PRIVATE FACES, PUBLIC PLACES : Fading Away, but Not Without a Fight

There are two large rooms in the American Legion Hall in South Gate. One is a bar: dark, night-filled, beer and old ashes, video games and television, men alone. The other is full of light and symbols of pride: a huge flag, prayers lovingly painted on wood, honor rolls, long tables and, on this Sunday midday, the laughter and easy exchange of 40 or so members of the B-17 Combat Crewmen & Wingmen Assn. of World War II. Men drawn within; next door, men reaching out.

The heads are white, balding, patched with small growths or sun freckles, backs are held stiffly, knees walk clumsily, hands are pudgy and well-used after 70 years and more. Ordinary men on a Sunday outing: Were they rich, successful men of glamorous lives, they probably would not be here in this anonymous patch of eastern Los Angeles on high noon of a weekend.

They are the men who are passed by without a glance at the Sizzler or as they stand by neat plastic suitcases in airports. Men who seem to have had smaller lives--their way of holding themselves demands no attention from the world, no homage nor particular respect.

Bud Kingsbury, for instance: treasurer, a plumber by trade--40 years of pipes and leaking joints, of commercial buildings and steady work. His wife of 47 years, Kay, is busying herself at the back of the room with a coffee urn and boxes of Winchell’s doughnuts. He has lived through it all: the terror, courage, heroism, unquestioning bravery, bailing out over far-away seas, the only survivor; he swam 21 miles to shore and spent two years in a German POW camp. Friends went down, but live still in memories as young, darkly handsome flyers. Marty, over there, once got in touch with one such flyer’s son--he wanted to tell him of his father, his valiance and death. The son, older by then than his father had been as a flyer, was embarrassed by it all, shied from the emotion, the untidiness of life’s breath.

Many are new to such gatherings. For years, they put together their lives, children were born and grew, the deadly challenge of war was exchanged for the tiny deadliness of making rent or mortgages. Most took what came, their years of flying put away as one folds a winter overcoat. And only now, as life narrows--as children leave, friends die, bodies betray--do they seek the warmth of old buddies, seeing themselves reflected in others’ eyes as once they were. Memory is a powerful and strange spirit.

Nor were their lives uneventful; that, too, is an illusion. Marty’s daughter died at the age of 10, of a brain tumor. He put off the life of a striving salesman, the quest for riches. He gave all he earned to one wife, then another, and ever since has worked for community interests, for associations, getting by. The large house in Hollywood became a small, unfurnished apartment in the Valley: another layer of memories.

There is a speaker today, as there usually is. Hans Langer was a pilot in the Luftwaffe, 1,500 missions, 63 kills confirmed, decorated by Hitler, almost 30 years’ service postwar with TWA.

The consummate irony of war: that enemies may reunite as brothers--except those who missed the dance of history when their lives were taken. For most of the men here, Langer comes as a comrade--the camaraderie of flyers, of fighters, of war--and as an American citizen settled in the pastel retirement of Long Beach.

But suddenly, the past and present merge as they are never meant to do. Hans’ comments on how the Luftwaffe would not have lost the war inflames Marty. His resentment bursts out and his voice rises, angrily filling the room, staining this nice, cozy warm afternoon with his anguish of what was. He is quickly reproved and the awkward moment is smoothed over in a glow of nostalgia.

But for a brief while, the nakedness was there: Two men met, not as elderly Americans, but as young, fierce enemies jumping into the void as flames lit like Hell around them.

We walk through life on a thin crust--and men are rarely as they seem.