Causalities of War

I’m having a hard time putting my thoughts into words. Memorial Day weekend was physically tough as we ended up with three 90-degree days with incredible humidity. There were also violent thunderstorms to deal with. Much of this time was spent outdoors in the heat watching Emily’s granddaughter play in a softball tournament. And while I wanted to publish this on Memorial Day, I was overcome by sleep and now it is several days later. At the same time, much of what concerns this entry was helped by correspondence with my cousin, Rita, who is older than me and can remember much of what I want to write about.

On Memorial Day, my son John blogged a beautiful column about the causalities of war, focusing on his grandfather, the father (Tony) of his mother Rosemary, who never got over what happened to him in a horrendous battle in the North Africa during the Second World War. I know how that battle severely affected his relationship with his family and thus his mother’s relationship with our sons and me. Please read it at: http://munzermusings.blogspot.com/2016/05/memorial-day.html

But that is only half of how war has affected my children, so I am going to write about the other half. The characters include: James Alford (my grandfather on my mother’s side), Margaret Alford (James wife, better known as “Maggie.”) a second Margaret Alford (my mother, better known as Peggy and the youngest daughter of James and Maggie), Mary Alford (my mother’s oldest sister), Nellie Alford (my mother’s older sister), Rita (my cousin, daughter of Nellie) Tony (my late father-in-law who was wounded in Africa during World War II), Rosemary (Tony’s daughter and my former wife for more than 30 years) and John Munzer, my son who wrote the blog that inspired this.

On Memorial Day, I made a trip into Jersey City to visit Grandfather James’ grave. It was just the second time I visited the grave. Peggy never spoke of the grave. I couldn’t get her to tell me where it is. She once said, “they’re dead. It doesn’t matter. Who cares?”

The Jersey City gravesite, 2016, where James, Mary and Maggie are buried. I placed the flag there because the cemetery did not have him listed as a veteran.

What I did know of my grandfather was he was one of those young men who was placed in an untenable situation. He died in France during the First World War. Each war is usually very different. James’ war was called “trench warfare.” Armies dug in to defend themselves and for more than a year the front never differed by more than a mile. In the meantime, many new weapons such as aircraft and tanks bombed and shelled the trenches. Men were forced to take up their rifles and charge into unobstructed machine gun fire. It was wholesale slaughter. France lost 90 percent of its male generation. It was useless and impossible to stop the deadlock. And this all started because a crazed terrorist killed a minor member of the Austrian nobility.

Ironically, it was the second war James was involved with. My cousin Rita tells me he was also a member of Teddy Roosevelt’s “Rough Riders” of the Spanish- American war of 1898. But the two battles that group was involved in were one-day events with few casualties on the American side. And they were a cavalry unit, unlike James second turn as an infantryman.

Grandpa "Jim," James Alford, who served with the Rough Riders during the Spanish-American war and died in France about a month before World War I ended.

He died on Oct. 14, 1918 in France. It involved the last German offensive of the war, which ended five weeks later on November 18. Ironically, on that same day a British gas shell exploding in Belgium temporarily blinded Hitler.

As I said, this was my second visit to the grave. The first time, was in 2011 after I uncovered papers about its location long after my mother’s 1984 death. At that time, I discovered my mother had a sister, Mary, whom she never spoke of.

While I suppose that James’ death would be an incredible shock to his family, I discovered Monday that about 40 days after that, Mary, died. Peggy was probably around 6 when this happened. Mary was 12.

How could anyone cope with such a situation? These became hard times for the Alford family. According to Cousin Rita:

“My mother (Nellie) said Mary never complained about being sick. They talked a lot apparently. Your own mother (Peggy) would have been very young at this point and possibly didn't remember much of Mary. Another thing my Mom said often is that Mary always smiled. When she died, my mother, still a child herself couldn't believe it. She believed that, even though Mary spent most of her life in bed, she always seemed happy (and therefore healthy in the mind of my mother, another child). She told me she was shattered by her sister's death but she tried not to let on because her mother was suffering and she wanted to help. Thinking back, I realize how much like my mother that was.

Maggie loved Mary so much and talked of her throughout her life. She never really told me anything about her (at least not that I remember). Just that she was such a joy to her.”

Let’s take this a step further. Here you have a widow who is also in shock. Record keeping was haphazard and it took some time for Maggie to get survivor’s benefits. She was employed as a housekeeper.

According to Rita, “Maggie didn't begin to get her benefits for some time afterward. She took on a job as a kind of caretaker for an apartment where she and her daughters lived (possibly free or low cost, I don't know or remember). My mother (Nellie) who was about 11 or 12 piled her hair on top of her head to look older and got a job as a telephone operator to help out. Maggie told me Mom would come home from work and scrub the apartment floors so that she (Maggie) didn't have to. But according to my mother, it was Maggie who mostly did the scrubbing and everything else. She did sewing, and other odd jobs, among them handling some cooking for Jewish neighbors on days they were forbidden to do any work, and she nursed the sick. Only once, when Mom said it was a matter of putting food on the table for her two daughters, did she accept money for that. Even later in life, Maggie was one friends and neighbors called on to care for the sick. She couldn’t support two girls on that kind of money.”

And my mother, so young, became “Baby Peggy,” a Vaudeville act. Now I don’t know how a child so young could think of going into Vaudeville. So it must have been Maggie’s idea. It surely must have been another way of getting vital money in such a bad time. Now little Irish girls singing and dancing on stage was a staple of Vaudeville shows. Perhaps the most famous family of that era was the Four Cohan’s, with daughter Josie doing the singing and dancing. Her brother was the famous George M. Cohan, whose life was portrayed in “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Also famous in that era were Eddie Foy and his seven children.

"Baby Peggy," one of many cute Irish girls of that name who performed by singing and dancing in the Vaudeville era. It is likely she performed only in Jersey City, never making it to the New York Stage. In her older years, she sometimes got drunk and performed her songs and dances when she thought no one was watching, then cry herself to sleep.

But my mother “Baby Peggy,” wasn’t the only little Irish act of that name. A Google search reveals several of them and it is unlikely that my mother ever made it across the Hudson River to the New York stage.

But I have to speculate that the backstage environment had to influence Peggy. Vaudeville featured a variety of acts from singers to strippers -- some of whom weren’t exactly ideal companions for a child. From my own experiences in amateur theater, I know that the intensity of the stage brings about and breaks apart relationships. And I now wonder how much my mother experienced it? Rita says Peggy was always supervised, but how much did she pick up? She was a very intelligent woman. Is it possible that being forced into Vaudeville further traumatized this little girl?

Why do I say this? Because my mother’s life was filled with rage long before I was born, I wonder if being forced into Vaudeville, and hating it, combined with the twin deaths formed that rage?

As I look into history, my mother was part of something called “The Lost Generation,” who came of age during that war and its aftermath. The term was popularized by Hemingway who used it in a novel called “The Sun Also Rises.” This was a generation who matured during the 1920s, often called the “roaring twenties.” That decade was one of incredible change. Emerging from the shock of war, the era was one of technological achievement. By now, everyone had electric power and inventions like refrigerators changed the economic situation. There was great growth and prosperity.

And into that era came my Peggy, a “flapper,” a young woman who was intent on enjoying herself and flouting conventional standards of behavior. She smoked to excess (which killed her eventually). She drank way beyond excess (which destroyed her family relationships). And the sexual mores of the time were revolutionary. And Peggy lived in the center of it, New York City, with its many speakeasies (nightclubs serving illegal alcohol – it was prohibition). To her, I suppose, it was a wild and wonderful time, filled with excitement.

And then suddenly the stock market crashed in 1929. And Peggy somehow survived the Great Depression, hanging on to a job as a legal secretary at a large law firm. And that was followed by another world war. After Peggy died, I discovered that she had been married and divorced to a man named Walter Cannon during that war era. An unsuccessful songwriter, according to Rita, he was mostly supported by Peggy. But it was wartime. Is it possible she couldn’t handle the thought of another loss so she made a pre-emptive strike in divorcing him?

 

Peggy's life (clockwise): Left, with grandson John circa 1980: With husband John, circa 1946; With me and my dog Pupcorn, circa 1953; The flapper, circa 1920s; "Baby peggy," circa 1919; With Judge Harold Price, her boss from the 1960s through 1980s; and in adult one-piece baby pajamas, circa 1977.

Much of this is speculation. But it makes sense to me that I should inherit the trauma.

By the time she entered her 50s, Peggy was severely alcoholic. As a teenager, I sometimes watched her drunkenly singing “Baby Peggy” songs while dancing; and then crying herself to sleep. She frequently battled with Nellie’s family. I am not sure why. Rita speculates that it was because of the stability of that family. I am very aware of the contrast between my cousins and myself. All three of them had generally stable lives without much drama. The brothers were long-term employees while I bounced from job to job (though that was also the nature of the businesses I was in).

But then, Peggy battled with everyone, especially her mother. But she told me often how horrible her mother Maggie’s death from cancer was. A few years before I was born, Maggie joined James and Mary at that grave in Jersey City. Perhaps that additional trauma was why she refused to let me know the locale of the grave. In my entire life, she never visited the grave, though sometimes on Memorial Day she would say to never forget that my grandfather was a hero in World War I.

Shortly before she left our family around 1954, she posed for this photo which included my dog and Cousin Luke (Red) on right. I'm in the middle and on the left is Bruce, a friend.

Much of this is speculation. But it makes sense to me that I should inherit the trauma.

And so, war has, without doubt ,impacted both Rosemary’s and my lives in many ways -- and our own children have been influenced by these wars that never ended in our families. Our marriage was filled with conflict and we sought counseling. One of the counselors said there was nothing wrong with either of us. We were simply survivors of our parent’s traumas and quite courageous. And make no mistake; Tony caused a lot of hell for Rosemary. I once bought her a Ginsu knife for Christmas and she wouldn’t go near it. She said it was memories of her father waving a kitchen knife at her and babbling his “I killed Germans with by bare hands” routine when she was a child.

And so, I must conclude, that in many ways war has also impacted my children, even after three generations. I find it ironic that, after living with the stress of my mother’s trauma and the stress of the my marriage to Rosemary, that after being diagnosed with depression for decades, then bipolar, my shrink finally figured out I was suffering from PTSD.

It isn’t just the causalities of war to think about on Memorial Day, but also the descendants – casualties in our own way.