My father was stationed in Morioka, Japan after the surrender in September of 1945. He had spent months in the Philippines witnessing the horrors of war, and transitioning from combat to one of occupation Japan’s surrender was a welcomed relief. The war had ended and a level of normalcy was beginning to emerge.
Dad was a prolific letter writer. His letters to his parents were filled with rich details of his military activities. As I read through a batch of Dad’s dispatches, I was struck by how quick he was to volunteer for whatever extra-curricular task required his time and talent. I saw this quality growing up, but by reading these letters, I realized he had been living this way long before I was born.
I thought I had been the first one in our family to ever perform in a Christmas pageant, but the cast photo in this “Conversation” shows my father standing at the end of the line on the far left dressed as a Roman soldier. The photo was taken on December 5th or 6th, 1945 on the stage at the town hall in Morioka. In the correspondences to my grandparents leading up to this event, Dad wrote in detail his involvement with this event, from music selection to conducting the choir to staging and performing. This might have been his first theatrical production.
Here was a multi-racial cast with a Japanese Joseph and Mary along with some of the citizens of Bethlehem side by side with American shepherds and soldiers. Dad played the music on “a little pump organ the church had” while directing the choir. Dad writes to his parents, “That was probably one of the first times since the war started that Japanese Christians and American Christians sung together…and it was beautiful.”
Once rehearsal was over, Dad and another soldier treated everyone to his version of snow cream. There had been a fresh ten-inch snowfall that day, and while he had no vanilla or chocolate and a moderate supply of sugar, Dad made do with pineapple juice that “ought to make a good sherbert – And it was (Dad’s underline) good. Everybody enjoyed it a lot.” Dad, and then with Mom, knew how to create something from scratch, from a theatrical production to concocting something tasty to eat afterward. Like the members of the cast in this Christmas pageant, my parents were so inclusive.
This theme of hospitality was as natural as breathing to my parents. Not just at Christmas but all year long. So often it is impossible to appreciate what you had growing up until you don’t have it any more. But then as I review my own life and the lives of my siblings and our collective children, I see how the gift of hospitality originating from the joyful hearts of Buddy and Bernie has been handed down to the third and fourth generations.
