Something About The Greatest Generation

My father, George, and his younger brother,

Ray, grew up during The Great Depression.

Together as young boys they attended military

boarding school outside of Chicago run by

Catholic nuns. At the time, those sisters of faith

meted out discipline and corporal punishment

rather than compassion and affection.

Educate and toughen-up the man-child was

their Dickensian philosophical and temporal

method of teaching. For my dad, his brother

and so many others back then in the big city,

it was indeed a “hard knock life.”

Home for them was a small room behind a

beauty shop where their single mom was the

proprietor. Having survived the travails of

those lean and tumultuous days, soon they

had yet a new challenge to face—World War II.

Both enlisted in the military, dad in the Army

Air Corps and bother Ray in the Regular Army.

Being a Combat Infantryman, Ray lived through

the worst of the worst, having fought in many

European campaigns including the Battle of the

Bulge for which he was awarded the Bronze

Star for bravery.

Dad, a weatherman, was fortunate to have

escaped the horrors of combat. Many years

later, newsman and journalist, Tom Brokaw,

published an historic account of those troubled

decades of the 1930s and 40s. Appropriately,

he bestowed a literary honorarium on those

who lived and died during that dark period of

American history. In his best-seller, Brokaw

referred to them with admiration in title and

essence as The Greatest Generation.

As with so many of that era, Dad and Ray came

home, battle-scared with depression and PTSD,

yet married and dutifully raised their families.

Both George and Ray are gone now as are most

of The Greatest Generation. And my brothers

and I have survived, sons born of those heroes

to this day we memorialize.

Dad preferred vodka martinis; Uncle Ray loved

his gin and tonic.

Chris Hanch 10-13-18