“Yes you do!” Deb declared with a laugh. “I won’t tell, Dad.”
“I don’t know,” he repeated. “I don’t remember too much about that. But I remember, I remember I used to have one girlfriend I know of. Adeline always used to throw that up to me. ‘You and your French girl!’” He couldn’t recall her name; said she’d been in Nantua.
“So how would you meet them?” I asked him again.
“I don’t know.”
“Would you go into town?”
“Oh, hey, listen,” he said, earnestly. “They were looking for Americans. Oh, hell!”
“Why was that?”
“I don’t know. They wanted us. They liked us. They liked American boys.”
“Were they pretty?”
“Oh, yeah.” He nodded. “Some of them were pretty nice.”
“What would you do?” I asked. “Would you go dancing?”
“No, just walk around . . . I don’t know,” he said.
After we’d talked for about an hour, Mr. Fiala suddenly said he was feeling very tired. He looked very tired. Honestly, he looked half dead. I felt bad, but Deb assured me that her grandfather loved—loved—to talk. A few years earlier, when the French had come to Kewaunee to present him his Legion of Honor, they held a little ceremony at the high school auditorium, hosted by the mayor. Art was supposed to be escorted up to the podium, receive his medal, say thank you, and sit down. Except nobody told him that; instead, he spoke for a half hour. Without notes. He was 100 years old at the time.
We left him to rest for a couple of hours, and returned to find him awake and awaiting us. We talked about a lot of things: how the Army had gotten him hooked on cigarettes for the rest of his life; about the dancing that went on when the armistice took effect; how he’d sailed home on the SS Luckenbach in May, 1919, telling an officer to go to hell when he’d ordered Private Fiala to go work in the ship’s galley; how he’d spent his first night back in America sleeping on a park bench in New York, just because he could. He made his way back to the Midwest, worked for a bit at a candy factory in Chicago (he was on an assembly line where peanuts were coated with chocolate), ran a taxi service in Kewaunee for a while, spent four years in northern Wisconsin just hunting and fishing, living for free at some rich man’s lodge. He was a foreman at the Kewaunee Brewery for a while during Prohibition; it made liquid wort in those years. He told me that in 1920, he bought an old car and turned it into the world’s first camper, so that he and his brother could take it hunting. Sold it four years later to a circus. He brewed chokecherry wine, showed me the recipe; it was written on a piece of Fiala’s Taxi Service stationery. He dated his wife for eight years, married her at age thirty-seven. Eventually, they owned a one-hundred-acre farm; he told me farming was the best thing he ever did. They had one child, a son, Carl. They called him Carlie. Private Fiala said he’d been in the American Legion for so long that they paid his dues for him now; that the secret to his longevity was that he ate peanuts every day. He told me that one of his grandfathers had gotten him drunk at a very young age, and that the other one, whose name had actually been Klutz, had met his end while dumping garbage off a cliff into Lake Michigan. He’d fallen in.
Entertaining as it all was, I couldn’t stop thinking about something that had happened earlier that morning, shortly before we’d stopped for a break. I’d just asked him again how he had come to serve in an engineering unit. “Well,” he’d said, “I asked them to put me in an outfit that’s going over quick. And they just happened to be making up that unit. And that’s why I got into that.”
“Why did you want to go over quick?”
“I don’t know.” He was quiet for a moment. “Cocky,” he said, finally. “I wanted to win the war.” He grew quiet again; there was no sound in the room at that moment but the groaning of the machine pumping oxygen into him. I turned off the camera.
And then, suddenly, without sitting up, he declared, loudly: “Listen! The people behind the battle were just as important as the people in the battle!” He took a few breaths, and continued: “I don’t know why the hell they put me in with the engineers! I didn’t ask them to do it! I wanted to be in the battle, but they put me in with engineering.” It sounded almost as if he were crying.
Tell me, how could I ever forget something like that? Here was a man, for all he knew on his deathbed, thinking back to a war that had ended eight and a half decades earlier, and he’s shouting, almost wailing, his regret, and maybe guilt, that in that war, the Great War, he hadn’t served in combat. It was excruciating to behold; for a moment, I hated myself just for being there. I didn’t press the matter that afternoon, when his spirits seemed to have recovered. We spent our time on other things.
An hour or so more of that and he was tired again. “Who am I that you should come here and talk to me? I’m nothing but a dummy,” he said to me at one point. Yet he didn’t want me to leave, either, said he wished I had come to see him before he’d gotten sick, that he could have told me much more. I couldn’t imagine what more there could be, but I nodded. Just before I turned off the camera, I told him I’d come back and see him when he was feeling better. Even as I said it, though, I imagined I might get a phone call from Deb before I left Wisconsin, inviting me to her grandfather’s funeral.
I didn’t.
He was still alive a week later. And a month later. And a year later. At one point, influenza swept through the home, killing a number of residents. Not him. He rallied, recovered, thrived. And so, nineteen months after I first met him, I returned to Kewaunee to see him again.
He looked great. He’d put on weight; instead of lying flat on his back, he was sitting in a chair, wearing a bright white fishing T-shirt and a blue cardigan sweater. He had on new eyeglasses that seemed to cover half his face, and an enormous baseball cap that announced: US ARMY VETERAN. The only vestige of his previous illness was the oxygen hose under his nose. His son, Carl, who was with him that day, told me his dad didn’t need it anymore, hadn’t for a long time, but that he liked it. I guess no one at the nursing home cared to argue the point with him.
We covered pretty much the same ground we had the first time I’d been there; he elaborated on this point or that. And then something truly amazing happened.
He was telling me once again about their first night at camp in France, when they’d slept in tents and awoke to a heavy April snowfall—they were in the mountains, after all—and how a French farmer had let all 250 of them sleep in his barn. “I was all right, I slept up above. But some of the guys were down with the horses,” he recalled with a wry grin. And then he added: “Say, that reminds me of something I didn’t tell you last time.”
To convey just how remarkable that statement was, and how stunned I was to hear it, I have to start by reiterating something J. Laurence Moffitt had told me the first time I met him: that his long-term memory was excellent, though his short-term memory was failing. Many of the veterans I interviewed—though not Mr. Moffitt—didn’t recognize me the second time I visited (though of course they all had the good grace to fake it); they had completely forgotten our first meeting. Most of them, in fact, couldn’t remember what they had eaten for breakfast that morning, even though they could recall quite vividly things they’d done and said eighty, ninety, a hundred years earlier. That’s the way the human memory works: last in, first out.
But I hadn’t seen Art Fiala in nineteen months. And the last time I had seen him, he’d been desperately ill, so weak he could only speak for an hour or so before he had to go to sleep. And yet, not only had he remembered our earlier visit—that was clear from the first moment I saw him again—but he actually remembered what he had and hadn’t told me before. I couldn’t do that, and I was almost seven decades younger than he. (He was also able to go off on long tangents—some that lasted twenty minutes or so—and somehow always return to the point of departure. Another skill that eludes me.)
“Say, that reminds me of something I didn’t tell you last time.
When we were situated up in that plateau,” he recalled, “I had a little time, and I walked up the mountain farther and I struck a little town, a little town up there. And when I got up on top there, the first thing I noticed, the women had wooden shoes and had a stick across their shoulders carrying two pails of milk going across the road there. And like me, it didn’t take me long to get acquainted with the people there, and they invited me into their home to see what they had there. And did you know that they had their cows in the same room in the house with them? There was a partition there, and you could go in the kitchen and sit there, talk and hear the cows mooing. That’s the way it is. Oh, I’ll tell you, it’s so much different. And there was a guy that used to come up, they had logging, he would come up there with a double wagon of some kind and you know that man would come up there in the morning and go back in the evening with one log. Yes, that’s all they had, a wagon and two parts and got that log on there. But just think of it, you work all day for that.”
So Private Fiala goes off to France, and no sooner does he get there than he stumbles into an Alpine Brigadoon. That was him; and that was his war.
He passed away seven months later, just before Thanksgiving. He died where he’d been born, where he’d lived for just about every one of his 106 years, not far from every place he’d ever spent any considerable stretch of time. Except one, of course. Were it not for the Great War, he almost certainly would have never traveled to a place so distant, and strange, as France was to him.
“The first time I went into a restaurant [there],” he’d told me during that second visit, “we didn’t know what to ask for. We started crowing like a chicken. And finally they know we wanted eggs. That’s the way we got it.”
“You just sat down in a restaurant and started crowing like a chicken?” I asked. “But what if they’d brought you a chicken instead?”
“Well,” he said, “that would have been OK, too.”
6
The Forgotten Generation
AT SOME POINT IN THE COURSE of reading this book, you may find yourself wondering: What’s it like to hang out with a centenarian?
If so: I may be able to help you with that. In the process of tracking down and interviewing every American veteran of World War I that I could find, I had the opportunity to spend time with dozens of centenarians, including several supercentenarians (that is, people 110 years of age or older); as a group, their median age was 107 years old. Let me share just a bit of what I’ve learned.
Now, several societal imperatives—including political correctness, a general taboo against generalization, and the powerful writer’s ethos that urges us to counter the conventional wisdom at every turn—demand that I tell you that centenarians are just like everyone else, only a bit older. However: I cannot. It isn’t true. In fact, it’s absurd. Centenarians belong to an elite and extremely small club, one composed entirely of men and women who have done something that the overwhelming majority of us will never be able to do. What’s more, they did it without even trying. How can you try to live to be 100? You can’t. Maybe you can try to live to be very old, but I’d wager that the effort, and the accompanying anxiety, would shave off more years than will simply leaving the egg yolks in your omelet. But these folks—not only did they live to be 100 and more, they passed most of those years in an era when cigarettes were believed to soothe your throat, red meat was an essential part of every meal, and seat belts were nonexistent. Many of their mothers smoked, drank alcohol, and consumed caffeine while carrying them in utero, too.
So no, centenarians are not like anyone else. It’s not easy to live to be 100 or older. At present, only one living American in about 4,400 has made it.
Getting to know the very oldest among us forces you to reexamine your notions of what it means to be old. Before I started this project, I imagined it might be very difficult to have a conversation with any particular person that age, based on the octogenarians and nonagenarians I happen to know. When I finally did start finding and meeting veterans, I was astonished to discover that I was actually able to talk with them about 90 percent of the time. I won’t say they were all good conversations—there was one fellow at the Soldiers Home and Colony in Orting, Washington, for instance, who kept asking me how the hell I thought he was supposed to remember things that had happened almost a century ago—but still: 90 percent! I don’t even succeed at making toast 90 percent of the time.
My mistake was, once again, in assuming that centenarians were just like everyone else, only older. They are, in fact, different from the rest of us from birth, and probably from conception. It is encoded in their genes that, barring things like war and unfortunate jaywalking-related incidents, they will live much, much longer than their peers. Almost all of them had parents who lived to be very old, if not quite as old as they were; one fellow, who was then 105, told me that both his mother and her sister lived to be 109. They are impervious to the things that take down the rest of us—Alzheimer’s, dementia, aggressive cancers. They do not get colds. They do not have to take a lot of medicine. Ever met one of those annoying people who brag that they’ve never been sick a day in their life? They’re probably lying, but a centenarian who says so might just be telling you the truth. They also age much more slowly than the rest of us do. They look a great deal younger than they are—decades younger. It is as if their inner clocks run much more slowly than ours do. A year to us is nine or ten months to them.
Nothing I have just said applies to every last one of the centenarians I met. That fellow in Orting, for instance, had dementia, or so his caregiver told me after the unpleasant encounter. Frankly, I think he would have been a jerk anyway. (Did I mention he called me an idiot, too?) Some of them had survived cancer or other potentially terminal diseases, some did take medication, and a few did look their age, or pretty close. However, if you’re a person who really needs to be able to break out an unassailably true generalization, say, at a cocktail party, I can tell you this: Every last centenarian I met was hard of hearing. At least. So if you’re reading this and you plan to live to be 100, I can pretty much assure you that while you are teleporting yourself to Neptune and storing your head overnight in a jar, plan on doing so with hearing aids in your ears. Of course, by then they might be so small as to be barely noticeable. So there’s that.
When I started finding and meeting veterans, I took a bit of a crash course in gerontology, the study of human aging. I read books, spoke to experts like Dr. Thomas T. Perls, of the New England Centenarian Study (the folks to whom Laurence Moffitt left his body), and Dr. L. Stephen Coles, of the California-based Gerontology Research Group. I learned quite a bit. For instance, although there are more female than male centenarians, male centenarians are more likely to have their mental faculties largely intact. No one is sure why this is so. No one is sure about much else when it comes to living that long, either. In fact, surprisingly little research has been done on the subject at all. Meanwhile, scientists keep studying vexing questions like whether or not reading makes you more informed, or consuming alcohol tends to make men and women appear more attractive to each other.
So I undertook my own study, by which I mean that I asked everyone I spoke with for the secret to their longevity. As you might expect, a lot of them offered up some version of Anthony Pierro’s and Laurence Moffitt’s claims that they don’t sweat the small stuff, or the big stuff. Or anything. I’m inclined to take them at their word, in part because a 107-year-old man really doesn’t need to lie to anybody, and in part because the people I met and interviewed were, almost to a person, extremely stoic. And they had very good reasons not to be. In addition to surviving the war, which often presented enough horrors in a single day to give the most jaded soul a severe case of posttraumatic stress disorder, they came of age in economically precarious times—the Panic of 1907, and coincident recession, cost millions their jobs and nearly broke Wall Street—without minimum wage, child labor, or workplace safety statutes. Jim Crow laws were unassailable. The co
ncepts of “civil rights” and “social justice” concerned but a few quixotic souls. The infant mortality rate was quite high; children often died of things that today can be cured with one or two pills. So did adults. They also regularly died from fires, overwork, drinking befouled water, and breathing in things you don’t even want to think about. Schools were overcrowded and underfunded—even more so than today—which was OK, actually, because a great many children had to drop out long before graduating in order to work so that their families might starve a little less quickly.
Then they went off to war.
And then, if they were lucky enough to come home, the fun really began.
Ever since 1998, when Tom Brokaw published his first book, it’s been fashionable to sing the praises of what he dubbed the “Greatest Generation,” the people who grew up during the Great Depression, then went off to fight, and win, World War II. Now, I’m certainly not going to denigrate, in any way, their achievements, but you only have to go back one generation to see that assigning a superlative like “greatest” to any of them is a dicey proposition at best. The parents of the Greatests—let’s call them the “Forgotten Generation,” since they are—grew up with all of the hardships I just listed, then went off to get the scalp of Mr. Kaiser Man, fighting in muddy, filthy trenches, battling tedium and lice as they ducked bullets, shells, and poison gas. If they made it through all that and managed to get back home, they often found their jobs gone, their farms laid to waste, their houses reclaimed by the bank. The GI Bill? Sorry; not until 1944. At least they could get drunk—for another year, anyway, until Prohibition outlawed that old reliable coping mechanism. By the time that was repealed, they were waist-deep in the aforementioned Depression, scrambling to feed, clothe, and shelter the Greatests. Who had time for a beer?
The Last of the Doughboys Page 15