This will be a tape, made by Herbert Gross starting on November 1 7th, 2003. Of his recollections of his life with Toha, of more than 50 years ago, so some details may be inaccurate, some sequence may be imperfect, but I’ll do the best I can. Made especially for Yuriko and Mike and Stephanie in honor and memory of Yuriko’s great Dad.

As some background, I was a Dental Officer in a small field hospital on a small island called Biak off the northwestern coast of New Guinea. And I’m pretty sure it was 1945. I’m not certain of dates anymore. We were a small hospital and we were especially low on help because a great many people had just been sent home as the war had just ended. In fact, almost all the enlisted men had departed and the few officers that were left were trying to take care of the hospital. We needed help. And sure enough, the Netherlands authority had been able to liberate some prisoners of the Japanese. These were mostly Javanese people who had been imprisoned and put into slave labor in effect. And now they were under the authority of the Netherlands-Indies Civil Authority and they didn’t know what to do with them. So when our army officers asked for possible help from them, they were happy to give us as many people as we wanted to help. Well, Toha Bin Haji Dulah, small, skinny, beaten-up, young man with no English, showed up at the officer’s area and he was to be our helper; Our house boy for the whole area of the officers.

Toha spoke no English. We gave him some scraps of uniforms and various things to keep him clothed. We tried to show him by pointing and smiling what odd jobs be might have to do but we didn’t know Toha’s spirit and personality because he immediately -  immediately took over and decided what had to be done by himself. He cleaned, he scraped, he organized things and we didn’t have to even decide what to do. He learned how to speak English by talking to as many of the enlisted men as he could. I don’t know where he slept, I don’t remember. But he made a lot of friends, and somehow got a book to translate from his Javanese language into English and started to learn words quite quickly; and we were amazed! And his health seemed to improve. His spirit certainly improved a great deal. And one of the few glitches was that he didn’t get enough rice. He kept complaining that he had to have rice every meal, every day. And we just weren’t used to that. But he managed, somehow. Well, Toha had a way of finding the right people to solve his problems, and of course he gravitated to the mess hail, became very friendly with the mess people, and took care of them as well as us. We didn’t have to clean our stuff, we didn’t have to organize our clothing, we didn’t have to take our stuff to the laundry and back anymore. It was kind of luxurious.

Well, one day we came back from our day’s work at the hospital which was small and not too busy, and the Colonel who was in a tent on a hill a little higher than the rest of us came out screaming “Where is my clothing!” The clothing had disappeared and when we looked, ours had disappeared as well. We had no idea what was going on until we searched the area and there was Toha, in one of the empty tents way down at the end, and he was ironing. He had been in my footlocker and for some unknown reason, in the P-X, just before coming overseas, I had purchased a small hand iron. And he heard, from the people arriving new on the island, that in other parts of the world, the army lived in starched, pressed uniforms. And he said in his broken English that he had decided that since we are eventually going to go to the Philippines, that we would be in a more civilized area and that we should have starched uniforms. So he promoted a lot of extra rice from the mess hail, boiled it up and made some rice starch, starched our uniforms which were just the cotton shirts and pants (we didn’t even wear ties there — thank goodness), and insisted that we wear starched uniforms which we of course did because he was the Boss by then and we were in the tropics deeply and I think the island of Biak was maybe 3 degrees off the equator. It was very hot every day. Well, steamed rice made into starch soaked into the clothing when it gets hot and sweaty really stinks — it really smells. But he didn’t mind. He insisted that we had to have starched clothing and we did.

I really don’t remember the timing or the dates of things, but eventually the word came that all the Americans left on the island of Biak would be moved to the Philippines. And there was a big, old freighter in the harbor which was to take us. It was American manned but the name tags on it showed us that it had at one time been Russian and one time German and I think it had been built in Germany and now was being used as a U.S. transport and fuel ship, I guess, and we were to go on it. We were only, maybe, 60 or 80 people all together left on the island and we had no idea what to do with Toha until I did some dental work for a couple of the ship’s officers. They came to the only Dentists on the island, my friend and I and we got to be friendly with them. We got the Captain and the first officer to agree to take Toha as a passenger even though he did not have official papers. Well, we went to the Netherlands Civil Authority and as I remember the man’s name was Van Der Vart Van Gulig, and he too became a friend and agreed to write a paper which in effect said (you know that paper probably still exists somewhere) it said that Toha Bin Haji Dulah was a Dutch subject (at that point they were still under Dutch control) and the Civil Authorities did not mind if he traveled to the Philippines. It was sort of a backward-permission to do that, and we used that paper to get him ship transportation. Well, all went well with the packing and everything until the very last minute. The day before leaving, the ship’s First Officer decided that it wasn’t a good idea. It wasn’t strictly official, and he refused to let Toha go on the ship. We had to scramble. Well, scrambling consisted of a lot of talking and agonizing but when we got to our friend the Mail Officer (there was only one of those left) he agreed to take Toha with him on the last departing plane. In order to do that he literally put Toha into a mail sack, carried him onto the plane, and then when the plane was aloft, took him out of the sack. I assume he put him back in the sack when they landed in the Philippines because the plan was for Toha to stay with him (I don’t remember his name) in a certain replacement depot near Manila where we would come and find him after our two week ocean voyage. We did that.

Lest I forget, on that same island one of the Medical Officers in that same little hospital was Dr. Robert Winston Churchill, and he too became a very close friend of Toha’s. Because that island had at one time had a very large number of troops, and because most of them had gone home, they could not take all of their stuff with them, and they left things. We went around the island collecting good things so as to be more comfortable. One of the things I acquired for my tent was a Crosley refrigerator. An American refrigerator which as I remember ran on 240 volts (I’m not certain of that, I think that’s what we used there) and a hot plate, an electric fan, a bunch of canned goods and some good food, and we boxed up all that we could; we put as much as we could inside the refrigerator and crated the whole thing and took it on the ship with us as unofficial cargo. Later on, as we traveled around the Philippines and went to different posts, my habit was to go to the Housing Officer at each base and say “Captain, I am Captain Gross and this is my house boy Toha and this is my refrigerator loaded with my food and electrical appliances, where do I sleep?” And he more often than not would say “You sleep with me!”

 
After about 2 weeks of ocean voyage aboard that ship being very lazy with nothing to do, we got to the Philippines, got to Manila, and we were sent to a replacement depot to move the hospital which was on paper; it consisted of a whole bunch of footlockers full of records and we were to move that to a place farther north. But we couldn’t find Toha. He simply wasn’t there and the Mail Officer was gone — he had been shipped out — and we didn’t know what to do. So I walked into the motor pool and demanded that I have a vehicle and somehow got one. As I remember it was an ambulance or a 3/4 ton pick-up type thing which they called a weapons carrier, and I and someone else whom I don’t remember simply drove around Manila. It was a big city (it still is) and it had been bombed and butchered and cut up so that it was a wreck. It was right after the end of the war. We had no idea where we were going or how to get there or what to do. But we had to find Toha somehow. We spent, as I remember, pretty much the entire day just wandering and, of course, you could go into any army facility to refuel the vehicle, which was no problem. And we finally found ourselves very late in the day way down into the market place area of downtown Manila. It was crowded, it was teeming, it was jammed with little stalls of people selling all sorts of things, and there was barely room for the vehicle to get down the middle of it. Lo and behold, right there in the middle of the road, is Toha. Standing there waving at us. And we stopped the vehicle and said “Toha, we’ve been looking for you all day. How did you find us here?” And he said “I was waiting for you.” He knew we would show up. Just amazing! So he went back with us to the replacement depot. I don’t think he had any personal belongings at that time. We loaded up the footlockers in a truck or a bus or something, I don’t remember what and went up north into the mountains where the Philippine government had its summer capitol at Baguto so as to be cool. Beautiful area. And that too had been pretty much destroyed but they took over what had been an American school at one time. As I remember it had been called the “Kent School” after a similar one in Kent, Connecticut. It was made into a small hospital with maybe eight or ten beds, more or less and a couple of nurses, a couple of physicians, a couple of dentists, a couple of administrators and Toha. Oh, and there were a few enlisted men. We managed rather nicely, there wasn’t much to do. We had good quarters and we had warmth because it was cool in the mountains, and everything was fine. The mess hall for the Officers was in what had been a country club; it was rather posh. I don’t know where Toha lived or slept but he took good care of us there as well. I say “us” meaning the cadre of the hospital. I don’t have a great deal of recollection of the rest of the time in Baguto, but Toha was there with us the entire time, and we had no problems at all there as I remember. I don’t remember much of Baguto but it was a choice spot and altogether too good to be true. They had built an entirely new hospital, well appointed, and we had excellent living quarters, so there was no problem. I think we were there maybe six weeks more or less I’m guessing) but pretty soon we were sent out to the infantry. When we came out of the mountains into the hot plains on the west side of the island of Luzon the big island, and we went to camp O’Donnell which was because that was the place which had been an army base before the war but it was the place to which the Bataan death march went. A lot of people suffered and died there. Well, they built a new camp there and activated a new infantry division of the Philippine Scouts which is an infantry division, composed of all Philippine enlisted men, and officers mixed US and Philippino. But they wanted most of the officers to be Philippino and they trained them as fast as they could do that. But they were training no dentists. So we had fewer dentists than we needed but an entirely new division of maybe 10 or 12 thousand men who had never seen a dentist so we were overwhelmed with work. But Toha took care of our living. We lived in tents and we had lots of rice there and Toha was happy with that. We learned to eat rice three times a day and as I remember we also ate soup there frequently which I never saw anywhere else in the army.

The only big problem with Camp O’Donnell was that they built it before they found out there was nowhere nearly enough water to supply the place. We had to wash in something like 2 helmets worth full of water a day, but we scrounged and we managed well. Again, I do not know where Toha slept but he was with us as often as necessary and took care of our personal needs. We got to be friends with a number of people there; a number of other officers, and we got to meet a few of the enlisted men though most of them didn’t speak English. We made some side trips, all of us including Toha, to other facilities where we could get real, hot showers, and meet American people.

 
From Camp O’Donnell (which they called “Camp Oh-Donelle”) we made a number of trips into Manila, and Toha went with us on some of them and started to make some friends. When the time came when we knew we would be leaving, and I would be leaving in-particular; I’d become very close to Toha and he to me, we tried to figure out how he could manage and how we could get him to the States. Well, there was no way. And there was no legal way for him to stay in the Philippines because he was an illegal immigrant. Well, Toha in his own way; his own inimitable, unconquerable way, managed to find friends at the Netherlands consulate. Now, the Indonesian government was by that time free of the Netherlands, but he still knew how to speak to the Dutchmen (I guess he spoke a little Dutch) and he made a lot of friends there and by the time I was ready to ship out he had managed to find a living quarters and some sort of job at the consulate.

After I left the Philippines, and came back to the U.S., I lost touch with Toha for a while but eventually we got in mail communication again and I learned that he was prospering in a way. He had made a lot of friends and was living well and he was healthy. One of those friends was Mrs. Cole, who I understand he had saved in the course of a fire. He had gone into a burning building and helped her get out, for which she was very grateful, of course. And later, I’ll probably include it in this story, after he had lived with us for a while in Norwalk CT, he went to live with her in California.

 
Well, I of course had returned to Norwalk and my family which was very, very nice and set about to open an office and practice dentistry on the public and got very much involved in that. Within a year I was married and very shortly after that we were starting a family. My recollection is that it was close to 5 years before I was able to have all the paper work done to have Toha come in as a student, on a student’s visa. I don’t remember any of the details except that I remember traveling from Norwalk, Connecticut to Hartford, the state capitol, several times and writing a lot of letters. But in any case, eventually, he was able to get here. I guess several people had contributed to his transportation costs, but he finally got here and showed up in Norwalk, Connecticut.

 
At that time, Evy and I were fairly newly married and we were living in a 1-1/2 room apartment and we had a baby boy, Jonny. I don’t remember timing but I remember that Jonny was a baby then and there wasn’t much room. But we managed. Toha slept in what was essentially the baby’s room, between our bedroom and the bathroom, and we managed for a while. But it got pretty crowded because we were expecting number 2 son. Well, that came in a hurry. David was born as a preemie, much too early and we were going to the hospital a lot. Eventually, when David was to come home there just wasn’t enough room for Toha. But luckily, my parents, in another part of town offered to have him live in their house, which he did. At the same time he had also started going to Norwalk High School because he had to do that in order to keep his student visa. That seemed to work well and he was a pretty good student but he really didn’t care for the academic stuff. He wanted to support himself in some way so in his spare time, every minute and nights, on a bicycle ( my old bicycle)  he would go off and work, mostly in restaurants. His most important job as I remember was in the Red Barn restaurant, a pretty nice place on the edge of the next town, in the woods maybe a 2 or 3 mile ride on the bicycle but he did it quite well. And he liked it. He learned a lot of English and he learned a lot of restaurant stuff.

I should return again to the first day he was with us when he first came to Norwalk living in that little, tiny apartment. We were not far from downtown Norwalk which in those days was a much simpler city. I guess they all were. It was a nice day. I don’t remember what time of year but gentle weather and we walked around downtown and nearby areas. And I think he was impressed that it was a nice town, and it was my town and it was comfortable. I showed him my office. Before too long, on that walk, I remember him distinctly saying “these people must be very wealthy.” I didn’t understand that so I asked him why he said that. His English was quite good by then. He explained that in the Philippines all the Americans and most of the foreigners too, I guess, had many servants and did none of their own work. They were wealthy enough to afford servants who did all of the gardening and cleaning and painting and everything else, even as he had done for me. And he had seen all these yards and houses look so neat and prim, and assumed they had a lot of servants and therefore were wealthy. Well, I jumped on that immediately and showed him that in the United States, especially these small towns, it was quite different. Everybody did their own and took care of it as best they could so as to be nice and servants were rare if not unknown.

When David was born, in 1951, as I said he was a preemie and he was in the hospital for many months, and at the same time we had started building a house. A modest house in the northern edge of Norwalk in what was still the woods and we were hoping to have that house ready for when David was born. But he was born too soon and then the house took longer than it was supposed to so Toha helped us through that raggedy period and lived with my parents all that time. When the house was finally done, I think in the fall of 1951, he moved in with us and we enjoyed that and took care of our second little boy and went on. Now I think it was about at that time that Toha went to California to stay with Mrs. Cole for a while and I don’t much of that period.

 
In this new house we had a fireplace which we’d never had before and Toha helped us make parties for all our friends to help us show off this new gadget and this new home and he introduced us to sates; And that became a big part of our life. He made up this wonderful sauce with amazing things in it. I remember molasses and peanut butter and peppers and whatever was delicious! And he made little barbecues of that stuff on meat for all of our friends and even bottled it for friends. That was great. At one point I also remember that we needed something for construction, I have no idea what it was, but he said why don’t we just go in the back yard, and go out in the woods, and cut some bamboo. Well, I had to straighten him out on that too. In Connecticut which is winter a good part of the time there simply is no bamboo. He had never before been in a place where there was no bamboo growing in the back yard.

By the way, in the Philippine infantry I learned to like rice although at that time I didn’t know it and enjoy it constantly even now.

 
Toha eventually, as I said, moved to California although I don’t remember the timing. He changed from high school education to some technical stuff. Maybe the people there remember more of it and maybe the records and newspapers contain more. But as you well know, pretty soon we had another son Lewis and then eventually a little girl, finally, a little girl named Debbie. And when I called Toha, or he called me, I really don’t remember, he told me that their little girl, Yuriko, had been born exactly the same day! And you know that too and that certainly was a joy, and we honor it as often as we can, when we can get to California. And we did get to California. We traveled there later on, on some of our trailer trips and I’m quite sure we also went there once to a convention. Let me think now. I think the first time we met Yuriko was when Toha and your mother, Yuri, were living in a little apartment and you were about 3 years old and Debbie also. I think it was our first trip traveling and camping out that way in the early 60’s. So you were 3 years old. I distinctly remember you had a Chatty Cathy doll, and Debbie loved it. You pulled the string endlessly to make her talk. It was kind of fun and we fell in love with you right away and kept in touch. As I remember, by mail for quite a while. Your Dad and your Mom did come to visit us in Connecticut a couple of times and they brought us beautiful Bali carvings and silk prints and we have them yet. They’re in storage and I hope to use them again one day. We also went to your wedding to Mike, what a wonderful affair that was! We flew to that one and Toha was riding high, walking about 3 feet off the ground. He was so proud of his girl, who he always called “my girl” and we were so happy to be there and meet his many, many other friends. As I remember, the Churchills were not at the wedding (I’m not sure of that) and I think Mrs. Cole had passed on by that time. I’m not certain of that either but I don’t remember meeting her. But I remember a beautiful wedding and a lovely reception after and meeting a lot of delightful people and we were so happy to be there. And meeting Mike, of course! And meeting him so many times through the years and enjoying it. I remember also that after the reception we went in your Dad’s car (well, you weren’t with us afterwards) but when we were coming home from the reception your Dad wanted to stop at McDonald’s to get a cup of coffee because he liked that better than at the reception or at his restaurant for that matter. We were kind of tickled at that.

Well, Yuri, that’s about all that comes to mind. It’s all I had on my outline list. I thought there might be more and take longer, but if it comes later I will include it and send it to you. Our contacts with you and your wonderful family have increased our pleasure through the years and couldn’t imagine anything better except maybe to live closer. We especially enjoyed our few visits to see you including the most recent one two winters ago and we will do it again. We’ll certainly keep in touch by email and phone and we’ll look forward to that.

No we’re not done yet, I remembered another incident. That was before your Dad was married and we, Evy and I, went to a dental convention in San Francisco. Well, we thought we were going there and we flew on some slow propeller plane which was long delayed and we were held up in the desert of southern California for quite a while. In any case, we reached San Francisco and checked into our hotel about a day and half later than we had expected to be there. Toha was living and working in San Francisco area at that time. We told him we were coming but we purposely did not tell him where we would be staying or when we would arrive because we didn’t know for sure what our commitments would be for the convention. We would contact him when we could. Well, we were exhausted and put a “do not disturb” sign out on the door and caught up on our sleep as well as we could somewhere in downtown San Francisco. Lo and behold there was a knock on the door very shortly yelling “Dr. Gross! Dr. Gross!” and there was Toha. Outside our door! And he explained after the greetings that he knew we were coming to a dental convention and he wasn’t happy with just waiting for us to call so he found out which hotels were housing most of the guests for the convention and he called every hotel and he found the one in which we were registered and then he came to a back door and made friends with one of the bell boys who got him up the stairs and told him where we were. We managed very nicely.

I think that story is a pretty good one to show Toha’s basic, intrinsic and wonderful adaptability and individuality and how he could manage to get to the heart of the situation and do what had to be done and to make friends. So that I think this is the end and I will try to have this duplicated and send it along as soon as possible.