Renoir’s dancers have always charmed me, particularly this couple, from 1883:
But I not necessarily a snooty highbrow. Coequal in my mind is Emma Stone’s “Parisian” dancer: Pure goofiness, and it makes me smile every time. From Saturday Night Live:
And why not dance down the Champs? This Supremes video, from 1965, makes me just a little nervous.
Must not forget Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge!
Not dancing, exactly, but I’ve always found this video charming.
A spontaneous Gloria Estefan tribute. I love these guys.
Anyway, what led to these thoughts was finding this morning a video that suggests it’s about The Frug, a dance popular when I was a freshman or so in high school. I don’t know that this is the actual Frug, but it’s in Paris, and it’s dancing, and I loved it, too.
One Hundred Years Ago (with additional commentary from me)
February 6
The skull of Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa is stolen from his grave in Chihuahua. Its whereabouts are unknown to this day. (His widow, Luz, keeps the touring car in which Villa was shot, in 1923, in the front yard of their hacienda. It becomes a planter.)
March 4
A writer in in Budapest commits suicide and leaves behind a note containing a crossword puzzle. The puzzle is yet to be solved.
May 9: Explorer Richard E. Byrd and his Navy Chief Aviation pilot Floyd Bennett claim to be the first people to fly over the North Pole, in their plane named “Josephine Ford,” which, if you ask me, looks far to small to make such a demanding trip.
May 12: Norwegian Roald Amundsen and his fifteen-strong crew fly over the North Pole in their “Norge” airship, becoming the first verified explorers to accomplish the feat. Seventy years later, it’s revealed that “Josephine Ford” had sprung an oil leak and the Americans had to turn back before they reached the Pole.
Damn.
June 23
The first Scholastic Aptitude Test (now commonly referred to as SAT) is administered to 8,000 high school students. The test, based on a World War I aptitude test administered to immigrants, is aimed at keeping Jewish students, disturbingly bright and hard-working, out of Ivy League colleges. I am not making this up.
“The Latin Lover” Rudolph Valentino, Hollywood silent movie star, dies suddenly of perforated ulcers, aged 31. His condition is named after him as “Valentino’s syndrome”. The following day, 60,000 mourners cause a riot in New York trying to reach Valentino’s body. (Part of Valentino’s 1921 film The Sheik was filmed in the Guadalupe Dunes.)
September 20
The North Side Gang attempts to assassinate powerful mob boss and rival Al Capone at the Hawthorne Hotel in Cicero, Illinois. Despite over a thousand rounds of submachine gun ammunition being fired, Capone escapes unharmed. (Capone favored the Central Coast as prime territory for bootlegging. By tradition, the photo below shows Capone shooting pool at what is today the Cool Cat Cafe in Pismo Beach. Those windows remain.)
October
6. Against the St. Louis Cardinals, The Yankees’ Babe Ruth hits three home runs in a World Series game, the first player ever to do so.
14. A.A. Milne’s children’s book Winnie-the-Pooh published by Methuen & Co. in London. (Eeyore fan here.)
22. Ernest Hemingway’s debut novel The Sun Also Rises is published. (About bulls but not balls.)
31. On Hallowe’en, escapologist and illusionist Harry Houdini dies from sepsis after suffering a ruptured appendix during a dangerous escape attempt from a water tank.
November
3. Sharpshooter Annie Oakley, star of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show and later the subject of the musical Annie Get Your Gun, dies in Greenville, Ohio aged 66. (Sitting Bull, who befriended her, called her “Little Miss Sure Shot; the Wild West Show visited San Luis Obispo twice in the early 1900s.)
13. P. L. Travers’ short story “Mary Poppins and the Match Man” appears in The Christchurch Sun in New Zealand, marking the first published appearance of the eponymous character. (Mary’s a Kiwi!)
December
3. Mystery and thriller writer Agatha Christie disappears from her home in Surrey, England. She would be found 11 days later at a spa in Harrogate, purportedly suffering from amnesia.
5. Soviet silent film Battleship Potemkin is released in America, being shown in New York. (The stairway shootout in Kevin Costner’s The Untouchables is an homage to a similar scene in Potemkin.)
11. Adolf Hitler, leader of the Nazi Party, publishes Volume 2 of his manifesto Mein Kampf. (It is the safest place for Germans to hide their money, in that no one has ever read Volume 2.)
31. Buster Keaton’s brilliant film The General–his unlikely hero, a Southerner, steals a locomotive during the Civil War—debuts in Tokyo.
When I was little, growing up on Huasna Road, we had a big stack of yellow vinyl 45 records—the ones with the big holes—and a record player in a box. Mom showed me how to work the record player and how to be careful with the records. I listened endlessly to Disney stories like “Little Toot,” about a tugboat, and “Tubby the Tuba.” (Our sons listened later to “Baby Beluga” and “Gnarly Road Rash” on CDs, and so did Elizabeth and me.
None of those records delighted me more than the stack—it took a lot of 45s—that included The Nutcracker. I was enchanted then and I still am, a feeling only heightened from my niece Emmy’s performance as a gumdrop at the SLO Ballet’s production awhile back. That’s me and Emmy. Note the expression on my face.
Anyway, a berserk sugar plum fairy nearly knocked Emily off the stage. She started to cry, caught herself, and carried on. She graduated from NYU with a degree in Drama and that courage I first saw in “The Nutcracker” has marked her all her life. Her grandmother, my mother, would have adored this young woman.
Back to the yellow records. I think I played The Russian Dance, agonizingly brief, so much that the vinyl became transparent. Normally the dancers are male, but this Bolshoi version, and I guess they should know, includes a ballerina. Good call, Bolshoi Ballet.
This music was my second-favorite passage. Balanchine choreographed this version. Wow.
The Arabian Dance, with those mysterious reeds and strings, was another beloved passage. These dancers, from the City Ballet of Singapore, are extraordinary.
The same dance, from 1986 and the Pacific Northwest Ballet, is immensely tragic. The dancer is Maia Rosal.
Clara finally gets a shot in “Dance of the Reed Flutes.” You go, girl!
This is sacrilege, to be sure, but I’ve never cared for the finale–“The Final Waltz and Apotheosis”–which is supposed to be all erotic and stuff. It’s pretentious, like its title, it doesn’t fit the rest of the ballet, and, if I were the stage manager, I’d prepare the stage with some strategically-placed dog poops. Especially for these blondies.
Someone posted the opening to Breakfast at Tiffany’s this morning and I was struck, once again, by its excellence. You had Mancini, New York in the early morning, Audrey Hepburn, that dress. It was, I think a perfect homage to begin a kind of American tour.
New York City
Mike Nichols, the ferry, the incredible camera work, and this glorious Carly Simon song. The Twin Towers still live in this film, and the sight of them still breaks my heart.
The American South
Places in the Heart, set in the Great Depression, was also evocative of my Dad’s growing up on the Ozark Plateau. This lovely hymn carries this film’s equally lovely visual essay about a small Southern town in the Cotton Belt.
New England
The premonition of a fisherman’s wife, and then the boats come in safely. From A Perfect Storm.
“The March Family seemed to create its own light…” The 1994 version; I’m especially fond of Gabriel Byrne’s German Romantic, who suddenly and instantly connects with Jo, steeped in Transcendentalism. Susan Sarandon is perfect, and I think the backdrop to this winter scene would’ve been the December 1862 Battle of Fredericksburg, in which the Union suffered enormous casualties.
Oregon
Milos Forman’s use of the musical saw and the dark landscape reminds you that, for all the fun you’ll have, this is an immensely tragic film.
The Great Plains
The master of this part of America is Terence Malick, first in his fictional treatment of the Charlie Starkweather murders in the 1950s Dakotas, then in his account of the immigrant experience in Days of Heaven. Gassenhauer’s “Street Song” has stayed with me ever since this opening sequence. Martin Sheen’s cowboy boots are impudent. The marvelous homage to this film is Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom.
The Shining is terrifying on many levels, but, to me, the Montana opening, from the air, is even scarier that “All Work and No Play Will Make Jack a Dull Boy.”
West Texas
The landscape’s evocative, and who better to narrate than Tommy Lee Jones, from No Country for Old Men. (Jones’s own film, The Three Deaths of Melquiades Estrada, in a similar locale, is superb.)
L.A.
What a contrast: Billy Wilder’s in Sunset Boulevard, with the voice of William Holden, already dead, and the freeway scene from La-la Land.
San Francisco
It’s studio-shot, but you can’t escape the bridges and the bay. And the chase scene so skillfully sets up the detective Scotty’s phobia. Poor James Stewart. A film full of evocative San Francisco street scenes and some cool vintage cars, too.
Long-ago America
In The Last of the Mohicans, the foot-chase is thrilling and tragic; the prayer to the fallen stag is profound. Malick strikes again in The New Land, whose opening sequence—about innocence about to be lost— might be the finest of them all.
One cheater, because it’s near the opening.
From Baz Luhrmann. Stunning.
“In Progress” because I’ll probably think of another dozen places and another dozen films.
The “Bulge,” in the dotted line, indicates the depth of the German assault, intended to drive a wedge between the American and British armies and drive to the Channel.
Manuel Gularte, Arroyo Grande, 965th Artillery Battalion
The 965th provided fire support at the town of St. Vith for the 7th Armored Division and the 106th Infantry Division. Their fire and the resistance of the two divisions stalled the German attack at its onset, which later took its toll as German tanks and trucks began to run out of fuel—by now, Berlin taxis were running on firewood. Oil had never been a German resource, which led to HItler’s Russian debacle. This was his Western Front disaster.
A 155mm “Long Tom” fires a round in the Battle of the Bulge.A G.I. in St. Vith.
Art Youman, Arroyo Grande, 101st Airborne
The “brothers” were Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry, 101st Airborne, and Youman, before the war a firefighter at Camp San Luis Obispo, was among them. He’d been promoted to Sergeant by Easy Company commander Dick Winters in Holland in September, and now the 101st was being asked to hold Bastogne, a Belgian town awash in the German advance. Their stand, during the coldest winter in Europe in thirty years, was, like St. Vith, a critical fight, diverting German forces determined to wipe the Americans out. They failed.
German infantry during their offensive.
Youman, second from left, during Easy Company training.
(Above): A 101st machine gunner in his foxhole; 101st soldiers in the 1944 foxholes their comrades had dug. This photo was taken 75 years after the Bulge.
James Pearson, Paso Robles, 455th Bomb Squadron, 323rd Bomb Group
(Above: Houffalize, Belgium; a German Panther tank in the town center suggest this town’s importance in the Battle of the Bulge.
Another key turning point in the Battle of the Bulge was the lifting of a stubborn overcast, which allowed American airpower to assert itself. One medium bomber that participated in this effort, a Martin B-26 Marauder, had a crew that included 1st Lt. James Pearson, the navigator. On December 26, 1944, that aircraft, “Mission Belle,” was shot down over this beautiful town. There were no survivors.
Pearson’s draft cardHe is buried in Hanford
“Mission Belle,” with an earlier aircrew, February 1944. The aircraft flew 149 combat missions.“Belle” at the right edge of this photo, taking off from Laon, France, in December 1944, the month Pearson was killed.
(Below): B-26 Marauders from Pearson’s bomb group–the “White Tails”–over Germany. The video’s music is touching, as is the sight, far below the Marauders, of P-38 fighters, which have connections to the Central Coast. You hope they are safely headed home.
At the end of this post, you’ll see the opening credits to “Ben Casey,” a popular 1960s medical show about handsome Dr. Ben, a neurosurgeon, played by Vincent Edwards.
Dr. Ben deftly picked up the brain he’d dropped earlier in this little boy’s surgery.
His competition was handsome Richard Chamberlain, on another network, as Dr. Kildare, whose love interests included the actress Yvette Mimieux. She was beautiful, and that didn’t prevent her from getting excellent reviews for her performance. (Okay, maybe the bikini helped a little.)
(Her character died, like every last ONE of the young women who set foot on the Ponderosa in “Bonanza.” Those Cartwrights were hell on women.)
Ben Casey’s boss, writing on the blackboard in the video below, was Sam Jaffe, featured in 1939’s “Gunga Din.”
Jaffe as Gunga Din, with Cary Grant, about to swash and buckle.Jaffe, as Dr. Zorba, with Edwards, as Dr. Casey.
Jaffe, born in New York City of Ukrainian Jewish parents–his childhood tenement is today a museum*– was of course a natural choice to play Gunga, essentially an Indian collaborator with the Raj, but, hey, his buddies were Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen and Douglas Faibanks, Jr., so it’s all good.
*(The Tenement House Museum, on the Lower East Side. Pardon Mr. History Guy for finding Jaffe’s connection amazing.)
Anyway, I was thinking of Ben today because I’ve decided I will contact Stanford and go up there for a wee bit of brain surgery. First, the caveats:
1. I have a tumor, but it’s benign. Nonetheless, it can cause you to fall down, develop blurred vision, and it messes with your memory, like forgetting the name of the actor in the movie you just saw on TV (Robert Ryan) or the name of General Grant’s horse (Cincinnati).
2. It is not actually a “brain tumor.” It’s arises instead in the meninges, which lines the brain. Since “Meninges” sounded to me like an island group, like “Azores,” I have named my tumor Manny.
Immigrants from the Meninges.
3. It’s a relatively simple procedure, requiring only a corkscrew and a 1960 Electrolux vacuum cleaner with an upholstery cleaner attachment.
4. Very high success rate, but recovery can be tough. It may involve people bringing me chiles rellenos or cheese enchiladas, sushi, Thai noodles with peanut sauce or ravioli for 60 days after the procedure. And maybe red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting.
5. Since it’s at Stanford, unless the surgeon loses the corkscrew inside, I’m sure there’s a chance that my IQ will go up, all the way to 100. I attended a week of classes at Stanford in 2004, on the Great Depression and World War II, and got to hold this X-ray of Hitler’s skull, from the Hoover Institution, so all of this is very symmetrical.
6. I get to have morphine, once a dandy additive to children’s medicine.
I’m still working up the courage, being a devout coward, to start the process that will lead to the surgery. It’s been two days now. I will try again tomorrow. I am posting this in part as an incentive for me to get off my rear end and get going.
These are my parents, Robert Wilson Gregory and Patricia Margaret Keefe Gregory, before and after World War II. I remember that painting of the Monterey Cypress on the wall of our home in Arroyo Grande. In the photos, my folks are newlyweds, innocent of the catastrophe would be me several years later.. The photo on the right shows them after Dad had come home from the war in Europe. They’re at the Biltmore in Santa Barbara, as far a remove from an oil town like Taft as you can get.
They met in 1939, when this storefront was a sweet shop/soda fountain owned by Mom’s parents, the Kellys. Dad ordered a banana split, struck up a conversation and the little newspaper clip, from July 1940, shows what followed. It’s true that my young father, only 22, was the manager of the Fellows Bank of America. He was also the teller and the janitor.
It’s what’s in between the banana split and the wedding that fascinates me. My parents were dating in 1939. Here are some of the films that were released that year:
In a very real sense (here’s to you, Turner Classic Movies!), Hollywood made my life possible.
I will now embark on a fool’s errand. If I were forced to pick three 1939 that mean the most to me, which would I choose?
I will toss two of the most obvious films: Gone with the Wind didn’t reach smaller California markets until 1940. And I’m only omitting The Wizard of Oz because, providing we strike oil in our Arroyo Grande backyard, I want desperately to see that surround-you show (DUCK! Flying monkey!) in Las Vegas.
Here, then, are my choices:
Young Mr. Lincoln. John Ford. You can criticize me for omitting Ford’s Stagecoach, a favorite, and you can condemn Ford’s hagiography, as naive as a sixth-grade textbook, but the is the first film in which Ford emphasized Henry Fonda’s legs. They are inordinately long, and young Abe—a nickname he detested—is far more comfortable resting them along a Sangamon County riverbank than he his trying to find a place for them inside a Sangamon County courtroom. Ford used those legs again, in My Darling Clementine, in a brief and funny scene where Fonda’s Wyatt Earp attempts to balance his chair along a Tombstone boardwalk. Just in case you think I’m nuts, a distinct possibility, look at what Sergio Leone did with Fonda’s legs in Once Upon a Time in the West, twenty-nine years after Young Mr. Lincoln.
In a way, I met Lincoln in Daniel Day-Lewis’s portrayal of him in Spielberg’s marvelous film. But I was a little boy when I saw the Ford film on television, and that was the Lincoln I fell in love with, the Lincoln that led me toward teaching history to young people.
2. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. If you want to know my politics, they’re hopelessly romantic—I’m Irish. It’s allowed—-than the perfect counterpoint to Young Mr. Lincoln is Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, where idealism collides with venality. The other thread that makes these films powerful is that their leading actors. Fonda and James Stewart were the best of friends, going back to Depression-era summer stock, and sharing a cheap apartment in New York City (Gene Hackman’s roommates, in his New York stage days, included Robert Duvall and Dustin Hoffman). In either case, you can imagine the young actors splitting a can of pork and beans.
But what made Fonda and Stewart authentic is that both loved America is vastly different ways: Fonda the Hollywood liberal, Stewart, the lifelong conservative from Indiana, Pennsylvania. Mr. Smith’s love for America is illuminated, as well, by its immigrant director, Frank Capra. You first meet that America in an earlier film, It Happened One Night, with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, when a busload of weary passengers suddenly comes to life by joining in singing “The Daring Young man in the Flying Trapeze.” It is an indelible scene, and Capra even inserts himself singing at the left edge of the movie frame.
It’s Stewart’s dogged idealism that makes Mr. Smith so appealing to me, but even he, one of my favorite actors, is not my favorite part. My favorite part is his co-star, Jean Arthur, today underappreciated. Arthur was smart, appealing, and suffered, all her career, from debilitating stage fright, including on film sets, but she delivered touching and very funny performances. Stewart and Arthur had been paired before in You Can’t Take It with You, another Capra film. In Mr. Smith, she is a cynical reporter who takes Stewart under her wing. After young Smith is humiliated on the Senate floor, there’s a quiet streetside dialogue where she helps him find his courage again. It’s stunning. Arthur’s performance is stunning.
Above: Stewart near collapse in Mr. Smith’sfilibuster sequence;Arthur, as Clarissa Saunders, picks up the phone in Mr. Smith’s office; in a studio still—the scene was shot in deep shadow–Saunders restores Smith’s faith in himself.
Another Thin Man. The Nick and Nora Charles film series, based on a detective invented by San Francisco writer Dashiell Hammett, may seem a trifle compared to other films from 1939. But once again, it’s the chemistry between the two leads, William Powell and Myrna Loy, that make this lighthearted detective film enduring. Their relationship was such that millions of Americans assumed they were married in real life. In this entry, the couple, new parents, are invited to a swanky estate. Their host winds up very dead. Here’s the trailer:
Powell and Loy weren’t married, of course. The woman who wanted to marry the impossibly suave Powell was the actress Jean Harlow. They spent time together at Hearst Castle, where Harlow continued her courtship. Powell wasn’t ready for that kind of commitment. When Harlow died of kidney failure in 1937, the impact on Powell, seen here with his mother at Jean’s funeral, was overwhelming. He had lost the love of his life.
Above: Nora (Myrna Loy) can’t sleep, so Nick (William Powell fixes her scrambled eggs; the couple with their dog, Asta; Loy, Jean Harlow– real-life friends–with Clark Gable; an unidentified woman, Powell and Harlow at Hearst Castle, 1934; Powell at Harlow’s funeral three years later.
I am not ashamed of my fondness for Myrna Loy. She was beautiful and her characters were played layers deep-, most notably in The Best Years of Our Lives, in her portrayal of a veteran’s wife who discovers that her husband has become an alcoholic. If her Nora Charles is far less worldly than Nick, she can still get the best of him, as she does in this charming closing scene from After the Thin Man, the 1936 film and predecessor to Another Thin Man.
I’m not alone in my admiration for Myrna Loy. That’s her in the statue in front of her Alma Mater, Venice High. My students and I visited the Frank home in Amsterdam many years ago. In Anne’s room, inside the Secret Annex, she’d cut a photo of Loy from a movie magazine and glued it to the wall. It was still there, carefully preserved beneath plexiglass.
The statue, Venice High School; Loy as a very young actor; the Frank home, Amsterdam.
They were gathering firewood Saturday for their family.
Apologies to composers Burt Bacharach and Hal David. The original version, written for the 1965 Michael Caine film Alfie, is performed by the incomparable Dionne Warwick in the video below.
Two carriers from Kido Butai, the Imperial Navy striking force, en route to Pearl Harbor
I have an infallible wish to change the course of history. I want to tell Custer, not that he’d listen, “Don’t go down there.” I want to tell Captain Smith of Titanic: “Slow down, sir. Pack ice, bergs and growlers ahead.” I want to tell President Lincoln not to go to the theater. I want to tell Amelia Earhart to double-check her radio equipment.
All of it, for sure, for naught.
The biggest challenge would be to give Pearl Harbor some kind of advance notice of what was coming to them five days after today’s date. The Imperial task force–six fleet carriers and a cluster of support ships—had just received the message “Climb Mt. Niitaka,” the code ordering Adm. Nagumo’s fleet to complete its mission. Radio silence followed.
My warning, obviously, never worked but neither did warnings from Naval Intelligence that the Japanese fleet had suddenly disappeared. That morning, the destroyer Ward’s sinking of a midget sub at the Pearl Harbor entrance didn’t cause enough nerves to jangle. The radar report from Point Opana, about heavy incoming air traffic, was dismissed because a flight of B-17 bombers from the States was due in that morning. The telegram from Washington warning that war was imminent arrived long after the attack had.
And, having no means to travel back in time, I wasn’t there, hopping up and down on Waikiki to warn servicemen and tourists alike about what was coming. They would’ve put me in the looney bin, anyway.
Rod Serling’s Twilight Zones loved to play with the time-travel warning from the future idea. In another vintage TV broadcast, the wonderful actor Dana Andrews (Best Years of Our Lives) tries the same trick, in an episode written by Serling. This Wikipedia summation is excellent:
Paul (Andrews) first travels to Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and attempts to warn a Hiroshima police captain about the atomic bomb, but the captain dismisses him as insane. Paul then travels to a Berlin hotel room to assassinate Adolf Hitler in August 1939 (immediately before the outbreak of World War II the following month), but is interrupted when a housekeeper knocks on his door and later calls two SS guards to his room. On his third stop, Paul tries to change the course of the Lusitania on May 6, 1915, to avoid being torpedoed by a German U-boat, but the ship’s captain questions his credibility.
Paul accepts the hypothesis that the past cannot be changed. He then uses the time machine to go to the town of Homeville, Indiana in 1881, resolving not to make any changes, but just to live out his life free of the problems of the modern age. Upon his arrival, he realizes that President James A. Garfield will be shot the next day, but resists the temptation to intervene.
Dana Andrews, as Paul, fails to convince Lusitania’s captain that destruction lies ahead.
Even Kirk Douglas, for crying out loud, failed to change history, and his chance, sure enough, came at Pearl Harbor. In the slightly cheesy but somehow engrossing film The Final Countdown, his aircraft carrier—the VERY appropriately-named Nimitz, after the American commander in the Pacific in World War II-—is transported back in time, to Kido Butai’s time. All hell ensues.
From the lofty heights of 1980, it was comforting to imagine we had the airpower sufficient to prevent the tragedy at Pearl Harbor. We didn’t, of course, lacking the time-travel storm, and we didn’t have the right, either.
That’s a shame, for the impact of Pearl Harbor was devastating on my hometown, Arroyo Grande, California. Two sailors who grew up here were killed on battleship Arizona, as was a second cousin of mine. One of the Arizona sailors, Jack Scruggs, was about to play his trombone as the ship’s band assembled for the morning Colors Ceremony when concussions from falling bombs killed him, blowing his body into the harbor. His second-grade Arroyo Grande Grammar School classmate, Wayne Morgan, died moments later when the great ship blew up. I used many sources to put together the ship’s story.
Since retribution seems to be a big theme in today’s America, Americans got theirs six months after Pearl Harbor. Four of Kido Butai’s carriers, Shokaku, Zuikaku, Shoyu and Hiryu, were sunk at Midway. 2200 sailors died with the four ships.
Japanese carriers under attack at the Battle of Midway, June 1942.
By then, my hometown’s Japanese American residents—-farmers, merchants, athletes, honor roll students— were at the assembly enter at the Tulare County Fairgrounds. In August, they would be moved to the Rivers Camp in Arizona, where the temperature hovered at 108 degrees for most of that month.
At war’s end, only about half came home. By then, two of them, soldiers, had died in combat. One was a 442nd Regimental Combat Team rifleman who died in the relief of the “Lost Battalion.” These were 240 terrified 19-year-old Texans surrounded by the Germans in France in October 1944. The 240 Texans were rescued, at the cost of at least 800 killed or wounded Nisei soldiers, including ours, who was trying to bring up more ammunition under withering German fire. The other G.I., an 83rd Infantry Division medic, was felled by a German sniper’s shot as he knelt over a wounded brother-soldier.
That’s too much history to change, and, in truth, given those two local sailors and those two local soldiers, we are honored—and, hopefully, humbled— by the gifts that were their lives.
A Dorothea Lange photograph, censored during the war, taken in 1942 California.
A Work in Progress 