My Life As A Warrior (Chapter One)

   As I may have said before, from the moment I emerged from my mother's womb hanging on to my twin sister's big toe for dear life, it became clear that I had not been born to be a warrior. I wasn’t even the passive aggressive type. In the cradle when my twin sister kicked me, I rarely kicked back. And when I did, I wasn't happy about it. I wasn't combative.

   In the fourth grade, at Coventry school when Reno Koepke, whose father was the manager of Mayfield Cemetery, viciously tackled me in a touch football game, I didn't fight back. I walked away and never played football in the schoolyard again. I didn't even blame anti Semitism.
   I just didn't do contact sports. I did try out for the track team, but was not anywhere fast enough.
   I occasionally got angry with my twin sister, and I remember chasing her around the dinner table with a sharp pencil and swinging out at her face. (I missed, Doctor Carson.) But I remember feeling very angry. Can't remember why, Doctor.
   So by the time I was ready to graduate from high school, I was perhaps the last person you might expect to volunteer to be inducted into US Army in the middle of World War II.
That was 1944. There was this ethos: War on. And for some inexplicable reason I signed on with the other guys, to be inducted the morning after graduation, it was the thing to do, to avoid being thought of as something less than a real man. I signed on. I was ready. I told every one who would listen. Particularly my girlfriend Rita Barnett, a nice Jewish SDT sorority girl. Her dad was manager of the shoe department at Sterling’s, a classy women's store downtown.

   At the time I really believed that I would be assigned to an officer training program on some college campus, since that is what happened to my good friends who went before me. Tom Schattenfield was at the University of Michigan, Larry Coben at the University of Kansas, and Bob Saslaw at Penn State. So I plowed forward.

   Reality struck when I got to Columbus after a tearful goodbye to my mother at Pennsylvania station at 55th and Carnegie. After a day of painful shots in the arms and all kinds of tests much like the SAT that I was sure I had aced, the minute the group of about 50 of us were assembled the captain called us to attention. I felt like top dog. Maybe an appointment to West Point, Dr. Carson.
But the mystique of any sort of academic future faded quickly as the captain barked:
   “We've had a new order from headquarters, the ASTP program has been cancelled."
I nearly wet my pants. He went on, “Private Weidenthal, you got the highest grade on the test. You are assigned to the 95th Infantry division at Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania.”

   At that memorable moment in my life, I had become a warrior, first class. Like it or not.
And although I squirmed a bit, I accepted reality and decided to go with the flow. None of the cheap psychotic tricks that some of the guys talked about, like the peanut butter on the toilet seat trick, or simply feigning insanity. Not for me. This neurotic kids from Cleveland Heights was playing it straight, Doctor.
   It turned out that the 95th had been training for combat for two years at Camp swift in Texas, and was assembling in Pennsylvania for the trip to the war zone and had been assigned to join General George Patton’s famed army for the march across Europe. It was not all fun and games. I saw it as historically significant, but personally dangerous.
Basic training for this kid from Cleveland was more than learning the “F word” as the adjective preceding every course of every meal.
   “Basic” had its memorable moments. Like the day someone shoved an M 1 rifle under my arm and ordered me to crawl in my belly through 50 yards of Pennsylvania mud while a fifty caliber machine gun mounted on a Jeep fired real bullets over our heads.
I remember being petrified, Doctor.
   We heard later that one terrified young man stood up and his body was torn apart by the the deadly bullets. They say the shooting ceased for awhile so they could remove his remaining body parts. I didn’t see it, but they say it happened, Dr. Carson.
   Or the day on mountain maneuvers in the Snake River Canyon of West Virginia, where I was assigned to carry tree pigeons in a cage on my back. They were geniuses. So smart, you could tie a note to their feet telling them where to go, and by God, they would make it. Of course my back was covered with more bird droppings in one day than the Ciivil War monument on Public Square gets in an entire summer. So much for basic training.
   Sometime during this period, my magnificent, caring mother, taking view of reality as only a mother can, came to Pennsylvania. She was on her way to New York on business and took me to dinner with some people she knew, including dear friend Leo Shore and his wife Shirley.

   Leo was a tough 32 year old Jewish business man who happened to be assigned to my unit. It was toward the end of the evening that she looked Leo in the eye, wagged her finger him and declared,
“You take care of my boy!”
Her words turned out to be more meaningful than we at that table in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 1944, could ever imagine.

To be continued…

Next week:
B-bombs and blackouts
Missing the boat to Omaha Beach
“I Always Wanted to Kill A Jew”
Having lunch with Gen. Patton
Winning the air medal
The Battle of the Bulge
Losing best friends
My life as a muckraker

My Life With Guns (Revised and Updated)

   The first time I ever saw a gun was when Don Glaser fired a pistol into the ceiling in Mr.Tubaugh's ninth grade English glass at Roosevelt Jr. High in Cleveland Heights. Needless to say mayhem ensued. Naomi Garber, who was sitting next to Don, screamed hysterically,
   "I can't hear! I can't hear!"
   Don, who later in life went on to win the Nobel prize in physics, had no idea the pistol was loaded, trembled and dropped it to the floor. Mr. Tubaugh, a round faced little bald man, who looked for all the world like Oliver Hardy, seemed about to explode. Punky Bernstein, a street-smart trouble maker who owned the gun, looked perplexed.
   "It's only a starter pistol," he shouted.
   "It’s okay. Nothing to worry about.”
   But it wasn't okay. Mr.Tubaugh grabbed Bernstein by the collar and threw him out of class, calming Naomi as well as he could. Of course no one called the police, and the class was dismissed with no assignment for the next day.
   But I had learned a lifelong lesson. It was back then, just before WW II was about to tear the civilized world apart, that it I came to the rather simplistic conclusion that guns, real or fake, loaded or unloaded, had no place in the classroom. And creeps the likes of Punky Bernstein, needed to be watched by someone carefully. BUT, with all that, Punky popped into my young life early on. We were neighbors. He lived in the next apartment building over on Euclid Heights Blvd. near Coventry.    There was no avoiding him. One day, we heard several loud snapping sounds not far away.
   “That’s a gun!,” he shouted, with considerable assurance.
   “Let's go!"
   We raced toward Coventry and the noises. Punky was exuberant.
   "It's gunshots!" There was no doubt in his voice. He was excited. Frantic. I was breathless and confused. What we found was not nice. It was the Bird brothers, a nationally notorious gang of bank robbers. They had attempted to hold up the Central National Bank at Lancashire and Coventry.
The Heights police had caught them on the spot. It was a nasty scene. There had been a shoot out. Two of the four Birds were shot and lay bleeding in the street. An innocent woman waiting for a trolley had been killed in the crossfire. When the smoke cleared and I had time to think, I asked myself, "Why?!" This was crazy. Had the world gone crazy?
   Fast forward a few years to World War II. I was the innocent, chosen at 18 for the infantry to fight with General Patton in Europe. Plenty of guns and much ugliness. Enormous devastation and lots of questions. Occasionally in the silence of an evening or two, I paused to ask myself,
   "Why this craziness? Why?"
   On my first week as a police reporter at the Cleveland Press, after college, I learned of a terrible tragedy. A woman in East Cleveland had accidentally shot and severely wounded her baby boy. I pounced on the story with visions of a page one byline driving my passion. With the help of police I found this attractive, but terribly distraught middle class white mother. She of course, was beside herself in horror and guilt. The gun was somehow left on the bed loaded. It was there, she claimed, to protect herself and her eight month old son from her husband, a madman who had threatened to kill her. Somehow the baby, while crawling on the bed, gotten hold of the gun and it fired.
   “Why?!,” I wanted to ask. But this was not the time. I was too busy getting my first story, which did indeed appear across the top of the page the next day. Mixed feelings, of course. It was a victory for my budding career.
   That was sixty years ago. No time for philosophical thinking. Strange how the memory of my first page one byline sticks.
   I don't remember whether the little boy died, or whether that mother went to jail, but I have often wondered about this fetish with guns. And as I read with distress about infants being shot in their homes or in their car seats, teenagers dying in gang shoot-outs, there are more questions about this human inanity. And I ask why, hoping that someone is listening.
   Maybe I should ask my Texas friend, Mark, a retired motorcycle policeman and gun aficionado, who once shot himself in the foot while loading his rifle, proudly posting a picture of it on Facebook.
Okay Mark, why?
   Perhaps that monumental intellect Jeb Bush had the answer the other day when asked by a reporter about the massacre of students at that Oregon Community College. With only a short pause, he declared without further comment,
   "Stuff happens," and then went on to brag about how he cut taxes in Florida when he was governor.
I guess that's it Jeb.
   "Stuff happens".
Why Jeb, WHY?

My Life As a Jock Watcher

It is difficult to identify the exact moment when I began my life as a jock watcher. Most likely it began some time in the tenth grade at Heights High.

On our first day at school, there was an orientation in the auditorium, and the first thing I noticed were these big muscular Arian looking men in the front, looking extremely important.

They each wore a black cardigan sweater with a large gold H, meaning they were athletes, rewarded with the letter for their physical prowess.

I decided that I really admired these guys, and perhaps at that moment I became a “jock watcher,” better described for me as a sports writer.

It made sense. There was no way that I was going to be one of them. I wouldn't be invited to their parties, certainly not their fraternities, and wouldn't have a prayer with their girlfriends. They were in another world, and I knew it that first day at Heights.

But as a writer I could become close to them. (As close as a little five foot five Jewish kid with glasses could ever become.)

So I signed up to be a sports writer for the school paper, The Black and Gold, a pivotal point in my young life.

This assured me immediate entree into the magical world of sports, into the locker rooms and all the games, even allowing me to travel with them to away games. But let me be clear, this was not a sexual thing. By that time as a high school freshman, I had clearly defined myself as a raging heterosexual. Or at least as hetero as one could be in the tenth grade. You do what you do for satisfaction, but that was it. I liked these athletic bodies, but I didn't want to touch them. It was more of a form of hero worship.

My heterosexuality was pretty much limited at that time to Virginia Hill, a tall slender, blue eyed blonde, who was a hall guard three days a week. Each of those days, I made of point of walking slowly past her, smiling and moving on. At first she didn't notice, but as time wore on she began to smile at me, and I smiled back. That was pretty much it for the tenth grade.

Back to those guys up front in the auditorium on the first day. One of them was a fellow named Sam Sheppard.To my mind, he was the classic picture of the ultimate jock; handsome and muscular. And standing next to him was his attractive girlfriend, Marilyn Reese, whom he would later marry.

Sam was a classic athlete. A star on the basketball team, quarterback in football, and a runner on the track team that won the state championship in Columbus. My career as a jock watcher in high school gained me some recognition, and even Sam would call me by my first name. “Hi Bud!" he would say. 

I would say "Hi Sam!" as though we were real pals. That gave me the stature at Heights that I longed for.

My next encounter with Sam Sheppard came a number of years later when I was working on the city desk at the Cleveland Press one Fourth of July. The call came from the police reporter that the body of Marilyn Reese Sheppard had been found in her bed, brutally beaten, bloodied, and partially dismembered by blows from a sharp instrument. 
Sam had become a surgeon in his father's hospital on the lake.

Sam protested his innocence and claimed that a bushy haired stranger had entered the house, fought with him, and then murdered Marilyn. So much for hero worshipping. The rest is history.

As I progressed in my young life as a jock watcher, I signed on as a sports writer at the University of Michigan Daily, after my stint in WW II. This was the big time. And I became totally immersed in the ethos of big time sports.

There would be none of this fighting for seating in Michigan's gargantuan 100,000 seat arena, the largest in the western world. There was greatness here, and I planned to become an integral part of it. Early on I arranged for my press pass and entered into the enormous press box high above the field, and of course high above the ordinary fans. They served hot dogs and coffee there, for free. Everyone had a seat with their name on it.

I pretended to know the game and its intricate ins and outs. Michigan executed its plays from the single wing formation. Half back Bob Chappuis as the passer, became famous. And coincidentally, he also had a girlfriend named Marilyn. I worried about her in later years.

By my senior year Michigan had won two national championships and made it to two Rose Bowls, and I went with them. 

On campus some people noticed me in class. Once, my philosophy professor asked me who I liked for the upcoming Ohio State game. I would puff up and respond, “I like the Wolverines, but we will have to wait and see to see. Pete Elliot has a bruised knee," I would tell the philosophy prof. As if really knew.

"Cogito ergo sum."

 "I think, therefore I am”, I whispered to myself, feeling certain that I now would get at least a B in this intellectually challenging class.

As for my jock watching, after graduation I gave it up to become a real reporter on a real newspaper, only once returning to Ann Arbor for a football game in 65 years, more than half a century.

Now on football Saturdays I can be found at The Fox and Hound Tavern at Eastgate, frantically cheering on the Wolverines along with “ordinary alumni," rarely recognized as the storied jock watcher of another mighty era. No press pass, no free hot dogs, no adoring sorority girls.

Just this little guy struggling to bring home a winner for another generation.