Sadly, Dad passed away in October 2009 at the age of 85 after a few years of declining health. Yet It seems to me only proper to reflect on his life on the occasion of what would have been his 100th birthday today.
Ralph C. Rogers was born in the small town of Decatur, Michigan on June 24, 1924, and lived there for the first 18 years of his life. He played varsity basketball at Decatur High School and eventually attended the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Drafted into military service during World War II, he entered the US Army in April 1943, just a couple months shy of his 19th birthday. He left his native Michigan, having never traveled farther than northern Ohio.
He was first sent to the University of Maine, in Orono, as part of the Army Specialized Training Program. The ASTP was designed to single out specially qualified soldiers for their exceptional IQs and send them to various college campuses around the United States to learn special wartime skills. The two-company detachment of over 500 soldiers assigned to the University of Maine in the summer of 1943 was designated as a “pre-radar” group to study electrical and civil engineering and other related disciplines that would be required for the eventual invasion of Japan. But the realities of war intervened.
In February 1944, during the third term of the ASTP program at Orono, many of the soldiers enrolled in the basic part of the program, including my dad, were recalled to active combat duty. Casualties were mounting rapidly in North Africa, and plans were afoot for the eventual invasion of continental Europe. The Army decided its need for infantry replacements was more pressing than the need for technical specialties.
Dad traveled by train to Tennessee to join the Second Army’s spring field maneuvers before undertaking basic training at Fort Jackson, in Columbia, South Carolina. He was eventually assigned to the 104th Infantry Regiment, 26th Infantry “Yankee” Division. Originally consisting of personnel from the Massachusetts National Guard, the division was no longer the special pride of New England as its ranks swelled with men from all over the United States. These new troops were needed to bring the division up to strength before it shipped out of Boston for France in the wake of the D-Day invasion in early June 1944. There it would join the newly constituted US Third Army under General George Patton.
Dad would serve in the front ranks as combat infantry riflemen and knew from the outset that the future of an infantryman was grim. Dad remained in the 104th Infantry Regiment throughout the northern European campaign in 1944-1945, including the Battle of the Bulge during which he received the Bronze Star for valor during combat operations. His regiment was also awarded the Croix de Guerre by the French government for its participation in the liberation of that country. By early May 1945, the 26th Infantry Division had crossed Germany and met up with advanced units of the Soviet Red Army in the vicinity of Ceske-Budejovice, Czechoslovakia when Germany formally surrendered. Since the autumn of 1944 the 26th Infantry Division had been in combat for 210 days; the 104th for 177 days. But the war was not over; the 26th and the 104th were deployed to the area around Linz, Austria to train for eventual re-deployment to the Pacific. Luckily that war ended before they had to go and finish the work begun in the forest and hills of northeastern France almost a year earlier.
It is difficult for me to imagine doing what my dad did at the age of 19 and 20, or seeing what he must have seen during those months of combat across Europe. One grew up fast in those years of peril and hardship not knowing if one would survive. Dad was a young man from rural Michigan barely 20 years old when called upon to defend his country. He was lucky to survive, and he pretty much put the war behind him when he returned home when so many did not . . . even when his young son would ask him what he did during the war. I imagine I was like many young boys my age when they first learned that their fathers had served in the military during World War II.
Dad told me a few stories although I was perhaps too young to understand just what he was telling me or how painful these memories must have been for him. Dad never really went into many details about the war, or exactly what he did, but there were a few stories he shared, and I still remember them as clearly now as the day he first told them to me. All sons look up to their fathers as heroes. So I knew the few stories he did tell me, but so many others – how he earned his Bronze Star, or his role in the liberation of a Nazi concentration camp – I would not learn about until after he passed away.
I had so many questions and there was no one who could answer them for me. Dad and his comrades-in-arms were just young American boys who learned very quickly how to become men. They were all young heroes sent to a dark and desperate place. It is important that each generation of citizens understands the sacrifices of the generations that came before. There is no way we can ever repay them for what they did, and the price exacted from them. Those of us who have never experienced the dangers and deprivation of military service, whether it be in wartime or not, must try to better understand what others have endured in the defense of our nation.
After the war, Dad returned home, married Mom, and attended the Michigan Institute of Technology, in Houghton until he eventually transferred to the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta where he earned a bachelor's and master's degree in industrial engineering. Then it was off to Chicago in 1950 to work in the engineering department of Montgomery Ward, the job he held when I was born the following year. He later worked for the Chicago-based consulting firm Stevenson, Jordan & Harrison for several years, a job which took him, and sometime his family, around the country. Still, Dad was gone a lot, flying off on Sunday afternoon only to return the following Friday night to spend a couple days at home before he was off again. In 1958, he took an engineering position with Champion Paper Company, in North Carolina, for almost six years. During that time he served in various professional organizations and taught engineering mathematics at Western Carolina University. Our home in Asheville, NC was the first house we ever owned, and the four years we lived there was the longest time I spent in any one location until I moved away from home after graduating from high school in 1969. Dad ended his professional career with J.C. Penney, joining in 1968 as engineering manager for Penney’s catalog division, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He later held that same position at the corporate headquarters in Manhattan until his retirement in 1984.
Dad and Mom moved to Florida’s Gulf Coast where they lived until 1994 when they moved to Ohio to be closer to family and friends. Mine was a family history that followed the trajectory of so many others of my generation. Mom and Dad provided well for me and my sister; a safe and relatively happy home, opportunity to travel around this country and abroad, and a good college education.
But it would not last. Things began to come apart after my sister and I had moved on with our own lives. My parents eventually divorced shortly before their 50th anniversary, in 2006. Dad moved back to Florida where he eventually remarried, and I did not see him very much after that; certainly not as often as I would have hoped. His life, for whatever reasons that I will never fully understand, took a new direction. In some ways I can help but think he was haunted by what he had seen (and perhaps done) during the war. I will never know, and perhaps I don’t really want to. But I was happy that he was happy, or so he seemed whenever I did have a chance to visit him.
I missed the time we should have spent together in those final years of his life. We talked on the telephone occasionally; it just wasn’t enough. I never doubted his love for me, or mine for him. We just had a difficult time showing it. With the passing of time, various physical and mental issues began to take their toll.
I did spend more time with him during his final illness, but these were visits to the hospital and the nursing home in Florida where he lived the last couple of years. It was tough to watch him wither away. During my last visit with him a few months before he passed away, he and I sat in his nursing home room and watched a baseball game together. At least I thought we did. I pulled out my notebook and scribble down this poem.
DEMENTIA
My old alien body is a foreigner
Struggling to get into another country
–Jim Harrison (1937-2016)
he draws long and hard on the chocolate shake
I brought him in the hospital & a smile crosses
his face between the final slurps sounding
like a Shop-Vac sucking water off
a flooded basement floor “Thanks for this”
he says holding up the empty cup still smiling
“Better than the tapioca they feed me here”
his eyes focus on a baseball game on TV
“the Tampa Bay Rays are having a good year”
Detroit is leading 12-0 in the third inning
I ask him about the book on his night table
he thanks me for it but it is not from me
none of this seems to matter to him at all
it will be forgotten by morning if not before
I sometimes wonder if someday I will end
up just like him my own memory slipping
I see faces but no longer remember names
a favorite song but I can’t remember why
a poem I wrote but can no longer remember
it is becoming a constant reason for concern
will I descend into this mental midnight
we sit quietly and talk about nothing special
& he asks me if maybe I can bring him
a chocolate shake the next time I come to visit
he continues to stare at the TV on the wall
Detroit is now leading 16-0 in the fifth
“Looks like the Rays may go to the Series”
The man of the hour is gone, but I am still blessed to have my mom who is in relatively good health and very sound mind at age 99. And she just renewed her drivers license for four more years!
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