The Wallace Street Journal
WALLACE — Visiting family in Anchorage last weekend, we found ourselves in Dad's room at the Old Folks Home perusing the contents of an old chest he's been lugging around with him since, oh, probably before our time.
Dad was born in Spokane, the son of a pioneer family who'd settled in Oregon not long after the Louisiana Purchase. He grew up in South Pasadena, Calif., turned down Stanford for Cal-Tech, was graduated from Berkeley where he met Mom, reared us kids up on Vancouver Island until we returned to the U.S. in my late teens for a brief and torturous incarceration at a Spokane high school.
When Mom died in Spokane two years ago tomorrow, my two younger brothers moved Dad to a nursing home in Anchorage, where they have both spent their adult lives. Dad quickly buddied-up with two guys named Bill, both Second World War vets (one Bill is Army and the other Bill is Navy). The wheelchair-bound trio keeps tabs on one another and swaps war stories — Dad is a Marine but thanks to the A-bomb never saw combat.
Among the contents of Dad's chest were three of his high school yearbooks. (There is something to be said about high school yearbooks: they, and the inscriptions of friends and acquaintances, haven't changed much over the past 70 years. “Great to have you in Geometry class, Richie,” “To a swell guy, see you in home room next year,” and the inevitable “Whew, we're outta here for three months!”)
We were looking for the faces of names he remembered, including one gal he apparently had a crush on back then, when it dawned on me: He was graduated in the Class of 1942 — a mere six months after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the bloody immersion of this country into the 61-nation conflict racing across Europe and Asia. His was World War II's first graduating class.
Those eager, young, smiling, optimistic faces gazing in black and white from my father's senior yearbook — entitled Copa d'Oro (Cup of Gold) — across the intervening six and a half decades, took on a whole new demeanour. How many of them, I wondered, were among the 16 million Americans who went to war; how many of them were among the 292,000 who met their deaths in the ensuing three years?
And how many are still around with first-hand memories of it, many of whom shed blood but lived to tell of it, who graduated from places like South Pasadena High School, their yearbooks declaring the virtues of honour, duty, dignity, dedication, loyalty?
And then comes to mind the nasal braying of that haughty, petty, petulant, crooked little man from Chicago, Hawaii and God knows where else, who now occupies the White House and denies the Class of '42 access to the World War II Memorial erected in their honour, and I am at once horrified, sad, and angry.
It is time to dust off those old virtues of the Class of 1942, and to make sure the iron is oiled and dry.
