A Little Piece of History...

[wayang]

Dad and I certainly enjoyed a laugh on the occasion of my receiving this letter from the Superintendent of West Point after being named a National Merit Scholar:

I'm afraid I already knew too much to be 'officer material'.
I mean, seriously...can you imagine this kid being made a 'butterbar'? (That's a 'lieutenant', for youse civilians...)

(The phrase "Kill Me Now" comes to mind...)

[johnallg]

Dane, very interesting read, and it parallels many stories I heard when living with 2 Nam vets in '72.

Originally from the Zoo, huh? Were there other Terrys here he was related to? I went to HS with a couple. I was also in AZ (Tempe) in later '73/early '74. I almost enrolled in MCC but decided I missed Lake Michigan too much and moved back. Went to an air show at Chandler AFB at that time too. First time I saw a Harrier.

Chandler used to be all cotton fields outside the 4 corners of "downtown" back then. Now it is wall-to-wall housing and shopping centers.

[wayang]

Hey, John...yeah, that would be Williams AFB in Chandler...we used to go grocery shopping at the base commissary there. I remember, in those early '70s days, the air force was training Israeli pilots at the other end of the valley, and we used to see Egyptian, Kuwaiti, Saudi, Iranian and Iraqi (!) pilots at Williams. Hmmm...You're right about Chandler and the whole Phoenix area...I've been back a couple of times for HS reunions, and I can literally stand at intersections and not recognize anything but the two street names. That ol' Mormon Temple looks the same, though...

Sorry about the 'Zoo confusion...my dad grew up in Tulsa, but ran away from home at 13, and joined the Army at 16, so he really didn't have a hometown...since he had to list something, he used my mom's hometown, Kalamazoo. We used to go there for holidays. My mom's name growing up was Patricia Herr, and she went to State High on the WMU campus, then graduated from Western, class of '40, I think. (Imagine having a german last name in those days) Don't know if there are any Herrs still around, but I have some relatives there named Fetterolf, Baker, and 'Koots' (treat that one as phonetic, I can't remember the right spelling).

I s'pose all the Terry's must be related in some way, since we all come from County Cork originally...but if they're anything like my branch of the family, they can't trace it back past a generation or two...

[johnallg]

Those were the days the valley was actually a bit of fun. When my parents moved out there in Dec. '72, they were 1/2 mile from the edge of the desert, just 1 mile south of the Superstition Freeway (now Hwy 60). I believe you need to drive about 20 miles (seriously) to find desert south of Tempe now.

State High, I believe it closed my sophmore year in HS - not many went there that year (1968 IIRC). It had a neat sounding name, was on WMU campus, and I was jealous I didn't go there (being around college girls!).

As for imagining having a German name in WWII days, try Allgaier!

[wayang]

Yeah, I knew some of your people would have been in the same predicament; I play with a Japanese American guy whose family was rounded up in California and moved to a 'camp' in Colorado...

'OMG', as the kids would say, I can't believe I typed "Class of '40"! That should have been Class of '50...sorry, Mom!

Many people don't know this, but the U.S. brought a lot of German troops back as POW's on empty cargo ships during the war...they were kept at prison camps around the states. There was one right outside Kalamazoo, and my Mom and some of her friends used to bring the prisoners baked goods and other little gifts, which they would hand through the fence. Hard to believe in this day and age...some would have frowned on it even then, but POW's are POW's, and people are people...

[johnallg]

Lived my whole life here (except for the 8 months in AZ) and I didn't know that! Probably over at Ft. Custer. It was a training camp with full barracks and security fence and all. That would make sense.

[wayang]

It was indeed Ft. Custer, John...

"During World War II, the fort was expanded to over 14,000 acres. In addition to its use as a training base, more than 5,000 German prisoners of war were held there. Finding able farm labor during the war became a problem as more Americans were drafted into the military or worked in the factories producing war materials. Putting Fort Custer’s POWs to work seemed an efficient solution to the labor shortage. The last German prisoners repatriated to their homeland and departed Fort Custer in 1946. They left behind 26 comrades buried in the old post cemetery. Sixteen of the German POWs were killed in an accident when their truck collided with a train as they were returning to the fort from a work detail on a sugar beet farm near Blissfield, Mich. The other 10 died from natural causes. Germans sent there for detention were retrained for jobs and shipped to other U.S. installations as duty workers."

That's an excerpt I found at this website: http://www.cem.va.gov/CEM/cems/nchp/ftcuster.asp

...and here's a picture of the German POW memorial there:

images.jpg (1.96 KiB) Viewed 368 times

A couple of other sites with info:
http://www.denkmalprojekt.org/misc_laen ... k2_usa.htm
http://www.kazooart.org/calendar/index.asp?id=20821

[wayang]

"So anyway, there we were, b*lls deep..."
(G. Washington, First Inaugural Address, Manhattan, April 30, 1789)

Yeah, well...there are many paths to 'full-personhood', but the military just wasn't for me. Although there have surely been a great many fine folks among the Officer's corps through the ensuing centuries, there have also been far too many who were overbearing, sadistic 'no-loads'...and I'm afraid the first time I had to take an insane order from some upper-caste loon, it would've been "Sin loy, GI...and sayonara, m**********r"...

So my path was a different one...as I used to say in McMurdo, "I'm a civilian: I don't get tasked, I get asked". I did what was asked of me...and here's what Congress gave me in return:

"Pin a medal on my chest
Tell my mom I done my best..."
(from the called-cadence poem, "If I Die In The Combat Zone", Anon., U.S Army Pub. No. LRLR/1234/12/34)