Progressive Christian Reflections by Chris Glaser: World War II

Showing posts with label World War II. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 20, 2017

Christmas in 1945 Japan

Mom included this twig with tinsel

from the family Christmas tree

in one of her letters to Dad in Japan.

This post continues and concludes “A Christmas Love Story” begun in my last post, using letters my mom and dad exchanged while he served as part of the U.S. occupation forces in Japan following the end of World War II, as she and their toddler daughter and infant son remained in their home in Los Angeles. (Mom was 30 and Dad was 29, and they shared the same birthday a year apart.) Current service members stationed abroad and their families know firsthand the challenges and heartache involved.

On December 25, 1945, Mom wrote of Christmas, “This has been the loneliest I have ever had. I haven’t cried—I’ve felt too numb. I don’t dare dwell on the fact you are so far away.” Then she describes that morning:

I wish you would have seen Stevie this morning. He was as excited as Sharon. He yelled & almost threw himself out of my arms. And I couldn’t turn him away from the tree & toys. I gave him his roly poly and oh did he love it. Pretty soon I put him back to bed & did he cry. He wanted to stay. He likes his rocking horse. He should—my hand is sore from using the screwdriver on it & I still don’t have the screws tight enough.

Sharon was well pleased with everything. I think the only time she had her skates off was when she ate her meals. I had told her they didn’t have any more skates like Bonnie was going to get unless you had told Santa to bring her some. And you had.

From my dad:

Sen Zaki, Japan

Christmas morning

Merry Christmas, my Darlings! … It was a happy Christmas for many of us new replacements—our mail has at last started coming through. Most all of the guys got stacks of letters yesterday—one guy got 47. Some of us, however, including me, did not get any, but our hopes are high for the next mail call!

“Red” Hunter and Sgt. Engel have been negotiating for two weeks with the necessary people to bring about the party we had last night. Passes to leave camp and a jeep for transportation were granted by our Lieutenant. And about 6:30 last night, Hunter, Engel, Gattis, and I left the camp. The rest of the guys here were settling down to their beer-drinking, which held promise of being a record-breaking celebration, there being a case of beer available per person. Which is one of the reasons we were now headed for Sen Zaki in a jeep. We were going to spend the evening with Johnny and his wife and perhaps a few of their friends.

Briefly, Johnny is a Korean, is the chief of the Korean Association here, is a graduate of Tokyo University, and—this is the important thing—he is a Christian! His father is a minister of a Korean Presbyterian church somewhere in Korea. Johnny speaks English, though, as he says, “English conversation very, very, difficult.”

It was perhaps chiefly Johnny’s idea that some of us gather with him and his wife on Christmas Eve to sing a few carols. And as we four fellows who were there last night think a good deal of Johnny and his efforts in behalf of his miserable people,* the idea got “promoted” in typical Yankee fashion to the point of reality. And although it was very different from any way I ever spent Christmas Eve before, I believe we came nearer to the true meaning of Christmas spirit than had we remained in camp and soaked up our case of beer.

Not that we did not drink some beer. Sgt. Engel and I took our two cases along. It is much better to share two cases of beer with a group of 8 or 9 people than just the two of us. And as it developed, also to my liking and I think to yours, there was a goodly amount of American beer to be left as “presents” to Johnny, whose meager salary does not permit many luxuries of life.

Red had a can of chili that his mother had sent him some time ago. I had several packs of cigarettes that I had got on the boat. Also we had chewing gum, a few chocolate bars. All these and the beer were our contributions to the feast. Also some tangerines. In fact it was practically our party, which was the way we wanted it, because we have so much and those people so little.

We G.I.’s did not eat the chili—for two reasons, one being that we had already eaten a big chow, and the other being that we had forgotten about spoons, and had we tried to eat it with chopsticks like they did we would still be there! ha! So we ate tangerines.

As I said, there were the four of us Americans. “Red” Hunter, a youngster of 19, who looks more like Spencer Tracy than Tracy does himself. Red is a religious youth and aspires to be a missionary someday. Sgt. Engel, lean, hawk-faced, fierce blue eyes, a bit smaller than I, and hopes this summer will find him back home on his Pennsylvania farm after his 2 year army stretch. John Gattis, from Alabama, I think, a carpenter and builder before his army life—very handy with a guitar, and a very good singing voice. He has a wife and two kids at home. And the fourth G.I.—well you know him pretty well already. Or have you forgotten me?

The others were: Johnny. More properly his name is John Kim. Johnny’s-----MAIL CALL!

I had just about given up hope that I had a letter when they called my name and gave me your letter of Dec. 11^th. It’s the first letter I’ve got since I left the States. Darling, I love you!

Dad interrupted his narrative to respond to things in Mom’s letter, reading it and re-reading it a number of times. Several pages later he returns to introducing the other Christmas Eve partiers: Johnny Kim’s wife, a university graduate and not a Christian, a Mr. Ree, a doctor named Miss Nagato, whom Dad describes as “very kind to Koreans,” plus the serving girl at the hotel, invited to join the group, “giggly,” whose “contribution to entertainment was two or three Japanese songs sung in a very high-pitched voice.”

They asked us about our age, our work, and our families. I showed them my pictures of you, Sharon, and Stevie and in three different languages I was told very emphatically that you are very lovely, Sharon very beautiful and Stevie a wonderful boy—and that I was a very lucky man. And [they asked] did I miss you all tonight? Did I miss you! Lord, Honey, no one could ever measure the amount of feeling that I had to compress into three simple words for the sake of John Kim’s limited vocabulary of English when I said very slowly, “Very, very much!”

I miss Mom and Dad very, very much. And I am grateful to be reminded of their love and faith through their words of Christmas past.

*Koreans were treated harshly during World War II.

Wednesday, December 13, 2017

A Christmas Love Story

If my dad had not sent the above Christmas telegram to my mom in Pittsburg, Kansas, and had my mother not responded positively, I would not be here and you would not be reading “my” blog.

My parents had been high school sweethearts in Pittsburg. My dad was editor of the school paper and my mom was its financial manager. Circumstances separated them three times. During the Depression my dad sought temporary work at a meat packing facility in Iowa to help support his parents on their 80-acre Missouri farm, and during World War II he served in the army as part of the U.S. occupying forces in Japan, while my mother “held down the fort” (as my father would say) in their Los Angeles home with a child and a baby, my sister and brother.

In between, my mom’s parents intervened to prompt Mom to break up with Dad because, they explained, she had never dated anyone else. So he went off to northern California and took a job driving a delivery truck for a baking company in the Sierra Nevada mountain range while she remained in Pittsburg attending college, working at Penney’s, and, as the oldest child, tending to her invalid mother and her father and siblings.

I have hundreds of letters they exchanged during their times of separation. Reading them, more than once I regretted my father never became the writer or the doctor he had hoped to be and that my mother missed out on traveling adventures she had hoped to have. I’ve published and travelled, their vicarious writer and adventurer, but I never had what they enjoyed: a lifelong relationship of love and romance.

People often look for scapegoats to blame for the “breakdown” of “the” family (as if there were only one kind of family), but in truth, it’s the economy and war that are a family’s most serious threats. My parents’ words are testimony to each.

My father deeply grieved having to leave his girlfriend behind in 1934, the year following their high school graduation, as he travelled to Sioux City in hopes of finding work in the meat packing industry which employed his brother-in-law. Going to Cudahy’s very early one morning shortly after his arrival, my 18-year-old future Dad found 175 men already there hoping for a day’s work. He reflected on the experience in a letter dated August 14, 1934:

I wondered at the time if there were just as many seeking work at each of the other two plants, Swift’s and Armour’s. Now I was actually seeing the great masses of the unemployed of a big city, not just reading the stories in the newspaper. I believe if people who are knocking the work-creating acts of the government could actually see and walk among a crowd of men looking for work, [they] would realize that it is [for] our gov’t’s safety to give employment to all possible. What a menace that crowd could be if organized and armed to the teeth. But, I admire those fellows. Their countenances, though not hilarious with joy, were not clouded with undue desperation. So as yet they haven’t given up hope and neither have I.

My parents missed having Christmas together that year because of the daily uncertain possibility of work at one plant or another and the geographical distance between them, even if either had money for the train.

The 1937 Christmas telegram renewed their correspondence, and, by November of 1939, they were married in a small ceremony at the First Baptist Church of Pittsburg, Kansas, visiting her family at their home in town and his family on the Missouri farm before driving to their new home in Quincy, California. Born and raised on the flat plains of Kansas, Mom not only saw her first mountains, but now lived among them! That Christmas, after sending wedding pictures as Christmas gifts, they had no money for gifts for each other, and Mom saved the few coins they had left, keeping them in her hope chest the rest of their life together, a reminder of their first Christmas as husband and wife.

Then came the war. My father was saved from being among the invading troops in Japan by the atomic bomb, and he disembarked from his troop ship in Nagasaki on my sister’s birthday the day after Thanksgiving, 1945. He saw firsthand the devastation of “Fat Boy,” a plutonium implosion device dropped on the city months earlier.

In her Christmas letter to Dad a month later, Mom wrote a story of how the family was doing in his absence and included it in a letter:

It’s Christmas Eve. In a little house on the corner of 62^nd and Third Avenue in the city of Los Angeles lives a service man’s family. See, there’s the star in the window. Outside it is raining. Inside tho there is a fire burning brightly in the fireplace, & a small tree gaily decorated with tinsel & baubles & memories of years past is perched on the chest.

In the bedroom the woman has just tucked the little girl into bed. “Mommy, I don’t feel like Christmas,” the little girl is saying. “I want my daddy.”

“Honey, we all want Daddy home. Even little Stevie. Maybe Daddy will be home with us next year. Now say your prayers and go to sleep.”

“_____ and please Jesus take care of Daddy” concludes the little girl.

My mom continues the story with her many chores after my sister and brother are in bed: washing dishes, boiling the baby’s bottles, putting the gifts out, assembling my brother’s rocking horse with some difficulty, completing a mattress and pillow for my sister’s doll bed. Christmas music on the radio makes her feel closer to Dad, but then she worries about his Christmas day, whether he’s safe, whether he’s received his Christmas box. It’s nearly 3 a.m. when she sits down to write “her summary of Christmas Eve,” “her nightly chat with that dear husband,” concluding with,

A far away look comes into her eyes as she hears “Winter Wonderland.” A snowy nite—cold; a little blue or black Chevy (I think it was a Chevy) but it doesn’t matter, for right there beside her is the most wonderful guy in the world. The shameless excuses she made to be alone with him. To know she had all of his attention for a little while—it was so nice to sit close to him and hold his hand while he drove along snowy streets. They could talk for hours and never tire of each other. She often suspected he listened to her not for any intelligent remarks she made, but because maybe he was in love with her.

So how was Dad’s Christmas in Japan? Stay tuned next week.

Wednesday, February 4, 2015

Fundamentals Without Fundamentalism

Dad in Japan.

Mom's senior photo.

Had they lived, my mother and father would have celebrated their 100^th and 99^th birthdays this past weekend. Gratefully I share some of the things they taught me by example that have shaped my spirituality.

They considered themselves fundamentalists, but this in the day when fundamentalism did not have quite the edge it does today. They were kinder, gentler fundamentalists, unafraid to laugh at themselves and to express doubt and uncertainty, able to cope with a daughter’s divorce and my homosexuality and even my progressive Christianity! My Mom openly questioned whether spirituality could adequately be covered by the “Four Spiritual Laws” popular with fundamentalist campus groups at the time.

Readers will know I am not a fundamentalist Christian by any stretch of the imagination, but my parents did provide me with the fundamentals of my spirituality, some of which follow:

Read and study, reflect and pray. First and foremost, the scriptures. Mom taught first grade at a Christian school and both Mom and Dad taught Sunday school at various times in our Baptist church, and the Bible was their central source of inspiration, as it is mine. Dad also read biblical commentaries and Mom also read mystics, as do I. When I travelled Europe after college, Mom asked me to take with me her marked and worn copy of Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ. They ended every day by kneeling together for prayer beside their bed. And of course we never failed to say grace before meals, even in restaurants (while my brother, out of embarrassment, was under the table “looking for his napkin”).

Do good. One Saturday morning, Mom invited a homeless man into our dining room and prepared him bacon, eggs, toast and coffee much like her mother had fed the unemployed men traveling the rails near their house during the Depression. Dad fetched an intoxicated church member for coffee to sober up before taking him home to his wife. They both invited a sad server at an Arizona café to join us at the table and recount her troubles. Dad led a weekly jail ministry for many years, preaching and toting a heavy portable organ to accompany the inmates’ hymn singing. These are just examples of how kind they were.

Seek justice. Mom’s Christian school (which I had attended) wanted to publish an article and photo about my receiving an award, but rejected the picture because I had a beard. My mom, who was never keen on the beard, informed them that I had won the award having that beard, and if they didn’t want the photo she would not give them the article! During the Vietnam War, Dad suggested we send Congress to fight it, and that would be the end of it. He once gave chase to a young man who had snatched a woman’s purse and returned it to her.

And, before I came out to them as gay, Dad said to my mother of homosexuals, “If they feel for each other what I feel for you, I can understand why they want their relationships.” When my ministry within the LGBT community first appeared in The Los Angeles Times in 1978, Mom supported me and, though popular with students and their parents, was “let go” after three decades of teaching first grade at sacrificial wages. Shortly before Dad’s death, after another devastating defeat for LGBT people at a Presbyterian General Assembly, he encouraged me, “I hope the next time you go tilting at windmills, they fall down!”

Attend church. We were in church virtually all and certainly every Sunday: Sunday school and worship in the morning, Baptist Youth Fellowship and worship in the evening. Wednesday evening was Prayer Meeting and testimony time. Dad was a deacon and Mom was a deaconess, and there were plenty of church meetings and work days.

Support the church. Years after Dad’s death, I volunteered to Mom that I would clean out their garage. I discovered their old financial records and learned that Dad basically gave the church his first week’s salary every month before taxes. Their income was minimal, though we had what we needed, so this was sacrificial giving. After Dad died, Mom continued tithing (10 %) of her small Social Security income. Additionally, they gave generously to the church’s building fund (even though they did not like the design of the new sanctuary!) and multiple charities, including the parochial school where Mom taught.

Love well. My parents and our family had our ups and downs, but when first married, they covenanted never to go to bed angry, following the biblical admonition not to let the sun go down on your anger. Mom and Dad were high school sweethearts and absolutely loyal. Cleaning their garage I found well over 100 multipage letters exchanged during three circumstantial periods of separation, including World War II, each expressing their passionate love for one another.

Dad worked hard, delivering bread to grocery stores and maintaining our yards and house, and Mom, in addition to teaching, cleaned house and fixed all the meals—both with some help from us kids. Thinking back on it now, I see that they were practical ministers of both word (teaching and preaching) and sacrament (delivering bread and meals). They offered loving hospitality to their children and those important to us, as well as their grandchildren, great grandchildren, other relatives, neighbors, friends, and strangers.

Follow Jesus. This was central to all my parents did, in word and deed, in spirit and body, and I am still trying to catch up!

A few of the posts that mention my parents:

Acts of God and Acts of War ( About Dad’s letters on board a troop ship docked at Nagasaki.)

The Making of You

The DoubleFeature

Thanks be to God for the life, writings, and ministry of the Rev. Richard McBrien (1936-2015)“who unflinchingly challenged orthodoxy in the Roman Catholic Church for five decades and popularized and perpetuated the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.” He is quoted as saying, “The theologian’s job is one of critically reflecting on [Christian] tradition or raising questions about it, even challenging it, and that’s how doctrines evolve and move forward.”

Please support this blog ministry by clicking here or mailing to MCC, P.O. Box 50488, Sarasota FL 34232 USA, designating “Progressive Christian Reflections” in the memo area of your check or money order. Thank you!

When leaving a comment on this blog, a URL is requested but not required to submit your response.

Progressive Christian Reflections is entirely supported by readers’ donations. It is an authorized Emerging Ministry of Metropolitan Community Churches, a denomination welcoming seekers as well as believers.