for another eighteen months. I was okay from then on.

I was sent back to Fort Benning. I was an NCO in the school troops battalion. We jumped for OCS [officer candidate school] and stuff like that all over the country. Then they put me as a weapons instructor in Greenville, South Carolina, for power pilots they were making into glider pilots. That’s where I spent my last eight months. I got married during my second enlistment. My wife was in the service. We met in South Carolina and got married before we were discharged.

I got out of the service then, and I was better. At least I wasn’t wild and crazy, like I was before. My mind was working better. I didn’t have the dreams anymore. Most of the stuff I’ve shut out. It’s funny, but you can shut out things from your memory. Some of the guys talk about things that I was supposedly there for and I have no recollection of it.

I came back and done just a little bit of everything. I worked in a trucking garage for a while, then as a mail carrier seventeen years, then I ruptured my back and had to have a spinal fusion done. They said I wasn’t going to be able to work no more so they retired me from the post office. So I went up to the Colville reservation and went to work for the police department, then transferred into the game department and retired as a game warden in 1988.

My wife and I had three children. One boy was lost in Vietnam. A daughter was killed in a car wreck. So we still have one. We have a grandchild and two great-grandchildren.

Every year we have our Easy Company reunion, and I go to that. I keep in touch with Shifty Powers. Paul Rogers, Jim Alley, and I stay in pretty close contact.

I remember my first Christmas home, December 1945. I didn’t have any civilian clothes to wear yet. Where I lived, every store was sold out, there were so many vets coming home buying civilian clothes. So I wore my uniform for about six months before I was able to get a suit, a couple pair of pants, and some civilian shoes.

I had a brother in the military. He spent most of his time in North Africa and came home alive. It was good to see him and my family again.

After the war, I worked for GE for a while, then quit and took my test at the post office. I worked as a letter carrier for thirty-four years. I’ve been retired for the past twenty-five years.

I was an avid fisherman my whole life. I did almost all my fishing in Canada. We got a fishing cabin, me and thirteen other guys. We always went in groups of threes or fours. None of the guys went there alone. The people who owned the fishing camp had a set of rules: you had to be a fisherman, and you couldn’t get drunk. So we all got along together really good.

All those years we went to the cabin we did a lot of fishing and got some big fish. We enjoyed life. I could have been with the OSS or the FBI, but I didn’t want either one. I wanted to fish. We went to the cabin every week. It was called Camp Adanac—Canada spelled backward. We’d go there every week on Friday and stay there until Sunday and spend our vacations there. We had a group of guys that were out of this world. We all got along like gentlemen.

I have six children and nine grandchildren. No great-grandchildren yet. Everybody’s doing good. They’ve got good jobs. I married my second wife, Phyllis, in 1974, and we’re together to this day.

After the war I came back and worked in the steel mill in Gary. But I didn’t stay there too long because some guys told me about the post office. I ended up being at the post office. I was a carrier for about thirty years.

I got married, yes. I had married Evelyn on a furlough from Camp Benning. I had met her here in Joliet. She was pregnant when I left for the service. When I came home my son, Richard, was eleven months old. What was that like to see my son for the first time? Well, you didn’t stop crying—it was really something else.

We just had the one son. We have two grandchildren, two boys. Evelyn died about six years ago.

What kinds of things do I do now? [laughs]. I don’t do nothin’. I’m retired. All I do is sit on my ass and watch TV.

There’s nobody from Easy Company who lives in this town, but we have conventions every year, and I go to them. Herb Suerth calls. In fact, he just called the other day. They’ve got a trip planned for Europe and wanted to see if I could go. I said yes.

The overall mood toward veterans was quite good. I think we all felt some uncertainty, but mostly people were hopeful. Everybody was trying to go back to college, get jobs, start over. They were building these victory homes very quickly.

I went to college on the GI Bill and went to work in sales for the Omar Bakery Company. I bought a house, got married, and raised four kids. My wife and I have nine grandchildren today. The bakery went out of business after nine years, so I went to work for New York Life for five years selling life insurance. Then I opened my own insurance agency until present day. I’m not quite retired yet. I’ve been in insurance for about fifty years total. I’ve had some health problems recently, so I’m slowing down. I’ll be eighty-two next month.

Our family has been very fortunate. My wife, Lucille, and I have done a lot of traveling. We’ve been back to Europe for four trips, Hawaii four trips, and Alaska once. A lot of this was done on military flights. I spent thirty years in the 84th Reserve Division in Milwaukee and was discharged as an E8 master sergeant.

When I got home, I didn’t feel like I belonged. None of the people were there that I knew. They had moved or died or joined the service. It was strange. I didn’t feel at home. None of the guys in the neighborhood—all the guys I used to play basketball with at St. Patrick’s—none of them were there anymore.

Once in a while I had nightmares about the war. I’d jump up out of bed—I didn’t know what I was doing. I still get them strange things, even to this day. I don’t remember specific nightmares. Sometimes I see people and no one’s there. I don’t talk about it because I figure people will think I’m crazy. So I don’t say nothing. Maybe it’s cause of the concussion I got back in Normandy. I wake up frightened and I’m ready to fight. I want to hit something, a door or something. I go after the people I see, but then the people aren’t there. But I don’t get that too much anymore.

For a while after the war I didn’t do much. I had a sister in Oakland, California, and we took a trip to see Florence, my sister. It was really nice.

When I come back, it was in the summertime, and there wasn’t much work around, but I knew a guy who knew another guy who was the postmaster of Erie, Pennsylvania. My friend set up an appointment for me to interview with the postmaster and talked to the guy for me. I had the interview. The postmaster says, “When do you want to start?” I says, “Tomorrow.” He says, “How about today?” I took a civil service test, passed it, and went into the post office. I worked there thirty-two years.

Joe [Lesniewski], he was from Erie, same as me, but I didn’t know Joe until France. We got to be good friends. After the war, I didn’t see him for a while. Then one day I was out delivering mail on the street, and a guy was blowing his horn at me. I said, “What the hell?” It was Joe. He says, “How can I get a job like that?” I told him the postmaster’s name. If you were a vet they’d put you at the top of the list. Lo and behold, a couple weeks or a month and Joe’s working there.

Our families got together once or twice throughout the years. We still see each other as families, but mostly we talk on the phone.

While I worked at the post office, I took a part-time job as a stagehand in the theater here. We did road shows, Broadway shows, rock shows. I worked there thirty years along with my other job, just quit a couple years ago, which is pretty good considering I’m eighty-four years old now. I don’t do nothing now. I’m lucky I’m breathing [laughs].

My wife, Sally, she’s one in a million. I married her fifty-eight years ago. We’ve got four girls, ten grandchildren, ten great-grandchildren. A slew of them. I’ve been pretty lucky. The place is loaded on Thanksgiving.

My wife and I are still involved in the Catholic Church. My wife sings in choir and I usher. I haven’t been there in a couple weeks because I fell down a flight of steps and fractured my wrist. Boy, it’s taken a long time to heal. I missed a step and went down the rest of the flight.

I don’t know if you can define success; everybody defines it differently. But I got a house, a nice wife, four good kids, and my health. I couldn’t ask for anything more than that.

I came home with the 75th Division in November 1945. We came home on the USS
Wooster Victory
. I arrived on Thanksgiving Day in Newport News, Virginia. Nobody knew I was on the way home or when I was coming. Ten days after I got home that girl I had been dating broke up with me. It took her that long for her to tell me that I wasn’t the guy for her.

After the war there wasn’t anything to do in agriculture, so I went into wood. Then I reenlisted and went back into the 82nd Division. Altogether, counting the Reserves, I was in the military for twenty-two years. I did 167 jumps.

After I got out, I traveled around the country for a little over three years. I had a 1939 Plymouth coupe, a dog, and a two-wheel trailer with everything I owned on it. I put 512,000 miles on that car. I had a job in every state in the Union except Maine. Hawaii and Alaska were not states then. I was at loose ends—I didn’t have any particular place to go. I didn’t have a girlfriend, and I just wanted to see the country. I did a lot of things then that you couldn’t do now. In the middle of the night, I’d just drive up alongside of somebody’s barn, park my car, and go to sleep. You wouldn’t dare do that today. They’d call 911.

I learned a whole bunch, too. I got a better education than almost anybody gets in college. I did every kind of a job that you could name. I worked as a carpenter, for an undertaker, in auto body shops and service stations, once I even worked as a carhop at a drive-in. I took whatever job I could find to put gas in the car. Gasoline was only twenty-five or twenty-six cents a gallon. I didn’t stay in any one town for very long. I stayed in Pennsylvania for about two months while I worked for the undertaker. I was going out with his daughter, but then I got to thinking, Who the hell wants to be an undertaker? When her dad started talking that way, well, it was time to pull stakes.

I got out to Los Angeles, and my dad was living there then. I got a job with an outfit that built fancy stairways. I built an apartment in my dad’s backyard. Then my brother Allen showed up, and we both went to work for a Hungarian fellow who had a cabinet shop. I learned a whole lot from that old boy. I learned a whole lot that I thought I already knew.

I met a girl in Long Beach—a waitress. Her name was Grayce, but I called her Peg. Then she quit and went home to Minnesota. I took a vacation, followed her, and talked her into getting married. We’ve been married for fifty-five years. Peg and I have four children and two grandchildren.

We came back out to California. I built modular homes for a while. Then one night the plant burned to the ground, so I was out of work. That’s when I went to San Jose. I worked for Hall Machinery setting up woodworking equipment. Then I got a job in a cabinet shop. Should have been a one-man cabinet shop, that’s all he had work for, but he had three people working there. I worked for him a couple months. Every Friday I had to wait until Tuesday or Wednesday the next week to cash my paycheck. Finally one Friday I said, “Jack, this is the last paycheck I want to get this way.” He said, “Okay, okay.” Well, come Friday night, he gave me another paycheck with nothing there to cover it. I went out the next day and got another job in a retail lumberyard. I went back to the cabinet shop and said, “You got the money to cover this paycheck yet?” He said “No.” So I said “Okay,” and went and picked up a skill sander, an electric drill, and a router, and said, “Well, I’ll hold these until you got the money.” He started to argue but I said, “You can protest all you want, but that’s the way it’s going to happen.” I never saw the man again.