43. Boyhood’s End
I hung around Chicago for another year. Okay, to be precise, a year plus a couple months.
For most of that time I attended a trade school that taught me how to repair television sets. I was there because a salesman had sweet-talked my mother into paying my tuition. Money for that tuition would have paid for two years at any of the colleges in the Chicago area, but I didn’t raise the point. As she said, “Our kind of people don’t go to college.”
The trade school was good at getting part-time jobs for its students, so for close to a year I had a solid income. But school ended, and so did the job I had. My parents picked up the slack in my income, which helped immeasurably.
Beginning about the middle of June 1951 until the early days of August, I made a pretense of looking for work. I left the house each day, rode the el or streetcars, put in a few applications, but mainly just killed time. I felt defeated right out of the starting gate. Soon I would be eligible for the draft, and no one would want to hire a draft-age kid.
It impressed me that people on the el and the subway and the commuter trains and the streetcars didn't smile. The dreariness of their commute was something I didn't notice in high school and elementary school when I used public transportation less than I did now, but I was now riding public transit during the morning and evening rush hours, when the cars were jam‑packed, every seat filled, people hanging onto the straps.
They were grumps—people who were tired and grouchy and sullen on their way to work in the morning, and in the same mood at night. It was not a sociable bunch. Hardly a word was said. Some riders read the paper, some napped, but most just grimly stared straight ahead, as though hoping to see a divine revelation that would deliver them from another day of the same tiring and tiresome ordeal.
I didn't want to live like that.
Then there was my social life, or lack thereof. There would be no more Dolores‑type incidents, I decided, so when I dated, it was seldom and sub rosa. If I wanted to call a girl, I went out of the house and used a pay phone, and I left no tell‑tale addresses or phone numbers around the house. It was a deceitful way to live, and I didn't like it.
Furthermore, my parents and I were no longer comfortable together. Rarely did we do anything as a family, even anything so undemanding as sit together on the front porch. Maybe the problem was the double generation gap that existed, or maybe the personalities involved were incompatible. If you analyzed the problem to death you would still come up with same answer: My life at home had run its course.
And my time at trade school had taught me more than electronics, thanks to many of my fellow students who were former servicemen attending school on the GI Bill. These men were veterans of either World War II or the postwar armed forces.
From listening to them, I decided that there was no way in the world I would go into the army or marines and spend my time crawling around in the mud. From the former navy men, I gathered that I wouldn't care for life aboard ship. Besides, I was infatuated with airplanes and was attracted to the air force. And as my ex‑GI classmates told me, being in the air force was as close to having a civilian job as a guy could get and still be in the service.
I told my parents of my plans, that I was going to sign up before I could be drafted. This was a family in which conversation was not a high‑order activity (Remember?), and I often was as uncommunicative as the senior residents. Still, I talked to them several times about my decision to join the air force.
Regardless of how many times I brought up the subject their reactions were the same. My father knew I had made up my mind and he maintained his usual Solomonic silence. My mother, however, offered two of the most inconsequential reasons I ever heard for not going into the military:
One. Who'll do your laundry?
Two. You can't raid the fridge whenever you want.
It seemed to me that the first concern should be, gosh, people get killed doing what I was about to do.
Job search aside, there was no ignoring news about the war in Korea. Kim Il Sung's North Korean army was overrunning South Korea and had destroyed Seoul, the capital of South Korea. The United Nations had asked member nations to send troops to South Korea, and the first American units were already in the fight. As with World War II, it was easy to identify the forces of good and evil—a democracy about to be seized by a dictatorship. This time, however, the villain wore new clothes, those of Communism.
Even more to the point was the draft. The World War II draft, which had been kept in effect after the war, was about to expire when the Korean War started. But during the same week that Kim Il Sung's troops crossed the 38th parallel, Congress extended the draft.
American fighting men would be needed to respond to the United Nations' call for troops to defend the South Korean people. Moreover, right‑wing politicians at the time clamored to stamp out Communism, wherever it existed. Doing so meant sending men to fight a Communist North Korean Army.
Thoughts of the draft were inescapable. In a few weeks I would reach the eligibility age of eighteen. Sometime after that I would be gone unless I enlisted first. But there were other options. Conscientious objectors or people in college or in certain jobs could obtain deferments. And, of course, a guy could simply avoid registering for the draft and hope not to get caught and sent to prison.
But in the tried‑and‑true spirit of John Wayneism–-“A man does what a man has got to do!”—I couldn't think about skipping out, legally or otherwise. And a steady dose of World War II movies had imbued in me some degree of patriotism. All things considered, it was not a matter of whether I was going in the armed forces but a matter of when.
And summer was miserable that year, an arctic-type summer. Seldom did the sun break through clouds that layered over the city. A cold wind seemed to be blowing constantly. I don’t remember ever going to a pool that summer, and I sure had time on my hands for a swim.
I had waffled enough.
On a Tuesday morning in August, I took the
el to the air force recruiting office in the Loop. By midafternoon I was with a couple dozen
other guys on an airplane flying to an air force base in Texas. My boyhood had ended.
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