"Across the fields to the Health Factory (or something)"

As I’ve delved further into the box of World War II letters that my dad wrote my mother, I've discovered new rewards.

I’ll share more about (and of) the letters in the weeks ahead. The history of the letters are hung up on a mystery of sorts. So far a preliminary search of government data bases fails to show Dad serving with the Army Air Force units he used as return addresses on the letters.

Is sleuthing this 60-year-old mystery worth it? Right now, let's face it, the Veterans Administration has its hands full.

So time — my time, and the government's — will tell.

In the meanwhile, my search of the letter box has uncovered a different kind of writing. I’ve come across some of the “stories" I encouraged Dad to write and share with me after he was forced to retire when a sudden on-set of delusions overwhelmed him. In the months and years that followed, Dad lost all direction, falling into despondency. Literal shock therapy hadn’t worked. Now I hoped writing might.

I knew from the letters Dad had written me that he was a fine writer, although he disparaged his efforts. He had a keen eye and brisk, easy style. I wish he had written more.

Though he wrote in the third person, his stories (so far I have found four) were mostly about his life as a surgeon and a urologist. You will see that he was much in demand and self-conscious about how he was seen, particularly by his patients and their families. He was a sharp dresser and had a no-non-sense, in-charge style. For all that, he liked to joke disarmingly at the bedside that, as a urologist, he was nothing more than a “glorified plumber.” Hospitals were no more than “health factories.”

In surgery, beyond the waiting room and the bedside, he was unpredictable: Charming, moody, funny, petulant.

But he was always professional — galvanized, and at times haunted, by the potential for and terrible consequences of surgical error.

I came to know him in this unfatherly role because I worked three summers in high school and college as a surgical orderly with him and other surgeons.

He was openly known to the surgical staff as “Wild Bill.”

In addition to practicing where we lived, in Rockford, Illinois, Dad was regularly called to the small towns that anchored farming communities. He raced along back roads in his Buick Century convertibles. “Dyna-Flow” captured their ride, power and flair. His cars were never more than three years old — comfortable rewards for his frenzied but rewarding life.

Let him tell the stories to you as he did to me.

Here’s one – a reflection really — which he openly suspected of being "9th grade." It's about a trip to a rural outpost — a Genoa, Belvidere or Freeport.

The throw-away, self-mocking title is his….

Across the fields to the Health Factory (or something)

Two kids rode the same horse down a dusty side road. The deep blue porcelain silos sparkled in the morning sun.

The back and white dairy cows gathered in the corners of their fields.

The oats were the lightest green of all. The darker trees in odd arrangements moved softly in the morning breeze.

A muddy creek oozed slowly beneath a rusty, one-track bridge. A red-winged blackbird perched on a cattail beside the creek.

The invisible meadow lark’s call came from nowhere, but somewhere.

An old farmer drove his tractor down most of the black-topped road

A sway-backed barn rotted on a deserted homestead. But nearby, just down the road, a huge white, working barn stood with its guardian silos. A collie barked as he drove past the farm.

Only the kids and the old farmer seemed to tend the country for many miles.

The road signs were rusty and leaning at crazy angles. Usually the signs bore no relation to the map. There must be a million “Town Line Roads,” all dwindling into “County Trunk F” at the wrong angle.

Often the surface dropped quickly from smoother black top to loose gravel and dust, then back again. He had learned to choose the next turn by gauging telephone poles in the distance.

Where was everybody?

No matter that he left the surgical schedule at home. He made mental lists of things he needed for the next case, the doctors to be called, tests to be run. He continually checked the rear-view mirror, the telephone poles, the road ahead.

He had learned to start with a full gas tank. No filling stations in dairy country. A few phones, but always on party lines — again he’d learned the hard way. A credit card call to a country phone operator was greeted with a sneer between suspicion and down right disbelief. If he didn’t call direct from one hospital to the next, he knew the line would go dead.

Gradually as he closed in on familiar ground — a water tower, a radio tower — he cut his speed to a reasonable limit. No hurry now. He knew the operating schedule would be late anyway.

The houses were newer, closer to the road, closer to the ground, closer to each other. And he knew he was closer to more trouble.

He had no time for food — a cup of coffee only. No time to think of the last case, of yesterday, of tomorrow. Only time to unpack his instruments, change into scrub clothes, cap, mask — and operate.

A World War II letter home

On this Memorial Day, I did something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time. For the first time, I've dipped into my dad’s wartime correspondence to my mother.

During World War II, William F. Seifert was a flight surgeon with the rank of a major in the U.S. Army Air Force. His 58th Bomb Wing of B-29s was stationed in eastern India with the job of flying “The Hump” (the towering Himalayas) and delivering bombs and supplies to bases in China. Later, the wing’s Boeing-made “Superfortresses” bombed the Japanese in Thailand, China and Japan itself.

In the last stages of the war, the 58th was stationed on Tinian, where the planes were being readied for their fateful A-bomb missions to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Dad survived the war and went on to practice urology in Rockford, Illinois. He died in 1989 at the age of 77. My mother saved every letter he wrote during the war, packing them into a cardboard box that was passed on to me when she died.

I picked a letter at random from that box today.

The letter, pulled from its envelope, is crisp and creased and in remarkably good shape. The words jump off the page. Dad was an excellent writer. He even dabbled in writing fiction later in life before depression, even paranoia, and tremors brought him down.

I’m looking at a letter dated Sept. 13, 1944. It describes the debilitating humdrum of war. The unremitting, sweltering, sleep-destroying heat of Calcutta. In the letter, Dad admits to having medicated himself to induce sleep. When realizes that he is becoming addicted to the drug, he stops taking it. The result, he writes reassuringly, is that he “feels like a new man.”

Then there is the dysentery and the diarrhea and “severe abdominal cramps.” Again, he manages to cure himself through his own regimen of drugs and diet.

A paragraph describes a strange incident of nocturnal noises in the corner of his sweltering tent:

“I had gone to bed at 9 p.m. when I heard crunching in the waste basket. Thinking it was a rat, which I’ve been chasing with a crowbar, I grabbed same and switched on the light to find a good sized wild cat. He made a bolt for the door. I let him have it as he went by, but I missed his head. Though he rolled over a couple of times, he kept going. Afterwards, I was sorry because I prefer wildcats to rats anytime, and this fellow should be very efficient at killing rats. Besides, maybe I can tame him.”

There’s a request that my Mom have prints made of photos of two airmen who were killed and that she send them to the men’s families. “I know you don’t like the assignment,” he wrote, “but it’s the last thing we can do and you know it’ll be appreciated.”

There’s his account of a pick-up volleyball games (“…my side lost — largely because they had to carry me. I truly played for the hell ‘off’ it….as I hate the game.”) followed by rounds of bridge. “You know — all-around athletes — and I should do better.”

He offers advice to my mother, who had written about how those who had been isolationists prior to the war and had managed to avoid fighting, were now celebrating V-Day in Europe. My mother had expressed her anger, and Dad writes her, “… and you are right, but we mustn’t forget that we were charter members of the isolationist school, although, of course, we have seen the light and done an about face… even if I lose the decision [Dad’s way of say he could be killed], which I won’t, you will always be able to tell Rick [I was 2 1/2 at the time] that the old man believed in giving it the full treatment, and that’s going to mean a lot to us….Don’t ever forget, we have ourselves to live with, and our country to live in, and if it’s as fine as we say, then it’s worth fighting for. Patriotism? Sure, but the kind that’s been raised by good, solid thinking, not just over-night.”

Mom used to recount how the war changed Dad from being a religious man to being a skeptic. He rarely talked about the war but he once bitterly recounted how the battered and shot-up B-29s would limp home only to crash land on the runways. He told how he and the medics would jump into the ambulances — they called them “meat wagons” — and how they would be left with the agonizing task of collecting the scattered remains of their buddies.

As is evident in his wartime letters, he clung to his humor and tried to brightened my mother’s life on the home front during his service.

I have no idea what I would have done in his position in those years before, and days immediately after Pearl Harbor. I know what he did. I have an idea of what the war did to him and that knowledge has influenced me.

In the years and wars that followed — Korea and Vietnam — he would occasionally speak of terrible costs of war, but without elaboration. I know this box of letters will fill in some of the blanks.