Stories about my Father - 22
Michael has COVID so I went to Boston yesterday.
He’s been holed up in the bedroom and I’ve been sleeping out on the couch. It feels like I’m sleeping in the office. He had one very rough day and now it looks like he’s on the mend. Of course, he got sick on the day that President Biden announced that the pandemic was over.
I don’t think that the President is wrong. In terms of the disruption to our way of life, I think that it was probably important to say it. It doesn’t mean that COVID is gone because it will likely never be gone. It just means that we should start to think about living our full lives with the virus as just another thing that occasionally jumps out and sucker punches us. The Spanish flu pandemic has been over for a century, but it still rears its ugly head from time to time, too. It might just be time to get on with it.
Since I felt fine and I keep testing negative, I decided to get out of the apartment and find out more about my great uncle Scott. Harvard University’s archives has all its class yearbooks, but none of them have been digitized yet. The only way to see them is to go to the reading room on the campus in Cambridge.
I trained up knowing only that Scott had been born in 1903 and that he’d gone to Harvard. Beyond that, I had almost nothing. No dates, just guesses. Much like traipsing after my father through Western Europe, I felt like I was following behind Uncle Scott as I wandered through Cambridge. The archivists at the library were wonderfully generous and kind. They seemed thrilled to have something to sink their teeth into. The first thing that they found for me was his entire transcript. He’d enrolled in 1922 and had graduated in 1927 albeit as a member of the class of 1926.
Under discipline, it states that he was “deprived of privileges” on July 25, 1923, but then “reinstated” on November 3, 1923. Elsewhere it states that he’d been granted a leave of absence for the academic year 1923-1924 which explains why he’d graduated a year late in 1927. What it doesn’t explain, however, is what happened.
Three years before, in 1920 there had been an infamous “Secret Court of 1920.” I didn’t know anything about this until just now. I was trying to find out what sort of disciplinary measures the University might have employed in the past when up this popped. It seems that in 1920 a kind of tribunal made up of five Harvard administrators was formed to investigate charges of homosexuality among the students. 30 interviews took place out of public view and action was taken against eight students, a recent graduate, and an assistant professor. Two of the students committed suicide as a result; one at the time and one a short while later afterward when his life had been ruined. The whole thing was extremely tawdry and relied heavily on two anonymous letters that named names. None of this was publicized outside of the University’s tight circle until eighty years later in 2002 when an undergraduate reporter for the Harvard Crimson named Amit Paley discovered a box in the archives labeled, “Secret Court.” Eighty years later.
Since then, there have been innumerable articles, books and films made about this court. There have been repeated petitions to award honorary degrees to the students who were deprived of them, but Harvard has consistently refused. I have no idea whatsoever (yet) whether any of this has any bearing on my Uncle Scott, but it certainly casts a rather harsh light on the world he chose to step into, just two years later.
It seems remarkable to me that this should have happened while the famous Hasty Pudding Club was in its heyday. The Club was known for its class shows where men appeared in full drag. I wouldn’t dare to say that all the men who were in those shows were gay, but in one picture I found of seven lovely ladies downstage in a row, my great uncle Scott is the one in full thrilling twirl dead center and clearly living his best life.
Amit Paley, who first wrote about the affair, graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and is now on the Executive team of the Trevor Project. William Scott Wilson, whatever it was that he was disciplined for in 1923, himself graduated cum laude with an AB (Artium Baccalaureous) degree in General Studies.
Born in 1903, Scott was too young to serve in World War I. In 1940, the Selective Training and Service Act mandated that all men between the ages of 21 and 36 had to register. Scott was 37 when the measure passed so was just slightly too old. When we entered the war a year later, however, the upper range of age was extended to forty-five, so Scott became a prime candidate.
In his words, “In 1942, at the age of 39, I became Private Wilson – 32632854 – and went, apprehensively, to Fort Eustis, Virginia, to learn the Art of Ack-Ack (Antiaircraft Artillery), because, in 1922, I had for a half a year studied calculus. Then my personal hell broke loose. My military career was brief and violent, fraught with incident, with unending absurdities, and with, as I then thought, ultimate misfortune. One day, towards the end of my tenth week of basic training, I leapt lightly over a pole on the obstacle course. I could easily have stepped over the pole; but I had been told to jump and being a good soldier - or so I thought - I jumped. My foot struck a small round stone and my right knee seemed to explode. Three and a half months later I was discharged simultaneously from the Station Hospital and Uncle Sam’s Armed Forces, with a bad limp and the sympathetic assurances of the Orthopedic Department that I would limp to my grave. It was a dark day. It was March 1943. Those few months of G.I. Life were ridiculous, illuminating and invaluable. I hope I never forget them.”
In April of 1943, missing him by just a few weeks, my father also arrived in Fort Eustis to begin his own basic training which was, like Uncle Scott’s, in Antiaircraft Artillery.
Despite what Scott had been told, his knee soon healed completely. So, in June, feeling he should be of service, he volunteered to be deployed overseas with the Red Cross. By August, he was sent to the Pacific as an Assistant Field Director. He had a brief orientation period in Australia before being attached to Headquarters Fifth Air Forces and sent into Nadzab in New Guinea. He was now in the thick of it.
I’ve been to Jayapura which is about five hundred miles as the crow flies west of Nadzab, but that’s as close as I’ve come to be able to follow his footsteps there. New Guinea is the second largest island on the planet behind Greenland. It sits just above the continent of Australia. Almost its entire population, even now, is made up of subsistence farmers still living much as they have done for millennia using stone age tools and techniques. Unfortunately for them, the land is rich in natural resources, so Europeans have been dividing and subdividing control over it for centuries.
Just before World War I, the Dutch controlled the western half, the Germans controlled the northeastern part, and the British controlled the southeastern part. Following the war, the German and British parts were combined and given to Australia to oversee. Then the Japanese invaded at the beginning of World War II and took over almost all of it.
We hiked through Iryan Jaya, as the Western side was then called, about thirty years ago. After World War II, it had been given back to the Dutch. When the Dutch granted Indonesia its independence, it then became part of the new country. There was very little there in the way of modern conveniences, even at the airport where we landed. It was basically a shack next to an airfield. Fifty years before that, when Scott was there, there was probably nothing modern that we would recognize there at all.
The Allied attack on Nadzab against the Japanese started on September 5, 1943. General MacArthur watched from a B-17 circling above. A week later the Japanese started a slow retreat that would take the rest of the war to finish. By December, Nadzab became the primary air base for the Allies in New Guinea. Rather than confronting the rest of the Japanese troops in the middle of the island, the Allies merely cut them off. This was done by isolating them and blocking their supply routes. There was little actual engagement. Some estimates say that up to 97% of the Japanese losses on New Guinea came from disease and starvation rather than combat. Installing a small force to keep the pressure on, the Allies moved on to other islands in what came to be known as “Island-Hopping.” The goal was to keep pushing Imperial Japan out of the Pacific.
While he was in New Guinea, Uncle Scott was quickly promoted to Area Director and found himself heading a staff of 35 men and women. Together, they followed the advancing Fifth Air Force as it moved into the Schouten group of Islands and then onto Leyte in the Philippines.
“The job was a large and engrossing one, since we were giving welfare, recreational, and canteen service to about sixty thousand men, whose demands and appetites knew no limits. Supply was my main headache and I can’t even pretend to add up the thousands of miles I flew to collect, by fair means when possible and quite frequently by foul, the things I needed to carry on.”
After losing the Philippines to the Japanese in the early days of the war, MacArthur was determined to reclaim them. In October of 1944, just over a year after the beginning of the Battle at Nadzeb, he launched the invasion with Scott and his team in tow.
“It was during the Leyte landing that I was first under direct fire. Of course, I had been in a lot of bombings, but there is something impersonal about a bomb. Here, however, in this decapitated coconut grove, there was an unpleasant little yellow man shooting directly at me – very personally – and I found the situation unfamiliar and disturbing. I was hugging my protecting coconut tree with considerable fervor when behind an adjacent tree I saw an equally frightened Filipino woman wearing a chemise-like garment made of a fabric I had designed for F. Schumaker & Company in New York eight years before. Perhaps it was my – shall we say – nervous condition which brought on what can only be described as a case of the school-girl giggles. Hysterically, I laughed and laughed; and more than anything else in the world at that moment I wanted to tell that Filipino woman I had designed the cloth she was wearing. In view of the flying bullets this seemed impractical, so I lost her in the subsequent battle. I shall always lament that.”
As this was happening, my father was just about to get on the ship on the other side of the world that would take him to Europe. Scott at 40 years old may have been in a better place to understand what was going on than my father was at 20. That understanding, though, probably made what he was facing more terrifying. Scott was long past the blissful ignorance stage of youth.
Years later he wrote, “Certainly there is no predicting the course of one’s life or one’s ultimate métier. Instead of captivating the world from across the footlights, which was once my mad dream, I find myself working with paper and color, textiles, metal, wood, glass, and now finally with that most modern and incomprehensible plastic called Lucite.”
“It seems wrong to say so, but I must admit that I enjoyed most of the war thoroughly. For me it was tonic and rejuvenating. I discovered powers within myself that I never thought possible, and I learned a great deal, I think, about essential human worth. Ridiculous, isn’t it, that it should take a World War to teach a guy that sort of thing!”
“Since 1926 (he wrote in his 25th reunion class notes) I have arrived independently and with naïve surprise at what seemed to be, to me, a number of profound general conclusions, all of which have been exposed as triple bromides – obvious to the point of laughter: the total absurdity of all snobbisms, the eminent practicability of kindness, and the deep need of giving all of one’s self to others if happiness is to be found in this life.”
Amen, Uncle Scott.