Melania

Dad, our EJZ, and his brother Casimir had a younger sister, Melania.

Melania was ten years younger than Eugene, having been born 12/14/1933.  She died, at home, of whooping cough, when a young girl.  Dad was unsure of the year of her death, recalling to me only that she died when he was away at Orchard Lake high school. 

When Dad was 16, Melania was six years old.

There appear to be no photographs or effects of any kind of this little girl.  It is as if any reminder would be so painful that no reminders were permitted.

What did she look like?  Here is her mother, Julia Mostkowska Zdrojewski, shortly after her marriage:

And here is the same lady some years later, probably after having had three children.  Note that her husband, our JPZ, arranged a similar pose:

Pertussis vaccine was developed in 1926; by 1933 it had been around for 6 or 7 years.  I wonder if Melania had been vaccinated.  In any event, the vaccine has never been perfect; mutations of the bacterium do occur; there was no antibiotic to treat a case of pertussis in the 1930s.

Had she lived, she would have been Aunt Melania to the children of Eugene and of Casimir.  Her children would have been cousins to our generation; their children second cousins to our children.

Dad only spoke of his little sister a couple of times.  He used hushed tones and pretty quickly put an end to the conversation.  Thinking back on that, I realize that twice in his life, his womenfolk died while he was away.  First his little sister died of a sudden illness, when he was a teenager.  Then when he was in Army boot camp in Fort Benning, his mother died of a heart attack.  Medical advances having made such deaths less common, it is easy for us of a later generation to fail to realize what it was sometimes like for our elders, even in peacetime at home.

Speaking of peacetime at home, here is the back of Aunt Melania's birth certificate:

The line at the bottom, centered, italicized, and bolded, instructs Carefully preserve this certificate by having it framed.  My instinctive reaction is FDR has been elected 5 weeks and already we are being ordered around!  I am satisfied to report that our family disobeyed.  They stuck it in a file with other such documents, which I am now going through.

This means that there will be edits to the other pages of this blog, beginning with the Z side and moving along to the M side.  I would be so appreciative of additions and corrections to the data up on those family pages.

Herbert Meyer on The Decision to Win the Cold War

Steven Hayward of Powerline has put up as a podcast a couple of interviews with Herbert Meyer, right-hand man to William Casey in Reagan's CIA. They date from 2014, and concern matters in 1983 particularly, as well as Poland particularly.  But the principles and the lessons concern 9/11 in identical fashion, and apply to the future as well.

The theme is that there is a right way and a wrong way to run a spy outfit. The right way is to attract and empower talent: individuals of talent in positions of responsibility and authority. The wrong way is to disgust talented people so as to drive them away, and empower career bureaucratic minds in their place.  What can be done with a bureaucratized agency other than shut it down and start over? My favorite quote:  "Bill Casey built an OSS within the CIA."

The podcast is here; the latter 80% of it is a more leisurely discussion that took place at Meyer's home on some island in Puget Sound.  It is worth the going through the more frenetic and clipped radio interview that constitutes the first 20% of the podcast.

Meyer wrote a memo urging top-level CIA to recast their thinking about what to do - win versus "lose elegantly." To say that it is thoughtful and thorough sounds pitiful, but then there is no way to do it justice. It just has to be read.  The memo has been declassified and can be read in .pdf form for that authentic early-1980s look.

Meyer went on to reboot intelligence gathering from all those capable agents in the field who had not been told the right things to look for, if data were to be gathered that could form a useful information pattern in the service of testing the hypothesis that the Soviet economy was on the rocks, and not rolling along as the then-current wisdom read. In the podcast he describes in vivid terms what this reboot meant.  Doing this was simple enough.  But it had not been done until somebody came along and realized what was wrong with procedures and how to put them right. Thanks, Mr. Meyer, Mr. Casey.

So, Russian factory workers were so desperate that they hijacked a meat train, held the conductors, offloaded all the government meat onto stolen trucks they had ready and waiting, and got out of there fast?  Who knew?  Well, people had known, but had not known that the bosses back home wanted to hear the story! When that was set right, the right data could flow in and be turned into information bearing on the hypothesis and destined for the desk of a Chief Executive who very much cared to think about it.

This is a story best heard from a man at the center of it. We are lucky to have it brought for us to hear; thanks, Mr. Hayward.

A Familiar Face

Dave Brubeck's music has given me great enjoyment - so much so that quite a while ago I pulled his photo out of his CD album and put it up on the refrigerator.

It seemed like such a natural thing to do. The thought of taking down that smiling face is disturbing. That's not an option!

Marian McPartland interviewed many jazz pianists for her radio show. Her Piano Jazz episode with Dave Brubeck is a favorite. They talk about and play music; he discusses how his classical piano training made his jazz possible and meaningful; he recalled his trip to Kraków, to the Jagiellonian University museum, where he "saw Chopin's piano."  A fan of Chopin!  No wonder I'm a fan of Brubeck!

Well, well, the joke is on me.  The other day, while sifting through the Photo Trove, I found this print in my hands.

It's the early 1960s, and a cool day with green leaves on the big cherry tree in the front yard at the Marilla house.  Perhaps the occasion is one of Mom and Dad's Memorial Day picnics. Any road, the party seems to be going well.

Memory is a funny thing; apparently so are preferences and inclinations. Brubeck's face looked really lovable to me.  I did not consciously think of Dad when admiring it. But subconsciously - that's another story, wouldn't you say?

Well now I am spooked. It is time to pull out one of those bubble beer mugs of Marilla origin and pour some beer into it as in days of yore. It is time to "restore the tissues," as Bertie Wooster says, and consider memories, and memory.

Blue Rondo alla Turca is among the favorites.

                                     

Lubię piwo.  Na zdrowie!

In a Larger Sense, These Battles Never End

Not too much of researches this day! Other work has intervened. 

Our special ops forces were in the news; I learned about HALO: High-Altitude, Low-Opening jumps.  Some of them jump out of the airplane at 30,000 feet.

Thinking about that I looked up at the far wall; there was a little photo of a studious young man who learned to jump in 1943.  His birthday is coming up on October 7th.

Thinking today about all the men who jump when they have to. Some jump out of airplanes, some jump in hearing rooms or other places, to defend the country and things like due process and the US Constitution.

Here is our EJZ at U Chicago. He's  studying in preparation for deployment to Japanese-occupied China.  At the same time he is thinking about Europe, specifically Poland, the land of his ancestors; see the map on the wall behind him?  And he is thinking of his buddies; see the photos?