Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service(5)
In August 1920, Grandpa Dan became a switchman on the Indiana Harbor Belt railway line and a year later was promoted to conductor. He was a hardworking heartland railroad man until he retired, when he gave me, his firstborn grandchild, his pocket watch. On the back he had engraved a simple inscription: “To Gary from Grandpa, June 1969.” I treasure that watch to this day.
By the time I knew my grandparents, everybody called Vesta “Grandma Betty.” Grandpa Dan and Grandma Betty had three children: my uncles Jack and Jerry, and my dad, Robert. During World War II, Uncle Jack flew thirty missions as a navigator on a B-17 bomber over Europe, while Uncle Jerry, at just eighteen years old, served on a US Navy ship—a landing ship tank (USS LST-811)—in the Pacific, arriving just after the battle for Okinawa ended in mid-June 1945. After Imperial Japan surrendered, Uncle Jerry traveled to the Palau Islands to pick up Okinawan families to return them to their homes. Mostly women and children, they’d been used by the Japanese as slave labor. He fed Hershey bars to the kids and on the ship bought them everything he could think of. The children sang for him in return, and years later he still said they were the most beautiful voices he’d ever heard. He spent that summer and fall traveling between the islands of Okinawa, Iwo Jima, Guam, Saipan, Leyte, and Tinian, and took part as a member of the occupation force of mainland Japan.
Uncle Jerry was remarkable. He signed up for the military right after high school graduation in 1944 but was told he was 4F because his ears were badly scarred from the scarlet fever and chicken pox he had simultaneously as a child. But Uncle Jerry convinced the recruiters he was fit for service. When he reached boot camp in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, doctors examined him once again and told him to get back on the train and go home. Uncle Jerry refused. He insisted on doing his duty. They let him stay. After the war, he would be discharged in June 1946, only to be drafted back into the navy again during the Korean War. In January of 1951, he began serving aboard the USS McCoy Reynolds until being discharged on February 14, 1952.
By the time I was old enough to understand and appreciate what my grandfather and Uncle Jerry had experienced during their war years, their service was long behind them. They also never spoke much about their military days. I did talk to my uncle Jack about his service during WWII before his passing in 2014, but this only came after I was an adult. I regret that I was never able to ask my uncle Jerry and my grandfather more about their service days before they passed away.
Dad was still a young teenager when World War II ended. After he graduated from high school, he tried college for about three months before deciding it wasn’t for him. He joined the navy and in 1951 went through boot camp at Naval Station Great Lakes near North Chicago. He then trained at Naval Air Station Jacksonville in Florida where they asked him if he wanted to go on a ship or if he’d like to take pictures for the navy. Dad chose the camera, so he was sent to Pensacola for more training, and then to Naval Support Facility Anacostia near Washington, DC, during the Korean War. Dad’s job was to develop the film and photographs that came back in cans from the war zone. The film and photos were sent to all the high-ranking generals at the Pentagon for analysis, so Dad had top-secret clearance. This was where he learned the film business.
Dad had met Mom back at Dwight D. Eisenhower High School in Blue Island, Illinois. Mom’s name was Mylles Alsip. Her parents had come up with the name Mylles when they combined her mother’s name, Mildred, with her father’s name, Leslie, throwing out the i and spelling it with an artsy y instead. We never knew much about my grandpa Les’s side of the family, as he and my grandmother divorced when I was young, and we didn’t see him much after that. I do know he didn’t serve in the military because of medical reasons, but his father, Walter Alsip, served in WWI, as did my grandmother’s father, Elmer Percival Blomberg.
After Mom and Dad tied the knot, I was conceived on the naval base Anacostia. A few months before I was born, Mom, pregnant with me, went home to stay with her mother and father on the south side of Chicago because she didn’t want to give birth on base. I was born at Saint Francis Hospital in Blue Island on March 17, 1955, eight days before my dad was honorably discharged from the navy. Does that mean I’m a navy brat? Well, just barely, I guess. Mom and Dad soon moved into a rental on the south side and eventually had two more kids. Three years after me came my sister, Lori Allyn, and a year later came my brother, Craig Randall. We called him Randy growing up, though today he goes by Craig.
Having served his four years in the military, Dad wanted to do something different, so right after I was born he went into the film business. Filmmaking was then a burgeoning industry in Chicago, with an entrepreneurial and forward-thinking workforce. The great Bob Newhart started in Chicago. So did Bill Friedkin, who won an Oscar for directing The French Connection. And today, the Chicago International Film Festival is the longest-running international film festival in North America.
Dad worked for other people as a film editor before launching his own company, Cam-Edit, when he was about thirty years old. He was the first person in Chicago to have his own editing business, and years later he was inducted into the Chicago Editors Hall of Fame. But in those early days, he edited documentaries, commercials, and industrial films—whatever came to him—and found himself immersed in the real-time Mad Men culture of the era: the 1960s, hard-driving, wisecracking, three-martini lunch crowd. Dad left home at seven most mornings and returned late, sometimes at midnight. And he worked many weekends. I knew Dad loved me, but in my growing-up years he simply was not around much.