But I'll first chime in with another theory about why some folks are more likely to turn up here than others. Actually I will just speak for myself: It's just easier for me to comment here than it might be for others because I'm here in my office most days at the keyboard anyway -- and I like writing just for the hell of it, as opposed to writing to get paid. It's a nice change of pace and limbers up my overtaxed neural pathways.
Also living away from home for so long it's great to be connected to Columbus in some way.
But as Philip Roth once said: "Goodbye, Columbus!"
You remind me of an interesting quote from a well known journalist in Denver years ago. His name was Gene Amole and he did interviews and played classical music on a local public radio station. He also wrote a column for one fo the Denver newspapers. He told a story about his first job with the paper as a young staff writer. His first boss told him to always make sure his desk was close to a Catholic girl on the staff, because they always know how to spell and use correct grammar.
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I think the reason for so many posts from a certain group is related to the distance from Columbus, but only includes those far away members who were in attendance at th 50th. I believe Pythagorus would have written the equation as follows:
50th + J.B. X #(Mi-C) + ikb = VV
where;
J.B. = that girl from Bexley
#Mi-C = number of miles from Columbus
ikb = idle keyboards
VV = (verbage volume)
* I just know how desperately Mike loves to have averything expressed algebraically
Does everyone recall that hot, crowded gymnasium, June 5, 1966. Those caps & gowns added to the discomfort. Happy 53rd Anniversary to all!
A more important anniversay is tomorrow. Many of us have relatives that were involved in the Normandy invasion. A big salute to The Greatest Generation!
Dave – that Catholic girl sitting next to you in algebra would have leaned over to tell you that you misspelled "verbiage" in you formula explanation. Oh no, I just broke my vow of silence! Sorry, everyone. Zip. zip.
Oh, and Fred – my Dad was at Normandy, but thankfully not in the first wave.... Sorry, I did it again. Boy this vow of silence stuff is harder than giving up watching television for Lent.
So... are the ten days almost up.....Not much action on the web page.
I am wondering if anyone else thinks about uprooting from the place where thay have lived all their adult years. I have lived in Findlay Oh for 43 years. Most of my friends are here. I have an active life... but I am not near any relatives, not near my daughter and grandson. We all know how life and health can change in a minute. I am concerned about how I will cope if something happens to my mind or body, and I need help. I think there is nothing holding you here, you can move anywhere. However I just don't know how easy it would be for me to make new friends. ..Oh, I'm not ready yet, penty of time to decide. But then one more year ticks by and no decision has been made. It is hard to think of ourselves as "Old" but the reality is we are. I like to think I am "middle age"... however I don't think I will make it to 142 ! So I guess that makes me old.
popping in just long enough to say: hi Francine. You are not alone. My mom used to say: "getting old isn't for chickens." And I think someone like you could make friends fast. And they would be the lucky ones.
I suffer the same dilemma. Someone once told me "Don't chase your kids. They will move again." And low and behold they just did - twice in two years. Since that darn "50th" I now have more friends back in Columus than down here. And I still miss Colorado after all these years. Age, health, finances and all that are starting to dawn on me. I guess when they say "Golden Years" they must mean it cost more "Gold" to live how we want to.
You have touched honestly on the trend toward youthful outlook and the hoped for long life that is incorporated in sayings like "70 is the new 50". Such BS is often followed by some attempt to get money from us for some supposedly youthful activity, or otherwise join in something that will prove "we still got it." I think this idea of "Hang in there, you really can still be 18 if you wish it hard enough" is especially appealing to people who have been relatively untouched by the physical or mental (both, for some) stress of 71 years. But, that said...
The years to finally see Paris or the bottom of the Grand Canyon are slipping by. 5 minutes ago we concerned ourselves with turning the magic 70. Don't wait. Just turning a bend in a river road and seeing fields covered by hay bales can lift the spirit high.
BUT, moving to a whole new location...not hard for me as I have done that multiple times AND ...very important point here...I am not a people lover. Making friends is not on the list of concerns for me. But if your friends and life there in F-town are a meaningful comfort to you...if you enjoy and need that interaction...then what are you missing? Stay put! If it is the daughter and grandbaby then go visit the hell out of them.
I would like to believe that for a few years yet, if you or any of our wonderful ladies really needed help, just write that clearly here. By the following day help would be on the way, from the goodness of the hearts of those kids we went thru some of our teenage years with. A gazillion years ago...
I don't know if this helped or not Franny. My mother said:
aw, what the hell. Here's a d-day story I wrote years ago. I'm sure this gentleman is long gone by now. But he was a beautiful guy. I'm proud to have met him and prouder still to have the honor of saluting him, wherever he may be.
Michael Mcleod, Sentinel Staff WriterTHE ORLANDO SENTINEL
There's a knock at the door. It's a neighbor, come to bid goodbye.
"We're moving to Ormond Beach," he tells Ken Weyrauch.
Weyrauch uses his left foot to prop open the screen, leaning against the doorjamb with his one good arm, talking to his visitor for only a moment. But by the time he shuts the door and returns to his living room, one beach has given way to another in his mind.
"They're moving to Normandy Beach," he tells his wife.
Mary Weyrauch tilts her head ever so slightly, registering her husband's mistake, correcting him without looking up from what she is doing. He is 82. She is 80. Theirs is a household in which the present yields easily to the names and places of the past. Particularly that name. Particularly that place.
Sixty years ago today, Ken Weyrauch was a young man sprawled beneath an overcast sky on a high bluff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. He could not move. He could not speak. His view, had he been able to raise his head, was of the 20th century arriving at one of its most monumental turning points.
On one side of him was a swath of rustic French farmland, honeycombed with overgrown hedgerows, swarming with thousands of soldiers. On the other was a beach where warships stretched across the horizon, and a rising tide left a crimson residue each time it lapped at the sand.
It was D-Day, June 6, 1944, the date of the daring Allied invasion, staged across 60 miles of Normandy coastline, that foretold the defeat of Nazi Germany and the end of World War II.
Weyrauch was a squad leader in the U.S. Army's 1st Infantry Division: the Big Red One. His company -- "A" Company, 1st Battalion, 18th Regiment -- landed at dawn in the heart of the fight on Omaha Beach, where a combination of circumstances would pit the best German defenses against some of the most battle-hardened U.S. troops.
The Allies would win the day. But as dawn broke, and the invasion began, the dug-in defenders had a deadly advantage over the attackers, particularly at Omaha Beach. That three-mile stretch of Normandy coastline would see roughly 2,400 Allied dead and injured that day, according to historians at the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans.
Weyrauch was severely injured by an artillery round that would cost him his left arm. For most of that day and all of that night, he lay among the dead, flickering in and out of consciousness, too severely injured to signal for help as medical corpsmen trudged by.
"They thought Ken was dead," he says. "But Ken wasn't dead."
LOVED A BRITISH NURSE
The Weyrauchs live in Ridge Manor, a small retirement community of narrow streets and immaculate one-story homes halfway between Orlando and Tampa.
Theirs was a wartime romance: He was the wounded American soldier; she the compassionate British nurse. But there were no tender bedside scenes. She never had the chance to nurse him back to health. They were separated for two years as he recuperated in military hospitals.
"It's hard to explain it to people these days," she says. "You couldn't just turn on a television and find out what happened. You couldn't just pick up a telephone and send a picture of yourself. You couldn't even make a long-distance call. It was too expensive."
So his proposal to her came in a letter dictated from his hospital bed. Her acceptance came in one of the many letters she sent back to him. And in 1946, she took the Queen Mary across the Atlantic to marry him, joining the horde of 30,000 young British "war brides" who came to the United States after the war.
Many of them would find disillusionment here, at least at first.
"We thought Americans were always living it up," she says. "In the movies we saw, it looked like all they did was go on holidays and drive around on Saturday night."
Instead, she found herself living in an apartment so spare -- with its derelict stove, its basement toilet and its trickling shower, shared with another set of boarders -- that she sat down on a chair in the doorway and sobbed when she first saw it. But they managed. He got a job that he would keep for 25 years, working for the Veterans Administration, helping other disabled veterans, first in Syracuse, N.Y., and then in Tampa. They had two sons. They remained active in veterans circles year after year, attending the annual Big Red One reunions and traveling to France for the 50th anniversary of D-Day, where they were showered with awards, souvenirs and gratitude by the people in the towns along the Normandy coast.
Their experience was somewhat different last week. They were invited to Washington, D.C., for the dedication of the new World War II memorial. The speeches were inspirational. But the scene at the airport was a familiar ordeal.
Ken Weyrauch's body is still riddled with D-Day shrapnel. As usual, it did him no good to explain that to airport security screeners. As usual, he was escorted to the side to take off his shoes and hold out his one good arm as he was screened with a hand-held metal detector. As usual, he was good-natured while Mary fumed as she sat and waited, surrounded by their belongings, angered at the injustice of it all: The poor man had survived one era's gantlet. Wasn't that enough?
DEFINING MOMENT
Like so many GIs who wound up on the D-Day beaches, Ken Weyrauch had a small-town, middle-class, blue-collar upbringing. He grew up in Liberty, N.Y., which gave him the raw material for a small joke he has been dusting off for more than half a century now: "I fought for Liberty in more ways than one."
He fought in a regiment that was involved in three amphibious invasions and some of the most brutal action of the war. The Big Red One met the Germans first in North Africa, then in Sicily. Then it returned to training bases in England to prepare for D-Day.
That was where the Weyrauchs met. She was a nurse who lived in the small coastal town of Weymouth, working for an ambulance service that tended to victims of German bombing runs. Later, she tended wounded soldiers at a British evacuation hospital.
Life in Weymouth meant growing accustomed to blackouts and air raids, which were so commonplace that one afternoon Mary and a friend ignored the warning sirens and slipped off to the beach instead of finding an air-raid shelter. They sat on a park bench and watched British Spitfires darting among German planes above the English Channel.
What she was witnessing was another defining 20th-century event: the Battle of Britain, a series of aerial clashes over several weeks. In the end the British fighter pilots staved off the Luftwaffe, saving England and inspiring one of Winston Churchill's better known oratorical turns: "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."
The social center of the town was the Regent Dance Hall, where British girls went to meet American soldiers who were, as the Brits put it, "overpaid, oversexed, and over here."
One night, ignoring the jitter-buggers on the dance floor, Mary found herself focusing on a lonely looking soldier who was sitting at its edge.
He told her he couldn't dance. She taught him how to waltz. They struck up a friendship that became a romance. Seven months later she found herself standing beside a road and waving as he and his company marched away to a secret location to prepare for a hush-hush operation.
When the Allies launched the biggest invasion in history a few days later, Weyrauch's company was at the heart of it.
They landed in the second wave, when the firing was still at its most intense. At Omaha Beach, unbeknownst to Allied intelligence, a fresh, veteran German infantry unit had been relocated to the bunkers a few days before. As the American soldiers piled out of their landing craft that day, they were subjected to such murderously efficient machine-gun fire that one survivor compared his dying comrades to corn cobs falling off a conveyor belt.
Weyrauch may have survived because his landing craft discharged its passengers slightly farther offshore. "They let us out on a sandbar," he remembers. "First, it was shallow. Then it got deeper, and we had to hold our rifles over our heads. All you could do was move forward. You had no choice."
He could see bodies and bombed-out vehicles on the beach. He could hear the piercing whine of artillery shells overhead. The water was so cold that it turned their feet blue. Their equipment was so heavy that many men simply sank and drowned. There were so many explosions that the beach itself was vibrating.
So many officers were killed on Omaha Beach that day that there was often no one left to give orders, and much of the Allied advance was made by men who simply chose to move forward on their own rather than wait for direction and die.
Somehow Weyrauch and most of his squad made it to the shelter of a sea wall, and from there up a ravine that cut through the bluff, following a taped pathway that scouts had laid out to help them avoid German mines.
Then, as he turned back to help other squads up the slope, an artillery shell -- Weyrauch thinks it was a German round that was meant for the beach but fell short -- killed several soldiers in his squad and knocked him unconscious. He lay there throughout the rest of the day and into the night.
Then daylight broke. He heard someone passing near.
"I still couldn't talk," he says. "All I could do was make a noise, like this, from the back of my throat."
He leans forward, crossing his right arm across his chest to grasp his empty left sleeve. His Purple Heart and Bronze Star lie in their cases on the coffee table in front of him. Nearby are two sepia, 1940s photographs, both of them glamorous, in their own way: him in his uniform, with a dreamy, romantic smile, and her in a pleated skirt and cardigan sweater, her hair in a Betty Grable wave.
Now Mary Weyrauch sits next to her husband, studying her hands, poised to correct him if he repeats himself or becomes confused. A year ago he was diagnosed with the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. Her time to nurse him, after all these years, has finally come to pass.
His ailment, along with the passage of time, has blurred much of the past for him. But Ken Weyrauch has no difficulty recalling the moment he searches for now. It is as if it has been stored in his body, rather than in his mind. He leans forward on his couch, contorts his face, and summons, from across the years, the wordless sound he made that June morning to mark himself as one of the living.
O.K., I guess the silence has been broken -- several times.
Jack, Francene chimed in with a great topic, one to which we all can relate. So, your post did have the desired effect. Now maybe more will follow.
Frannie, when I awakened this morning and was working out the kinks in my neck and shoulders I read your post and it dawned on me - I am old!!! You are receiving a lot of advice on this subject, mostly from the viewpoints of those who are spread across the country. But that is the way of today's world. As Dave M. implied no matter where you go family members are likely to move also.
Like Dave B.'s attachment to Lake Erie, I am forever linked to the Rocky Mountains and Colorado. We have lived here for 43 years also. Although there are no children involved Janet has a big family back in C-bus and my sister and her clan are in New Mexico. All of our doctors, dentists, pharmacies, hospitals, stores, close friends, mechanics, restaurants, service people , etc. are here in Colorado Springs. Unlike Tim we have not moved a lot and the thought of us doing so is quite daunting. If I die first I think Janet may decide to return to Ohio. I am unsure what I would do if she were the first to part. Life is very complicated as we get older - and we thought that was the case when we were eighteen!
We are all in that decade of life that I feel is the last real time we have to make such decisions for ourselves. And yet, at least I don't relish having to make them. "Maybe next year."
Hopefully you have touched on a matter to which other classmates will post their thoughts or experiences.
For those who read but do not post, perhaps you will at least just click on the "Post Response" tab and type "Here" or "Present" to let us know that you are listening.
Sometimes I think you guys have too much time on your hands, but as a "lurker" I always find your comments and observations very interesting. Thanks for doing what you do that the rest of us don't do and thanks especially to Mike McCleod for that piece on Ken Weyrauch. It touched me deeply.
Francene, I never left Columbus except for a 1-year teaching stint in beautiful downtown McConnellsville, Ohio, the hotbed of Appalachia on the Muskingum River. So you are not alone in wondering about choices made and still to be made. I think before picking up stakes, considerable traveling should be pursued—places known and unknown, destinations to relatives/friends and destinations only because you’ve always wanted. If you need a traveling companion, I’d be glad to hit the road with you. Let’s start with Detroit!!! Not because it’s always been on your radar but because Janie just posted the info about our class trip to the Henry Ford Museum. We’ll plan future itineraries then. Check out the details and let Janie know.
Hey all. Just in case you didn’t see the September trip announcement:
Plans are underway for our September class trip. All we need now is a count of all who are joining us. Jack Maxwell says we must plan on at least two days. And those two days are September 9 & 10—one day for the Henry Ford Museum and one for the Greenfield Village. The cost for the two days’ activities is about $75. Here’s a link to the website so you can browse and see if you are interested.
https://www.thehenryford.org/
Once we get an idea of interest, we can make decisions about hotels, driving arrangements, meeting places, etc. This will be a great adventure. Let Janie know ASAP if you think you can make the trip with us. We’ll post updates on the WHS ‘66 website.
Wow, now that Charlie has come out from behind the curtain and revealed himself I think we can finally close the Forum. This tops any previous high so far!
Just kidding.
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These stories of D-Day conjure up so many memories. From Darryl Zanuck's "The Longest Day" to countless personal acounts of those who were present at the invasion. (Great story Mike.)
I would like to share a little D-Day story of my own.
It was only only 24 or 48 hours (details fuzzy in my memory) after the intitial landings, that a group of Army nurses were landed on Normandy. When they got up on the cliffs above, they were manning the quickly erected surgery tents to care for the wounded. They were pretty messy - probably not the most sanitary of operating conditions - but they had to make do. Within the first few days, one of the nurses contracted a strange blood disease and nearly died. She had to be taken back to England with some of the early casualties, where she spent almost 6 months in the hospital before being flown back to the States.
She was left with a condition in her spinal cord for life. The condition required that she maintan as straight a posture as possible - sitting absolutely erect in a straight chair at all times. Slouching or laying back on a soft chair or couch would put undue stress on her spine and cause intense pain. She married (at Immaculate Conception Church) a man named Donahue from Kansas City where she spent her entire marrigae sleeping on the solid uncarpeted hard floor next to the bed where her husband slept. She bore three children. God knows how she got though those labors?
She was not a terribly attractive woman but her real beauty was in her wonderful kind, sweet nature - one of the kindest people I ever knew. She was also brilliant - she taught herself several languages.
She is long gone now, and I wish I had asked her more about her experience. Her name was Adelaide (Mitchell) Donahue. She was my dad's baby sister.
Francene, you've touched on an issue that has been on my mind for many years. Mary and I have contemplated moving to a nicer climate (than Indiana) at least for part of the year. But our ties are all here; we've lived here almost continuously since college graduation, with a two-year hiatus to Connecticut on a job move many years ago. All of our close friends are here, and two of our daughters and their families live within a few miles. We are "used to" living here, and a move to another climate, even given better weather, just isn't something we'll anticipate. I guess you get used to what you are used to. Without a complelling reason to move, we're here for the long run -- even if that "long" isn't as long as it used to be. Without strong ties to where we are, we'd be more flexible. This just the musings of an "old man"; but I refuse to believe that. Until I look in the mirror, I think of myself as being in the prime of life!
You are receiving a lot of advice on this subject, mostly from the viewpoints of those who are spread across the country. But that is the way of today's world. As Dave M. implied no matter where you go family members are likely to move also.
