I
needed someone with whom to talk it over. I would have called Elaine because, besides
being a chatterbox, she was one smart little cookie; however, since I knew she
was probably still peeved at me about bringing Shirley to the prom, I did not
call. Instead, after Dick left with the
car, I got on my bicycle and pedaled off to 13th and Kauffman to see
Patty Cross. It was a warm spring
evening and we sat on the concrete steps of the apartment. I told her all about it and how I felt—omitting
my wild idea about maybe going to the Naval Academy.
Patty
did not have to, nor did I expect her to, advise me. She simply listened patiently and let me get
it all out. Finally, she asked, “How
long would you have to sign up for?”
“One
cruise is six years. Could have signed
up for a short cruise—they call it a ‘diaper cruise’—if I had done it while I
was seventeen, but it is too late for that.”
“Well,”
she said as she snuggled against my shoulder, “six years is not all that long a
time. I would be out of high school
before then and probably have a job. Who
knows what may happen?”
When
Dick left to go back to Sa Diego four days later, I was still vacillating. The day after that, while I was changing the
women’s wear display in the window of the CC Store, I saw my old high school
advisor, Louis Barter, walking up the street.
I scrambled out of the display window, told one of the clerks that I was
taking a break, and caught up with Barter.
I invited him to have a beer with me at the Cave Tavern under the bank
across from the store.
Over
nickel glasses of beer, I told Barter my problem. I ended by asking, “What do you think I
should do, Mr. Barter?”
Barter
brushed the beer suds off his sand little mustache, looked keenly at me, and
said, “Look, Conrad, you want to be a naval officer and you want to fly. The best thing for you to do is to get two
years of college under your belt, then apply for the naval aviation cadet
program. Enlisting in the Navy in the
hope of making the academy would be a long-shot gamble at best.”
It
was not the answer I wanted to hear. I
could not see a possibility of making it to college in the near future. I did not believe that we had two or three
years before the United States would be forced into the war. I thanked Barter, paid for the beer, and
bought a package of Sen-Sen before I went back to the store.
Less
than a week later my mind was suddenly made up.
I had gone to a movie at the Castle Theater. The Lowell Thomas newsreel was devoted
entirely to the debacle at a town called Dunkirk where the remnants of the
British Army, under murderous fire from German guns and the Luftwaffe, was evacuated
from the continent. The newsreel closed
with a scene of Adolf Hitler dancing a little jig of elation outside the railroad
car at Versailles when the French capitulated.
The Nazis had full control of the continent of Europe.
