December 21, 2007
Serving Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:20 PM EST In Johnstown, Pennsylvania, where I find myself right now, we buy the much-prized if misnamed Coney Island hot dogs for lunch, bringing them back home with another local specialty, what seems to be a raisin cookie with delusions of grandeur. My friend’s father reminisces about the boxer Jack Johnson pulling up in a vast limousine before the unprepossessing Coney Island Hot Dogs, so that he could escort his white wife into the only restaurant in town that would serve them. It is not perhaps too much of a surprise that someone in these parts did. In those days, the ancients who marched at the head of parade on what I believe was called Decoration Day had formerly been the militia who’d turned out to get in Lee’s way on his road to Gettysburg. My friend’s father also remembers the beautifully braided manes of the horses that pulled the bread wagons through those streets, and the less carefully groomed horses that pulled the milk wagons. The industrial age was at high heat when my friend’s father was a boy, and it is useful to be reminded that in the city where they made steel with locally mined coal and iron, the work of daily life was still done by animals. The hot dog stand is within sight of what had been a steel mill, one of ones that helped win the Second World War. In those days Woody Guthrie’s guitar was carved with the grandiloquent slogan that “This Machine Kills Fascists,” which was not true, but the things they made in Johnstown did kill Fascists, and pretty effectively, too, as did the men of Pennsylvania generally, who numbered more winners of the Congressional Medal of Honor than the citizens of any other state. Their city then housed more than 100,000 people, in those days most of them working in the mills or off at war. It is now less than a quarter of that size, and all the mills are gone, although not all the soldiers. In church on Sunday, an Annapolis cadet was one of the pallbearers, and a little sheet of paper by the door asks the small congregation’s prayers for those of its members who are in Iraq, of whom 25 are listed. The sign in front of a local bakery announces that it sends Gobs, a much-loved confection, overseas, and my guess is this does not mean to investment bankers in London. The woman behind the counter at a small store selling wonderful smoked meats told me that yes, they do have a mail order business; last week they sent 24 cases of beef jerky to Iraq. I was recently reminded that the whole country was like that in the 1940. Last year one of my cousins turned some home movies into a DVD and sent copies to the rest of us. It was startling to see so many New York and Chicago relatives, some of whom I had never before heard mentioned, wearing various uniforms. I knew that my father had served in the infantry, and two uncles in the Air Force. But who was that naval officer? Who were those others? Thinking back on it, I am surprised that I was surprised. When I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, everyone’s father seemed to have been a veteran of the Second World War, and younger uncles had all served in peacetime, or during the Korean War. Teaching modern undergraduates at a good liberal arts college, this is very far from the case, although I do teach the odd general’s daughter or veteran. But in the main those I teach, who are bombarded with talk of “service learning,” do not themselves serve, at least in one distinct older meaning of that word. The names in that list at the church tended to have either more consonants or more vowels than do the names of most of my students (or colleagues), and one other difference came to mind: I do not think those men and women would have watched a DVD like the one my cousin made with quite as much wonderment as I did.
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