Tony

Roger was a tall, handsome man with the gentlest of natures. He couldn’t help what happened to him. It happened to many men, over a million at least. Their stories didn’t all start in the same place or end there. It happened to Tony, too. He was in his early 20s, playing his sax in clubs after his shift at the mill.

Tony was a high school graduate, having taken the scientific track at school, even if college was never a possibility. He fell in with all the others as expected, even the dropouts, because, face it, only about a third of the men his age had a high school diploma.

       But Tony didn’t fall in with all the others in everything. He was an artist, plying his trade with a pencil, doing portraits. He was a natural, but people like him never went to art school. Not a Tateh by temperament, his silhouettes were always in pencil, not the blackout variety.

And then there was the music. An exceptional player, he loved his sax more than just about anything.

On the weekends and after his 3 to 11 shift at the mill, he would head out to the clubs, sax in hand, and play as long as they would let him. It was his stage, and no amount of shyness could keep him from the music.

At closing time, all hyped up from a night of playing, he would often drive to the all-night diner in East Liverpool. He drank coffee, his second favorite thing after his sax, and sometimes would have breakfast. He’d make it home before daybreak and fall asleep before the first light. When he woke up, it was the beginning of more of the same.

It was a great life, full of opportunity. He spent as many hours playing his sax as he did at the mill, and this made all the difference.

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Roger was drafted in 1951, and his story and that of so many others took a strikingly similar course. Basic training had its share of mishaps, and even here everyone didn’t make it out alive. It was a prelude for what was to come. Boats carried the men to their destination, sardined into bunks, rocking with the waves. Many claimed seasickness to mask their fear.

Kids ran along the train tracks used for transport within the battle zones. They no longer had parents, and they begged the men for something to eat. Some of the guys threw their empty tins and laughed, but not everyone who was drafted acted this way, even if they had to carry a gun, even if they had to shoot.

In the trenches, smoking a cigarette was a death wish too often successful. The snipers, invisible in the night’s darkness, would have a perfect target when they saw the orange glow of the cigarette end brighten as one of the men inhaled for the last time.

Tony was a smoker then, but he always kept his head down. The image of those who failed to do the same never left him.

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Roger never smoked. He came from farm country, and he had been working on his family’s ranch when he got the call. He didn’t know at the time what it would be like. He planned to go back to the farm once his tour of duty was up. And eventually everyone’s was, in one way or another.

The rural kids, the kids of immigrants, and the poorer ones were, more often than not, moved to the front line and lived for months in trenches. Tony’s chief complaint, likely because everything else transcended comment, was that the trenches were too short. Tony was under 6 feet tall, and he was never able to stretch out. The inability to rest frustrated him. When he wasn’t trying to sleep, he was taking his turn at the machine gun.

Roger was a whopping 6 feet 2 inches tall. It must have been so much worse for him. Sleep deprivation was the norm, even for the lucky ones who could stretch out all the way in their trench.

There were always 3 men stationed at a gun, and each man took a shift while the other two had time off. It was kind of like the mill, where each day was divided into 3 shifts of 8 hours: 7 to 3, 3 to 11, and 11 to 7. They never asked you what you wanted to do in the war, what your occupation would be. Gentle or not, if they assigned you to be a machine gunner, that is what you did.

The fireworks were always the sign that battle was about to begin, and the bugles. The flashing lights revealed the landscape in shadowed relief, the silhouette of a man, the enemy, against the horizon. The gunner would always think, “Which of us will die today?” It was a mind game, and the prelude to battle, the rank anticipation, was almost as bad as the shooting itself.

Tony and Roger were survivors; they were never the ones to die “today.”

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Roger never went back to his farm. It was too quiet there. He hung around in Los Angeles and became a regular at the New Follies. His favorite was a toe dancer named Angel Face. She wore her flaming red hair in a bow. He craved that anticipation when the stage would light up, when he could see her shadow against the curtain, the cutout of darkness showing her shapely form. It reminded him of something, but he could never place it.

Roger’s infatuation with Angel Face grew, but she wanted nothing to do with him. He was just a poor veteran of the Korean Conflict. She was sure it was only a matter of time before her name appeared on the marquee of a motion picture theater.

But Roger had an idea; he wanted to give her the fame she craved. One night after all the patrons had gone home to their beds, he mounted the iron gates of the New Follies shortly before dawn. He carried with him his hunting knife and a .32 Spanish automatic.

The lighting was low. He used chalk to scrawl the name “Angel Face” on the stage, then called the AP. The police arrived and threw on the lights, setting the scene, Roger’s silhouette in stark relief against the curtain. They told him to drop his gun, and then the shooting began.

It was said he died from two bullets, one from his own hand and one from the police. He lay dead on the stage, an image memorialized in print by the AP. But the show will go on, the headlines blared. That very same evening, the toe dancer fulfilled Roger’s final wish. She wore a black ribbon in her flaming red hair as she danced, and all she could say was “The poor guy.”

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Tony went back to his hometown after the war. He resumed his routine at the mill as if nothing had ever intervened. About a year later, he met a woman, and not even a year after that, they married. They had a small house built in a bedroom community upriver from the mill. They moved in shortly before the birth of their first child.

It was 1957, and the story of Roger Whittier made all the newspapers. It was a spectacle within a spectacle that fascinated almost everyone. Like so many others of their era, Tony and his new wife had the local paper delivered to them at their front stoop. It was no surprise that the picture of Roger dead on the stage caught Tony’s eye. He understood the lights, the stage, the anticipation, the end. It happened to all of them in one way or another.

Tony’s wife turned 25 in 1957; no doubt she was born the same year as Angel Face. For her birthday, Tony made her a sidewalk that led from the driveway to the front door of their new house. In one of the pavers, he inscribed the date, a memorial to what was lost. She was expecting her second child by then. Time moved on.

When they were first married, Tony sketched a single portrait of his wife, her head turned slightly to one side. Pushed to the back of a drawer, only their kids saw it when they went there looking for something. I thought my father was such a magnificent artist. When I was five, I heard he was in a war, and I asked him if he killed a man. As for his sax, he never played it again.