Riff and Parade

by William H. Benson

August 27, 2015

     “Life is a lot like jazz,” said George Gershwin. “It is best when you improvise.”

     During the 2004 political debates, the radio host Don Imus described the two vice-presidential candidates Dick Cheney and John Edwards as “Dr. Doom and the Breck Girl,” because Cheney appeared glum, dour, like a bulldog, whereas Edwards appeared well coiffed, “like a pretty girl in a shampoo ad.”

     A journalist in Florida named Roy Peter Clark then riffed on Don Imus’s comment. Riff is a jazz term that describes improvisation, when one musician borrows and builds on the musical phrase of another. In Clark’s hands Cheney and Edwards became “Shrek versus Breck,” “Dr. No versus Mister Glow,” “Cold Stare versus Good Hair,” and “Gravitas versus Dental Floss.”

     We now enter the 2016 presidential campaign, and it is a crowded GOP field. Real estate mogul Donald Trump leads the pack with an approval rating of 24% in the polls, and in the first debate on August 6, he hogged ten minutes of airtime, the most of any candidate.

     He brags, “I am a man of great achievement. I win. I always win. Knock on wood. I win. It’s what I do. I beat people. I win.” This is from the man who wrote the book The Art of the Deal. One wonders, “How did this bragging billionaire with so little substance on the issues even get on the stage?”

     A riff on the first debate. “Trump versus the trumped.” “’You’re fired!’ versus ‘I need to get hired.’” “The wild view versus the mild few.” “A clown versus the frowns.” “Exasperating versus uninviting.” “The cold stare and funny hair versus the horrified glare and less hair.” “The outrageous versus the ungracious.” “The Grumpy Cat look versus the bulldog spooks.”

     The columnist Maureen Dowd points out Trump’s major difficulty. “How does he curb the merciless heckler side of himself, the side that has won over voters who think he’s a refreshing truth-teller, so that he can seem refined enough to win over voters who think he’s crude and cartoonish?”

     Refined he is not. “George Will is a dope,” Donald Trump says, and George Will says that he has “other and better reasons for thinking it might not be altogether wise to entrust him with the nation’s nuclear arsenal.”

     Timothy Egan writes in The New York Times, “Normal politics can’t explain Trump. For that you need Freud. Trump fits the classic definition of narcissistic personality disorder. Everything that comes out of Trump’s mouth is junk, but at least it fits a pattern.”

     Life in America is a parade. Most stand on the sidewalk to watch, and we call them spectators or fans or voters. Only a few march in the parade, and those we call celebrities, stars, athletes, champions, or politicians. Certain spectators yearn to join the parade, to make the transition from fan to celebrity, from follower to leader, from politician to statesman, but few do so. Most are poorly equipped to handle the stardom or leadership. They falter and lose their way.

     For example, because of his musical talent, Elvis Presley led the parade for two decades, but he possessed zero talent to deal with the celebrity status. He faltered, lost his way, and died at forty-two.

     The parade demands our attention. It says, “Turn on the television. Watch this movie. Listen to him sing. Read this novel. Watch him pass the ball. Listen to this glib politician. The parade is passing by, and if you glance away, you will miss something exciting that will thrill you for a moment.”

     The parade’s quality is another matter. More often than not it is of low quality, even trashy, junky, degrading, or uninspiring, with scant fulfillment or substance. A Hollywood executive named Fred Friendly said it best. “Television and the movies make so much money at their very worst, why would they want to achieve their very best?”

     The English writer, Samuel Johnson said, “When familiarity and noise claim the praise due to knowledge, art, and elegance, we must beat down such pretensions.”

     Donald Trump represents all that is “familiarity and noise,” like a sugar high, but who among the Republican candidates stands for “knowledge, art, and elegance?”

     Matthew Continetti in the Washington Free Beacon approved of Senator Marco Rubio, saying that his “’crisp and compelling answers’ made him the clear winner of the debate, proving he’s a true ‘political talent,’ who appeared ‘confident, energetic, eloquent, and knowledgeable,’ with a great command of both domestic and foreign policy detail.” David Harsanyi in TheFederalist.com said the same, that Rubio is “the most gifted and well-positioned candidate in the GOP field.”

     More debates will follow, the parade marches on, and we shall see if Rubio’s “knowledge” can trump Trump’s “noise.” If life is a lot like jazz, then Rubio and the others might have to improvise. They might have to riff on Donald Trump’s bizarre statements. They might have to “beat down such pretensions.”    

Linda Cliatt-Wayman

by William H. Benson

August 13, 2015

     “Miss! Miss! Why do you keep calling this a school?” asked Ashley. “This is not a school!”

     It was an awkward moment, at an assembly, in November of 2002. Because a fight had broken out that morning, the school’s new principal, an angry Linda Cliatt-Wayman, called all the students and staff to the auditorium where she hoped to present her expectations for the students’ behavior and for their achievement. Ashley, a student, interrupted her with the chilling words, “This is not a school!”

     Fast forward to the fall of 2013, when Cliatt-Wayman walked into another north Philadelphia high school, her first day as principal at Strawberry Mansion High School.

     Officials rated the school as “persistently dangerous.” Chains slung over the front doors. Fights were rampant. Math and reading levels stood in the bottom decile. Classrooms were in disarray. The neighborhood was locked in poverty. The students felt scared. The teachers felt defeated. The school district had slated the school for possible closure. Hopelessness pervaded the atmosphere.

     Four principals in four years had tried and failed to turn the school around when Philadelphia’s Assistant Superintendent of schools at that time, Linda Cliatt-Wayman, decided to give up looking, “because,” she said, “I could not find a principal who was suitable for the job. So I volunteered.”

     Last May, she spoke on TED talk. The first thing you notice is her voice. It booms out loud, determined, confident, and earnest, the kind of voice that demands to be heard, that would cause a high school girl or boy to jump, wake up, pay attention, listen, and act.

     How does anyone turn around a school, or any institution, especially one trapped in a deteriorating cycle of apathy and desperate poverty?

     Linda Cliatt-Wayman started with slogans. Her first: “If you’re going to lead, lead.” With her staff’s help, she reset the combinations on all the lockers. She created a deployment plan, so that she knew where each staff member was every moment of the day. She changed the burned-out lightbulbs. She filled two dumpsters per day for weeks with all the junk and trash that had accumulated in the classrooms. She found funding for more teachers. She established a “non-negotiable discipline policy.”

     Above all else, she tried to make the school a safe environment. Students now pass their backpacks through metal scanners before they are brought into the school. Pockets are emptied. Ninety-four cameras peer into the school’s every corner. Signs everywhere announce, “Weapons are prohibited.”

     Security guards roam the hallways and lunch rooms, ready to bust up the fights. No boots, and no hoodies. The boots stomp on heads, and the hoodies hide students’ faces from the cameras.

     Her second slogan: “So what? Now what?” She would listen to no excuses from students or staff. “Now what?” meant “let’s solve the problem now,” rather than list the excuses.

     Her third slogan: “If nobody told you they love you today, remember I love you.” She manages the lunchroom, where, she says, “they often outman me, and I don’t know if I have the manpower to bring it back.” But it is in the lunchroom where she learns the students’ names. She sings “Happy birthday!” to them. Then, one day a month she holds a town hall meeting and fields students’ questions. “Why do we have a dress code? Why do we have so many rules?” She meets the questions head on.  

     This fearless warrior in north Philadelphia has attracted national attention. Diane Sawyer took her camera crew into Strawberry Mansion High School one day and found herself in the middle of a girls’ fight. Another girl draped an arm around Diane’s shoulder and announced, “Nobody hurts Diane!”

     Linda Cliatt-Wayman grew up in poverty in north Philadelphia. She beat a lot of odds. “She experienced firsthand the injustices perpetrated against poor students in education.” She graduated from high school, college, and earned a master’s degree. She attributes her success to, what she says is, “my amazing mother.” With Linda beside her, her mother would ride a city bus into Philadelphia’s better neighborhoods, point at the clean and prosperous homes, and dared Linda to dream.

     By tough love, rigorous rules, and consequences, Cliatt-Wayman’s efforts at Strawberry Mansion High School produced results. After one year, the literature and algebra scores more than doubled.

     She delivers a needed message to her students, straightforward, no hesitation. She loves the students, and she believes in their potential to succeed if given the chance. Over the intercom at the end of the day, she delivers her message. “I want you to be careful going home today young people,” she says. “You all have to remember that education is the only way. It is your only ticket, and remember that if nobody told you they loved you today, remember I do.”

     “This is not a school!” Ashley said, and Linda Cliatt-Wayman answered, “So what? Now what?”

Hamilton, the Musical

by William H. Benson

July 30, 2015

     On Saturday afternoon, July 18, President Barack Obama and his two daughters, Malia and Sasha, were pleased to attend the new musical based upon Alexander Hamilton’s life, Hamilton.

     The popular play moved to Broadway, to the Richard Rodgers Theater, on July 13, after it received rave reviews off-Broadway. It is the brain-child of the gifted lyricist and hip-hop musician Lin-Manual Miranda, thirty-five years old, of Puerto Rican descent, who wrote the songs and stars in the lead as Alexander Hamilton.

     Miranda explained that years ago when on vacation in Mexico, he read Ron Chernow’s bulky biography of Hamilton. As he read it, he said, “Hip-hop songs started rising off the page.”

     Miranda approached Chernow, but the biographer questioned if rap and “hip-hop music could be the vehicle for telling such a rich, complex story.” Miranda “pointed out that with dense, rapid lyrics, you could pack an enormous amount of information into the songs. He also noted the use of rhyme, including internal rhyme, and all of the clever wordplay that was possible.”

     Two months later Miranda went to Chernow’s house and performed a song, supposedly sung by Aaron Burr, then the vice-president, who shot Alexander Hamilton in a duel on July 11, 1804, 201 years ago, in Weehawken, New Jersey. Hamilton died the next day at the age of forty-nine.

     “How does a bastard orphan son of a loose lady and a Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean by Providence, impoverished in squalor, grow up to be a hero and a scholar? The ten dollar founding father without a father. Another immigrant, coming up from the bottom. His enemies destroyed his rep. America forgot him. And I’m the darned fool who shot Alexander Hamilton. I’m the darned genius who shot Alexander Hamilton.”

     Impressed, Chernow told Miranda, “I think that’s the most astonishing thing I’ve ever heard in my life. You have accurately condensed the first 40 pages of my book into a four-minute song.”

     Other songs followed, and sewn together, Miranda covered Hamilton’s life: that he was born on Nevis Island in the British West Indies, that he was illegitimate because his mother and father were never married, that he was an avid reader and writer, and that he moved to New York City and attended King’s College, later Columbia University, where two centuries later Barack Obama attended.

     General Washington appointed Hamilton as his aide-de-camp during the Revolutionary War. At the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, in the summer of 1787, Hamilton argued for a strong union. He wrote the majority of the Federalist Papers and convinced New York State to vote 30 to 27 for the Constitution. Then, for five years he served in President Washington’s cabinet, as his Secretary of Treasury, where cabinet meetings often turned into heated battles between Hamilton and Jefferson.

     The reviewer for the Theater Mania, Zachary Stewart, said of Miranda’s play, “Exceptionally smart and unexpectedly timely. This story of an American patriot is the best new American musical in years.”

     One important fact about Hamilton comes across. Hamilton’s piercing intellect and his verbal swordplay antagonized people. Of Hamilton, Stewart said, “He should not say the things he says, but he cannot help it. He knows he is right.” The biographer Saul Padover said, “He gave the impression of a man who could not curb his feelings—or his tongue. The consistent pattern of Hamilton’s character was one of outer unquiet and inner disharmony.”

     Most of the actors who play the Founding Fathers in Hamilton are either African-American or Latino. At first Chernow questioned the multi-ethnic casting, but then he said, “After a minute or two, I started to listen and forgot the color or ethnicity of these astonishingly talented young performers. The miracle of the play is that it shows us who we were as a nation but also who we are now.”

     A white actor plays a foppish King George III who taunts the rebellious Americans with the song, “You’ll Be Back,” and a white actress, Phillipa Soo, plays Hamilton’s wife, Elizabeth.

     The most haunting song is “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story.” Burr lived, Hamilton died, but today in New York City, Hamilton’s adopted city, it is African-Americans and Latinos who tells us Alexander Hamilton’s story. Miranda combined eighteenth-century politics with hip-hop music.

     In another haunting song, Hamilton and Burr sing to their children, but when they do so, they face the audience; in a sense they sing to their posterity. “If we lay a strong enough foundation, we’ll pass it on to you. We’ll give the world to you, and you’ll blow us all away.”

     Hollywood and Broadway ran out of ideas for intelligent scripts decades ago, and so it is refreshing that the entertainment industry has now joined arms with the historians. What Steven Spielberg did with Lincoln in 2012, Lin-Manual Miranda has done with Hamilton in 2015. 

     On stage, front and center, Aaron Burr begins Hamilton with the question, “How did a man so disreputable and so hated achieve so much, even getting his face on the ten-dollar bill?” Although he displayed brilliance and a vaulting ambition, the best answer is, “Hamilton migrated to America.”

Lord Chamberlain’s Men

by William H. Benson

July 16, 2015

     In the spring of 1594, twenty-six London actors joined together to create an acting company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. These actors included London’s leading dramatic actor at the time, Richard Burbage; plus Will Kempe, London’s leading comic actor; as well as Richard Cowly, William Slye, John Heminges, Alexander Cooke, Henry Condell, and the thirty-year-old actor from the small town Stratford-on-the-Avon, William Shakespeare.

     He, as well as the others, were most fortunate, because this acting company brought together the talents of extraordinary men, rarely seen before in theatrical history.

     Because of the bubonic plague in 1693, Queen Elizabeth’s court had shut down London’s theaters, but by the spring of 1594, the plague had dwindled, the theaters opened up, and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were ready to perform plays.

     Acting upon a London stage demanded strenuous work, talent, determination, and intelligence. The men were expected to fence, dance, tumble, memorize dozens of lines for each play, and depend upon each other. They had to cooperate. Many were called, but few chosen.

     In order for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to achieve success, they had to find a dazzling set of plays, scripts worthy of staging, that would prove popular among London’s penny public. At that time actors were actors, and playwrights were playwrights. The playwrights wrote their plays, sold them to the several acting companies, but received little, if any, royalties if their plays proved successful.

     William Shakespeare, the actor, decided that he could write plays for his acting company. Of all of London’s actors, he alone wrote plays, a fact that did not set well with the playwrights. The same is true today. Jack Nicholson, Clint Eastwood, and Tom Cruise do not write their movie scripts. Perhaps Eastwood, but not Cruise, and definitely not Nicholson.

     The record is clear. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men collaborated, worked well together, trusted each other, grew fond of each other, as they performed play after play. There was little display of anger, hostility, threats, or the filing of lawsuits that so often tore apart other acting companies. For sixteen years, until 1610, a series of astonishing plays unfolded. Others described the men as “sober, discreet, properly learned, honest householders, and citizens well thought of among their neighbors.”

     William Shakespeare may have set the tone for his acting company. His colleagues described him as a “relaxed happy man,” “almost incapable of taking offense,” never litigious, quarrelsome, or deep into a literary feud. He displayed “a natural good temper and instinctive courtesy.” Ben Jonson called him “gentle Shakespeare,” and Sir John Davies said, “Thou hast no railing but a reigning wit.”

     In the spring of 1594, Shakespeare was well-known in London, first as a respectable actor, but more so as a poet. He had written and published two literary poems—Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece—that went through ten editions. Also, he had written three plays on the War of Roses, Henry VI, Parts I, II, and III; a farcical comedy, The Comedy of Errors; and a tragedy, Titus Andronicus.

     Shakespeare could have continued writing literary poems that, he knew, would sell well, but he laid the poems aside and directed his talent to the business of writing plays for his acting company. The turning point in William Shakespeare’s life occurred when he joined the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.

     “Everything else that Shakespeare wrote for the rest of his life belonged to the company of actors that he joined in the spring of 1594.” For sixteen years, his creativity was “unparalleled in literary history.” Not a solitary guy who wrote his plays in an attic alone with quill pen and ink bottle, he contributed to his acting company, his colleagues recognized his talent, and he delivered.

     He grabbed raw material, the stories he pulled from history books, and then he visualized them on London’s stage. He imagined what Richard Burbage and Will Kempe would do and say, and then he coined words, phrases, characters, conversations, all designed to play with the audience’s emotions.

     In 1610, Shakespeare retired from London’s stage, a wealthy man, moved back to Stratford, where his wife, Anne, and their children had always lived. Six years later, he passed away at fifty-one, which means that next year the world will mark the four hundred year anniversary of his passing.

     In 1623, two members of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men—John Heminges and Henry Condell—assembled thirty-five of Shakespeare’s plays and published them as the 900-page First Folio. The two men printed an estimated 800 copies, but only 233 survive today, and of those, 82 reside in the the Library of Congress’s Folger Library. Heminges and Condell action preserved Shakespeare’s plays.

     What does this history mean? Two things. First, genius can display itself within the context of intelligence and civil behavior. Second, the actor William Shakespeare displayed little interest in achieving immortality as an author. Instead, he wrote for the stage, for those magical moments when Richard Burbage stepped forward and became King Lear or Hamlet. O to have been there!

     ‘Tis the season for a tempest, but instead, strive to enjoy a pleasant midsummer night’s dream.

Jay Walker

Library of Human Imagination

by William H. Benson

July 2, 2015

     In 2002, the multi-millionaire Jay Walker designed and built his Library of Human Imagination. Located in Ridgefield, Connecticut, Walker’s 3,600 square-foot home stores and displays his collection of books—over 50,000 volumes—plus his myriad of museum-quality artifacts. Thus, it is both library and museum. Wired magazine said that “it is the most amazing library in the world,” and after seeing pictures and videos of it, I agree.

     First, Walker drew his inspiration for the library’s floor tile from the twentieth-century designer, M. C. Escher. The tile design that Walker created reveals a tumbling, wooden-block pattern that creates a three-dimensional effect. Then, from the floor one can look upwards and see stairs that connect the library’s three levels. Books stand in shelves that stretch from floor to ceiling against the outer walls, but certain of the rarest books are opened and displayed on tables.

     Walker’s most stunning effect is his dazzling display of glass throughout the library. Partial glass walls, no more than four-foot tall, surround visitors, who feel as if they are walking through a maze. Walker commissioned artists who then etched the glass walls with specific designs, such as the binary code, Egyptian hieroglyphics, or Chinese symbols. Then, by directing blue, green, red, or yellow lights at the glass, Walker creates an eery, but overpowering sensation.

     As for his artifacts, Walker likes to juxtaposition two items. For example, one can see an original copy of Robert Hooke’s book, Micrographia, published in 1665, that listed illustrations of bacteria as seen through a microscope. Nearby stands an early book on dwarfs. Small life forms, and small people.

     Then, in a TED Talk, Walker points to a four-foot high scale of a DNA molecule, and beside it sits an Enigma machine used to decode the Nazi’s communications. Walker describes the former as the code for life, and the latter as the code for death.

     On another TED Talk, Walker holds up his Gutenberg Bible, the first book printed on Gutenberg’s printing press, but Walker points out that that Bible was not printed for reading, because, “in 1455, nobody could read.” What then prompted the invention of the printing press? Walker answers by holding up a single sheet of printed paper, an indulgence.

      To raise money, Walker said, the Church sold a piece of paper that promised the purchaser less time in Purgatory, following his or her death. Once the Church began printing indulgences instead of drafting them by hand, it was like printing money. Walker says, “The religion drove the technology.”

     Hanging from the ceiling is an un-launched Sputnik satellite, and also a chandelier from a James Bond movie, Die Another Day. In a case stands a dinosaur’s hefty thigh-bone, and on a table stands a complete skeleton of a juvenile raptor.

     A visitor can see both old and new in Walker’s library: a meteorite, a U. S. flag carried to the moon and back, Franklin Roosevelt’s napkin on which he drafted his plan to win the war, a clutch of fossilized dinosaur eggs, a 1535 Coverdale Bible, an edition of Chaucer, and an instruction manual for the Saturn V rocket that launched Apollo 11 to the moon.

     In recent years, Walker acquired an anastatic facsimile copy of the Declaration of Independence, one of the two known to exist. In the early 1840’s, John Jay Smith brought the anastatic technique to America from England. There he had learned to apply chemicals and a copper plate to an original document. The ink from the document would soak onto the copper plate, and then printers could print copies from that copper plate.

     It is not certain if Walker’s facsimile was reproduced from the original Declaration of Independence, which would explain the original’s current poor quality, or from a subsequent engraving. Either way, the words on the anastatic copy underscore the intent of the fifty-six Congressmen who signed the document in early July of 1776, that they wished to sever all political allegiance to England’s monarch, King George III. “When in the course of human events,” and “We hold these truths to be self-evident”

     In the history of humankind or in the Library of Human Imagination, little is of more importance than independence, the idea that the people should govern themselves, free of a ruling monarch, and do so by forming laws that they all can read and obey. Slavery begins when others tell the people what to do, say, or think, but freedom begins when the people think and behave as they want. Thomas Paine called that simple idea, Common Sense.

     In the fifteenth century, indulgences freed people from Purgatory in the after-life, but in the eighteenth century, the Declaration of Independence freed the colonists and gave them permission to create their own government in this life.

     Jay Walker, curator at the Library of Human Imagination, said, “We create by surrounding ourselves with stimuli, with history, and with human achievement.” In his library the stimuli includes plates of etched glass bathed in light and colored blue, green, red, or yellow, as well as historical documents. Together they dazzle the imagination.  Enjoy the 4^th of July!

Suki Kim and Fathers’ Day

by William H. Benson

June 18, 2015

     On Sunday, June 25, 1950, North Korean bombs fell on Seoul, South Korea’s capital, and the civil war began. It ended three years later, on July 27, 1953, with the same division as it had begun, with the Korean peninsula divided into two parts at the 38^th parallel, Communist to the North and a democratic-republic to the South. South Koreans now call the war, “the 6-2-5 Upheaval,” but the North Koreans call it “the Fatherland Liberation War,” even though no fatherland was ever liberated.

     In 2011, Suki Kim, a Korean-American woman, then forty-one years old, taught English in Pyongyang, North Korea. In 2014, she published her memoir, Without You, There is No Us, and in it she described her 270 students at Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST), a North Korean college for boys, funded by donations raised by evangelical American Christians. PUST’s teachers were all foreigners, and officials watched them closely.

     Suki explained her situation, “I lived undercover in North Korea, posing as an English teacher. I was born and raised in South Korea, their enemy. I now live in America, their other enemy.”

     The teachers’ “counterparts” and “minders” refused to allow any discussion of religion or missionary work or anything that conflicted with the official party ideology, which, Suki said, was the lie that North Korea is “the world’s most powerful and prosperous nation.”

     She said that North Korea is a gulag posing as a nation, and that PUST was a heavily-guarded prison posing as a school. Her students knew very little of the outside world. For example, they did not know of the world wide web, which made it not quite “world wide.” The students were not permitted to leave the school, and were not allowed to communicate with or see their parents.

     Every book, song, advertisement, newspaper article, and picture was about Kim Jong-Il. Every blank wall space in the school was covered with his picture.

     Suki tried to teach these boys better skills in English composition, but her job was difficult. How could she teach twenty-year-old men how to think and then write an essay, or voice an opinion? All their lives their minders had told them what to think, do, say, and believe, and that they must obey. Critical thinking and truth-telling were not prized commodities in North Korea.

     Officials watched the students’ every move, heard their every word, disallowed them to express their thoughts, and reported all that they did or said. All students knew that if they would commit a single mistake, “unimaginable consequences” from this merciless and brutal regime would result.

     To help her students feel more comfortable with the truth, Suki played the game “Truth and Lies” with them, and then she asked them to write pretend letters to family members. Feeling pressured to obey her assignments, the students often reverted to lies. “When I was in the fifth grade, I cloned a rabbit,” or “I visited China on vacation.” Both were lies. Every knows that no one leaves North Korea.

     Suki grew to adore her students. When she called them “gentlemen,” they giggled and blushed. They understood that “she wanted them to live gentle lives,” which she knew was difficult in that repressive country. There was little she could tell them about life in South Korea or America.

     Americans call the Korean War, the “Forgotten War,” but no Korean can forget the war. The civil war divided families, and caused pain-wracked separations. Mothers lost their sons, wives lost their husbands, and children lost their brothers, never to see or speak or write to them ever again. Once captured, there was no release program. All communication ceased.

     Sixty-five years ago, on June 25, “everything went wrong” inside Korea.

     The Oklahoma National Guard drafted my dad in October of 1950, a month after his wedding. Army officials told him that he now belonged to the 45^th Infantry Division, 180^th Infantry Regiment, First Battalion, Company C. He went through basic training at Camp Polk, Louisiana, and in April of 1951, a ship carried him through the Panama Canal and across the Pacific Ocean to Hokkaido, Japan.

     In December of 1951, he landed in Korea and was given the job of mechanic, repairing army jeeps and trucks. In August of that same year, after eight months in Korea, he was released from duty and returned home, carrying with him one overwhelming wish, to forget the entire experience and never talk about it. He hated the military. He hated the drill sergeants. He hated others telling him what to do. He hated the war, and he hated being in Korea.

     Yet, he was fortunate, even lucky. Whereas tens of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Koreans lost their lives, he lived and was reunited with family, friends, and home.

     Fathers’ Day is Sunday. Enjoy the day, remember your father, speak to him if you can, and think of the freedoms we enjoy in the United States of America. At the very least, you and I can tell the truth, and we can write an opinion column.