Summer 1954 Baltimore

The last posting for my grandfather the Colonel before his retirement post was in Baltimore. Coming home from Korea, he was put in charge of the records center for all enemy POWs at Fort Holabird. We journeyed north from Chattanooga to spend the summer in the row house my grandparents had found in Baltimore, some distance from the post. Out behind the house was a garden with corn, peppers and beans. We children were put to bed upstairs at our usual bedtime, which at the Baltimore latitude in Daylight Savings Time meant before sunset. We protested. It did no good.

Fishing with the Colonel

When I was eleven, my grandfather the Colonel took me to Savannah beach for a fishing trip, just the two of us. My grandparents had just moved back to Augusta for my grandfather’s retirement, and my mother and grandmother were occupied with cleaning up the house from the tenants who had lived there for the years Boozle was posted elsewhere. Menfolk were an encumbrance for such undertakings, so we were dispatched to the beach for a male bonding weekend.

We spent hours on a pier dangling our lines in the ocean, with little result except for one small fish I insisted on placing in our cooler. Then I went swimming. My grandfather, who could deny his grandchildren nothing, rented a float for me to paddle around in the surf. I stroked it out into the calmer water beyond the breakers, and drowsed away an hour or two. Not liking to squint into the sun, I stayed on my belly, the fish belly white of my back exposed to the August sun. My grandfather finally managed to get me to shore, and we walked back to the motel. My back was already on fire, and I soaked in the freshwater fountain in the motel courtyard, cooling my reddening shoulders and back. My grandfather, beginning to be alarmed, bought some Noxema cream to spread on my back. It did no good, and by morning, after a sleepless night, blisters the size of half dollar coins were popping up on my shoulders.

The trip back to Augusta was long and agonizing, for me due to the pain of my scorched back, for my grandfather by the thought that he had failed to protect me from myself. The Colonel was absolutely devoted to all of us grandchildren, and his mental and emotional pain was at least as painful as my physical suffering.

Days of lying on the couch in an upstairs room, belly down with cloths soaked in tea spread across my blistered back followed our return, with my mother and grandmother in constant attendance on me. My grandfather hovered in the background, suffering such guilt that my grandmother refrained from chastising him after the initial shock of seeing my back.

Fifty years later, my grandparents and my mother are gone, and the story of my sunburned back I can relate with no sense of pain. I am sure that until his death, my grandfather remembered that day with undiminished pain. Parenthood and grandparenthood have made  me understand what he felt. Where love is felt so strongly, responsibility for pain remains long after the event.

From Korea and Japan

the observations of Franklin Walter Reese, Colonel, USAR

My grandfather, my mother’s father, of whom I have posted here before, was posted to first Korea, then Japan the year following Japan’s defeat in World War II. My grandmother and my aunt followed, but not in six months, as they thought they would, but in eighteen months, the very end of 1947. By that time the Colonel was in Tokyo, and eventually they were billeted in a very comfortable Japanese house, complete with garden, maid and gardener.

For the eighteen months before the rest of his family arrived, my grandfather was mostly in Korea, a place he despised on sight, and only gradually came to know enough about to understand. On his departure, my grandmother gave him a thick ledger book, and commanded him to record his daily life, thoughts and descriptions of places and events, so that eventually she could share something of the time he would spend apart from her. They had never been apart more than a matter of weeks, or a month or two, in all their years in the army.

Growing up, I only knew sketchy details of all this, principally my grandmother’s fond memories of the house in Tokyo, and her exploration of the shops and stores of that rapidly rebuilding city. It was through the efforts of a family friend that the journal finally was turned into a printed booklet, distributed in 1990 to the family at large.

Reading the journal has been a priceless gift, a view of my grandfather more complete than I could have imagined. I loved my grandfather, as everybody in the family did, especially the grandchildren. We thought we knew our grandfather, but the journal immeasurably expanded our appreciation of his intellect, his language skills, and the depth of his compassion, understanding and moral values.

The journal is also in many places hysterically funny. Funny quite on purpose, for humor was my grandfather’s shield and buckler against loneliness and the squalor of life in the third world, which Korea at least certainly was. There are many stories in the journal, but some of the shorter impressions and funny bits are collected at the end, following the entry for my grandmother and aunt’s arrival. I will post a few here.

From his voyage on the transport ship:

The “monster” as we called the toilet in our cabin. From time to time a large amount of air collected in the line and when one stepped on he pedal to flush the bowl, the air would release suddenly, shooting the water from the bowl in a geyser several feet high. Most alarming the first few times it happens. One had to learn to sneak up stealthily on the foot pedal, jab it quickly, and retreat until Old Faithful subsided. Note: it must have been more annoying to the females.

In Korea:

The way the Korean plumbers ripped out all the Benjos* in the hotel to replace  them with western toilets, then found out they didn’t have the latter – the resultant suffering by the hotel population.

*Basically a hole in the floor opening into a trough, with no seat. You “hover” and pee. Or the other.

Yeah, plumbing and bathroom concerns were much on my grandfather’s mind.

Two GIs who visited a Korean friend for a convivial evening fueled by much saki. They went for a walk after dinner, and while crossing the Han River the GIs decided it would be a lot of fun to drop the Korean off the bridge into the river…which they did. He was not injured, and managed to crawl out safely, but was quite puzzled at the actions of his good American friends.

So, the next day he went to an MP officer to complain. The officer looked at him pityingly and then said, “You should be greatly honored. In America, it is the custom in fraternities, clubs and colleges to initiate new members in this way. The two soldiers were making you a member of their club, and you are now a very close brother to all American soldiers.”

The Korean was so gratified by this explanation that he implemented the same “initiation” in a Korean club to which he belonged, and for several weeks it was quite common to see Koreans solemnly dropping their “brothers” off the bridge into the river. The American sense of humor prevails.

Many more stories, but that will have to do for now.

I miss my grandfather, but I am so thankful for his journal.

February’s End

One more day, courtesy of a Presidential election year, and February 2008 will be gone. Spring is just over the March horizon. February has many memorable days for me to observe. I have commented on the birthdays, but there is one more, for my late grandmother Nana, that I still remember each year.

On February 17, 1903, Thelma Wilmarth was born to a large family in Pennsylvania. For 93 years she raised children, grandchildren, cooked, sewed, packed up and moved from Army post to Army post, and loved without let or hindrance all her family, down to great-grandchildren. On a cold and blustery Good Friday in 1996, family from the four points of the compass gathered at Arlington to see Nana’s ashes lowered into the grave already holding our grandfather Boozle, Colonel to Nana’s Lady.

We then went to the Fort Myer Officer’s Club for a lunch hosted by an old Army friend of my grandparents. We drove past the chapel where forty years before, my Aunt Barbara had walked out under a archway of crossed swords with her new husband, my Uncle Tommy, then a young Army officer. He eventually retired a full colonel, and that day they both sat again in the club where their wedding reception had been held.

Nana would have liked the coming full circle that marked that day. Memory is what we have in every family, a personal history and mythology that defines us. Looking backwards we find our direction forward.

I wonder what March will bring?

The Colonel’s Lady: Thelma Wilmarth Reese Merchant

What do you call a woman who can bear children, raise them with love and unflagging energy, cook like a first-rate chef, sew well enough to provide her daughters and herself with clothes that looked tailor-made, go to work when her husband was overseas, love without reservation her extended family, her husband, her daughters, her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and do it all with an unlimited well of good-humor? In my family, we called this woman “Nana.”

I have called her “The Colonel’s Lady,” and here she is with her Colonel, Franklin Walter Reese, USAR.

The occasion was their 25th wedding anniversary. They would mark another 24 years before my grandfather Boozle died of cancer. Their love was deep, powerful, occasionally full of laughter, very, very rarely with sadness or discord.

It is a running joke in our family that Nana was “the General” to Boozle’s colonel, but her generalship owed little to iron discipline, chain of command and punishment detail. Nana built her strategy on what she knew her loved ones most desired, so long as it was not to their detriment, then marshalled all the forces at her command to carry the day for us. No general on a battlefield was more determined; no foe could slacken her fierce partisanship on our behalf. She loved unconditionally, and was loved in equal measure by her family.Nana lived on beyond the Colonel’s death, married again to Fred Merchant, a sweet man who never stopped smiling when in her company, as though he couldn’t believe his good fortune. Nana had that effect on men she loved. But she told them that the good fortune was hers. They loved her for that, as well.When, after the surrender of Japan, my grandfather was posted to Korea, and later to Tokyo, Nana sent him off with perfectly packed trunks and a blank, leather-bound journal which she commanded him to fill with his daily activities and thoughts, until she and my aunt Barbara could join him, once their turn for family transport came. They both thought that would be within six months, or less. It turned out to be eighteen months. Nana coped, keeping a household going in limbo, seeing my aunt off to school each day, occupying herself with household minutiae and writing letters to Boozle.

Reading the journal, printed up by a family friend years later, I realized how lost and lonely my grandfather was without his wife, without her boundless energy, love and support. Almost every entry shows this sadness. Along with this overarching melancholy, however, there are literate and penetrating observations on everything he saw or thought. Nana knew her Colonel. I am so grateful for this window into his life, and she made it possible.

Both my grandparents have been gone for some years now, but their love for each other and their family still forms the foundation of our lives. We laugh at the stories we tell each other, and we warm ourselves before these memories as we would before a fire in winter. I love them both, still, though they are gone, and as I get older I realize more and more why my grandfather showed such devotion to his Thelly. She was the organizing force and enabling source of love for him, and for all of us. If I could give her one more hug, I would.

The Colonel at the Tip-Top

The Colonel, my grandfather, had a long retirement, beginning at age 55. Not quite making the jump from Colonel to Brigadier in the downsizing Army post-Korea, Boozle had his parade and retirement party early in 1956.

At the time, he and my grandmother Nana were living in a rambling old house on Monte Sano Avenue in Augusta, Ga. “Mount of Health” Avenue was located on a slight elevation from the lower, river bottom downtown district of Augusta. The name was a relic of days of malaria and Yellow Fever, when elevation was thought to be a protection from disease. Lots of old trees, old homes, little clusters of shops scattered through the neighborhoods. Down the hill from their house, Nana and Boozle had access to one of these clusters of little shops in a mini-business district at the end of Central Avenue.

There was Pee-Wee’s hamburger joint, to which we grandchildren loved to walk with Boozle, delighting in greasy, griddle-fried hambugers further heated in the bun in large sandwich steamers. Lots of french fries sodden with unhealthy, several days-old grease to go with cold fountain Cokes, topping off the meal. Yum. After restoring us to Nana, who exclaimed “Why do you take the children to that greasy spoon, Franklin,” we would flop on couches and chairs in a bloated stupor for the rest of the afternoon, our bodies slowly absorbing the delicious, but barely digestible, lunch.

In the evening, after we had been force-marched to bed by the General (Nana, who, like any Army wife, always ranked her husband), Boozle sometimes escaped to an hour or so at the Tip-Top. Down the tree-lined street, past the tall cylindrical water tower with the green, moldy streaks of overflow water around the top, Boozle made his way to hold court at Sneaky’s Tip-Top Grille. Actually, I think the “Sneaky” was a later addition to the title, marking a change of ownership.

Each evening, neighborhood men, including some of the shop owners whose businesses had been shuttered for the evening, sat around battered, cigarette-burned tables and drank beer and ate peanuts, talking of events of the day and trading reminiscences-most of the regulars were Boozle’s age or older. There was Pee-Wee, his grille cooled and scraped, the doors of his little joint locked. A nameless man, a cobbler, who was the oldest, nodded in the corner. Several other men watched their beers warm and the frost melt on the mugs. And there was the Colonel, my grandfather, strolling in with the air of one who was accustomed to carry a swagger stick, and review the troops. The most gregarious and gently courteous of men (a gentle man, as well as a gentleman), he would greet each man by name, smiling under his trim moustache (replaced briefly after a European vacation by a gray beard.)

One day, after a previous day had been spent in a discussion of the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (consensus was at the Tip-Top that Truman had saved many American lives by giving the go-ahead), Boozle brought in a souvenir of his service in the occupation of Japan. He and Nana had toured Hiroshima in early 1948, after Nana and my aunt had joined Boozle in Tokyo. Boozle, probably in violation of regulations, had picked up a twisted piece of metal, which he determined after much puzzlement was a bicycle pedal, warped and re-forged by the heat of disintegrating atoms. This pedal he brought back home, and on this day in the Tip-Top, he displayed it for his friends. The old men were hushed at the sight of this exemplar of unimaginable destructive force, and the forever different world in which their children and grandchildren would live.

The old cobbler reached out to touch it, and Boozle handed it to him. Of all the men at the Tip-Top that day, the cobbler was most awed by this simple little artifact, and seeing his fascination, my grandfather impulsively gave the old man the pedal. Smiling broadly, the cobbler said he would proudly display this memento of history in his shop, and tell his customers of how he had come by it, given by “the smartest man I ever knew,” for Boozle was a giant among the gentry of the Tip-Top. Boozle read widely and with attention. He could discuss many subjects. In the Tip-Top, Boozle was King.

We should all be Kings somewhere.

The Colonel Retires

My grandfather, the Colonel, retired in 1956, soon after the New Year. He had 20 years active duty in addition to a number of years in the reserves before he was called to duty. He was 55 years old. The promotional ladder had a very high step from Colonel to Brigadier, and in the downsizing following the Korean War, Boozle didn’t make the step. So, it was time for a parade, and, true to Army life, a hell of a party.

My grandmother, Nana, was experienced in staging parties, and this one was going to be memorable. Boozle’s last post was Fort Gordon, in Augusta, Georgia. Years before, in a previous posting, they had decided that Augusta was the place for retirement, so a house on Monte Sano Avenue was purchased, and kept as rental property in the years following, awaiting the time of retirement. The house was 90 years old, two stories, high ceilings, large rooms, formal stair case, with a broad upstairs hall and large, open rooms downstairs perfect for a party. That January the four bedrooms were fully booked with family members from across the country.

There were cases of PX beer stacked in the pantry, there were cases of liquor bought across the Savannah River in South Carolina (cheaper than Georgia), and there was a bartender, and a maid who had worked for Nana previously and was schooled by my grandmother in food prep and presentation. Nana, known to the family as “the General,” (Army wives always ranked their husbands, it’s a rule) had prepared her most definitive Party.

After the preliminaries, the parade and speeches and presentation of awards, plaques and other folderol at Fort Gordon early in the day, the Main Event got underway that night. The crowd kept coming, the rooms were jammed, the bartender was sweating like it was July rather than January, and the food never stopped, nor did the booze. Brass and ribbons glittered and flashed, party dresses swirled and there were ungodly lines for the bathrooms; in short, the Party rocked, although that was not a word my grandparents recognized or would have used. On the front porch after dark, cigarettes glowed in the night, as guests leaned on the rail and chatted in the cool night. Gradually, listing guests, propped by only slightly more sober spouses or friends, collapsed into cars and departed.

I was there. Most of the evening I lurked in the kitchen with my sisters and cousins, getting under foot and peering out the kitchen door past the bartender, whose bar spanned the doorway into the front hall. We were not fools. Going out amongst that throng could have gotten children trampled.

After the last guest wandered down the front walk to their waiting car, our respective parents, breathing heavily, gathered us up, bathing us in the odors of bourbon, scotch, beer, perfume and cigarette smoke. The maid and bartender were making a sweep of the downstairs rooms, filling bags with the flotsam and jetsam of the party. We were bundled upstairs and put to bed. Owing to the number of family attending, a large folding bed had been rented for the upstairs landing under a front window overlooking the porch. Here I was to share sleeping arrangements with the putative honoree, my newly retired grandfather. He had been exiled from his own bed in favor of one of my great-aunts, who was bunked with Nana.

Now, as the night deepened and so did the rumble of snores, my grandfather apparently was taken with the need to relieve himself of the whiskey and other beverages imbibed earlier. He slowly began to lever himself out of the low, creaky folding bed, waking me. I mumbled to him, but he did not answer. It was another somnambulistic event. As we later re-constructed his path, had he been in his own bed, he would have ended up in the bathroom,.

Unfortunately, that path led, in the upstairs landing, directly into the railing six feet above the stairs. I still remember the crash and clatter of my grandfather landing on the staircase after pitching over the railing. It was loud. It woke up even the partied-out adults. After a moment my grandmother came rushing out of her room, shouting, “Franklin, Franklin, what are you doing?” When my grandmother called Boozle “Franklin” it was similar to my mother calling me by my whole name. Boozle was in trouble. A low groan was my grandfather’s answer from the dark depths of the stairwell, and lights switched on to reveal him slowly standing up, apparently uninjured save for a few cuts on his forehead and one knee. Nana fussed and patched him up, upbraiding him for his thoughtless behaviour. “You have terrified poor Skipper (that was my nickname at the time, I can’t believe I am revealing it after these many years), look at the poor kid, it’s all right, Skipper, Boozle didn’t mean to scare you, did you, Franklin?”

“Oh, certainly not, Thelly (her name was Thelma),” turning to me, “Sorry, guy, Boozle just did something silly, don’t worry.”

Actually, the next day at the Post Hospital, the doctor found that the Colonel had broken two ribs and jammed one shoulder, which accounted for the groans he could not stifle for the rest of the night, as I listened, wide awake until just before morning. Nana was horrified, of course, but didn’t quite forgive my grandfather for scaring me, either. A retiree is without honor in his own home, apparently.

Boozle and staircases were somewhat incompatible, from those early days with the bookshelves on the landing, to the retirement party. Eventually my grandparents bought a one-story home, and things were less exciting at night. I expect they both were glad it was so. I was, too.

My Grandfather the Colonel

My grandfather, Col. Franklin Walter Reese, USAR. His grandchildren, starting with me, called him “Boozle.” The story about that name later. The picture here is of FWR after retirement, while travelling through Europe space-available on service aircraft. This would be around 1957-59, when he was often mistaken for Ernest Hemingway.The photo, in fact, was his passport photo for those years.

My grandparents, Franklin and Thelma, were the heroes of their grandchildren, islands of unconditional love throughout our various childhoods. They were also great idiosyncratic characters of matchless humor, sense of adventure and zest for living.

FWR was also a raconteur and entertainer who could keep his friends and family in stitches. Whether telling with deadpan humor of falling into a glass-fronted bookshelf on the upstairs landing whilst sleepwalking, or acting out jokes with appropriate accents, expressions and dramatic pauses, Boozle was good value at any party. And during twenty years of active duty in the Army, there were many parties. I don’t know if the Army has a bugle call for the cocktail hour, as they do for reveille, taps or other times of the day, but they ought to. Especially during the forties and fifties, the U. S. Army was a place of hard drinking, and Boozle was the man for the hour. Cocktail, that is.

Now, his name. During WWII Boozle was stationed in D.C., and my father, after marrying my mother and impregnating her with me, was shipped off by the U. S. Navy to the South Pacific. While awaiting my arrival, Mother lived with her parents, so my first home was with Boozle and Nana, and my Aunt Barbara, still in school.

The “Nana” is fairly standard, but my infant self was responsible for christening my grandfather “Boozle.” Each night, on first arriving home, FWR made straight for my crib, where I was usually still awake, fussing and doing baby stuff.

My grandfather would lean over the crib, making circling motions with his hand, forefinger extended, descending towards my little belly, sounding out buzzing sounds as he homed in on my belly button: “Bzzz, bzzzz, bzzzzzz…boozle!” and he would gently poke my belly. So, naturally, my name for him became “Boozle.” And all the family adopted the name. Something about it seemed so right for the Colonel.

I don’t remember this, of course. I was a prodigy in my family’s eyes, being first child and grandchild on all sides, but eating and pooping and sleeping pretty much occupied my days. Which is why the curious incident of Boozle and the bookshelf in the nighttime didn’t register with me. I heard that story a lot, along with the Boozle! story and how foul the soy formula I had to eat smelled, among other trivia.

Especially after a more strenuous than usual cocktail hour, Boozle was prone to sleepwalk in the night. Sometimes his automatic pilot worked, but, other times…there was the tumble down the stairs into the bookshelf on the landing. My grandfather awoke amidst a pile of books, shattered glass and spattered blood. My grandmother scolded him severely while binding up his wounds and accused him of waking the baby-me. Apparently this was as great a sin in those days as when I had my own babies around the house.

Boozle was a bit more concerned about the bloodstains on his books, which he had acquired with great care and bitter expense during the Depression. Boozle always loved to read, and his letters from where ever he was posted were wonderful to read, funny and literate and brimming with his spirit.

The books were carefully cleaned, the bookshelf repaired and became in time a resource for the grandchildren whenever we visited Nana and Boozle during vacations, at posts from Washington, D.C. to Augusta, GA. Book-loving and bibulous, but always first and foremost a grandfather. I hope I am half as good a one as he was.