Old Times

I start a lot of sentences with "when I was a kid". That was fifty years ago now. Doesn't seem that long ago in some ways and an eternity in others. Almost every one I thought of as an adult has passed on. It doesn't seem possible. They were just as real as you and I, and now, exist only in my memory. All had done things that should have been noted and written down somewhere. Uncle Dana served on a troop transport in the Pacific and survived a Kamikaze attack. It happened so fast a cook ended up manning one of the anti-aircraft guns. That snippet is all I know of his years in the pacific. I was too young and the war years were too recent and too painful for anyone to tell you much, really. There were some interesting stories their somewhere, I just didn't think to ask.

I had two friends that lived across the street. We spent most waking hours together. We were young boys and went from one bad idea to the next, trying to enjoy ourselves, create a little adventure and stay under our mothers radar. Their dad was a milkman and in those days that meant he went door to door, checking the little insulated box on peoples porches for notes that said how much milk to leave. He drank alot at night and was quiet in a way that you were careful not to intrude on. He was at Normandy, the battle of the bulge in Bastogne and fought his way through Europe all the way to Germany. Mom or dad gave me that bit of information to explain his behavior. At the time, I thought heroes were much larger than life and carried themselves with a self confidence that was a tip off to their herodom. The idea that one could live across the street and deliver milk was out of the question.He was like a lot of men that came home from WWII. They never talked about it and went on to unassuming, mundane jobs. Most, like him, drank a lot. He died when I was in Junior High School. Too much alcohol and too much WWII finally got the best of him. By any definition he was a war hero. There were so many after the war, medals were almost laughable. They were just stage props and somethihg Hollywood could make movies about.

As kids, we spent our time avoiding adults. They were in charge of setting limits on you and were to be avoided when possible. In those days, mothers didn't keep you insight at all times. You were to report in occasionally to keep them informed of your whereabouts, but that was relaxed as you got older and your record of behavior was not marred with too many glaring infractions caused by your freedom. Mostly, what they didn't know, didn't hurt them.

Consequently, a lot of the knowledge about people you thought quite ordinary, was not very extensive. We were more concerned with ourselves and our fun than anything else. We were having adventures. The adults we knew, but knew little about, were as dull as mud and overexposure to them would make your life quite tedious. It was unthinkable that they might have had an adventure ever.

Now, I wish I had pumped them for information. Probably, the filtered version of their stories would have been almost as dull as I imagined at the time. When I got old enough to have been told some of the unedited stories, I was starting a family and too dumb to ask before the opportunity was gone.

I'll give you one example of how we know seemingly ordinary people with extraordinary stories. When I lived in Trenton and had a farm stand, I had customer named Friedel Doerstling. She was a brusque, pushy, and somewhat abrasive old German woman. She came in a lot and after awhile I got used to her. Her husband Hans fixed my grandmothers clock for me once. He was a tinkerer and as it turns out a mechanical engineer. Years went by, Hans died, I sold the fruit stand and to make a bit of much needed money, I helped Friedel clean up and dispose of his things. I helped pack and lugged boxes mainly. It took a few weeks and she made coffee and lunches and we talked a lot to fill the time. She had lived in Germany with two small children during World War II. Hans had been in Charge of a factory using allied prisoners as labor. When the bombers came, she would take the kids to the basement and hug them and wait it out. She had a garden and would trade strawberries for chocolate bars with the prisoners that were marched past her garden on the way to work in the factory. "Hans was gut to zem" she assured me. One day I was packing books in his little shop, on the back of the house and came across a copy of Mein Kampf. "Wow" I thought. Friedel was in the house so I opened it to see what it looked like. It was autographed personally by Adolf Hitler. "Holy cats!"
In the middle, between pages was a picture taken of Hitler giving a speech. It was taken at distance of less than ten feet. It had the Nazi flags draped in the background and a huge wildly cheering crowd. Whoever took the picture was up on the stage with him. He was flanked by people on each side. This was valuable and not one of Hans's engineering books. It raised a lot of questions in my mind and I took the book into show Friedel. She looked at and didn't seem excited or ashamed or surpised. I asked Friedel who took the picture. She said, "I did." Were you on the stage with him? "Yah, I was a swimmer in the 1936 Olympics and we were all on stage with him." As days went by, I found out she, Hans, and the children had emigrated to the Dominican Republic after the war. That raised a bunch of other questions in my mind. How did the get there? What was there source of money right after the war? Why such an obscure country? There probably was a lot more to this story than I was being told, but Freidal knew I couldn't put it into a context that would make it understandable and perhaps defensible. Without being there, it would be very hard to understand.



All history is shaded by the author recording it. I'm sure this story was filtered and shaped to fit Friedels needs and circumstances. It does make my point about older people being more interesting though.

I think young people marginalize older people for a couple of reasons. First they feel the older people are out of touch with the new reality and that only young people can view current events with the needed insight. They are not burdened with looking at historical facts to formulate an opinion. Older people can not escape putting today's occurrences into a perspective which is shaped by their life's experiences. They cannot forget what the have seen and done over the years so things are sorted and categorized. Similarities with past happenstance is considered. In a bygone era, the "wisdom" thus imparted led to respect for the older people.

Second, schools have replaced elders as the educators. This abdication of education to teachers has led to a point where a few teachers with their limited background and biases influence the many. The richness and diversity of the older generations is marginalized and so their experience based wisdom is replaced with youthful, ego based wisdom, made up as they pass through school. Arrogantly assuming whatever is taught to them to be exactly right. People whose experience leads them to disagree are discounted. When experience is not valued, those with experience are not included in discussions. Why bother to ask an opinion if you don't have respect for the person giving the answer?

The point of this is that older people have a heck of a lot of interesting stories. The younger you are, the less interesting experiences you have. Teenagers are a dull lot and yet they believe with youthful fervor to be much smarter than their parents to the point where they only associate with other teenagers of equal brilliance. Sound familiar. It is almost the definition of a teenager.

I didn't ask a lot of questions of older people when I was young either. I wished I had. Consequently, the stories contained in their answer is now lost forever. What were my great grandfathers and great grandmothers like? Were they funny, happy, rich, poor, abusive, or what? I didn't ask and now I can't. Everyone who knew is gone. I am now the possessor of the knowledge of my children's great grandparents. I knew them well. I know stories about them--good and bad. I loved some and had very little to do with the others. I will bet that none of my kids know their first names. I think this is typical and sad. I intend to rectify this. It would be very sad to see a repetition of my mistakes by my children.

The moral of the story is get out there and talk to older people. I guarantee you will be surprised by what your learn. Some things may be useful and some not, but it is all going to be interesting. Some will knock your socks off.