It wasn't until now, almost 40 years past those backyard adventures, I realized that you, like so many other veterans of D-Day, just plain don't talk about what you did in France in 1944. In my young mind, I guess I thought it would add a new direction to our war games if we had some REAL stories to act out. Saunders from the 1960s TV series Combat. It was there I spent most of my playtime tearing around the streets and alleyways, pretending I was Roy Rogers or Sgt. That was a question I often asked as a 6-year-old tomboy growing up in Millersburg, Pennsylvania, on the banks of the Susquehanna River.
He certainly never thought of himself as anything special or heroic. I think he was both pleased and proud - mostly for me. My Dad died suddenly on December 21, 2005, but he had a lot of chances to hear this piece as I sent him a copy when I first wrote it for MPR News. As Dad got up on stage, he realized he was about to play with Django Reinhardt. Once, on "R & R" in Nice, France, his buddies got him up on stage at Maxim's. Officers and other enlisted men called on Dad to play impromptu recitals. I grew up hearing him play every single day, and many nights his playing the blues or a great ballad put me to sleep.ĭuring the war he found an old beaten up rotary valve trumpet and carried it with him through the whole thing. Rafael Mendez used to call on Dad in his clinics in New York and Pennsylvania, where he called Dad "the best naturally gifted trumpeter" he ever heard. Immediately after that phone call, I knew I needed to write it all down to remember how he remembered.ĭad was a career high school history teacher in Pennsylvania, loved by his students for his sense of humor an avid (and excellent!) golfer, golf columnist, and one of the best jazz trumpeters ever. Perhaps he realized the time left to him was short, and he needed to pass this oral history on to the next generation. Then, one night in a single phone call with my Dad, all the stories started pouring out. Over the years, my Dad had stayed pretty silent on the topic of the war, until the 50th anniversary rolled around in 1994. My Dad didn't have much to say about it at the time, like a lot of World War II vets. It was then the 40th anniversary of D-Day. Before returning home, I went to Normandy to see where my Dad, Norman "Bud" Warfel, served during World War II.
In 1984, I took a grad school student's holiday to London to stay the summer with a friend, trying to see all the West End plays I could from the cheap seats.
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