I shall always remember him as one of my favorite cousins: the man who
dared to interview & spar with Germaine Greer; the author of the
best-selling "Masters & Johson Explained"; the anonymous Playboy
Advisor of so many years, who gave reasonable, earthy, Jewish-rooted
advice about sex long before Dr. Ruth made it mainstream.  Visits to
his & Kazuko's place in Chicago, in 1966 after a Grand Western Tour,
in 1970 and 1975 en route to Madison WI for Blitzstein research, and
in 1978, while on tour with the Met, were unforgettable.  I remember
writing to him in admiration while a student at Harvard in the late
1960s, and having him respond, putting himself down as "Old Uncle Nat
at the Tit Factory."  I also remember him telling me and my Uncle
Edgar he would finance an opera we were writing together "if the
characters f--k on stage."  Edgar blushed.  I took him up on it -
though the coitus takes place in a blackout between Act II Scenes 3 &
4 (see <http://www.ljlehrman.artists-in-residence.com/Sima.html>) so I
guess that didn't count!

Anyhow, he will be sorely, and forever, missed. - Leonard J. Lehrman

EVENT INTRODUCTION

Hello.  For those of you who don't know me or can't see the family resemblance, I'm Nat's son, Jerry.  I want to thank you all for coming today and sharing this beautiful Sunday afternoon with us.  I understand that this is the first sunny day of your winter this year.

I would like to give a special thank you to those of you who traveled here from afar to pay their respects to my Dad, from places such as Minnesota,  New York, and San Francisco. 

But the award for traveling the farthest to attend this event goes to someone who traveled all the way from Japan, Etsko Tazaki.  Etsko, my Dad would be honored to have his event rank up there with the last time you flew to Chicago  -- to play solo piano with George Solti and the Chicago Symphony.

In honor of my father, we are going to keep the talking as brief as possible, so that we can move on to the eating, drinking and schmoozing half of our program today.  We've got seven speakers today.   

The first up today is my Dad's kid brother Marvin, who probably knew him longer than anyone else here.

JERRY SPEECH

 Well, I'm the last speaker today and I'm the only thing standing between you and happy hour.  So if I drag on too long, I'll look at the faces of some of my Dad's old colleagues to see if they're imitating his old "phased out" look.

A Man of Paradoxes

There are so many things I could say about my Dad.  But one overall observation is that he was a man of paradoxes.   He grew up in a very working class family in Brooklyn, but he became quite a cultured dude.   He started playing folk songs on the guitar in the 50s -- as a way to get laid, he said; but later, he moved on to classical guitar music.  The highlight of his concert career was when he played at the wedding of my best friend, whose father was the principal harpist for the Chicago Symphony.  My Dad played well that day, but he took even greater pleasure in having gotten one of the best exchanges of all time – the CSO harpist played at my wedding.

The love of opera was another thing you wouldn't expect from a guy who used to eat spaghetti with ketchup.  For someone who wasn't famous for his good memory, my Dad was like a walking opera libretto.  When he took me to one of his favorite operas, like Carmen or Madame Butterfly,  he would summarize the whole plot, without a note; and he could even hum the best arias.  He could speak French and loved French food. But when he used to travel to New York for business he would make the limo driver stop at Nathan's so he could get his fix of hot dogs with sauerkraut.

Sense of humor.

As I'm sure many of you know, my Dad had a pretty sharp sense of humor.  My wife Makiko still remembers the first time my Dad phoned our house after we had gotten married.  My newlywed bride gushingly asked my Dad, "Do you want to speak to your wonderful son?".   My Dad appreciated the straight line, "No", he said, "Let me speak to Jerry."

My Dad as a Mentor

As illustrated by the great stories told today by Barbara and Christie, many Playboy employees have told me how my Dad was a mentor to them.   Of course, his number one mentoring project was probably me.  He was a tower of strength and wisdom to me when I was growing up.   When I was in school, I always submitted my papers to him for his editorial review.  I became a pretty good writer because I was more fearful of his red pen than grades from my teachers. I went on to become editor in chief of my high school newspaper. He was proud of that, but his proudest moment came when I was almost thrown out of school – for refusing to back down from some censorship by the school administration of a critical editorial cartoon.  

One of my Dad's biggest mentoring moments was actually administering some "tough love" when I was floundering about after college.  I told him that I wanted to try my hand at writing the Great American Novel.  Well, with Playboy the leading source of American fiction at that time, my Dad had a pretty good idea of what it took to be a writer. 

My Dad didn't mince words with me:  "You've never written a creative thing in your life!  Don't kid yourself."  It was tough, but great, advice.  He must have known that I would go on to a happy career in the legal profession, where non-creative writing is a professional virtue. 

Speaking of writers brings me to a bit of a bit of a literary diversion that offers some objective confirmation that my Dad was a great editor.  I found in his files recently some correspondence from 1967 between my Dad and Norman Mailer.  My Dad wrote Mailer asking him about  some remarks from a Playboy interview.  Specifically, his letter asked Mailer to elaborate on, of all things,  and I quote, "giving head".  Mailer wrote back: "With all due respect for the fine, and I repeat fine, editorial job you did on the interview, . . . I don't know what I can do about enlarging the succinct remarks I make about cunnilingus in the interview. . . . I want the reader to be slightly puzzled and slightly nettled".  Oh, the life of a Playboy editor!

My Dad's Core Values

One of the things I am most proud of was my Dad's core values.   Despite the glamorous Playboy job, my Dad was really a family man.  My son Daniel, when he was in high school, interviewed my Dad for a biography.  My Dad told him "seriously, my dream was to have a family and children and send my kids to college."  Of course, Daniel asked him if he used to have affairs and orgies at the office or at Playboy Mansion parties.

I had asked my Dad the same thing when I was a kid.  He claimed that Playboy executives were pretty square and went home to their spouses.  As my Dad put it in a later interview, "Hefner took care of the fantasies all by himself.  We made the magazine, he made the life."

I always wondered if he was giving me a line back then.  So, a couple years ago, at an event showing the Hefner rebel movie at his senior citizen complex, I tried to pin him down him in front of a large audience.  I asked him:  "OK, Dad, now that Mom's not around and I'm old enough to handle the truth, was that really the truth?"  He smiled and said that was his story and he was sticking to it! 

I know that he loved his career at Playboy.  But he knew that the pressures of the job would take a toll on him if he stayed too long.  I remember when he called me a couple months before the end of my third year of law school.  He asked me if I was going to graduate on time. I told him yes.  He quit Playboy a month later.  The power and glory of being the publisher of Playboy Magazine in Chicago must have been intoxicating.  I am as proud that he could walk away from all that as I am of his accomplishment in getting there.

One last thing that really showed his values was my Dad's interest in people from all walks of life, whether they were celebrities,  Playboy bunnies, nurses or cleanup people.  He was genuinely interested in people because he felt that everyone had an interesting life story to tell.  As one of his friends put it, "When you spoke to Nat, you felt that he was really listening and that your story was the most interesting one that he had heard that day."

Relationship with Mom

I can hardly close my remarks without saying a word or two about the wonderful relationship my Dad had with my Mom.  It feels odd to say this about one's own parents, but they were an awfully cute couple.  Despite his lusty use of the "F-word", my Dad was a sweet and kind man.  But it was hard to compete on those grounds with my Mom.  When I observed to my Dad once that Mom was one of the world's most kind and selfless people,  he agreed and retorted: "Hey, it's not easy living with a saint." 

But he was a very loving husband, and they had a very special 51 years together.  She was his rock for all those years, so the hardest thing about losing her more then 6 years ago was wondering how my Dad could go on without her. 

After five decades of monogamy, I thought he would become the Hugh Hefner of his senior citizen complex.  But instead he called me up five years ago and said that he had found a girlfriend.  No, not another Japanese woman. Or even a Jewish American Princess. But a vivacious, charming and beautiful Italian American who had spent much of her life  as a travel industry executive in Chicago.   After my Mom's passing, Jean rekindled in my Dad a joy for living that nurtured him for another 5 years of happy living.  I know that my Mom would have been grateful, as we all are.

Ending and time for drinks 

My famously impatient father would no doubt be fidgeting in his seat by now after hearing all of us drone on for so long.

For those of you who can't get enough reminiscing or who want to add a story, there is also a website that I set up that contains a bunch of tributes, photos, articles about my Dad and stories written by my Dad.  Just go to ForeverMissed.com and type in Nat Lehrman.  For an interesting history of my Dad's role at Playboy, I particularly recommend the story titled, "My Son, the Pornographer."  (Of course that's from a Jewish magazine.)

So thank you again for listening.  Please join us for the next hour or so for drink and food in the other side of this room.  Let's do some schmoozing that would do my father proud.

Cindy's remarks at Dad's memorial service in Chicago, May 2014

    Thank you all for coming today, and thank you all for the emails you sent and for the stories you posted about my dad on the memorial website that Jerry made. They brought back a lot of nice memories and they also taught me some things about our dad that I didn't know before.
    One thing that really stands out for me is the number of stories people told about Dad being an important mentor to them. He used to sometimes mention in passing that he'd been helpful to someone or other in their work, but he never made a big deal out of it and I guess I never completely paid attention cuz, you know, who really listens to their dad when he talks about that kind of stuff. So thank you to all of you who taught me about that wonderful side of my father.
    Most of you probably don't realize it but the great comedian Sid Caesar died within a day or two of my dad. Shortly after his death the comedian Billy Crystal wrote a wonderful in memoriam piece for The New York Times, and in it he kind of summed up how I felt about my dads death. He said that when he heard that Sid Caesar, his hero and his friend, had died, the first emotion he felt was relief, because the last few years of his life had been so hard and so limited and so full of illness. He had stopped being Sid Caesar.
    But after a few days, and as part of the process of writing the article about him for The Times, he was able to remember Sid Caesar as he had been through most of his life,  and that made it possible for him to mourn for him and to grieve.
    All of your emails and postings about my dad helped bring him back to me as the fun, smart, independent, generous, musical Daddy that I loved so much. And that was nice because when he died, I couldnt grieve for him because I was so glad for him that his suffering was over. But now and for the rest of my life I can remember him as he was for most of his life.
And because you all were so generous in sharing your memories of him I wanted to share a few memories of my own.
    Number one: my dad had really long legs and he walked really fast. One of my main childhood memories is of trying to keep up with him.
    Number two: tennis. When my mother played tennis she only wanted to play games, she didn't like to just hit. My father and I, on the other hand, could spend an hour hitting back and forth to the exact same spot in the center of the baseline and never get bored.
    Number three: this might surprise any of you who heard my father and his brother in their famous folk music and blues singing act, but he actually did love music. He used to sing and play for me sometimes, especially "Good night, Irene" and "Get Along Home, Cindy Cindy" at bedtime. 
    My two favorite classical pieces are ones he introduced me to: the opera "Carmen," especially as sung by Marilyn Horne, and the Concierto de Aranjuez, particularly as performed by the Eugene Ormandy Orchestra.
    He used to say that his favorite opera was "Rigoletto," and any of you who know the plot of that opera won't be surprised that memory number four is: He was a great and very loving father. Even from a young age no one ever had to explain to me the meaning of the words "she's a real daddy's girl" or "that's daddy's little girl." and although it wasnt a song he introduced me to, of course I will always love the song,"My Heart Belongs to Daddy." Because it always will.
    Thank you.

Let me add my own memories about this wonderful person whom I not only loved but felt such gratitude for the ways he helped and counseled me during tough periods in my life. Of course our relationship started off rocky -- I was at the welcome for Kaz at Lou and Lee's house, and persuaded Sandy Berger to sneak out of the apartment and walk across the GW Bridge to Palisades Amusement park which looked like it was ten minutes away. I was 11 and Sandy was 9. We were gone about two hours, finally crossing the bridge and seeing that to get into the park we'd have to climb a huge cliff. I think we arrived back just before people were going to call the cops.

But what I remember most vividly about Nat is the way it was for me in the Sixties, at Iowa, lonely, unsure about what I wanted to do. And then I would make trips up to Chicago, staying at Nat and Kaz's.  They made me feel so welcome -- as if they were the lucky ones! Did they ever know how comfortable they made me feel? How much I admired the things Nat did, how sensible I thought his advice was on writing, how much I admired his enthusiasms -- like classical guitar? And what a great storyteller he was about the family, with his portraits of Riva, and Riva's sister, my grandmother -- and glimpses of  what he thought of his older cousin -- my mother? I didn't feel like a distant cousin -- though in this family, as Nat always said,our motto is "I am my own grandpa." I felt like I had a wiser older brother, both then, and when I lived in Illinois, going through a divorce and needing those visits to Chicago again.

I hope everyone still has our tape of the Family Reunion, so you can get it out and watch the warm witty, self deprecating speech Nat made  on that panel discussion. Of course everyone loved him.

And I don't want to forget,that through Nat I got to know another cousin who's enriched my life over the years -- Marvin. Marvin, seeing you and Paisha at Eric's wedding made me feel we really were celebrating not just with Eric and Leigh but the family members (no, not all, but a lot) we love most. 

Like all of you, I will miss hearing Nat tell stories -- like the time in fifth grade when he was trying hard to tell other kids his name was "Nat." Cousin Rose came to teach his fifth grade class, wrote her name on the board and mortified him by announcing to the class, "Yes, I am related to my darling Nathaniel!" 

I wish I had made clear how much I valued the times I spent with him and Kaz. But I will never forget what it meant.

Marvin, do you remember how at the Reunion Estelle told us she was trying to fix your Mom up with my uncle Joe? "But Lou stole her away!" she said. That's one time I'm glad Estelle failed at something. Joe did all right. And Lou and Lee brought two people into existence who enriched our lives. I will miss your brother -- and Cindy and Jerry, your wonderful Dad.

I have spoken to a lot of younger brothers down through the years, and each and every one of them has reinforced for me how lucky I was to have Nat.  I grew up thinking that to love someone like a brother was the most powerful kind of love, and I’ve always been surprised and shocked when people tell me that they didn’t get along with their sibs. 

Nat taught me the value of being playful, and he was always playing with me.  If I was in a bad mood, he would play with me and charm me out of it – if I was being a poor eater, he would play with me at the table to get me to eat.  If I needed help writing something for school, he would be right there, teaching me how to think it through, and put it into words.

What he did was a hallmark of his, in terms of ego; which is to say, he had no ego involved in dominating me, as a seven year older brother could easily have done.  Instead, he would let me win at games, and if I would excel and seemed to get better than him at something, instead of his escalating to prove he could beat me, he would claim credit for being such a good teacher.  And of course, I knew that if he really wanted to, he could beat me, but it was ok with him that I thought I was hot shit in beating my big brother.

He was a charmer.  He was constantly charming me with something, or playing with me.  My earliest memory was maybe one or two, and we were playing peek-a-boo under the covers, and I wanted the game to go on forever.  My only disappointment was that after doing it a million times, he would want to stop and I was ready for a second million times.  I never understood why he got tired of it before I did, but it was just something I learned to live with.

Let me talk about Second World War blackouts; without my older brother, I would have been a basket case.  As a child, imagine this: When the sirens came, I’m told to crawl under the table in total darkness. In abject terror I ask if we’re being bombed.  Nat turned it into a little game, as he did with most things that scared me, or I didn’t want to do, and assured me we were ok, it was just an a practice drill.

            And then there were the monsters in the outer world.  Were there really haunted houses? Ghosts?   He was like the voice of reason, and would so convincingly tell me why there are no monsters or ogres or whatever bogeyman you want to believe in, that my unbounded confidence in this world almost bordered on arrogance.

I have Nat to thank for a totally rational understanding of reality.  Even when he broke my heart when he told me there was no tooth fairy, or Santa Claus; and because of him, being naughty or nice right before Xmas just doesn’t matter any more.  I know better.

When I would get an answer wrong, instead of telling me I was wrong, he would compliment me for making a good guess.  He always told me that an intelligent, thought out guess that was wrong was better than a memorized and rote correct answer.

Earliest childhood; he liked to pat my head – once I learned the value of money I started charging him.  At first he tried to get twenty pats for a penny, but as I got older and wiser, I did what most corporations do – I kept giving him less and less for the same price, until we were down to a penny a pat.

In addition to being playful, he taught me first and foremost, to laugh. He taught me to do routines - he would set me up to be the funny guy while he would be straight man. This was when I was two and three and four, and young enough to be cute doing these corny jokes. 

He would ask, Where were you born?

 In a hospital. 

Why, were you sick? 

No, I wanted to be near my mother. 

 I think when he tried to do these routines with his own children, they told him to get lost, they had their own lives to live.  But in me, he had the perfect set up guy. 

I would ask him,

Why is the sky blue, and he would say,

I don’t know –

why is the grass green? 

I don’t know. 

Then  after a few more questions which he would answer with the same, “ I dunno,”, he would say to me,

But keep asking questions – that’s the only way you’re going to learn!

He helped me learn the value of money – he would offer me a big nickel in exchange for a smaller dime.  He would logically point out to me that isn’t bigger better?  Of course I fell for it at first, until mom would chide him not to tease me, and he would start laughing, and I knew I had been had.  Fortunately, he had a hard time keeping a straight face when he was conning me, and eventually I could tell without intervention from mom.  Then he would try to keep a straight face when he asked me if I wanted to give him two dimes for a nickel.

He paid me to identify instruments – I used to hate listening to his jazz records, and would squawk when he put them on; he quickly figured out that one of the ways to co-opt me into listening was to pay me to identify the different instruments.  I got real good at identifying saxes, and clarinets and trumpets and trombones, etc.

Let me not give the impression that it was all fun and games, or warm fuzzies. When he wasn’t teaching me something, he was tormenting me.  Of course, he could pin me down in wrestling, and then he would threaten to drool on me, unless I said uncle.

You know that expression, hold ‘em at arm’s length?  Well, that’s what he literally did to me.  When I would get pissed about something, I would start flailing at him, and he would put his hand on my forehead and hold me at arm’s length, so I couldn’t reach him.  Then as if that weren't bad enough, he would start laughing at me.  Eventually, I would forget why I was so angry and then I would start laughing.  Our parents were like that too, and it was very difficult to carry a grudge in that house, because everybody would just ignore my tantrums and shit and treat me like I was normal.

My saddest moments of childhood were when he was in his teens, and sometimes excluded me from his teen activities. I think he would bribe dad to take mom to the movies, and  invite girls and boys over for an evening of fun and games, or who knows what, because he would practically lock me in our shared bedroom while they partied in the living room with the door tightly closed. I could hear the music and the fun, and I was all alone – no tv, no internet, no facebook, no tweets, no radio, no phone to call  friends  (we didn’t even get our first phone until I was 12) – no nothing but some books and a few measly toys that I was bored with.

He got into photography when I was about 8 or 9, and he showed me the magic of being in a dark red room with a blank piece of paper in some liquids, and suddenly, an image appears!  Magic!  And that created for me a lifelong love of photography.

When he was in college, I was about 10 or 11, and he came home and talked about Freud, and the unconscious. I could never again bullshit myself after that.

He turned me on to Oscar Wilde, Dorian Grey, Reading Gaol, Henry Miller, Of Mice and Men, poetry, folk music, the great classics, and so much more.

He took me to my first foreign film, Dirty Hands, an existential French film, then he took me to see Hiroshima Diary, the Japanese version, a sort of docudrama which they said would never be shown again in this country, and I didn’t always understand what was happening in these difficult films, he would patiently explain to me what was going on.

He was the great explainer.  Even when he didn’t know, he sounded like he knew.  He perfectly exemplified Ambrose Bierce’s definition of positive – Mistaken at the Top of Your Voice. But of course to me, everything he said was gospel.

He played the guitar and sang folk songs in the late forties, long before it was fashionable, and he brought home friends who played instruments – Some guy with a trumpet, who would come over and serenade the neighborhood, and his friend Freddie Fitzsimmons who played this wild new instrument that I’d never heard before called a banjo.  And he sang stuff we didn’t even know existed - wild southern Appalachian folksongs, and country gospel and blue grass stuff, that I still can’t get enough of. 

One day in the early fifties, he came home with a recording of the Songs of the Lincoln Brigade, and he laughingly reported that the clerk who sold it to him had seriously said, “Someday you’ll regret buying this!”

Speaking of which, in 1954 Nat told me to go to a concert at McMillan Hall in Columbia, I believe it was, and see this great singer and banjo player who had been banned by McCarthyism named Pete Seeger.  Nobody really knew about him at the time, except as part of the disbanded Weavers.  What I remember best about that concert was that when he sang a work song, he put down his banjo, picked up an ax and started chopping a log on the stage.  That was like nothing I had ever seen before. (It would be another five years before Pete Seeger would practically single-handedly start the folk music craze.) 

When Nat went into the army, he offered to pay for any classical music lps that I bought – He suggested I start off with an Andres Segovia, playing Bach transitions, and then Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, which started my lifelong love of good music.

I used to love to come to Chicago and play tennis with Nat – At first I had to drag him out, but once I got him onto the courts, it was like playing against a machine – and I say that in the best sense – I would HIT the ball, and he would return it – nothing hard, but not too soft either, and then I would try to slam it past him, and somehow, he would return it, not too hard but not soft either. And then I would try to SLAM it again, and unless I could put it really out of his reach, he would get to the ball and return it, guess how?  Not too hard but not too soft.  He rarely made unforced errors.  He left that to me.  Thanks brother!!

Nat taught me that the most important things in life aren’t fame and glory; no, it’s Power and fortune!  I used to love to listen to his stories about how he worked with Hefner.  Hey Hef, I gave $20,000 to the NAACP, in your name, because I thought that’s what you would have wanted. And Hef would say, with a straight face, “What a great idea, I’m glad I thought of it.”  “Hey Hef, I wrote this chapter of the Playboy Philosophy, because I think that’s what you would have wanted to say.” And soon Hef trusted Nat enough to turn most of the writing over to Nat.

Soon he had built up his own little bailiwick in the Playboy Empire, what others almost snidely would refer to as Nat’s Magazine. And what a staff he had!!  You know that expression, trying to herd cats?  Well that was his staff.  A wild bunch of individuals each brilliant in his or her own way, and most thinking at first that they knew better than Nat how to do things.  And Nat would very patiently, but firmly let them know who was boss, and how things were to be done.

He had a mind like a laser beam, and he could always get to the crux of the matter with no wasted words.  He taught me how to think succinctly. He once sent me a letter someone had written to Playboy that he wanted to challenge, and he gave me a five-word instruction that I’ve never forgotten.  “Refute this.  Make logic unassailable.”

The most difficult thing about those Playboy years was how distracted and not always present he was, when he came home to dinner.  Jerry and Cindy and I still joke about the time Kaz made fondue, and we must have spent about twenty minutes in a lively discussion about the color coding of the forks, and how, when we dipped them, we can always tell which one was ours, etc.  Nat sat there, eating, nodding as if he was listening, but saying nothing, himself.  Then after a little silence, he suddenly blurted out, “Hey, have you guys noticed how these forks are color coded?” And we just looked at each other and burst out laughing.

Mickey Laitman, a dear departed friend of Nat’s from the Old Days once asked me if I felt bad, if it ever bothered me to always be called Nat’s kid brother, or little brother as he affectionately refers to me now, and I answered, what are you kidding?  That’s the safest, most comfortable, warmest fuzziest place in the world for me, to be Nat’s little brother.  He was the rock of my childhood, and life would have been far more dismal and empty without him. 

If everybody had an older brother like Nat, this world would be a far better place.

I would like to close with a little poem that Nat turned me onto many years ago, which started my love of poetry.

Just a few days after my eighth birthday, President Roosevelt died, and there was a two page picture spread in the newspaper with a banner headline, “Home is the sailor, home from the sea,” and being a fairly literal child, I asked Nat what that meant, since FDR wasn’t a sailor.  He explained to me that he had once been Secretary of the Navy, and told me the line was from a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson called Requiem.  He then showed me a poetry book with the whole poem, and I was so taken with it that I memorized it, because to that eight year old that I was, it spoke volumes about living and dying, and still does.

Nat, I dedicate this to you, because it speaks to the full and blessed life you led.

Under the Wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie,

For glad did I live, and gladly die,

And I lay me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me,

Here he lies where he longed to be;

Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

My friend found this 1970s photo of Dad at eBay of all places ...! 
http://www.ebay.ca/itm/BS-PHOTO-bma-584-Nat-Lehrman-/390724981740 

Chicago Tribune

Little Girls Grow Up A Daughter Seeks Her Fortune, A Father Shares

June 04, 2000|

By Nat Lehrman. Nat Lehrman is a former president of Playboy's publishing division and former chairman of the journalism department at Columbia College. 

The more you love your little girl, the more you hate the phrase "giving the bride away." Isn't there a happier way to describe such a seminal event as the marriage of your daughter? How about "sharing"? - When your son marries, to the contrary, do you "keep" him? Not exactly. - My daughter, Cindy, was the second born to her mother and me. Her brother Jerry, is three years her senior. She was a pretty child, bright and sensitive, with a great sense of humor.

There wasn't any question of whether she'd "be given away," only when and to whom. Her father was a magazine editor, and, not coincidentally, she showed a great interest in writing and writers, culminating, in her teens, in a big crush on a friend of mine who is a famous Tribune columnist (no names please). Was there a hint of the future in all this?

My wife, Kaz, and I weren't surprised when Cindy left Chicago to seek her fortune in New York as a writer or editor. It's my hometown and she actually spent her first two years there and considered herself a native. But her career search went slowly, and she suffered through low-paying jobs and awful living quarters. (Does this sound familiar to a lot of parents?)

For our own peace of mind, we bought her a studio co-op in Lincoln Center at the peak of a New York real estate boom. We should have known that she'd fall in love with someone shortly after she moved in and the apartment would be too small for them. It's like lighting a cigarette (in the bad old smoking days) while you're waiting for a bus. Two puffs and the behemoth rumbles in. In this case, 15 months in a pad that had dropped substantially in value, and she was ready to move.

Woody Hochswender, the man she was to be given to, was an impressive recipient. He was tall, slender and handsome, and he was soon to be a highly regarded fashion columnist for The New York Times. It was no surprise that she fell in love with a writer.

Only a few questions remained. I wondered if she would ask my permission and her mother's. Of course my daughter's intended would propose to her on bended knee in the most romantic of traditions, wouldn't he? Certainly I looked forward to sitting down with him, brandy and cigars, as he requested her hand in marriage.

Did I really expect these traditions to be followed (I who bridle at the custom of giving the bride away)? Of course not. But there were other deviations from convention, I soon discovered. Woody had adopted Buddhism as his religion, and the ceremony was to be held in a temple in an obscure part of Queens, in the shadow of Shea Stadium. There was some trepidation, but to my surprise, the elders of my family loved the nuptials. Very exotic, they thought. Although I find most weddings boring, I liked it too. The encomiums in English were literate and entertaining, and the religious part was mostly chanting and very pleasing to the ear.

That was 11 years ago. Woody is freelancing now and Cindy is a reporter for a local paper in northwestern Connecticut, where they live. Somehow we do manage to share Cindy with Woody--and with their 6-year-old, Kate, who is a "pretty child, bright and sensitive, with a great sense of humor." I'm glad it will be Woody who has to worry about giving her away.

Me? I thank heaven for little girls.

See the attached link for a great article about Dad written by a Jewish magazine:

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/26418/my-son-the-pornographer
 

TO CATCH A WIFE: 

WHAT A TRIP!

by

Nat Lehrman

When I talk about “Kaz,” strangers think I’m referring to a vaporizer.

Hardly.  It’s the name of my wife (derived from Kazuko).

Funny name for an American wife, but actually she is a naturalized American.  Her country of origin is Japan.

How did I meet her?  How did I marry her?

Read on.

It started in an army post situated on the outskirts of Nara, Japan, the country’s first capital (720-794). Nara had this distinction before Kyoto (794-1868) and long before Tokyo, 1868 to present.

I had been drafted in early 1953 during the Korean war.  The war ended in August just as I was shipping out to the Far East.

I was assigned to Japan and I lucked into a soft spot in an MP detachment in Camp Nara.  They made me the company clerk because I was the only one in the unit who could type. 

The company clerk managed all the paper work that passed through the First Sergeant’s desk, and he was the guy who ran the detachment on a day-to-day basis.  The most important document was the Morning Report which every company in the armed forces prepared.  It specified the status of each man in the unit (sick, AWOL, present for duty, and so on) and it specified the racial breakdown of the company.  It was prepared in several copies, one of them going to the Pentagon.  Among other things, this report helped the big brass monitor racial integration at all levels of the service. I liked that.

I started on a Monday, did my first report and walked it over to Post Headquarters.  I entered into a big anteroom, surrounded by a number of offices.  There was a balcony to my right.

A deep, female voice boomed out, “Can I help you, private?”

I looked up to the balcony and saw an attractive woman, taller by nearly half a foot than the average Japanese female, and much more voluptuous.

It really bugged me that she addressed me as “private.”  This was the lowest form of life in the army and most people either called you by your name, or neutralized your lack of rank by calling you “soldier” or “GI.”

I concealed my resentment, probably because she was so nice to look at, and I told her why I was there.  It turned out that she was the chief clerk in the Adjutant General’s office, and it was she who collected the Morning Reports.

This meant I would see Kazuko Miyajima nearly daily for the next 18 months.

Good start for my burgeoning army career.

Kaz had been working for Uncle Sam as an “indigenous” employee for several years. She was very bright to start with and was highly fluent in English (which she learned primarily on the job, having only had a smattering of it in high school during WW II). Her English was so good that she was given the job of editing the English-language post newsletter.  American personnel weren’t trusted for this task as long as Kaz was around to do it.  

She also excelled in typing and all the other clerical skills.  What made her and other Japanese employees especially valuable is that they didn’t rotate every year or two as the GIs did. They were there for the duration.

Although we became good friends in a short period of time, we didn’t get around to dating until my stint was almost up.  Before that, we did a lot of coffee breaks together and I joined the post choir and stood close to her as we belted out hymns.  I also used to go spectatoring at the post basketball games.  She was an avid fan, and though I didn’t care much for watching these games, it was a good opportunity to sit beside her.

One of the reasons for our hesitance to date, I think, was that she rarely dated GIs. I never found out why. I suspect she thought they were dumb.  Another factor was her serious dedication to the Japanese Protestant church. Although my Jewishness was secular, I think we both sensed problems in trying to iron out our differences.

But we eventually overcame our inhibition and we did date in September of 1954 -- that is, we dated for a while.

The first fly in the ointment was at a noodle restaurant I took her to. I expressed my warm feeling for her and told her that I was going to try to get a civilian job with the army for a year or so after discharge, and that I’d like to continue seeing her.

I intended this as a feeling out process, but she saw it quite differently.

She told our friend Mitzi the next day (and Mitzi repeated it immediately to me) that I had proposed to her, but that I had done it in the most unromantic way, in a cheap restaurant, with noodles dripping from my lips.

This put a crimp in our relationship, which I regretted.  At the same time, I had determined I wouldn’t marry a Japanese while I was still there.  I felt that the environment was so seductive that it concealed all and any of the problems that might occur for a mixed marriage back home in the bigoted U.S. of A.

One thing led to another and we were barely speaking to each other by the time I departed, in January 1955.

But the feeling was still there, and we began a rabid overseas correspondence almost immediately.  It got deeper and deeper until one day in mid-1956 I proposed to her and she accepted by return mail.

The proposal was easy enough to do, but now I had to figure out how to get back there and bring her across the Pacific.

My parents couldn’t afford it.  And then of course they were deathly opposed to it.  

At the time, I was working as a writer for the International Travel Department of the American Automobile Association.  The air fare was about $1000 round trip, and I was earning only $65 a week.

One of my AAA projects during this period was to go to Europe (a dream for me) on an “educational” tour -- visiting hotels, restaurants, cathedrals, etc., so I could better write about them.  But the boss’s daughter, who also worked for the company, talked her father into giving my spot on the tour to her best friend.

I was irate, and I demanded recompense.  How about an independent educational tour to Japan? 

They were happy to comply, just to keep me quiet.  They gave me two weeks off, got me a travel agent’s discount on the airline (75% off) and got me discounts at hotels throughout Japan, Hong Kong and Formosa.

It was wonderful to return to Japan, and especially to see Kaz again.  But now we had to make some hard decisions and some complex plans.

The first step was a visit to the American Consulate in Kobe.  We went there specifically to garner information about the process of getting hitched.  We wanted to have this information while we mulled over the big step. 

A clerk gave us a batch of papers in Japanese and told us to take them to an address downtown.  When we got there the papers were stamped and we went back to the consulate and we sat down on a bench in the waiting room. I had no idea what was in the papers, and I don’t think Kaz had much of a chance to read them, either. In a few moments, a Japanese clerk waved at me to come in, and I pointed to Kaz and said, “Should she come, too?”

“No, leave your wife there,” he replied.

“My wife,” I exclaimed to no one in particular.  Then to the clerk, “We’re married already?”

“Yes,” said the clerk.  “Please go to the Consul General’s office.”

I did and I kept waiting for them to send Kaz in, so the Consul General could perform a nice little civil ceremony.

No such luck. He merely asked me to raise my right hand and swear that everything I had declared was truthful. That was it.

I went out of his office in a daze and told Kaz, “We’re married.”  

We went down the street to a jewelry shop and purchased a skinny little gold band for three dollars. In later years, Kaz showed it to a Japanese friend of hers, who had recently won the lottery.  She was bragging about the upscale merchandize she’d purchased. In a burst of anti-snobbery, Kaz held out her left hand and said, “I bought this for three dollars in Kobe.” 

Her friend looked wide-eyed and said, “I’ve got better curtain rings than that.”

For our fortieth anniversary, I bought Kaz a rather elegant ring to replace this one.  I think I nearly broke her heart. She really had grown attached to our little memento.

But back to our marriage in Japan, there remained the challenge of bringing Kaz to the United States. First, she had to clear a mountain of paper work.  Did she have a criminal record?  Was her health in good shape?  And so on.

I finished up my AAA Far East education tour and went back to New York where I would quarterback the next steps.  

During this period, she wrote me that the wedding “ceremony” in Kobe was hardly satisfying to her, and indeed she didn’t feel married.  Would I please arrange a suitable ceremony?

This surely put me on the spot.

A suitable ceremony from Kaz’s point of view was in a Protestant church.

My parents would have preferred a synagogue.

All my left-wing atheist friends would have been happy with a civil ceremony.  Me too. 

Is it possible to make compromises on strongly felt issues such as these?  I would find out. 

I ran myself ragged, exploring all the possibilities. None seemed suitable until I discovered a “church of all faiths” in the east thirties in Manhattan.  Its pastor was a Unitarian named Donald Harrington (a very prominent guy who later ran for mayor of New York), but the congregation was not necessarily Unitarian. Each parishioner kept his or her own faith -- Protestant, Catholic or Jewish (maybe even Moslem, I don’t remember) while worshipping with the others.  

How bad could this be?  A perfect compromise -- if there is such a thing.  The Reverend Harrington interviewed me and I liked him immediately. He was supportive of what Kaz and I were doing (which was a little unusual in those days).  He said, “You have so many problems to overcome with a mixed marriage that it will probably strengthen the bond between you.”  

In retrospect, I think he was eminently right.

Meanwhile, Kaz arrived in March ‘57, as scheduled, and my first problem was in connecting with her. I went to Kennedy Airport to meet her, but I got there too early, so I went to the coffee counter to kill time.  Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, her plane arrived.  I ran out to meet her when I finally heard an announcement, but she was already off the plane and heading for the ticket counter to get a return flight.  She was that mad at me because I wasn’t waiting at the door when she got off.

But we patched it up and prepared, as soon as we settled in, to go meet my parents.  My mother had threatened to kill herself when she learned of our nuptial plans. The idea of a mixed marriage in her family -- especially a racially mixed marriage -- was more than she could bear. But she was resolved to make the best of it, little knowing how good it would be. 

She came to the front door and stood there, looking grim.  I thought this would really turn Kaz off, but she looked right beyond my mother’s forbidding mien, threw her arms around her,  kissed her and said with a big smile, “Hi, Mom.”

The immediate recognition by Kaz of the relationship -- calling her “Mom” -- was the icebreaker. (Kaz later said that the word had little emotional freight for her.  It was in a language foreign to her and she was happy to use it if it made someone else happy.) 

My mother’s frown turned to a big smile and to tears of joy.   She never got over the shock of falling in love so quickly with her daughter-in-law.  They got along famously forever after.

One of my favorite anecdotes about my mother’s change of attitude occurred when my kid brother told her that he’d impregnated his girl friend and was going to marry her.  My mother looked suitably disturbed as Marvin unraveled his plans.

“But look at the bright side, Mom,” he said, tongue in cheek.  “At least she’s Jewish.”

My mother pulled herself up to her full height, and said, “What does that matter?  How about Kaz?  She’s not Jewish and look how wonderful she is.”  We’d come a long way, baby.

Our wedding, which occurred shortly after Kaz’s arrival, was a small one:  My parents and brother and about a half dozen friends.  One of them demurred at signing the register, because he felt his communist background might bounce back and bite my non-citizen wife in the behind.  Remember, this was shortly after the McCarthy period.

My most vivid memory of the occasion was when we were walking toward the ceremony room.  Dr. Harrington said to me, “Nat, this is an ecumenical room and you’ll like it.  The money to build it was donated by a Jew. It has a Guttenberg bible on the wall, and that’s Protestant.  And finally there’s a small statue of the virgin Mary on a pedestal to represent Catholicism.”

“The virgin Mary,” I blurted out, picturing the look on my parents’ faces, “the virgin Mary?  Who needs that?”

”It’s on wheels,” he said.

“Well, wheel it out!” I bellowed.

He ran up ahead of us and wheeled it out.

The ceremony text was -- guess what  -- the Book of Ruth:  “Thy people are my people and my people are thy people.” (Or do I have that backwards?)

Some of my friends, who were intermarried, too, sat there and giggled. My parents kept looking around apprehensively, not really convinced this wasn’t a church.  Kaz was vexed, I’m sure, because it wasn’t enough of a church.  As for me, I couldn’t wait to get out and begin our lives.

We did and we are still continuing, 48 years later.

BY

Nat Lehrman

There’s an old adage, “Don’t wish for what you want.  You might get it.”

A number of years ago, I wanted to take an exam testing my knowledge of French.  I wanted to take it so badly I could taste it. I did take it and I could have been the sorriest boy alive if ...  But here’s the story.

My commanding officer walked up to my desk, where I was clacking away at a typewriter, looked at me compassionately and said, “Pack your bags, Corporal.  You’re shipping out.”

“Shipping out?  I’m happy here. Why do I have to leave?”

I was the company clerk in a Military Police detachment in southwest Japan. It was the early fifties, just as the Korean war had ended.  The food was good and the living was easy. We didn’t do reveille, we didn’t do weapons practice and our only maneuvers concerned getting off the post fast for drinking and chasing. There was no better duty in the entire army. Ship out?  Why me?

“What’s this all about Lieutenant?  Did I screw up?  Am I being punished?”  

“Not that I know of,” he replied.  “I haven’t seen your orders yet, but one of the guys in headquarters muttered something about French.  I have no idea what that means. I thought you were Jewish.”

I was the only Jew on the post, and from New York, yet.  I never ran into any anti-semitism per se, but there were a lot of barbed remarks. Like, “Get me those papers in ten minutes, Lehrman, and I don’t mean a Jewish ten minutes.”  Nothing earthshaking.  But a little insensitive.

“Just get ready,” he continued. “All your questions will be answered when you get wherever you’re going.”

“French?” I asked myself, struggling with the only clue I had. I did study about 18 credits of French in college, and I did take an army interpreter’s exam many months before.  But I never heard diddly about that -- I assumed I had flunked it -- and besides, what did French have to do with the Far East? They didn’t speak it in Korea.  

Were they sending me to Paris? Not bloody likely.  Even the army wasn’t nutty enough to transfer a draftee with eight months left half way around the world.

Up to this point, I had been valuable where I was.  I could type.  And a typist was worth his weight in gold.  It gave me lifetime security for the 18 months I had to serve.   

Actually I would have given up typing in favor of becoming an interpreter.  Two college buddies of mine who’d been drafted the semester before me had managed to take a “linguist’s” exam in French and as a result, both of them were shipped to Europe. I knew French at least as well as they. I counted on this as my trump card to make the army bearable.  Eighteen months in SHAEF headquarters in Paris?  What could be bad about that?

So, in the beginning, about a minute after I arrived at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, the army replacement depot (“repldepl”) that sorted out newcomers, I sought and found the officer in charge of linguist exams.

He was a pleasant-looking, mild-mannered Captain and he listened to my request patiently -- for about two minutes -- before denying it.

“These exams are for linguists,” he told me. “You’re not a linguist. You only speak one language besides English.”  True enough. Yiddish, which I wasn’t very good at anyway, didn’t count.

I left the Captain’s office crestfallen.

I spent about another week in Camp Kilmer, and then I was given orders to report for MP training in nearby Fort Dix. 

Why was I chosen for the MPs?  I was the least likely candidate for police work that one could imagine. I was averse to and had no experience with physical conflict and couldn’t imagine myself dragging recalcitrant soldiers, probably twice as tough as I, to detention. And I was the world’s sloppiest dresser, which wouldn’t go well with all the MP spit and polish.

The answer is they were looking to fill an MP training battalion on the day I was available. But you had to be qualified:  a height of 5’8” (I was 6’1”) and a high school diploma (I had a college degree). In other words, I was upwardly qualified -- by a lot. That’s the army way. And once you were trained in a specialty in the army, you rarely could change it.  I knew this doomed any notions I had of interpreting French. 

But before leaving Camp Kilmer I had to attend one of many  orientations,  A corporal wandered in to one of them and asked if anyone in the room would like to take a linguist exam.  All I had to do was raise my hand and say, “Me.”  No captain to tangle with here. The corporal wrote my name down and told me, I would “hear from them.”

Within the next few days, I was immersed in MP training in Fort Dix and I quickly forgot about linguistics.

Forgot about it, that is, until one day, about eight weeks into basic training, I was in the middle of a bivouac, which is like a camping trip during which you eat field chow and sleep in a tent. A jeep pulled up and the driver asked for me. He drove me back to camp where I was ushered into a language testing room. Voilà! L’examen français!

I was annoyed, because I was about ten weeks away from anything French and I was sure I’d forgotten a lot of what I knew. But I took the test and was driven back to bivouac, where my MP training was resumed and my French forgotten about once again.

At the end of 16 weeks of training, I was given a seven-day furlough and ordered to Seattle, whence I would be given an assignment in the Far East, presumably Korea, where guns were still blazing. 

I spent my furlough mostly feeling sorry for myself, and I guess I wasn’t thinking clearly when I boarded the New York-bound train in Bangor, Maine, where my parents lived at the time.  Instead of carrying my duffel bag on my back, I checked it in the baggage car.

I presumed it was transferred when I boarded the train to Trenton, New Jersey, where the troop train would pick us up.

The train from New York was beset with delays and we arrived in Trenton with only minutes to spare.  You could see the headlight of the troop train a short distance away.

I ran upstairs to the baggage counter and asked for my duffel.

“Sorry, soldier, it ain’t here yet.  Must be on the next train from New York,”

“But, sir, I’m going to miss my troop train!” I said, frantically.

“Too bad, sonny, I can’t help you.” 

I ran down the stairs where the train was in its final stages of boarding. I saw a lieutenant, whom I presumed was in charge, and I said, “Sir, I don’t have my bag yet. What should I do?”

“Go fetch it,” he said, as if it were sitting there waiting for me, and he turned around and boarded the train.  Ten seconds later, it was gone and I was standing on the platform feeling desperate.  President Eisenhower had a few weeks before signed a bill declaring that missing a troop movement was to be considered a form of desertion and punished accordingly.

I happened to look down the platform and I noticed two GIs moving toward me.  One of them said, “Did you miss the train?”

Oh, did I feel good.  Two other guys in the same stew I was in.

“Yeh,” I said.  “You, too?”

“No,” was the reply.  ”We work in the Transportation Section of Fort Dix.”

“Oh Lord,” I thought. “This is it.  I’ll spend the night in the brig and who knows what will follow.”

“What happened?” one of the guys asked.  After I explained, the other one said, “Get yourself a room at the Y.  Your bag will probably be here tomorrow.  Get it and come see us at the post. We’ll get you to your destination.“

The next day these two nice guys gave me an airplane ticket, New York to Seattle. Who had ever flown in 1953?  Not me. And the plane didn’t leave until Monday so I had a three day pass in New York!  Meanwhile my buddies were jammed into this pokey transcontinental troop train.

I got to Fort Lewis, Washington, another “repldepl,” a few hours after they did.  

At this point, my luck took another major leap upward. As we were waiting on the pier to board the ship to the Far East, an announcement was made that a truce had been signed in Korea.  Hallelujah!

My luck got still better when we arrived in Yokohama. Even without a war, Korea was not considered very good duty at that time (especially for MPs, who were generally given prison guard duty.  Yech.) The troop count on the ship was 2000.  As it turned out, 1800 were assigned to posts in Korea.  The other 200 (including me) were dispersed to camps in Japan. Can you believe those odds?

And what a camp I was shipped to!  Camp Nara was situated at the edge of Nara City, the first capital of Japan. It was one of the most beautiful and historically significant cities in the country. And it was only a short distance from Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe, the cultural and commercial center of the country.

The barracks had housed Japanese naval cadets before and during World War II. This was better than a Hilton hotel!

My lucky string kept gathering momentum.  After two days in Camp Nara, waiting for an assignment, I was summoned to the headquarters office and told that my records revealed I could type.  How would I like to be the company clerk?

Is that a serious question?  Of course, I would like to be the company clerk. I said this before I had any idea what a company clerk is expected to do. But certainly it had to be more down my alley than spit polishing a uniform and breaking up fights among drunken GIs.

The responsibilities of the company clerk were not onerous.  There’s a form called The Morning Report, which terrifies everyone because it must be typed perfectly -- no strike overs, no erasures.  Once I caught the hang of it, however, it took me about five minutes to do it without do-overs, and maybe a half hour to redo it five times on hung over mornings.

After finishing this chore, there wasn’t much else to do. I had a jeep assigned to me, and could tour the countryside at my leisure. And there was a modicum of paperwork that came our way and could be disposed of in two hours per week if one were literate.

And that’s the point.  The noncoms who had been in the army for 15 to 20 years previously were generally undereducated, and were thrilled to have someone handle the company’s paperwork.  That was my contribution to them. 

My first sergeant was a sweetheart of a guy who had barely six years of education.  His responsibilities were primarily administrative and he could hardly read or write. So I did everything for him, and he did everything for me.  He was spared reading and writing, and I was given incredible freedom. Even though I never rose above corporal, I virtually ran the company, since there was little to do those days other than push paper around.

What did I do after my paperwork was done each day?

On some days, I’d take my jeep and drive through the countryside to Otsu, a charming little town on a great big lake (Biwa).  There was very little traffic in Japan at that time.  The Japanese manufacturers had not yet started to flood the roads (of the world) with their inexpensive and capable machinery.  All I ever saw were other army vehicles and occasionally a Japanese three-wheel utility vehicle, puttering along at about 15 miles per hour.  I never enjoyed driving as much.

There was a tennis court across the road from my office.  Plenty of time was available to develop my game.

Three day passes were abundant, and I used them to take the highly efficient electric railway trains to Kyoto (half hour on the express), the second capital of Japan, after Nara.  There is probably no place in the world with as many temples and shrines as in Kyoto.

Osaka, also a half hour away, was the place to go for movies, good restaurants and bars and the vision of a really bustling town.  It reminded many people of Chicago.

Back at the base, we normally ate at the mess hall, which was quite good compared to the impression people have of army chow.  On the other hand, I do remember that at breakfast, when “cookie’ would offer us eggs to our order, we used to say, “Give ‘em to me raw before you fuck ‘em up.” 

All this seemed to be coming to an end, I realized as I began packing my bags.

I went to the transportation office next day to get my orders.  “Where am I going?” I asked.

“To Indo China.”

“Why me?” I asked.

“Well,” the clerk  said, “it looks like the French army has got its ass in a sling in Dien Bien Phu, and our President has promised to help them.  First step is to send some liaisons -- GIs who speak French. I see by your records,” he continued, ”that you took a linguist's exam...”

Jeez, was this going to come back and haunt me?

“And you did pretty well,” he said.  “Fluent in Writing, Fluent in Reading and Fair in Aural Comprehension. (This was one “fluent” better than my friends who went to Europe.)

“I’m sure there’s nobody in this entire command more qualified than you.”

“Yeh, thanks a lot. I’m really flattered.”

I tried to look at the bright side.  I’d had a good run of duty for the past nine months and at least they were shipping me out to do desk work, not rifle toting.  On the other hand, several of the American liaisons had been killed in skirmishes.  I wasn’t sure how I felt.

I went back to the barracks, starting packing my gear and shipping home my souvenirs. I made some discreet inquiries about my particular circumstances, and it appears that the general in charge of our command had sent a TWX to every post asking for identification of all GIs with French on their records.  I may have been the only one.  It makes sense that all the others would be stationed in Europe.

Well, I went around mumbling as a mantra, “Don’t wish for what you want...”  Look how this French exam, in my mind a passport to soft army duty, was now poised to get me out of wonderfully soft duty and into a combat zone. And here went my incredible string of lucky breaks. 

But the luck overcame the mantra. Just as I finished packing, on  a sunny day in May 1954, the French evacuated Dien Bien Phu and liberated me to finish my duty in Japan.

Is there a moral to this story?

There are a couple.  In the army they always tell you “Don’t volunteer for anything.”  Maybe even linguist exams, benign as they appear.

Second moral:  even fifty years later, in this man’s high tech army, typing is still a premium skill.  Only now they call it “word processing.”  Learn it, recruit, learn it.