THE MIDDLE-AGED LIONS: A STORY OF WAR AND PEACE...

by Saul Pett and Jules Loh

Associated Press News Features Writers

*This article appeared in 1966

The planes came 25 years ago - oh, where did the time go? - and they hit Pearl Harbor and that ended the confusion, the national and the personal confusion. Should we or shouldn't we get into the war? It's too late for that, Charley, we've been attacked, we're in it, and we'll have to lick hell out of `em. Should I study law or get a job or go Into the old man's business? Forget it, Charley, you have no choice, you ain't going anywhere but in, dontcha know there's a war on?...

Twenty five years ago - Is it really that long? There were, then as there are now, the vague seekers, the under-achievers, the lost young searching for Identity. But then their war came and made up their minds and there was no time to grope. And it was the biggest war ever and the bloodiest war ever, but it was a neat war. You know your enemies and most of your friends, and the purpose was real and clear. A maniac was loose in the world and he and his partners had to be stopped, pushed back and nailed into their cages. That, son, was a war, truly a world war...

And now suddenly it is a quarter century later - how fast it went. And the men who once were The Young Lions, as Irwin Shaw called them, now they are middle-aged and blurred by the 25 years that have rushed by since. Remember Pearl Harbor? Of course they remember Pearl Harbor, and every detail of where they were and what they were doing when the word came. The word that ended the national illusion of safety in oceans and the personal illusion of personal choice. And remembering with ease, it comes to them as a school text. One almost resents the fact that a boy today has to memorize a date from a book to know when his father went to war.

All right, dad, tell me, where were you in the big war and what did you do and what did it do to you? What did it interrupt in your life? Were you confused? Were you scared? Did you ever actually kill anybody, dad? How did it feel? And what did you do when you got out and how did you think it would be? How, my father did you come to this time and place, to this house, to me, to your middle age? Did it all work out as you had hoped?

......

Chapter THE DAY

"Pearl Harbor? Where the hell is Pearl Harbor?" The radio was up and everybody seemed to be asking the same question in Pat Barnett's Bar and Grill, on Lily Place, in the Borough of Queens, in the city of New York, in the U.S. of A. On Dec. 7, 1941. Ed O'Neill was drinking his beer and trying to think In the uproar. He stared across the bar at the long mirror and before it, at the outsize bottle of Carstairs where they kept the donations for the Veterans of Foreign Wars, those old guys from the old war. He was 22, thin, strong, tall, full of an energy he dimly sensed and a restlessness he couldn't understand. He had a good job, draft-deferred, at Sperry's. The Depression was over finally for the O'Neills. The old man was working steady again. Ed O'Neill could remember otherwise. When his father got only one day a month at his trade, brick-laying, and that for the WPA. When he had to fill in doing jobs for the neighbors and selling box lunches for 25 cents to construction workers. When both Ed and his older brother Tom delivered papers, simonized cars, anything for a buck in the house, and a leg of lamb went from Sunday to Thursday.

College had been out of the question and Ed's three months in the CCC, dropping trees in Oregon, hadn't gotten him anywhere. True, he won the middleweight championship and was thinking of making a career out of boxing. But the old man said no and Ed O'Neill always listened to his father. He couldn't remember a time when he wasn't fighting often. Even back at Our Lady of Grace School, where the issues became critical, like who was first in line in the schoolyard, and challenges were made to meet behind the billboards at Kent and Willoughby Avenues, at 3 o'clock, and when you got there you had to wait your turn, there were so many other Irish kids with affairs of honor to settle. But now he was grown and there was the war and his good job at Sperry's and what to do? Ed O'Neill left Barnett's on that Sunday afternoon and went home to think. In the next few days he read how the Japs had bombed Pearl Harbor while their diplomats were talking peace in Washington. And in his mind he kept seeing the Arizona, blown-up and mostly sunk, and the guys trapped below.

Ed O'Neill made up his mind and he told Tom he was going to enlist and Tom should stay awhile. Tom said he had the same idea only Ed should stay and Tom would go. Neither could persuade the other and both went to their father. Their father said he figured all along they'd both want to go, and on January 12, 1942, they did. They took a subway to Manhattan, and together went to the recruiting center at 90 Church. Tom went in one door for the Navy and Ed went in another for the Marines. It was that simple.

......

"They've bombed Pearl Harbor!"

In Norman, Oklahoma, the word was shouted up the staircase of the Beta Theta Pi house as Frank Sneed was coming down. Surprised? Not entirely, for this thoughtful young man of 22, thin, gentle, intense as his red hair, and somehow expected we would be dragged into the war. He had watched, in the papers, the rush of Hitler's armies through the low countries, through the fall of France to the water's edge at Dunkirk and, to the east, their titanic push toward Moscow and Stalingrad. He had watched the spread of the Japanese in China, had noted their hungry arrows pointing toward Malaya and French Indochina. He was aware of the Nazi evil and the beginning horror of the concentration camps.

He was aware of all this but not emotionally connected to any of it because he was 22, an only child, much involved with himself and a relative stranger to strife. Back in Lawton, the Depression had been a vague thing that happened to other people, and even after his father died in 1936, the family real estate and insurance business went serenely on. Now his mother had a new `41 Pontiac with red disc wheels and Frank Sneed couldn't wait to get his hands on It. He was now a senior at Oklahoma U., determined to make his last year a happy one because he knew the war was waiting for him around the corner of graduation.

As a cadet captain in advanced ROTC, he knew he would be called to active duty in June. Career? Oh, yes, he was majoring in economics, minoring in English, and when he thought about the future at all he thought vaguely of writing. But now there was the present, and this pretty brunette, Doris Lee Smith, and when Frank and "D.L." went to the Brown Owl for hamburgers and beer and they hummed "Moonlight Cocktail" and "One Dozen Roses" and danced the "conga" and a local contortion-called the "O.U. Swoop". And they listened to the great records together, to Bob Crosby and the Duke and Eddie Miller. And Frank Sneed was awful proud of being social chairman of the Beta house and excited by the Competition among fraternities for the best house decorations.

Plans? He would report to Ft. Sill after graduation and then he would try to switch to the Army Air Corps because he had already flown a Waco and a Curtiss Robin and flying was great! Until then, there would be "one last big round of parties." Plans? These were his plans and to a young man of 22 they were sufficient until the day of December 7, 1941.

......

The game was to see who could make his Model A spin the most times around completely. Each driver would get a good start, bound down the side of the pond onto the Ice, cut the wheel, slam on the brake, hang on for dear life and spin, spin, spin. It was the way the farm boys around Glidden, Iowa, found their fun on windy Sunday afternoons. It was what Ralph Neppel and his friends were doing that Sunday afternoon when the news came. They heard it over the $8 radio Ralph had recently installed in his car. They huddled close and listened wordlessly. None them fully understood the great issues that on this day had at length exploded. Ralph had just turned 18; the others were about the same age. Draft age. Of that fact, their understanding was profound. When the broadcast ended they talked quietly a few moments and then each climbed into his own jalopy and drove off with his own thoughts. Would Ralph be called up? Would his brother Arby? If both, who would run the farm?

Arby, older than Ralph by four years and the oldest of the seven Neppel children, had borne the burden of the farm work ever since their father died. That was nine years ago and Ralph had been the last in the family to see him alive. He was outside gathering corn cobs to kindle the kitchen stove when they carried his father out on a stretcher. "That's a good boy, Ralph," his father said, and be sure your mother has plenty of wood too." They didn't have penicillin then and the next morning Maximilian Neppel was dead of pneumonia. The medical bills that year took all the Neppels had. They sold the old homestead near Wiley and rented a place, 240 acres, near Glidden. Ralph swore that one day they would own their own farm again.

By the time Ralph was 13, he could drive a team as well as any man. Nothing satisfied him more than the feel of sweat-softened reins in his hands and the hypnotic sight of rich black earth curling around a cultivating disc. And when the work was done - well, there was fish in Coon Creek in the summer, pheasants in the fields in the fall, and traps to set in the winter. Muskrat pelts fetched 40 cents a piece and an occasional badger would bring $4. When he was 16 Ralph had saved enough, $60, to buy his Model A.

The car - Ralph gave it a name, "Friday" - wasn't just a means of transportation but a badge of manhood. He could go places! Like over to the picture show at Lidderdale, or to Carroll for the Saturday night dances at McNabb's Roof Garden. There was the place, McNabb's. It was a dance hall and a bar above the John Deere Implement Co. By leaving the fire escape doors open it became a roof garden where the band was loud, the laughter easy, the jitterbugging fast, and the Grain Belt Beer a bargain at 10 cents a glass.

Ralph Neppel had never been farther from home than 60 miles but to him there could be no fuller life than his life in Carroll County, Iowa. But now there was a war on and as the busloads of young men heading for the Camp Dodge induction center at Des Moines became more frequent it was Inevitable that life would change for one of the Neppel boys. All right, Uncle Sam, You're pointing your finger from the poster; you decide, Arby or Ralph?

......

Martha and the cook were putting Sunday dinner on the table when J. Hamilton Napier Jr. heard the news. He had been puttering in the yard among the magnolias and the long-leafed pines and flipped on the radio while he was washing up.

The possibility of war wasn't unexpected by Ham Napier, but was a wretched time for it to start! Ham was at last beginning to feel comfortable again. His long-delayed law practice was developing beautifully and he and Martha, their 18-month-old marriage bubbling with promise, were setting Into a graceful life in a comfortable home on an oak-shaded lane in one of the better sections of Macon Ga. Their home on Gallaway Drive wasn't a great distance from the large, white-columned house on College Street were Ham Napier Avenue, where his great-grandfathers antebellum mansion once stood.

Ham Napier, tall, whip-lean and erect, had been raised in the genteel tradition of Southern aristocracy. As a boy he learned correct manners, learned the proper way to address the servants, and though he swam in the Ocmulgee River with Isaiah, the cook's son, both were aware of their difference, and their distance. But the proud old name was really all that remained of Ham Napler's legacy. In 1926, when Ham was in his sophomore year at the University of Georgia, the family fortune suddenly was gone, exhausted in a pre-Depression plunge of the cotton market. For the first time in his life, Ham Napier knew need. He left school, hitchhiked north and worked for two years, then completed his college and law school - only to learn, upon graduation, that the Depression was an impossible time to open a law office. Ham took other work in other towns and then returned to Macon and found a job checking titles for a homeowner's loan company. By 1939 he felt the time was right to try again on his own. He hung out his shingle and business began coming his way. A year later Hamilton Napier took lovely Martha Birsey as his bride.

The wedding was at the magnificent Birsey home, bedecked with palms and Bermuda lilies for the occasion. Then Martha and Ham moved into the house on Callaway Drive, a wedding gift from Martha's father. And now it was Pearl Harbor Day and Ham Napier had a decision to make. He was 32 years old, and married - not a likely candidate for a low draft number. But Ham somehow figures it would be a long war, that he would be in it eventually. Anyway, his conscience told him he couldn't duck It. Perhaps, he thought, the thing to do would be to enter early and try to get something tolerable; the notion of sleeping on the ground was abhorrent to him. He thought about it until late that night, and all day Monday at his office. On Tuesday, at breakfast, Ham Napier told his wife his decision. "Martha, I've decided to join the Navy," "The Navy! Hamilton, what on earth use would the Navy have for you?"

What use, indeed, could the Navy have for J. Hamilton Napler, Jr.., 32-year-old lawyer? He had been to sea only once in his land-locked life, on a charter fishing boat in the Gulf of Mexico and he didn't know a binnacle from a barnacle. But in America in 1942 there were thousands of men who had never been to sea who would soon be ship's officers and men, as soon as the Navy could train them, as fast as the arsenal of democracy could build the ships.