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TIMES PAST: VISITS TO VETERANS HOME CULTIVATED AN

INTEREST IN THE LEGACY OF WARS -- Some of the veterans

told stories of the smell of mustard gas at a place called Chateau

Thierry at the Battle of Argonne Forest. The men seemed to

have difficulty breathing as they told their stories.

Sawtelle veterans home

Story here... http://www.sanluisobispo.com/news/local/story/232208.html

Story below:

-------------------------

Times Past: Visits to veterans home cultivated an interest in the legacy of wars

By Dan Krieger

“M y love is bigger than a Cadillac (Oo-bop-wop, bop-bop). I try to show it and you drive a me back (Oo-bopwop, bop-bop). Your love for me, got to be real (Oo-bopwop, bop-bop). For you to know a just how I feel (Oobop- wop, bop-bop). A love for real not fade away.”

I spent part of New Year’s Eve 1958 sitting in an Oldsmobile Rocket 88, listening to a popular disc jockey playing Buddy Holly’s music. “Not Fade Away” had a nostalgic cachet for me because I was about to graduate from high school, and my life was about to change.

Far too much has been made of the complacency and conformity of the 1950s “Leave it to Beaver” and “Ozzie and Harriet” generation.

Seventeen-year-olds in 1958 understood how ephemeral life could be. Our early formative years had been shaped by World War II. Some of us had seen family members off at the train or bus station, never to return. I had at least three friends who had lost their fathers.

We had seen our parents’ tear-streaked faces on April 12, 1945, when the radio announced the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had guided our country through the darkest years of the 20th century.

We were on the cusp of the “penicillin revolution.” A childhood friend’s brother had died of blood poisoning, the result of a skating accident.

My sense of change and interest in history developed during these early years as I got to move colored tacks on a cork-board-mounted map that my grandmother kept for me. It was a great way for a 5-year-old to learn geography as we reposition the “Allied advances.”

I went with my grandparents to Sawtelle veterans home in West Los Angeles. The huge Victorian hospital was at the front of what seemed like an ocean of headstones of veterans’ graves dating to the 1880s. Even in California you could get a sense of the magnitude of the Civil War by counting the graves of the Grand Army of the Republic.

It wasn’t death, but the living legacy of war that fascinated me. My grandmother would use war-rationed sugar to bake cookies. We would carefully wrap the cookies in wax paper and place them in a bag with several pieces of fruit and a “four-pack” or two of Chesterfield cigarettes. My grandfather had some connection to the Liggett & Myers Tobacco Co. and had cartons of these samples that I later found were handed out in college bookstores across the country.

We would take several dozen bags to the veterans home on Sunday after church. At the age of 4 and 5, I would hand these over to men in wheelchairs on the grounds. They looked to be very old, but I later realized that many of them were in their early 50s.

Some of the veterans told stories of the smell of mustard gas at a place called Chateau Thierry at the Battle of Argonne Forest. The men seemed to have difficulty breathing as they told their stories. As an asthma sufferer, I could relate.

Yet when they opened the bags I placed in their hand, their choice astonished me. I would have gone for the cookies. They went for the Chesterfields.

One of the veterans taught me the meaning of a line from a popular World War I song: “Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag…While you’ve a lucifer to light your fag, smile, boys, that’s the style.”

A “lucifer” was a match and a “fag” was a cigarette.

That was when I decided I wanted to study the Great War and other wars. I had learned about the inevitability of change, hence my nostalgic response to Buddy Holly’s song, the timelessness of which is attested to by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Grateful Dead revivals.

But the infirmed Doughboys with their “fags” on the lawn of Sawtelle also taught me that the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Dan Krieger is a professor emeritus of history at Cal Poly.

-------------------------

Larry Scott  --

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