Almost all those who served in World War I are gone now. 16 million people died during the Great War. Countless thousands served. One of those was my grandfather ~ who flew planes over France in dogfights without benefit of parachute or radar. He was a proud member of the Quiet Birdmen, a fraternity of WWI pilots (including Eddie Rickenbacker) who were anything but quiet when they got together for reunions in New York in the 1920s.
My grandfather grew up in a life of privilege. His father had met my great-grandmother while the two were riding horses in Central Park. They had a "pink wedding" that was a feature story in The New York Times. My grandfather, their third son, could have waltzed his way through Columbia University, where he was an All-American on the football team, and gone on to an easy life doing whatever it was he wanted to do. But that wasn’t him.
In 1917, my grandfather wired his father for money, allegedly for surgery he needed for repairs to a deviated septum. The deviated septum part was true. The surgery part, though, was false. He used the money for a farewell party for all his friends, because he had enlisted and was on his way to France to fight in World War I.
Flight in an integral part of my family’s story; the men in my family have always loved to fly:
Flight during World War I, though, was hardly the stuff of Top Gun. Pilots, like my grandfather, who flew over France then, did so in crude machines:
Somehow, he survived.
After the War, my grandfather retained his love of flight. In 1927, he flew his Jenny from New York to Washington, D.C. in a race with a carrier pigeon to prove that planes worked. He won.
He went on to a career in the book business that lasted five decades.
In the 1970s, as my grandfather aged, a horrific disease (much like Lou Gehrig’s) disabled him. This All-American, this WWI pilot, crawled on his hands and knees down an obscure entranceway to Soldier Field in Philadelphia for the Army-Navy game, because he could not bear the thought of being seen in a wheelchair. He did enjoy the game.
Toward the end of his life, my grandfather was bedridden. I wrote to him every week, and he dictated responses to the nurses my family was fortunate enough to be able to employ. His letters were filled with good cheer: a constant theme was the hideous stuffed frog mariachi band that one of my aunts had purchased in Mexico and had sent and that he detested; he had instructed his nurses to throw the orchestra out for several weeks, but it kept ending up back on a shelf of the bookcase across from his bed where he had to look at it. He wrote: "I know far more about stuffed frog mariachi bands than I ever wished to."
He was lucky, I suppose, in that, in his final days, he had people who loved him and doctors and nurses who were able to help him: toward the end, because of the disease, they had to tape his eyes shut, because he could no longer blink. He never once complained.
On the bureau in his bedroom, my grandfather kept a picture of me, taken in the gardens of Versailles when I was 14. I had mimicked the pose of my mother, in a picture of her taken there thirty years earlier. She was, in that photo, young and beautiful. My grandfather loved my mother very much, and he had always loved that photo of her. The photo of me was a poor replica -- 14 was not my best age. But he had kept it, because he loved me, too.
He died in November 1978.
I would really love to have him back for just one night. I would love to be able to tell him how much I admired him and how much his personal courage meant to me. I would like to be able to thank him for his service to our country. And, in his honor, I would so much like to be able to tell him that in this year, 31 years after his death, we lived in a country where it was possible for all veterans, even those struck with horrific diseases like he had, to have all the medical care they needed and, at the end, to die with dignity.
Thank you, P. I will always love you.