Tag: Writing

Mother took me downtown to a federal office building to register for the draft. I was 18. I have my draft card with the Selective Service number on it in a trunk with other memorabilia from the time.

Dad served as an army paratrooper during the occupation of Japan. There is a photograph of him and Uncle Don, fresh from Tallahassee, with parachutes strapped on, ready to jump.

It was with a sense of family history, personal commitment, and duty that I followed the law by registering. Not all of my friends would contemplate entering military service, a couple of conscientious objectors were among my cohort. I felt no such compulsion and if I were called up, I would go.

In the eighth grade I had an assignment to read the newspaper and clip articles about topics which engaged me. The spiral-bound notebook I made has a section on the Vietnam War, including a newsprint photograph of a soldier that had just been hit by small arms fire and was falling to the ground. Going to the war was a real possibility, one I didn’t take lightly.

Like so many young people, I was enraged by the killing of four college students at Kent State University on May 4, 1970. A neighborhood friend organized a peaceful protest march to the military armory. I carried an end of a mocked up coffin representing one of the dead students in Ohio. A photograph of us made the local newspaper. I came to feel strongly the Vietnam War was wrong.

I took a student deferment as I had the option, and wanted to exercise it, delaying military service until after graduation from the university. I ended up cancelling the deferment when it became clear during sophomore year my draft lottery number would not be called. I was off the hook and breathed a sigh of relief as the Vietnam War was ongoing, and only crazy people wanted to fight there.

The conclusion I reached once the war ended on April 30, 1975 was the military was a mess and citizens had a personal, civic responsibility to improve it. That led me to explore options for enlistment. I enlisted to become an officer and left Davenport in January 1976, the bicentennial year. It was somewhat patriotic.

When I arrived for basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina I entered a different world. There were about a dozen white guys like me who had enlisted for officer training. They came mostly from New England and states above the Mason Dixon line. The majority of the company was comprised of local black guys and Puerto Ricans, many of whom knew each other from home and had enlisted together. There were a couple of white guys seeking to get on the draw with the Alabama National Guard, although they struggled to perform basic military tasks. At the time I believed Alabama did not send its best people. If you asked me in 1976 who would fight in our wars, my answer would have been black and Puerto Rican soldiers. It was a volunteer army and that is mostly who volunteered.

Ingrained in me was the liberal idea of equal rights under the law and equal protection. It mattered not that I was in a racial minority in basic training because it felt normal to me. I’d been exposed to different races and ethnicity when our family visited Florida where Father attended high school. I also shared a bunk house at YMCA camp to which staff had assigned all of the black campers plus me. Equal protection and equal rights used to be an American idea yet even as a grader I knew we had a long way to go. In South Carolina, in the military, it was obvious we weren’t equal as all the officer candidates were white.

The Unites States requires a standing military to meet our global commitments. Until the current president assumed office the United States stood as a force for good all over the world. Deployment on tough missions had become a norm. We continue to have a global military footprint, although its role has changed. Arms sales have become increasingly important to the U.S. under Trump’s “America First” foreign policy. The administration is changing the balance of power in the Middle East and elsewhere. We hope President Joe Biden can restore respect for the U.S. during his administration. What remains constant, though, is the need for a citizen armed forces and a standing army.

In his book, Who Will Do Our Fighting For Us? George E. Reedy, who extensively studied the selective service during the Nixon administration, wrote, “I believe that democracy can live more easily with the conscripts than it can with the professionals. The former do not like what they are doing — and that is precisely the reason they should be preferred.”

The need for military troops ebbs and flows. Some skills are highly specialized and require a longer term service commitment. Aircraft pilots are an example of this. For the most part, our military trains for specific missions and ramps up to meet staffing requirements. When operations end, units stand down. That is a normal progression and endemic to how the U.S. military operates. Having people from all walks of life, rather than dedicated professionals, enables citizens to witness our military and make sure we do good. That begins with a commitment to service, duty and honor when we consider our options in society. For me, the choice was easy.

By the time the City of Davenport was laid out, the Black Hawk War had ended. American men involved with the war, including some who would later become famous — Zachary Taylor, Abraham Lincoln, Winfield Scott, and Jefferson Davis — had departed. There was this land on the Iowa side of the Mississippi River.

With the Indian tribes removed, something needed doing with it, or so they believed. By any measure, the enterprise was a commercial venture in an arbitrary location. Its lackluster beginnings would haunt the city, certainly until I was born more than a century later.

(Spelling and punctuation preserved from the original text).

In the fall of 1835 a group of men met to form a company for the purpose of purchasing land and laying out a town site on the Iowa side of the river across from the fort. These men met at the home of Colonel George Davenport to discuss the issues concerning the town. Other than George Davenport the following men attended the meeting and became part of the company: Major William Gordon, Antoine LeClaire, Major Thomas Smith, Alexander McGregor, Levi S. Colton, and Philip Hambaugh. Another member of the company was Captain James May, in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania at the time.

The spring of 1836, Major Gordon surveyed the land that was to become the City of Davenport. The spot selected was west of the LeClaire Reserve and bounded by what is now Harrison Street on the east, on the north by Seventh, west by Warren, and south by the river. It included 36 square blocks and six half blocks. The cost of the entire platt was $2000.00.

In May, the area had been divided into lots, streets, and a proposed business section. Then the enterprising company offered an auction. People were brought from St. Louis by a steamboat and docked on the river front. The sale continued for two days. During the day the area was shown and in the afternoon an auction was conducted. In the evening the ballroom of their steamboat hotel was turned into a place for a lavish party in hopes that the second day of the auction would be as big a success as the company had hoped for. Unfortunately the sales were far from what was expected. Only fifty or sixty lots were sold at $300.00 to $600.00 apiece.

The promotional adventure to sell the city of Davenport was not a success in the number of sales made or amount of money collected. Most of the lots went for low prices to St. Louis speculators who hoped to make a profit on a resale.

A Clearing in the Forest by Gayle A. McCoy

While visiting home at Thanksgiving in 1976 I considered what I wanted to accomplish overseas while in the military.

What are the points of emphasis going to be? I can see two major ones in addition to my duties as a U.S. Army officer: writing and traveling.

What can be said about writing is that I will buy a typewriter and work a story at a time. If something good develops BRAVO!

As far as traveling is concerned, I will make the best possible use of my time and finances to travel, seeing the people, talking with them, eating with them, and viewing their ART and ARCHITECTURE.

This is no modest task in itself but one which must be undertaken for the full experience of the country’s culture. It should prove most pleasant.

Journals, November 25, 1976

I underestimated how engaged I would become as an Army officer. When we were in garrison my day started well before dawn with a simple breakfast in my bachelor officer’s quarters followed by a shower and a drive from Martin Luther King Village near the Mainz main railway station to Robert E. Lee Barracks in Mainz-Gonsenheim. It was well after dark when I returned to King Village. If the officers club across the street from my quarters was open, that’s where I would find camaraderie and dinner.

When we were in the field, we were gone for as much as three weeks at a time. Our field operations were maneuvers in the Fulda Gap and other strategic spots in central Germany. When we were on maneuvers we got very little sleep. We would road march with our tracked and wheeled vehicles from the barracks to the area around Fulda when we were rehearsing for a potential Soviet invasion. When the trip was longer we’d load everything on flatbed rail cars. The rail car loading was a scene from old World War II motion pictures.

We also spent time at designated training sites like Grafenwöhr, Hohenfels and Baumholder. For an extended period of time I split my week between Baumholder (Tuesday-Saturday) and Mainz (Saturday-Monday), which made for never ending weeks. I was young and up to it. I listened to Armed Forces Radio in my pick up truck on the drive home every Saturday, almost like clockwork.

Because I studied French in college I served as an exchange officer with a regiment of French marines in Brittany. Our battalion commander in Mainz told me if the balloon ever went up, that is, if Soviet troops invaded West Germany, I would most likely be transferred to a position where I could use my French language skills as a liaison officer. I also took a platoon through French Army Commando School in Vieux-Brisach where I served as French-English translator. My French-speaking skills improved considerably because of these assignments.

I held three different positions in the 2nd Battalion, 87th Infantry, a mechanized infantry unit part of the 8th Infantry Division and V Corps. I started as a platoon leader, then became a company executive officer, and spent the rest of my tour of duty as the battalion adjutant. These were positions where I learned what it meant to command troops and used almost every skill I learned before entering the Army. It was life, as good as it gets.

I did buy a typewriter, and still have it. My main writing turned out to be in my journal which covers from Dec, 28, 1975 until Oct. 22, 1979. In reading my journals for this project I’m both lucky and glad to have them.

Some friends from home stayed with me for a while in Mainz. I met Dennis and Diana while working a part time retail job in high school. I took leave and we toured Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Switzerland in a rented Volkswagen sedan. Dennis is of Belgian descent and asked me to write for his newsletter at the Center for Belgian Culture of Western Illinois in Moline. It took some time and my first article was titled To Belgium and Back: November 1977. He published two more of my Belgian travel diaries the following year.

As far as travel goes, I had experiences that would have been impossible outside an Army unit. During our field training exercises I got to know some parts of the Fulda Gap better than I knew Mother’s neighborhood in Iowa. As a soldier I was both threatened with a gun by a German reveler during Fasching, and welcomed into people’s homes while stranded in parts unknown. There was still resentment lingering from World War II, especially among people who lived through it.

During my trips to France I felt a part of history. The marine unit to which I was attached was on alert to mobilize to the Republic of Djibouti after the African state declared independence from France. I would have deployed with them, although luckily we didn’t.

During an amphibious landing on Belle-Île-en-Mer we were immediately helicoptered to a drop zone further inland. I missed the U.S. ambassador from Paris who was waiting for me on the beach and had come to greet me. I also think he heard my French was a bit questionable, which it was on that assignment. He finally caught up with me under a poncho, next to a barn, at a farmstead where the owners served us dinner of hard cooked eggs, potatoes and sparkling cider all produced on their property.

There were trips to Roman ruins in the Taunus Mountains on weekends, rock climbing near Trechtingshausen, and many visits to the Rheingau wine country. A number of battalion officers made a trip to Luxembourg where a field officer in the Luxembourg Army showed us historic sites related to World War II. Everywhere we went we felt part of history.

While my quarters weren’t fancy, they were an outpost where I took up residence and deployed all over Europe during my time in Mainz. It was a unique experience for which I am thankful.

13 November 1976
Fort Benning, Georgia

Whatever malaise I felt once has now subsided. I am in excellent health, with the swine flu and Hong Kong flu injections rolling around my bloodstream. Aside from a few bits and pieces of personal affairs I am ready to depart for Europe.

But most of all I feel as if my major problems, stemming from my youth, are solved. I have come to understand the human condition and have come to terms with it. I have made some modest inroads in society with only one major faux pas and am involved with what could earmark a successful life.

As always one asks by what standards is success judged? To this I answer first of all good health. Without this one is hard pressed to be successful. Without health, success can be judged only in terms of living within whatever handicap one possesses. While in the eyes of many, myself included, this is an admirable achievement, for me success must include good health. This is not to be in comparative terms but free from bodily ailments which distract the mind/spirit relationship.

Second in the measure of success comes adequate food, clothing and shelter — with imagination in their implementation. The basic needs must be taken care of with style and diversity in order for success to be achieved.

Next in considering success is a spirit/mind awareness. The spirit must be able to sort itself out from the mind. Upon sitting back, the spirit must be able to observe the actions of the mind. If this can be achieved then success is evident.

The last and most important aspect of success is the ability to be in communication with the other members of the human race. To be open minded and willing to believe, knowing that each person is capable of letting the divine essence shine through.

I by these terms am now a success and hopefully I will remain successful for the rest of my life.

May the Lord have mercy on my soul, that success not swell my pride, that I may also live through the next week.

~ Excerpt from my personal journal before departing Fort Benning, Georgia for Thanksgiving in Davenport. From there I would drive to Terre Haute, Indiana, and then to Charleston, South Carolina, where I would ship my vehicle to Bremerhaven, West Germany and take up residence in Mainz.

When our parents bought a home in Northwest Davenport the kitchen quickly became the center of family activity.

The home was an American Foursquare built in 1910. It had an expansive front porch facing Marquette Street with mature maple trees on either side of the walkway. There were two tall pine trees on the south side of the house, and a silver maple next to a detached tar paper garage in back near the alley.

The entryway had leaded glass doors leading to a foyer where a staircase led upstairs to three bedrooms, a bath, and more stairs to the unfinished attic. Abundant mahogany woodwork adorned the foyer. To the right was the living room with leaded glass windows and a wide pocket door separating it from the dining room. The dining room had a bay window with leaded glass. The dining and living rooms were large enough for home entertaining which consisted of parties for us children, family gatherings, and card parties organized by Mother. On Dec. 26, 1982 there was an open house to celebrate our wedding with friends, family and neighbors.

The kitchen was small by today’s standards. Every inch of wall space had something on it. The centerpiece was a large enameled, cast iron sink with a left side drain board. The drain board also served as countertop space. There was a gas range in one corner, a space for a refrigerator, and a small table set against two windows on the north side of the room. It was a kitchen with five doors.

There was a door leading to the foyer between the range and the refrigerator. Sometimes that door was kept shut. Another door, perhaps the most used, led to the dining room. One led to a pantry that included a built in china cabinet and other shelving. There was a door to the basement, and one to a small vestibule with a closet and yet another door to the back porch. In all, the house had livable space of 1,561 square feet on 0.15 acre, a regular city lot. It seemed like more space because the basement and attic were quite usable.

Our kitchen was a place of transition in the period I lived there from Summer 1959 until leaving for university in 1970. By that I mean food came in through the doors and was processed for storage or prepared as meals. We hauled groceries up the back or front steps, depending on where the automobile was parked. We took canned goods to the basement for storage in a handmade wooden cupboard designed for the purpose in an era of home canning. In those days there was less processed and prepared food and more raw ingredients. Our kitchen was about more than food storage and preparation.

Mom’s friends stopped by unannounced and entered the kitchen through the vestibule without knocking. Model Dairy had home delivery to a milk case on the back porch and occasionally Mother spoke to the milkman. The kitchen was a bustling center of social activity we took for granted.

We most often entered and left home through the kitchen. Mother would usually be there or in the dining room. We told her where we were going and asked permission to leave the yard. There were coat hooks in the vestibule for storing everyday outerwear. In winter, when we came indoors we took off our shoes and put them by the furnace register next to the range to dry.

Countless meals were prepared in the kitchen, typically by Mother. We had a family cuisine different from other families in the neighborhood. It became a discussion topic among my friends and neighbors. I ate some meals at the small table by the windows when my brother and sister weren’t around. I didn’t spend much time cooking with Mother yet recall my friend Dan and I gathering at the range to watch her make tacos while we were in high school. I took little of Mother’s cooking technique with me when I left home. My main memories of food are her bringing serving bowls, dishes and platters full from the kitchen to the dining room table where we gathered for meals.

After Father died we began a transition to the dining room as the central gathering place. When I returned from university, or later travels, that room became the focal point. We talked for hours around the dining room table. As we aged, our relationships with each other changed in front of us. Some of those conversations were memorable.

Yet it is the kitchen with its five doors I remember most about that period. What went on there was formative and stands in stark contrast with how our lives would change. It created in me a sense of normalcy.

It seems like a small thing yet we need a place to spread our work during a writing project.

I moved all the books piled on this table to the chest freezer for the time being. Hope we don’t have to get in it for a while.

The books in the photograph are cook books produced in the neighborhood where I spent the years from 1959 until 1970. I don’t understand the extent of cultural artifacts presently scattered around our home and will use this table top on sawhorses to transition them into some kind of order. That’s the plan, anyway.

Conceptually my present writing is coming together. It will be a compilation of thematic sections, some drawn from past writing and some new. I’ll use longer fragments written over the years, some of them quoted verbatim, and others highly edited.

Framing this will be brief historical essays about important places, including about Piety Hill and environs, where Mother was born; Lincoln County, Minnesota, where Grandmother was born; and Glamorgan, Virginia, where Father was born. Other important places are Davenport, Iowa City and Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Mainz, Germany; Tallahassee, Florida and Southern Georgia; Lake County, Indiana; and of course Big Grove Township where we settled in 1993.

There will be a second frame about work: Mother, Father and Grandmother during the period before I left for college; and highlights of my work history including high school jobs, summer work while in college, military service, the interim period between finishing graduate school and marriage, my transportation-related career, and the varied work experiences after my July 2009 retirement.

By reducing these topics to brief, separate sections I expect to provide background so I can focus on more interesting subjects.

Even though I have a table on which to lay all this out, not everything will fit. That will force choices — a good thing.

It’s clear from the progress of the coronavirus pandemic the state will be stressed for a while. Cedar Rapids to our north is doing poorly. State Senator Rob Hogg reported yesterday, “Cedar Rapids is now number one in the country for the fastest increase for coronavirus cases in metro areas with more than 50,000 people.” With cooler weather and winter coming, it’s a good time to work on indoors projects. So, I shall.