MARCH 29th: A BITTERSWEET DATE

 

 

From Linda Lee Greene, Author/Artist

 

My mother was born on a March 29th, and ninety-one years later, my father died on a March 29th. My daughter, who is a registered nurse and hospice administrator, and therefore well-versed in the dying patterns of people, predicted my ailing father’s date of death. She was certain he would hold on to life until March 29th of that year. She explained that people nearing the final moment of their life cycle often wait until they reach what to them is a meaningful date to take their last breath. In my father’s case, it was my mother’s birthday, his wife of close to fifty years. She had died twenty-two years before then.

            My parents were country folks, both of them born and raised in the untamed foothills of the Appalachian Mountains of Southern Ohio. Barefoot, innocent, natural, and free, in their early adolescence and a decade before they had me, they courted side by side on the swing located on the cavernous front porch of my grandparent’s farmhouse. The beautiful young girl, her red hair aflame in the sun, and the gorgeous boy, his yellow hair a glowing nimbus enfolding his head, spooned and riding bare-back on Old Smoky, stole into private nooks for kisses in the surrounding thick forests, and then slipped out of their clothes for a dip in the creek, the daredevil boy swinging and howling like Tarzan from a thick grapevine and cannon-balling into the deep water. Refreshed and eager for the hunt, they scavenged for arrowheads that were the plentiful artifacts of the Shawnee who had inhabited the land for thousands of years before white people. Summer evenings brought a gathering on the porch of young boys and girls of the area, guitars ringing and voices singing out in rhapsody of just being alive and in love. Later they scampered like colts in the pitch black night catching lightning bugs in jars, and then passed them on to their younger siblings, offerings the youngsters took to bed and under the covers giggled at the wonder of their blinking insect-nightlights. And then, a hand in hand stroll out to the spacious yard, the girl and the boy watched the stars rise from the gentle Appalachian peaks that on all sides enclosed their distinct world.

Franklin D. Roosevelt took possession of the White House the same year the girl and the boy found each other in the porch swing. All around them the Great Depression raged on, but the distinguished president’s reassuring radio-messages restored confidence in their future, a future that begot marriage, a worldwide war, and my birth while my father was off training to fight in the conflict. In the aftermath of the war, my parents, my little brother, and I beat it to the big city for better employment for my father. Time marched on rapidly, as it is wont to do, and my two kid sisters rounded out our family.

On this bittersweet March 29th, I celebrate the 98^th birthday of my mother while I mourn my father’s passing on the March 29th of seven years ago. Both of them are in heaven, or some other realm of the beyond. Maybe there is a porch swing there, too, and Old Smoky out in the yard, ready and waiting to carry them on his bare back, to follow the Path discovered by the ginger-headed girl and the tow-topped boy so long ago, the Path that leads them forever on and on and on…..©

 

Photo: 4 year-old Linda Lee Greene and her parents

 

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Multi-award-winning author Linda Lee Greene’s GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS, is an ambitious and a thorough exploration of two families whose experiences are funneled through the pivotal early to middle decades of the twentieth century. This seamless blend of fiction and nonfiction renders an authentic slice of Americana at its most personal and profound. Based on actual events and oral history of her parents and extended family, and featuring transcriptions of dozens of authentic private letters written by the story’s principle characters, Greene delivers an insider’s view of the hearts and minds and day to day events of a singular group of people counted among history’s greatest generation. Powerful in its sweeping journalistic impact and at the same time tender in its novelistic prose, this extraordinary book contributes greatly to the preservation efforts of the era it interprets.

 

“5 stars…Wonderfully Written! This was a thoroughly enjoyable book. I loved the Americana. It reached out and touched my heart, mind and soul. It provided tremendous insight into what many American families endured during the first half of the 20th century. It captures you and draws you in. This is most certainly a five-star novel.”

 

Purchase Link: http://goo.gl/imUwKO

 

#March29, #Appalachia, #AppalachianMountains, #Ohio, #PorchSwing, #Shawnee, #Americana,  #FranklinDRoosevelt, #GreatDepression, #WorldWarII, #GuardiansandOtherAngels, #LindaLeeGreene

 

 

 

 

FIGHT LIKE A GLADIATOR!

 

 

By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist

It was late July of 1991. I steered my car into an open parking space near the front door of the funeral home, and then stepped out into the balmy Columbus night. As I approached the sprawling building, I saw my parents standing side by side at the edge of the half-moon court that opened onto the entrance. They were turned toward the parking lot, perhaps because they saw my car, or maybe because they were reluctant to face the situation that awaited them inside the place. We were there for the memorial of my father’s older brother—my father’s favorite brother. Upon their retirement three years before, my parents had relocated to Hawthorne, a little town in northcentral Florida. It had been several months since I had seen them, for the reason that both my mother and I had been ill and unable to travel. My father was largely unchanged. But my mother was almost unrecognizable. In all my 46 years, my mother was tall, erect, and put together in her appealingly unpolished way. This person appeared a half foot shorter, undone, and convex, as if the upper portion of her body were curled in on itself, as if to protect itself from an evil force. My heart sank to my toes. I knew intuitively that my mother was dying. Two weeks later, the diagnosis confirmed it.

            My mother was settling in to her retirement so beautifully—living in her Florida paradise for which she had worked like a dog, for which she had scrimped and saved and sacrificed and planned year after year. She had reined in a life in Ohio that had long been too big for her and the trimmed-down Florida version was so much more manageable and enjoyable. Due to the fact that they were underfoot 24/7, she and my father were finally coming to terms with unspoken issues of their 48 year-marriage. And then came the unspeakable tragedy: just as she had made of herself the person for which she had always striven, had created her best life in important ways, had fought her illness like a gladiator, eleven months after her diagnosis, she died.

            “What an awful mockery death makes of life, of an individual’s significance! Death renders a person’s accomplishments, beliefs, and attachments as transitory, hollow, pointless!” These were the thoughts that flooded my mind. I still have to fight against them, at times.

March 6, 2020, the day I began to quarantine because of coronavirus, set in motion for me a period similar to that slice of time in which my mother faded away—but now, it is my country that faces the threat. If nothing else, coronavirus has brought to light America’s glaring deficiencies, but still, in her best days, America set the standard in the world for greatness, and for a long while she lived up to it—not fully and certainly imperfectly, but she has always struggled for excellence when given a fair chance by her leaders—and/or, when forced into it by arbitrary circumstances. America has earned the opportunity and the right to finish her work, and not to go down in a blaze of horrible mockery of her efforts.

There is an underlying strength and bravery to America of the kind that formed my mother’s core. Actually, it was the other way around. America shaped my mother—the America of the Great Depression; the construction of the Empire State Building and its ilk; World War II; the founding of the United Nations; the Nuremberg trials; the formation of NATO; the Korean Conflict; the Bay of Pigs; the John F. Kennedy assassination; Civil Rights; the Martin Luther King, Jr and Robert F. Kennedy assassinations; the Moon Landing; the Vietnam War; Women’s Rights, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and more, so much more, and so often it was two steps forward and one step back. All of it honed my mother to the ethic of, “Getting up every morning and going to work until she just couldn’t make it anymore.”        

Forces are trying to kill the United States of America. Forces have always tried to kill the United States of America—but she has fought them off. Come together again, my fellow Americans! Come together with me and fight for America like gladiators!©

Books by Linda Lee Greene are available for purchase at Amazon.com.

©A STEP AT A TIME…A WORLD WAR II BUCK PRIVATE SPY

By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist



On a warm June day in 1994, amidst Middlefield, Connecticut’s rolling hills, a solemn military funeral at St. Sebastian Cemetery culminated the life of seventy-four-year-old World War II veteran, Biagio “Max” Corvo. Sicilian Jesuit priest, Father Joseph Sibilano commemorated Max as a “quiet hero…a man of God and country…[who] devoted himself to a mission greater than himself and gave to his country and family a living legacy…a cause of freedom he so cherished and fought for in his lifetime.”[1]

                Max was not a native-born son. He had emigrated to Middlefield from Augusta, Sicily when he was nine. His father, Cesare Corvo, in 1923 was forced into exile from Sicily when Benito Mussolini’s Fascist tide swamped Italy. Leaving his wife and children in the care of his mother, Cesare fled the political persecution and sailed to the United States, where, earlier in his life, he had worked as a member of a traveling troupe of Italian actors. He settled in Middlefield among a group of his immigrant fellows who had taken up residence in the town’s “Little Italy.” Aided by powerful friends in the old country, and after having gained his American citizenship, Cesare secured passage to America for his family. October 29, 1929 was the arrival date: “Black Tuesday,” the day the New York Stock Exchange crashed and the United States plunged into the Great Depression.

                Dominated by his thatch of curly black hair and soulful dark eyes, the under-sized, nine-year-old Max stepped foot in his American school ignorant of the English language and local customs. A segregated school by today’s standards, the student body was comprised almost entirely of Italian-Americans. But a teacher, a true-blue American pacifist, free of prejudice of any kind, who perceived her students as the “natural descendants of Dante, Raphael, Michelangelo and other geniuses of the Renaissance”[2] imbued in her young charges a burning desire to be open-hearted and fair-minded world citizens. She was young Max’s touchstone, and he thrived in and adapted with gusto to his new environment. The difficult economic era took its toll on the Corvo family, as it did on nearly everyone, however. As a result, Max was forced to terminate his education in his junior year of high school and to do his part in helping his loved-ones to navigate the Great Depression.     

                Cesare, Max’s father, raged against the oppressive Fascist system in Italy on the pages of an Italian language newspaper he published in Middlefield and that enjoyed wide distribution in Connecticut. He also maintained contact with fellow anti-Fascist expatriates in New York, Chicago, and other major cities in the United States. He stayed in constant contact with friends in Italy, active partisans of the underground movement against the Mussolini government. A firm hatred of unjust and oppressive regimes was drummed into Max’s consciousness, and coupled with his elementary school teacher’s sensibilities, he grew to be a man who could not sit on the sidelines and lament the state of affairs. Even before Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Max enlisted in the Army, hell-bent on routing the world of Fascism.

                Extraordinarily intelligent, quick-witted, and clever to the point of startling accuracy, Max had ideas about underground warfare in Italy. He hatched an espionage plan whereby secret agents would infiltrate Italian and German Axis strongholds in areas of the Mediterranean. Like Winston S. Churchill, Prime Minister of Great Britain, Max believed that the key to victory in the European Theater of World War II was a second front in the Mediterranean, an operation that would force Mussolini and Hitler to scatter their forces in defense against the Allies in the south, thereby relieving the Soviets whom the Germans were trouncing in the east. Securing the Mediterranean would also give the Allies the tremendous advantage of controlling the oil fields in Egypt and the Middle East, a coup that would go a long way in starving the Axis forces of the means of running their machines of war. Max presented his proposal to senior officers at the Quartermaster Training Center at Camp Lee, Virginia where he was assigned as a trainee in clerical duties. His scheme had its intended impact, and soon the twenty-one-year-old buck private found himself working in the Italian Secret Intelligence branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Washington D.C. Max’s first major assignment in what later was known as the “Corvo Plan” was to recruit personnel, “volunteers who would be willing to put their lives on the line in the fight against Fascism.”[3] His and his father’s lifelong anti-Fascist contacts, both at home and abroad, proved more than handy in that regard. His simultaneous duties included shaping future espionage actions, setting up the permanent staff, and training the new recruits in specific intelligence targets in Italy, Sardinia, and Sicily. 

                Promoted to second lieutenant, by age twenty-two Max headed the military operations of the Italian Secret Intelligence espionage unit he had formed, comprised mainly of Italian-Americans and Italian-citizen partisans. Having raced the clock against the deteriorating situation in the Mediterranean, the initial members of the unit were in training by the time of “Operation Torch,” in North Africa, which was the first combined British-American invasion against the enemy in World War II. By the time of the invasion of Sicily (Operation Husky), the unit was the “only pool of manpower and expertise in the U.S. Army which was familiar with both the language and terrain of Sicily.”[4] But it took a while for commanders to trust it and put it to use, which didn’t occur until the Allies were in Sicily eight months later.

                No more a nine-year-old boy with the green grass of Middlefield tickling his toes, he was a man now, his soldier’s boots coated with the dust of the ancient, rocky soil of his early childhood’s Sicily. There was no time for reminiscence, however. There was a great big world before him needing saved. He and a compatriot went in search of a place to set up a command center for themselves. At present, a luxury seaside hotel, Falconara Castle’s biography began in 1392, granted initially by King Martin I of Sicily to a subject in reward for loyalty against an enemy. Then as now, it served as coastal defense, and Max put it to use once more. It was the first OSS headquarters in Italy. Perched on a promontory high above the sea, it gave view of the coastline for miles in every direction. The caretaker of the place explained that only a matter of hours before it had housed the commander of a coastal division of Italian troops. The men had quartered in adjoining buildings. Following a token resistance against the Allied invaders, the commander and his men had fled, some eluding capture and others taken prisoner. The Allies were corralling so many prisoners, both Italian and German, that long lines of them were marched to the beaches and loaded onto empty Allied ships and transshipped to Tunisian and Algerian prisoner-of-war camps.

                Max and his fellow officer set off by Jeep once again, this time on the road to Licata to report to General Patton’s headquarters to get assignments and to check on communiques from Washington and/or Algiers. Having been taken by Allies only days earlier, although dirty and unkempt, the city was open for business again. It was apparent that Fascism had planted itself so deeply in the people, dragging them down to despairing hunger and neglect. But they smiled and waved at the American G.I.’s, and an old Sicilian barber blubbered with pleasure when Max stepped across the threshold of his shop, and in his own tongue, asked for a haircut. On the same street, an American doctor was already busy treating droves of children, their rail-thin legs encrusted with oozing red sores.

                Max didn’t “Get to Berlin,” which was the goal of every fighter for freedom in those times. But for more than three years, he planned and directed high-risk, behind-enemy-lines operations for the OSS, which was America’s first central intelligence agency, missions that made all the difference in the success of Allied actions in the Mediterranean theater of the war.              

MAX CORVO, OSS ITALY 1942 – 1945, A Personal Memoir of the Fight for Freedom, is a fascinating read of the formation, training, and missions of the espionage unit, as well as intriguing descriptions of the Italian people and geography.  The “Corvo Plan” was the model for all future OSS undercover operations in the war. The book is available for purchase at prominent booksellers.

Books by Linda Lee Greene are available for purchase in eBook and soft cover on Amazon.com and other booksellers.



Image: Max Corvo      

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[1] https://larouchepub.com.

[2] MAX CORVO, OSS ITALY 1942 – 1945, A Personal Memoir of the Fight for Freedom, Max Corvo, Enigma Books, New York, NY, 1990, pg 3.

[3] MAX CORVO, OSS ITALY 1942 – 1945, A Personal Memoir of the Fight for Freedom, Max Corvo, Enigma Books, New York, NY, 1990, pg. 21.

[4] Ibid, pg. 65.

©A STEP AT A TIME…COMING OF AGE IN WORLD WAR II

By Linda Lee Greene, Author and Artist



Born in 1920, farmboy Bob Gaffin’s formative years had been Great Depression years. At the age of sixteen, he had conned his way into the Civilian Conversation Corps (CCC), passing himself off as the required age of eighteen to get in. The extra few CCC bucks every month had contributed mightily to his family’s coffers: they had helped to pay for his brother Bussy’s medical bills, repaired farm equipment, and purchased lumber for the larger house his father had been building, a necessary project to accommodate the ten members of his family. Living in the deep country of Southern Ohio, USA with their large garden, orchard, as well as forest and farm animals as sources of food, the Gaffins had kept their bellies full at least, and as such had fared better than most city folks who had relied on soup kitchens and the Salvation Army for sustenance during those bleak economic times. Still, Bob had suffered in his heart over the awful poverty so many of his family’s neighbors and friends, and even some relatives, had borne with such dignity.

Bob’s two CCC stints had widened his world far outside of the 586 square miles of his Adams County, Ohio home. He had been sure that the natural wonders and colorful ethnic cultures of the Northeastern United States in which he had been immersed had acquainted him with all the remaining planet had had to offer. But then, Confederate country had loomed on his horizon and he had breathed in the DNA of the Civil War battlefields on which he had imagined his grandfather might have fought. Many more new things had been revealed to him there—not just the ways and means of war he had learned in military boot camps, but also how white people had lived so very differently than had black people, and how a flag other than Old Glory had so often whipped in the hot and humid subtropical air of that Rebel lair.

Who would have thought that Bob would have sailed the Atlantic Ocean in an enormous ship stuffed shoulder to shoulder and knees to knees with his fellow G. I.s and come to ground in North Africa just two months before his twenty-second birthday? How had it been that in a combined British-American invasion in World War II’s “Operation Torch,” Bob had entered his baptism of fire among the American troops at Casablanca in French Morocco? As explained by Winston S. Churchill, Prime Minister of Great Britain, the invasion had not been the “…beginning of the end,” but the “end of the beginning.” And so it had been for Bob, whose innocence had been shattered by the explosions and gunshots of that confrontation; as he and his Allied counterparts had rolled forward into a long and dirty war with their German and Italian enemies, and as during the muddy winter lull in the fighting, he had observed in that place overt slavery still practiced, Jews bullied and persecuted with impunity, and in their flight from the Nazis, terrified and desperate and tattered European refugees bulging the streets and sleeping on floors of public buildings.

It hadn’t stopped with North Africa. It couldn’t have ended there. In Southern Sicily a few weeks later, which was a barren and arid geographical extension of North Africa, the wheels and serpentine tracks of Bob’s half-track pulverized the bodies of dead Germans and Italians lying in the way of vehicular progress, each humped carcass pitching the half-track up and down like a bucking horse. Tears flooded Bob’s eyes, and the contents of his stomach gorged his throat. But then he saw the hollow eyes and bloated stomachs and protruding bones of the children, gorgeous, innocent, raven-haired Sicilian children lining the roadways of that stingy Fascist state, their little filthy hands reaching out, their noses running in anxious beseeching: “Acqua! (Water) Pane! (Bread)”

Never had he seen such destitution. As he and his compatriots of the 2^nd Armored Division captured and assembled thousands of Italian Prisoners of war (POWs) nose to shoulder, Bob thought about the soup lines he had seen back home in Cincinnati and Louisville. Returning to that part of the world was far, far in the future. Wiping the world clean of these Nazi bastards would be a long and difficult job, but Bob was up for it. Every step of his journey to that hour had prepared him for it.   

Books by Linda Lee Greene are available at Amazon.com. Her novel of historical fiction titled GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS features a far-reaching look at Bob Gaffin’s childhood and young life.



Image: Bob Gaffin in casual military attire