Lincoln Presidential Museum

We visited the Lincoln Museum in Springfield first. We managed to get there just as the Museum opened so we were first in line to go to the hologram of the Civil War, an amazing production. Then we went to another theater where we saw clothing of the First Lady along with a replica of one of the rooms in the White House. After that we went through the display of the Presidency, which included a lot of information about the problems Lincoln faced. It seemed the country came apart almost before he was inaugurated. It made me reflect on the political problems we have these days.

Road Trip to Southwest

Here we are all packed up and ready to head to the Southwest and Las Vegas. We are traveling in the Ludmans’ new Ford Edge because it’s a bigger car than our little diesel. As it was, we had to stuff the suitcases into the trunk, not to mention various other bags and snacks and water bottles. We also had our medications and camera equipment and even Shiela, the GPS. If you had opened any doors or the trunk you’d have to jump out of the way to avoid injury from flying bags. But we’re off on our trip.

Our jolly little band drove off down Michigan highway 12 to the Indiana Toll Road and across Northern Illinois to catch the highway down to Springfield, where we intended to visit the Lincoln Presidential Museum as our first stop. We got a motel and of course the first thing we did was check for bedbugs. Luckily there were none, so we had dinner and turned in, getting a good night sleep so we could go to the museum the first thing in the morning.

The plan was to drive west on I 70 after going South to Springfield. From there we traveled on to St. Louis, where we saw the Arch marking the gateway to the West. Next we drove into Missouri, making a detour to see the Capitol at Jefferson City and then stopping at the Truman Library in Independence. Next on to Abeline, Kansas to the Eisenhower Library to see Ike’s birthplace. Then on into Colorado, past Denver to Vail where we got all mixed up about how the town was set up. We spent a couple of hours there and then went on to Grand Junction where we spent the night. Such was the start of our Road Trip.

Uncle Harry

Uncle was the world’s most negative person. This is him with Annie's mom when they returned to the United States from Poland.

When I knew him I’d greet him by saying, “what a beautiful day. Uncle.” to which he would say, “What’s good about it?” If I said “Let’s go look at the sunset, Uncle” he’d reply, “Ya seen one ya seen ‘em all.” No matter what you’d say to him you couldn’t cheer him up.

Still, Uncle seemed to like me. I’d come over to his trailer and sit around with him talking about his experiences during World War Two. The story goes that Harry was working in a machine shop somewhere in Chicago. He was supposed to be important to the war effort and therefore he had a deferment. But he was a fiery personality given to telling everyone what he thought; or maybe a more accurate way of saying it would be to admit that he had a tendency to tell people off when he got mad. Which he did a lot. He therefore had been giving his boss all kinds of trouble, telling him off and so on, until one day he got mad enough to quit his job. Those were the magic words. Harry stormed out of he shop and the next morning, family lore has it, he was informed that he was now draft eligible and therefore to present himself to his draft board. In no time at all Harry was in the army. It was typical of Uncle; he had a knack for shooting himself in the foot.

Once in the army he was attached to General Patton’s care. He found himself off the coast of North Africa in a landing ship with orders to debark off the ramp of the front of his ship. I suppose it was one of those kinds of ships that came right up close to the beach and the troops jumped into the water and waded ashore. All the soldiers in front of him did so and Harry was swept along with them, full field pack and all. Now Harry was a short little guy, barely the minimum height, not even five feet tall, so when he went off the ship and into the water, instead of the water coming up to his waist it came up to his nose (neck). He had all he could do to keep from going under as he struggled ashore with the other guys. But once on shore they were ordered to form up and hike into the desert some fifteen miles, according to Harry. Of course he was drenched and his shoes were full of water, but off they went anyway. They walked and walked and at the end of the day when he took his shoes off his feet were all warped and curled up and in a horrible state. He always swore he hated Patton because Patton had ruined his feet. Whether he actually saw any action in Africa he never did mention, but he was in a unit he called ack-ack, or anti aircraft fire, so he may not have had to do any shooting at all.

Next he was sent to do another invasion, Sicily in May of 1943. This time he was involved in some of the action, much to his disgust. He was still in Ack Ack, stationed at some air base in Sicily. He was mostly occupied with things like putting his carpenter skills to use, such as they were. He built things like latrines and some other minor buildings. Latrines were the big thing, though. He was dug in with the other troops around the edge of the airfield and, as he told it, the German planes came over at twenty thousand feet and looked down to see the airfield ringed with baseball fields. So the next day back came the Germans and bombed the bejeebers out of the airfield, including Harry. He was still mad about it decades later. “I coulda been killed, all for some stupid Goddamned baseball field.” was his way of looking at it. But the bombs rained down. Harry dove for his hole to save himself and found another soldier in there, along with his duffle bag full of dirty laundry. At this point I have to pause to explain that Harry never washed his laundry, he just got new underwear, so he had amassed a huge dufflebag bigger than himself where he carried around the dirty stuff with the idea of washing it one day. At that point I had to interrupt: “Hold it, Harry. You mean you were carrying around sixty or seventy sets of underwear and socks and stuff? How’d you carry it all?” He said. “Oh some big guy would come by and say, ‘need help with that, soldier?’ and he’d carry it for me.”

Back to the foxhole with the soldier in it along with his dufflebag. Harry had to find another spot, so he ended up lying in a little depression while the bombs were falling. When he came back to his hole later a bomb had had a direct hit and the other soldier was killed, but what was even worse, from Harry’s point of view, was that all his underwear was full of holes where the shrapnel had gone through it all. It was all ruined. I suggested that he had been really lucky, but he was pissed off about his underwear. So much for Uncle’s concern for the other guy.

The next campaign Uncle took part in was the invasion of Italy at Anzio. That one was the real thing; the Americans suffered a lot of casualties and made a mess of it, as far as Uncle was concerned. He would talk about one part of the campaign where he was in one spot for weeks all because of one German gun that was holed up in a mountain, in a cave, I believe. It held up the battle for weeks. Then one day they found out where that gun was and blew it up, and according to Uncle they moved up twenty miles or so in one day. He didn’t really talk too much about that part of the war, probably because it was the worst part fom his perspective. But I don’t know. Maybe it was just that nothing happened to him. His final campaign was the invasion of southern France, where he was stationed around Avignon for the rest of the war, still with an AckAck battalion.

After the war Harry returned to Chicago where he got a job in another machine shop making good money.

More Anecdotes about London

Anecdotes

London

Annie and I spent a lot of time in London over the years, digging around all the nooks and crannies we could find. I don’t believe that we ever went there that we didn’t find something new about the city. I had spent two summers almost exclusively in the city and had taken the opportunity to go to as many plays as I could afford, which was really quite a few since you could get standing only tickets at the back for as little as a few shillings. I preferred better seats, of course, but I took what I could afford. One play I particularly remember from that period was Peter Schaffer’s play, The Royal Hunt of the Sun. I didn’t see the original performance at the Old Vic; I saw it at the Queen’s Theater in 1965 or 1966. It was a marvelous performance, with many actors I got to recognize over the years, like Anthony Hopkins, Derek Jacobi and Colin Blakely as Pizarro. The music for the play was marvelous, as I remember, and the scene where the king of the Incas, Atahualpa, died and his followers expected him to come back to life. I have never seen the play again but have expressed to Annie how much I would have liked her to see it.

The very first play I ever took Annie to in London was at the Old Vic in 1968. We went to see Peter Brook’s version of Oedipus Rex, a play I have since seen described as “notorious” because of its startling conception of the play. It starred John Gielgud as Oedipus and Irene Worth as Jocasta and was especially notable because of the chorus being tied to the pillars of the theatre, Guilgud being given sunglasses when his eyes were gouged out, Jocasta committing suicide by impaling herself on a spike, and last of all, a huge yellow phallus being wheeled onto the stage with a band playing “Yes, we have no Bananas.” After the performance was over we had a lot of merriment over it.

We went on to see many plays over the years, but non were as strange as that Oedipus. I know that I had seen 25 or so plays the two years I had lived in London over the summer, but over the years we went to hundreds of productions, some of which we can still remember very well. We saw Olivier in Othello, with Maggie Smith as Desdamona, a majority of Shakespeare’s plays, including Trevor Nunn’s 1977 production of Comedy of Errors at the Aldwych which was notable in that Duke Solinus was portrayed as a banana republic distator (Pinochet?). It had Mike Gwilym as Antipholus of Ephesus and Judy Dench as Adriana. I remember it as a high energy performance. We also saw Anthony and Cleopatra, again at the Aldwych, starring Richard Johnson as Anthony and Janet Suzman as Cleopatra as well as Patrick Stewart as Enobarbus, and Julius Caesar at Stratford, where we sat in the first row and it looked as though Caesar’s Legions were going to walk right over the audience in the opening, even the woman behind me who somehow managed to snore through the start and most of the play.

On another occasion when we were in Stratford on Avon we went to see a play at the Swan Theatre. I on’t remember the name of the play, but it was something like a Restortion comedy, with lots of wigs and elaborate costumes. We got about half way through the performance when the lights went out, leaving us all in the dark. Everything came to a standstill, of course, and after a little time someone produced a couple of flashlights. The actors made a few comments and the director decided to get out the candles and see the rest of the play by candlelight. Shortly the candles had been lit and the actors took off from where they had been when the lights went out. We were impressed that they could so easily slip out of character and then back into it with so little effort.
The play went on five or ten minutes and then another problem occurred: one of the actresses backed into a person holding a candle and her wig caught on fire! The audience reacted and let the actors know immediately, even though they realized it about the same time. So the play stopped for a second time. It was decided it was too dangerous to proceed with candles. While the company were trying to decide what to do the lights came back on. We all breathed a sigh of relief and the actors resumed their persona and the play continued.

By this time the play was running nearly a half hour late, which wasn’t a real problem with the audience of the actors, except that there was a small boy in the play. It was explained that due to the child labor laws he could not be kept up past ten o’clock. The audience were then asked if they would mind if the little boy came out and said his line. Everyone agreed, so out came the small boy, who was playing the part of a servant, and said his line. He received a loud ovation. It was obvious he was quite pleased and he could then go home to bed. After, when we got to the part of the play he was supposed to be in, one of the actors told us, “this is the spot where the little boy was to say his line.”

We left the theatre that night believing we had seen something really extraordinary. It seemed thus to me, at least, but then I frequently have bouts of brain fade during which I find it impossible to name a spoon or fork or what food I am eating. That they could slip into and out of the play impressed me quite a bit. But then, I suppose it was not anything particularly remarkable or heroic, since that was the kind of thing actors and actresses were well trained to do. Just the same, it made for an unusual night at the theatre.

We had many a wonderful experience at the theatre. I often wonder about people who never go to plays, or limit themselves to musicals only, though I have seen some wonderful musicals, too. When we were in London I think we went to just about every theatre that was open during our stay. Back here in the US we still go regularly to Chicago, a good theatre town, Stratford Ontario, Niagara on the Lake, The American Players Theatre, to plays in Sarasota, Florida and in Philadelphia. We have even gone to the theatre as far away as Sydney and Melborne, Australia.