Artists Working In Uncommon Media

 

[Readers of Rick On Theater will know that I have an interest in the visual arts.  I’ve posted many articles, both by me and by others, including a number from published sources, on art from one perspective or another.  I’m often fascinated by innovative and experimental art, work that’s groundbreaking and daring—even if I don’t always like the results.  Just as I am with theater, I’m taken with artists who devise new ways to express themselves with new media or new techniques.

[Recently, I read two pieces in the New York Times’ monthly style magazine, T, about artists working with materials that are, not unique, but also not mainstream.  One works with cloth and thread, though he’s not a tapestry artist or a needlepointer.  The other’s a sculptor who work with lighted tubes of neon.  I say “works with” and not “works in” because he incorporates the neon tubes in his sculptures with other elements—though the tubes and the light they emit are the most dynamic components of the sculpture.

[In both cases, I hope, you’ll see what got my attention—and piqued my imagination.  Maybe these artists and their work will intrigue you a little, too.] 

“Out of Whole Cloth”
by Siddhartha Mitter 

[The article below was published in T: The New York Times Style Magazine on 27 September 2026.  It was posted to the paper’s website as “What Happens When a Painter Abandons Paint?” on 10 September 2026.]

Eric N. Mack has created a singular style of painting by forgoing paint altogether and using fabric instead.

The artist Eric N. Mack [b. 1987], known for his abstract fabric assemblages, works in a simple studio in an office building turned creative hub in Manhattan’s financial district. When I visited in early June, I found the room packed with textiles — piles of colorful remnants, gauzy lengths unrolled on the floor and racks of clothing, some of Mack’s own design. A heavy-duty Singer sewing machine held the center of a cluttered worktable. Out the window, we could see the South Street Seaport at a distance, the ship sails echoing Mack’s fabrics.

Mack, 39, identifies as a painter — and trained as one in art school at Cooper Union, and later at Yale. Back then, he was already challenging the norms of the field, painting onto unusual surfaces like blankets and drop cloths and setting them up as sculptures; for almost a decade now, he’s used fabric and thread, not paints and brushes, to make his marks. His assemblages can stretch over metal frames or hang off lines and free-standing armatures, or cascade in bright hues across, say, a museum atrium, making the space itself a sculpture of light. When we met in the studio, he was preparing his exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea that opens today [You Red The Shirt Off My Back, 10 September-24 October 2026]. Pinned to the wall were works he was making, including some for the show: Each was a kind of collage, joining small segments of many different shapes and patterns and materials, stitched and layered into irregular forms.

[Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art on Cooper Square in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

[Chelsea is a neighborhood on the West Side of Manhattan. The area’s boundaries are roughly 14th Street to the south, the Hudson River to the west, 6th Avenue to the east, and 34th Street to the north. In the 1980s, the area began to attract restaurants and nightclubs and, in the ’90s. art galleries focusing on the most contemporary artists and works.]

One of a cohort of young Black artists to appear in the early 2010s with fresh ideas and cross-disciplinary tendencies, Mack received institutional recognition almost immediately, participating in an influential group show of emerging artists at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2012 [Fore, 11 November 2012-10 March 2013]. His work was in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, and he had his first New York City solo exhibition that same year at the Brooklyn Museum [Lemme walk across the room, 11 January-4 August 2019]. He’s shown widely ever since.

[The Studio Museum is an African-American art museum in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan. Founded in 1968, the museum collects, preserves, and interprets art created by African Americans, members of the African diaspora, and artists from the African continent.]

His fabric works join a lineage of conceptual experiments that are based on painting while also shedding the medium, in part or in full. Among his touchstones are figures like Sam Gilliam [1933-2022; see “Picasso, Bearden, Gilliam, and Gauguin” (26 June 2011) and “Sam Gilliam (1933-2022): A Personal Tribute” (2 July 2022)], the great Black abstractionist who began draping his painted, unstretched canvases in the late 1960s; Robert Rauschenberg [1925-2008], the protean assemblage figure who made textile works in the 1970s; even [Vladimirov Javacheff] Christo [1935–2020; Bulgarian] and Jeanne-Claude [Denat de Guillebon; 1935-2009; Moroccan-born French national], with their wrapped buildings and monuments. This fall, he will also appear in “Hard Art,” an intergenerational show of 44 artists at MoMA PS1 [Long Island City, Queens; 5 November 2026-8 March 2027] that traces the legacy of Black abstract painters, including Gilliam, Mary Lovelace O’Neal [American; 1942-2026], Joe Overstreet [American; 1933-2019] and more, across many media. (And a large-scale installation by Mack is on view at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Ky., responding to the building’s architecture, through Nov. 29.)

But Mack finds equal inspiration in street and high fashion, and in the histories of quilting and the domestic arts. How fabric is made and traded, and with whose labor; how it is worn on the body; how it is kept or reused: All this, for him, infuses the material down to the snippet. This concentrated potential keeps Mack trawling fabric and remnant shops, visiting markets and artisans on his travels and accepting the miscellaneous batches of fabric that friends think he might want to use. It has led him to focus his practice. Where he once employed different methods — readymades, ornamentation, photo transfer, magazine-page collage — he has pared his priorities to fabric, space and form. The result is a distinctive visual language, sensitive to fabric’s social and emotional life, how a remnant can marshal a memory; how a pattern comes with a story embedded in it. Unlike paint, Mack told me, fabric can “also talk about time and fragility.” He added: “I like that about textile. It’s something that I’ve wanted painting to be able to do, which is why I’ve conceptually fused them.”

At the studio, I asked Mack to guide me through one of his works in progress. Pinned to the wall (and still untitled), the piece involved several dozen elements: a dynamic assembly of strips and squares of many colors, patterns and textures. The total work possessed the rough proportions of a dress — albeit one bizarrely confected, and then deconstructed by some centrifugal energy. Mack pointed out a rectangular section near the work’s top. It had bands of narrow stripes in shades of red, blue and green. He got it, he said, on Chongming Island, an outer district of Shanghai in China’s Yangtze River Delta, where women have woven homespun cotton for centuries.

As we continued to look over the piece, alighting on other fabric segments, it became a map of the artist’s sources. A lace section, for example: “I got this in Turin in a secondhand shop,” Mack said. An Indian-style, paisleylike print was purchased at a market in Rome, a bit of burlap at an ordinary home and garden store. A swath of linen came from Emblem Weavers, one of the surviving traditional suppliers in Ireland. “They gave me a lot of remnants that I’m still working with,” he said. And the larger rectangle, slightly frayed with loose threads hanging, in a tartan pattern anchoring the bottom of the work? “There’s a punk shop I go to in the East Village,” Mack said. “If it has a grid on it, I’ll get it. It felt like it kind of balanced everything out.”

[The East Village is a neighborhood on the East Side of Lower Manhattan. It’s roughly defined as the area east of the Bowery and Third Avenue, south of 14th Street, north of Houston Street, and west of the East River. The area has undergone many changes since the early 19th century, and today it’s a center of avant-garde and experimental culture and arts, including the visual arts, theater, music, and writing.]

A grammar was emerging, one that relied on a combination of history and intuition. The work’s energy — and also its control — dwelt in its torqued internal geometry, the way Mack positioned the patterned fabric pieces slightly off kilter. The artist often leaves deliberate gaps in his compositions that he likens to oculi or breezeways — “like the work is beginning to unmake itself,” he said. In the jagged edges, he was exposing the vulnerability of the material.

At the same time, all the reference points and different histories seem to create something familiar, a kind of connection between the work and the viewer. “People ask me if the viewers can touch the work,” he said. “And my answer is always that I think the viewers already know what it feels like. Because so many of the fabrics are so ubiquitous, you already can imagine, which ends up being a kind of sensorial overlay.”

Clothing and style are fodder for experiments that have landed along the spectrum between fashion and art. He’s collaborated in the past with the London-based streetwear designer Kiko Kostadinov [Bulgarian; b. 1989] and with Grace Wales Bonner [English; b. 1990], now the creative director of Hermès men’s wear. (When we met, Mack was dressed unassumingly in jeans and a Supreme jacket.) At one point, he was making “outfit collages,” incorporating full clothing pieces — trousers, windbreakers — into his scrap-and-remnant assemblages. Though there are fewer overt explorations of fashion in his work now than earlier in his career, the possibilities lurk. While we were looking at the patchwork piece we had analyzed on the studio wall, he said, “I think it may need to be worn.”

Mack grew up just outside of Washington, D.C., and his parents both worked at the National Gallery of Art [in Washington, D.C.] — his father in exhibition installation, with a specialty in plexiglass vitrines, and his mother in the gallery archives. The family identified so much with the museum that they chose his middle name, Nathaniel, for its alliteration with “national.”

Mack’s father also owned a clothing store, so his son would either accompany him to the museum, where he roamed the galleries and watched him clean the vitrines — “with his personal proprietary solution”— or help out at the shop. These formative experiences built his awareness of not just art and fashion but “how close they were at times,” he said. “What people were wearing on the street, how culture moved through fashion — there was this progress where I was like, ‘Oh, I’m seeing this in real time.’”

Outside was the Black D.C. of the 1990s, rhythmed by go-go music, the stubbornly regional dance genre epitomized by bands like Rare Essence, Trouble Funk and other hyperlocal acts. “It was an interesting kind of cultural specificity, and it had its own resistance,” he said. “It just had such a flavor and feeling — really Black, but also just complex.”

He’s titled works and shows after D.C. locations or bands. How these memories filter into his art is abstract. “Just as I’m preserving an old piece of fabric in the middle of these newer materials, or thinking about simultaneous contrast, there’re these moments of culture that I want to compress into the work.”

Equally in the air for Mack, who attended an arts program in high school, was the local fine-art legacy — notably the Washington Color School [see “The Washington School of Color” (21 September 2014)] painters of the 1950s and ’60s, who sought a language of color on canvas using acrylic and methods like shaping and soaking. This group, plus offshoots, included Kenneth Noland [1924-2010; see “Morris Louis” (15 February 2010) and “Picasso, Bearden, Gilliam, and Gauguin” (26 June 2011)], who cut canvases into sculpted shapes; Morris Louis [see “Morris Louis”], who poured color on large unstretched canvases; and Gilliam, as well as the great Black painter Alma Thomas [American; 1891-1978], known for the bold rhythms and patterns of her abstract paintings. All were influences on Mack, he said.

Shortly after high school, he visited a Gilliam retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery of Art [Sam Gilliam: A Retrospective (15 October 2005-22 January 2006); see “Awake and Sing!, et al.” (3 April 2017) and “Sam Gilliam (1933-2022): A Personal Tribute” (2 July 2022)], followed by one of Louis in 2007 at the Hirshhorn Museum [Morris Louis Now: An American Master Revisited (20 September 2007-6 January 2008)]. Later, he said, he realized that “these were bookends — these are saying so much, and they’re local artists who, unlike go-go, were really able to penetrate. They’re in museums all over the world.”

[The Corcoran Gallery of Art was an art museum in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1869, the Gallery closed on 28 September 2014 due to a prolonged economic shortfall. Its art school and building transferred to George Washington University and its collection was distributed to other public museums and institutions in Washington, primarily the National Gallery and the American University Museum.

[The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is an art museum in Washington. Opened to the public in 1974, it’s part of the Smithsonian Institution and focuses on contemporary and modern art, mainly on the post-World War II period.]

Mack has “an almost encyclopedic knowledge of all these artists and movements,” said the artist Abigail DeVille [American; b. 1981], whom he befriended at Yale. “I’ll show him a picture of a work in progress and he’ll have immediate references.” The artist Tomashi Jackson [American; b. 1980], a friend since Cooper Union who showed alongside him in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, said that anywhere Mack went, he always looked for the library. “He is a good-faith participant in art-historical lineage,” Jackson said. “As a maker, and then inside of our inherent responsibility to give it back.”

In the late winter of 2019, while Mack was preparing for the Biennial and had installations up at the Brooklyn Museum and the Serpentine gallery in London, he participated in a fourth show that is perhaps the one that most impacted him as an artist, even though its material trace has been lost. For the Desert X outdoor biennial in California, he draped billowing lengths of cloth over the plaza of an abandoned gas station just outside the town of Mecca [California], by the Salton Sea. The fashion house Missoni donated fabric. He titled the work “Halter.”

[Desert X is a site-specific, contemporary art exhibition that is held in the Coachella Valley in Southern California. The inaugural Desert X was held in 2017, and subsequent exhibitions have been held every two years. Desert X 2027 will take place from 30 October 2027 through 7 May 2028 and will mark 10 years since the inaugural exhibition.

[The Salton Sea is a shallow, landlocked, highly saline endorheic lake in Riverside and Imperial counties in Southern California.]

One month into the exhibition, the work disappeared, leaving only bits of fabric and rope, apparently burned, in circumstances that have never been resolved. Speaking at the time to ArtNews, Neville Wakefield [English curator, b. 1963], the exhibition’s artistic director, said there was little to be done: “The beauty of the piece was that it was extremely fragile, ephemeral, diaphanous work. The fact that it has succumbed to its own fragility might add to the narrative.” The loss strengthened Mack’s resolve. All his pieces since then, he told me, “come in a continuum where they’re answering for the absence of that work.”

From this perspective, the outdoor work Mack showed last year at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in Upper Manhattan was cathartic for the artist. The piece, titled “Cartouche” [2025], part of “Fishers of Men,” Mack’s solo exhibition at the academy [27 September 2025-8 February 2026], addressed the peculiar architectural setting: The mannered Beaux-Arts complex of Audubon Terrace — the grand dream of an early 20th-century philanthropist — dead-ends at the rear facades of two prewar apartment buildings more typical of Washington Heights [neighborhood in the northern part of the borough of Manhattan], with their fire escapes and water towers. Against this backdrop, Mack strung two parallel ropes and attached between them a billowing textile collage that stayed up through most of the winter. “This exposure to the elements — and being braced by the architecture — was ideal,” Mack said. From earlier New York artists, he added, he’s come around to the idea that “the city is a collaborator.”

[Audubon Terrace is a cultural complex comprising eight buildings in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan. Developed for several cultural institutions between 1904 and 1930, Audubon Terrace was commissioned by Archer Milton Huntington (1870-1955; philanthropist and scholar). The complex is designated a New York City landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

[The site was originally part of the estate of John James Audubon (1785-1851; French-American artist, entrepreneur, naturalist, explorer, and ornithologist), which was later developed into the Audubon Park district. The first buildings were completed in 1907 for the Hispanic Society of America and the American Numismatic Society. Additional buildings were designed for the American Academy of Arts and Letters (AAAL), the American Geographical Society (AGS), the Heye Foundation's Museum of the American Indian (MAI), and Our Lady of Esperanza Church.

[In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the AGS, ANS, and MAI moved out. (The Museum of the American Indian, now a New York satellite of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, is located downtown at the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House at 1 Bowling Green.) Boricua College, the Hispanic Society, and AAAL took over the other three institutions’ buildings; Boricua College itself moved out during 2026.]

When I asked Mack’s old school friend DeVille about him, she’d replied with a poetic note. “I think of Eric’s work not only as an extension of the body but as an ancient technology of place making,” it read in part. “It’s carving out a space of memory, loss, whimsy, dreaming as a poem or song.”

In the studio, Mack put his aspirations differently: “I think the way that I break through is with this kind of public address. This relationship to freedom. Taking these knowable formats and introducing these worlds that I don’t see as disparate at all.”

[Siddhartha Mitter writes about art and creative communities in the United States, Africa, and elsewhere.  Previously he wrote regularly for the Village Voice and the Boston Globe and he was a reporter for WNYC Public Radio.]

*  *  *  *
“Afterglow”
by M. H. Miller

[This report was also from T: The New York Times Style Magazine of 27 September 2026.  It was posted on the website on 21 September 2026 under the title “He Grew Up Without Electricity. Then He Became Obsessed With Neon Lights.”]

In the 1960s, the artist Stephen Antonakos developed a spiritual relationship with neon. Today, his preserved SoHo home and studio is a testament to the material's mysteries.

One evening in the late 1950s in New York City, the artist Stephen Antonakos [Greek-born; 1926-2013] left his West 29th Street studio and began to walk downtown toward his apartment. As the story goes, at some point during this walk he had a near-religious epiphany after seeing a restaurant’s neon sign. Neon wouldn’t have been an unfamiliar sight for Antonakos, who worked in advertising by day and at night made exuberant sculptures out of found materials like pillows or empty sardine tins. Back then, it was still a part of the urban landscape, though by the early ’70s it would begin to be replaced by more affordable and practical LED lighting. Having lived in New York since the 1930s — except for two years in the Army during World War II, when he was stationed in the Philippines — Antonakos grew up around neon icons like Radio City Music Hall and Katz’s Delicatessen. But it was as if he were seeing neon for the first time: the intensity of its color, the way its glow called attention to itself. He’d later describe the moment as finding “what I didn’t know I was looking for.”

[Katz’s Delicatessen is a Jewish deli (but not kosher) at the corner of Houston and Ludlow Streets on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Since its founding in 1888, it has been popular among locals and tourists alike for its pastrami on rye, which is considered among New York’s best. In 2016, Zagat gave Katz’s a food rating of 4.5 out of 5, and ranked it as the number one deli in New York City.]

Neon is a natural element (number 10 on the periodic table) that was discovered by British chemists at the end of the 19th century. In 1910, the French engineer Georges Claude [1870-1960] patented sealed glass tubes that combined neon with an electric current. Claude planned to sell his invention as lamps, but their intensity proved more useful in advertising; in 1925, a Packard car dealership in Los Angeles was one of the first businesses to install a neon sign. In the 1960s, neon had a powerful influence over American contemporary art. In addition to Antonakos, artists who worked with the material included Chryssa Vardea-Mavromichali (another Greek American, who went by the mononym Chryssa [1933-2013]), Dan Flavin [American; 1933-96] and Bruce Nauman [American; b. 1941].

But few artists explored neon with a deeper affection than Antonakos, who treated it less as a material than a medium unto itself. He was the subject of numerous gallery and museum shows and made more than 55 large-scale public neon works in places ranging from the facade of a Tel Aviv power plant to a terminal at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. Yet the greatest showcase of his art is at his home and studio on West Broadway in SoHo, where he lived and worked from 1967 until his death, at age 86, in 2013. The loft, which can be visited by appointment, has since been preserved by the artist’s second wife, Naomi Spector Antonakos [b. 1938 or ’39], now 87, who was born in Massachusetts and worked for several of the New York galleries that represented her husband. The two married in 1972, and the couple raised their daughter, Evangelia [b. 1975], now the head of the department of math and computer science at Bronx Community College, there. (Antonakos had a son from his first marriage, also named Stephen, who died in 2020.) The family slept in bedrooms scattered around the space, none of which had walls that reached the ceiling in order to maintain a continuous flow. Antonakos worked in the northwest corner of the loft, using a utilitarian drafting table and a metal desk, a section of its surface covered by a blue neon rectangle under frosted glass.

[SoHo, short for “South of Houston Street,” is a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan. Formerly home to small factories, since the 1970s, the neighborhood has been the location of many artists’ lofts and art galleries and has also been known for its variety of shops ranging from trendy upscale boutiques to national and international chain store locations. Designated by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and declared a National Historic Landmark because many of the buildings incorporate cast-iron architectural elements.]

When he moved in, the 5,000-square-foot space was raw and virtually uninhabitable. There was no kitchen or even refrigerator. The bathroom was little more than a closet with a trough. SoHo, which had only recently acquired that name, was largely undeveloped, full of abandoned manufacturing spaces with high ceilings and large windows. Antonakos’s studio evolved alongside the neighborhood, where he and his wife became social fixtures, befriending other artists, including Robert Ryman [American; 1930-2019], Sol LeWitt [American; 1928-2007] and Richard Artschwager [American; 1923-2013]. The place came together, Naomi told me during a recent visit to the studio, based on “Stephen’s instinct. It’s very subtle and it’s just him.”

Antonakos was born in a village in southern Greece with no electricity, where natural light was taken seriously. “We can’t imagine the darkness,” Naomi said of her husband’s upbringing. “If there’s no moonlight, you cannot see your hand, much less your feet.” In interviews, Antonakos recalled how he’d sometimes lie awake in the early hours before dawn, waiting for the sun to arrive.

The center of his universe was the Greek Orthodox Church. “To enter the chapel was to enter another world,” he once wrote in an artist statement. “Being inside it was like being plunged deep inside my own feelings and finding a paradise at the same time.” When he was 4, his family (he was the youngest of four sons) moved to Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Later, they lived in a Greek enclave in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, near another Orthodox church that became vital to him. He remained very religious throughout his life: Near his worktable, he covered a small section of the wall with religious items.

Some of this iconography appeared explicitly in his work, most famously in 1965’s “The Blue Neon Cross,” a modified crucifix bisecting four differently colored neon squares. But more often his pieces display an almost primordial sense of minimalism. In one area of the studio is a scalene triangle in green neon; in another is a board painted solid white and backlit by blue neon. These suggest a rare confidence that the [art] critic David Ebony [American; b. ca. 1954] has described as a “what you see is what you get approach.” The art historian Irving Sandler [American; 1925-2018] called Antonakos “essentially a classicist in the Constructivist tradition” — his forms have no symbolism or meaning outside of themselves. Antonakos himself once explained his working method as “I place things in space.”

In the 1970s, he began designing free-standing rooms that incorporated neon pieces, but his process was always simple and straightforward, even as his neon works grew very large. He’d draw detailed, to-scale renderings of neon installations in colored pencil on brown paper. These plans would be sent to Spectrum on Broadway, a neon sign maker in Woodside, Queens, that was his chosen fabricator.

As an artist, Antonakos seemed to have little interest in the answers to big questions. What fascinated him more were the questions themselves — and materials, like neon, that sometimes seemed to elude interpretation altogether. In 1971, when he was teaching briefly in California, he wrote to friends in New York, asking them to each send him a package. He didn’t know what he’d been sent and never intended to open the packages, preserving the mystery. “I do not want to tell people how to experience art, mine or anyone else’s,” he once said. “I simply want to try to find for myself ways of putting things together visually so that the possibility for a kind of higher consciousness may occur.”

[M. H. Miller is the features director for T Magazine.  He’s a prominent journalist and editor who writes extensively on contemporary art, culture, and the historical evolution of New York City’s art scenes.

[Before joining the New York Times, Miller built a robust career as a culture journalist and editor.  His writing has appeared across several major literary, news, and art publications such as the New York Observer, where he served as a reporter and senior editor; ARTnews, where he worked as an editor; the Guardian; the London Review of Books; Bookforum; the Village Voice; and NPR.]

The Letters Project, Part 2

 

[This is the second installment of my transcription and summary (with commentary) of the correspondence between my future parents over the course of 1945.  If you haven’t read Part 1, I urge you to go back to 19 September and read it first before going on to Part 2.  There will be about 20 installments, spread out from now through the end of October 2027.]

LETTERS FROM THE FRONTS
January-December 1945

[This section of the letters starts off with something of a bang.  After that, it covers Dad’s last weeks in the U.S. before he and his artillery battalion are shipped to Europe.  The letters here record the last time my parents-to-be see each other until Dad returns after the end of the World War II and his separation from the service at the end of the year.]

23 January – 26 February 1945

In her letter of Tuesday, 23 January, Mom wrote that on Saturday night, she and “some of the ‘old crowd’” went to the Grill Room (in the Hotel Hildebrecht in downtown Trenton), which Mother characterized as “more or less Trenton’s night spot” that “use[d] to be our Sat. night hang-out,” and she found herself in the middle of “a real, honest-to-goodness brawl.”  At closing time, 2 a.m., Mom’s crowd began getting ready to leave “when, from apparently nowhere, & for no good reason came the cry ‘You S of B of a Jew!’”  Mother went on to describe the event:

Fists began flying; words socially un-mentionable were echoed thru-out the room, tables were thrown over, glasses were smashed—and what not—until the MP’s came in—and the fight temporarily subsided.  However, the fight was carried out into the lobby—and, in discussions, to the street and to where we went for “a bite.”  To say the least, it was something!!  The “grease-ball” who started the whole thing got scratched a bit—but not enough, to my satisfaction.

I don’t know what Mom meant by “grease-ball” (the quotation marks are hers), once a common disparaging term of contempt for someone of Mediterranean or Latin descent, except that it was intended as an all-inclusive insult for the man who shouted the anti-Semitic slur and started the brawl. 

Neither of my folks was the kind of person to throw around ethnic slurs, but there were a large number of Trentonians of Italian heritage (I believe there still are), and Mother may have been referring to that, especially if the instigator appeared to be Italian-American.  If that’s the case, I can’t explain her choice of words except to think she was young, intemperate, and probably very angry.

(Opened in 1929, the Hotel Hildebrecht, at West State Street and Chancery Lane, featured a well-known Grill Room and cocktail lounge that famously doubled as a local nightclub and evening gathering place through the World War II era and into the 1950s.  The hotel closed in 1980 and was demolished in 1984.

(The Military Police were involved because, during the war, Trenton was a major transit hub for service members due to its proximity to Fort Dix, less than 20 miles to the southeast, one of the Army’s largest training and mobilization centers.  Because so many soldiers flooded downtown Trenton on weekend passes, both local police and Army MP’s actively patrolled downtown night spots like the Hildebrecht.)

“It’s laughable, looking back,” Mother admitted when she wrote about it three days later.  “But it surely produced a great deal of anger at the time.”  She went on to express some thoughts, not about anti-Semitism so much, but wondering why some “people have to segregate themselves.”  Ironically, she was talking about Jews, who she seemed to feel congregate in enclaves, keeping themselves separate from gentiles.

Now, both my mother and my father were “assimilated Jews,” part of the so-called “lost generation” of American Jewry.  That’s the generation of Jewish Americans, mostly born during or just after World War I, many the children of immigrants, who assimilated so thoroughly that they were more “American” than Jewish. 

(My dad’s parents, Jacob [1890-1963] and Lena, née Kirschbaum [1896-1949], were both born in Eastern Europe—the Ukraine and Latvia, respectively—in the late 19th century; Dad was born in New York City in 1918, days before the armistice that ended World War I.  Mom’s family, on the other hand, were native-born Americans for several generations on both her parents’ sides; my maternal grandfather was even a World War I vet, as I noted earlier [see Part 1].  Mom was born in 1923, just 4½ years after the end of the war.) 

While most of the lost generation, like my parents, practiced Judaism (they were not apostates), going to synagogue, being confirmed and bar mitzvahed (bat mitzvahs weren’t common for two more generations), and marrying within the faith, few learned Hebrew (much less Yiddish), kept kosher homes, or observed the domestic rituals of Jewish worship.  Almost all were Reform Jews. 

Neither of my parents grew up in Jewish neighborhoods and they both went to public schools (though my mother went to a co-ed private boarding school for high school—but it was Quaker).  Mom went to a women’s college in upstate New York and Dad went to a small men’s college in Virginia.  (Dad did join a Jewish frat, however.) 

Neither of my grandfathers was in a business that’s traditionally identified with Jews: my dad’s father, my Grandpa Jack, or Pop-Pop J.L. (his middle initial was L), was a pharmacist in New York City and Mom’s father, Grandpa Harry, or Pop-Pop H.F., was a doll manufacturer (see “Horsman Dolls”). 

(I don’t remember Jack’s actual middle name—just his initial—but I think it was Leopold or some Jewish or Slavic name that was later Americanized as Leopold.  Harry Freedman didn’t have a middle name.  “Harry” also wasn’t a nickname—that was his actual name on his birth certificate and his military documents.  Jack was, of course, Jacob, but probably only after he arrived in the States in 1900; I imagine at birth he was named “Yaakov” or some East European equivalent, like the Ukrainian “Yakiv.”

(I mentioned earlier where my father-to-be’s family lived in Manhattan.  It’s curious, but that site—the building no longer stands—is a short walking distance from my current home.  In addition, though Pop-Pop H.F. had moved his doll factory to Trenton in the 1930s, the company maintained sales offices in Manhattan’s Toy Center South, a building at 200 5th Avenue on the northwest corner of 23rd Street.  That’s one-and-a-half blocks west of Pop-Pop J.L.’s pharmacy and his family’s apartment.  Both are in my cruising area.)

You already know about Mom’s social work with the Red Cross, a field in which she continued to volunteer in the civilian sector after the war (she worked with the Travelers Aid Society in Washington); Dad was a journalist briefly after he finished college, before he “volunteered to be drafted” (as he put it) in 1941, and then he was an executive with a small movie theater corporation in Washington after he was discharged until he joined the U.S. Foreign Service in 1962. 

(The Travelers Aid movement began in 1851 in St. Louis, Missouri, to assist travelers, primarily women and children traveling alone.  The idea spread to other cities and the primary purpose became to provide social work to women traveling alone in order to protect them from moral danger, specifically white slave trafficking.

(The Travelers Aid Society of Washington, founded in 1913, began assisting travelers at the new Union Station in March 1913 to help them navigate the city for the first inauguration of Woodrow Wilson [1856-1924; 28th president of the United States: 1913-21; inauguration: 4 March 1913].  The first National Travelers Aid Association was founded in 1917 to serve all travelers regardless of gender, age, class, race, or religion.  

(From the 1920s through World War II, Travelers Aid was a fixture at major railroad stations, assisting travelers with information, helping unaccompanied minors as they traveled, and assisting stranded travelers.  It was one of the original organizations that came together in 1941 to form the United Services Organization [USO] to assist traveling service men and women.

(Travelers Aid International, which is the successor to the National Travelers Aid Society, welcomes immigrants to the U.S., with operations at or near many ports of entry.)

From the perspective of my parents and their peers, I suppose it might be explicable that my mother would see Jews associating exclusively with other Jews as unwholesome self-segregation.  It’s ironic, too, in a way that 81 years ago, my mother should focus on a phenomenon that is today an occasional topic of concern among African Americans, Latinos, Muslims, and other groups, particularly on college campuses.  I can’t say I ever thought of my mother as prescient.

In what came close to anti-Zionism, Mom questioned the need for Jews “to go over [to Palestine] and disturb the Arabs . . ., when they’ve got a good enough place right here in the U.S.”  This was a remarkable notion for several reasons.  First, Mother was considering only Jews from the United States who emigrated to Palestine, which was a relatively tiny number precisely because they had a good situation here. 

Second, the question came long before the mass immigration of displaced European Jews to Palestine after World War II, leading to the partition of Palestine and the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. 

Third, Mom wasn’t reckoning on the determination of many peoples to have a homeland—we’ve seen it in the Kurds, the Armenians, the Chechens, the Basques, the Canadian Inuit, and many other ethnic and national groups who’ve lost their homelands or never had one.  It’s a current concern again now in the Middle East with the drive for a Palestinian state.

Finally, Mother had yet to feel the bite herself of the kind of overt anti-Semitism she would encounter a few years later after she and my father moved to Washington, D.C., and went house-hunting.  More than once, in the capital city of this “good enough place,” real estate salespeople announced proudly, as they showed a prospective home to my parents—neither of whom looked stereotypically Jewish—that the neighborhood was “of course, restricted”! 

If you’re too young to have heard that code word—or never saw the Best Picture Oscar-winning 1947 film Gentleman’s Agreement—it meant “no Jews allowed.”  Why emigrate to Palestine, indeed.

Dad responded to Mother’s tale of violence and anti-Semitism on Friday, 26 January.  He exclaimed, “Sounds like you really got yourself involved in something last weekend.  My goodness, a veritable race riot.”  He wondered what he’d have done if he’d been there, and imagined he’d have “dived under the closest table still standing.”  My father, the hero!  He then added a little remark which I hope was at least slightly sardonic—although, perhaps not: “I have always maintained that when one visits the provinces (Trenton) barbarism is very rampant.” 

As for Mother’s rumination about Jewish self-segregation, Dad agreed with her.  “You know, dear, you’ve hit on what I believe is one of the fundamental causes for anti-Semitism,” he began.  “Segregation by the Jews to themselves.”  But he continued: “Another and opposite cause is those who force themselves into places and among people who neither welcome nor tolerate them.” 

That sounds like a call for separatism, or at least an acquiescence to exclusion.  That’s not the father I knew, especially in the 1960s when men like Martin Luther King, Jr.; Jesse Jackson; and Andrew Young were agitating for black civil rights.  Both my parents supported this movement, including desegregation efforts, even among people who “neither welcomed nor tolerated” it!  In his letter, Dad closed by saying: “A happy medium is much closer to the answer.  This problem, however, is another one that will and can only be solved by time.”

In his 24 January letter, the one in which he told the story of the distraught sergeant, Dad also wrote that he’d “been awfully busy for the past three days,” though he expected “from tomorrow on I will have a little more time to relax.  Things won’t be going at quite such a furious pace,” Dad predicted, “for a few days at least.”  That turned out to be an erroneous prediction (as he would admit in a subsequent letter). 

I surmise that orders for the transfer east hadn’t been received at Camp Hood yet—in wartime, those kinds of orders weren’t committed to paper and delivered until the last possible moment for security reasons (and for the possibility of contingency alterations in plans)—but with just a little over a week to go—considering how much would have to be readied for a move of that magnitude (artillery battalions travel with a number of big guns, trucks and jeeps, and all sorts of heavy materiel)—there would have to be scuttlebutt.

The 529th was an 8-inch howitzer battalion with 5 batteries, including 3 Firing Batteries (100-120 men each), comprising 4 guns per battery, or 12 guns in all.  All the support equipment for maintenance, ammunition supply, and logistics was in the Service Battery, while the Headquarters Battery, Dad’s command, contained the battalion’s command, staff, wire and radio communications, and fire-direction elements.  At full-strength, the battalion would number 540 to 600 personnel (consisting of approximately 30-35 officers and 500-565 enlisted men).  

As CO of the Headquarters Battery, Dad would have directly commanded 3 to 4 staff officers and approximately 95 to 110 enlisted men.  In addition, the Battalion Commander and his staff lived, ate, and traveled with the HQ Battery.  The HQ Battery Commander had to manage this complex of men and equipment that allowed the battalion staff to do their jobs, including seeing to their rations and housing.

Despite all the frenetic activity—and I’d imagine that nearly everyone at Camp Hood, around 50,000 troops until the 529th and other units began departing, would have been involved one way or another—there was still time for social events.  Dad wrote that everyone was anticipating “a soirée of sorts for Saturday night,” three nights hence, the 27th. 

The President’s Ball at Camp Hood, which I assume was the annual charity celebration across the country on or near FDR’s birthday (30 January) to raise money to combat polio (which Roosevelt had contracted in 1921), was to be “a formal dance . . . at the club.”  “All the wives are in a dither about the prospect of wearing a gown,” Dad reported.  “They get such few opportunities that they practically all faint at the mere possibility—such an existence.” 

Well, I can imagine that there were few chances to dress up in the wartime army, especially at a base like Camp Hood—but I suspect Dad was overstating the case a bit.  (A “camp” in the army is a temporary or reserve base, though some become permanent “forts” later, as Camp Hood did.  The facilities at the smaller camps are minimal and rudimentary, sometimes no more than tents and Quonset huts, compared to the larger, more substantial forts.  Semi-permanent army bases in combat zones abroad, such as Afghanistan and Iraq, are also called camps.  The Marines call all their bases camps.) 

The women (those who weren’t military personnel—the army had the Women’s Army Corps, or WAC, just as the navy had the WAVES) would wear civilian finery—an evening gown in this case—and the officers would wear Class A uniforms.  The army’s formal dress uniform, the equivalent of the civilian tuxedo, was Dress Blues, but that uniform was discontinued between 1940 and 1947 for austerity reasons during the war.

(The WAC was formed in 1943 when the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps [WAAC], established in 1942, was transformed into an active-duty branch of the army.  Except for nurses, assigned to the Army Nurse Corps, all female soldiers were assigned to the WAAC and later the WAC.  In 1978, the WAC was disbanded and all female soldiers were integrated into the appropriate formerly male units.)

However festive the evening was for the members of the 529th Field Artillery Battalion and their ladies, they couldn’t have known that it would be the last President’s Ball of this kind: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who founded the March of Dimes in 1938 to support the fight against polio, died in office on 12 April 1945, ending the tradition that started in 1934.

Dad reported he’d tried to phone Mom on Wednesday night (the 24th), before he wrote her, and in a note on Saturday afternoon, the 27th, Mom told him she was devastated at missing the call.  She also mentioned the President’s Ball (which was the evening of the day she wrote). 

The note, written at the Hotel St. Moritz on Manhattan’s Central Park South (the portion of West 59th Street along the southern boundary of Central Park from 8th Avenue/Central Park West on the west to 5th Avenue on the east), was mostly chit-chat; Mom was waiting to meet her parents at the hotel for a “fancy” lunch with a business associate of her father who wanted to introduce his nephew to my mother—a set-up, to which Mom wasn’t looking forward! 

Behind all the gossip—Mom had been reading Kathleen Winsor’s steamy 1944 novel Forever Amber, “probably the most talked about book today!” Mother exclaimed (everyone “wants to know with whom next Amber will sleep,” Mom explained)—was the unasked question: what about that journey home? 

What Mom couldn’t know was that on Friday, 26 January, the day before Mom wrote her note from the St. Moritz, amidst Dad’s responses to Mother’s account of the Grill Room brawl and her opinion of Jewish self-segregation, he wrote succinctly: “Darling, the trip east is out of the ‘possibility’ stage.  Just stand by and wait for a call.”  Two sentences for the news at which Dad had been hinting and for which Mom had been waiting.  Now it was a reality, just short of official. 

Mom wrote back on 30 January, having just gotten Dad’s announcement, to “Gene, my l’il [sic] precious bundle of joy!” 

(I must insert here that this letter seems to have been bound in the wrong order and I’m making the decision on my own that it’s out of place.  It was mounted right after Mother’s letter of 23 January and, since both letters were annotated only “Tuesday,” without a date, Dad must have thought, as I did at first, that Mom had written two letters on the same day, one before and one after receiving Dad’s letter of Sunday, the 21st. 

(After I read Mom’s letters, I began to have second thoughts about this notion, and now, after relating Dad’s 26 January letter, the one announcing the certainty of his move east, I’m convinced the letter is Mother’s immediate reply, written not on Tuesday, 23 January, but one week later. 

(There are several reasons for this conclusion, but the main one is that without this letter, there’s no response from Mom to Dad’s major announcement.  I can’t believe that Mom wouldn’t respond enthusiastically to that letter—and I don’t accept the likelihood that of all Mom’s letters, that that response would have been lost.  Besides, this letter simply fits here too well, whereas it didn’t really a week earlier.  There’s even a reference to the set-up she wrote about on the 27th.) 

“I’m so damn excited with the idea,” Mom wrote, and she told Dad she’d “plan to stay home as much as possible, till your call comes in announcing your arrival in the East.  Don’t want to miss it for all the world.”  She also provided Dad with a fairly detailed schedule of her upcoming activities so he’d know when not to call or where to find her if she wasn’t home.  (For instance, there was to be a 50th-anniversary celebration for my mother’s grandparents in the Cotillion Ballroom of the Pierre Hotel on East 61st Street in Manhattan on Saturday, the 27th, and Mom planned to stay in the city overnight.) 

Mixed with her excitement of the prospect of my father coming back to New York, Mom admitted also that “now that it’s practically happened (your coming) . . . I’m a wee bit scared!?” 

Mom explained that she wasn’t sure she could manage the expectations she’d built up—but I think there was also an element of dread because of the unacknowledged purpose of his trip east: Dad was about to go off to war.  He knew it, of course, and I’m sure his family and Mother had guessed by now.  It’s that topic they didn’t put into words, as I said earlier—outside of anything that was classified.  Not only did Dad not bring it up except that one time (see Part 1), but Mother didn’t articulate it, either. 

I don’t have the letters Dad exchanged with his parents and his sisters (Kris, like Mom, was just out of college, but baby sister Marion [1927-2015] was still a 17-year-old freshman at Vassar College at this point), but I suspect the war wasn’t discussed among them, either.  Army life was one thing to write home about—I did that myself, just like I’d written home about boarding school and college before that—but the war and the prospect of facing “shots fired in anger,” as we used to put it, were something else altogether.  And I imagine the same was true of other GI’s and their families as well.

(By the way, Mom didn’t specify which grandparents were celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary, but I’d guess it was her mother’s parents.  I never heard Mom talk about her paternal grandparents, but her Grandfather Jackson Kline was the subject of several stories.  I don’t have any recollection of him—I don’t even know his wife’s name; I assume she was gone by the time I was born—but there are a couple of wonderful photos from around 1947 or ’48 of four generations of my Grandmother Valerie’s family sitting on the veranda steps of my grandfather’s rented vacation house in Deal, New Jersey.

(We’re each sitting on one step above the other, in a diagonal line with me at about a year old—Mom’s actually holding me up—at the bottom right; then Mom above and to the viewer’s left of me; then Nana Val above her; and then Valerie’s dad, my great-grandfather Jackson, at the top on the left. 

(Jackson, according to my mother, was a yarn-spinner—apparently you couldn’t ever be sure what he said was true; it usually wasn’t—and an inveterate flirt.  Mom described to me a scene in a hospital room where Jackson was once confined, and she arrived for a visit to find him surrounded by a gang of young nurses who were rapt by stories he was telling, none of them factual!  He also lived to a ripe old age, a rarity on both sides of my family until my mother, who died at 92, and my Aunt Kris, at 93.)

On Sunday night, 28 January, Dad wrote that he’d taken it easy that day: “I didn’t get out of bed until after two (just to show you that I can do it) . . . .”  He expected that the “next week should go very fast (I hope) and should not hold too much labor for me.”  He continued, “If I can stay out of the ‘old man’s’ way I should be fairly unoccupied for the next few days.”  My dad, the goldbricker!  Who’da thunk it?  (By the way, “the old man” was a common way GI’s had of referring to their CO’s; it was usually a term of endearment and esteem more than insulting or derisive, but we’ll see that Dad didn’t have a lot of respect for his colonel.)

Of course, Dad acknowledged, “I said the very same thing a week ago and then lightning struck.”  He even added: “God—how I hate work.”  With less than a week before Dad and his unit moved out of Camp Hood, it’s more likely that this day would be his last leisure time until he boarded the ship to France.  Either he was fooling himself, or he didn’t really know the date of his departure yet.  (As I observed earlier, orders like these came suddenly so there’d be less time for sensitive information to leak out.) 

Dad went on to muse about his post-war druthers:

When I get out of the Army I shall spend some time lying flat on my back and have all sorts of bugle calls sound so that I can completely ignore them.  I shall stay up late nights and never even be awake to see a morning sun.  I shall surround myself with chaise lounges (I’ve grown quite fond of them) and expend my energy moving from one to another.  I intend to use my mustering out pay to hire a small boy to occasionally refill my glass and change the records on the victrola.  Think this sounds at all exciting?

I wonder how many other GI’s had similar dreams.

(A victrola was a common, colloquial term for a phonograph or record player.  The word was actually a brand name, Victrola, for the popular machine made by RCA Victor.)

Mom’s letter of Friday, 2 February, was just chatty—complaints about work, a “hen party” she and Kris happened into the previous evening, plans for a movie with “the WAVES” (Kris and, I imagine, her roommate, Blossom Willens [1920-2019])—except for her disappointment that she hadn’t gotten any mail from Dad for two whole days!  “Then again—maybe you’re on your way—huh?” she suggested, not knowing that Dad was in fact on a train en route for New York. 

Indeed, on Thursday night, 1 February, Dad wrote, “By the time this letter reaches you I will have left Texas.  Matter of fact, I may even see or speak to you before you read this.”  (Dad, in his turn, was “very much perturbed all week by the complete lack of mail.”  The letter Mom wrote on Hotel St. Moritz note paper on Saturday, the 27th, was the last he’d gotten, he affirmed, and it hadn’t arrived until the morning of the 1st. 

While Dad blamed the bad weather in the east for holding up “all transportation,” I suspect that the battalion’s imminent transfer and the logistics of the move might have had something to do with the mail delay.  The very next day, Dad sent Mom a change-of-address notice because the unit’s mailing address was changing from Camp Hood to “APO No. 18257”—the address that would follow the unit abroad—and it’s not a stretch to assume that the Army Post Office was already diverting mail to the battalion’s new quarters. 

Dad described the activities of preparing to depart the camp:

It has been a very hectic day, as you can well imagine.  Everything had to be cleaned up, buildings emptied, last minute packing accomplished, and the train loaded.  This loading of trains can be and is quite a task.  It has been my primary job for the past two weeks.  I have loaded two of them now, and when we load our personnel tomorrow, I will have completed that job.  Now I only hope I don’t have to load the ship.  The forms the army dreams up to be filled out are endless.  I am quite convinced that the war cannot possibly last another two years for the simple reason that there isn’t enough paper.

That was only the third mention of the war in any context so far in any of Dad’s (or Mother’s) letters.  You’ll notice they were all vague and general. 

Dad finished his work at 9:30 that evening and the 529th would entrain for New York on Friday, 2 February (the day of Mom’s most recent letter), arriving on the 7th, and he ordered Mom, “Make some wonderfully fantastic plans, and we can be gay trying to fulfill them.”  (Dad added as his closing lines of his last letter before being essentially sequestered before embarkation: “Being gay with you is no effort at all.  Somehow or other you bring out the playboy in me.”) 

The next correspondence between my parents-to-be were three telegrams Dad sent Mom from the train (or from a station en route) on Wednesday, 7 February, announcing his arrival that evening.  One of the wires, time-stamped 6:44 p.m., read: “BE HOME TONIGHT AT EIGHT CALL KRIS AND MEET ME.”

Mom revealed in a much later letter that she met Dad’s train in New York as he asked—against her parents’ wishes.  According to family lore, when Dad asked my mom to come to New York City on his arrival at Penn Station from central Texas, she agreed—over my grandfather’s stern objections; my grandmother was aghast. 

In that day and age, proper young ladies just didn’t rush off to the big city alone to meet a man, especially one she’d only met a few weeks earlier—and who’d gotten smashed at her parents’ anniversary celebration!  But my mom stood her ground—she obviously already had the stubborn streak I got to know from an early age—and met my future dad’s train from Texas on that Wednesday evening. 

Mother and Dad were obviously together a lot over the next weeks because the only correspondence until the end of February was a short, undated message on Hotel St. Moritz note paper that Dad must have left at the hotel for Mom one afternoon after his battalion arrived in New York City to tell her he’d be by to pick her up at about 5 p.m. after taking care of some “business” uptown.  After that, the next letters Dad wrote were from the unit’s temporary quarters when he was prohibited from leaving before shipping out. 

(None of the letters, either from Dad or Mom, stated where Dad was billeted before boarding the transport ship.  This may have been for reasons of security—or it could simply have been unnecessary since they both knew where he was.  In a letter written from Germany on 30 June, Dad revealed that the 529th Field Artillery Battalion was housed at Camp Shanks in Orangetown, in Rockland County, New York [27 miles north of New York City and 88 miles northeast of Trenton]. 

(According to Wikipedia, Camp Shanks was “a staging area for troops departing the New York Port of Embarkation for overseas service during World War II.  Dubbed ‘Last Stop USA,’ the camp housed about 50,000 troops spread over 2,040 acres . . . and was the largest World War II U.S. Army embarkation camp, processing 1.3 million service personnel.”  The camp closed in 1954.

(Mom wrote in a 22 February letter of “putting you on the train” the previous evening, the last day she and Dad saw one another before further passes were denied, but in his June letter, Dad wrote about habitually taking a bus to the camp, a trip that would have taken over an hour-and-a-half in the days before the Interstate. 

(I tried to obtain my dad’s military records from the Military Personnel Records Center in St. Louis to try to eke out some details of his World War II service, but his were among the personnel files lost in a fire in 1973.  I also tried to get my Grandpa Harry’s World War I records, but that request failed, too; this may have been due to the fire as well, or it may have been because I lacked too much pertinent personal information about Private Harry Freedman.)

From Mom’s 22 February letter, as I observed, it’s clear that she and Dad spent Wednesday evening, the 21st, together.  Later, Dad seems to have sent Mom a telegram about the suspension of passes because she wrote plaintively on Thursday afternoon:

[I] thought I’d . . . start what looks like a long-term corresponding relationship!

Already feel like something, very important to me, is missing – Only said good-bye a matter of several hours ago, and it’s as if you’ve been gone for ages.  Although it was obvious from the beginning that you’d not be around for long – the more I saw of you the more difficult it became to realize that fact –.  While I suspected, for some strange reason, all last evening that it would be “so long” for a time – it still came as a sock in the jaw when you admitted that there’d be no more passes!!

Then my future mother began bargaining:

And still today . . . I had a slight hope tickeling [sic] my sub-consciousness that your hike would be called off or you’d be able to have just one more pass!  Honey, just one more to really say good-bye.  Putting you on the train last night left me with a feeling of “unfinished business.”  I suppose, tho’ I knew, I nevertheless didn’t realize I’d not see you again – so that when you “boarded” I couldn’t make myself say all the usual “good lucks” expected at a farewell such as ours ought to have been.  (However, that all goes without saying – You know, words or no, that my very best wishes go with you, no matter where.  My sweet, only the very best for you, always!)  Honey, maybe you were wrong (and I suppose you can be sometimes).  Perhaps you will get off tonight – or even tomorrow.  After all, it’s only a little past two – and I’ve never received your wires this early and the matter of your leaving now is a “spot” of guess-work, on your part – no?  Oh, please, God, just once more!!!

She closed by promising to write again the next day and complaining about “why the devil . . . can’t your mail start coming in!?”  No one said, but I suspect the confinement to camp also included censorship of mail—stopping all unofficial correspondence from leaving the post. 

There may also have been some form of screening of in-coming mail as well, as Dad didn’t get Mom’s letter of 23 February until Monday, the 26th.  (If it only took two days for a letter to reach Texas from New Jersey in January, why would it take three days to get one from Trenton to Orangetown, New York, in February unless the mail was being held up?)

Mom wrote again on Friday afternoon, the 23rd, as she promised, a mostly chatty letter about work and weekend plans written from her Red Cross office in New Jersey.  Mom apparently had found a little “cubby-hole” where she could write to Dad during office hours . . . until it was “discovered,” as it were [tsk, tsk!].  (Kris had apparently not been feeling well for a “couple of days” and was taking off work.  Mom was planning on “entertaining the l’il [sic] gal” that evening.) 

She did devote a paragraph to bemoaning the lack of contact with her beau, “so near, and at the same time, completely out of reach,” and dreading what she’s “figured” would be “3 weeks (opt[i]mistically), but with a usual amount of luck, 4 weeks” without mail from Dad . . . “and, sweetheart,” she added, “that’s a Hell of a long time.”  (I don’t really know what that’s all about exactly, except, as I speculated, the preparation for embarkation for the ETO—the European Theater of Operations—meant a blackout on both passes and off-post contacts.)

It seems Mom’s epistolary prayer of the 22nd was granted.  After Mom sent off her Friday letter, pass restrictions were apparently lifted for Saturday; Dad called her Friday night to tell her the news.  The next day, on Sunday, the 25th, Mom wrote: “I was so sure you’d be in last evening—I’m beginning to wonder now, tho’ if you didn’t have some slight suspicion, hunch, ‘or something’ that Fri. would be the last [day of pass restrictions].  No?” 

I can’t tell if Mom was being serious about Dad having foreknowledge that the restrictions would be lifted or if she was just teasing, but it’s possible—not to say likely—that Dad did have some idea, even if only scuttlebutt.  On the one hand, the lifting of restrictions would probably have been considered sensitive information and not announced to the men of the 529th in advance so that word wouldn’t get out; on the other, information like that is hard to keep off the post grapevine. 

In any case, Dad would have been constrained from phoning, telegraphing, or writing Mom beforehand.  Of course, it might also just have been a last-minute decision by the colonel: a letter Dad wrote during the day on Saturday, 24 February, reads as if he had no intimation that he’d be free that evening and seeing my mother.  It would be the last time they’d be together until Dad came home from Europe after the war ended.

In the letter, Dad lamented, “Today might have been so very lovely if circumstances had only permitted,” obviously unaware what was coming down the line later that day.  “I miss you darling,” he continued.  “I know that as time piles up, this missing you will grow more and more intense.”  But I have no way of knowing when this letter, despite its date, was actually delivered to Mom; she didn’t mention it in her next couple of letters, and Dad didn’t say anything about hearing from Mom until his last letter in the month, the one dated the 26th (in which, you recall, he reported that the last correspondence he got from Mom was from three days earlier).   

I’ve always said, by the way, that Mom had a way of seeing things from an emotional perspective rather than a rational one, and in her letter of the 25th, she put a sentimental spin on this turn of events, too.  “I’d been certain you’d come in—maybe because the plans we discussed seemed so nice,” she decided, “—or perhaps you didn’t give me an opportunity to doubt the possibility.”  That’s my mother all over: things happen for her because she feels they’re right—and logic be damned.  (That was Dad’s department!)

Mother never detailed those “nice” plans for Saturday evening, though she did strike a grateful and deferential note:

However, I ought not to be “piggish”—in my last letter to you [it was actually the letter before that] I begged for “just one more pass” and the Gods were with me that time – I don’t dare ask for “just one more” – Tho’ for my part, it could go on and on and on . . . .

In his letter of 24 February, Dad made a wry comment on life on post at that moment:

I am sitting here midst much confusion and a great deal of cussing.  Just the normal emotional outlet of some of the boys accompanying necessary chores.  Somehow or other things just don’t seem to work quite satisfactorily unless accompanied by profanity.  It makes up for an undeveloped vocabulary—and I find that I’m certainly no exception.  Just another “post-war readjustment” that I am going to have to enjoy working on.

He ended the letter by saying, “I can hardly wait to get this over with and get back to you.”  This makes me wonder if Dad and his fellow artillerymen in the 529th had any idea how imminent their departure for Europe was.  The fact is that beyond the immediate cessation of the restriction to the camp, “this,” meaning the preparation for embarkation for the ETO, wasn’t over and, after that Saturday evening, Dad didn’t “get back to” Mom until after V-J Day, half a year away.

On Monday, 26 February, Dad wrote the last letter in the collection before embarkation.  He’d received Mom’s letter of the 23rd, probably the last correspondence he’d get until disembarkation in France, and he spoke of his sadness at the prospect of not having “personal contact” with Mom for some time to come and having to make do with her letters as the only available substitute.  Then he related a chance meeting with “an old friend” on Sunday night.  He made a poignant point that I bet many GI’s considered under similar circumstances.

At the officers’ club with his CO to relax over a “jug,” Dad’s former battery commander from 1942 walked in.  Captain Leary, commander of HQ Battery, 45th Field Artillery Battalion, at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, had “made” Dad a first sergeant. 

(Dad was promoted to first sergeant [enlisted pay grade: E-8] on 4 February 1942, the last enlisted rank he held before entering Officer Candidate School [OCS] at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, home of the Field Artillery School, on 26 February.  He graduated and was commissioned a second lieutenant [pay grade: O-1] on 9 June and was retained at the school as an instructor for a year. 

(He received several subsequent assignments, including a stint, likely July to August 1943, before he was assigned to Camp Hood, at the newly established Military Intelligence Training Center at Camp Ritchie—later Fort Ritchie, now closed—in Cascade, Washington County, Maryland.  A former resort in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Maryland, Camp Ritchie was about 75 miles north-northwest of Washington, D.C., 70 miles from Baltimore, and 16 miles northeast of Hagerstown, the county seat.  Afterward, Dad held various posts until he was assigned to the 529th sometime in 1943 or ’44.

(MITC was formed at the very beginning of the war (19 June 1942) to train GI’s in interpretation, translation, interrogation, intelligence, and counterintelligence directed against the Axis powers.  One of the War Department’s first efforts was to cull service personnel with knowledge of the languages of the Axis and the occupied lands, and soldiers from all over the armed forces who spoke German, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, French, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Greek, and so on, were gathered at Camp Ritchie. 

(These recruits became known as the Ritchie Boys.  As my dad explained it to me, most of these men were either immigrants and refugees—many were Jews who fled Germany and Austria and Nazi-occupied countries—or first-generation Americans like my dad who grew up speaking one of the needed languages at home. 

(Dad first learned German from his Grandmother Fanny [Frances, née Draubner; ca. 1865-?], with whom he spent afternoons after school while his father was working in the drug store; Dad’s grandmother had refused to learn English.  He then studied it in high school and college.  Coincidentally, Dad’s German professor in college, William W. Pusey, III [1910-94], was, some 30 years later, my Russian teacher there.

(A large number of the men were restaurant workers from the ethnic eateries in cities like New York and Chicago, but once they were at MITC and began testing and training, the instructors discovered that many of them had no other usable skills for intelligence work than language facility. 

(When they washed out of MITC, instead of sending them back to their original units, the brass at Camp Ritchie decided to keep them on as camp complement, and they became the cooks, pastry chefs, and bakers in the mess halls and service clubs, doing the work they’d done as civilians.  My father—whose mother was said to have been a terrible cook who could make only one dish well: stuffed cabbage—told me that the food he ate at Camp Ritchie was the best he had anywhere in his life.  I suspect that was a great exaggeration with respect, at least, to the latter half of his life.  We did some mighty fine eating from my teens on!

(Besides, my mother was—or became—a terrific cook!)

In the 26 February letter, Dad recounted:

We sat for several hours and talked of old times and men in the old outfit.  It amazed me how actually long ago that all was.  I’ve kidded a great deal about all the time I’ve spent in the service, but actually it has passed very quickly.  Last night, however, it suddenly dawned on me how many years have gone by, and how many more remain before there is an end to all this.

[“The Letters Project, Part 3” picks up on the day that my father’s unit sets sail for the ETO.  As you’ll read, Mother didn’t know he’d departed and it was days before she caught on to that fact.  The next letters from Dad will be written from France (after one piece of correspondence from shipboard, but I suspect it was dispatched after he reached Le Havre).  Readers’ll see that installment on or about Saturday, 31 October 2026.]