Fifty Years!

It’s turned into an epic tale lasting more than half a century, so I guess I have to start at the beginning.  As Mal said, “You can’t open the book of my life and jump in the middle.”

It was spring in 1972 and I was working the graveyard shift at the Plaza Hotel in Houston.  Working at night was great for a college student:  if you finished your work early, there was ample time to study.  And it taught you that sleep was a luxury reserved for weekends.

One night, the night auditor’s girlfriend brought him a pizza and the two of them shared it while I was wasting time with paperwork.  I was more than a little pissed that neither of them offered me a slice of pizza.  That was the first time I saw The Doc.

A month or two later, the lease was up on my prison-cell-sized apartment and I agreed to share an even smaller apartment with the night auditor.  It was a garage apartment, built over a three-car garage, in a run-down section of Houston, far too close to the ship channel—a real dump but the price was right.  Since I saw my roommate’s girlfriend frequently, I eventually forgave her for not sharing that pizza and I even dated her sister a couple of times.  (We saw The Godfather and after the movie, she wouldn’t get into my car until I checked the backseat.)

When summer came, both my roommate and I had some time off, and The Doc suggested that we go to Florida…No particular reason why, since we lived 40 miles from the beach in Galveston, but what the hell?  We jumped in my car and drove to Daytona, Florida.  After enjoying the beach for a few days, we turned around and drove straight back.  Somewhere around Alabama, I realized that I had stopped thinking about The Doc as my roommate’s girlfriend.  Driving all night while the other two slept gave me ample time to think over the situation.

It was very simple.  I had fallen in love with the smartest woman I had ever met.  Now all I had to do was convince her to go out with me.

When we got back to Houston, I announced that I intended to marry The Doc.  Privately, I told her that we were going to get married and have a son named What’s-His-Name.  No one believed me about any of this—there was some discussion of my sanity.

Naturally, my roommate was a little pissed.  There was an apartment for rent across the street, so I moved out.  It took several weeks to convince The Doc to go out on a date with me.  She, too, lived in a truly rotten part of town (on our first date, I killed a rat on her front porch with my pocketknife).  I don’t suppose that is part of modern dating practices.

The first date was followed by more—thankfully rodent-free—and eventually The Doc agreed to marry me.  I think the deciding factor was that Alice, her cat, obviously loved me more than her.  If you can’t depend on a cat’s judgement, then this world is doomed.

The wedding was a monument to how to get married on the cheap.  There were handwritten invitations mailed out to the twenty-odd guests.  The ceremony was in my parents’ living room.  The bride wore a beautiful blue dress purchased from Foley’s for $14 and her bouquet was Bank’s roses and English Ivy from the front yard.  I splurged—at my brother’s insistence—and spent $30 on a brown sport coat.  

Though The Doc disputes the veracity of this part of the story, it was almost an incredibly short marriage.  The ceremony was performed in my parents’ living room, directly in front of the fireplace.  When the preacher (the same one who had married my parents twenty-seven years earlier) pronounced “You may kiss the bride….” The Doc’s eyes rolled up in her head and she started to fall backward towards the open fireplace.  I caught her—and we’ve been catching each other for decades now.

It was a nice reception (also in my parents’ living room).  The wedding cake was from the local H.E.B grocery store.  I remember my mother being a little wistful after the ceremony and she confided to my new spouse that she thought that I would never finish college.  She was right: starting this Spring, I’m a graduate student pursuing a master’s degree in Art History, which will be my seventh degree (I think).  I’ve decided to homestead the university.

We honeymooned at the Menger Hotel in downtown San Antonio—a distance of almost 15 whole miles from where we were married.  With our extravagant entertainment budget, we watched the Wizard of Oz on television and went to the zoo the next day.  If I remember right, we walked by the Alamo a couple of times.  We are, after all, native-born Texans.

Shortly after the honeymoon was over, The Doc was accepted into medical school.  I was shocked because I had known lots of people who claimed they were going to medical school, The Doc was the first person I knew who actually did it.  

Medical School was expensive and we had to cut more than a few corners to financially survive the next four years.  We still lived in slums, there were no vacations, and we lived about as frugally as possible.  The local grocery store kept a loaded cart in the back of the store, where badly dented cans or cans that had lost their labels were offered for sale for a dime each.  Until I started earning a better wage, most of our meals came out of that cart, periodically supplemented with something I shot.

We waited years, until The Doc was a senior surgical resident, to start a family, and yes…we named our first son What’s-His-Name.  A couple of years later, The-Other-One was born.  Though it has been decades since either has lived at home, I occasionally still wake up in the middle of the night thinking I should go check to see if they are sleeping okay.  How fast those years went by and how much I would pay to experience just one more day of their childhood.

As I’m writing this, it has been 50 years and a couple of hours since that wedding ceremony.  And two children, and a half-dozen grand kids, several moves, and two careers.  I’ve lost a kidney and had a heart attack—neither of which I would have survived if my wife hadn’t been there with me.  I fell in love with The Doc because she was the smartest woman I ever met.  She still is and I still am.  I still wonder why she ever said yes to my absurd proposal!

And marrying her is the smartest thing I’ve ever done.  

P.S.  She says that she married the smartest man she’s ever met, but she's just being kind.  I might believe stubborn.

A Window to Another Time

Kaiser Wilhelm II certainly didn’t cause The Great War—at least not single-handedly—but he didn’t do a whole lot to prevent it, either.  Listing all the reasons for the first of the two world wars of the 20th century would take a complex discussion of rising nationalism and empires scrambling to acquire colonies like children grabbing candy after busting a pinata.

Note.  I’m a little astonished at the cartoon to the right.  I fed that first paragraph into an AI program and asked for a cartoon.  There was a ten-second pause, then it spit out the cartoon.  Don’t bother trying to decipher the caption, it’s either gibberish or the text of another meaningless email from Enema U’s Vice-President of Research.

That’s not to say that the Kaiser was exactly blameless, either.  As he grew up, he was fed a steady diet of tales of Prussian military glory, and once he became Kaiser, he wanted to lead Germany to a victorious future.  By definition, that meant he needed a war.

And there was, however, that small difficulty with the Kaiser’s ship complex.  Great Britain had ruled the seas from long before the days of Napoleon, and since being a great naval power was de rigueur for maintaining an overseas empire, the Kaiser wanted his own great navy.  The fact that both of his cousins, the King of England and the Tsar of Russia, had great navies really rankled Wilhelm, so he started building one of his own, touching off an international arms race that greatly added to the spirit of militarism across Europe and even resonated in the United States.

If you doubt that the Kaiser was envious of the British Navy, look at the photo at left, in which the Kaiser is seen wearing the uniform of a British Admiral of the Fleet while attending the funeral of his grandmother, Queen Victoria.

Early on in the war, Germany did very well…for a while.   The Kaiser’s army successfully pushed into France and his navy fought the British Navy to a draw at the Battle of Jutland, but then the war bogged down into a stalemate.  Two years into the war, there was a power shift within Germany when Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff seized control, leaving the Kaiser with only a purely ceremonial role and no actual control over conduct of the war.

When the war ended, one of the provisions of the Versailles Treaty required that the Kaiser—who had recently abdicated—be handed over to the Allies to face prosecution “for a supreme offense against international morality and the sanctity of treaties”.  Considering the low opinions both the French and the English had of the Kaiser, it was likely that he would have been found guilty and executed.  Desperate, the Kaiser wrote to another cousin, Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, asking for asylum.

The Netherlands had remained neutral during the war, and while public opinion of the Dutch people was divided on the fate of the Kaiser, Queen Wilhelmina resisted the demands of the Allies and granted amnesty to the abdicated Kaiser.  Since both were direct descendants of Queen Victoria, and Wilhelmina’s grandfather had married the Kaiser’s sister, the queen no doubt wanted to keep peace in the family.

The Kaiser moved to the Netherlands late in 1918 and began house hunting.  Since he was not exactly traveling light—he moved 59 freight cars of antiques, paintings, silver, and memorabilia with him—it took him two years to find the perfect little house.  

Doorn House had started as a 14th century castle and had been steadily improved in the intervening five centuries.  Covering over eighty acres, the estate sports a functioning moat, an elaborate gate house, and extensive English-style gardens.  The former Kaiser was free to live at the estate but was required to stay within ten kilometers of home.  Despite frequent invitations, Queen Wilhelmina never visited her cousin.

In all, Wilhelm lived a comfortable, but somewhat lonely, life. At Doorn house, he frequently spent his time working in the gardens, chopping wood, and futilely dreaming of the day when the German people would demand his return to the throne.  In the 1930’s, Wilhelm had several meetings with Hermann Goering, who wanted the Kaiser to support the Nazi Party.  Disgusted by Kristallnacht, the former Kaiser refused to have anything to do with Hitler or his party, saying:

Of Germany, which was a nation of poets and musicians, of artists and soldiers, Hitler has made a nation of hysterics and hermits, engulfed in a mob and led by a thousand liars or fanatics.

When World War II started, Winston Churchill offered asylum to the former Kaiser in England, but Wilhelm refused to leave his home.  When the Netherlands were invaded by the Germans in 1940, German troops guarded Doorn House but were not allowed inside the gate.  Wilhelm died of a pulmonary embolism in 1942, and his wishes to have no swastikas present at his funeral were not honored.  His remains were placed in a mausoleum in the garden, there to await the day when the Prussian monarchy returns to Germany.  

Today, Doorn House is a museum, remaining largely as the former Kaiser knew it, with his books and papers still on display along with the more than 30,000 objects he brought with him from Germany.  Of special interest to probably no one is his extensive collection of ornate snuff boxes.  The estate has become a shrine to a group of German monarchists, who still gather at the house once a year in support of the current claimant to the throne, Georg Friedrich, Prince of Prussia.  His 2014 claim to recover the estate was rejected by the Dutch government.

One last note about Doorn House:  When Wilhelm found the estate, he bought it for 500,000 guilders from the family of the Baron van Heemstra.  Among the Baron’s children who were raised in the old castle was Baroness van Heemstra, who later became a British citizen and a well-known author of children’s book under the penname of Ellaline Vere.  She is better known as the mother of Aubrey Hepburn.

Three Great Letters

In the The House of the Spirits by Isabelle Allende, the author says that “Letters are a gift reserved for the living, denied to those in heaven.”  I think the author is close to the mark, for letters, at least good letters, are immortal and last long after both the writer and the recipient have left this world.

I like letters.  I like to plan letters in advance, then I enjoy writing them—after selecting the right paper and ink—then I like to mail them.  I would probably like to receive them, but that rarely happens any more.  For most people, letters have evidently been replaced by email, which is a sorry substitute.

There are multiple websites that list the ten greatest letters of all time, the five letters that changed history, or the dozen or so most important letters in politics—there are so many that I have no intention of competing with them.  For the last week or so, I have been thinking about three letters in particular—letters that aren’t important in most people’s minds, but letters that I thought were memorable.  They might not exactly be historic letters, but they are interesting.

After winning the election in November 1960, President John F. Kennedy began putting together his government and the newly appointed Ambassador to India was his former Harvard professor, John Kenneth Galbraith.  Galbraith, his wife, and their three sons would all be moving to India, much to the consternation of Peter Galbraith, the ambassador’s second son.

Ten-year-old Peter didn’t want to leave his friends and his school and he didn’t like the idea of leaving his home and moving thousands of miles away for a period of several years.  When the President heard about Peter’s unhappiness, he could understand how the boy felt, since his own father had been appointed Ambassador to the Court of St. James (England) more than twenty years earlier.

Though Kennedy hadn’t been in office for even three months, he took the time to write a personal letter to young Peter, telling the boy about his own experiences in leaving home and friends and moving to a new country.  

“More than twenty years ago, our family was similarly uprooted when we went to London where my father was Ambassador.  My younger brothers and sisters were about your age.  They, like you had to exchange new friends for old.”

Kennedy went on to tell young Peter to look forward to the exotic animals he would see in India, particularly the elephants.  After warning the boy to avoid the cobras, the president said that he considered the children of his ambassadors to be the junior members of the Peace Corps.

By all accounts the boy took the message to heart and felt easier about the move.  The New York Times reported about the letter on April 2, 1961 and the story has made into several books, including one by the ambassador.  What has never made the books, as far as I can tell, is that there was a second letter.

Peter Galbraith had a nine-year-old brother, James, who felt a little left out by the presidential attention that his brother was receiving.  After all, he, too, had moved to India, leaving behind his friends, his school, and his home.  When President Kennedy learned of the boy’s unhappiness, he wrote a second letter, this time to James, thanking the boy for his sacrifice and urging the boy to grow up to be a good Democrat like his father, but perhaps one not so inconveniently sized.  The president was making a small joke about the ambassador being 6’ 8”.

In 1945, a young agent for the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency, ran agents in Germany tasked with tracking, and in a few cases, killing high ranking officers in the German Army.  As Germany collapsed at the end of the war, the young agent made his way to the Bavarian mountaintop retreat of Adolf Hitler, helping himself to some of the Fuehrer’s personal stationary.

On May 8, 1945, VE Day, the young agent took the time to write his three-year-old son a letter commemorating the end of the war.

“Dear Dennis, The man who might have written on this card once controlled Europe—three short years ago when you were born.  Today he is dead, his memory despised, his country in ruins.  He had a thirst for power, a low opinion of man as an individual, and a fear of intellectual honesty.  He was a force for evil in the world.  His passing, his defeat—a boon to mankind.”

The young agent, Richard Helms went on to become the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 1966 to 1973.  The letter still exists and is on display in the OSS Wing of the CIA Museum, a facility that is not open to the public.

The last letter is my personal favorite, you’ll have to forgive me for being a little biased.  My father was born in West Texas, the son of a poor farmer with eleven children, in an area hit hard by the Great Depression.  To survive, my father left home to join the Civilian Conservation Corps, working to build highways and parks near Fort Worth.

After Pearl Harbor, those young boys, already outfitted with khaki uniforms, were more or less just marched into the nearest recruiting office and enlisted into the Army.  My father ended up as an engineer on a B-25 bomber—something that still astounds me, since my father was many wonderful things, but he was absolutely incapable of doing anything mechanical.  At any given time, there was a large collection of inoperable lawn mowers behind our garage, because my father had no idea how to change a spark plug or clean an air filter.  I still have his maintenance manuals for his plane and have no idea how he managed to do any of the routine tasks the book describes.

While stationed for training in Fort Worth, my father met my mother at a skating rink after she managed to fall down in front of him enough times to catch his attention.  They fell in love and planned a wedding after the war.  Shortly after becoming engaged, my father was sent to the Pacific Theater for the duration of the war.  Surprisingly, for a poor ol’ country boy with hardly any formal education, he was a prolific letter writer, writing whenever he could—but at least once a week—and those letters are now in my possession.  

Reading the letters is an emotional roller coaster and often requires a little research to understand the cultural references.  The letters were censored, too, so at times, it is impossible to determine where my father was stationed when he wrote a letter.  My father was very young, and this was the first time in his life that he had left Texas, so the letters reveal almost constant amazement at the new, wider world he was experiencing.  The most common topics of the letters are returning to my mother, his hopes for a life after the war, his hatred of traveling by ship, and a general loathing of everything the Army gave him to eat.  

“Oh, darling, I can’t wait to get back to you.  When I get back to Fort Worth, we can celebrate.  I want to take you to a really nice restaurant, you know, the kind where they bring the food right out to your car.”

I can’t be absolutely certain, but I don’t think my father was joking.  My biggest question is who he was going to borrow the car from.  

Secret Agent Tolstoy

In the early days of the Pacific Theater in World War II, the Allies had a difficult problem in the mountainous country between India and China.  The Chinese armies of Chiang Kai-Shek were fighting the Japanese but were desperate for supplies.  Early in the war, Japan had captured Shanghai from the British, then advanced and cut off the vital Burma Road that brought supplies from India to China over land.

The Allies began ferrying supplies by air over the Himalayas—doing what pilots called “flying the hump”—a dangerous mission that cost the lives of many pilots.  If you are interested in reading more about the pilots who took on such missions, I would suggest reading God is My Co-Pilot by General Robert L. Scott.  Actually, I would recommend reading anything written by General Scott. 

There was talk about finding a land route through Tibet, but the State Department strenuously objected.  Keeping China as an ally was an important war goal and China had territorial disputes with Tibet.  The Army sided with the State Department, so the matter was closed—there would be no official overtures made to Tibet.

Luckily, there was an unofficial agency that could handle the job.  The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was the war time spy shop, run by Colonel ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, that answered only to the President of the United States (much to the annoyance of both the State Department and J. Edgar Hoover).  Hoover thought that his FBI could handle all the covert needs of the country and the State Department didn’t believe in spies.  

It appears that President Roosevelt didn’t really trust Hoover, so he set up his own covert shop.  After the war, Hoover got revenge by convincing President Truman to shut down the OSS.  By 1947, Truman realized that some form of intelligence gathering agency was needed and most of the former OSS agents would run the new Central Intelligence Agency.

The OSS sent two special agents on a secret mission to Tibet to try and survey a new overland route to China.  At the time, Tibet was so remote that few Westerners had any experience there, and the United States had no direct contact with the government.  So the two special agents had to be skilled diplomats, explorers, surveyors, and military leaders.  Accordingly, the OSS sent Major Count Ilya Tolstoy, the grandson of Leo Tolstoy, and Captain Brook Dolan.

Both men had other qualifications beyond their OSS training.  Tolstoy (right) had served in the Russian Army during World War I, was a trained ichthyologist, had helped develop McKinley National Park in Alaska and, just a few years before the war, had set up a movie studio that specialized in underwater photography, particularly with dolphins.  Today, we call that place Marineland.

Brooke Dolan (second from left) had already completed two expeditions to Eastern Tibet and Western China, collecting animal and bird specimens.  He was the first Westerner to bring a panda out of China.

Since no passport or visa into the country was available, the only official authorization the two men could carry was a personal letter from President Franklin D. Roosevelt to the new Dalai Lama, the leader of the Buddhist faith and the head of the Tibetan government.  When the two agents arrived in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, they were to ask permission to cross Tibet into China.  

The two men left India in September 1942 and began the climb up the rugged mountainous trail up to Lhasa.  The caravan consisted of 33 mules and 15 native guides and took three days to complete.  Luckily, they were welcomed into the capitol, and presented not only the president’s letter, but a $2,800 Phillipe Patek gold pocket watch to the Dalai Lama.  I’m not sure how much the Dalai Lama appreciated the watch, even if it did tell the day of the week and the phases of the moon, since the spiritual leader was only seven years old at the time.

The Tibetan leaders were only too happy to grant permission, knowing that such recognition from the United States added credence to their territorial claims.  All that was asked of the United States was for the gift of long-range radio equipment.  When the request was forwarded back to the US Army, it was shocked to learn of the expedition.

After the war, there was some confusion about whether or not the US government had promised to support the cause of Tibetan independence.  The Tibetans were hardly alone in this regard:  several countries seemed to gotten the impression during the war that America had traded support in the war against Japan for America’s future support for their independence.  The people of Vietnam certainly believed that we had promised to help end French colonialism.  After the war, President Truman evidently decided that French assistance against the Russians was more important than a free Vietnam.  Truman was probably wrong about that, since as General Norman Schwarzkopf supposedly said (but probably didn’t), “Going to war without the French is like going deer hunting without your accordion.”

For three months, the two explorers surveyed mountain passes and followed rugged trails, mapping a route to China.  It was so cold in the highest mountains that they drank 40-50 cups of hot tea daily to keep warm.  The two OSS agents traveled along the same ancient trails that have been used for centuries to transport tea, silk, musk, and jade.

Their secret mission completed, the two men submitted their maps to the Allies…who quickly decided that the trail was so rugged, so long, and at such a high altitude that it was better simply to keep flying those cargo planes over the mountains.

When the Dalai Lama visited President Obama in Washington, in 2016, he was carrying that gift pocket watch.