by Howard A. Ellis
Occasionally, folks who read Ellis in Wonderland, my off-the-top-of-my-head sporadic internet-circulated column, ask me when (or why the heck did YOU of all people?) start writing?
I’m bemused, surprised, at the interest cause I never really was a fabulous or spectacular success in my military (1942 - 1965) or civilian (1965 - 1990) journalistic careers from the standpoints of celebrity or wealth. Down to the nitty gritty, it was just the realization for me of a child’s day dream which began in 1933, in an apartment house basement near St. Louis, Mo., and after a lot of reality, is ending with my wife and I in happy retirement, in a rundown old house here in Moreno Valley, Ca., nearly 73 years later. Honest!*********
From the time I was an 8-year-old tad in 1933 living with an aunt - my moms sister - in University City, Mo., - to 1965 when I was 40 and living here in Moreno Valley, Ca., I always wanted to be some kind of writer... Its really not a long story, well not THAT long of a story.
In 1933, my mom was a single mom long before it became fashionable.
Shortly after bringing me forth on Jan. 15, 1925, in our apartment at 11 Albany Street, Brooklyn, N.Y., she got a job as bookkeeper at one of the Big Apples most fashionably exclusive jewelry stores, Guebelin et Frisch, Jewelers in the Jewelry Mart Bldg. at 576 Fifth Avenue.
Once I was old enough for schooling mom consigned me to a series of private boarding homes and schools (I did my time in 17 different elementary, junior high and high schools) with weekend visits to her new apartment in very fashionable Windsor Tower in an upscale Manhattan neighborhood.
How upscale?It even had a private park for walking your dogs (and bellhops to walk em). It was called Tudor City (incidentally, still there and just across the street from what is now United Nations Plaza).
As the 1929-39 financial depression depressed the country’s living standards, mom sent me to Missouri to live with Aunt Bess and her husband, Uncle Hy, and their kids, Anita, 18, and Bud, 16. They were all great to me for the year I shared with them. It was when I first experienced what it was like to live with real parents and have two cousins as brother and sister of my own. I remember their apartment was on the third floor at 744 Interdrive, University City, a suburb of Greater St. Louis.
But, because I did miss my mom (my estranged Dad was living in Los Angeles, Ca., at the time), I was essentially a lonely kid. Then, one day, just to get away from it all I explored Aunt Bess apartment building basement where I discovered her unlocked (people were trusting back then) storage locker. It had a few trunks, suitcases and cardboard cases in one corner of the 10X10-foot area but, more important an old desk which didn’t even have drawers, and an old lamp with no shade but it did have a bulb and an electricity cord and I found a socket to connect it...hence, LIGHT. There was, also, a wooden chair with one arm broken off but it was sit-able.
So I found a rag and dusted this furniture and set up the storage locker as sort of my secret hide-away...but afterthought made it my secret office. And, what does an eight-year-old, third grade student at Delmar Elementary School need with a hide-away or office? I had to give it some serious thought…
Well, I figured, since I lacked interest in sports - stickball, baseball, football or soccer, etc., and wasn’t good at any of em anyway - I should be/do something else, something special and alone. But what would that be?Hey, I used to keep a kids diary in which I’d make up stuff like I was a real newspaper reporter hunting down scoops, making headlines and getting bylines.
Obviously, I had one hell of an imagination, I became a phantom Walter Winchell, a famous news columnist of the era...Good evening Mr. and Mrs. North America, and all the ships at seas...that was his evening radio program schtick...but he also had a nationally syndicated gossip column exposing the private lives of the worlds famous and infamous, from royalty to movie and stage stars to politicians and even gangsters.
Winchell was sort of a hero to my naive little - very little - mind, as was another columnist of the times, Mark Hellinger who wrote simple but humanist stories about...what else, humans, people.
When I came home from school after 3 p.m., Monday through Friday, I’d get milk and cookies from the icebox (remember ice boxes?) because Aunt B and Uncle H both worked, and my cousins were busy with high-school socializing, leaving me on my own, an early latch key kid. Then I’d go down to the office where it didn’t take me long to conjure up a phantom typewriter and typing paper for my imagination-churned fantastic news stories. Of course, there really wasn’t anybody to interview, cause the few kid friends I had were reluctant to come down to a musty basement also populated by rats and bugs...and watch a nutty juvenile pretending to be something and accomplishing nothing.
They were wrong, even if I myself didn’t know it, I was accomplishing a future...giving birth to a dream and clinging to the hope it would somewhat awaken to a reality.
After a year with the UCity folks, mom brought me back to New York. In 1935, life led us from there to (for the first time) Los Angeles, California, and the re-appearance of Dad. Then, with him, it was back to New York in 1937 and, in 1940, widowed mom and I moved back to University City.
Of course, a year later along came World War II, and by 1942, at age 17 I had enlisted in the Army Air Corps as a communications specialist and, eventually, was sent to Europe where I served until coming home in July 1945. During the 1943-45 soldiering in Europe, my work as a cryptographer provided me with real typewriter and paper and instead of faking it in a basement, I actually, when off duty, voluntarily wrote columns about the war (The G-Eye View) for the Maplewood, Missouri, Gazette and the University City Tribune, both weekly homey throwaways. It was a fun thing and gave me basic experience...but certainly no wages and some hassle from our army censors.
After the war, I worked awhile as a civilian Department of the Army communications specialist in the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and then, in 1947 in a burst of impetuous confusion, re-enlisted and in 1949 was assigned to the U.S. Army headquarters in Soviet-blockaded West Berlin. Thats where I met my future (and only) wife, Ingrid Pietz. Because I was in a highly-classified special operations section, the security jokers called me forth one day and advised, it isn’t encouraged for G.I.s to marry German girls, so you can either give her up or lose your security clearance and be reassigned OUT of West Berlin.
My reply was, Sir, did you ever kiss a security clearance?
No, soldier, I didn’t, said he, so you have a new choice, either find yourself a non-sensitive job in West Berlin, outside of security activities, or well transfer your (CENSORED) to the Western Zone, and the only kissing you’ll be doing is to kiss your girl goodby.
G.I.s are resourceful. I’d heard there was an opening on the Berlin Military Post newspaper, BERLIN OBSERVER...and sent an assignment request to the Public Information Officer, Capt. Harrison Youngren who interviewed me. Sometime earlier, I had, brashly, written a personal letter to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, our WW2 commander, gabbing about what military life was like in occupied Berlin. Ike, by then president of Columbia University in New York City, sent me a politely generic thank you note on his star-stamped stationery. I showed it to Capt. Youngren who mistook it as an endorsement of my genius and assigned me as unit news editor/reporter/columnist.
AT LAST the kid’s day dream was becoming reality. I had my first non-fantasy newspaper reporter job and the kid in the basement locker was elevated to a new level in dreamland.
Before Ingrid and I could be married, however, my tour of duty in Berlin ended in 1950, when I had to return to the U.S.A. She wasn’t to join me for more than two years but she’s sure with me now. Anyhow, I got out of the army and went back to U.City/St. Louis but without any formal education, or training, to qualify me for a real newspaper job in civilian life. I got a job as a mail clerk at General Foods Corp., but joined the Air Force reserve for weekend-warrior kicks and extra income, and Ingrid languished in Deutschland waiting for me to save enough money to send for her.
As fate would have it, the Korean War broke out in 1950, and only nine months after leaving the army as a corporal, the reserves were activated and I was assigned to a Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona, where I was promoted to technical sergeant and assigned as editor/columnist/reporter of the base newspaper, DESERT AIRMAN ...des ja vus all over again. It meant more and more experience in mililtary journalism but not the real thing in my vacuous mind. While at Davis-Monthan, I got leave and married Ingrid in Berlin (we eventually had a family of five - three sons, two daughters...but that’s another tale).
From Tucson we were, in 1953, assigned to Stead Air Force Base in Nevada, with the base newspaper. From there, in 1955, we Ellises (while expecting our third son) transferred to Elmendorf Air Force Base at Anchorage, Alaska, where I was assigned to the SOURDOUGH SENTINEL in the usual duties. We did good. Our staff won in the first U.S.A.F. world-wide base newspaper contest. It may not have been fabulous or spectacular in the real journalism world, but to us it was like winning a group Pulitzer Prize. With three other base paper editors winning in other categories, I was flown to Washington, D.C., as a guest at the Air Force Association annual banquet to accept our trophies. A few months later, the All-Alaska Press Club actually honored me as All-Alaska military newspaper editor of the year...YEAH!!The kid was movin’ on.
Things calmed after that hullabaloo and my last military assignments, still mostly with base newspapers, were at March Air Force Base, Riverside/Moreno Valley, Ca., then Goose Air Force Base, Labrador, Newfoundland, Canada, and finally, Castle Air Force Base at Merced, Ca.
I doffed the uniform in February 1965, and blended into levis and T-shirts to return home in Moreno Valley...and then, to my astonishment, got my first (and only) job ON A REAL NEWSPAPER. It truly wasn’t talent...that got me the job. My former boss at March AFB was, Col. Ross Annis, a personal friend of Dave Ackley, senior editor at the SAN BERNARDINO COUNTY SUN-TELEGRAM. Dave was a staunch pro-Air Force guy who’d uv hired anyone coming out of the service who could read, write and type. I could, read and type. On that nebulous basis, he hired me. When I met my new supervisor, City Editor Arnie Ismach (now a retired faculty member of University of Oregon), I hastily told him, You know, I don’t have a college degree...I don’t want to come to work and be told I wasn’t qualified...He assured me they’d evaluated my scrap book and reference from Col. Annis (I guess) and was given four-years college credit for life experience... (Thank you, Army and USAF).
And Arnies patience and guidance made a real-life local journalist out of me and before retiring 25 years later, I did the rounds from reporter, copy editor, columnist, night city editor and nearing-retirement-goof-off. It was an adventure.
The basement kid was never a Pulitzer winner but didn’t do too shabby along the way. Now, after 55 years of military, and civilian, journalism, and 15 years into second retirement, I’m still poundin’ out my ego-driven panic-motivated Ellis in Wonderland columns which began so long ago in the Davis-Monthan base newspaper, DESERT AIRMAN.
GOT KIDS WHO DAY DREAM? Be careful how you deal with it...Heck, they could just be planning their futures. Its the way I went, only I didn’t know it at the time. My day dream did come true.
THATS LIFE...Life is good.
Published U.S. Legacies Jan 2006
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