Tag Archives: veterans

02.17.26
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Loyalty

Those Germans. They always know what they’re talking about, even if nobody else does. 

Those Germans. Carl Burckardt, Die jungen Deutschen. Public Domain. 

From the language that brought you Weltschmerz, Weltanschauung, Gemütlichkeit, and Fahrvergnügen, comes our old friend, Schadenfreude—taking pleasure at the misfortunes of others.

Volksvagen’s “Fahrvergnügen” ad. Fair use.

Right now, however, I’m focused on loyalty, and I’d like to commission the German language, if possible, to give us a word meaning nostalgia for the old loyalties of yore, now lost in our benighted era. 

In May 2024 Your New Favorite Writer posted a piece, “A Time Travelogue,” and a man wrote this week to thank me for it. 

The original post was a visit to the now-distant past, to the time when I was a boy in Streator, Illinois. I happened to mention “the Onized Club”; my correspondent happened to be Googling last week for “Onized.” That was, as investigators say on TV, the nexus. 

Onized jacket. Fair use.

The Onized Club was a company-sponsored club for the thousands who worked for Owens-Illinois Glass Company and their families. Owens was far the largest employer in Streator. The word “onized” was a transform of the words “Owens-Illinois” and “organized.” By going to work for Owens you became onized. People were proud of this club, which gave them various benefits—especially, wearing spiffy “Onized” fan gear around town. 

It was a company town. During the years when glass jars and bottles were being displaced for many uses by cheaper plastic or coated-paper containers, every quart of milk sold in Streator carried the legend: “See What You Buy—Buy in Glass!” Those who were onized naturally wanted to keep their high-paying jobs. They were grateful to the company. They were glad to be in the club.

The man who wrote me had been commissioned to do a project of some kind for the Streator Onized Credit Union. Puzzled by the term “onized,” he Googled it to find out what it meant and, voilà! found my blog post, which enlightened him on the origin of the term.

BUT HERE’S THE TWIST: As he continued reading, he “became nostalgic for a time I never knew when the richest among us funded the public good. A time when companies cared about their employees enough to spin up a credit union to make sure they had access to banking. A time when employees had an actual reason to be loyal because the respect went both ways. . . . [Y]our article reminded me of what life could be like and for a moment, I was there – imagining I was Onized and cheering for my team.” 

Aw, gosh—now I’m all choked up.

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But wait a minute, Dear Reader. Hold your horses. 

My new friend seems nostalgic for a time he never knew, “when employees had an actual reason to be loyal because the respect went both ways.” Hence the need for a new German word. Perhaps Loyalitätsnostalgie—nostalgia for (an era of) loyalty.

The thing is: I have lived in both eras, and I’m not sure they’re all that different.

Don’t get me wrong. I venerate the ’50s and ’60s as a wonderful time—a golden era, with all sorts of good things that have been abandoned in our heedless rush for modernity. (Or, these days, postmodernity.)

But that’s partly because memory dwells on the good stuff. At least, my memory does.

A Vietnam War-era P-38 can opener, with a U.S. penny shown for size comparison. One remains useful; the other, not so much. Photo by Jrash. Public Domain.

We all look back to the early years of our lives as the standard against which we measure all things. That’s why old duffers who have not touched an M-16 rifle or used a P-38 can opener in sixty years wear baseball caps with patches representing their old units and blubber unashamed tears when they meet fellow vets. It’s not because the service was so wonderful—it often wasn’t—but it was the capstone or climax to the early years of a person’s life, the passageway to adulthood. Often enough, as adults, we look backward to the more exciting and heady days of youth.

So what about it, Gentle Reader? Has the two-way tug of loyalty between employer and employee gone the way of the Great Auk? Does it live only in the past?

I don’t think so. To begin with, it’s not clear that all rich people, or all large corporations (the two categories are not identical) were stalwart stewards of the public good in old times. Second, for every splashy billionaire we see in today’s media behaving like an ass, there is a quieter billionaire out in the hinterlands working patiently for a better world. We have a good example right here in Wisconsin: Judith Faulkner, creator and sole owner of Epic Systems, Inc.—who, besides having invented a very beneficial medical software, is methodically working to give away 99 percent of her net worth to worthy causes during her lifetime. There must be many other examples.

I know there are a lot of lesser companies in small towns across the nation, delivering great goods and services with workforces who are proud of what they are doing and of the company in whose employ they do it. 

Loyalty will always be with us. It’s the glue that holds our society together. It works so well because it is a two-way street. Smart bosses go to extraordinary lengths to get and keep good employees, and those employees work not only for their bosses but for their communities. 

Relationships of mutual loyalty not only abound in the business world, they also make schools, churches, libraries, hospitals, and all kinds of nonprofits work. 

Those who do not live within a web of loyal relationships would be well advised to keep seeking. Such relationships are out there for the having. When you find an employer, a partner, or an institution worth giving your loyalty to, make sure you respond in kind.

Then you’ll truly know the joys of Beziehungsglück (relationship happiness).

Worth thinking about until next time.

Blessings, 

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

09.09.25
by

The Units

Dear Reader: Last week I promised you the final part of my 5-part series on the Old West. I am afraid I will have to ask you to be patient for another week. In the meantime, I hope you’ll enjoy this look back at some of the earliest memories of an old man. This post was originally published November 5, 2019.

Daddy’s friend Clark drove standing up. That’s the first thing I noticed. “That’s how milk trucks are,” he explained. “You have to drive standing up.” I was still amazed at this when we arrived at the circus. 

A three-ring circus, Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Combined Shows. Public Domain image from State Archives of Florida, published under Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0 license.

There in the gathering darkness: a big tent on a dusty lot. We sat high up and saw people called “acrobats” fly through the air and drop into a big, bouncy net. And there came a little car that drove around the three circus rings and dropped off clowns, one by one—at least a dozen of them. The little truck, by some magic, seemed to to have an inexhaustible supply of clowns. 

A milk truck. You had to stand up. “DSC_5874” by improbcat is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 .

Clark drove the milk truck but did not own it. He was not a regular milkman. He was a college student like Daddy. He drove an early morning milk route for extra cash and could use the truck in off hours.

It was 1949; I was four. We lived in The Units—three or four rows of jerry-built shacks on the campus of Knox College. Each unit, one of three connected side by side, had a kitchen, a bath, a small livingroom, and two small bedrooms. Each unit housed a mommy, a daddy, and one or two very young children.

The occupants were families of war veterans attending college on the newly-enacted GI Bill. We moved in when I was three months old, in September 1945, and left in June 1949, not long after Daddy took me to the circus. 

Special Bond

The families who lived in The Units shared a special bond and a certain kind of outlook. The men were college students, the women housewives. They were all, on average, four or more years older than the typical entering freshman. They were householders, married, with young children. The usual campus hijinks of the era held no charm for them. They had their own hijinks. 

They were more serious men, you see, having just fought a war. Yet, like all students everywhere, they sometimes put studies on the back burner, accepting lower grades as a  reasonable price for the rich social life of The Units. That social life included beer, cigarettes, the needs of their toddlers, and late-night bridge games.

The family next door, with whom we shared a wall, was Bud and Helen Steele and their daughter Heather. Helen and Bud played bridge with Mommy and Daddy most nights in their place or ours. When the visiting couple got the contract, the one who was dummy got up and ran next door to check on the ostensibly sleeping child. Bud, whose name was Virgil, was a wiry man with a ready smile, from a family that farmed just south of Galesburg. Helen was a fresh-faced and friendly young woman from Saskatchewan. I don’t know how they managed to find each other, but they made a great match. They remained fast friends with our family long after The Units and until their dying days. My younger sister and I still keep in touch with Heather and her siblings, Hugh and Linelle.

Diversions and Hijinks

One of the men in The Units sought to beautify the little patch of green grass in front of his place by planting two or three sapling trees. Several of his colleagues, by dark of night, dug up the trees and, perhaps inspired by the beer, re-planted them upside-down.

Iceman and children. German Federal Archives, published under the  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany license.

Life was likewise fun for us tots. A small pack of us roamed The Units, outdoors in almost any weather, older ones picking on younger ones. In summer the iceman came twice a week. Our iceboxes had to be replenished with large blocks of ice, which were slid into the upper compartment to cool the meat, butter, eggs, and milk in the lower compartment. The iceman used black wrought-iron tongs to lug these ice blocks into our kitchens. We kids waited beside the iceman’s idling truck until he came out, tongs empty, to get another ice-cake. Then the boldest of us, Dale Price, begged ice chips from the iceman. He gave us each a two- or three-inch sliver of ice to hold in our hands, very cold under the hot sun. You had to brush dirt and sawdust off the ice chip. Then you sucked on it for as long as you could stand, dropped it, and ran off to play another game. 

It may not sound like much, Gentle Reader; but for us it was a treat.

One time Dale Price drank turpentine from an old Campbell’s soup can my mommy had left on the back stoop, midway through a furniture painting project. Dale was rushed to the hospital to get his stomach pumped out. “Darn that Dale Price,” Mommy said. “Always getting into things.”

The Railroad

Burlington engine No. 5633, no longer going anywhere, on static display in Douglas, Wyoming. Photo by Wusel007, published under the  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Galesburg was a railroad town, astride two great lines: The Acheson, Topeka and Santa Fe, and the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy. The Units stood across South Cherry Street from the main line of the CB&Q. I clearly remember standing in our front yard on a bright morning, watching a fast train zoom by, pulled by a chugging black steam locomotive, perhaps a 4-8-4 “Northern,” a long cone of white smoke streaming out behind it. At night, I lay in my crib beside Teddy, my bear and best friend, and listened to the imponderable chug, roll, and bump of iron thunder as switch engines sorted and grouped railcars in the nearby Burlington yards. 

Mrs. Grable’s School

Life went on. Daddy had a part-time job taking the Galesburg Register-Mail to the outlying district of Bushnell in the afternoons. The GI Bill provided tuition, subsistence, books and supplies, equipment, and counseling services for veterans in college; but daily  expenses, beyond “subsistence,” could be tight. When I was three, Mommy got a part-time job as a secretary in an auto parts company, and I began attending a nursery school, “Mrs. Grable’s.” 

1950 DeSoto Suburban ad, Public Domain. Scanned by Alden Jewell, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Mrs. Grable had a large house with a big backyard and lots of toys and crayons. One or two other old ladies helped her wrangle kids. She had maybe a dozen of us. She picked us in the morning in her DeSoto Suburban—a big car with jump seats and room enough for the whole dozen of us. Later in the day she drove around The Units and dropped us off one by one, like circus clowns alighting from a mystery vehicle every afternoon at three.

Blessings, 

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Author 

Larry F. Sommers

06.11.24
by

Honor Flight

I’m going on an honor flight.

Who? Me? Your New Favorite Writer? 

Who’d-a thunk it? 

Flight of Honor participants in Raleigh, NC are welcomed back by crowds. Photo by Rtphokie, licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0.

You know what I’m talking about? Maybe not, since honor flights are a recent invention. 

Military veterans from a locality are flown, free of charge, to Washington, D.C., on a given day, ostensibly to view the nation’s war memorials. At the originating airport, on board the plane, and at the destination airport—Reagan, Dulles, or Thurgood Marshall—they are drenched with applause and special treatment. Veterans thus honored are often moved to tears.

The original notion was to honor men and women who fought World War II—the “Greatest Generation.” The National World War II Memorial had been completed in 2004, yet few WWII vets had gone to Washington to pay a visit. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines of that vintage were growing old and infirm. How many would live long enough to visit the memorial expressing the nation’s gratitude to them and their fallen comrades?

The National WWII Memorial. Photo by Duane Lempke, licensed under  Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

The Honor Flight Network, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, was founded by Earl Morse and Jeff Miller, two younger-generation veterans. Wikipedia says it “grew to a veritable forest of volunteerism, fundraising and goodwill toward the Greatest Generation veterans, who had been too busy building their communities to demand recognition for wartime service.” 

Why Me? Why Now?

Since its founding, the progam has naturally progressed to recognizing veterans of the Korean and Vietnam conflicts as well as World War II. 

Although I was involved with the Vietnam War, I never thought of going on an honor flight.   

Those junkets are laid on for doddering old men, I thought. Which certainly does not describe yours truly.

Moreover, I was hardly a gung-ho troop in the first place. In the years when I wore a uniform, bellyaching was the more fashionable posture. I was only too glad to gain separation from the U.S. Air Force 55 years ago. Since then, I have been mostly absent from veterans’ events, organizations, and affairs. 

So why am I listed on the manifest to ride the Badger Honor Flight this coming November? 

One good thing about living so long—I’ll be 79 tomorrow—is that one gains perspective. One mellows. 

Being a Veteran

Though never vocal about claiming respect as a veteran, I have come to realize that there is a point to it. Those who donned the uniform when called upon, whether we endured horrendous combat or performed other tasks, rightly earned our nation’s gratitude.

The historian Steven Ambrose described a particular outfit in World War II using words lifted from William Shakespeare: “band of brothers.” The phrase evokes an intense, unbreakable bond among those who have borne the battle, be they Britons at Agincourt in 1415 or Screaming Eagles at Normandy in 1944. 

King Henry V and his band of brothers at the Battle of Agincourt, 1415. Painting by John Gilbert (1817–97). Public Domain.

The whole corps of us who served, doing any job at all, in the armed forces, may not rate such a heady epithet. The totality of U.S. military veterans, I think of as a “gang of guys with a certain sameness.” 

A Vietnam War-era P-38 can opener, with a U.S. penny shown for size comparison. Photo by Jrash. Public Domain.

We have all been yelled at by noncommissioned officers in boot camp. We learned how to stand up straight and how to salute. Even decades later in civilian life, we align the plackets of our shirts to our belt buckles and trouser flies to achieve a straight “gig line.” Every one of us can still work the official P-38 can opener that was issued with tinned field rations in the days before the introduction of plastic-pouched “Meals, Ready-to-Eat” (MREs). 

These tokens held in common must not be taken lightly.

But, What’s the Point?

Even so, when my late friend Jerry Paulson, a fellow Vietnam-era veteran, came back from his honor flight a couple of years ago and insisted I should sign up, my reaction was skeptical. I am no doddering old man. But then, neither was Jerry, and he’s no longer among the living.

When I learned a bit more about the process, I changed my mind. You see, a veteran doesn’t just go on this trip. A veteran is accompanied every step of the way by a volunteer “guardian.” 

If you need help walking or boarding the airplane, even if you need a pusher for your wheelchair—your guardian is there for that. But what if you happen to be in tip-top shape? You get a guardian anyway! 

It’s right there on the website: “BHF uses a 1:1 Veteran to guardian ratio. We do this to for the safety and accountability of our Veterans. The most important reason is to ensure each Veteran can enjoy their ‘Trip of a Lifetime’ to its fullest.” I suspect they simply don’t want to pick and choose which vets need help and which ones don’t.

The program has volunteers ready to act as guardians. But—this is what snagged me, Dear Reader—you can nominate your own guardian. It can be a member of your family. It can’t your spouse, which would amount to an expense-paid holiday for two. But it can be your son, daughter, niece, nephew, or friend. 

I thought of our only child, Katie. Suddenly the project became compelling. 

My Guardian

Katie was almost fourteen when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. The First Gulf War, which soon followed, happened when she was a teenager, far removed from any concern with world affairs. By September 11, 2001, she was 25—old enough to fight for her country in the Global War on Terror which followed. But military service, whether compulsory or voluntary, has always been a predominantly male thing. She did not enlist, nor did anyone expect her to.

Though women today serve in all branches, they do not generally grow up with a sense of their own eligibility, vulnerability, or destiny of military service. But young men do.

Historically, our country has provided about one war per generation, and the young men are expected to fight it. Not all of them, but some of them will surely go. The rules of the game—the degree of compulsion or free choice—vary by national policy and historical circumstance. Some are born too late for one war and too early for the next. But all young men live in the shadow of the next war. 

War for men is like motherhood for women. We don’t all experience it, but its very possibility shapes our lives. Those who go through it are formed by it. Those who escape it may feel they have missed out on something, even if it is something better avoided.

I have no memories of real combat, thank God, to haunt my days and disturb my dreams. In those days when battle was a live possibility for my generation, I could have burned my draft card and fled to Canada. A lot of men did. The reason I didn’t was not that I was a super patriot or convinced of the need to fight the Communists in Southeast Asia, but only that I wished to continue being an American, subject to our nation’s laws. 

(If you want the full rationale, look up Socrates’s conversation with his friend Crito. It’s filed under Plato’s Dialogues.)

Crito Closing the Eyes of Socrates, bas-relief by Antonio Canova  (1757–1822). Public Domain. Image file by Fondazione Cariplo, licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0.

Katie is still a young woman. She’s had no opportunity to understand the nature of the experience her father went through more than fifty years ago, or the resulting bond among a gang of guys with a certain sameness. 

But come November, she’ll accompany me as my volunteer guardian on what amounts to a road trip with a random sampling of that gang of guys. I don’t know who my fellow Badger Honor Flight veterans will be, but I reckon we’ll have a few things in common. Maybe Katie and the other guardians will catch a whiff of what our sameness means to us and therefore to them.

That’s reason enough to go.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer