Home to the Village

The little town of Weidman, Michigan, has no employment problems and no adjustment crises for its returning servicemen. The author explains why. 

WE used to laugh apologetically at the size of our town, calling it a wide spot in the road. 

That, of course, was before we began to experience the amazing backwashes of war that were to come. It was before we'd imagined that a townlike ours, with its characteristically intimate customs and its slow pace of living, was to have a place in the pattern of war and the readjustment to peace. One of our truly characteristic customs has been a factor of real benefit to our returning veterans. 

The country village has no unemployment problem, no adjustment crisis for the returning service-man, for the reason of the peculiar closeness with which village families live together. The village knows all about each individual veteran before he gets home - what's happened to him, how he's getting along, how he feels about everything from politics to personal ambition, or physical damage and how he wants us to regard it. And the village, because of its tradition of making private affairs public, comes across.

Our Honor Roll, painted on the side of Middlesworth's general store, lists 243 names for the village and its farm trading area. The village itself sent forty-six boys, to war, with forty-five destined to return. The homes they return to are no palaces, by a long shot; but a local veteran can sit beside ma's kitchen stove as long as he wants to rest-and these kids are very tired. They don't have to rush into jobs. Their folks have deep roots here, their homes are as established as those oak tress growing on the hills northwest of town. 

We have Purple Hearts, DFC’s & Bronze Stars, a Silver Star or two, twinkling up one street and down the other. We have one of the more serious amputee cases out of Percy Jones General Hospital, at Battle Creek. We've had nervous-exhaustion cases, malaria cases, psychoneurosis, but the village has recognized no scientific problem in these because they're our own boys and we understand them. We not only have watched them grow up from the three-cornered- pants stage but we know what each one talks about with his parents, which ones want to discuss their war experiences and which ones don't; we hear everything about one another here in the country village, and so we get a cross-section of the things our veterans are doing, saying, even thinking. 

Most of our boys grew up in the expectation of finding employment outside the village, but those who want to stay here or must stay find that they can. One veteran, for whom there was definitely no chance outside, found that a job appeared for him, for the simple reason that he had to have a job here, where he could leave work in the middle of the day and go home to bed, if necessary. The job opened up when Newt Dieterle was about to hire an attendant for his gas station. Newt, a newcomer among us, happened to be a man with good business sense, and one with a heart, and also one with a hankering to enter into the village life. So he hired Bob Kirvan, and Bob has had exactly the kind of job he needed in order to recover. But by the very pressure of village talk and village feeling, Newt could not have hired anyone but Bob.

The beloved-of-fiction power of village gossip is no pipe dream. We've always discussed one another's affairs thoroughly. Peacetime gossip may get out of hand, resolving occasionally into the downright hilarious, but in this particular instance our penchant for wholesale personal discussion pays off. A local boy is mustered out of service, and within the hour every house in town knows about it, and every house is glad. The boy, because he was brought up on village tradition, knows that approximately 350 people are thinking of him tonight. 

We stage no official welcomes, have no organized machinery to help the veteran. But when Bill and Hermione Smith got that Government telegram advising them young Walter's right arm and leg had been torn off by an exploding shell in Sicily, George McClain said, " Tell him there'll be a job for him at the garage when he gets home. " We all know all about such details as what Hermie wrote Walt, and what Bill said to George, and what George answered, because that's the way we live. We all know, too, about Wait's writing home from foreign hospitals somewhat later, telling his folks how he longed to go fishing once more. When he finally got here, via Battle Creek, where he underwent his thirteenth major operation, he tried going fishing, and made out all right. One of our village citizens gut a brand-new boat for Walt on his private lake that he'd never allowed the rest of us to fish on, and somebody else drove Walt to and from the lake. 

We have nothing of any great material value to offer our returning veterans. We only talk about one another all the time, and so we know everything there is to know about one another. That's how we happen to know what are the immediate wants of our veterans. 

We knew all about the Ritchie family's postponing its Christmas celebration because Don, who had been with the field artillery since the April before Pearl Harbor, was stuck on the West Coast in the December transportation melee. We got all the bulletins of his belated progress, practically mile by mile, on the road home. After he'd got here, Don voiced the typical village veteran's reaction. 

"When I told the fellows in my outfit," he said, "that I was going home to a little town, the city guys said, 'Boy, are you lucky!' And they meant it. One of the foremost items in the veteran's mind is the problem of security during the next few years. All the men I’ve ever talked with have agreed that the Government can't shell out enough to give millions of veterans security. And we don't want it that way. We want an even break and a chance to work-and, of course, a place to light until we can get our bearings.Which is where a lot of veterans from city homes-or perhaps no homes-figure we et country-born fellows are lucky." 

Since the boys have been getting back in numbers, they congregate in village mother’s kitchens or perhaps at Agnes' Place, where they can sit around Agnes' table for hours over hamburgers or cokes or beer. They call it "establishing a beachhead." We never ask theboys what it is they're so eager to get together to talk about, but we know, of course, just as we know other things about one another. They don't describe the things they went through in the war. They don't discuss thefuture to any extent, or even girls. They just want to get together again, being mainly in the same age group, and it's quite possible that, without putting it into words, they want to feel something of that gone-forever t way things used to be." But we know better thanto barge across and sit down at theboys' table. They have let it he known - again without official notice - that they want to be left to themselves whenthey gather at Agnes' Place. Certainly, you call a greeting to them. But you don't sit with them without an invitation. 

Families here joined with one another in weathering the long tensions of the war itself. We knew the terrible waiting, the uncertainty of odds for the Thomases, the Spragues, the McArthurs - each family with four soldier sons. " It'd be a miracle if all of them come back!" we told one an- other. All but one came back. The Thomas service flag shows one gold star, three blue. 

We asked Charley and Kit Johnson daily what they heard from young Charley in his unrelieved endurance of two years of jungle fighting. 

We knew when Leon and Gladys McArthur were leaving their house at eleven o'clock each night to walk two miles around the snowy square, after which they could sleep, maybe, when Young Mitchell was going out as a gunner on bombers, in the days when bombers were going out of England -unescorted beyond the Channel, and a kid's chances of returning from all his twenty-five missions were not good. The village noticed Leon's and Gladys' hair getting white-but of course we only talked of this among ourselves 

as Stuart, another son, set out to establish a brilliant record with the 238th Combat Engineers, beginning with that first bridge at Carentan. From the things Lieutenant Stuie sent home to his parents thereafter you knew heexperienced a lot of hand-to-hand argument with Nazis through France and Belgium and Germany. And Gladys, our most devout leader of the local Methodist church, learned to exhibit the souvenirs, handing you a couple of tarnished shoulder bars and telling you calmly, "These are from the uniform of the first German Stuart shot." As though she were remarking, "Tlese are a couple of dish towels from the Ladies' Aid." 

Stuie got the Purple Heart, with oak-leaf cluster, and the Silver Star he earned in an attack on a place called, in his citation, "Hill 203, in Germany." He and Mitchie are home now, as are more than half of our village boys. We've watched the earlier arrivals adjust themselves to long-dreamed-of everyday life. We watched Mitchie having a rather hard time with shattered nerves; finally getting set, how, ever, as assistant cashier of one of the county-seat banks; and we know better than to sympathize when he finds it painful to sit down or stand up. We know all about Mitchie's fracturing the end of his spine when he bumped against his machine gun as his plane lurched, dropping one of its riddled engines.

We know what Capt. Al Sprague says and thinks. Captain Al was pilot of a bomber, with twenty-five missions over Europe, then finishing out with the Transport Command in the Pacific. Captain Al has what he terms “a mess" of medals, which, like his brother Harlan's Bronze Star, are tucked away in a dresser drawer. We know how much junior Cole needed rest, delaying as long as possible his return to his prewar job with Dow Chemical Company at Midland. June was in a Navy hot spot, his ship participating in the invasions of Sicily, Salerno, Anzio and Southern France; after which June earned another battle star at Okinawa. He got pretty tired before his war job was done. Louie Frantz's ship put into London in time for Louie to get acquainted with incendiary bombs, and Louie wears reminders in wounds in both legs. We discuss Calvin Ohls' plans for entering business with his father next August, when Cal will have completed a six-year hitch with the United States Coast Guard. Cal has a smart collection of battle stars, from the days when the Coast Guard was conveying transport ships. 

One by one, they're returning, and their first delight is their discovery that home is exactly as they remembered it, only more so. And it stays in the same old place. Pa and me have not moved to a new location by the time the kids 

get out of service. True, we've had certain changes that were inevitable. John Ritchie died while his two sons were in service, but Mrs. Ritchie, a frail, elderly woman, kept the home fires for Jack and Don. Miles Drallette's wife died a year ago, but Wendell was in India, and so the old home waited. 

We no longer feel apologetic for our village. We've learned better, perhaps through such things as Marine Sgt, Johnny Beutler's telling us, in letters to his father from Saipan, Okinawa and Japan, "I've seen a hell of a lot of the rest of the world . . . and I can't get home fast enough! "

THE END

Transcribed by Joyce McClain from the original article, August 2001.