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“As we strolled up the hollow through the giant sycamore trees towards High Street, my legs felt like wood, and it was as though I had been struck by lightning.” |
COLUMBUS seemed strange and intimidating as the trolley car wobbled up High Street from Union station and dropped me at the main entrance to The Ohio State University for a dinner rendezvous with Mary Margaret. She met me in the lounge of Baker Hall and took me to the dining room where we ate with a group of her friends. I felt a little overdressed in Jack's expensive Hollywood suit, but those were the only clothes I owned other than my Marine uniform. I was glad to see that the dress code in those days of clothing scarcity was "anything goes." Most of the guys were wearing parts of their military uniforms while they waited for the stores to make new clothes available. The food at the girl’s dormitory was good, so I bought a meal ticket for the quarter. It would be nice to have a group of ready made friends to eat with while I took on the confusing and frustrating life on that big inhospitable campus.
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Just getting around was a challenge. I had classes on some days from seven in the morning until ten at night. Housing was another big problem, since the two men's dorms had been given to the women. The board of regents had decided that with twelve-thousand lusty GI's invading the campus, the prudent thing to do was to keep all of the coeds under lock and key at night, and to let the men shift for themselves.
A group of guys from the Independent Men’s Association decided to demonstrate against the dormitory situation. I joined them as they staged a "Camp-in" in front of the dorm. All freshmen and sophomore women were required to live in the dormitories, and they hated the Draconian supervision imposed by the administration. They had to be in the dorm by 9:30 every night except for one mid-week and one weekend night when they could stay out until midnight.
I finally found a room about a mile east of the campus from which I had to walk back and forth. Later, Mary's boyfriend, Selim Rahme, got me one where he lived, north of the campus. We would walk a mile to Baker Hall for breakfast. Getting to classes on time was also a challenge because there was only a ten-minute break to get from one end of the campus to the other. I finally bought a bike at the police auction which helped me make my classes on time. It was about the only bicycle on the campus in those days, and students kept taking it when I was in class, and I would find it days later, somewhere on the campus.
OSU was obviously unprepared for the 12,000 new students which doubled the size of the student body, and some of my classes were held in big overflowing auditoriums. They also had little yellow huts scattered around the campus where instructors would work with smaller groups. But sometimes they knew little more than the students, and also sometimes there was no one to talk to when you were having trouble with an assignment. It seemed as though they were just going to let us sink or swim. Fearing that I couldn’t maintain the required three point average in my chemical engineering major, I asked for a consultation with the Dean. He told me that the engineering college was so overcrowded that he expected to graduate only 18 percent of the students. That did it for me, and like most of my friends, I transferred to the College of Administrative Sciences where I felt at home and breezed through with the required three point average.
Selim -- who was from Lebanon in the Middle East -- and I hung out and occasionally ate our evening meal at a bar and grill called the “Blue Danube” -- the “Blue ’Dube” to generations of OSU students -- where we would sit around discussing the war when we should have been in our rooms studying. Selim was breezing through the Engineering College without much study or class preparation. I asked him where he learned to make mechanical drawings so well. His reply was, “I had most of these freshman classes back in high school Lebanon.” It looked as though he would have no trouble being one of the eighteen percent that the Dean told me would graduate.
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He and my sister, Mary Margaret, were amazing -- they both made straight A’s with seemingly little effort. She had made straight A’s since the first grade, and was now working on her Master's in English. She earned her Bachelor's Degree at Ohio University and then joined the Marines to become one of the first “Women’s Reserves.” She trained at Hunter College in New York, then was sent to Chicago where she did a tour of recruiting duty. She had also been trained as an aviation mechanic in Oklahoma during the war where she worked on Hellcat Fighter planes, but had never got to fly one. She met Selim at the OSU Airport where they were both taking the University course in flight training. I was amused when they both told me that they didn’t trust each other’s flying skill and wouldn’t fly together -- in fact, they didn’t really care for each other’s driving skills either!
When I completed my junior year, Mary Margaret graduated, and Selim dropped out of school. They were married in July, 1950, and took a bicycle tour of France for their honeymoon. When they returned, she went to Carlinville, Illinois, where she began her distinguished career as a college professor. Selim then started a machine tool business in Detroit where he had soon earned his first of many millions of dollars.
When I began my sophmore year, I moved into the Independent Men’s Association House near the campus where I felt at home with the thirty guys who roomed and boarded there. I had been lonely at the rooming house during holidays and school breaks when everyone went home, but I had no home. The IMA elected me social chairman, and I had fun organizing dances, parties and picnics. We invited girls from the dorms who belonged to the Independent Women’s Association. Planning picnics was easy. All I had to do was reserve a shelter at the reservoir park, order a U-Haul truck, call my counterpart in the women’s dorm, and arrange to have thirty blind dates meet us in the lobby with picnic lunches.
My roommate, Bob Zeiffle, drove a truck in the Marines, so we appointed him to drive. He finally complained, though. He said that by the time he got the truck parked, all the guys had jumped out and latched onto the prettiest girls. He was always left with the fat one. I had wondered why he always had a fat date and had assumed that he just liked the nice round ones.
We were still unhappy about the girls having all the dorms, and therefore occasionally played practical jokes on them. One Halloween night, we kidnapped a pig from the University Farm and turned it loose on the third floor of Baker Hall. We sat innocently in the lounge playing bridge while excited shrieks and screams could be heard from upstairs as that pig ran up and down the hall!
Another time, we stole a table from the lobby of Mack Hall and then invited the residents to our house for a dance party. When the girls arrived and were escorted into our big dining room which had been decorated for dancing, the first thing they saw was their table, holding our hi-fi equipment. Their social chairman, who was my date, exclaimed, “You rat! They searched all our rooms for that dumb table.” The table reappeared at its old spot the next night with a note saying, “The joke fell flat -- the table from Mack is back."
Among my closest friends were Len Kail, a former tail gunner, Ross Castor, a Marine Reserve captain, and Bob Zeiffle, a former Marine corporal like myself. I’m afraid we spent more time horsing around and going to clubs and bars than we did studying. One night, we went to a popular club, the Ionian Room in the Deshler Wallick Hotel at Broad and High Streets. When we left that crowded room and got back on the trolley, we discovered that no one had paid the tab, which was seventeen dollars--a small fortune in those days. I went back down the following Monday and asked the hostess if I could pay it. "Take your pick, Honey," she said, and handed me a big stack of unpaid tabs belonging to others who walked out accidentally as we did . . . or on purpose.
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One night, Len and I decided to go on a “Safari” and have a glass of beer in every bar between the campus and downtown, which was three-and-a half miles and many bars away. We worked our way down the west side of High Street and back up the other side to the campus. One of the downtown bars was on fire when we got there, but we went in anyway, not wanting to spoil our record. We sipped our beer while the firemen worked around us! When we got back to the IMA House, we walked around and down the alley to our parking spot before we realized we were on foot!
Most of our escapades were in Len’s dodge, like the time we took a load of guys to the Burlesque Show downtown. As we left the theater, we noticed a life-size cutout of the striptease standing in the lobby. We kidnapped her and proudly displayed her in our study room. Mrs. Barron, the house mother, told us at breakfast, “either that girl goes -- or you go!” That night we returned her to the theater, but did not wait to collect either reward or ransom!
Before my term as social chairman ran out, we decided to have a really big all-campus dance. We rented the men’s gym, which has larger than four basketball courts and hired the famous “Ray Anthony” dance band. We were gambling a lot of money that we didn’t have, so the dance had to be a success. We made the gym unique by naming it the “Club Cabaret” and arranged for two hundred tables to be placed among the decorations around the dance floor. One of our IMA members was studying to become a standup comedian, and worked up an act for the intermission.
Our publicity went well and the dance was an assured success until I learned that one of my committeemen had failed to get permission to bring in the tables. The university steadfastly refused to allow tables in the gym, so we had a real crisis. Our house mother saved the day when she showed us how to construct intimate booths by using four chairs and a lot of crepe paper. The dance turned out to be the talk of the campus that quarter!
While the Ray Anthony Band was in town, the Music Department declared a “Ray Anthony Day" and invited them to play at the monthly Jazz Forum in University Hall. The forums were organized by Alan Abel, a music student from Coshocton. Abel was highly creative in luring famous bands to his forum when they were appearing in Ohio. I always made it a point to attend, and enjoyed concerts by several famous bands including Tommy Dorsey, Stan Kenton, and one time, Gene Krupa, who appeared without his band and gave 1,400 students a lesson in drumming. The only problem was, we had to wait three hours for Krupa to appear. A local jazz group from Lockborne Air Force Base was there to warm up the audience and keep us entertained while we waited for Krupa to appear. And it was worth the wait! He borrowed the set of trap drums from the jazz group, talked to us about his life and the art of drumming -- Krupa style.
Many years later, I learned why Krupa had been late. Alan Abel had advertised Krupa’s appearance without his permission. He was playing a gig at Buckeye Lake and had refused to come. A delegation from the Jazz Forum, including some of the prettiest girls on the campus, went with Abel to Buckeye Lake and kidnapped him and brought him to the campus against his will. He complained all the way, but he finally relented and put on a great show with the borrowed drums.
All of this extra correctular activity wasn’t helping our grades any, so six of us moved into a four-room apartment on High Street and vowed to buckle down to our studies. Serious study had been almost impossible in the IMA House because of all the distractions and temptations. Even sleeping was a challenge sometimes. For example, our house stood just ten feet from the Tri Delta sorority House, and their third floor shower and dressing room was right opposite the window over my bed. It was their tradition not to tell a new resident or guest about the window full of leering faces waiting for a new pledge to finish her shower. I found it hard to sleep with ten guys on my bed!
When brother Jim graduated from high school, he moved in with us. He said that he didn’t see how we could study with all the carrying-on all the time, but I told him that he should have seen us before we settled down to serious study! During the following year, he and I moved into a quiet rooming house on Norwich Avenue.
At about this time, some of my friends from the IMA decided to re-activate the Theta Xi Fraternity that had closed their chapter during the war. Len and I agreed to help, but would not live in the house that they were buying in the fraternity district. By this time, we had to make our studies our first priority. My degree would be in Business Administration which consisted of dozens of tough courses in business management, accounting, economics, psychology, English, history, math, and statistics. If I did well, I would be recruited by many corporatons.
Len, Bob, and I liked to attend the Saturday night dances in the girls’ gym. Sometimes, we would meet new girls and take them to Robinson’s Grill at Fourteenth and High for cokes and snacks before the midnight curfew. We would get dressed up in our loud sport coats, bright bow ties and fraternity pins that sparkled with pearls and a ruby when our jackets casually came open. Those pins were “bait” to attract the prettiest girls. Len didn’t need any bait since he was tall, blond and handsome, but Bob and I were short, black haired and needed all the help we could get!
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One Saturday night at the gym, Len said, “Hursh, look at that!” Two very cute co-eds had come in and sat down across the hall from us. We wasted no time making our move. We casually flashed our pins as we strolled over and asked them to dance. Len got the blond and I got the cute one with nice brown hair. She admitted later that she was hoping that the tall blond guy would choose her, and that she was almost afraid to stand up to dance with me for fear that she would be taller. But our heights were the same, and as we talked, I discovered that we were very much the same in many ways. What happened that night is difficult to relate. Being with her was electric -- especially when I held her hand or took her in my arms to dance. I knew in a few steps that she was a very special person, and began to understand what the composers of love ballads were trying to say.
After the dance, we walked out into the crackling February air and down the steps to the dimly lit walk along a little mirror of a lake. As we strolled up the hollow through the giant sycamore trees towards High Street, my legs felt like wood, and it was as though I had been struck by lightning. But, best of all, her goodnight hug told me that it was happening to her also. When she told me that her name was Mary Janice, I thought to myself, this girl was made for me. She was like the several Marys and Janices in my high school class, all rolled up in one wonderful creature.
One day Len said, “You’re crazy if you don’t marry that girl!” I wasn’t ready to reveal that I had thought of nothing else since that very special night that we met. Then, on April 30, I gave her my fraternity pin, and then a month later, a diamond ring when I asked her to marry me.
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Being "pinned" and getting engaged in a fraternity is really quite an experience. You never know what your crazy fraternity brothers will do next. I think they lay awake nights thinking up pranks to pull on me. They abducted me, threw me into Mirror Lake, caught me again and took me way out into the country where they left me soaking wet. On another occasion, they set all the clocks and watches in the apartment one hour ahead so that I would be early for my date with MJ, and catch her with her hair in curlers. Whenever I got into the bathtub, they would dial the ring-back number and announce the MJ was on the phone. One night, they serenaded us right on MJ’s front lawn, and her folks didn’t know what to think!
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As each quarter’s schedule began, I would find a part-time job that would fit into it because the university would not try to accommodate working students. I mowed lawns, waited tables, ran a soda fountain, ushered at the theater, cleaned the owner’s suite on the top floor of the Leveque Tower, loaded tires at the Goodyear warehouse, tried telemarketing, sold shoes in three different stores, tried door-to-door sales, operated a printing press and sorted IBM cards. My final job before graduating was as a stock boy at the Albers supermarket where I earned fifty cents per hour.
During that last year, I still took time to have several dates with MJ each week. We would meet on the campus for a hamburger and chili or a coke, and always had a date on the weekend for a fraternity party, a campus dance or a movie. My whole life was revolving around the hours we spent together. We finally decided to get married during the following spring break on March 19th, instead of waiting for my June graduation. My fraternity brothers, MJ’s parents and Aunts and Uncles, her grandma, and my brother Jim, attended the wedding at the King Avenue Methodist Church. Afterwards her parents took the whole party out for a wonderful luncheon reception. We spent our honeymoon in our cozy one-room apartment where, for the first time since the age of twelve, I felt the contentment of my own home.
There was just one more quarter to go, but it turned out to be two quarters due to the cancellation of a required class. When that extra quarter started, the Korean War broke out, and President Truman started calling up all the Marine Reservists. Each day, for the next three months, I was on forty-eight hour notice for call-up. It looked as though my education would be interrupted again. We cherished each day as though it would be our last one together.
Fortunately, my graduation preceded my greetings from Mr. Truman, and I received my degree during a blinding rainstorm in the open air of Ohio Stadium. Our commencement speaker, Branch Rickey, tried to end his speech so that we could seek shelter, but we made him continue his fascinating and inspirational speech. A little rain was nothing after the hardships we had endured trying to get through college on that difficult campus.
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Then came the summons to Camp Lejeune, and we were in another frantic preparation for war. I was thankful that we hadn’t waited until after graduation to marry, because we had nearly eight wonderful months together before I left her to go to war again.
The war had gone badly for South Korea. They were nearly defeated and had retreated down onto the tip of their peninsula. Fortunately, Truman had reacted very quickly and sent reinforcements at once to fight under the United Nations banner. The North Koreans were well equipped with Russian weapons, and fought stubbornly as the UN forces fought back. Then the First Marine Division made a daring landing behind the enemy lines at Inchon, which resulted in a decisive victory for the United Nations. But it wasn’t over yet. At Christmas time, a large army of Chinese crossed the northern border and broke through the UN lines. The Americans suffered heavy losses as they turned and fought their way southward through blizzards and subzero weather until they could set up a defense.
During this time, the reserves were pouring into Camp Lejeune and were rapidly being equipped and trained to reinforce the hard pressed divisions in Korea. This time, my specialty was demolitions, and we trained mostly with land mines. There didn’t seem to be the same Gung-ho spirit as in World War II. The inactive reserves weren’t expecting to be called up unless war was declared, and at least not until after the National Guard. We had all had four years to get our education or start our careers, and many, like myself, were married and had started families.
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both expecting to ship overseas. |
My friend Zeiffle and I were only in the reserves because our buddy, Captain Castor, was required to recruit in order to maintain his reserve commission. We knew that if the cold war with Russia turned into a hot one, there wouldn’t be much time to mobilize for war. We were told that all able-bodied veterans were being asked to sign up to serve only in case if a world war. We were organized on paper under our old Military specialties and ready for immediate deployment in case of war.
As it turned out, it didn’t work that way. In the first place, Castor was not mobilized because his new job with Shell Oil Company was considered essential to the war effort. Bob Zeiffle and I went back in as corporals and had to start over, more or less. We were trained in new specialties. Instead of going in again as a BAR man or infantry squad leader as before, my degree in business administration was associated with Military supply. So I was put into the headquarters company of my new outfit, the Second Combat Engineers, and wound up in the demolitions platoon.
We were due to fly to Korea at any time, so I had to learn my new trade very quickly. They gave us plastic explosives of several types and land mines to practice with. We learned to blow up bunkers, bridges, tanks and one time we even blew down a grove of trees with one shot. Our battalion was practicing road building and was laying tree trunks side by side as a corduroy road over the soft places. They asked our help to cut down the trees, so my squad wrapped primer cord around a couple dozen trees and blew them all down at once. Unfortunately, we set the woods on fire and had only one hour to put it out or sacrifice our weekend leave. A supreme effort ensued that soon extinguished the flames.
I spent the next phase of my training blowing up things with shape charges and digging holes with a big auger mounted on the back of a six-by-six truck. I became very popular with the troops when they were assigned the job of digging holes for garbage pits or latrines. A six-foot deep hole was only a five minute job for me. Our most important function, however, would be that of clearing mine fields -- the dirtiest, nastiest task in any war.
Many Marines died before they could even be sent to the war. They would drive home every weekend, desperately putting their affairs in order, and these exhausted men had many fatal accidents. Once, I rode as far as Columbus with a friend from Chicago who had a new Kaiser. They would spend 42 hours of their 48 hour leave on the road.
In late January, the orders came for the battalion to fly to Korea. On our last night before our departure, we crowded into the slopshoot for an evening of beer and singing. Then an amazing thing happened and I was left behind. An emergency message came to my Company Commander from the Red Cross. It stated that MJ was gravely ill from childbirth complications, and that I was urgently needed at home. The CO immediately granted me emergency leave and I then jumped on a bus that was just leaving for Ohio.
Unfortunately my ticket took me only as far as West Virginia. There had been a foul-up in the payroll, and none of us had been paid during the twelve weeks we had been there. However, my friends did pool all their money and came up with a sum total of eleven dollars and change which would get me as far as West Virginia. I had to get off the bus at Charleston and then slog through the deep snow and slush to a point where I could start hitch-hiking the remaining two hundred miles. Three men finally gave me a ride and told me as we crossed the Ohio River that I would have to pay the toll. When we got to the booth, I leaned out the window and said, "Sorry, I don’t have a dime, and I’m on emergency leave." We proceeded on until we ran out of gas in Chillicothe, Ohio. We sold some worthless tools for enough gas to make it to Columbus.
When I arrived at White Cross Hospital, the maternity ward nurses took a dim view of a bedraggled, soggy Marine who was demanding to see his wife and new baby. They explained that it was hours after visiting time and tried to turn me away. The head nurse finally relented and proudly produced the baby that MJ’s mom had raved about. I thought there must be some mistake because with his red wrinkled skin, he looked incredibly tiny and more like a drowned rat to me! Then I found MJ in a ward that had been converted from a sun room. How wonderful it was to hold her in my arms again. She agreed with her mother and the nurses that Davie was indeed a very beautiful baby. MJ thought he looked like her Uncle Keith, a very handsome man!
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Those of us in the Engineers who were left at Camp Lejeune were given the task of building a village of houses to be used as a house-to-house combat range. I sent for MJ and Davie to come down because I knew it was going to take us at least eight weeks. We found a little cottage at Kure Beach, which was seventy-five miles south of the base. I had to start hitch-hiking at three in the morning in order to be in camp by roll call. It was worth it though. The hours we spent on the beautiful beach were pure bliss. We took Davie in his buggy everywhere we went, whether it was by bus or on foot. One time we left him on the beach and completely forgot him until we got across the dune to our cottage. I rushed back and found people around his buggy admiring that beautiful baby and wondering what had happened to his parents.
He would literally draw a crowd everywhere we went. His big blue eyes, sandy hair and big round head and happy face were like a magnet that stopped people on the street. When we went to the dance hall or other places, we would just shove his buggy into a corner and he would sleep through anything. In fact, the fresh sea air made all of us sleep extra well.
Then my Engineer compay was ordered to Quantico to construct Quonset huts for the Marine Officers Candidate School, and MJ and Davie had to return to Columbus. I was offered an appointment to the OCS because of my degree from OSU and my 137 score on the MIQ test, but my acquisition of a wife and baby had cooled my Gung-ho spirit and changed my priorities. So I turned down the chance at the world’s most dangerous occupation -- a platoon leader in the Marines.
I was discharged in December in time to be with MJ and her family for Christmas, 1951. After that I went to Akron for job interviews and accepted the first one offered. We were soon off to the beautiful city of St. Louis and a new adventure in my life-long journey from Goschachquenk.
