From the Vault of Art Shay: Anniversaries
By Staff in News on May 4, 2011 4:00PM
Sixty seven years ago today, the night preceding a similarly lovely second day in May, using the stars of Orion plus Capella and Arcturus, peering through my sextant, I navigated our B-24 Sweet Sue from Goose Bay, Labrador to a magically verdant landfall at dawn near Derrynacross, Ireland (where fisherman hollered at us as they once cheered Lindbergh on to the east, waving towards Paris), to a smooth landing at Tibenham in East Anglia. The very next day our 500 pounders -- on which I chalked the names of my baby twin brothers, Barry and Stu -- took out the long black hangars adjoining Orly Airfield in Paris in which Marshall Goering would now no longer be able to service his Nazi fighter planes. Barry would one day help develop the communications system of a future Air Force One and Stu would co-head an aviation company now being wooed by several big time suitors. It's all connected, as Studs often averred.
En route to our initial bombing point, amid sporadic German 88mm bursts of flak, I saw and photographed the Eiffel Tower from the air as my father had done during peacetime from the ground in 1906, when he went up (at 24) in a tethered hot air balloon and safely back down, basket and all, from the Paris garden of the Tuilleries. It was in these gardens where Hemingway would describe to me in 1945 how he trapped pigeons in a shoe box so that Gertrude Stein would have something to cook for him and her weird brother Leo, who spoiled Ernie's lunch telling him that pigeons tasted like undercooked rat.
When I was a boy in the 20s and 30s, I used to rummage in my father's junk drawer and lovingly gaze at postcard views of relatives who shared my DNA, but for reasons of death or distance I would never meet: rioting fellow political activist friends of my dad's; atheist radicals being beaten by the Tsar's police or free-lance Cossacks; a secret armed society of Jews with revolvers, peaceful Uncle Isaac wildly aiming at the sky in their midst. Of giant ships with German and English names - Friedrichshaven and Cunard in gloomy docks, departing for his beloved dream country, America, and best of all, the slightly blurred folding Kodak snapshot of my prideful dad, Herman (in a suit of his own making no doubt) smiling at the camera with Monsieur Eiffel's tower looming behind him.
It was a picture I would duplicate, less his blur, in June 1945, just after the war ended in Europe and I would be en route to my third tour of duty, flying the wounded home from the Pacific while Florence packed our 1936 rumble seat Plymouth for our dangerous hegira from Brooklyn to San Francisco, not even suspecting we had in our secret company, our waiting-to-be-born first child. Jane would become the first law student in U.S. history ever to argue (her professor reading her brief) and win a case in the U.S. Supreme Court. Currently, Jane heads the (LA) Century City Bar Association.
All, all dangerous and lovely events, maybe related and long past, vital to your being whoever and whatever you are in your busy round of life with its own surreal clock ticking out the tiny seconds of your impossibly crowded days that seem to thrust themselves at you anew and privately every morning when you awake, insisting that you deal with them urgently and personally, like e-mails from your soul. I mean, some shard of WW II possibly rubbed off on you, fashioned you or affected one of your relatives in some way, didn't it? Just here, we're in ships-that-pass-in-the-night terrain.
But they do pass, don't they? Before you grow old gracelessly and are reduced, like some corny performer on his last tour, to pulling acts, scenes and memories from that busy theater between your ears, to scant applause, an occasional polite note attesting interest, requests for pictures, pinning down memories and mostly the blank shrug of everlasting, one expects, youth, getting on with its invisible and unspoken job of growing old while doing what you have to - like have children, abominate death.
What has that got to do with you? Enjoy weddings and ignore what doesn't interest you. But not having time to do what you really wanted to do with your precious life. Whatever the hell that was.
If you can't wait until this time every Wednesday to get your Art Shay fix, please check out the photographer's blog, which is updated regularly. Art Shay's book, Chicago’s Nelson Algren, is also available at Amazon.