EXPERIENCING A NATIONAL TREASURE: THE WORLD WAR II MUSEUM

There are an endless number of reasons to visit the magnetic city of New Orleans, but this time, for me, there was one overpowering one: to experience the National World War II Museum located in the heart of that already-historic city. I use the verb “experience” here in its most explicit and literate sense, because – and especially for a veteran – this is not a typical museum where one gathers a glimpse of works of art or a passing view of some piece of culture. This is where one goes to take part in a gut-wrenching and mind-bending look at a part of our national anatomy so intrinsic to our sense of identity as a twentieth century people that it is both life-changing and indelible.

            It is possible that my personal outlook on all this is colored by the fact that I lived through the times so graphically portrayed here, and that I was a participant on the battlegrounds of another war which I see as an interconnected aftermath of what we file away as “World War II”. It is also true that veterans of any of our country’s wars is likely to be more profoundly affected by what is experienced here than any other visitor; and I hasten to add that nowhere will a veteran feel more welcomed and more at home than at this corner of history on Andrew Higgins Blvd. and Magazine street in New Orleans.

            Commenced as the “D-Day Museum” on June 6, 2000 thanks to the efforts of the late author/historian Stephen Ambrose whose home was there and who recognized the fact that the “Higgins boats” – the landing craft which were built there in the tens of thousands, and whose genius led to victories around the world were born there - made it the perfect location. The emphasis on the Normandy campaign is still alive and well at the museum, but as the capacity for growth expanded, so too did the vision of the museum’s founders so that today, every facet of WWII from its battlefields to the “Home Front”, from its music to its headlines are brought alive by exhibits and interactive displays.

            Without any question, the centerpiece of the museum experience, (and the point at which I think every patron’s visit should begin), is the Tom Hanks 4D masterpiece “Beyond All Boundaries”, a one hour film experience which plays in the “Solomon Victory Theater” at intervals throughout the day. The “recreation” of the D-Day landings and other climactic events of WWII which take place there are dramatically enhanced, not only by sound effects which surround the audience, but sudden bursts of lighting to accompany gun fire and an underground system which shakes the seats of patrons to simulate battle experience. In the course of viewing winter conditions which accompanied the Battle of the Bulge sequence, “snowflakes” actually fall from dark storm clouds onto the audience in the front of the theater.

            Another worthwhile experience is the final mission of the USS Tang (SS 306), an interactive recreation of the last sea patrol of the most famous American submarine of WWII, in which the participants – limited to no more than 27 – actually man the sub’s duty stations in the ship’s interior as the action plays out. I filled the assignment of StM1c Ralph F. Adams, age 19 from Camden, N.J. as a torpedo man at station No. 5, where I actually pushed the button launching several “fish”. (The Tang was the only U.S. WWII Sub. from which a small handful of men managed to survive a sinking by ejecting from the bottomed boat.) I do not recommend this experience for all museum patrons.

            While most reviewers recommend you plan a 3-4 hour visit, my son and I spent eight hours in our effort to visit and absorb as much of the museum’s sights and sounds as possible, paying special attention to the recorded voices of the real people whose individual stories can be heard by the pushing of a digital button beneath the photo display. Best of all, we had the chance to sit down with a living veteran of the Pacific campaign where we were able to listen to his story and ask the questions they inspired; and to feel of his heartfelt devotion to his country and the comrades now gone but still alive in his untarnished memory.

            Even better, I rejoice in having a son whose generosity made this trip a reality for me.

 

 

Conceived and built by Andrew Higgins of New Orleans, the so-called “Higgins Boats” or LCVTs as pictured here in the WWII Museum were described by Pres. Dwight Eisenhower as having “won the war for us!” More than 12,500 of these craft carried our men ashore at Normandy and across the beaches of the Pacific.

 

 

 

A B-17 Flying Fortress hangs from the ceiling at the WWII museum where it can be examined from three viewing levels in the main building.

 

 

Chris Cooper touches a chunk of Hitler’s “Atlantic Wall”, one small piece of a thousand-mile long “impenetrable” phalanx of fortifications the Allies broached at high cost.

                                                Al Cooper Photos

FACING WINTER WITH LEWIS & CLARK

When Meriwether Lewis and William Clark together with the 31 other members of their “Corps of Discovery” finally reached the Pacific Ocean on the 7^th of November, 1805, a 4000-mile, 18 month long trek across the North American continent lay behind them, and a fast-approaching winter in a strange land lay ahead. For all practical purposes, they had “disappeared” from off the surface of the earth in the eyes of the anxiously waiting leaders and citizens of the country in whose service they had been dispatched; they couldn’t have been more “alone” as they contemplated the challenge of their return journey.

            After deciding that their chances of finding food sources were better to the south, across the mouth of the Columbia River in what is now Oregon, they surveyed and selected a site accessible to the sea, but protected by heavily-forested game-rich surroundings. Their greatest asset turned out to be the friendly native Clatsop people who had occupied that corner of the continent for hundreds of years, and whose knowledge of land and sea would prove invaluable to the expedition. Not only were they of a welcoming nature, but they had had prior experience trading with white visitors from sailing ships, and were quick to bridge language differences.

            With the leadership of their two Captains, the men soon built log living quarters, a smoke house for preserving meat and salmon, and defensive picket walls. Reflecting their appreciation for their native friends who initially shared with them large pieces of blubber from a beached whale, they named it Fort Clatsop. The hunting of elk and deer became a winter-long enterprise for the Corps. members as they worked to prepare everything they would need before undertaking their long return journey of 1806.

             The essential preserving element whose supply had been long exhausted was salt, and so Capt. Lewis, on December 28^th, according to his journal, sent a small group consisting of Jos. Fields, William Bratton and George Gibson to find a convenient place near the sea at which they could begin making salt. After they had found such a place - presently in a restored condition in the town of Seaside - the operation required five iron kettles and the round-the-clock attendance of five men tending the fires, carrying buckets from the sea, and then transporting the finished product to camp 15 miles to the northeast. By February 15^th, and despite illness and injuries, the men had produced just over three bushels of high grade “white salt”, and the salt-making camp by the sea was abandoned. (This is a story of special interest to the author who has visited the site, has a collection of salt from all over the world, and on whose wall hangs an artist’s rendering of the Lewis & Clark salt works.)

            Sacagawea, the Shoshone wife of Tousant Charbonneau was an ever-present asset to the expedition, especially in searching out berries & edible roots and in “gentling” sometimes prickly relations with the Clatsop people. If there is an unfortunate side to what was basically a peaceful co-existence between the two cultures, it was a notion on the part of Capt. Lewis that the natives were untrustworthy and “given to theft”. I believe that he was mistaken, and in a future article called “The Story of a Canoe”, I will explain why.

            In 1955 – on the 150^th anniversary of the event, the Fort was initially rebuilt by the people of Oregon.  After a fire intervened just prior to the bicentennial celebration in 2005, it burned to the ground and was rebuilt bigger and better by 700 volunteers for a 2006 dedication. The following year, Fort Clatsop became part of one of our nation’s newest additions to the National Park system to be known as “Lewis & Clark National Historic Park”.

A replica of the original Lewis & Clark winter quarters as built in 1805.          Nat. Park. Svc. Photo

 

The interior of the Ft. Clatsop quarters were Spartan at best, and smoky at worst.  Al Cooper photo

 

 

 

A Park employee dressed as a “Corps. of Discovery” Private demonstrates use of a smooth-bore musket like those expedition hunters used to hunt deer and elk.                              Cindy Cooper Bagley photo

 

 

PAYING TRIBUTE TO SOME OVERLOOKED WARRIORS

On September 12^th, 1944 newly-arrived observers at Mountain Farm RAF base near Oxford, England might have been excused for thinking they were “seeing things” when a British Mk XI Spitfire wearing USAAF markings, tail number 944 and an unusual blue color scheme executed a successful if spectacular crash landing on the sod runway. The talented pilot who walked away from the slightly damaged aircraft was in fact an American named John S. Blyth. A closer look would have revealed that the legendary Spitfire had had all its guns and protective armor removed in favor of extra fuel tanks and two large 36” focal length cameras.  Blyth was one of a small cadre of American pilots flying daily high altitude photo recon missions over Nazi Germany assessing bomb damage for Allied planners.

 

 

 

Somewhere in WWII England, a Spitfire wears U.S. markings as did the one flown by John Blyth.

 

            In all, John Blyth flew 51 unescorted missions to distant targets such as Berlin and Munich, all alone in the cockpit of his unarmed and unprotected specially adapted Spitfire, a plane which Blyth described as a “gift” to any pilot privileged to fly it.

            I have chosen Lt. Colonel John S. Blyth USAF (Ret) to introduce this column not just because his story is an inspiration in itself, but because he represents a unique breed of American military aviators whose flying careers began as enlisted (non-commissioned) pilots.

            To all but a handful of dedicated military aviation historians it may come as a surprise that since Army Corporal Vernon L. Burge climbed into his Wright Model B biplane in 1912, more than 3000 “Flying Sergeants” or “enlisted” pilots have flown for the Army, USAAF and U.S. Air Force, while another estimated 5000 non-commissioned officers wore the wings of Navy, Coast Guard and Marine aviators. It is a statistical verity that of the 3,000 RAF fighter pilots who saved England in the “Battle of Britain”, 2,000 were Sergeants, including members of the famed “Eagle Squadron” – Americans who had crossed borders in order to serve with their cousins across the Atlantic prior to Pearl Harbor. The 145 Eagle Squadron enlisted pilots who later joined the USAAF became the only Sergeant pilots entitled to wear the wings of both countries.

 

 

This “ageless” J-3 Piper Cub was often the first introduction to flight for U.S. Enlisted Pilot trainees.  (It was also the plane in which the author soloed.)               Al Cooper Photo

 

            It is worth noting that many of the pilots who volunteered to fly transport planes across the deadly Himalayan “Hump”, and the brave men at the controls of those cantankerous gliders delivering Airborne troopers behind the beaches of D-Day Normandy likewise wore stripes on their sleeves rather than bars on their lapels.

            As a proud former non com, I dare to suggest that this unique breed of military aviators brought with them a motivation and sense of pride which distinguished their military service over and above mere technical proficiency. Often ostracized, treated with official skepticism, and routinely segregated, they performed with unusual dedication and unquestioned honor. Eighteen became fighter “Aces”, 760 retired as field grade officers and eleven became Generals. General Eisenhower’s personal pilot, like that of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery came from the enlisted ranks, while Aleksandre F. Yefimove rose through the ranks to become Chief of the entire Soviet air force.  Louis H. Carrington, a l942 graduate of WWII’s enlisted pilot program, with his crew won the coveted Mackay Trophy for their historic non-stop trans-Pacific flight of an RB-45 multi-jet bomber with mid-air refueling, a precedent-setting accomplishment, and as early as the 1920s, it was a tiny handful of Army non-com pilots who pioneered the art of teaching all-weather instrument-flying in the face of a military dictum which opposed the idea.

 

 

 

At least 5,000 enlisted pilots known as “Nappies” flew for the Navy, Marines & Coast Guard.

 

            Commenting on the wisdom of the WWII “enlisted pilot” program of the USAAF, one historian said “The program’s success was not a result of the U.S. Army. The success lay with the motivation and spirit of the enlisted men it trained. These men made the program. They had been given the opportunity of a lifetime to fly. They wanted to fulfill their dreams and be a success. They wouldn’t – and didn’t – fail”

            As a parting tribute to this nearly-forgotten era, I salute old-time flying sergeants George Holmes and Tom Rafferty who - by then serving as officers - took retirement at the end of WWII retaining their aeronautical ratings and “permanent” ranks.  When the USAF became a reality in 1947, they immediately re-enlisted as Master Sergeants, thus becoming the first, last and only Sergeant Pilots to wear the new Air Force blue uniform.

TAKING A DRIVE DOWN MEMORY LANE

It was while reading a largely-historical spy novel set in World War II occupied France, that I became fascinated by descriptions of an unusual automobile driven by a Nazi officer, and much admired both by his German contemporaries and the French citizens who had to tolerate his unwelcome presence in their community. Built by the famous Hispano Suiza engine works, it sported an extra set of rear axles and a grandly-elegant interior design.

             My search for an example of this extraordinary six-wheel piece of automotive history led to the Forney Transportation museum in Denver, Colorado, where – I learned – a 1923 Hispano Suiza Model H6A Victoria Town Car resided at the very center of their world-class display of some of the most honored and rare automobiles, bicycles, motor cycles, stage coaches and trains.

            The beautifully-restored behemoth I found waiting for me there is believed to have been built in France for King George II of Greece who didn’t remain “King” long enough to take delivery, the car eventually finding its way to America where Hollywood big wig D.W .Griffith bought it for $35,000, just in time to give it a starring role in “My Lips Betray” in 1934.

 

 

End of the search: The 1923  Hispano Suiza H6A “Victoria” Town Car at Denver’s Forny Transportation Museum.

 

            Almost as exciting as meeting up with the target of my year-long quest was to find another historic gem positioned right next to it: this time, the 1923 chrome yellow Kissel Speedster owned , “adored” and driven by aviatrix Amelia Earhart, and still a real head-turner today, with its flashy paint job, wire wheels, cutaway doors and “outrigger” side seats.  After her parents’ divorce, and at a low point in her own life, Amelia decided in 1924 to take her mother with her to join her Boston sister. Amelia hated trains, and decided to challenge the continent’s primitive road system, saddling up her bright yellow “Kizzi” for what turned out to be a 7,000-mile journey from Los Angeles up and across Canada’s poorly-charted vastness; a six week adventure for a driver who had learned to fly before ever getting behind the wheel of a car.  (Amelia was never an accomplished pilot, and all we know about her road-savvy is that “she drove very fast”, even in Hollywood.)

            The Kissel line of automobiles deserves more than a mere mention, and among car aficionados, it remains a standout. Louis Kissel and his four sons built their first car in their Hartford, Wisconsin shop in 1907, entirely from components of their own design and manufacture. For the next 20 years, their home-grown engineering genius produced some of America’s most advanced and sought-after road machines. Among the fast-and-famous who drove Kissels – in addition to Amelia – were actor Douglas Fairbanks, Fatty Arbuckle, fighter Jack Dempsey, and other well-knowns such as Greta Garbo, Mary Pickford, Al Jolson, Rudy Vallee and William S. Hart. There are at least three of these timeless beauties at Forney. Alas, a business deal gone sour led to bankruptcy in 1927, just as the country was sliding into deep depression.

 

 

Amelia Earhart’s 1923 Kissel “Goldbug” Speedster was revered by its owner as her “Yellow Peril".

 

            If I could choose one other Forney “beauty” to rhapsodize about, it would be their l934 Pierce Arrow “Fastback” in gleaming red with black trim, the most prized (and expensive) American showpiece of its time, with handcrafted coachwork whose seductive curves claimed to have eliminated every “straight line”. (My own father – otherwise a very cool, almost stoic kind of guy could wax poetic when calling my attention to a passing Pierce Arrow.)

 

 

At a time when nearly 75 car manufacturers competed, the Pierce Arrow stood supreme in the eyes of many.

                                                                Al Cooper Photos 

 

            Needless to say, my stroll among the gleaming automotive legacy at Denver’s Forney Transportation Museum was a journey down memory lane.

FORAGING FOR NATURE’S SWEETEST GEMS

My first pair of tiny-sized hip boots was a surprise Saturday morning gift from a father who was preparing me – not for an introduction to stream fishing – but a day of wild huckleberry gathering in the marshes of New Jersey’s Pine Barrens. I was probably no more than four or five years old, but I remember the occasion in all its details, including the green tree snake we encountered in our fruitful and near-magical labors.

            With a father who was a product of the cedar forests of the Northwest, and a mother whose family had pioneered the Jersey Palisades of the “Garden State”, ours was a family steeped in the traditions of self-reliance and a deep appreciation for the gifts of the woods and fields. The family dinner table and cellar keeping room were at the center of home life, and the small game my older brothers brought home regularly found their way into Mom’s savory “Brunswick stew”, just as our half-acre garden filled the jars which lined the winter shelves in the old cellar which once had harbored the kitchens of the stage-coach Inn which had once graced the premises.

            The huckleberries I mention were but one of the sweet gems which linked me and my three brothers to a set of memories that come to mind by easy invitation when I need something to cheer me up in a moment of unease in the midst of a sleepless night or a trying time.

            The nearby oak woods were home to a treasure trove of wild berries, from red raspberries and their black-cap cousins, to the king-sized blackberries which were my favorites. My two older brothers who were free to roam freely throughout the surrounding countryside, would know where the most productive patches lay hidden, and with our gathering pails in hand, we would raid nature’s pantry, but only after they had sworn me to secrecy; I was never to let on to my friends and boyhood pals where our special patches were located.  Keeping those wild sanctuaries inviolate from trespass was a life-and-death mandate.  Often, in the midst of a cold winter, I would pay a lone visit to our basement, where I would gaze with deep appreciation – even a childhood awe – at lines of shining BALL bale-lid jars filled with the berries I had had a hand in gathering and preserving, knowing that each quart would find its way into one of Mom’s incomparable berry pies, made even more tasty for the December winds blowing outside.

            Then too, there were climbing vines of wild fox grapes from which Mom made glistening jars of quaking jelly which was somehow more highly esteemed than anything that came from the cultivated Concord grapes which grew on arbors in our own yard, to say nothing of the hard to pick and sort, but wonderfully mouth-puckering elderberries that found their way into juice and jellies (and also I have to admit in my later years a fine wine).

            Part of the mystique of those memories lies in the knowledge that we were not only following in the footsteps of this land’s original Americans who had frequented these same woodlands for the same purpose, but that we were walking in the shadows of history which had been written here, where Washington’s ragtag army of Continental soldiers had taken refuge after a nighttime “escape” across the Hudson River after being overwhelmed by a superior British force in the battle for Manhattan which might easily have ended the war for Independence.

            Years later, while wandering in my canoe through a chain of ponds in Vermont’s “Northeast Kingdom”, I thought of all this when finding myself engulfed in clouds of dazzling crimson orbs overhanging the channel through which I was traveling. Recognizing the shiny porcelain-like beads as High-bush Cranberries, I began stripping them into the moving craft until I had enough to take home and cook down into one of the most ravishingly-beautiful jellies our young family had ever experienced. It was to be so rare a discovery that it has never had a sequel.

            Whether knee-deep in the red-leafed blueberry barrens of northern Maine or husbanding a hard-won basket of wild, tiny but exquisitely-sweet springtime strawberries from a Vermont pasture, I have reveled in the wild bounty of the free food offered up by Mother Nature across this gifted land I love.

In the years before home freezers were commonplace, a summer’s surplus went into canning bottles, such as these heirloom BALL bale-tops from the author’s collection filled with 2013 blackberries and blueberries.

REDISCOVERING THE LITERARY WORLD OF JAMES HERRIOT

Ordinarily when traveling, my reading list is determined by several books I have taken with me, or – more frequently – by volumes uncovered in the local and regional book stores I love to browse along the way.  I am not easily diverted from some kind of a planned reading itinerary, especially when I find such rich pickings in those out-of-the-way collectors’ troves. That changed for me unexpectedly while staying in the ocean-side cottage of friends when I picked up, first laid aside, and finally was intrigued enough to explore a small, unassuming gift-sized volume titled CAT STORIES, by well-known deceased British animal writer James Herriot.

            Of course I was no stranger to the veterinary-author’s decades-long appeal to a world-wide audience of readers and fans of the famous television series based on his best-selling family of stories  published under the rubric “All Creatures Great and Small”, “All Things Wise and Wonderful”, etc.. At one time I had even collected annual calendars featuring much-admired photography from the Northern Yorkshire “Swaledale” country in which he lived and worked, and which he helped to make a magnet to visitors and tourists, a phenomenon which continues today long after his death.

            As I breezed through a table of contents with such titles as “Oscar: the Socialite Cat”, “Moses Found Among the Rushes” and “Buster the Feline Retriever”, I found little to excite my interest, until I began to read first one, and then another of these small but wonderfully-crafted literary gems. I read quietly and thoughtfully at first, and then, at my wife’s urging, aloud for the benefit of both of us. While I had long been entertained by the author’s lifelong attachment to and unabashed love for the animal kingdom and his rare insight into country life in an era fast disappearing from what we too-casually call “the modern world”, I began to recognize that I had been missing something important: James Herriot had been painting a far broader word “landscape” than the one I (and probably many others) had been seeing. To explain this, I need to back up and connect my readers with some history.

            The real name of the Englishman about whom I write was James Alfred Wight, who did indeed become a country veterinarian after service in the RAF during WWII, and who with his wife chose to live in North Yorkshire where he set up his practice in Thirsk, and then nearby Thirlby in the “Dales” of that green and picturesque country of broad pastures, wandering lanes and stone walls. Aside from the farm animals which consumed his very busy daily life, he had an intense interest in – even a passion for – the English game of “football”. (I use quotation marks for the benefit of Americans who might be confused by such terminology.) Young Alf had long wanted to write and the sport of football was his chosen subject. Not wishing to bring embarrassment to the profession in which he labored, he chose to use the name of one of his favorite goalies as a pen name, and James “Herriot” was born.  Alas, his career as a sports writer was discouraged by a stream of rejection slips. Then, and not until the age of 50, he discovered what so many authors learn eventually, and he began to write about the things he knew best, and the adventures of a country animal doctor took the world by storm.

            What I really came to understand thanks to a small book called CAT STORIES is something his own son (also a veterinarian and writer) captured so well in a biographical sketch of his Dad:

            “One of the things that people get wrong about my father is that he wrote ‘nice little stories about animals’. My father didn’t write about animals – he wrote about people. That I think is what keeps his work alive today.”

            And that is what I finally came to discover on my own in an innocent-appearing little book I look upon as a collection of literary jewels, penned by an incredibly sensitive man with a deep interest in people.

            James Alfred Herriot (nee Alf Wight) passed away at his home on Feb. 23^rd, 1995, and the world is richer for his having lived among us.

 

 

 

:         Published just months before the author’s death at age 79, CAT STORIES presents a rare and intimate insight into the complex, seldom-explored and often poignant relationships between small household animals and the people whose lives they touch.

 

 

BEING TRUE TO THE STORY-TELLER’S CREED

In the world before written languages were universal, and still today in the far reaches of the most remote regions of the earth, it has been the responsibility of “story-tellers” to record and pass on the most important elements of human society, and to preserve for succeeding generations and ages the genealogy, traditions and history of the people. I learned more about the intimate, day-to-day history of their Crow villages from hours spent at the feet of Elizabeth Smart Enemy and Barney Old Coyote than from archives accumulated by post-graduate university scholars. I mention this in an effort to excuse the hubris which has led me to print a personal business card which has the hopeful word “Story Teller” printed under my name. It also gives me a reason to pay homage to a number of people whose examples have touched, encouraged and motivated me to even aspire to such a lofty self-expectation. One of those names which will be relatively unrecognized in the region where I presently make my home just happens to be an important one for me personally, thus justifying my taking up this space to talk about him.

            After flying a bomber in WWII, studying abroad, and having a full career in government and public service, Bill Caldwell fell victim to a love affair with the state of Maine in 1964, leaving behind a busy life in New York City and moving to the coastal village of Damariscotta – population 1000.  Jobless, and at the invitation of a friend in the publishing field, he began writing a column for the Portland, Maine newspapers.  For want of the “Big Story”, Bill began finding a lot of “Little” stories, all around him and wherever he looked, and what’s more he had a world of fun doing it; and the readers loved it. In every cove and inlet, and around the stove of every country store, he found an endless range of characters, each with their own unique tale to tell.

            He also fell in love with Maine’s coastal waters, and ended up buying a “retired” 30-foot lobster boat he fixed up and named “Steer Clear”, in which he and his wife Barbara would spend live-aboard week-ends and summers visiting Maine’s hundreds of offshore islands and remote seaside villages. There he found even more stories to write up on his portable typewriter and send off to the anxious editors, each conveying a personal look at the human side of life in his adopted state.

            Not content with telling just one side of Maine’s story, he traveled into the interior, finding himself as much at home with trappers and lumber jacks, moose hunters and game wardens, potato farmers and blueberry pickers, as the clam diggers, lobstermen and lighthouse keepers of his home base.

            I began crossing trails with Caldwell’s work in my annual Down East visits each year, always managing to “just miss” his itinerant footsteps, despite the fact he docked “Steer Clear” within a mile of my own Maine headquarters. I was quick though, to snatch up copies of his books, beginning in 1977 with “Enjoying Maine”, and in 1979 “Maine Magic”, each a collection of his newspaper articles printed with the help of his publisher – Guy Gannett Publishing. Then in 1981 came “Islands of Maine”, in 1983 “Rivers of Fortune” and in 1986 “Lighthouses of Maine”, each a veritable treasure trove of history and real-life stories which might have occupied a full-time staff to produce, let alone a single guy with a typewriter and a boat. I would like to hope that something of the “story-teller” which is trapped somewhere inside me, was put there by my “unmet” friend and exemplar – Bill Caldwell.

            While I cannot help but confess to raw envy for the story-telling skill and story-gathering opportunities which filled 20 years of Caldwell’s life, I have to admit that the exact time and circumstances which made that magic combination of factors come together is a part of the story itself.       Bill Caldwell passed away in far-away Arizona in 2001 at the age of 82. At his request, his cremated remains were scattered off the coast of Maine, not far from his home “Piper’s Bend” which I pass by almost every year.

            At the end, and from everything I know about him, I believe that Bill Caldwell must have believed as I do in the Story-Teller’s Creed as passed on by Robert Fulghum, a copy of which I keep where I can always see it:

   “I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge; that myth is more potent than history; that dreams are more powerful than facts; that hope always triumphs over experience; that laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.”

LISTENING TO THE OLD-TIMERS

In a way, this column is a continuation of one I wrote weeks ago, in which I paid tribute to “Old Carl”, the venerable maple sugar-maker who not only shared with me the arcane secrets to be found in the shadows of a steam-filled Vermont sugarhouse, but gifted me with an insight into how to live life deliberately and meaningfully, even in the wake of ill fortune.

            When I left for overseas duty in a combat zone several years later, my father and older brother – both Marine Corps veterans of prior wars --  gave me the same piece of advice: “Find yourself an old-time Non-com who has ‘seen the elephant’ before, and attach yourself to him. Do what he does and pay attention to what he says. It is your best chance of staying alive.” Sergeant Steinbarger, the man I eventually replaced, got me through my first crucial weeks in Korea, but an unexpected assignment tossed me back into unknown territory shortly after his departure for stateside. Although my training and experience equipped me for a wide range of Military Police duties, orders to fill the need for a Criminal Investigator in a multi-service area embracing many miles of jurisdiction in what was a military “hot zone” seemed overwhelming.

            At that point it was my commanding officer, Lt. Colonel Lenton D. Roller who saved me from grief by arranging for me to “go to school” in Seoul under the unofficial tutelage of a reserve officer who had been an old-time New York City Homicide Detective (whose name I have forgotten, to my shame).  With limited time and exigent circumstances due to an active enemy campaign, he pushed me to the limit, creating every conceivable kind of crime scene and scenario possible in the bombed-out buildings and abandoned classrooms of our home-made “campus”. He was a rough and tuff “old-style” city cop who was all business, with no time to waste on military protocol and sophomoric platitudes. In one week that grizzled veteran taught me things it might have taken several years of investigative routine harnessed to a typical chain-of-command to experience. His continuous emphasis on developing and practicing the powers of observation not only got me successfully through my first homicide case at the age of 18, but has served me in all my pursuits to this very day, and lies at the center of my chosen craft as a story-teller.

            In a later chapter of my young military life, it was Master Sergeant Mike Rathsack who became my “father-in-chief”, as I suddenly found myself stateside, with a brand new wife, and the day-to-day operational responsibility for the security of a Fighter Interceptor base at the age of twenty. Adjusting to life in the extraordinary closeness of the military-married community can be a challenge all by itself, but to have your “six o’clock” protected by a 6’7”, 250- pound “graybeard” who had served as Chief Bo’sun of both a PT boat, and a PBY amphibian in WWII was a double blessing for me and for Shirley. He and his wife literally took us under their arms, enticing us to find housing in the Puget Sound community of Mukilteo, Washington, where Mike was Commander of our crash boat. (He also taught me how to fish for Crappie in the Snohomish lake country.)

            Still later, I served a brief, but somewhat dangerous “undercover” assignment in the very early days of what we now call “the drug war”, and there it was another old-timer, Master Sergeant Walter Koreyvo, an OSI Special Agent, who was my stalwart partner, teacher and protector.  And the “old timer” who taught me that very few “bold” pilots get to be “old” pilots, was a soft-spoken instructor named Edmondo Roberti, who had grown both old and wise in the days of biplanes and dead reckoning.

            My first serious forays into the field of wilderness travel and serious writing were inspired by the best-selling author and founder of “The Wilderness Society”, Sigurd F. Olson, who was a friend right up to his death in 1982, while it was Scott Nearing, dean of the back-to-the-land movement who was building a stone wall by hand around his half-acre garden at age 97 who left an indelible respect during my visit to his Maine homestead, where even his new stone home had been hand-crafted by him and his wife Helen, stone-by-stone, with mortar mixed in an old wheel barrow. (When asked, he informed me he thought it might take 13 years to complete the wall!)

            And if today I want to know what kind of fruit will grow best here in Rockville, and the best date for planting corn. . . I will ask my friend and neighbor Orell Hirschi whose family roots and local knowledge go back to pioneer days.

             Yes!  I have learned over the years to pay attention to the “Old Timers” of life here on planet Earth.

 

 

Late in his life, prominent author and outdoorsman Sigurd F. Olson shares canoe route   strategy with a younger Al Cooper in Minnesota’s Border Lake country, circa 1980.

 

PAYING HOMAGE TO “PAPPY” BOYINGTON’S “BOYS”

I recently attended the funeral of an old friend; someone I have known as a neighbor for many of the years Utah has been my home. Not only was this renewal of family connections with his wife and offspring pleasant and refreshing, but the entire tasteful and respectful service was both touching and educational. I learned things about my old friend I had never known, in part, I suppose, because he was one of those humble, unassuming people who quietly go about living a life of everyday work and public service without fanfare or show. I’m not sure I even knew that he was a veteran of Marine Corps service; he was one of those quiet veterans. Although undoubtedly as proud as almost all Marines are it was apparently so personal and private a matter with him, that even in death, his family saw to it that the official Marine Corps Honor Guard carried out there salute in a private setting, prior to and apart from public funeral services. That is just the kind of guy he was.

            In a family tribute delivered by his son, himself a former airline captain, I learned that my friend had served as an enlisted man with VMF-214, one of the most famous fighter squadrons America ever put in the air, legendary during an earlier era in WWII as the “Black Sheep Squadron”, led then by another legend, Colonel Gregory “Pappy” Boyington, and active in every war since then.

            All of this remembering took me back to the hero-worship of my boyhood when “Pappy” Boyington’s picture hung on my bedroom wall, along with those of Colin P. Kelly, Richard Bong and Tommy McGuire. Impatient with his country’s hesitancy to fight the Axis, Boyington had resigned his Marine Corps commission to travel to China where he flew P-40s and Brewsters against the Japanese with Chenault’s “Flying Tigers” (The American Volunteer Group). After Pearl Harbor, and with several aerial victories already under his belt, he was welcomed (reluctantly some say) back into the Marine Corps as a Major, heading to the Pacific to fly F4U Corsairs against the Japanese.

            As Commander of Marine fighter squadron VMF-214 he and his equally-non-conformist and party-loving followers named their unit the “Black Sheep”, an identification which soon became well-known both at home and with the enemy they met in the air. By coincidence, their Marine Air Group 13 flew out of the same fields my brother’s unit, Marine Air Group 27 used at Henderson Field on Guadalcanal, and later the island of Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides, so I had a special incentive to follow his exploits.

            Rabaul on the island of New Britain was the Japanese “Gibraltar” of the Pacific with a powerfully protected harbor and some of Japan’s best pilots in 1943-44. It was against this target and these defenders that the “Black Sheep” matched skills every day, and it was in that venue that Boyington was credited with 26 additional air victories, to bring his verified total to 28, one of only three Americans to attain that high water mark. He was a generous leader though, sharing “Ace” status with five of his squadron mates, always choosing to fly the least airworthy fighter on the base as the group deployed for each sortie. Some of their most dangerous missions were against ground and harbor targets requiring them to endure accurate and determined ground fire at low altitudes, and on January 3^rd, 1944, “Pappy” was shot down at sea.  Picked up by a Japanese submarine, he spent the remainder of the war in a POW camp outside Tokyo. He would not learn until his release as an emaciated victim of starvation and cruel treatment that he had already been approved by President Roosevelt to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.

            One cannot pay homage to VMF-214 and its sister squadrons without mentioning the Vought F4U “Corsair”, one of the greatest examples of aviation genius to come out of WWII. Designed initially for Navy Carrier-based operations, it ultimately became synonymous with Marine Corps fighting squadrons. With its unmatched Pratt & Whitney R-2800 Twin Wasp radial 18-cylinder engine the “Corsair” became the first American fighter to exceed 400 mph. The same engine would eventually power many other famous aircraft including the AAF’s P-47 “Thunderbolt”.  By the end of the “Corsair” era in 1953, the 12,571 F-4Us in its 16 model variations would represent the longest production run of any piston-engine fighter aircraft in U.S. history.

            Colonel Gregory “Pappy” Boyington, USMCR (Retired) died in 1988 and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.  A descendent of Sioux ancestry and born in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, the Boise Airport was named in his honor. If the “Black Sheep Boys” who knew and flew with him were around today, they would attest that above all other honors, he was revered by those who served under him.

 

 

Lt. Colonel Gregory “Pappy” Boyington briefs his “Black Sheep” Squadron members prior to a mission.

 U.S. Marine Corps Historical Museum

                                           

 

 

 

          

With its classic gull-wing profile, this Vought F4-U “War Bird” is still flying today.                                                                                                                                                               Al Cooper Photo

 

 

 

 

 

A CASTAWAY’S STORY - MEET THE REAL ROBINSON CRUSOE

Perhaps it was inevitable that so remarkable a set of characters as William Dampier, an Englishman, and Alexander Selkirk, a Scot should cross paths three hundred years ago in a world in which England, Spain and France were almost constantly at war. What we do know is that Selkirk as a troubled lad almost always being pursued by the authorities might have been looking for a way to escape Merry Olde England while Captain Dampier, a well-known Buccaneer on the lookout for likely recruits for his sea-going fleet of free-booting ships might have been looking for another hand.

            The term “Buccaneer” – an old Spanish word describing cooking fires which just happened to be traditional among their ilk – came to mean the same thing as raiding parties who preferred being known as “Privateers” or sea-going mercenaries who raided and plundered the ships and towns of their country’s enemies, and who included among their numbers many of “high” birth and lofty title. In other less quaint times and places they were called “pirates”.

            Sometime around 1703, young Selkirk left his Scottish hometown of Lower Largo, Fife as a crew member of the Cinque Ports on a privateering mission to the South Seas with the well-known Dampier and a three-ship raiding squadron which put ashore for water on a tiny speck of land known as the Juan Fernández Islands off the coast of Chile. By this time, it would appear that the young mouthy sailor was enough of a seaman to feel that the Cinque Ports was anything but seaworthy. Not content to argue about the need to make some repairs, it seems that Alex said something like “I would rather stay right here than go one more league in this leaky tub”. (I’m just guessing about the exact language of this conversation, but not about the outcome). With his sea chest and its meager contents for company, Selkirk was left behind, amid the squawking of a million gulls, sea lions and seabirds, and an infestation of rats, a legacy of years of European visitors to the archipelago. And thus he would remain for the next four years and four months. He was now the Governor and sole citizen of Más a Tierra.

            If there was to be a saving grace to his adventure, it took the form of his free-spirited and self-reliant life style and the good fortune to have been the son of a leather-tanner. First of all, Selkirk befriended some of the island’s feral cats, and turned them into a rat-consuming posse making beach life more endurable. Then, as his shoes and clothing wore out, he moved inland where herds of equally-feral shipwrecked goats provided protein for the meat-pot and an ample supply of hides on which to practice his boyhood tanning skills. With building supplies in abundance, and the best of dining offered up by sea, pasture and forests, staying alive and well on a 35-square-mile island warmed by the Humboldt Current seems not to have been too much of a challenge for a young man smart enough to make his own knives and tools from abandoned casks and convenient flotsam. In fact, it would be the arrival of other ships, all of them manned by the Spaniards who sought to hunt him down and kill him which would be the occasional bane of his lonely existence.

            All of this was brought to my mind recently, as a perusal of my “Time Table of World History” marked February 2^nd, 1709, as the date on which another English ship – HMS Duke - commanded by Capt. Woodes Rogers would come calling in search of water and a cure for the scurvy which was decimating his crew of Privateers. The island’s lone inhabitant not only led them to fresh water, but to feasts of roasted goat meat which saved their lives.

            The return voyage would extend by another two years the Scotsman’s homecoming to Fife where his memoirs of his South Seas adventure would fall into the hands of Daniel Defoe, who would edit it into The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.  As if that were not sufficient recognition, another fiction writer named Jonathan Swift would be inspired by the tale to write his own version with a different twist and call it Gulliver’s Travels.

            And so one life was saved and two great adventure stories were inspired by an event which took place 304 years ago and in a land far, far away.

 

It would be difficult to put a number on the young lives of those whose love for reading and                                           powers of imagination were so kindled and stoked as in the case of those in virtually every land

 and every language who have come under the spell of Daniel Defoe’s most famous story. How                                      fitting that this international book store in Istanbul Turkey bears the name of Robinson Crusoe.