To Those who are not here

Rudy, 1918

By Don

World War I ended with an armistice when the German generals signed the surrender in a railroad car. When Hitler defeated the French during WWII in June 1940, the instruments of surrender of the French and British were signed in the same railroad car in the forest of Compiegne. The 1918 surrender terms were quite harsh and Germany soon floundered into such an inflationary economy that a bushel basket full of German paper money was required to purchase a pair of shoes. I still have a bank note for 1 million Marks from the bank of Berlin dated 1922.  

With little hope for the future, Rudy turned his back on his share of the family farm, left home to the chagrin of his parents, worked a double shift in the Ruhr coal mines and made enough money to be an Einwanderer (immigrant) departing from Bremerhaven for New York on the liner Resolute.

He had a bit of a love affair on the ship and was processed through at Ellis Island. Not speaking any English and not finding many German speaking people, he still managed to get from New York to New Jersey in a taxi, with the driver circling the block a few times to pad the fare before getting to brother Ludwig’s house. Welcome to America, the land of the free and those that would take advantage of an immigrant that did not speak English. Reminiscent of any current immigration issues?

He initially worked with brother Ludwig who was a house painter, going to work taking ladders, paint cans and drop cloths on trolley cars. He soon made enough money to start his own business, buy an American car, and learn English at a night school full of diverse dialects. He met my mother at a German-American social club in Newark. 

He learned how to fix used cars and later told me what I called Lidke’s Law: “If there is something wrong with an American car, the first place you should look is the last place an American worked.” I passed that wisdom along to anyone who might listen. About ten years later, he bought a two story home in Maplewood, NJ during the Great Depression of 1929 to 1939, managed to father a son in 1933 and drove a painter’s truck that proclaimed "R. Lidke Painting and Decorating since 1927.”

After the start of WWII, many fathers went into the armed forces to fight “Nazis and Japs.” Rudy did not want to fight another war and kept working. I went into his steamer trunk and found his Iron Cross, a medal from WWI that at the time was the German equivalent of a Purple Heart.  I wore it to grammar school to show that my father was also a hero. He was very upset that I did that. 

My father told me many times that Germans were good people. They were very smart, worked hard, and were very industrious. He told me how friendly they were and how neat and trim the villages, farms, and cities were. Above all, they were polite and orderly. 

I still have no idea how he managed his emotions during and after WWII, or what he thought of his son who mentally crucified all Germans. Responding to American war propaganda, I constantly drew pictures of American planes shooting down Nazi planes. As it says in a Broadway musical, ”you’ve got to be carefully taught to hate.” Soon it would be the Koreans and the Vietnamese and the Iraqis and certain Arab tribes and of course, the Russians. 

I finally made it to Germany with Doris in 2013, going to a DOD resort in the oh-so quaint village of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, the home of the 1939 Winter Olympics. Germany was everything he said it was and so much more. Doris and I went to the top of the big ski mountain and sat and looked around at the magnificent views. I wanted to look up to my long dead father and say “You were right Dad, I’m sorry.” Doris and I have a photo of us eating Weisswurst and a big pretzel mit bier at a small mountain inn. I thought of him when, afterwards at home, I titled it “To those who are not here."

A young Russian girl cleans our apartment now and she struggles with English. I smile at her, trying to imagine her circumstances. I remember the three German student aviators who got their wings and stood in formation with me and the others when we got our wings...The band played our national anthem and the German national song. They were three orphans -- no mother, no father, all long dead from the war. I am not ashamed to say, I teared up...Grandpaw

In the Beginning

By Don

My high school was filled with the sons and daughters of the professional class -- lawyers, doctors, and other white collar folk who commuted from Maplewood and South Orange (my hometown and Doris’s, respectively) to Newark and New York City for work. 

The difference between me and the other students at my high school was not intelligence, it was that they had somehow been taught to achieve. I was educated but I didn’t achieve at their level. In particular, the part of my brain that used numbers struggled. Geometry was difficult and I managed to avoid trigonometry. However, I did well in geography and history and what later became known as geopolitics.

But that period was the time of war. Born in 1933, I received a different education with the invasion of Poland in 1939, Pearl Harbor in 1941, VJ Day in 1945 and the Korean War in 1951.  My education was accentuated given my father’s memories of fighting in another war when he was 18 in the Kaiser’s artillery. My father Rudy lost one brother in the horrific battle of Verdun in 1916 and his second brother was last seen being marched out of Stalingrad in 1943 as a prisoner of the Russians. I was both naive and infatuated with history and current events.

Airplanes were a great part of WWII. I made model planes and wound up their rubber bands and flew them until their crashes made them irreparable. The Flying Tigers of 1942 captured my imagination. I took a P-40 model that was not very flyable, put it in my bicycle basket and took it to the top of Goethall’s Bridge at Staten Island. I wound it up, poured lighter fluid on it, torched it with a match and sent it 300 feet down in flames to the water, giving it a proper death, or so I thought at the age of 10.

Rudy never talked about the horrors of his war and did not try to dissuade my imagined heroics of WWII and its pilots. I was never given a toy gun. In my grammar school days I played cowboys and indians with a stick. In those days, Hollywood did not show blood and gore when people died.  Bodies yes, but no gore.

Rudy left me to my aseptic vision of war, grateful that we were in America. His idea of achievement was to work harder for his family.  He wanted to change the sign on his painter’s truck to read...“And Son.” I would have none of that and thought that I might want to fly. Pilots never died, they just crashed.

In 1951, visits to the high school guide’s office made me aware of the cost of a college education. By happenstance and still rudderless, I drove to the Philadelphia airport with two equally rudderless friends to see a newly reactivated Navy flight demonstration team called the Blue Angels. The announced leader was a pilot named Butch Voris. It was most impressive. The planes were F-9 Panther jets. Little did I know that I would later fly them.  

Meanwhile, Rudy painted a house in South Orange. Someone showed him a yearbook from Clemson with many photos of uniformed cadets, as was the custom at an A&M college. I was not asked which college I wanted to attend but it was Clemson or “And Son” on the truck.

Flown at Kingsville, TX

Clemson had an aero club and I learned to fly a Piper J-5 Cub mostly with lunch money and a redneck instructor in bib overalls. Clemson had Air Force ROTC but in my sophomore year I failed my flight physical due to a scarred left ear drum. Remembering the Navy planes at PHL, I drove to Raleigh and signed up for the Navy flight program. About three years later I flew F-9 Panther jets at Kingsville, TX in gunnery, rockets, bombs and formation flying with Korean veteran pilots who occasionally taught us dog fighting. At this point I thought I was God’s gift to aviation. What an education I was to have in the NAVY.

To this day, I remember the trip to PHL and think...Thank you Butch Voris.

So began 20 years of Navy flying.