Morgan Woodward, Cool Hand Luke and the Joys of Trivia

Morgan Woodward died last week at the age of 93. He is a prime example of an actor whose named I forced myself to memorize when I was young. My memory was good and I filled it up as much as I could, with everything from facts about animals to trivia about comic books. I also memorized the names of actors I had seen on TV shows and movies, most of the movies when they were on TV years after their theatrical releases. This often meant waiting to the end of shows to write down notes about the cast lists. Back then, there was no Internet, so the research was harder to do. I took pride from a young age in identifying actors when someone would say "Who's that guy who was in...?" Morgan Woodward wasn't just Oh That Guy to me. His TV career started in 1956, and he worked steadily until the late 1990s. retiring in his early seventies. In the 1980s, he finally got lucky enough to be a regular on the long-running prime-time soap opera Dallas. A gig like that was the only way for a man who was never a star to get a steady paycheck. But for me, my favorite roles of his were from the late 1960s, two guest roles on the original Star Trek, once as an inmate in an asylum and once as a Starfleet captain, playing Boss Godfrey, a.k.a The Walking Boss, in the 1967 Paul Newman vehicle Cool Hand Luke.

This is a perfect camera shot. Morgan Woodward's face is framed under the black circle of his hat, his eyes hidden behind reflecting sunglasses. The Walking Boss doesn't say much, and he doesn't have to. The prisoners are terrified of him, as well they should be. Lots of character actors get to chew the scenery - Woodward did in both his guest roles on Star Trek - but here he is not just cool, he is cold. The movie is about Luke defying authority, and The Walking Boss makes the stakes of that defiance clear. One false step and The Walking Boss would kill him.

Cool Hand Luke is as entertaining as a trip through hell can be, but it's also a trivia goldmine. The stars of the film are definitely Paul Newman and George Kennedy, but the cast is full from top to bottom with actors whose careers either already had great performances or young actors who would become much more famous within a few years' time.

One of the actors who already had famous credits was Jo Van Fleet as Luke's mom. In real life, she was only ten years older than Newman, but due to make-up and acting ability and Newman being so damned pretty, you never think she's too young to be his mother. A decade earlier, Van Fleet had a small, pivotal role in East of Eden, directed by Elia Kazan and starring James Dean.

Another actor who had great roles before and after Cool Hand Luke is Strother Martin. Many actors' careers back in the day were either defined as TV actors or film actors, but Martin switched back and forth regularly. He was famous for overacting. For a movie actor, his characters have a lot of tics and eccentricities, but it's always fun to see him on screen. He was in several of Paul Newman's films after Cool Hand Luke, including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Pocket Money and Slap Shot. 

The cast is full to the brim with actors who would be much more famous within ten years. Among the faces you might be able to pick out of this crowd from left to right are Ralph Waite, George Kennedy, Joe Don Baker, Wayne Rogers, Dennis Hopper and Harry Dean Stanton. Of those six, Joe Don Baker was just an extra, his character had no name and he had no lines. 

As I said earlier, a trivia goldmine.

The movie is over fifty years old, so it is no surprise most of the cast is gone. Now that Woodward has died, the only surviving actors are Lou Antonio, Harry Dean Stanton, Anthony Zerbe, Joe Don Baker, Kim Kahana and Joy Harmon, who played the girl washing the car that George Kennedy's character Dragline named Lucille, the proximate cause of the famous fight between Dragline and Luke. As far as I can tell, she was the youngest person in the cast. Ms. Harmon turns 80 next year. Besides Cool Hand Luke, where she has no lines and only a single scene, her best known work is as Merrie in the 1965 sci-fi movie Village of the Giants, a much bigger role both literally and figuratively in a much less well-known film.

I apologize to Morgan Woodward for making an essay that should be an appreciation of his career into a memory exercise. My only excuse is the name of this blog is To the Best of My Recollection, and a major reason my recollection became good was from following the careers of the character actors like Morgan Woodward that I saw on TV when I was young.

A scene from 12 Angry Men

This weekend, I watched Fail-Safe for the first time all the way through. My trivia brain already had a few things stored about the movie, but very few. I knew it was in black and white, just like Dr. Strangelove, the other famous movie about nuclear war from 1964. I knew Walter Matthau played a creepy, pro nuclear war professor, and I must have seen scenes from the film while flipping through cable TV back in the day, because I knew there were scenes with Henry Fonda as the president and a young looking Larry Hagman as the guy who would translate what the Russian premier would say. The scenes were in a nearly blank room, just the two actors. Hagman is now associated with I Dream of Jeannie and Dallas, but this is a much different role and he and Fonda are so good together.

I don't love the film the way I love Strangelove, but director Sidney Lumet made a lot of interesting choices. The one that is really striking is there is no incidental music in the film. I wracked my brain trying to think of other films without music, but I had to swallow my pride and look the information up. Someone I just met on Twitter, Allison Stern-Dunyak, brought up a few and Lumet's name kept popping up. I had forgotten there was no score in Network, and I hadn't seen his films The Offence or Dog Day Afternoon, the latter is a gap in my education I plan to fix. But I most certainly did see an earlier film in Lumet's career that had no musical cues, 12 Angry Men. 

It was one of my earliest memory self-assignments to memorize the names of all the actors, but I didn't think to link them to their seat numbers. I just saw a scene on YouTube, so it's not all that impressive to list the names right now, but there are two actors in the cast who didn't get quite as much work as the rest. So as a kid, I made an effort to remember Joseph Sweeney as the old guy who is the second vote for not guilty as George Voscovec as the foreign born juror. The other ten actors are better known, the big star being Henry Fonda, and the rest would go to lots of roles in film and TV like Lee J. Cobb, Edward Binns (also in Fail-Safe), Jack Klugman, John Fiedler, Martin Balsam, Jack Warden, E.G. Marshall, Robert Webber and Ed Begley.

Now that I have gone through the winding path that got me to thinking about 12 Angry Men, I focused on one scene, Ed Begley Sr. big star turn.

This was the liberal dream in mid-century America, and it rings completely hollow today. In a room of twelve white men, only one of them is a flat-out racist and when he stops talking in code and just uses the kind of racist language we hear from our president. (At the start of the film, we see the defendant. Since the film takes place in New York in the 1950s, I assume his brown skin is meant to tell us he is Puerto Rican.) All of the other eleven shun him completely. He is later so ashamed he votes to acquit.

We know the truth today. A racist like this would stand his ground and this would be an 11-1 vote, which back then would have meant a hung jury. Or even more likely, one of the other jurors - all white and all male - would have backed him up when he went into his racist diatribe.

It is still one of my favorite films, but looking back at it from the era of Trump, it's every bit as big a fantasy as Creature from the Black Lagoon, and more's the pity.  

Music on the radio in the early 1960s San Francisco Bay Area

When I was a little kid, I had a rocking horse on springs and I loved it. My earliest memories of listening to music were sitting on the rocking horse, happily squeaking along with the music, though I doubt I was a stickler for keeping to the rhythm. 

My older brother says I loved Tubby the Tuba. I remember we had the record because the name rings a bell and I remember the album cover. I went to YouTube to listen to several versions, and I can report the songs and the story are not in my memory. I suspect this is because I stopped listening at a certain age and never went back to it.

I definitely remember a condensed soundtrack album of The Wizard of Oz with all the songs and enough extra dialog to make the plot clear. Like most Americans my age, I have no idea how many times I saw The Wizard of Oz, but it was always a treat to watch after we got a color TV. I also remember loving Artur Rubenstein's recording of the Chopin waltzes, which was the start of a lifelong love of Chopin's music. The springs on the rocker made a racket even when they were oiled, but in my imagination of it, I assume my mom found the noise comforting, since she knew if I was in the rocker, I wasn't running around the house getting into trouble.

What I remember about the radio in the early 1960s are just a few stations. My mom and dad listened to classical and the two stations were KKHI and KDFC. I listened to the rock stations because my older brother and sister listened and I definitely got into it myself. When I started listening, the rock stations were KYA, KFRC and KEWB. 

I was also a Giants fan, so I tuned into KSFO for the games and sometimes hung around to listen to their easy listening format after the games were over. The big star DJ in the area was Don Sherwood, but I started listening after he left the station. The names I remember from listening to were Jim Lange and Dan Sorkin, respectively the early morning and mid-morning DJs and a weekend announcer named Scott Beach. The station had a rarely used minute and a half long station identification jingle by the Johnny Mann singers that I always loved to hear.

 
But most of my memories were of the top 30 stations. While they heavily relied on whatever songs were hits at the moment, DJs would also throw in a few songs from a few years back, so I heard Buddy Holly's music years after he was dead. Other 1950s favorites for me were Chuck Berry and Little Richard. On the other hand, Elvis Presley left me cold.

Top 30 radio was weird. Yes, of course we heard the Beatles and the Beach Boys and a lot of Motown acts, but I distinctly remember when a streak of Beatles' songs at number one for months was broken by Puff the Magic Dragon. Other songs that made it into the number one spot on the rock stations included Louis Armstrong singing Hello, Dolly - a much bigger hit at the time than What a Wonderful World ever was - and Barbra Streisand's People. I also remember hearing Allan Sherman's Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah played on the rock stations.

I confess that I didn't listen much to KDIA, the local soul station, so while I heard a lot of black artists, there were also many I wouldn't discover until well after the fact. I remember the first time Etta James was on a jukebox in San Francisco in the late 1980s that had a few of her singles from the early 1960s. Because she was a survivor, her older tunes started to be a big part of media, with At Last used on several commercials, and her 1995 tribute to Billie Holiday entitled Mystery Lady won a Grammy. But I can testify she was not a crossover star on the rock stations in the Bay Area back in the day.
 

Some music gets more play in retrospect than it did at the time, some gets less. Ray Charles recorded Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music in 1962 and it was absolutely huge. The song I Can't Stop Loving You made it to number 1 on the charts for R&B, rock and easy listening. While ironically it didn't do as well on the country charts, many artists like Willie Nelson and Buck Owens acknowledge that the record did wonders for the sales of country artists, opening people's ears and their hearts to how good the best of country music was.

If I could be an "influencer" in today's culture - a highly unlikely event - I think the first name I would like to bring out of the past for more respect is Sam Cooke. He had a lot of crossover hits, but my most vivid memory is listening to the radio report that he had been killed. At the time he died, the song Shake was climbing the charts, but right after the news, some DJ put on the B-side, A Change Is Gonna Come. I had never heard it before and I began to weep uncontrollably. The song can still make me cry.

I will write more about 1960s radio in the months ahead, but I wanted to get these few ideas down first.

The Speed of Invention and Sports on the Radio

The radio and the telephone and the movies that we know

May just be passing fancies and in time may go.

Love Is Here to Stay, music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira Gershwin, written in 1937

Nostalgia isn’t just for geezers anymore. At any time from 1900 on, a person in their thirties or forties could see just how much technology had advanced since their childhood. When Ira Gershwin was a boy in the first decade of the 20^th Century, radio is an invention still in the experimental phase and the telephone is a toy for the rich. Of all of the inventions he mentions, only movies could count as a popular culture phenomenon before 1910, but the trend was too new for people to be certain it wasn’t just a fad. The oldest of my grandparents, Grandpa Rogers, is a young man in the century's first decade, and the youngest, Grandma Hubbard, is born in 1906.

Jump to the 1930s, when Gershwin wrote the lyrics. My parents were kids. The telephone was a fact of life but for many people, there were still “party lines”, which meant the phone could ring in your home but you shared the line with several of your neighbors, so the call might not be for you. Everyone in the group had to wait to hear the pattern of the ring. Movies were a huge cultural phenomenon, much bigger than they were thirty years earlier, and radio was the first massive technological home entertainment success.

Moving forward another three decades to the 1960s, when my siblings and I were still living under our parents’ roof. Radio still existed, but television had overtaken it as the primary source of home entertainment. The graph above does not show this, only that color TV was starting to make inroads. The movie industry was being challenged by TV and the studio system was breaking down, but it was still a major cultural force. According to the graph above, telephones in 1960 have about 80% market penetration in 1960 and jump up to 90% by 1970. Pretty much everyone has a phone and if party lines still existed, it was only in sparsely populated areas.

Before I write about radio in my youth, a quick peek forward to the 1990s. My nieces and nephews are kids and I am working in the computer game industry. The videogame business was still new and volatile, with early dominant companies like Atari and Coleco already fading away. Video arcades would lose market share as the home technology improved. There was still debate about whether or not whole industry was just a fad. The dominant technologies of today - cell phones, home computers and the Internet – had minimal market penetration.

You probably feel like the world is moving very fast. You might take some comfort in the realization that your grandparents and even your great-grandparents felt much the same way.

When I was boy, radio had already been knocked out of the top spot in the home entertainment field. Most scripted shows – dramas, comedies, variety shows and quiz shows – were now on television and only a few examples remained on radio. But though the kinds of shows available on radio had shrunk, it was still the dominant source of two forms of virtually free entertainment, sports and music.

A quick paragraph defending the phrase “virtually free”. Of course you had to buy a radio or TV set and when you turned it on, your electricity usage would go up, costing you a few cents every hour. But no payment you made would get into the pockets of those who were providing content. The government held control on the airwaves and broadcasters had to pay for licenses and uphold standards the government would set. Using today’s definition, it was socialism and it ran, for the most part, very smoothly.

You “paid” for radio and TV by paying attention to commercials. It is and was a completely unenforceable contract. You could mute commercials or run a quick errand when they were on. Once home taping becomes an option, you could fast forward through them. And yet, this odd form of payment has successfully funded the massive industries of radio, TV and advertising content for decades and does not show any signs of dying out. Internet content follows much the same business model. We are so immersed in capitalism that the odd details of its continued existence are almost beneath our notice, but for me, the business model of advertising is one of the oddest details by far.   

Let’s look at sports in the 1960s and early 1970s, or more accurately, let’s listen to them. Televised sporting events were much rarer than they are today. Baseball home games were never televised except if your team was lucky enough to make the World Series, and even the more TV friendly NFL and AFL would black out home games if they had not sold out well in advance of game time. Basketball and hockey on TV were very rare occurrences. After baseball, boxing was probably the sport with the most cultural impact and horse racing was much more prevalent than it is today. In both cases, gambling was a big part of that.

Fans of a team of any sport would often become fans of the announcers as well, and those fan bases were decidedly local. In Los Angeles, men my age can wax as nostalgic for Vin Scully and Chick Hearn as they do for Sandy Koufax and Jerry West. For me, the great announcers of my youth were Russ Hodges for the Giants, Lon Simmons for the Giants and the 49ers and Bill King for the Raiders and the Warriors. 

Hodges was our link to history, having worked for the Giants when they were still in New York. He spoke his most famous line “THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT! THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT!” when Bobby Thompson hit the game winning home run in the 1951 single game playoff against the Dodgers. 

Simmons could be very funny and in some ways he was my favorite growing up. I remember a ballgame where a player came to the plate and the fans were not happy.

Hodges said, "He's getting a mixed reaction from the fans."

Simmons replied. "Yes, there are loud boos and there are soft boos." The broadcast booth was close enough to the press box that you could hear the writers laughing in the background.

And then there’s Bill King. King spoke so quickly and clearly and saw the action so precisely, he was on another level. The closest comparison I can make is to listening to Art Tatum play piano. I would listen to him even if a game was on TV, his voice on the radio and the TV muted. I particularly remember the 1972 Raiders-Steelers playoff game known best for “the immaculate reception”, Franco Harris catching a pass that bounced off Jack Tatum, a Raiders defender. Harris was trailing the actual intended receiver by at least ten yards and caught the deflected ball just before it hit the ground, then ran it in for the game winning touchdown. The main TV camera didn't catch the whole scene, but King called the play in real time, exactly as it happened. The TV announcers were dazed and confused and needed to find the right camera angle to make the play clear. Back then, referees didn’t review plays, but to their credit, they got it exactly right on the field. King got it exactly right as well, but he was a good fifty yards away from the action.

The fans on radio couldn't see Bill King's facial hair, but it was on a completely different level as well.

In the Bay Area, sports radio also had a great disaster, Harry Caray announcing for the Oakland A’s in 1970. Caray is beloved in St. Louis and Chicago where he called the games for Cardinals, then the White Sox and then the Cubs. In the Bay Area, we were used to the top professionals and Caray was just an aging, back-slapping drunk. His act didn’t work here. Monte Moore, the A's main announcer before and after Caray's rocky tenure, considered 1970 the worst year of his professional life. Much later in the 1990s, Will Farrell's impression of Caray on SNL played up the drunken incoherence. It was exaggerated to be sure, but it was accurate as well.

On Monday, I’ll continue discussing listening to radio in my youth, dealing with the content that fill the most hours of air time, recorded music.

Albert Finney 1936-2009

Ten years ago on my old blog Lotsa 'Splainin' 2 Do, I wrote an appreciation of Albert Finney. Today we have the news of his death and fans around the world are expressing their love and admiration for the man. He was nominated five times for acting honors by the Oscars, but never won. On Twitter, fans have named their favorite roles in more than a dozen productions, including Tom Jones, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Two for the Road, Scrooge, Annie, Murder on the Orient Express, Under the Volcano, Erin Brockovich, Big Fish, The Gathering Storm, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, The Dresser and many more. The picture above is from Miller's Crossing. I can't say it's the best work he ever did, because his work from role to role is incomparable. All I can say for sure is Miller's Crossing and Murder on the Orient Express are the two Albert Finney movies I have seen most often. It doesn't matter if he's listed as the star or just a major supporting role, when I see him on screen, I immediately classify the work as an Albert Finney Movie.

I have no idea what he was like to work with, but the work itself will last forever. He was one of those actors who made the other actors around him look better than usual, and this includes some of the best known names in the industry.

Here's another shot from Miller's Crossing. Gabriel Byrne's character Tom searches for Verna and when he hears she's in the ladies' room he barges in unannounced. Finney has a cameo with no lines in the scene. That's him in the background in the maid's outfit. Just thinking of him deciding to spend so much time in the make-up chair for less than ten seconds of screen time makes me smile.

Best wishes to the family and friends of Albert Finney, from a fan.

We shall not see his like again.
 

The Draft, Part 2

My older brother Michael turned 18 in 1968. He had no plans to go to college, so a student deferment was not available. My father advised my brother about what to do when we went the draft board. He told Michael to make sure they knew about the pin in his leg, the result of a nasty motorcycle accident Michael had in high school. Dad recommended he affect a slight limp. My dad told him to tell the people inspecting him that he had heard the Army would pay to fix it.

All of these subterfuges had no effect, but Michael received a medical deferment just the same, due to his allergy to penicillin. I spoke to him just recently to make sure about the details, and he told me his official classification was 1-Y. He joked that with a 1-Y, it was likely our mom would be called up before he would.

 In December of 1969, the first of the draft lotteries was held, and the results would apply to men born between 1944 to 1950. Most of them would have already gone through the process, just as my brother had, but some of them would have deferments with a time limit on them, like those who were attending college. Those with low numbers would be conscripted, while those with high numbers would be spared. My brother was already effectively out of the system, so he paid no attention to the lottery. The number for his birthday was 69. Without the 1-Y, he would have been drafted and almost certainly sent to Vietnam, as was the case for many of his classmates.

I was five and a half years younger than my brother, with a birthday in late December. My time in the barrel came not when I was eighteen, when I registered, but instead when I turned twenty in 1975. Nixon was gone and Saigon had fallen, but I still might be forced to give up two years of my life to peacetime service, like Tom Lehrer and Jules Feiffer before me. Unlike my brother, I had gone to college and was still attending in 1975, but a low lottery number could render that moot. My lottery number was 310. If the Army didn’t change the rules, I had no reason to worry about the Selective Service.

The lottery’s introduced in 1969 was due to an executive order by Richard Nixon, in consultation with the armed forces. It’s doubtful this idea could have passed Congress at the time. Being seen as anti-draft was political poison in most of the country. Even so, the Army had always disliked the draft. It tended to produce very bad soldiers and the wars after World War II didn’t require the same level of manpower.

While it was young men, their friends and family who were marching in the street, the decision to kill the draft came from the military. Men in a smoke-filled room somewhere, men who had no reason to hide their contempt for the “dirty hippies” opposing the draft, effectively got rid of this system for their own reasons. Pleasing the protesters was neither here nor there to the Army, but Nixon did see the political advantage in taking an issue away from his political opponents. It was never presented as a concession to the anti-war movement. Nixon claimed he hadn’t seen the anti-war protests, that he had been watching sports on TV at the time. (Some of his publicly stated lies were just as transparent and foolish as Trump’s.) It was also made crystal clear that failing to sign up for the Selective Service was a crime and the government would still prosecute anyone who didn’t get a draft card.

The change was swift and the logic odd. Why would the government continue this bureaucracy and put the full force of the law behind it if wasn’t going to use the Selective Service to conscript young men in the army? Why did both major parties support a bureaucracy that effectively did nothing? Parties with anti-draft planks were small and had no clout, like the Libertarians or the Peace and Freedom Party. In 1976, the first presidential election that I was old enough to cast a vote, I registered Libertarian in large part because of my dislike of the draft, but also because of Nixon’s abuses of the FBI and IRS to go after his political enemies.

I voted for the Libertarian candidate Roger McBride for president in 1976. His claim to fame was as a “faithless elector” in 1972, casting his vote in the Electoral College for the Libertarian Party candidates instead of Nixon and Agnew, the ticket his group of electors had were meant to represent. 1972 was the first year the Libertarian Party had fielded candidates for president and vice-president. This is exactly the sort of pointless act of rebellion that appealed to me when I was young.

I even decided to attend a meeting of the Libertarians after the 1976 election was over. Within an hour of meeting my fellow party members, the bloom was off the romance. I was passionately against the Selective Service and COINTELPRO, and while I didn’t use drugs at the time, it was clear to me the War on Drugs was a bad idea. Others there, all of us relatively young white men, were equally passionate that not one penny of federal money should be spent to support the postal system.

I left the meeting with a very strong impression, one that has not changed in the more than forty years since. The Libertarian Party was chock full of nuts back then, and it hasn’t improved with age.

I write about the draft because it was a reality all young men faced, my brother and I included, both of us now in our sixties. Men just a few years younger than am I did not face this danger, and it has been dormant for decades, even now when the United States has been fighting wars that have lasted decades. When the draft existed, when young men were forced to give up years of their youth to be in the military or flee the country or go to jail, there was no serious political movement to abolish it. It moved forward through the decades by inertia. Your grandfather was drafted, your father was drafted, when the time came, you would be drafted. Then the draft effectively ended, though the bureaucracy to start it back up exists to this day. The inertia to maintain this new and opposite status quo is just as strong now. Neither major political party would have made abolishing the draft a plank in their platform even back in the height if the anti-war movement in the 1960s. Now, neither party would consider adding a plank to re-instate the draft. The popularity of war waxes and wanes, but the all-volunteer army is an idea that stays popular, regardless of what the government might ask those young volunteers to do.

The change was swift, implemented by executive decree and never turned into a political poker chip. It was Nixon who effectively ended the draft in his first term, but he never admitted it. He hated the anti-war movement and wouldn’t think of running in 1972 on the accomplishment removing this burden from the lives of all young men in the country. Publicly, the Selective Service was still presented as a legal obligation, punishable by jail time if any young man did not comply. But it collected those names, issued those draft cards and did nothing with them, the perfect example of a pointless bureaucracy.

We have lived with this charade for fifty years now. If I had my druthers, I’d see it shuttered, but there is no political will to do that either. It is likely kept in place waiting for a third world war, which these days would probably mean war with China, the only other true superpower. Russia is more than willing to rattle a sabre, but it fights now with political maneuvers because its military is deeply depleted by the loss of morale after Afghanistan and the generations of corruption of the country’s leadership, a corruption that continued and even grew after the Communist Party collapsed under Gorbachev and Yeltsin.

A major impetus for this blog are the recent historical fiction films like The Paper, Hidden Figures, BlacKkKlansman and On the Basis of Sex, stories about events that happened in my lifetime, stories that show young people how much different the world of their parents and grandparents was from life as it is lived now. I do not expect a movie about the end of the draft will soon grace the silver screen or even become a prestige mini-series. There was no underdog hero, there was no exciting courtroom drama. It was a backdoor deal and those who caused it would not even admit its main effect, the burden it lifted from the lives of all American young men.

I’m 63 now. If it returns, it is no concern of mine. Still, I am glad that men younger than I am have not had to endure what my dad and my brother and I did, and it is my fervent hope the unjust system never returns.

The Draft: Part 1

When I was a kid, I worried about being drafted. This was a completely normal worry for any American male who wasn’t planning on volunteering for military service, but most didn’t give it much thought until sometime close to their eighteenth birthday, when signing up for the Selective Service would be mandatory. I was worried well before I was ten, and I can still recall the grown-ups in my lives that helped fuel my anxiety, though only one of them knew me personally and none of them would have wanted me to worry as much as I did.

It was on a weekend sleepover at my Grandma Hubbard’s place that I first learned my dad had been drafted and that he served in Korea. I was between 5 and 10 years old. Grandma Hubbard ran a nursing home and staying at her place for a Friday and Saturday night was a treat all my siblings and I enjoyed. Staying in a nursing home might seem a dreary affair for a kid, but Grandma had a color TV before we did and a nice hi-fi system. More than that, she was a good cook. I especially remember her fried chicken and occasionally fried rabbit, a meal I enjoyed but never had before or since. More than that, some of the patients and nurses adored me. I say with no false modesty I was an adorable kid.

Among the patients, I particularly remember Mrs. Benjamin, who was 99 years old when I met her and devoted to the San Francisco Giants. We would sit together in the front room in rocking chairs, listening to Russ Hodges and Lon Simmons calling the games on the radio. Mrs. Benjamin did not make it to 100, dying just after the Giants lost the 1962 World Series, likely of a broken heart. Among the nurses, there was a large African American woman named Gussie who loved me to bits. She and I would play cards and I would cheat by announcing new rules when the game was nearly over.

“Now you let Gussie win sometimes!” Grandma Hubbard would scold. Gussie would just laugh.

It was one weekend I noticed a medal in my Grandma’s bedroom on her night stand. When I asked, she told me my father won it in Korea. He had safely landed a plane that had a wing shot off and soon after that, he was honorably discharged and came home. He didn’t want the medal and so he gave it to his mom for safekeeping.

All of this was news to me. My dad never spoke of his wartime experience before I saw the medal, but he was willing to speak of it now that I had questions. In all the time he was alive, I don’t ever remember him volunteering stories, but that one afternoon, I asked questions and he answered them.

It was 1950 when he was drafted at the age of 21. He married my mom before he left. She had a son by a previous marriage, my brother Michael, oldest of what would become a brood of five, two boys and three girls. My father adopted Michael and I considered him my brother, not my half-brother. I admit with shame that once during an argument, I referred to him as my half-brother and it clearly hurt his feelings. I never said it again. In reality, the distinction was meaningless to me. When I was born, my older brother Michael and my older sister Kim were already part of the household. He lived with us until he moved out as a young man. Michael was always there and he was always my brother.

My father had studied at University of California, but he had neither a student deferment or permission to avoid service as the breadwinner of a young family. As he put it, he was dragged from under a bed kicking and screaming and shipped off to Korea.

My father was sent to an accelerated boot camp, but even with his few college classes, he was not put on track to be an officer. More than the college credits, his most useful military skill was he already had a private pilot’s license. Regardless of that, he started his military career as a buck private and rose to the rank of corporal before he was cashiered and back to that truly desired rank, civilian.

Anyone familiar with military protocol will know that a corporal should not be flying a plane, but he was solo in a small cargo plane that lost a wing to enemy fire.

So how did a corporal find himself flying a military cargo plane? He was flying from the front line down to Seoul and back to pick up booze. The thinking was that he had shown he could fly and he was a skinny kid in early 20s. Giving him a co-pilot would mean the plane wouldn't carry as much whiskey. My dad joked that he had to land the plane safely because if he crashed, they might not be able to put out the fire for weeks. He also added that the parachute was not an option. He was terrified of parachutes.

The booze runs were a regularly scheduled part of my dad’s job. Every few weeks, his unit would need more refreshment and some officer, usually a lieutenant or captain, would knowingly lend my dad his uniform so he could fly the plane without arousing suspicion. My dad tells the story of some particularly thirsty full colonel offering his uniform, but this was vetoed. No one would believe someone could rise to rank of full colonel being as obviously young as my father at the time.

This had been going on for several months, clearly against military code but just as clearly sanctioned by his immediate chain of command. When he landed the crippled plane, the military magazine Stars and Stripes published the story and people other than his immediate superiors got wind of the situation. A decision had to be made whether to give him a medal for bravery or a court-martial for impersonating an officer. He got the medal, meaningless to him, and a discharge and ticket home, which were more valuable than gold.

This is not where the story ends. Months later, the Army is in touch and tells my dad they overpaid him $473.27 and would he please remit a check as soon as possible? (My father liked to make up numbers. In his defense, the story goes better if some exact numbers are chosen here.) Offended, he wrote back that they never overpaid him and in fact, because they had never given him flight pay, they actually owed him $790.84. They had given him a medal for flying, so they had to admit they knew, and flight is hazardous duty, so it earns extra pay. Letters went back and forth for months and the Army finally decided to give him the flight pay minus the amount they claimed he owed them.

As I said previously, all my dad’s stories highlighted the absurdity of army life, which prepared me very well for popular entertainment that would have the same theme. But I was kid and I asked questions, and those stories weren’t as funny.

Was he ever shot? No.

Did he ever kill anyone? Probably, was his answer.

He told the story of a battle where he and his comrades are entrenched on high ground and a North Korean troop tried to dislodge them. (I have no idea how many men are on either side of this battle. I was too young to ask.) The order is given to commence fire. The advancing North Koreans soon stopped advancing and fell to the ground, some of them returning fire. This goes on for some time, my father never stipulated how long. Eventually, most of the North Koreans retreat. The order is given to cease fire. It is finally quiet. Many North Koreans were not retreating. They were dead or wounded.

This is the only battle story my father told. There was no bravery or glory in it, just bullets at long range killing and wounding the enemy. I never asked about the casualties among his comrades.  One North Korean military commander tried to win a battle against the odds. He failed. Some number of men died due to his mistake, the majority of them his own troops. If there was any moral to this it was simply, war is boring.

I heard these stories in the early 1960s. I’m not sure if it was before or after Kennedy died. The United States had troops in Vietnam, but I likely learned this story from my dad before the big escalation ordered by LBJ. I was less than ten years old, but I realized the draft still existed and it was just waiting for me to come of age.

And then there was popular culture. I’m not sure where I was when I first heard Tom Lehrer, but I immediately fell in love. The first album I heard was An Evening (Wasted) with Tom Lehrer. I had never heard any music like this or even read liner notes like this, which generously quoted many of the worst reviews Lehrer ever got. The album opens with the morbidly cheerful Poisoning Pigeons in the Park and ends with one of his many songs about nuclear annihilation, We Will All Go Together When We Go. Along the way, he plays the song he wrote about his time as a draftee, It Makes a Fellow Proud to be a Soldier. It was like the stories of my dad’s experience had been turned into a peppy song with funny lyrics. I cannot overstate how much of an influence to this day Tom Lehrer has been in my life.

My next big influence was the Jules Feiffer cartoon Munro, made in 1959. I’m not sure when I saw it on TV, but it was a few years later on KQED, the local public station. It’s the story of a headstrong four-year-old being drafted. Coincidentally, I was four when the film was made, but older when I saw it. It captured my anxiety almost perfectly. Again, like my father’s stories and Tom Lehrer’s songs, the army was presented as an unrelenting and stupid bureaucracy, and I understood clearly in my pre-pubescent mind that it was just waiting for me to grow up. Lehrer and Feiffer have something in common. They were draftees, but were lucky enough not to see combat.

I was in high school when first read Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s Slaughterhouse Five, two of the great anti-war novels written by veterans of the allegedly Good War. Both enlisted after Pearl Harbor, so they were not draftees. I was pleased to find out, many years after reading their books, that Heller and Vonnegut were pals.  

The story goes that in the 1980s, Vonnegut and Heller are at a party being thrown by a hedge fund manager. Vonnegut tells Heller that last year, the host had made more money than Heller had made from decades of royalties on his bestselling Catch-22. “That may be true,” said Heller, “but I have something he will never have. I have enough.”

Years later, when politicians were coming out against the war, two of the earliest converts were Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota and George McGovern of South Dakota, both of them veterans of World War II and, not surprisingly, good friends.

It felt good to know there were adults who felt the way I did about war, but there was no significant faction of elected officials who were proposing getting rid of the draft. To oppose the draft was considered cowardly, an excuse for “lazy hippies”. Ironically enough, decades after Vietnam, many pro-war politicians were outed as draft dodgers as well, most notably Dick Cheney, the man largely responsible for the American misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, wars that turned into quagmires every bit as damaging to American power as Vietnam was, but with considerably lower American death tolls.

It appeared inevitable. The draft had caught my dad and Jules Feiffer and Tom Lehrer and it wasn’t going anywhere. It would be there to catch my older brother Michael and eventually, me.