Marilla Christmas

Dad (EJZ), Mom (CAMZ) and Rita Sonnelitter,
c1970.

John (JFZ) and Tye, age 3.

Memorial Day 2016

" . . . Our echoes roll from soul to soul

And grow for ever and for ever . . . "

These forget-me-nots grow on the lawn here in Argyle.

Mom and Dad brought them from Marilla

one time when they visited here.

The lines are Tennyson, from The Princess.

Here is a bigger excerpt:

The splendor falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story;
The long light shakes across the lakes,
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, 
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O, hark, O, hear! how thin and clear,
And thinner, clearer, farther going!
O, sweet and far from cliff and scar
The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!
Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying,
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O love, they die in yon rich sky,
They faint on hill or field or river;
Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And grow for ever and for ever.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.

Gene's M-1. The Power and the Transmission of Memory.

Some things were seen; many were not seen. Some few things were known; many more were not known. In the end, one day, my brother shone a light in the darkness.

A certain leather strap was always in the same spot at one end of Dad’s closet. To the right of his shirts, hard by his tie rack, directly above the shoeshine kit, it hung on a spindly wire hanger.  Worn, oddly folded, and bearing odd buckles, it was part of our childhood landscape but we did not mess with it.  We also did not ask about it; somehow we knew it were better not to probe.

A clunky scrapbook, with forty-odd pages of photographic prints pasted in in the crazy-quilt style fashionable in the 1940s, was also part of our home. We looked, and we inquired, but the answers, though kind, were brief. Yes, I was in China. We rode ponies into China and when mine went lame I found saddle sores; there was nothing I could do for my pony.

We taught the Chinese to blow up bridges. We blacked our faces, swam out at night, and attached the explosives. When a train came over carrying Japanese soldiers, we blew up the bridge.

A few bits of backstory came to our ears indirectly. From an uncle: There was hand-to-hand. From our mother: He told them he knew English, Polish, Latin, and French, so they taught him Japanese, and then they sent him to China! At the dinner table, talking with my future father-in-law: Ha! Yes, we were flown back over the Hump in late ’45 and the Japanese were still shooting up at us. From the eulogy delivered by the uncle: He jumped out of that plane snapping pictures on the way down, so the planners would have an idea of the terrain for the land invasion they had to prepare.

And we knew from our mother that in his nightmares he would cry out, Hey, Frenchie, look out! Look out, Frenchie!

Yet when we grew up and asked for details, he would just smile and say, There was a lot of running.

Dad died with his boots on, as he had frequently proclaimed he would. Mom kept his bathrobe on her pillow for a few months, then followed him. My brother and I emptied our childhood home; on clearing their closets I took up that strap as though on autopilot, silently packing it for the trip to my office where a collection of Dad-related items began to grow.

On the last day, alone in the house by the woods, alone in the empty house, my brother felt that his job was not done. Not everything was safe. Question marks still hovered in the air. Something made him climb yet again into the big, low attic, turn on the flashlight, and slowly crawl all around looking for answers.

There, jammed way under the eaves, silent and generally invisible, were two grey packages. He took them out from their waiting place. From one he drew photo logs, hand-drawn maps, and a Bronze Star citation related to OSS Detachment 202 Team JACKAL. Out of the other came an Army money belt, from which tumbled medals, ribbons, a field compass, and Chinese coins.

The entire trove is here with me now; I am partway through a proper study and have made some progress. Scanned photos reveal a lot. I figured out who Frenchie was, for which my relatives will forever be grateful. Still, the papers from under the eaves refer to events prior to and after the big mission, in the same way that the scrapbook contains no photos of the big mission, and little information beyond what is offered in the Saturday Evening Post article of March 23,1946, which is pasted right in there. He took home what they let him take home, just as he spoke only of what they let him speak. His handwritten mission journal is in Box 862 of something called “OSS Personnel Files – RG 226 Entry 224” in an OSS/CIA stronghold – maybe the Hoover. Some day I would like to hold that journal in my hands.

The strap is the sling from his M1. The earliest photo of his rifle is from A.S.T.P. training at the University of Chicago.

By the time he shipped out, he had been training with this rifle for a year and a half. As far as I can tell, the rifle is a version of a .30 Caliber M1 carbine.

Its next photographic appearance is somewhere near Kunming, where his buddy snapped a shot of Gene demonstrating how the OSS looks for bad guys in caves.

And there we see the leather carbine sling. We see the pistol in the holster, either a US M3 fighting knife or US M4 bayonet with hilt visible behind the holster, and a magazine pouch mounted on the stock. A 15-round magazine is visible just below the sight.

A true gent named David Fletcher at Iton’s Cave explained to me that “the vertical thing in the carbine stock is a strap well.” Further, “. . .the string arrangement under the pistol holster is a leg tie string, which was often braided if the holster was not secured to the leg at the bottom. . . There was a special method for braiding them, at least in the USA.” Thank you, David Fletcher.

The photo below of a US Army paratrooper’s kit is from the 1938 edition of Philip B. Sharp’s The Rifle in America. The paratrooper’s M1 is a little shorter than the standard rifle that ground troops would carry, according to the text. It does not look exactly the same: the strap well on the stock looks different. It is an “M11903A1.” But look, you can see very well how the strap attaches to the rifle.

A person looking through the China section of the scrapbook thus far, with almost touristic scenes of the rural area near Kunming, would conclude they were just fooling around, wasting film. Actually, they were working. From end-May through early August, 1945, they made multiple sorties north to sabotage things critical to Japanese transport, while preparing for their big mission. 

George C. Chalou edited the 1992 National Archives and Records Administration’s book The Secrets War: The Office of Strategic Services in World War II.From page 95:

          "Vital to Japan’s control of the Chinese interior was the mile-long bridge that crossed the Hwang-Ho (Yellow) River near Kaifeng. This double-track bridge was the thread that joined the Japanese armies of north and south China. Against all odds, Jed veterans and a brave band of Chinese guerillas under the command of Col. Frank Mills and Maj. Paul Cyr mined the great Hwang-Ho bridge. On August 9, 1945, the day Nagasaki was bombed, [in fact over the night of 8-9 August] SO Mission Jackal blew away two large spans in the bridge just as a Japanese troop train was passing over. The entire train, carrying some 2,000 Japanese soldiers, was dragged to the bottom of the Hwang-Ho."

Frank Mills, et. al., published in 2002 OSS Special Operations in China. Chapter 3 discusses the Hwang-Ho Bridges mission, relying on the mission journal. From pages 84-85, Gene:

          . . . was Field Photo trained and . . . [kept] the day-by-day Team Log all the time JACKAL was in the field. Zdrojewski was young, about twenty I guess, [he was 22] but he had been parachute-trained in Kunming and I believe this was his first combat assignment. He was impressionable and his language in the Team Log reveals thoughts that most of us had but never expressed . . . The Team Log was always guarded and placed in a separate container with incendiary grenades that could be ignited immediately if capture was imminent . . .I don’t know of any other operational teams in China that kept a log with this detail. The standard issue blue-lined paper from letter-size writing pads is now getting yellow and ragged with age, but Zdrojewski’s handwritten entries in pencil script are clear.I can picture him, sitting in one of the mud huts or in the rooms they had later in the walled compounds, writing down the day’s events as they unfolded during the months to follow, probably just before climbing into his sleeping bag to grab a little sleep with his.45 pistol and grenades by his side and a lantern or candle or an Army issue flashlight lighting up the scene."

The trove waits for me to resume study, as it had to be set aside for a while. But now I can start again. And I have been keeping that strap oiled.

To the right of his shirts, hard by his tie rack, directly above the shoeshine kit, Gene’s rifle strap was never farther than 12 feet from his hand, every night since he came home in 1946.

(An earlier version of this photoessay appeared on the Member Feed at Ricochet.com)

Kitchen Table Memories

The Wrought Iron post described the kitchen table in the Marilla house and asked for peoples' memories of times around that table. Sharon (Stroinski) Buckley has offered her memory, which is apparently anchored pretty securely with taste and fragrance impressions:

"I think that was the table Debbie and I had breakfast one morning when we stayed over where we had milk from Fitzingers farm(not sure I spelled it right ). I remember it tasted awful cause it was straight from the cow. After all these years I still can taste it. Sorry Julie. I'm a city girl."

Ha!  Sorry, Sharon.  Dad was an early-adopter of the natural-foods thing, as you may recall.  Part of that was buying raw milk right out of the milkhouse at the Pfitzinger farm across the road.  The good parts were that it was fresh and that it had pretty high butterfat content.  The downside included occasional "barny" flavors and odors.  Old-fashioned barns just never had good ventilation, so there were always some dust and some ammonia in the air.  Old-fashioned milking systems had stainless-steel vessels (very cleanable, and they cleaned constantly and vigorously) but the equipment was hand-carried around in the barn, and had openings that necessarily opened to the air sometimes.

Modern dairy farms have very much better ventilation; you can drive around and see cow barns with no sidewalls and lots of fans and tubes.  In the winter they have thermal curtains that unroll like roller shades on windy days; these block the wind and retain the heat, but the fans and tubes keep working all winter.

Modern milking equipment keeps the milk all enclosed in stainless steel from the moment it exits the teat to the moment it ends up in the stainless steel bulk tank.  So it is cleaner and it smells better and gets cooled faster than ever it did in the good old days.  As well, the standards for bacteria count, inflammation indicators, and residues of medications are very, very much more rigorous than in decades past.

No buckets, no bedding in the milking parlor.

Lots of light, lots of testing and  checking and monitoring.

Dunno who these people are; these photos are just off Google.
But this guy looks just as nice as I remember Mr. Pfitzinger.

Pfitzinger farm is still going, but they milk in another location in a modern barn.  The old place is used for raising youngstock.

So you've got me thinking about your childhood kitchen, upstairs on 65 Poplar Avenue.  You ready? I remember watching in awe as my big cousin Sharon strolled into the kitchen carrying a shirt with a button off; immediately, smoothly, and without fuss drew open one of those white-painted drawers in the built-in cabinet; retrieved therefrom a needle and thread; and leaned back against the kitchen counter talking away and sewing that button on by herself.  My admiration for that demonstration of skill and elegance was boundless.  Sorry I didn't say anything at the time.  I was too wowed to speak.  There you go.

Julie

Christmas Decoration, Argyle, 2012

Coot Hill Family Historical Preservation Society Headquarters
has decorated for Christmas.

Pani Julia Mostkowska-Zdrojewska, who is with the angels,
has an angel by her portrait.

Marty and I have known this angel all our lives.
Look how feathery his feathers look.
How beautiful is the drapery of his gown,
as with right knee slightly bent
he hovers over the stable entrance.
"Gloria in Excelsis Deo!"

Here his hovering mechanism is revealed.
You took one of those wires for hanging bumpkies
and worked it into the plaster
and then into the wood
of the roof of the żłobek.

You don't know "żłobek" ?    Go to Google Translate.

Did you think I knew how to type all these Polish diacritical marks on my keyboard?

Thanks!  But alas, it is not so.

Wesołych Świąt!

Julie

A Couple of Marilla Photos

The snapshot below shows the essence of Gene and Clara's as a place and an institution, and, I would hope, explains the name of this blog.

They built the house in 1957.  We're seeing the kitchen not too long after that, and already so many of the vital elements are in place.  To the left, the hallway goes to the back door, which most visitors used, as well as indwellers.  So they checked out the garage as they came in, even if they were grandmas wearing fox stoles at the time.  This set the tone.  Of course, sometimes folk used the front door for fun. Then they would ring the doorbell, which had no microchip. A little hammer struck melodiously on long metal tubes.

On the walls we see the Polish Eagle on a card, and a recipe affixed to a cupboard door with a clothespin.  We see Suzette's dziura, her hidey-hole, with her leash hanging on the sidewall of it, a bit of her blanket, and a bit of herself at Clara's feet.  

Recipe books, Girl Scout candy in a tin, Southern Comfort,
Angostura bitters, stand mixer, electric frying pan.

That's a waffle iron on top of the refrigerator.
It's very benevolent-looking;
maybe it's the Buddha.

Clara is dressed like Julia Child - or perhaps Julia Child dressed like Clara - and it is important to realize that the stripes on her apron are in black, mauve, and greys, while the big band of pockets is a rich red.  Despite how that might sound, it looked great on her and against the oatmeal tweed of her below-the-knee sheath skirt.

Gene just got back from the office.

There's company in the house, over by the kitchen table, and somebody took that picture.  Blaise and Dorothy Militello may well have taken that picture. Wonderful neighbors: they first met in the winter, when the drifts were six feet high in front of the kitchen windows.  Clara looked up from the kitchen sink, and there were two feet on snowshoes standing on the snow directly in front of her. That was Dorothy, come over to say hello.

Below is the lead Militello saddle horse, Queenie, with Marty and Julie.  This is the driveway of their house, and across the road are buildings of the Pfitzinger farm.