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Dispatches From Dystopia

~ "What man by worrying can add one cubit to his span of years?"

Dispatches From Dystopia

Category Archives: World War II

4 March 1944/1994/2019 A Wedding And Two Anniversaries

04 Monday Mar 2019

Posted by David in Family, World War II

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

marriage

4 March 1944 was the day my parents married. They were married at Third Presbyterian Church at the corner of 26th & Broad Streets in Richmond, VA. It is in the heart of the neighborhood known as Church Hill. The eponymous Church in question isn’t Third but St John’s Church, an Episcopal parish, where in March 1775, Patrick Henry made his “Liberty or Death” speech. I’m afraid this is not taught in the schools any longer, so one day I will post about it.

However, I digress. My Dad was a newly commissioned Second Lieutenant of Marines. They started married life seeing each other on weekends when he had liberty from The Basic School and the field artillery course at Quantico, about 75 miles up U.S. 1 from Richmond. Mother was working as a secretary to an executive at Reynolds Metals, a business that relocated to Richmond in the late 1930’s. Mother got a job because she could type. She also was fluent in Spanish and could translate foreign correspondence.

The War progressed. My Dad was assigned to the 15th Marine Regiment of the Sixth Marine Division. The division was headed to Okinawa where a grim and bloody land campaign was fought. After occupation duty in Japan and Tsingtao, China, Dad came home. He stayed in the Reserve and he split his time between his accounting practice and his military duty. As a result, we had no family vacations at the beach or anywhere else until we were adults. Then our vacations included us children and grandchildren at the beach house my father had built. It was the happiest of times for us all. Dad and Mother loved their grandchildren deeply

Life went on, with all the drama an Adult Child of an Alcoholic (my mother) could bring to the table. Mother herself didn’t drink. You might say she was a carrier of the disease. I think it’s a miracle only one of us four children (me) developed alcoholism and even more of a miracle I found recovery,

Mother’s physical health was always a bit precarious with hypertension, obesity, diabetes, gynecological issues. She had a quintuple bypass at age 69 in the summer of 1988, at the time we adopted my younger son.

When 1994 came around we wanted to do something special for our parents’ Golden Anniversary. I made a video of all the houses my parents alone or with the family lived in. We planned a party for that day March 4th. The day before, my mother fell. It wasn’t just a fall. Unbeknownst to us, she had had a stroke. Twenty-five years ago, first response knowledge of what to do after a suspected stroke wasn’t what it is now. Mother’s stroke was serious, debilitating. She had to use a wheelchair. She lost most of her ability to speak, even though she understood conversations.

Labour Day Weekend, 1995, Mom died. She was 76. Dad was a widower, who remarried Valentine’s Day 2000. He and my stepmother were together until August 2011, when he died aged ninety.

Around the time of the anniversary, I started antidepressant medication (Prozac). I started feeling good and decided that living with an active alcoholic wasn’t good for me, I made a decision to do an intervention on my alcoholic wife. Ultimately I got honest about my own drinking and cannabis use and got sober myself. My wife went to treatment on 6 July 1994, (Mother’s birthday coincidentally). I quit drinking 10 July 1994. Our marriage ended shortly after. I guess my ex-wife stayed sober most of that time. She stopped speaking to me in 2013. In 2015, she died, without telling me she was terminally ill.

In 2001, I remarried, converted to Catholicism in 2010. My elder brother died in December, 2014 at age 65. I had surgery in 2015 that ended my working career. I am a Stay At Home Husband. I blog, manage my health, swim, go to AA and Mass whenever I can.

It will be 4 March 2019 in about 92 minutes. My elder son now lives a few blocks from the building where his grandparents were married, in a more or less gentrified neighborhood. The Church itself moved about sixty two years ago.

This is a time of gratitude that my parents made that commitment to each other that brought my two brothers, my sister and me into this world. I have the life I have, for better or worse, for that decision they made seventy-five years ago.

I love you Dad. I love you Mom. I miss you both. We all turned out OK. You loved each other enough to risk everything for a life together. Thank you. We owe everything to you.

Criminals Amid The Innocent

27 Friday Jan 2017

Posted by David in Refugees, World War II

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Tags

Eichmann, Pope Francis

I’m a great believer in the Law of Unintended Consequences.  Things just happen that the planners don’t plan on.  Sometimes those consequences are more dire than the problem deemed necessary to correct.  Examples from history  would include the World War that proceeded from the response to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, or the rise of Organized Crime in the USA after the passage of the XVIII Amendment and the enforcing law, The Volstead Act.

Right now, refugees are flooding Western Europe and, to a lesser degree, North America, from the brutal wars in the Middle East, principally Syria.   This has not been the only refugee crisis in recent history.  After World War II, there were millions of refugees, Displaced Persons,  in dire need of a new home and a new start.  Present among the refugees, were the very persons who caused this humanitarian crisis,  Nazi war criminals. They used the crisis they precipitated to escape justice, blending in with the refugees.

Fast forward to 11 May, 1960, when an automobile worker, walking home from his bus stop, is kidnapped in a Buenos Aires suburb. His identity card said he was Ricardo Klement, a German immigrant to Argentina.  He was, in fact, Adolph Eichmann, an architect of The Final Solution, the Nazi plan to exterminate European Jewry.  Eichmann and other Nazi war criminals used the refugee crisis to escape justice.  His kidnappers were members of the Israeli security service, Mossad. They smuggled Eichmann out of Argentina on an El Al airliner to Israel where he was tried and executed for his war crimes.

Coincidentally, at the time of the Eichmann kidnapping, a young man was at  seminary in Buenos Aires, studying for the Roman Catholic priesthood. His name was Jorge Maria Bergoglio.  He was the son of an Italian immigrant, an anti-Fascist who fled from Mussolini, to the relative safety and freedom of Argentina.  Today that young seminarian is Pope Francis.

The Holy Father is very familiar with the refugee problem.His personal experience informs him of who benefits from refuge granted.  His upbringing in Argentina also tells him of those who exploited the plight of the refugee to avoid justice.  Today a refugee, sadly, may not be an innocent fleeing a blood bath, but rather a criminal intent on perpetrating more violence. Good judgment on the part of Western governments is critical to protect their countries from those who wish it ill.

Popeye-Killed in Action 27 November 1944

27 Sunday Nov 2016

Posted by David in American History, World War II

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Animated Cartoons, Film, Fleischer Studios, Popeye, Willard Bowsky

Of course, Popeye is a fictional character. How could he die in battle?  Who died on this day in 1944 was Willard G. Bowsky. Willie Bowsky was born in 1907 to a Jewish father and Italian mother and grew up in the New York metropolitan area. He was a talented artist who found work in the Fleischer Studios, run by Max and Dave Fleischer. He drew Popeye and Betty Boop cartoons, soon directing a team of animators. The Bowsky cartoons stand out from the ones done by the Seymour Kneitel team.  The manic synergy between the action and the music characterizes his work.

Unlike the Warner Studios (Looney Tunes) or Disney,  based in Hollywood, the Fleischer Studios operated in New York.  There is a characteristically “urban” quality to the cartoons with street scenes and traffic commonplace. The Fleischer output was sold exclusively to Adolph Zukor’s Paramount Studios.  They developed a patented technology  that had the characters move on a three dimensional background that gave the cartoons a unique “depth”.

In the late Thirties, the Fleischer Studios relocated to Miami, Florida.  The studio quickly fell on financial hard times, exacerbated by the expense of the move.   Dave Fleischer, director of the cartoons and brother of Max Fleischer, President of the Studios had a falling out. The source of the friction was Dave’s affair with his secretary, which rankled the straight-laced Max.  The studio went bankrupt in 1942, was absorbed into the Paramount organization and became known as Famous Studios.  Shortly after this acquisition by Paramount, Willard Bowsky joined the Army. He was 35 years old.  Most talented animators who enlisted in the Army readily found work producing cartoons for the war effort. Training films and propaganda to boost morale constituted most of their output.

Bowsky did not choose that route.  He volunteered for combat duty, and was assigned to a reconnaissance unit attached to the 14th Armored Division. On this day in 1944, his unit encountered German forces near Barr, Bas-Rhin, France. Willard G Bowsky was killed in the ensuing fire fight. He was posthumously awarded the Silver Star and Purple Heart. He is interred at the Lorraine American Cemetery and Memorial.

Bowsky’s story stands out because he could have taken an easier way, but didn’t. Something to think about.

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