Having Healthy Bank of Memories Makes Growing Old Almost Palatable

We saw a movie last weekend by the enigmatic--and inexplicable--title of “Come See the Paradise.” It’s about the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II, a worthy theme but--I’m sorry to say--a pretty bad movie. But because it dealt with the period of the late 1930s and early ‘40s, I found it scratching a lot of memories that enabled me to avoid thinking very much about the movie.

Two scenes in particular sent me back through the years. Three young women did a takeoff of the Andrews Sisters singing “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree” that triggered the memory of an evening on Guam during World War II--I think it was Guam, those islands are sort of jumbled in my memory--when the real Andrews Sisters, very young and very popular, came out to entertain the troops.

These stars would arrive, usually with a half-dozen chorines and a stand-up comic, do a couple of shows, well-protected from the hungry souls out front who hadn’t seen an American woman in many months, then disappear into the sky, leaving behind a vague feeling of dissatisfaction that quickly replaced the exhilaration of the performance.

I suspect our troops in the Persian Gulf are feeling the same thing after seeing the carefully censored shows allowed them. And maybe one day a movie will trigger the same memories for them.

The other scene was a confrontation between baton-wielding police and workers trying to organize a food-processing plant. It brought me up short to realize how recently working people in this country won the right to organize--and how strongly and violently that effort was resisted.

I was around when John L. Lewis first organized the coal mines and Philip Murray created the first union to represent unskilled workers. I spent many days with David MacDonald, Murray’s top assistant and later head of the steelworkers’ union, ghosting a book for him recounting those years.

This is a period of American history seldom taught in our schools. I’m not sure why. It’s probably because the semester is running short and teachers want to have plenty of time to deal with World War II. But there may be another reason, too.

Except for the civil rights movement of the 1960s, no other period illustrated the reactionary and repressive instincts of many elements in the ruling elite of this country so well as the two decades in which labor unions fought and bled for the right to represent the American worker--and labor leaders were labeled Reds and Bolsheviks.

As so often happens with such affirmative movements, they have long since been corrupted, and now big labor is almost as reactionary as the management that once opposed it. But at least, I was around when an ideal was being pursued, and I not only saw it happen but talked with some of the people who made it happen.

Once I allow such thoughts to begin to germinate, it sets up a whole pattern of thinking that is triggered repeatedly by external trivia. To anyone who has lived as long as I have, virtually everything one sees or hears sets off an alarm ringing in the past.

For example, we rented a Doris Day movie over the holidays. Again, the movie didn’t engage me as much as the memory of Miss Day, pink, plump, and in her late teens singing “Sentimental Journey” in front of Les Brown’s orchestra, for whom she worked as a vocalist. I first saw a whole bevy of performers who later made it very big in the movies sitting on straight chairs at the end of a band platform and getting up periodically to do vocals. Besides Day, there was Frank Sinatra, Dick Haymes, Rosemary Clooney and Dorothy Lamour, among others.

They would play for our high school and college dances, and at nearby lakes during the summer. I wasn’t a good dancer, but I was energetic and enthusiastic--and I sweat a lot. Every woman in my life has had to endure that, and the high school girl I later married--who taught dance but never quite got it across to me--would frequently go home as wet as I was from dancing with me. I’ve never quite understood why any of them put up with it.

There was also a special on PBS about Benny Goodman that took me back to the Emboyd Theater in Fort Wayne, Ind. That’s where I first saw Goodman and his band, playing on stage between showings of a movie. The big bands did that, too, playing three shows a day. It cost 50 cents to get in, and although the management tried to prevent it, we would stay for two shows, and sometimes all three. I can still hear the sound of Goodman’s theme as his band was silhouetted behind the gauze curtain in front of the movie screen.

Such reflections are one of the few compensations for growing old. Longevity has very little else going for it, except, perhaps, some dubious wisdom and a greater likelihood of being able to put current happenings into a workable historical perspective. But these memories, by themselves, make aging almost palatable because they are rich and vivid and--yes--often rose-tinted. And it takes so little to set them off.

I saw a photograph in The Times recently of a group of soldiers standing in line with their laundry at a base in Saudi Arabia they had named “Camel Lot.” And it reminded me instantly of a crude wooden sign I had seen 46 years ago on a hillside in Guam, bitterly fought over a few weeks earlier. The sign pointed in two directions; one read “Tokyo 2,225 miles;” the other read “Des Moines 4,610 miles.” It was refreshing to know that kind of American humor still lives today.

Whenever I got disenchanted with my fellow countrymen, it was always the humor that brought me back. There’s nothing like it anywhere else in the world, and I’m irrevocably hooked on it.

Awhile back, I went over to UC Irvine to listen to one of my former students, Gordon McAlpine, read from his first novel, a delightful book called “Joy in Mudville” that has as its centerpiece the home run Babe Ruth apparently--and arrogantly--predicted in a World Series game against the Chicago Cubs. These events took place in the 1930s, and in the question session after the reading, one member of the audience asked the author to describe his research of that period--which he did in some detail. And I remember thinking, in great wonder, that all he had to do was ask me. I was there.

Whoever wrote “Come See the Paradise” could have done the same thing. I was around for all of that, too--and I think they would have had a better movie if they’d checked with me first.