These stories are even harder to date accurately, so I haven’t even tried.
After the end of World War II, Dad said that since “there wasn’t much going on” in France, he took up the offer to immigrate to the U.S. and left when he was 18. These stories cover the time between his arrival in the U.S. (maybe 1948) until he met my mother (1960 or so).
Again, I could probably ask my Mum for details, dates, specifics, etc, but making these tales more factually accurate would somehow rob them of their romance. Kids don’t care what year it was, they’re only interested in the human at the centre of the tale, methinks. And since this is how these tales were told to me, this is how I’m going to pass them along to you.
Enjoy!
(1) Good Luck Shines Upon Him
After jumping through all the hoops required by the folks in the U.S. Citizenship offices (including learning to speak and write flawlessly in English), the government rewarded my father not only with his papers, but with a draft notice. Having survived World War II, he was off to the Korean front.
Thinking about it now, this time must’ve been particularly hellish for my father. Dad was 5’6″ and had suffered a wide variety of childhood aliments that left him small and sinewy. And so he found himself in his early twenties a dark-haired, olive-skinned immigrant Frenchman surrounded by hale and hearty Iowa farm boys. That must have been quite a challenge.
(Completely irrelevant aside: my great-grandmother taught my bored, sickly father how to knit, and he taught me, and I taught my daughter. It’s the little things, eh?)
If basic training was hellish for Dad, I never heard about it, but I do know that he was spared the worst of the war by sheer luck. Basic training completed, his unit was on parade preparing to be shipped overseas. The day was impossibly hot and sunny, and after a couple of hours of standing at attention, Dad collapsed from sun stroke.
And so Dad was bundled off to the base’s hospital where he dutifully drank water and took aspirin. A day or so later, one of the generals going over to Korea with his unit wandered through to cheer the men up, and got to chatting with my father. Dad mentioned that he’d just completed his B.A., and the general asked if that meant that Dad knew how to type.
“Yes, sir, I took a quick course.”
Next thing he knows, my Dad’s assigned to be one of the general’s secretaries.
He spent the Korean War typing. Happily.
(2) What my Dad Has In Common with Vito Corleone
I tried to find the video clip for this, but nada.
I was recently watching The Godfather Part 2 with Hubby, and when we got to the scene wherein young Vito Andolini is re-baptized by an immigration official, Hubby burst out laughing at the bureaucratic nonsensical-ness of it.
“My Dad did that, you know,” I said.
“Your last name is not Champagne. Or France.”
Well, no.
What my Dad did, yousee, is re-baptize literally boatloads of immigrants. Seems that somewhere in his travels with the U.S. army, my dad became, for a brief period, the official guy in The Godfather who re-names Boy Vito.
Dad would fill out paperwork for new arrivals, taking down their personal data, vital statistics, etc, thus registering them with the U.S. government as legal immigrants as they disembarked. And in the process, he did some editing. As in, he once renamed an entire ship-ful of Polish immigrants.
“Really? All of them?” I couldn’t imagine it.
“Oh yes. They were making a new life for themselves, and wanted a new name to go with it. ‘You give me good American name,’ they’d say. I tried to talk them out of it, but they were all insistent and once you did it for one guy, the rest all wanted the same thing, so I just went ahead and did it. All these Polish people with really ethnic-sounding names, now they’re John Smith and Andrew Jones and Susan Carter.”
“So you, a trained historian, with a PhD no less, have personally stymied generations of genealogists. Score, Dad,” I said, and my father burst out laughing.
(3) The Librarian Queen
Dad had a story for every occasion, including when I got a job in a public library.
After his discharge from the army, Dad earned his PhD in history – specifically, if you’re interested, in the history of the French Revolution. Degree in hand, he wandered the United States for a time, drifting from contract to contract at all kinds of little universities across the Great Land.
One of these little schools had a small library staffed with a single librarian, who’d been there since Jesus trod the road to Jerusalem. She was lovely, she was sweet, she was ancient, and she was the Queen of her little realm, securing her “indispensable” status by refusing to maintain either a card catalogue or a means of tracking materials checked out of her library. Her logic was simple and irrefutable: she knew every book, and she knew every student, and so she knew where everything was, all the time. And since her system was also immensely cheap, the Administration supported her completely.
You see what’s coming, right?
Yep. She died. In her sleep. And, of course, she took her cheap, indispensable catalogue and circulation system with her.
(4) And then…
… Dad ended up in Indiana, where he met and married my Mum. She was his teaching assistant, and he’d slip little love notes into the stacks of marking he’d assign to her. Romantic!
They didn’t stay in Indiana long, moving to Canada in the mid-60′s. My brother and I were born here, and here we all stayed.
My dad was 32 when he married, bringing his adventures to a close.
