We Who Are Alive and Remain (4 page)

I was born February 12, 1926, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I had one brother, who died at birth, so I was basically an only child. My parents were both from Milwaukee. My grandparents were from Germany.

My father worked as a Milwaukee City firefighter, so he always had a steady paycheck, even through the Depression. He had fought for the American army and been wounded in World War I, gassed, and had been in the hospital for a while because of that. I know he was at Château-Thierry in France, an area that the 506th PIR went through in 1945, twenty-seven years later. I don’t know much more about him in that capacity—he didn’t say too much about the war. Not many men do.

My given name is Henry, though I go by either Henry or Hank. I was born March 26, 1925, in Larksville, Pennsylvania. There were seven boys in my family: me and two brothers, then I have four half brothers. Back then they had big families. I’m the oldest.

Dad worked in a coal mine. He wanted me to go to work, so he got me a job in the coal mines with him. I didn’t have much schooling. I had to quit school, which I hated. I didn’t want to quit, but my old man told me I had to go out and get a job. My old man was a tyrant. I was about fifteen when I quit school, maybe younger, I don’t quite remember. This was just after the Depression, and times were rough. Luckily we always had enough to eat, but I wouldn’t say we were loaded. We lived from day to day.

My brothers and I fought a lot but mostly good-naturedly. Everything was physical. Once for fun I climbed to the top of a big tree like Tarzan and yelled to my brothers below to cut it down. They did, so I rode the tree all the way down to the ground.

Well, I worked for two months in the coal mine, then one day Dad came home and said, “We’re going to move to New Jersey and get a job down there.” I was never so glad in my life. Just walking through those coal mines looking at the ceilings—a lot of guys were killed in cave-ins in those mines. I had a cousin killed in a cave-in. I hated the coal mines and wanted nothing to do with them, but my father was a very dominant man. In New Jersey he worked at Phelps Dodge Copper products. I got a job down there, too, making cables.

About that time I wanted a change. I was sixteen and I lied about my age to go into a CCC [Civilian Conservation Corps] camp [you had to be eighteen], and went back to Pennsylvania for this. It was mostly forestry work and building roads. I stayed with the CCC for two years, the maximum time allowed. When my time there was up I had to leave, but I wanted to stay so bad, I felt like crying. I loved it in the camp. And I learned a lot of things there. I slung a sledgehammer breaking rocks. I used a two-man saw and learned how to fall trees. I really loved it.

My father was born in Poland and my mother in Austria. All of their children are first-generation Americans. I was born June 18, 1925, into a family of fourteen children, number eight from the top. I had eight sisters and five brothers, all of us born and raised on our farm in International Falls, Minnesota, so there were plenty of chores to keep us busy and strong. When I got my chores done, I liked to spend my time outdoors hunting, trapping, fishing, swimming, riding horses, and climbing trees. It didn’t matter what season it was, I was always outdoors. I grew acclimated to all the seasons.

When I was thirteen I trapped a bobcat. Earlier I had found a moose carcass that was missing the hindquarters and had placed my trap near it. After school one evening I skied up to my trap and discovered the cat. I approached it, not knowing he had backed way up on the chain because he was trying to get away from me. Suddenly he sprang on me, claws out, stripping off my stag pants like corn off a cob. I fell sideways, grabbed one of my skis (still strapped on), and beat off my attacker. Then I loaded him up and took him back to the farm to skin him and collect a bounty.

I was born (of all places) in New York City, July 25, 1921. My dad was a human resources type of guy. When I was quite young he went to Atlanta and became head of the Community Chest (now the United Way), so when I was ages four to eight, we lived in Georgia. Then he went to New York and was in the movie business. He made films like
The Silent Enemy
and
The Vikings
. My father did well financially in his earlier years, even through the Depression. In the movie business he associated with the Whitneys and the Vanderbilts, what they called old money. But he also had a little problem with alcohol, as did his son later on, so he pretty much blew it in later years and wasn’t affluent after that.

I was only fifteen when I graduated from high school. They thought that because I had lived in France when I was a kid that I was smarter than I actually am, so they skipped me a couple grades. Dad had made a picture called
Through the Centuries
, which was all about the history of the Catholic Church, so Dad went back and forth in France working on that movie and getting permission from the pope. My mother and I stayed over there in 1930 and 1931, when I was nine and ten years old. I went to school near Versailles right outside of Paris. I learned how to speak French, which was a great help during the war because many people in Europe speak two or three languages, one of which is usually French. Some of the German prisoners, if they didn’t speak English could speak French, so that was a good thing to know.

Later Dad started Marine Studios here in Florida, where I live today. He made underwater movies. He was with the studio until they opened in 1937 and was then bought out. So we went and lived in Key West on a boat. Here, I’ll name-drop for you—Ernest Hemingway. I went to school with his son Jack when we lived outside of Versailles. (Jack was nicknamed “Bumby.” He was the father of the models Mariel and the late Margaux Hemingway.) The Hemingways had a pool, and Bumby and I swam together as kids. He was a couple years younger than me, but since there were only a few Americans in the school in France we tended to stick together. Then later they moved over to Key West, so I knew Jack Hemingway in both places—Key West and France.

Did I get into many fights as a kid? Yeah—that’s my middle name: fights. That’s the reason I stayed a second lieutenant. When I went to the 10th Armored Division I roomed with a guy who was just out of West Point. I was just out of Texas A&M, and we partied and drank together. The next thing I knew he became my battalion commander. He decided that I knew too much about him and got on my case (this is just my side of the story, of course). At a private party he kept following me around telling me my rifle was dirty at inspection. Finally I had had too much of it and hit him. He wanted to court-martial me. But my commander said no because it happened at a private party. So the guy put an “S” on my efficiency report, the lowest score, which meant you couldn’t get a promotion even if General Patton wanted to promote you. So I was a longtime second lieutenant.

To back up, I didn’t enter university immediately after high school. After I graduated I figured I needed to grow up a little before college, so I got a gravy train job with the road department. My father had done some politicking in Tallahassee and knew the commissioner of the state road department. So I spent some time on an engineering crew. I didn’t have any experience. The job was really handed to me. I entered university when I was eighteen and majored in economics and history.

I was born in Erie, Pennsylvania, on August 29, 1920. Dad worked at Griswold Manufacturing Company, making cast iron cookware. He spoke seven languages, and the FBI kept on bothering him because they wanted him to work with them, but Dad had a hard time speaking English. So over the years, I took it upon myself to teach him. All the kids in the neighborhood could speak English, so that’s how I learned. I spoke fluent Polish as well.

As a kid, Dad had been sweet on a girl—they had both grown up in the same town in Poland. Unknownst to him, his family came to the United States on the same boat as her family did. They met again in the States. They were still in love, so they got married. That was my mom and dad.

In the early 1920s and ’30s, everybody was poor in Erie. Everybody looked for money and food. Nobody had much. You saw maybe two or three cars on the streets. You saw an airplane maybe once every two or three years. We had a place in one of the city’s parks with a big building in it. The people who didn’t have anything to eat went there—morning, afternoon, and evening, and could eat. It went on like that until the late 1930s.

From the time I was about thirteen years old onward, I did a lot of running. I ran from my home to Presque Isle Bay and back home again—ten miles round trip. I did that three to four times a week. Most of the kids in the neighborhood ran like that. We were very conscious of our physiques. In summers we went swimming across the channel, about four hundred to five hundred feet wide. We were all in pretty good shape.

I graduated from Erie Technological High School in 1939. You could study a lot of trades there: printing, drafting, woodworking, electrical engineering. I studied electricity and ran all the machines. I was taught to run any machine we had in our school building. For a year after graduation I worked in a CCC [Civilian Conservation Corps] camp on Bull Hill in Sheffield, Pennsylvania. They trained us in the CCC camps just like in the army. Each morning we got up early and ran five miles. We trained in close order drills with wooden rifles. They really put us through it. That helped put me in a good position to go into the service. I was able to get right to work after the CCC camps with General Electric, where I was a tool and dye maker for a year. Then I decided to volunteer for the army.

I was born in Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1923. Yeah, I know Joe Lesniewski pretty well [also from Erie]—he followed me all around the war [laughs].

My father delivered coal. In those days they didn’t have furnaces, they had coal stoves. As a little kid the truck used to come and dump it by a chute down in the cellar. It was a pretty dirty job. It was during the Depression when I grew up, hardly anybody was working. You didn’t see cars on the road or big stores or anything. Everybody I knew was poor.

We lived in the middle of the city—in those days Erie wasn’t as big as it is today. My family was very poor. Yes, we always ate, but they had a food bank and we used to go up and get food for free. It was tough. You just didn’t have stuff. You couldn’t get a job. In my family there were eleven children. I was third from the last, nearly the baby. Rough as it was, we all got along pretty well. We made up our own games—kick the can, we always seemed to have a football around, maybe a baseball. We usually made our own baseballs.

We were Catholic and all grew up going to St. Patrick’s Church and School. We had a nun for a teacher. You had better do your work or she’d crack you over the head or hit you on the shoulders with a stick for talking or fooling around. She’d crack you really good. Everybody was scared of her. I played a lot of sandlot football and a little bit of basketball—never in school, though. I liked sports and always played as much as I could. In high school I was about 5½ feet, maybe 130 pounds.

I used to help my father delivering ice. You picked up 25 pounds of ice with these prongs. If he had to go someplace he always called me to help. He sold the ice for 50 cents. He cut the ice up. That was the refrigerator—you had a big box in the house and you’d put the ice on top. Near the lake they had a little shack, two or three blocks from the ice. The ice didn’t come off the lake. You had to get it at the place that made all the ice. Everybody would buy it. I delivered newspapers for a while, if you call that a job, but there just wasn’t no places to work.

I had one other brother who went into the service. He made it through the war. Afterward he got married and lived pretty far away, but I managed to see him quite a bit. His name was Charlie, but we called him Chubby. I don’t know why we called him that—he wasn’t chubby. I had another brother, Gerald, and we called him Softy. I asked him, “Why do they call you Softy?” He worked in a coal place, so he said, “because of soft coal.” I couldn’t connect that, but that’s what they called him anyway. I had another brother, Robert, and we called him Bibs. How the hell did he ever get that? Another brother, James, we called him Pep—I don’t know why they called him that either. I was the only boy in the family who didn’t get a nickname.

I grew up in Oak Park, Illinois. Our family is Armenian. Dad was a carpenter early on but switched to Oriental rug repairing, which he did most of his life. My father managed to keep us going during the Depression. He worked hard day and night to keep us afloat. My mother was a housewife. During the war she participated in the Gray Ladies (Red Cross). There were two boys in our family, my brother and I. He was with Jimmy Stewart’s air force [General James L. Stewart] as a teletype man.

As a boy, I had no idea I wanted to be a medic later on. I was a Boy Scout and took first-aid classes with them. My family is Episcopalian, so when I graduated from high school I thought I might want to go into the ministry. I went to a Methodist school first, Ohio Northern University, then a Baptist school, Hardin-Simmons, in Texas.

At Ohio Northern I joined a fraternity. I was the only fraternity boy who was a member of the Timothy Club, for preministerial students. My fraternity brothers could hardly wait until I became a preacher so they could sit in the front row and heckle me. They called me the PPP. One time at a fraternity dance somebody called me that and a girl wanted to know what it meant. I didn’t want to tell her it meant
piss-poor preacher.

Faith became more personal for me as the years went on, nothing I wanted to impose on anybody else. I also thought it would be unfair of me to go into the ministry and get married—in those days it was assumed that your wife would go into the ministry with you. So I didn’t want to impose that on a wife who maybe didn’t want to choose that sort of life. I went into psychology after the war.