IN HONOR OF MY FATHER-IN-LAW ON VETERANS DAY

It's been just over two years since my father-in-law, Morey Hunter, passed away at the age of ninety.  During the thirty-five years that I knew him, he never once spoke voluntarily about his service during World War II.

For Morey not to speak about a subject was unusual.  He was a garrulous and highly opinionated man, operatic in tone and sentimental by nature.  Where family and close friends were concerned, he didn't just wear his heart on his sleeve, he gave it to you wholesale.  He was a tireless worker, a dapper dresser, a fastidious cleaner, and a rabid Yankees fan which led to some truly hilarious banter with his New England transplant daughter.  He loved to argue, waxing both poetic and crude about politics, movies, sports, and the quality of the fruit at various local markets about which he was more fanatic than he was about the Yankees.  But about the war, he would say almost nothing.

Because of his reticence, the details of his service are sketchy. He was sent overseas in 1944 as a radar specialist with an artillery battalion.  He saw service in North Africa, Italy, France, and Germany where, being a natural if untutored linguist, he became a German translator despite only knowing Yiddish.  He arrived in Dachau the day after the camp was liberated.

If pressed, he would tell us some of the more humorous incidents that befell him in Europe - the time his rifle split during guard duty in a rain storm or the time his precious supply of canned tuna from home was destroyed by German artillery.  But even in these stories, there was always an undercurrent of the fear and brutality he'd experienced, the sense of isolation he'd felt as a young man far from family and home and in constant peril.

Only twice did I fully see the psychological scars the war had left on him.  The first was in the summer of 1999 during a family vacation in Italy.  We were driving from Tuscany down to Naples, the car ringing with laughter over some forgotten travel mishap, when Morey suddenly became quiet and withdrawn.  I asked him if he was okay, and he simply said that he'd been there before.  I looked up at an approaching road sign:  Monte Cassino.  He had been present at one of the bloodiest campaigns of the war.

The second time was in the spring of 2003 when Morey received a cryptic phone call from France to his Florida home.  Given the bad connection and his partial deafness, he couldn't understand much of what was being said but managed to get enough information for me to follow up.  The call was from a French family, the Merciers, who had befriended him and a GI buddy while they were stationed in Épinal after the liberation of France.  The father, Marcel, was a young boy at the time but had very clear recollections of the time he spent with the Americans.  In broken English, he wrote Morey the following:

"The last time I saw [you] was some weeks before Christmas and [you] should have come to dinner but [your] unit moved some days before...and we were very sad."

"Please [know] the friends who are dead for the France are not dead for nothing.  French people love their American friends...I wish to your family a good health and I address you my good and faithful memory."

When we asked Morey what he would write in return, he looked at us sadly and said, "I can't.  You write him back."  We were stunned and pressed the issue.  This family had gone through a tremendous effort to make contact; how could he not reply personally?  He got mad and told us again that he couldn't and wouldn't.  The pain of remembering was clearly much deeper than we imagined.  We never brought up the subject again.

Morey was among the fortunate who returned from the war.  He married, raised a family, prospered in business, and lived a full, rich life.  But it would be thoughtless of me not to remember him today for his service to this country and for the sacrifices he and countless others made for the freedom of the world.

GOOD BYE MR. CHIPS AND GOOD RIDDANCE

At the tender age of fourteen, I abandoned hearth, home, tube, and fridge and went off to boarding school for three years.  When I arrived at Williston Academy in the fall of 1964, I was a chubby lad of 160 lbs., but after three months, I was twenty pounds lighter and three inches taller.  The inches were a consequence of puberty; the pounds were victims of circumstance.

Before I wallow in the Dickensian details, it's only fair to note the benefits I received at Williston.  I was given a solid general education with a strong emphasis on writing and literature.  With no TV available, I discovered that there just might be something to this book-reading thing.  I also developed a keen interest of theater since the Drama Club was one of the few places a sports-challenged dweeb could meet girls.

For Williston, like most New England prep schools of that era, was strictly single gender.  Apart from plays, the only contact we had with women came during the occasional Saturday night dance.  These two-hour affairs were more tightly chaperoned than Sicilian mob trials and afforded all the intimacy of a subway platform at rush hour.  Your escorts were chosen by the sole criterion of height, and more often than not, this was bungled.  Many was the night I found myself dancing cheek-to-sternum with some mortified amazon from our sister school.  Prep school may have sharpened my mental skills, but socially, I was one evolutionary step shy of Neanderthal.  As a result, I spent most of my first semester at college gawking at female classmates like a randy village idiot.

The lack of women was only one of many rigors at Williston.  Boarding schools in the 60's came fully equipped with an exhausting and rigidly maintained schedule of studies, athletics, and vicious hazings.  There were daily room inspections, a mandatory dress code, and a dearth of fellow Jews.  Because the school was founded by a dour Congregationalist minister, attending chapel was mandatory six days a week.  To this day, I'm one of the select few of my tribe who knows the words to "Onward Christian Soldiers."

But those hardships were like a week on the Riviera compared to what passed for food at Williston, and I use the word "food" in the broadest possible sense allowed by the English language.

Meals were taken in a large communal dining hall tastefully decorated in Early American Penitentiary.  It could have easily been mistaken for Leavenworth except that the inmates wore blazers and sported more pimples than tattoos.  The room held fifty long rectangular tables, each seating nine students and one faculty member.  Food and drink were served in bulk from indestructible stainless steel platters and pitchers - clearly a time before Martha Stewart had any influence on "institutional" decor.

Like classes, meals at Williston were for instruction, not pleasure.  Apart from providing basic sustenance (dubious at best), the partaking of food was seen as a means to manners, civility, and restraint.  Since the actual food was merely an adjunct to these lessons, it was treated with the same joyless severity as logarithms and gerunds.

However fresh and savory provisions may have been when they arrived at the Williston kitchen, they were soon taken to task by the school's culinary Marine Corps.  Under the stern leadership of head chef Albert Boudreau, the staff didn't so much prepare food as beat it into submission.  Chicken was shaken down and bullied by these gastronomic goons until nothing remained but grease and bones.  Crisp string beans were strong-armed into limp, colorless straw, and potatoes were clubbed into mush right out of the sack.   Serving this stuff wasn't merely an affront to the palette; it was a violation of the Geneva Convention. 

Our biweekly "treat" of roast beef was cooked so far beyond well done that science has yet to find a name for it.  It's as if the recipe came from The Solar Core Cook Book:  "Place meat in preheated oven at 15,000,000° F and roast until nuclei are sufficiently fused."  The remains were then stored in steam chambers until the texture became indistinguishable from an all-weather radial.  Once it was certain no vestige of flavor remained, the meat was cut into thin grayish-white slices and stacked on cold metal trays.  It was served with a brown sludge-like gravy consisting of equal parts beef drippings, butter, flour, flour, flour, flour, and flour.

Another feature of the Williston dining experience was the requirement to wait tables for a three-meal rotation every nine days.  Apparently, it wasn't enough to be nauseated by the culinary horrors tableside, you had to witness first hand how meat and produce could be cruelly transformed into hardened criminal fare.  You also learned the brutal lessons of natural selection as you and forty-nine other crazed students fought with Darwinian fierceness for the clean dishes and silverware needed to reset the tables before you were late for class.

In such a place at such a time, weight loss wasn't a sign of deprivation, but a blessing.