1946-1953

EPILOGUE

1946 -1991

It is possible, grandchildren, that I may not have the time or energy to set down the details of my even more adventurous second quarter century; therefore, in this “epilogue” I shall simply summarize the events that led me all over the world and into a truly “golden” retirement.  Some of you might protest, “You have lots of time, Papa Con!” but I am approaching seventy years of age and much of the time left my beloved Phyllis and I intend to devote to us and to the travelling we would like to do.

My entire life has been full of adventure that I would like to record in detail later as Part III of my story.  Meanwhile, I hope that you have found the tales of my first quarter century interesting and perhaps amusing in places.  The following is but a bare summary outline of the events that led me all over the world and finally here to the peace and quiet of Sandy Point in the Pacific Northwest.

It took me two years to make the adjustment to civilian life in peacetime.  I first took a job at Meir & Frank in Portland, Oregon, selling ladies shoes.  That was not satisfying and did not last.

Conrad Frieze, graduation from OSC 1949

I then got a job in Vancouver, Washington at the courthouse as a draftsman for the county assessor.  During that two-year period, I realized one of my dreams—on the veteran’s G.I. Bill I started flying lessons and by 1948 it was time to complete my final year of college.  The University of Washington was over-crowded with returned veterans on the G.I. Bill and housing was hard to find in Seattle.  I settled on Oregon State College in Corvallis and in June of 1949 graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering with an Aeronautical Option.

My ambition was to be in the light plane industry as a designer; however, none of the light plane companies were hiring engineers.  It was a bad year in general aviation.  Then one day I spotted the new, swept-wing sleek Boeing experimental B-47 jet bomber sitting on the apron at Boeing Field.  I was entranced, applied for a job at Boeing, and was accepted as a junior engineer.

That began my lifetime career with Boeing.  It got off to a slow start.  I was put to work in the Tooling Department designing riveting jigs for the B-47.  It was not what I wanted.  Every day without fail I would stick my head into the cubbyhole office of Stan Little, the engineering representative and say, “Stan, when the hell are you going to get me a job in Flight Test?”

Wichita Flight Test

1950 – 1953

In February of 1950, my persistence paid off.  I got my job in Flight Test on the condition that I would go to Wichita, Kansas, for eighteen months to help set up the B-47 flight test program down there.  I was assigned as a flight test Operations engineer, planning test flights, obtaining and analyzing data, and writing test reports.

Except for being in the relative desolation of Kansas from the green mountains and ocean of the Pacific Northwest, it was a dream job.  In Wichita, I worked with a happy-go-lucky bunch of flight test engineers and test pilots who would become life-long friends.

I did not stay eighteen months in Wichita—I stayed three years, three months, and six days.  As the program built up I received regular promotions until I was a Flight Test Operations Engineer A and the lead engineer on the B-47 flight loads program.  Brian Wygle was the pilot, Ross Patrick the co-pilot, and I was the test engineer recording data while we flew the No. 2 B-47A to the limits of its structural design.

On February 19, 1951, I became a father.  Our little daughter Stephanie Kathryn was born.  Like most men I had hoped for a son, but Stephanie was adorable and was the apple of my eye.  I was a proud father and assumed a son (or sons) would come later.  (I was dead wrong.  It became apparent that Shirley had a great dread of getting pregnant and she instituted a strict regimen of birth control.  I accepted the situation, but I fear it laid a brick in the wall that would grow between us.)

[There is plenty that I can fault my mother for, but in her defense, I will tell you what she told me.  She told me that she had two miscarriages before having me and that after having successfully delivered me her doctor told her that further pregnancies would be a danger to her life.  My mother has a tendency to hear whatever is most dramatic and may have exaggerated her doctor’s advice.  It would not be the last time.  I spent a childhood (and my adult life) wishing I had siblings so my father wasn’t alone there and adoption seemed to be out of the question.]

The End of an Era

The biggest change at ComNastsAsia came early in May when we had our change of command.  Captain Luthi was replaced by a “by-the-book” Annapolis man, Captain Williams Soech (pronounced “Shay”), USN.  The relaxed days were suddenly gone.  Now we were required to wear our black neckties in the office and shined black shoes. Reserving our old boondockers for duties outside.  We no longer flipped our captain a casual morning salute, but snapped one off crisply with military precision.

Shoech was a fair man but tough.  Every regulation was enforced.  The pass-through in the office was closed up, a new intercom system installed, and the offices were re-decorated.  Visitors no longer sauntered casually into the captain’s office but had to make a formal appointment through me.  When a VIP captain was due to visit, I was required to look him up in the Annapolis register to find if he was senior to Shoech in date of rank.  (Carl Luthi had not given a damn about date of rank.  He had been casual with VIP visitors all the way up to the rank of Rear Admiral.)

Part of the change in life on Guam was the arrival of our spouses on the 22^nd of May.  Spaulding and I laid on a large cocktail party at our quarters in their honor and it was well attended by officers from the captain on down and the small handful of wives that already had arrived on the island or came on the GENERAL MITCHELL.

It was, no doubt, a dull existence for our wives. There was little to do on Guam except some sightseeing around the island, an outside movie theater, the officer’s club at ComMarianas, and occasional parties.  It was bearable, but occasionally Shirley would voice her dissatisfaction with the Navy wives pecking order that was established by the husband’s rank.  A Reserve ensign was the lowest of the low seated “below the salt” at any table.  The same applied to Shirley at Navy wives functions.  She resented that.

My required year of active duty would be up in November of 1946; therefore, it was time to decide what I was going to do.  I started the paperwork applying for transfer to the Regular Navy.  Meanwhile, I applied for retention on active duty for another year.  (Shirley was not exactly pleased about that.  She preferred to return to civilian life, being simply no cut out to be a Navy wife.)

The situation resulted in some heated arguments on the subject.  I tried to confine them to times when we were off in the jeep or away from others at the beach at Talofofo Bay across the island, but Commander Spaulding and his lovely brunette wife were fully aware that life was not too rosy for Ensign Frieze and his wife.

In addition, we Reserve junior officers did not take entirely to the spit and polish of the peacetime Navy.  We soon formed an informal organization called “The Pissed Officers Club” complete with private stationary on which we wrote our informal memos to each other.  Our crest was crossed purple shafts (we felt that in some respects we were being given “the purple shaft” without benefit of Vaseline) on which was superimposed a thunder mug called “Supreme Latrine” and our motto was “A Bitch In Time Saves Nine!”  Commander Spaulding provided the motto and he and our Reserve Commander Ben Hardin, NATS Asia executive officer, were the only senior officers ever to become PSOB (“Brother Son of a Bitch”).

Finally, the dissatisfaction at the office pus the occasional bursts of temper in our private life got to be too much.  Although I longed to have “USN” instead of “USNR” after my name, the day before I was to take my application for transfer to the Regular Navy which had been approved by Captain Shoech to ComMarianas for submission I tore it up and threw the pieces into the wastebasket.

It is possible that I might have reconsidered and taken a different course (I apparently had to make a choice between Shirley and the Navy); however, in June of 1946 I received notice that my application for a one-year extension of active duty had been rejected as the Navy cut down on personnel.  As of August 20^th, of that year I would go on inactive duty in the Naval Reserve.

After a rousing going away party thrown by my enlisted men for their “mustang” officer, I was detached from ComNatsAsia and we sailed on the USS GENERAL MANN for San Francisco and the separation center.  It was the end of my active duty with the Navy and the close of my first quarter century.

My Navy career was not yet completely over.  When I returned to Vancouver to try to find a job and consider finishing the year I needed for my bachelor’s degree in Aeronautical Engineering, I joined the Voluntary Reserve and, later after we moved to Seattle, obtained a billet as ordnance officer in a Reserve fighter squadron at the Sand Point Naval Air Station.  By then I had been promoted to lieutenant, junior grade, and was taking correspondence courses to be ready to accept promotion to full lieutenant.  in effect, however, it was the end of an era in my young life.

[It is tempting to feel bad (and I have) for my father at his giving in to my mother and leaving the Navy, but the promotions were going to men who had been to Annapolis and you may recall that his test and chances of that had gone literally up in smoke on December 7^th 1941.  As it turned out his career path allowed him to see as much, maybe more, of the world than if he’d stayed in the Navy.]

Guam

On Guam in 1946, where I landed in mid-January, I was assigned as Staff Secretary to ComNatsAsia in the headquarters offices at Agana Naval Air Base.  The first few months were a happy time.  The commander of the Asiatic Wing of NATS was a wartime reserve captain, Carl Luthi, once a pilot with Northwest Airlines.  He ran a very relaxed and informal staff.

We had a crude “squawk box” system between offices; however, Captain Luthi did not like being sequestered alone in his office.  He had a pass-through hole in his office so that his desk and mine as staff secretary and administrative aide in the anteroom with our yeoman were effectively side by side and we could chat back and forth.

I was the junior member of a staff of nineteen officers.  Most were reserves with airline backgrounds.  Luthi liked the informality of the wartime Navy and kept it that way.  In the tropical heat we were not required to wear neckties during working hurs and our footwear was unshineable “boondocker” work shoes.

The quarters assigned me were a room at the BOQ at Commander, Marianas, headquarters high on a hill overlooking Agana Harbor and a Japanese prisoner of war camp that was still well filled.  (The Marines were still bringing more holdout Japanese soldiers out of the jungle almost daily.)

We were two to a room at ConMarianas and my roommate turned out to be Commander Earl Spaulding, the senior medical officer on the island and a very likeable officer.  Spaulding had a hospital at Agana NAB and a staff of nurses who resided in a guarded compound of Quonset huts adjacent to the ComNatsAsia offices on the base, also a series of Quonset huts.  That period from January to May of 1946 was a pleasant time in my Navy career, then changes started to occur.

The changes started gradually as the Navy began converting back to a spit-and-polish peacetime basis.  Some of or relaxed reservists began to be replaced by Regular Navy officers.  We soon were informed that included ComNatsAsia and Carl Luthi would be replaced by a career Regular Navy captain.

Meanwhile, we merrily went on our relaxed way.  Even though I was the junior officer, I was accorded some consideration by my fellow officers since one of my collateral duties was Motor Transportation officer and I controlled the assignment of jeeps from our motor pool. (Inevitably, I drove one of the newest of the jeeps.)

We found in March that the Navy was going to allow dependents to come to Guam as long as quarters for married couples could e arranged.  A housing area of married Quonset huts across the base was being set up but would not be ready for occupancy in the near future.

Commander Spaulding, my roommate at ComMarianas, came up with a great idea.  In the nurses compound at Agana NAB there was an extra Quonset set aside for the senior medical officer.  Spaulding had not occupied it because he enjoyed the camaraderie of the BOQ and the nearby ComMarianas officers’ club which was considerably more luxurious than the one on our base.  Earl’s idea was for the two of us to convert the senior medical officer’s Quonset to a two-bedroom dwelling and we could both have our wives come to Guam.

We worked on that Quonset ourselves every evening after working hours and on weekends using scrounged materials.  Meanwhile, in my assignment as Staff Secretary, I was in a position to hand walk our paperwork through the captain and through ComMarianas for approval.  On the 20^th of March we applied for transportation for our wives to Guam.

Spaulding turned out to be a scrounger without peer when it came to furnishing our residence.  We seldom bothered with requisitions for furniture, but scrounged our own.  It was easy because some of the bases on Guam had already been abandoned, but the furnishings not yet removed.  Earl spotted an abandoned Marine base somewhere on the far side of the island.  As Motor Transportation officer, I issued truck trip passes and, for a bottle of booze, we could always get some of our enlisted men to help.

While I worked on wall finishing, Spaulding would disappear across the island with a truck and a couple of men.  He would return with, first of all, bathroom and kitchen fixtures, then living room furnishings from the abandoned Marine officers’ club.

Beds were another problem.  All we could find were regulation cots with thin mattresses until Early came up with another idea.  At the ComMarianas BOQ we slept in comfort on good Beautyrest single mattresses.  There was a BOQ two-story Quonset building that had never been occupied and it had a plentiful supply of new beds and mattresses, but our requisitions failed to produce any.  Ingenuity was required as, before we had our quarters completely furnished, our wives had sailed from San Francisco on the Navy transport USS GENERAL MITCHELL.  They were due to arrive together the third week in May.

We mounted a “Mission Impossible” type operation that reminded me of my procurement of hand tools at Ile Nou except this one required some close timing.  Earl had already paid off the CPO who was ComMarianas Master at Arms in charge of the buildings with a bottle of good scotch.  I issued an evening truck pass and got two of our enlisted men to assist.

On the appointed evening, Dr. Spaulding drove his chief nurse to the ComMarinanas officers’ club for dinner where he proceeded to apparently get quite drunk.  It was part of the plan that had to be executed with literally split second timing.  The key was that an officer escorting a female off base at night was required to be armed.  Spaulding wore his 45-caliber sidearm.

While they had dinner and Spaulding drank enough afterward to have booze on his breath, I took the truck work party to ComMarianas and located the unused building.  The Master at Arms was there, unlocked the door, then quietly disappeared.  We loaded four of the single beds that could be pushed together to form doubles and waited in the darkness until Spaulding hand his nurse appeared in the parking lot.

The main gate at ComMarianas had a double lane with a Marine guard on each.  We timed our arrivals at the gate so that Spaulding got there a few seconds Ahead of the truck.  When we pulled up Spaulding was in an argument with the one guard who had checked his sidearm and found that there was no magazine in the pistol.  The guard was insisting that he had to go back and get a magazine or he was not armed to escort the nurse back to Agana.

While Spaulding argued, apparently, a bit tipsy, the guard on my side was distracted by listening in on the conversation of the drunken commander.  He casually looked at my trip pass, did not inspect the cargo of the truck, and waved us on through the gate.  As we disappeared down the road, Earl suddenly found the magazine for his pistol under the Jeep seat and, he too, was waved on through.  Operation Bedsnatch was a complete success.  We had our beds and the boys who helped us had enough booze to throw a party in their quarters to which Earl and I were invited.  We went.

A Wedding, a Transfer, and a Sentimental Journey

Chapter 37

End of an Era

The wedding took place in St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Vancouver, Washington, on November 8^th, 1945.  Since Johnny Berry could not be there, my best man was Pat Madden, an old VHS classmate and husband of Shirley’s sister Mary.

We borrowed my father’s car (by then the old Chevy had been replaced by a newer Plymouth sedan) and spent our wedding night in the New Heathman Hotel in Portland.  The balance of our honeymoon was spent at the Mills family beach house at Seaview, Washington.

After the honeymoon, accompanied by my new wife, I reported in at Moffet Field near Los Altos, California.  There I was assigned temporary duty in the Inspection Division of VR_4, a squadron of Douglas R5D four-engined transport planes of the Asiatic Wing of the Naval Air Transport Service (NATS).

It was in California that I first became aware that Shirley was not going to be happy as a Navy wife.  She disliked hotel living so we moved to a furnished room in Los Altos.  After a party at the Moffet Field Officers’ Club late in November, Shirley expressed unhappiness at the Navy wives pecking order.  Among them, being the wife of a lowly ensign, she was low on the totem pole.  Otherwise, we were quite happy.

During the first week of January, 1946, orders came for me to report to the staff of Commander, Naval Air Transport Service, Asiatic Wing on Guam.  While I awaited transportation to Guam, Shirley’s parents flew down to Los Altos to drive back to Vancouver with her.

On the evening of January 9^th, we went to the Naval Air Station at Oakland for me to catch one of the VR-4s airplane to Honolulu.  There we were all subjected to a bit of a fright.  As the airplane taxied out for takeoff near dark, Shirley and her parents watched from the observation platform on the roof of the terminal building.  Just s the R5D got airborne, I became aware of a glow outside my window.  The number four engine was on fire!

We made a tight pattern around the field, trailing a thirty-foot plume of flame while four ambulances and fire trucks raced to the end of the runway.  Fortunately, the fire was simply burning grease and oil on the engine set on fire by a faulty high tension lead in the ignition systems and was quickly put out.  We drove back to Los Altos for the night while the plane was being repaired.  

I guess my bride was more than a bit tense when we reported back the next morning.  She had noticed the tail number of the airplane that caught fire and we were leaving in the same airplane.  I assured her that it had been repaired and that the Douglas airplanes were very reliable.

To me, it felt like a homecoming when we landed at Hickam Field near Pearl Harbor.  I relished the warm breeze that stirred the coconut palms when I stepped off the plane.  The situation was a bit dreamlike.  Only five short years before, I had arrived on TIPPICANOE, a young and inexperienced seaman second class.  Now, with the war behind us, I had returned wearing the gold braid of a Naval officer.

I soon found how irrevocably my life had changed.  I checked into the BOQ at Fort DeRussey in Waikiki for the two-day wait for further transportation to Guam.  First I had a drink in the Banyan Court of the Moana Hotel which had once not welcomed me as an enlisted man.  I then rented a car.

For old times’ sake I stopped at the Black Cat on Beretania Street for a drink.  The bar had not changed and was still a hangout for enlisted men.  It was a lesson that there comes a time when you can’t really “go back”.  The several enlisted men stared at me and edged away at the batr until the bartender came to my rescue.  Spotting the red good conduct ribbon I wore, the bartender called out, “Hey. Fellows, he’s a mustang!”

(“Mustang” is the cognomen applied to officers who were  once enlisted men.  I was to find that in many situations that red ribbon was to my advantage in dealing with enlisted men.)

From the Black Cat I drove over the Pali to Kaneohe to see Ludi Carpenter who had once been a surrogate mother to me, stopping at Lilly’s Fruit Stand on the old road to buy her a bag of fruit.  It was not a happy visit.  Ludi welcomed me with a big smile and hug.  Admired my officer’s uniform, but then had a sad story that was all too common in the islands.  Carpenter had abandoned her and the several children for a stateside haole wahine sometime during the war.

My visit to NAS Kaneohe was a real exercise in nostalgia.  PBYs still lined the wide ramp.  There were the marks of bullets still visible in our old hangar.  I stood for long moments on the patched area in the ramp where there had once been that bomb crater in which Richard and I had set up the machine gun after the attack.  I could almost hear the snarl of diving airplanes again, the thudding of machine guns, the whine of ricocheting bullets, and the explosions of bombs.  The scenes were still fresh in my mind and I had a feeling of pride that we had been there.

After lunch at the Kaneohe Officers’ Club, I drove back to Waikiki via Kaimuki and the little house at 1256A Ekaha Street then tracked down Diane and invited her for a drink at the old Waikiki Tavern.  That was a happier time in spite of the cloud of the divorce form Dick.  She was no longer with the Marine but lived in a hotel for women only and had started playing golf professionally.  She, too, admired my uniform and was mystified at how I had found her until I explained that I simply had called one of her brothers.

Diane and I had dinner at the one taboo Banyan Court of the Moana.  Sitting there in the warm darkness after sunset with the glow of candles on the white linen, silver, and the gold bars on my collar I could have sworn I saw, outside the wrought iron fence, a white-clad young seaman looking wistfully in at us.  Perhaps it was only a figment of my imagination.

(I was back in Hawaii about every five years of my first sixty and watched the changes as they took plae.  In the 1940s I love Hawaii and each return was a sort of homecoming except that I was sad as the influx of tourists wrought radical changes, first on Oahu, then on the other islands.

I watched the freeways go in, first replacing the dusty road to Pearl Harbor.  The exciting old road over the crest of the Pali was closed when the four lanes through a tunnel were completed in the late Fifties.

Periodically, from the vantage point of Punchbowl Hill where the World War II military cemetery and memorial were built, I watched the carpet of green that was Waikiki except for the white bulk of the Mona and the pink pile of the Royal Hawaiian give way to a concrete jungle of high-rise resort hotels.

In later years came hordes of our old enemy, the Japanese.  They came first as tourists with cameras slung about their necks, then they came as prosperous businessmen carrying briefcases.  They could not conquest Hawaii so, after the U.S. occupation brought them to unprecedented prosperity, they proceeded to buy most of it.  I no longer care to go back.  My Hawaii is long since gone.)

A Commission and Moving On

"I sat by the window feeling a mixture of regret and elation as the train clacked west across the darkening Midwest."

Our commissioning ceremony was on 2 November 1945 and, suddenly, one of my ambitions had been achieved.  I was now Ensign C.R. Frieze, AL, USNR, wearing the gold braid of a naval officer.  (The “AL” denoted aviation ground officer.)  My orders were to proceed on two weeks delayed orders and report to Moffet Field, California to the Commander, Naval Air Transport Service, Asiatic Wing.

My good friend Johnny Berry got together with me after the commissioning ceremony.  Johnny’s situation was similar to mine.  His fiancée, Nona, was waiting for him in his home town of Anaconda, Montana.  I had wanted him to come to Vancouver and be my best man on November 8^th, but his wedding was scheduled for November 5^th.  We planned to ride the “Toonerville Trolley” from South Bend to Chicago, then catch a train west, he dropping off in Anaconda.

We bought a bottle of bourbon to celebrate on the train.  It was a mistake for Johnny.  He was not as used to drinking as was old “Pappy” Frieze and promptly got a bit “under the weather”.  I was a bit foggy myself when we got to Chicago and first took us to the wrong train station.  I finally found the right one, then had to find the ticket window for the Great Northern.

Johnny was enough out of it that, at each stop, I would sit him down on his B-4 bag with our luggage and say, “Don’t move, Johnny.  You sit right there and I’ll be right back,” then I would go off to get our tickets.  Fortunately, I was sober enough to manage, got our tickets, and found the right platform to catch our train.

I sat by the window feeling a mixture of regret and elation as the train clacked west across the darkening Midwest.  I thought sadly of my carefree days wearing the white hat of an enlisted man and I thought about Midge back in South Bend.  On the other hand, there was my commission and a buxom blonde with Betty Grable legs waiting in Vancouver to marry me.  I finished the bottle of bourbon and fell asleep.

The End of the War and the Beginning of Something Else

Although we were strictly disciplined, our social lives went on during weekend liberty.  We were encouraged to attend events rather than hang out in bars and were expected to project a gentlemanly image.  Once we were in our grey midshipman uniforms, I rarely went back to the Music Box. I did stop one evening for a drink in the bar but the oldy at the organ did not recognize me in my officer-type uniform.  After that, Johnny Berry and I had “happy hour” at the bar in the LaSalle Hotel where we taught the bartender how to make an “Ile Nou Cocktail” from grain alcohol and grapefruit juice.  On our free Saturday evenings, we went to movies, bowled, or attended a USO or St. Mary’s dance.

The end of World War II same came on 14 August 1945 after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  It was not a liberty night for we midshipmen and we were not given special liberty.  We had to be content with listening from our dormitory windows to the celebrations in South Bend.  Already knowing that the end of the war was imminent, it was almost anti-climactic to us.  We listened for a while then went back to our studies and to the scuttlebutt as to what would happen to us.

Off and on there were many rumors passed around.  One was that we would simply be discharged and sent home.  Another was that upon commissioning we might either apply for transfer to the regular Navy as ensigns or else go on inactive duty as Ensign, USNR.  A third, shortly after V-J Day, was that with so many officers out there wanting to return to civilian life, we would be commissioned in the regular Navy.  Al proved to be untrue.  (In actual fact we were commissioned ensigns in the Naval Reserve and were required to serve at least a year on active duty before making the choice of transfer to the regular Navy or going on inactive duty but with continued participation in a Naval Reserve unit.)

Early in September we ordered and were fitted for our officer’s uniforms, dress blues and khakis.  That was when I met “Midge”.  When I went ashore for my fitting at the uniform shop, it occurred to me that I had seen officers carrying suitcases instead of seabags.  After my fitting, dressed in my sub-battalion commander’s greys, I dropped into a luggage shop to order a leather suitcase.

I was struck dumb and tongue-tied when I confronted the young lady behind the counter.  She was one of the most beautiful girls I had ever met.  She was small with a slender but mature figure beneath a simple dress.  A mane of chestnut hair framed an exquisitely molded face with eyes more blue than my own.  She was a sort of combination of today’s Christie Brinkley and Vanna White.  I had barely enough presence of mind to note that the small hands resting on the glass countertop held no rings.  I judged she must be about twenty years old.  Her voice was low and musical when she said, “Yes—may I help you, sir?”

When I explained what I wanted, together we selected a brown leather suitcase.  While she filled out the sales slip and I tried not to stare dumbly at her beautiful features, I stated that I would like my initials stamped in gold on the suitcase.  She assured me that could be done right there at the shop.

She then asked, “Will there be anything else, sir?”

I smiled and took the direct approach, “Yes.  I would like your name and telephoe number.  You happened to be the prettiest girl I ever had the good fortune to meet!”

The girl was silent for a minute while she coolly looked me up and down then those gorgeous eyes came to rest on my campaign bars and she touched them with a finger.  “How did a midshipman get those?”

I explained that I had been in the Navy for two years before I was selected for the officer training program.  She was silent again for a moment then her eyes, now twinkling like first magnitude stars, met mine. 

“Well, my name is Elizabeth, but my big brothers call me ‘Midget’.  I prefer ‘Midge’.”

Meanwhile, she finished the sales slip while I reached for my wallet.  When I looked at the slip for the total, I saw a local telephone number written across the top.  I did not want to overdo it with this one so I paid for the suitcase, folded the sales slip, placed it carefully in my wallet and said with a grin, “Thank you, ma’am.  I’ll be back Saturday to pick up the suitcase and I expect you will be hearing form me!”

Hear from me, Midge did.  I telephone her that evening and she accepted a date for dinner and a movie on Saturday.  We never made it to the movie.  I selected the best restaurant in South Bend and we sat and talked so long over dinner and dessert that the last show had started before we realized how the time had gone by.

It developed that Midge was a very intelligent young lady.  She was sensible and she knew as much about the course of the war as I did.  She was twenty-one, not twenty, and she lived at home with her parents.  She had two older brothers, both of whom were in the service—one Army and one Navy.

While we were getting acquainted over dinner, Midge asked if I had a girl back home.  I was honest up to a point, “Sure I do, but home is a long way away.  I expect most fellows have, just like I expect that you have a boyfriend around somewhere as beautiful as you are!”  (I stopped short of telling her I was engaged.)

“That’s pure blarney, sailor, and I love it!  Yes, there are some that hang around but no one special.  I plan to go to L.A. soon to visit relatives and they tell me I should try out as a model.  I haven’t wanted any permanent attachment yet.”

I took a deep breath.  “Look, Midge, Midshipman’s Ball for my battalion is coming up the 21^st.  I would like it very much if you would be my date.  It is our one big formal event on campus.”

My heart came as near to beating fast as it had in four long years when Midge turned on that beautiful mile and simply said, “I would like that very much, Midshipman Frieze.”

That ball is a treasured memory of my days at Notre Dame.  When I picked Midge up in a taxi that evening with a corsage of a single gardenia in hand, she was beautifully groomed and wearing a formal gown with a black lace top.  She did not coyly keep me waiting but was ready.  She introduced me to her parents, placed the gardenia in her hair over her left ear so it would not get bruised while we danced, and was ready to go.

There was a host of lovely girls at the ball with my shipmates but none more beautiful than petite Midge.  On the dance floor, she was a feather in my arms.  It seemed a very short time before the dance band was playing “Good Night, Ladies” and I had to take her home.  On the darkened porch Midge thanked me and came up on tiptoe to give me a quick kiss on the cheek.  Vancouver seemed very far away and the odor of gardenias can still remind me of that balmy September evening.

My final month at Notre Dame passed swiftly.  My log indicates that we completed our final examinations on the 25^th of October.  I finished with a 3.8 grade average.  Baccalaureate was on Sunday the 28^th of October.  

Midge and I dated on two or three weekends during my final month at Notre Dame.  It was obvious she liked me and liked to be with me and I was quite devoted to her.  When I saw her I did, indeed, have a protective feeling and even a pang of jealousy one weekend when she did not go out with me, but went instead to a football game in Chicago with one of her brothers home on leave.

If this were a romantic novel, I would have phone Shirley, called off the wedding, and Midge and I might have wound up together.  The thought crossed my mind more than once during those days in South Bend.

It was not to be.  The old Ozark boy had given his word, the wedding preparations were complete, and gifts were already coming in at the Mills house.  I agonized over it and simply did not have the guts to do it.

I put it off until the first of November then, at the luggage shop the day before I was commissioned, I painfully told little Midge the whole truth.  She reacted a bit numbly and just said something like, “Well, that’s tough.”  Her impossibly blue eyes were sad when we said goodbye.  I left the shop feeling like a louse and not walking very tall.

[Were this a movie, there would be the sound of a record screeching to a halt here.  The elephant in the room is the question as to why my father married my mother, particularly when it seems that he didn’t intend to get engaged to her in the first place.  Despite the fact that I would have not existed or been someone else (there’s an intriguing thought), I wish that he would have displayed the same courage that he did on December 7^th and told her that, no, that he hadn’t meant marriage or realized that friends and family saw what he could not—they were ill suited.  I was born six years into their marriage and my father stayed for me, of that I am sure.  In 1968 I became engaged and not far into 1969, satisfied that he was going to turn me over to a nice young sailor (a Navy man’s dream), my father left our home in Bellevue, Washington.  His explanation to me was pretty similar to what he wrote in his memoir, he simply had never really loved my mother.  She did love him despite the fact that she was terribly damaged by her alcoholic mother and suffered from anger issues that made life in suburbia less than Ozzie and Harriet at times.  There is a fine line between love and hate and my mother crossed it in 1969.  Bitterness filled her life until my father’s death in 2002.  Fortunately, for him, my father did find happiness with my step-mother Phyllis.  They married in December 1973 and were very happy ever after, she keeping him at home until his death.]

(Midge did, indeed, make it as a model.  Four or five years later I was diving into downtown Seattle from East Marginal Way and there on a billboard advertising bread was Midge’s wholesome, All-American, smiling face.  My wife, Shirley, never understood—and I did not enlighten her—why I almost ran into a lamp post on a clear day in light traffic.

I glimpsed Midge once more about ten years later in a television commercial.  I do not remember what it advertised, but she was playing the part of a young matron with some children.  She was still slender and there was no mistaking that lovely face, low voice, and auburn hair.  She looked, sounded, and acted very happy.  I felt very glad for her.)