Reminiscences of my Dad

My Dad, after whom I am named Roman, is now 83 years old, lives in Florida, is still in good health, and is as active as can be. [Dad reposed on January 20, 2013. Memory eternal!] We talk by phone every week, and I try to visit him at least once a year, even though we live almost at the extreme antipodes of the continent from each other. Even though he has a computer, his internet access is dial-up, and so he rarely if ever visits my blog, and will probably not see this. Even so, I want to tell him, “Thanks for being my Dad, and may God grant you many, many years.”

My first reminiscence, an explanation about my name...

While I was growing up, and until the age of 37, I was called Norman, my original English name. I was born when my Dad was serving in Korea, and my Mom and he could not agree on my name. “I want my first-born son named after me,” my Dad told her.
“We can't do that!
‘Roman’ is such a greenhorn name! All the kids will laugh at him when he goes to school!” my Mom argued. She always wanted to be the most American and up-to-date. My Dad's name is an ancient name, like the names of all his brothers and sisters, but he gave in, because he was far away, and he didn't want to argue. But my Mom offered a compromise, “Norman, how about Norman?” she offered.
“It sounds like Roman, and then the kids won't bother him, because it's an American name. Think of Norman Rockwell.” My Mom was a graphic artist, and she liked paintings and painters. So, I was baptised as a baby in the basement chapel of a neighborhood convent in Chicago, Saint Mark's, and my Dad's sister Elizabeth (Evelyn) and her husband Leo, were my godparents. My grandmother Sophia (far left in the photo) used to call me Normek which is Polish for Normie and my parents called me Norm. I won't tell you what my schoolmates called me, but they made fun of me anyway, because back in the 1950's, Norman was just as goofy-sounding a name as Roman would have been. In fact, it was worse. Kids with very foreign-sounding names, like Dragomir or Wolfgang were never taunted, because their names were just too mysterious. Mine, however, was just on the cutting edge of nerd-dom, and so I was always embarrassed to even tell people my name.I just had to include my first grade class photo. The kids in this picture are too precious, and so typical of what we were like in those days. About half of the class were either immigrant kids or American-born of immigrant parents. Zoom the photo and see if you can tell which are the immigrants, the ‘greenhorns’ as my Mom called them, and which are the Americans. By the way, I am the boy at the right end of the second row from the top, wearing a white shirt and tie. Seymore is next to me wearing a suit (his name was a bit weird too, and he got teased as I did), and Dragomir is the fourth boy from the right in my row, standing below the smiley boy in the dark suit. It's strange that I still remember many of them by name. I was in love with Maud, the Asian girl second from the left in the third row.

To finish the story, at the age of 37, when I was chrismated into the Greek Church, I regained my original name ‘Roman’ in the Greek form ‘Romanos’ to honor my Dad, and because my Mom had already reposed, it gave her no offense. That's the story of my name, if anyone was wondering.

Now, to the real reminiscence of my Dad...

I was 17 years old, had just gotten my driver's license, and had not yet really learned how to handle a car in all situations. I was working the 2nd shift at the Wheaton post office where my Dad was the superintendant. It was after midnight, and a drizzly sort of night, and I was going home. Filled with the sense of power I had, driving my Dad's new station wagon, I took a curve at too high a speed, rolled the car into a ditch, breaking the windshield and all the windows, lost my glasses and bumped my head really bad, but the car bounced back onto its wheels and was driveable. I drove the 18 miles to my house, my Mom was up waiting for me, but Dad was already in bed, snoring. She opened the door and asked, "Norm, are you alright?" and then looked at the car, roof smashed down and all the edges lined with grass poking out of sod fragments. She hurried me in, and then went and woke up my Dad. I went with her.

"What happened, Norm?" he asked. I lied. I made up a story of how there must've been oil on the road when I took that curve and rolled his new car into the ditch. He slowly got up and got dressed, "Where did it happen?" he asked, then, "Let's go and see if we can find the windshield and get the license sticker off of it, so it can't be traced." We went down and found the sticker and tore it off the shattered windshield, and drove home. We both went back to bed. I feared for my life in the morning.

What did Dad do? Nothing. He just started driving his jalopy to work, tried to salvage parts off the new car (he worked on cars), and rescheduled me to work in the Dead Letter department during his working hours, since we now had only one car in the family. He never blamed me or punished me or even mentioned what happened again. He took the loss, and acted as if he never had that new car.

I've never forgotten this incident all my life, and even though when I've reminisced about it with my Dad, he has said, “Well, that's not how I remember it!” ...well, he probably doesn't want to be made out to be a ‘softy.’ After all, he was an army man.

The other reminiscence (for there are two) about my Dad, well, I've posted this before, but anonymously, but here it is again, only now you know who the old veteran was...

An old man sitting in his tiny room on a day bed.
On the wall behind the bed are two glazed picture frames, the one on the left full of awards and ribbons from his American Legion days, the one on the right displays an arrangement of military decorations, bars and medals hanging from ribbons, with a sepia tone photo of a young soldier in his early twenties. He has company with him in his room, a rare event.
His visitor asks him about the medals, “What was this one for? And what about that other one?” The old man’s eyes get a far away look in them when asked about a medal for his service in Korea during the war almost sixty years ago. “What did you do when you were in Korea to earn that? Were you in combat?”
“No, not exactly what you’d call combat, but I was surrounded by it. Me and another soldier, we were assigned to carry mail between Pusan and the front lines. When we landed in Pusan, that’s about all there was of Korea, the Chinese had overrun everything. My original army unit was almost completely wiped out. I got placed in a different unit, and we took the mail back and forth.

“We lived in the railway car that carried the mail, like a postal unit on wheels, it got hauled from the base at Pusan to wherever we had to get the mail to and from our troops. We took in a Korean boy, must’ve been twelve years old or so, named Kim Mun Heup. He spoke good English, he was from a rich family in Seoul, but both his parents were killed in the fighting. We took him in as our house boy. He cooked, washed our stuff, helped us buy food and supplies in the towns wherever we went. He lived with us in the railway car.

“We paid him, of course, but I got a hold of a Sears Roebuck catalog, and we let him look through it and pick out clothes and other things. We sent away for them, and when they finally got here, boy, was he ever happy! He had a baseball cap and real American clothes, tee-shirts and blue jeans, and shoes. Boy, was he ever proud! Kim found about six other boys, all orphans like himself, but younger, and became their manager. He got his orders from us, and gave them their work. He paid them, and shared with them, of course.

“I was proud of him, too, and I wanted to adopt him and bring him back to America, but I knew that wouldn’t go over well. I’d just gotten married before being shipped off, and I had a baby on the way. I knew my wife wouldn’t want to see me bring home a kid just ten years younger than me, and not ‘one of us,’ if you get my meaning.

“When we were in the north, at the front, refugees would come to me and my buddy, maybe Kim told them about us, and we’d give them a place to stay and a ride in our mail car back to the south. We’d drop them off at various places along the way, where they had friends or relatives to take them in. Times were pretty rough, and they’d lost a lot. Once we even hid a bunch of Catholic nuns who escaped from the north and dropped them off in a safe area. They were Koreans, of course, but spoke good English, as did most of the people that came to us for help.

“Boy, would we ever have gotten in trouble for hiding these people, if the base commander had found out! But he never did. That’s because we always dropped them off before the train got back to Pusan. We didn’t see any harm in it, helping those folks. What else could we have done?

“I didn’t stay right to the end of the war. Our replacements arrived, and me and my buddy returned to the States. Like I said, I really wanted to adopt Kim and bring him home, but it just couldn’t happen. So before we left, we gave him a couple of thousand dollars and dropped him off in a small town where he had some relatives. The money was for his education. I hope he made it. We didn’t stay in touch after the war. Life had just changed too much for all of us.”

The visitor listened to the old man release his secret story and wondered, had anyone else heard this told in many a year? Was the buddy still alive, staying alone in some cottage like this old soldier? And where was Kim? Three whole lifetimes were lived completely apart, that once for a year or a little more had been more closely knit than family, two young men and a boy riding the rails together in a war-torn land, carrying messages between danger and safety, carrying souls secretly from oppression to freedom.

That’s worth more than medals.