The Air Force Pilot

We’ve been getting some outstanding speakers here at the continuum care complex as part of our Life Enrichment Program. Our latest was a pilot of an F-105 Thunderchief during the Vietnam War. Lieutenant James DeVoss’s plane was shot down during a bombing-run over Laos in 1969 and he was rescued by a group of para-rescue jumpers who found him on his back in a bamboo patch with bamboo shoots impaling him so he couldn’t move and he suffered numerous injuries caused by being ejected from the plane. “His left arm shattered, both hips were dislocated and his knees were separated. In the right knee, every tendon, every piece of cartilage, every ligament was completely torn apart. One nerve; one blood vessel with some skin around it, was all that remained to keep his lower leg alive. Another 8th of an inch, it would have ripped apart, and he would have bled to death." (Quote from a USA Today article.) We had a genuine purple heart recipient and highly decorated pilot in front of us.

For first half hour of his talk he described in great detail the training that Air Force pilots go through, not only on how to fly and how to eject from an aircraft that’s malfunctioning but he also described the training pilots get on how to survive behind enemy lines and how survive being a POW. Up until this point we didn't know about him getting shot out of the sky and my cynical side was thinking, This old guy is here to relive his glory days. But then he switched from talking about training to showing a film of his plane getting shot down and the rescue that followed and it started sinking in---how much this man had suffered through and survived. 

The para-rescue jumpers had done many missions like that one before but for some reason the Air Force decided to make a documentary of one of them and his rescue was the one that got filmed. It was that footage that the lieutenant was able to show us. I’ve never been a gun-ho supporter of the military but watching and listening to this man I gained a real appreciation for the sacrifice, courage and training pilots in the Air Force go through to serve our country.

My Mahjong teacher and her husband both served in the Air Force and sat next to me at the lecture. There were five or six others in the room who’d also been in the Air Force so you can image the quality of the questions that were asked during the Q & A part of the lecture. I asked if he’s flown planes after his years-long recovery and he did---not in the Air Force but he got certificated in some civilian crafts and taught for awhile. Afterward some of us where talking in the lobby and one woman said she wanted to ask if he had any mental therapy to deal with PTSD but she didn’t dare, felt it was too personal, and I remarked that I’ll bet doing talks like this probably helps with that and the chronic pain his wife said he still has to this day. 

But I was probably wrong. After finding him online I discovered that in 2017 he was inducted into the Michigan Aviation Hall of Fame and because of the “enshrined results” of that honor (research done) he became a Motivational Speaker. His presentation wasn’t born out of a need to tell his story but rather out of a renewed sense of wonder that he survived at all. Somewhere on his website he says he’s sharing his story to say “thanks for my everything” to the men who saved him.

Given all the crazy stuff going on in our country I don’t feel very proud of the U.S.A. right now so this was the perfect lecture to see the week of the Fourth of July. It gave me a little of that pride back again....if only temporarily. ©

Baby Sweaters and the Danish Boat Lift

Last week before I got sick I went to a lecture that was spellbinding and mesmerizing---yes, there is a difference---and at several points it had the hair on my arms standing right up. That was a common reaction. I’ve been going to the Life Enrichment Lecture series at the senior hall for many years and this was only the second one where the speaker got a standing ovation. What was it about? It was titled “When Good People Do Something” and it was an uplifting account of what the people of Denmark did during WWII to save 98% of its Jewish population (7,200 people in all) from being rounded up by the occupying Nazis. The speaker was a professional storyteller and a Professor of Humanities at Lawrence Technological University, born in the Bronx and was great at doing accents. She took us through the steps the Danish people did spontaneously when they got wind of the fact that the Nazis were planning to raid the synagogues on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and send all the worshipers to concentration camps.

With less than 24 hours’ notice, gentiles and Jews alike sprang into action. They passed the warning around not to go to the synagogues and to find places to hide away from their homes. Strangers and neighbors took people in to their homes to hide, businessman provided money to help them flee the country and hospital workers helped sedate Jewish children so they could be hidden in fishing boats for an impromptu boat lift to take the Jewish people off the peninsula that was Denmark to neutral Sweden where they could apply for political asylum. Only 500 of Denmark’s nearly 8,000 Jewish population were rounded up by the Gestapo and deported to Theresienadt concentration camp. By far, the most successful Resistance Operation in all of Europe.

Denmark was important to Hitler because it was his breadbasket to feed his troops. Along with its rich fishing industry they also had some of the best boat builders in the world and Germany brought all their ships to their ports for repair. The Resistances repaired them in such a way that they’d break down again out at sea. The lecturer read some words written by the King of Denmark in late 1930s about Adolph Hitler and they were the same words we often hear used to describe Donald Trump. She snuck that quote in so fast and kept right going to another antidote that it had everyone looking at each other, wondering if we just heard what we heard.

When good people do something. Christian churches hide artifacts from the synagogues until the end of the war and when the Jewish people were able to come back to Denmark two years later they found their houses just as they left them only they’d been cleaned, the cupboards stocked with food and fresh flowers were on the tables. But the Danish people were not the only ones who did courageous things during those dark days. Historians speculate that the person who spilled the beans about the planned raid was a high ranking German in charge of occupied Denmark who had lived there long enough to learn to love the country. Another high ranking German, historians believe, let his humanity show when he pulled most of the Germany patrol boats off the waters to “paint” during the month while the boat lift was in full operation and that added to their evacuation success. 

The lecturer, Corine Stavish, ended her talk with these words: “People were presented with a clear choice between good and evil and they choose ‘good.’” She’s active at National Storytelling Festivals and, if you get a chance to hear her talk, go. She’s witty and poignant and she knows how to make history come alive.

Switching Gears: Let’s talk knitting. The sweater and vest below are my last projects of the 2018/19 winter. I have to put my knitting needles and yarn away because it gets too hot and sticky to knit in the summer. The lady bug sweater is for my youngest niece’s cottage where her grandkids often need a sweater on cool summer evenings on their pontoon. The vest is for my oldest niece’s grandson who loves wearing vests, and he loves his grandpa’s John Deere tractor.

My mom used to make graphic pictures on sweaters but the tractor was my first attempt. She also used to make entire sweaters with patterns like on the lady bug sweater’s front panels only fancier and with more colors. With the vest I learned how to use yarn bobbins---at one time there were nine bobbins hanging down the back of the tractor---and I can see how they can take the frustration out of those Scandinavian designs. I may try another next winter. Anyway, good-bye knitting and hello eBay. May is here! ©

NOTE: Photo at top is from the Danish Jewish Museum and shows one of the fishing boats used to smuggle people to Sweden. Can you imagine how many trips it would take to get 7,200 people across the bay to Sweden? Our speaker said someone tried to burn that musuem down recently but they saved it.

From President Ford to Nigerian Princes

I live in President Gerald Rudolph Ford territory. The Ford Presidential Museum is near-by, his childhood homes, too, and I met the guy on many occasions when I was a kid. Ford had a camper that as near as I can remember looked like the one in the photo to the left and when he wasn’t in Washington serving one of his many terms in the House of Representatives he was in his district moving that little camper around to different neighborhoods so it was convenient for his constituents to come talk to him. He’d publish a schedule in the paper and people would line up at the door and if my memory serves me right when you got inside a kitchen timer was started so everyone one in line got an equal amount of his time. That kind of attention to his constituents is what kept him in office from 1949 through 1973. Ford was a Republican and my dad was a Democrat and a labor union representative for the factory where he worked and Dad took me with him whenever he had ‘advocacy work’ to do with Ford. Ford listened, took notes and gained my father’s respect. 

I know a lot about Ford so I almost didn’t go to the Life Enrichment lecture at the senior hall about the former president. But I needed to get back into my normal routine and I did learn a few new details like the fact that “Junior” was a stutterer until the 5^th grade when his teachers finally quit trying to turn the left-hander into a right hander, then the stuttering just went away on its own. I also learned he kept a copy of Robert Kipling’s poem “If” in his breast pocket every day of his adult life. As a boy his mom used to make him recite the poem if he showed any signs of a temper. She feared having a bad temper was passed on from his birth father who was physically abusive. She had left him when her son was just two weeks old.

My favorite permanent exhibit at his museum is about pop culture from the 1970s because Ford was the president during the Bicentennial and if I had to name a favorite year in my life, it would be 1976. I even had a long, loose fitting hippie-style dress with a smocked front that I made out of a light weight “homespun” cream colored fabric with small, 1976 dated flags and fireworks printed all over it. I wore it to every weekend music festival and parade we could find that summer of ’76. I still have it. As Marie Kondo would say, it gives me joy. Seeing it from time to time hanging in the back of my closet makes me want belt out a little Bellamy Brothers “...Let your love fly like a bird on a wing and let your love bind you to all living things..Just let your love flow like a mountain stream and let your love grow with the smallest of dreams..."

After the lecture I walked across the hall to go Book Club. I’ve never been less prepared for a book discussion and I didn’t even try to bluff my way through it. I’d read the book a couple of years ago and had planned on reviewing it last week but the power outage put a snare in that plan. I couldn’t concentrate on anything more complicated than putting a 500 piece jigsaw puzzle together. Yup, that’s what I did when I was cut off from media and good reading light. From the time I was a kid, if weather got in the way of something we wanted to do, we’d pull out the puzzles or games. We didn’t even have electricity in the early years at the cottage or indoor plumbing. Puzzles, Monopoly or playing poker were our ‘devices’ back in the ‘40s and early '50s. 

A week ago today when I posted the short note about having to leave the house because I didn’t have heat or power someone left the following comment on that blog entry: “You Baby Boomers are the most evil generation to ever exist. You are all psychopaths. You destroyed your own children’s future, destroyed the economy and then you sit back and laugh. I hope you boomers enjoy your retirement homes! I guess what I’m really trying to say is, can you Baby Boomers hurry up and fucking drop dead?”

It was a poop-and-fly-away, cut-and-paste comment that I found on several other blogs after googling those words. It wasn’t the first time I’ve heard Millennials vs. Baby Boomers smack like that. It’s a theme that pops up on political message boards from time to time. But wouldn’t you love to know the backstory on why that particular Millennial feels so beaten down by his/her life that he/she has taken to leaving death wishes Johnny Appleseed style across the internet. I'm tempted to say, "Get a grip! Gripping about the generations before and after our own is a time-honored tradition."

But rather than get snarly about the “debate” I tend to look for the lighter side of the Millennials vs. Boomers conflict. For example: A tweet by Mrs. Math Teacher: “Baby Boomers blame Millennials for everything but WHO PUT CARPETING OVER ALL THESE HARDWOOD FLOORS?” Or this tweet by Andy Levy: "'Millennials are idiots' [says] the generation that made a millionaire out of the creator of the pet rock." And Zach Wallen's: “I love Baby Boomers who say ‘kids don’t even know how to write cursive’ in a negative way. Like ‘okay, grandma you can’t even turn your laptop on without getting six viruses and wiring half your retirement income to a Nigerian Prince.’” ©

The Bellamy Brothers