Even This I Get to Experience

by Norman Lear

  But as part of that greatest generation, I have to acknowledge how much more we had going for us that contributed to our Pearl Harbor response as compared to, say, this generation’s burst of patriotic fervor at 9/11, which petered out when a war that couldn’t be adequately explained—and has been overwhelmingly regretted—suddenly enveloped us. Soon, too, we were drowning in cheesy rhetoric aimed at restoring our feelings for the old red, white, and blue, but as soulless as the flag pins that bloomed on DC lapels.

  I won’t argue that we Americans loved our country more in 1941, or that we love our country less today. But I will say that we were far more in love with America and far more connected to the idea of America than we are now. The good ship USA had not foundered as often and as publicly then and so we were surer of our country, believing more in its propensity to do good in the world. We had frequent reminders of our history and our values. In some junior high schools and in virtually all high schools we were taught civics. The news that came to us by way of radio was unrushed and in context. News departments were not pressed to be profit centers, and that held true when television came along just a few years later. And so rape, murder, and other horrors did not lead the news; our senses were not assaulted across the dial by an unholy array of shouters hurling social and political invective at one another, and the news was not offered up in opinionated bumper sticker sound bites.

  We saluted the flag and recited the Pledge of Allegiance every morning (before the words “under God” were gratuitously added to it). There were lots of parades, too: celebrations of America on Independence Day, Armistice Day, Memorial Day, and Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays (observed independently then, jointly now as the generic Presidents’ Day). Those parades, most of them small but no less proud, were replete with college and high school bands, military bands when available, World War I veterans in full force, a diminishing group of Spanish-American War vets, and, of course, the flag. Vivid in my mind are memories of my zayde standing with me at the curb, holding my hand and squeezing it tightly as the flag passed by and the martial music played—“Stars and Stripes Forever” was his favorite. When I looked up at him, there’d be that inevitable tear running down his cheek.

  • • •

  I TALKED TO MY FOLKS about enlisting a half dozen times over the next several months, each time bowing to my mother’s pleas not to. The country didn’t really need me. It needed college graduates more, needed lawyers more. Oops, so she forgot I didn’t want to be a lawyer. Well, then, they needed whatever I wanted to be more. Couldn’t I see how this upset her? She had to get off the phone. Her stomach was acting up again from all the aggravation. “Here, talk to your father.”

  H.K. by then was himself a part of the war effort, scouring the Connecticut countryside to locate tool-and-die makers, metalworkers, and small factories in the hinterlands and bringing them small-parts work from major Midwest plants with federal contracts to make heavy equipment for the military. Aircraft manufacturers, for example, needing hundreds of small parts they couldn’t spare the time or the specialists to produce themselves, contracted out to factories that would be brought to their attention. These middlemen were known as ten-percenters, that being their commission on the deals they brought in. Herman K. Lear was their man in Connecticut, and he was doing well. And by then he knew some retired generals who were working for the War Department (renamed the Department of Defense in 1947). So, not to worry, H.K. assured me, one phone call to General So-and-so and he’d get me a desk job right here in the States.

  After nine months I stopped talking about it and enlisted without telling anyone. They learned of it a week later. You may wonder how I could have taken so long to enlist, given what I described as my need to serve my country, but, then, how amorphous and faceless was “my country” as compared to the beseeching face of the woman who gave birth to me, was extolled by my father as a saint, and had once suffered a goiter? When she heard of my enlistment she went straight to bed. It was like I’d stabbed her in the heart, she said. She couldn’t even find the strength to ask into what branch of the military I had enlisted. It was the Army Air Forces. That pleased my father, because he knew just who to call to assure me of that desk job in the States, now “maybe even close to home.” It didn’t occur to me that his ability to secure this “desk job” was just another of his pipe dreams, and I begged him not to make that phone call as strongly as my mother had begged me to stay in college.

  • • •

  HAVING ENLISTED IN SEPTEMBER, I was called up for service in early November 1942 and sent to Atlantic City for basic training. Thousands of us were stationed in the ocean-side hotels along the boardwalk. Gambling and casinos didn’t come to AC until 1978, so we passed our time watching training films, taking instruction, and working out in the various hotel ballrooms. We drilled and marched on the boardwalk.

  Despite my new uniform with its Army Air Forces shoulder patch, I still felt like a pretend soldier, drilling above the beach, the ocean on one side and the other side flush with stores and entertainment emporiums now courting tens of thousands of GIs. Coursing up and down from my room on the sixteenth floor and trotting as instructed through a hotel lobby to join my platoon, I felt as silly as I thought I must look. When I tried to put a positive spin on this choice of unmilitary surroundings, I saw it as a measure of how thoroughly every segment of our society was mobilized to participate in World War II.

  Before long I was sent to Scott Field in Illinois (an hour’s ride from St. Louis, Missouri) to be trained as a radio operator. I had enlisted to become a pilot—it was right there in my papers—so I spoke to every high-ranking officer I could find about this mistake. I was told that my next stop would be Laredo, Texas, for in-flight gunnery training.

  My memories of Scott Field include learning Morse code and meeting two fellow GIs: Wally Kuflick, who had no eyelashes because he pulled them out in class, often as we watched him; and another private from somewhere in the South whose name I’ve mercifully forgotten, who in one fell swoop alerted me like nothing I’d ever read or heard before to the issue of race in America. I was on line to get into the mess hall when I heard this jovial, pleasant-looking guy, five or six men behind me, say something about having played “Nigger baseball” back home. There wasn’t a chance that a black guy might have overheard this, since desegregation in the military didn’t begin until the midfifties. I couldn’t have been the only GI to be startled by the expression, but no one could have been more sickened by it, especially as described. The game was played by a few white boys in a car with the rear right window open, driving through a black neighborhood, looking for a man or boy on a bicycle. When they sighted one, the car would come from behind to pass him on the left, and a baseball bat would shoot out of the open window to clip the rider on the back of his head. Nigger baseball.

  I’d give anything to add that I belted the private, or at the least chewed his ass off. Instead, I held back and just felt nauseated.

  When our radio training concluded we boarded a troop train to Laredo. Most of the men traveled in regular seats, but a dozen or so of us were lucky enough to draw berths. At about three A.M. I was lying down, dressed and reading, when we stopped at Texarkana, bordering Arkansas and Texas. The train emptied in a flash when we saw a group of women wearing USO aprons serving coffee and doughnuts on the station platform. I can’t be sure we GIs fully appreciated the support, affection, and respect we were being shown at every turn wherever we were stationed or transported. It was just an everyday manifestation of the 360-degree, wall-to-wall war effort. I haven’t known anything like it since and it warms me more than I can say to remember it now.

  This stopover in Texarkana is memorable for another reason—in a phrase extremely popular at the time, it was a “Lucky Strike Extra.” One of the USO women had a daughter helping her, nineteen or so and delicious. She had never seen a troop train, and with my lower berth twinkling like
a star in the corner of my mind, I offered to take her aboard for a peek. The entire stopover could not have been more than half an hour, but that was enough time, coffee and doughnuts aside, for that young woman to contribute to the war effort.

  Note: This lickety-split assignation was not all my doing. I was not—never have been—a lickety-split man with the ladies. The girl, caught up as much as her mother in the how-can-I-serve emotion of the moment, was simply doing her part as a patriot.

  • • •

  WHILE I CONTINUED to talk to the top brass in Laredo about my stated intention when I enlisted, I learned to handle a 50-caliber machine gun. From a seat behind the pilot of a single-engine plane I fired at a plastic target trailing some hundred feet behind another small plane. I passed muster and went from radio operator to radio operator–gunner, and I made sergeant. It was only when I received the orders for my next post that I learned someone had finally heard me. I was being transferred to the University of Buffalo—where the Air Force had set up a College Training Department (CTD) on the campus—for pilot training.

  Before we take leave of Laredo, there is one brief, repulsive memory that I haven’t managed to expunge. A bunch of us GIs heard that there was a tent show in Nuevo Laredo, the town across the border. I don’t specifically recall, but I’m sure I knew what I was going to see and—for shame—went anyway. The tent was the size of a two-car garage, it was a blisteringly hot summer day, and there must have been fifty or more GIs in attendance, pressing and jostling to get a better view. The show consisted of two women and a small horse, and whatever you can imagine taking place with that cast of characters. Yes, whatever you can imagine.

  • • •

  IN BUFFALO we learned to fly in an AT-6 single-engine trainer aircraft, one of the most highly regarded worker planes in the history of aviation. While the Air Force thought us too green to solo, we did get to do it all with an instructor at the end of our term, an afternoon I will never forget.

  One of the two best friends I made in the service was Jimmy Gorman, a great-looking, singularly Irish lad with blue eyes and jet-black hair. I had a full head of black hair and blue eyes also, and when we were together most people thought my mother could have come from Ireland, too. That, of course, pleased the gnawing sliver of me that persisted in feeling himself an outsider.

  One night toward the end of our training, Jimmy and I were double-dating at the Circus Bar, a rotating merry-go-round cocktail lounge atop the Statler Hotel in Buffalo. Jimmy had fixed me up on a blind date with an Irish lass by the name of Helen O’Leary. Of course the joke of the evening was that if Helen and I were to marry, she would become Helen O’Leary Lear. In our dress uniforms Jimmy and I were a striking pair, the girls we were with were extremely pretty, and this could have been the very first time I thought of myself as good looking. Fit and slender, too, because the Air Force had us running five to six miles each morning wherever we were stationed. No memory in my long past is clearer than that of the four of us sitting at the edge of the Circus Bar as it slowly turned above the city, sipping our Southern Comfort and basking in one another’s presence. I have tried all my life since to understand what I did next.

  In a pause between laughs, I got up and walked to a pay phone visible from our table. Although I hadn’t talked to her in well over a year, I remembered Charlotte Rosen’s number and phoned her, person-to-person collect, in West Hartford, Connecticut. She picked up and, just as happened the first time I called her, the delight in her voice was unmistakable when the operator asked if she would accept a collect call from Norman Lear in Buffalo, New York.

  “Yes, of course,” she exclaimed.

  It took no more than a few minutes to tell her what I was doing in Buffalo and to learn that she and her folks were contemplating moving to Florida. Then, with tear-filled eyes and a misty view of Jimmy and the two girls on the merry-go-round bar oh so slowly coming into view, I heard myself ask, “Want to come up to Buffalo and get married?”

  There wasn’t so much as an “Oh, my God,” not even a “Really?” Her response was instantaneous: “Yes!” If I were writing fiction here, I might describe the moment as dreamlike. But it wasn’t. I knew what I had done. I just had—and to this day have—no idea why.

  A few more phone calls following the historic one, and plans for the wedding were set. Her folks and mine—who had never met—would drive up to Buffalo in two weeks. I would hire the rabbi, make the other necessary arrangements, and the ceremony would take place on a Saturday night at the Statler, in a private room adjacent to the Circus Bar. When that day arrived—October 21, 1943—the only guests were a handful of cadet friends. The wedding party consisted of bride and groom; the bride’s parents, Al and Rhoda Rosen; the groom’s parents, Herman K. and Jeanette Lear; the groom’s intended best man, Jimmy Gorman; no bridesmaid, because Charlotte didn’t want one; and, to my surprise, my father’s best friend at the time, Sidney Fineman, who was brought along by H.K. to serve as my best man.

  The Yiddish word plotz, which means “so stricken as to burst,” was invented for me for that moment.

  “But, Dad,” I stuttered, “Jimmy Gorman is my best man.”

  “Norman, Sidney isn’t well, but still he came all the way from Hartford, look at him, how can I tell him you don’t want him?” my father said, while my mother raised her eyebrows over his shoulder in her patented “What can you do?” way.

  My best man was Sidney Fineman, in the deadest of wedding ceremonies. Somewhere between ashamed and destroyed, I got shit-faced with my buddies and waved my bride off when she went to bed. For the newlyweds, our first week together was every bit as unromantic as the wedding and the marriage proposal. Charlotte and I were strangers when we made love and, if possible, knew each other even less well when we had concluded.

  • • •

  A WEEK AFTER our wedding Charlotte went home and I was sent to what was called a staging area in Nashville, where we were given thorough physicals and took a number of written tests, largely mechanical and mathematical. When they were over I was told I had “failed the physical,” and was “disqualified for aircrew training.” Not only couldn’t I be a pilot, I couldn’t fly altogether. But wait. I had already been trained as an airborne radio operator and gunner, and now I wasn’t fit to fly?

  I was to ship out in two days, but to where and in what capacity? All I knew for sure was that I was grounded, but why? I thought it might be my sinuses because some doctor somewhere had once questioned them. In any event, when I was handed my orders I was astonished. I was being transferred to Avon Park, Florida, where I was to be assigned as a radio operator and gunner on either a B-24, known as the Liberator bomber, or a Flying Fortress, more often called the B-17.

  Double-checking my military record recently, I found that tests concerning my “reflexes, gait, coordination, musculature, tension, tremor, and other pertinent tests were: NORMAL.” I was physically fit to fly, but based on written math tests, I was not. “Estimated adaptability for military aeronautics: LOW” was the way they put “too stupid to be a pilot.”

  • • •

  A HUNDRED OR SO of us were billeted underneath the stands at a ball field in Avon Park. Hundreds more were scattered about in local hotels and motels, as well as at MacDill Field, an Army Air Forces base. We were shipped there from units across the country to be assigned to aircrews in our individual specialties, though it would be about two weeks before we got those assignments. After a couple of days of being run aimlessly around the field and ordered to attend lectures we’d already heard—with titles such as “Why Condoms,” “She Could Be a Carrier,” and “What You Need to Know About Venereal Disease”—I responded to a notice on the bulletin board about a plant “important to the war effort” that needed some help the next week. I grabbed the opportunity for a change of pace and scenery.

  The plant I signed up to work in made fertilizer. It was not
as unpleasant a place to work as its product might suggest. I would describe the air as heavy and musty and the task I was assigned as arduous and boring. I steered a huge wooden wheelbarrow under a wide metal chute that opened just long enough to fill it with some five hundred pounds of fertilizer, which I then wheeled down a long wooden gutter to a spot where the contents were emptied and shoveled into a waiting truck. I then pushed my empty wheelbarrow back up the wooden gutter to pick up another load and repeat the task.

  There were maybe eight guys doing the work I’ve described, all but me black. The gutters were side by side, so when I was wheeling down one track, I’d pass several of the men coming up. And vice versa. In the week I spent there I must have passed each face a hundred times. At first their curious expressions marked me as an oddity, but by day two there was an occasional wink with the hint of an “Okay?” My return wink signifying “Okay, indeed!” resulted in welcoming nods and grunts until a gentle layer of amusement began to grow, too, out of our unorthodox situation.