It was October, 1929.
As the Stock Market crashed, a young man, not quite eighteen, was
finishing high school and looking forward to going to Columbia University.
He worked summers, during high school, as a soda jerk. With the fall of Wall Street, the money he
had in savings was taken by his parents to cover living expenses. He told me that he only found out the money
was gone after they took it. Starting at
Columbia in September, 1930, he worked at various jobs to pay for school.
Unfortunately, working when he could and going to school
didn’t work. He worked as a
golf instructor and his grades suffered. He attended school in the fall of 1930, but
had to take the spring semester off to earn more money. At some point, he gave up on going to
Columbia University and just worked to help support himself and his parents.
Older and wiser, that same man enlisted in the United States
Marine Corps in 1943. Even though he was
too old for the draft, he wasn’t too old to serve his country. And that’s what he told his young wife who
was pregnant with their first child.
Newly enlisted in the Marines, at the age of thirty-one, he
was hoping to become an officer. On his
application, he wrote: ”Although I have regretted always not having
been able to finish college, I feel, nonetheless, that I have managed to
acquire an equivalent education.”
With his application, he included several letters of recommendation.
From his employer:
We can unqualifiedly endorse his character, intelligence, initiative,
and dependability.
From the general manager of a company that he had dealings
with: He always impressed me as being honest and trustworthy, a
patriotic citizen, a person who had the ability to accept responsibility and to
command the respect of others.
His work has always been such as to require initiative,
imagination and leadership, and I unhesitatingly endorse him as an applicant
for a commission in the armed services.
A half dozen more letters of recommendation were sent on his
behalf from people in the business world who knew him and knew what a good
officer he would make. By July of 1943,
the recommendation for commission as a Second Lieutenant in the United States
Marine Corps had been approved. By the
time the war was over, he was a Captain.
And before he resigned from the USMC Reserves in the early 1960’s, he
had attained the rank of Major.
This was all new to me when I read it last summer. I sent for his military records and found out
he never graduated from college. I
always assumed he had, yet he never said he did. He talked of his college years with
fondness. Little did I know that the
Great Depression, which changed so many lives, had changed his, too.
It doesn’t change how I feel about him. He was the best father anyone could ask
for. Always finding time to teach his
children the things he thought they ought to know. I will never forget the stories he told, the
books he read to us, the encouragement and support he offered, and the kind
words that he shared always…
He was, and always will be, my Daddy!
Cali
No comments:
Post a Comment