Reading · The Book of John

My father, like a lot men of his era (being of The Silent Generation), was fascinated by World War II. It was something of a cliche, the 80s dad, reading Lonesome Dove on the weekends1, with his vast collection of Time-Life Books about WWII.

TIME-LIFE: World War Ii-complete 39 Book Set - Etsy — Dad owned all these.

For me, born in the 70s, WWII seemed a million years away, not the brisk thirty or so.

So I didn’t really understand my father’s obsession with the affair.

He was a history buff, particularly focused on the world after WWII, the Cold War, and the strained relations between the U.S. and Russia. He was a Russophile, he and mum having visited Russia before I was born.

(Apparently, in mom’s telling, they were at a train station somewhere in Russia, and somebody handed Pops some “literature,” in the form of pamphlets. She didn’t go into detail, but from what I gathered, the pamphlets were subversive, and probably illegal. She thought he should throw them away before they got on the train, but he was fascinated with them, and said he wanted to preserve them.

Til they were on the train, and gentlemen with submachineguns started poking through passengers’ pockets and luggage, looking for contraband.

My father excused himself, and went to the bathroom, where the pamphlets mysteriously vanished.)

Dad joined the Navy Reserves out of high school, to get money, to get away from Minnesota, and to get an education. But he never thought he was the interesting part of the story.

He had odd ideas of what made his stories interesting.

I tried many times, as Dad got older and his memory started waning, to get him to tell me about those early years.

He’d respond with a story, say, about how he was living in a rooming house and had to sneak past his landlord every day to get to his room.

“Why?” I asked.

“Oh, because I always wore my Navy uniform and I spoke Russian, so he thought I was a spy. But, listen, I have to tell you about the curtains in this rooming house…”

And I was like, “Dad! Tell the story about him thinking you’re a spy!”

He’d brush it off and say, “Oh, hell, that’s not interesting.”

And then go on to detail the stupid curtains.

My father, ladies and gentlemen.

But anyhow, I never knew the Russian spy in the Naval outfit, I knew the man who would often pull down those Time-Life books about WWII, and study them.

I never understood the fascination. He’d lived through the war, hadn’t he? Didn’t he get enough information at the time? Or the three decades after?

Apparently not.

Those books were a staple of our living room my entire growing up. Well, those and his almost-complete collection of National Geographic.

(Now that I think on it, the fact that I became a collector of any stripe was inevitable. My dad collected history, my mom fancy dining ware, among other things.)

I tried to look at those books a few times, out of pure curiosity. I never got very far. I was young, my knowledge of WWII pretty facile, so details like that were lost on me.

But those books were incredibly useful to me as a kid. I used to draw on copy paper my father brought home (read: stole) from the school he taught at, and when I needed a hard surface to draw on, those books were mighty handy. Nice, firm hardbacks, of a bigger size than the 8.5 x 11 copy paper, so I wouldn’t have to shift the paper around to draw a complete picture.

I don’t remember if those books went out the door when we moved him to California to care for him, or before.

Now, I wish I had them.

Not necessarily to obsess over and study. That was Dad’s thing, I’m far less into global history than he was.

But as time goes on, and I learn more about how other cultures learn about world events from their point of view, and how our own history is slowly being drowned in a bathtub by rich politicians who only care about shifting the nation’s wealth into their pockets, I wish I had a record of history as we knew it in the 70s.

Not because it’s necessarily correct, though I trust the Time-Life people were at least somewhat objective.

But because those sorts of records will become increasingly valuable. With AI and the internet starting to eviscerate history, so that objective facts become harder to track down and verify, it’d be nice to have something to be able to at least refer to, to ground ourselves.

Or, barring actual facts, to have a record of where we saw ourselves at a time when the American persona was at its most self-confident.

Again, maybe not a wholly accurate portrait, but one we can build from, as “facts” get turned into mush.

Click the titles to get at muh stories:

Bastards of a Lesser God

or you c’n find alla this right chere: