My cousin JuJu,

When we were kids during the Depression Years, my cousin John Kriete, lived in a tough section of Hoboken, N. J. Sunday visits to see our aunts, uncles and cousins, all of whom lived within easy driving distance, became an inexpensive form of family week-end recreation. John had an older brother, Warren, who was about my age and whose name became my middle name. But on one such weekend visit by another of my aunts and uncles, my older cousin Bill took Warren for a walk, and while crossing a busy street, Warren was killed by a passing car.

A pall descended over the families which lasted for years. I remember the funeral, even though I was in my pre-teen years. Warren was laid out on the living room sofa, and we kids didn’t really understand the full meaning of his death. I had never seen a dead person before. His mother must have taken it unusually hard, because her younger son John came to live with us for the next few years. He was a big, good natured kid who never took offense. His mother called him Junior, since he had been named after his father, but we kids always called him JuJu. Big, good natured, blue eyed, blonde, roly poly JuJu!

When I was married in October 1943, JuJu was best man at my wedding. We were both in uniform, he was a 6' 4" Marine Corps PFC stationed at the Picattinny Arsenal in N.J. as a Marine guard, an Adonis in uniform! Four months later, I remember reading his letter in my foxhole on the Anzio Beachhead in Italy. He was fed up with being a guard! He wanted action! I told him, he was nuts! He had it made! Stay where he was! I heard nothing for several months and then a letter from my parents told me that JuJu had been wounded in action on Iwo Jima and was in a military hospital in the States. When I came home two years later, he was still in the hospital.

After the War, I don’t remember seeing JuJu for several years, until we both attended a family reunion. He had gone to college on the GI Bill, became a teacher, and was married. We all brought our kids, but JuJu didn’t have any kids of his own. He brought the two youngsters he had adopted. I asked about his wound and he said it was a gunshot wound in the hip. No further discussion. He was then divorced and remarried. Still no children and in his late forties he died of colon cancer.

What do we really know about the terrible price of War?

Russ Cloer

Remember WW2 Bowling Alley;s

Gettysburg, Pa. Only two Alley's no automatic pin setter

Garden Bowl: Detroit, Mich.

Serving up strikes and spares for 89 years, this is America's oldest bowling alley.

The men in the 3rd Division changed the wording slightly. Patton?? Right.

Old Blood and Guts, Our blood and his guts!

Russ Cloer

Train Whistles

When did you last hear the doleful wail of a steam train's whistle? I'm talking about the steam whistle of an old-fashioned steam locomotive, the kind the engineer sounded to send his message to all within earshot. It was the punctuation he added to the sound of incessant hissing, chugging and huffing and puffing. To the pervasive smell of coal smoke and cinders He had scores of stirring compositions. Their meaning, only he and perhaps the brakeman knew.

As a young boy, I was captivated by those sounds. I never tired of hearing them. They told me that my small town was part of a much larger world which I longed to see. There are few sounds on earth that will bring forth visions of adventure in romantic, faraway places, like the insistent call of a steam locomotive's whistle. It tugged at me like the Pied Piper's flute. It brought visions of snow covered mountains, of barns and silos, of castles and minarets, of camels and deserts, of canals, windmills and shimmering rivers, of narrow cobble'stoned streets and houses with steep, gabled, red tile roofs.

And when I grew older, I saw all these things along with enough adventure to last me a lifetime. I saw camels and deserts while crossing the Sahara in "40 & 8's". I saw Mt. Vesuvius and the ancient ruins of Pompei on my to the Anzio Beachhead. I saw the Coliseum silhouetted against the first pink streaks of dawn while leading one of the first patrols into Rome. And I saw the sandy beaches of Southern France from the ramp of my LCVP. I was welcomed by cheering French crowds and the continuous ringing of Church Bells in the Rhone Valley. I trudged through the snow covered Vosges mountains on Christmas Day and saw the Austrian Alps from Hitler's Berghof on the last day of the War. The shimmering rivers were the Moselle, the Rhine, and the Danube all of which I crossed under enemy fire. The cobble stoned streets and window boxes bursting with red geraniums were in those small German towns that had not been bombed into oblivion. Barns gave us shelter and a place to sleep. I saw the famous cities of Casablanca, Oran, Rome, Paris and Salzburg, all mostly untoughed. And Nurnberg and Munich in ruins. To be sure, it wasn't all pleasant. In fact, it was mostly hell! But it's nice to remember the "good stuff" and to having "been there."

But when the War was over I still heardd the melancholy call of the steam train's whistle. The tug was even stronger now, but the whistle was sending a different message. The faraway place, which it now extolled, was the one I had left 3 years earlier. That wonderful place called home! The whistles were calling me home.

But now in my retirement years, the whistle no longer calls. I listen, but I hear no plaintive wail. The engineer is gone, as is his whistle and locomotive. They are dinosaurs out of the past and perhaps I am too. But I haven't forgotten the romantic songs that the whistle used to play, nor the dreams and visions which it inspired. Nor the adventures and the faraway places that the whistle implored me to see.

And yet I know that the day will come when I will hear the wail of the whistle one last time. Its tone will be soft and serene but it will not be denied. It's call will be insistent and its message will be clear. The time has come to make that final journey, the one to join my buddies, my friends and loved ones who were given less time than I. The engineer will be there, as will his train and whistle. They assure me that I will be welcomed with smiles to a place of peace, love and harmony. A place where we will all be together again. A place from which there will no longer be any need to journey afar.

Russ Cloer 10/11/02

Excerpt from the book, "These Good Men" by Michael Norman.

Such Good Men

" I know now why men who have been to war yearn to reunite. Not to tell stories or to look at old pictures, Not to laugh or weep on one another's knee. Comrades gather because they long to be with men who once acted their best. Men who suffered and sacrificed, who were stripped raw, right down to their humanity. I did not pick these men. They were delivered by fate and the United States Army, but I know them in a way I know no other men. I have never since given anyone such trust. They were willing to guard something more precious than my life. They would have carried my reputation, the memory of me. It was part of the bargain we all made, the reason we were so willing to die for one another. As long as I have memory, I will think of them everyday. I am sure that when I leave this world, my last thoughts will be of my family and my comrades such good men".

Posted by Russ Cloer