INSERT – Definitely the Greatest Generation
DAD: FATHER OF EVERY YEAR
1924-2008
Like Roy, the assistant director on the Frito-Lay shoot, my father was a World War II veteran. Roy and Dad served in the South Pacific. That theater of engagement was the bloodiest of WWII . . . not that Europe and Africa was any vacation.
Dad served from 1943-1945, the worst of the fighting. His troop ship was prepped for the invasion of Japan prior to the dropping of the atomic bombs. He came home soon after.
He enlisted the day after he graduated high school, June of 1943. He’d just turned nineteen by the time he finished boot camp in the Autumn of that year. Found himself in San Francisco at The Presidio, and shipped out under the command of General Douglass MacArthur. A few weeks later, his detachment landed on the beach at Milne Bay and engaged the Imperial Japanese Army.
All told, my father, George W. Young, Jr. . . . I’m actually George W. Young III, but don’t tell anyone . . . landed on three beaches in the crescent of the South Pacific Islands, including New Guinea. How he survived is anyone’s guess.
Wounded towards the end of war, Dad arrived back at The Presidio and spent two weeks in Letterman Military Hospital. A week-long train trip to Philadelphia followed his release. His parents picked him up at 30th Street station. He weighed 135 pounds. Dad stood six feet tall.
He married my mother, Elizabeth Kathryn Leonard, on June 1st in 1946 in the Audubon Lutheran Church, less than a mile from his boyhood home. They were together until his death in January of 2008.
Dad worked as an unskilled laborer in the Texaco Oil Refinery in Westville, New Jersey for 41 years. He (and Mom) raised three kids; sent two of us to college; and attended all our weddings despite one of them, mine, being 3000 miles away.
To this day, my sister, my brother, and I are still married to spouse #1. As Mom would say, “We don’t get divorced in this family. We’re too cheap and stubborn.”
Whatever works.
They survived the Depression, WWII, and The Soviet Union.
Yikes.
****
But how did they survive a first-born son who chose to move to New York City and pursue a career in dance? They’d just spent a fortune (For them) sending the lazy git to college. I graduated, but eschewed any sort of real job; packed a couple old wheel-less suitcases; and found myself in Manhattan at The Terpsichore Ballet, a third-tier company run by Richard Thomas, Sr., the father of John Boy of The Waltons.
If you’ve shaken off The Great Depression; been shot at by a hostile army; and lived most of your young life with the nuclear Sword of Damocles over your head, perhaps an offspring in the arts ain’t so bad.
What I did for those first five years of my life probably threw Mom and Dad, but if it did, they never showed it. Dad, a corporal in the Sixth Army, was nothing but supportive all through college and the Broadway attempts in New York City.
My mother used to buy white shirts and comfortable black shoes for me for Christmas and Birthdays.
I waited on more tables than I danced. Dad always asked me if I was okay for money. I wasn’t, but as my parents never let on if they were worried, disappointed, depressed, etcetera, I never gave them a clue if I was broke, starving, unemployed, and a step from being on the street.
Couldn’t do that to them.
Yes. Stubborn.
****
They made several trips to see me perform in the Big Apple and Summer Stock.
Both were still working at the time. Making the trip from South Jersey to Manhattan, not an overly long drive, 90 miles. But they had to take the afternoon off and battle rush hour traffic.
Also, while I was very familiar with New York City by this time (1982), they were not and this is long before the portable GPS. Getting to the theater posed a challenge, but they made it. Got to see them after the show, and, late as it was, they drove back to south Jersey and went to work the next day.
Their sacrifice and parental love effects Yours truly to this day. In particular, a nine-degree day with plenty of snow did not dissuade them from catching an Off-Off-Broadway performance of Hello Dolly in a small theater in Chelsea. Glad they did, since the show received very positive reviews, and was the closest I ever got to The Great White Way.
Neither parent was overtly demonstrative in expressing their love. Always knew it was there. Believe Mom finally exhaled when, while I was working on The Nightmare Before Christmas, I helped produce a “Making Of” segment for CBS.
She called me after the segment aired.
“I’m so proud of you,” she said. Her voice broke. She paused. “Always had to do what you wanted to, didn’t you?” Another pause. “If you had told us it was all going to work out, I might not have worried so much.”
“Yes, you would have, Betty.”
Dad’s voice in the background.
“Your father can’t come to the phone. He’s a little out of his element.”
No, he’s not, I thought. Never has been.
Comments