To those of us who were there it seems like last Tuesday, even as America dutifully observes the half-century anniversaries of the great events of "the last good war." Can it be that those innocent kids with whom I went off to fight are the same gnarled grandfathers now recounting their ordeals for the television cameras? This makes me wonder what befell my best friends from the early days of the war: all those tenors, basses and baritones.
Tenors, basses and baritones? Yes, indeed.
It is October 1942. At this time draftees go only into the army; the U.S. Navy is still all-volunteer, and proud of it. The army to me is represented by albums of horror photographs of World War I, the mud, mayhem and doughboy corpses of the stalemate in Europe. With the draft board threatening to collar me, I volunteer for what I perceive as the brisk, clean, mudless U.S. Navy -- Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler dancing on a battleship. Anchors Aweigh!
I am torn from family security and college education to face the rumored agonies of boot camp. Apprehensive fellow recruits and I endure a lonely all-night Baltimore-Chicago train ride, arriving weary at the huge Great Lakes Naval Training station for the harrowing ordeal of induction. Hounded by bellowing coxswains into a processing building, we are deprived of civilian clothes, lined up stark naked to be stabbed, bled and queried as to whether we like girls, and finally uniformed and herded into the barracks of a boot company.
Expecting only misery for the next four weeks, and real war after that, we are immediately coerced into to some kind of conclave in a neighboring drill hall. Up to this time we have seen only power-mad petty officers and surly chiefs, but suddenly before us is a real officer with the exalted gold stripes of a lieutenant commander.
He's no brute; to the contrary he's an affable, ebullient fellow, who cracks a few unfunny jokes and tells us he needs men who can -- would you believe it -- sing. And anyone so inclined should report to an adjacent room. Complying (I love to sing), but utterly confused, I am confronted with a sailor at a piano. He gives me a hymn -- "We've a Story to Tell to the Nations" -- to sight-read and then asks me to sing a scale.
The Navy never tells you any thing, so that afternoon when my name is one of 10 called out in the 120-man boot company, I have no idea to what punishment or reward I am sentenced. Lugging our gear, we are escorted to another barracks, already filling up with other puzzled recruits. There we learn the incredible truth. We, a special company, will spend the next four weeks singing, as part of the famous Great Lakes Choir.
Now, as others grovel before tyrannical chief bosun's mates on the drill field, we happy few rehearse hymns under skilled choirmasters recruited, like us, into the Navy. Our principal soloist is John Carter, tenor of the Metropolitan Opera and star of radio's "Chase and Sanborn Hour." The lieutenant commander turns out to be Hjalmar Hansen, a noted choir director. Every Sunday morning, we sing at three chapel services, Sunday afternoons we sing on the radio for a Chicago station. Each Friday night comes the climactic event. We are the stars of "Meet Your Navy," coast-to-coast on NBC, sponsored by Hallmark.
The Navy in 1942, whether Baptists like it nor not, conducts an
Episcopal chapel service for everyone except Catholics. At the Apostles' Creed and the part about believing in "the holy catholic church," some of the boys from Dixie balk. Over and over the chaplains have to explain, "It means the universal church, fellows, not the Roman Catholic church." Some of them remain suspicious. I, totally unchurched but happy singing hymns, don't care. My newest friend in the choir, Sam Lawent, cares even less. He's Jewish.
I figure it can't get any better -- but it does. When the four weeks of boot camp are over and the end of our gravy boat looms, six of us, mirabile dictu, are appointed to the "Retained Choir." This means we go right on singing, but as an elite group, backing up the boot-camp choir. We give concerts in Chicago, Racine and Milwaukee. We do a network Christmas gala with the Metropolitan Opera. We meet girls.
But I can't beat the rap for the whole war. After four tuneful months, Sam and I are abruptly rotated out, lowly second-class seamen again, and in my future are 22 homesick months in the South Pacific. No hymns, no girls -- but that's a story for another day.
Gwinn Owens is a retired Evening Sun editorial writer.