Ad Astra Per Aspera

This is my father when he played baseball at Augusta Military Academy, Staunton, Virginia. That is pronounced "Stan-tun," Yankee.

He loved sports. Like all the boys he took boxing, and riding, and played football until a leg injury stopped that. He said he spent much of his youth bewailing his fate, to have missed a career in football, until WWII came and he turned tears into smiles, for the football injury kept him out of the infantry.

He loved AMA. He was voted into the Ad Astra per Aspera Society, the highest honor a cadet could receive. When I was little I asked him what "Ad Astra per Aspera" meant. He said it meant "From s___ to the stars!" When he talked about military school he made it sound like the most wonderful place a boy could be.

The cadets lived in the standard fortress-style barracks, with some of the instructors around for supervision. The dorm had several floors linked by a deep well of wooden stairs. My father told that a favorite activity of the cadets was to take a pail, fill it with small things that could make a noise, like baseballs, and perch it atop an instructor's door. The cadets were silent on their cots, waiting for the old man to turn in for the night. Then - ! The pail came down, the baseballs rained like cannonballs down the stairwell. The cadets hooted and shrieked. Discipline was utterly lost. You always tried to get not caught smoking.

They ran AMA about as close to a military post as they could. At the entrance to the school was a guardhouse manned by upperclassmen. One night my father had guardhouse duty. He was Boss until he began to feel the nicotine bottom out in his brain. When another cadet came by, my father asked him to stand the guardhouse while he had a smoke. The lad surprisingly, suddenly agreed. My father slipped off to have his forbidden pleasure and no sooner did he take a long draw than a loud and tremendous explosion shook everything around. My father flew back to the guardhouse and saw the other cadet flying in the other direction. He saw the remains of a firecracker on the ground and some remains of the guardhouse also.

Colonel Roller, legendary head of the school, caught up with my father that night and asked him where he was when the firecracker exploded. Father knew smoking was forbidden and leaving the guardhouse while on duty was forbidden and that the Colonel, like God, always knew everything. "Sir, " said my father, "I was out of the guardhouse having a cigarette." Colonel Roller looked at him hard and said: "If you had told me anything else, I would have called your father, and you would be out of here tonight." And that was it. The Colonel was loved and feared, and sixty years later my father still spoke admiringly of him. Ad Astra Per Aspera! From s___ to the stars!

I have a placard certifying that my father Received No Demerits in the 1933-1924 session. It is signed by Col.Roller and his son, also a Colonel. Nevertheless, my father seemed to have a good memory for at least one exercise to relieve the weight of demerits,which was to take a wheelbarrow to the coal pile, fill it, and push it back over a plain the size of a football field to the building that housed the furnace, where the colored help hung out. A cadet might get a sentence of 12 loads, or 20, or 5, and since he was kept fit with all the drilling and sports, one could imagine greater impositions on one's freedom than pushing a weight for an hour or so, and afterwards entering the world of Downstairs, receiving motherly sympathy from the ladies that made up to some degree the absence of his mother, and tales of cadets of yore from their kindred bottom-of-the-food chain Black men. Did I mention there was fresh pie and seconds right there, hot from the kitchen, proffered generously to the cadet who had "done his time, " and a clandestine smoke before heading back to the barracks? Like many of the Southern-born cadets, my Yankee father's home came with a husband and wife of the Negro race that ran his parents' household inside and out. Father said he was not altogether averse to get coal-hauling duty because it relieved to a great degree his loneliness,to visit the colored workers at the school. Like the other boys, my father probably spent more time with Grace and Albert Wilson, the highly skilled and dignified couple that worked for his father, than he did his own father and mother. It was as close to home as many cadets would ever get.

Father saved scrapbooks and letters and awards and papers from Augusta. He never made a collection of anything else. AMA closed its doors years ago. There is an alumni association and a little museum in one of the buildings. They do not have a stuffed horse. They might not have a wheelbarrow. I think AMA is in heaven, and they are still training souls for truthfulness and selfless service, souls of every hue and color, and that my father has something to do with it. From s___ to the stars!

Coatesville Hospital School of Nursing

Class of 1938

Evelyn Ruth Coffman, R.N.

This is my mother at her 1938 graduation as an R.N. from the Coatesville Hospital School of Nursing. Wasn't she beautiful! She was 'till her dying day.

Coatesville was and maybe still is a steel town. In her day it was Lukens Steel Company. It was huge. It employed almost everyone. A lot of people were coming to Coatesville from Italy and Poland and Germany and Eastern Europe. They were used to hard work and sent back home every dollar they could to bring the rest of the family over. There were lots of languages spoken in Coatesville, and lots of churches to serve their particular nationality and denomination. Some of the churches held dances and beyond there were social clubs and nightclubs where Whites and Blacks gathered for Coatesville-style jazz and drinking. My mother told me that on one of their midnight excursions to downtown, she and her pals visited a nightclub, for the music. They were crazy about music. I believe she told me it was there she smoked her first and last cigarette. She said they did not stay long. It was too hep for student nurses. But there was dancing everywhere in those days. Any building with a roof and a wide, flat floor could book a good local band and even some of the big ones. She went out dancing all the time. Everybody did. After she graduated nursing school and was working, she still went out dancing. You had a date in those days. It was on a blind date, at a dance, that she met my father. Follow your heart!

The Coatesville Hospital School of Nursing was up on the side of a hill overlooking the steel mill. Student nurse quarters were on the second floor. There was a ledge along the side of the building and an upper patio, where the class picture was taken. Imagine a string of student nurses creeping in pitch dark along a narrow ledge twenty feet up and climbing down the balcony with nothing but the grip of their fingers and toes, just to go dancing. They were of the Greatest Generation. She said that going out after dark into Coatesville was always safe. They were never afraid and never molested. Those were the days! Being student nurses, they were aware of those places in town that supplied the fodder for their training. A combination of booze and knife got many an immigrant into a hospital bed, where the students, under supervision, would tend them. Nurse that she was, my mother had only compassion for them. Once out of the nightclub and onto a hospital bed, they were charming and appreciative . Some were in and out so often they came to know the nurses by name. Mother had only one patient who was ever trouble, but they brought his mother in and she set him straight.

At one time a very serious accident occurred at the old Lukens, and it caused me to ask Mother if she had attended any unfortunates brought in from the mill. She said that once a young man had got his hands caught in a press. She said they did not even look like hands anymore. The doctors left his hands on and every day around the clock, a student nurse would show up and massage his hands. All day every day. Eventually the students' work did the trick, and his hands returned to where he could use them. He didn't have to lose his job, which was a nightmare for a man in those days, especially one trying to put away money to bring the wife and kids over ASAP.

The injuries she talked most about, once the pump was primed, were the decapitations. The steel mill was a very, very dangerous place, and the factors that ignite disaster came together twice for my mother. On a busy night they called my mother, who probably didn't have too much skill yet, to go to the bedside of a steelworker. They did not tell her what his condition was, but with some ingenuity Mother was able to get him laid out well enough for his relatives to look. There was another case, but it must have been further along in her training, because she was able to talk about it with a sort of gallows humor.

There was no air conditioning, no relief from the heat in the hospital unless a patient brought his own electric fan. Everybody, students and staff, was expected to work uncomplainingly under conditions that would not be tolerated in an animal shelter. Student nurses, as Lowest of the Low, were handed every assignment for which they were qualified that no one above them wanted. Discipline was designed along the Marine Corps plan, like many institutions of professional education back then. Caps and uniforms had to be starched and white and spotless. Stockings were white, shoes were white and had to stay that way. Being on time, handling the academics, sailing above the blood and gore and screams, making do with medicines so primitive that today's nurses might not even recognize their names. Folding a towel the wrong way could get you extra night duty. Falling asleep on night duty could get you a week of towel duty.

I think my mother was born moving, and so she was an ideal candidate for a student nurse in the '30's when twenty or a hundred other young women were standing behind you, eager to take your place in the school. It must have been under the head nurse's orders that they ever got her to sit down for the picture.

Chickie

This is an action photo of my father feeding somebody's chickens. The lady in the skirt behind him was probably a neighbor who liked children, because my father's parents would sooner keep a hippopotamus in their carp pond than chickens. You might think that this picture indicates that dad developed a kinship with the birds, enough so that he might raise some himself when he became a man. This was not to be. He married an R.N. who was trained over three years in 36-hour shifts, just like doctors were and are today. This put neat and tidy in the blood. She would sooner have kept a diplodocus in her cap than chickens in the yard. This was to have interesting repercussions later.

My mother married a man who although overqualified academically for delivering coal and loading feedbags onto frieght cars, had a gift for making people feel good. The son of wealth moved easily among his Amish customers and farm families; he was one of them. He even had a farming rhythm to his voice, and fell almost naturally into the phrases and accents of his customers. This drove his wife nuts, because before they married he had a Virginia twang and a college boy vocabulary, whereas she, like many folks coming up out of poverty, paid extra attention to her speech. For her class it was a part of the ticket out. Neither of them had counted on marriage to turn their worlds upside-down.

Even long past Depression days, farming was (and is) a risky business. Mostly the customers paid their bills in cash, sometimes in fits and starts, and sometimes not at all. My grandfather forgave many a debt that was never spoken of beyond his office. Paying or not, the dignity of the customer was most important. A face saved was a face that would speak well of the family business for generations.

Thus it was that one very, very hot June day my father delivered coal, or maybe feed, or lumber - to a customer who wished to pay in chickens. Although the customer pressed my father to accept several birds, he protested that he could accept only one, because his wife was so busy with something (who knows?) but she would be by in the car later that day to collect. There was never a question of not accepting chickens for payment. The customer's pride was on the line and who knew? Someone might really want it.

Inwardly my mother hit the ceiling but being the great wife that she was, she dutifully piled the two little girls and Brother No.2 into the big red Ford station wagon. It was red inside and out. Everything in it was red. A better choice for the trip might have been a brown Ford, but too late - we were on our way to the farmer's.

Brother No.2 acted like he went for chickens every day. My sister and I were wild with excitement. A pet! "This bird is not a pet!" Mother warned. It's a chicken. And after we get it and take it home, we're giving it away." Her tone told us she would not be moved. But at least we would have our small time in the station wagon with our own chicken. My brother pretended he was in San Francisco. Mother pulled into the farm lane and the wife was there to greet us. She held a brown chicken upside-down. Its feet were tied and it didn't seem to like it. My mother got out of the car with a big paper bag in her hand. We stared at the chicken with rich fantasies of keeping it in a doghouse and dressing it in castoffs. My sister jumped the gun on me and named it Chickie. Mother slipped the bird headfirst into the big paper bag and thanked the wife profusely. She stowed the bird in the back seat, with me. I almost fainted from excitement. Then, before we hit the road, the chicken wrenched itself out of the bag and performed amazing leaps and somersaults. Feathers flew. With its feet still bound it fought back with its final means of defense. Chicken excrement began to fly everywhere. Immediately the chicken-as-pet fantasy died. With claw and beak it attacked. Feathers scraped with surprising pain against our bare arms. It was flying in the car!

The eyes seemed void of life, and the squawks and cries were my first taste of a living thing in misery. The odor was indescribable, only to say it smelled like chicken s___ and we knew from that day on why that phrase had such power and popularity. "Just keep it out of my face," Mother said calmly. My sister and I were frozen in terror and amazement. Brother No.2 manfully assumed leadership and kept the thing away from her eyes and away from our legs. In not a moment too soon Mother pulled into the back yard and calmly but swiftly assigned us tasks. Chickie was humanely tethered to a clothes pole. Brother No.2 brought it a pan of water and what did the bird use it for? Sister and I, still dazed from seeing a creature go from fantasy pet to hand grenade, obediently gathered rags from the ragbag and Mother went into the house and came out with a cleaner that guaranteed not to tarnish metal.

By evening the car was red again, but everyone agreed that the windows must stay rolled down all night) and it was laughter and happy times around the supper table. Mother and Father had cooperated to achieve a goal; when disaster struck, we children were enlisted to join the family effort; the farmer and his wife enjoyed a small breather from frozen cash flow. These were the times, when the family was united in good ways for good things, that I felt most alive, and pray that the sad and frightened faces of the children I see in prison might know if only in their sleep the safety and joy of being a child in a family that knows how to live, parents that know how to love.

My childish wish to keep Chickie alive was dead. I did not mind if someone else would take it and dress it, properly. Mother knew best. I could rely on her word as I relied on Father's ability to always earn a living for us.

Much later, in my father's last years, he used to call all women between the ages of 21 and 25 "Chickie."