Coffee with Dad... Tea with Mom

By David Heinrich

The world had turned upside down! During the cataclysmic days of World War II, the world was plunged into darkness, and rays of sunshine were few and far between. Many familiar sources of security that had provided comfort and optimism to the people of many nations had fallen by the wayside. The Great Depression had drained the already-exhausted people of their sources of livelihood; and now at their weakest point, chaos, blood, and death appeared to be reigning supreme. Suddenly childhood dreams and plans for success were dashed to the ground, and the world was searching for hope amid the despair of war and death.

Don Heinrich and Dorrie Brain were swept up in this chaos and struggled valiantly to find their way forward despite all the uncertainties that plagued them and those around them. They lived in two very different cultures at a time when the world was large and communication was slow and almost nonexistent in many cases.

Brought up in the Midwest of the United States, Don had come through the Great Depression, and he knew the realism of hardship and struggle. Dorrie, at the other side of the fierce Atlantic Ocean, had grown up in the small town of Shrewsbury, England, near the Welsh border. Neither one could know what kind of life was in store for them as they tried to sort through their limited options. The tide of world events was sweeping them along paths that neither had known before.

Meet Don and the young man he had become as his character developed through many hardships. Meet Dorrie and the young woman she had become through her gentle English heritage. How could they know that destiny would soon propel them together in the most unlikely way? Together they found joy, love, and purpose amid the global chaos and uncertainty.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 24, 2021
• ISBN: 9781662439247

Book preview

Don…In the Early Years

Don was born in 1917 in Peoria, Illinois, the second son of Earnest and Genevieve Fuller. His older brother, Bob, was older by one year.

His father, Earnest, worked hard as a salesman but was often on the road and away from the family. Genevieve, his mother, was left in dire financial straits when Earnest suddenly died from pneumonia. Genevieve moved with the two boys to join her older sister, Maggie, at her home in Crawfordsville, Indiana, a few weeks after Earnest’s death.

Bob was five, and Don was only four years of age when they moved with their mom to join Aunt Maggie. While living in Crawfordsville, Genevieve met George Heinrich, who was visiting his family in Crawfordsville. George had been Earnest’s best friend in high school, and he was very relieved to find that Genevieve and her two little boys were okay after Earnest’s death since they were living at Maggie’s home. George had attended Earnest’s funeral and had been concerned for their future.

Maggie invited George to dinner, and that was the beginning of a relationship between George and Genevieve. As is often the case, good friends like George and Earnest are often very different from each other. Friends seem to make each other stronger and balance each other through their differences. Genevieve realized this fact as she and George began spending more time with each other in Crawfordsville. George was teaching high school in Peoria, so planned weekends were the only time they could get together. Crawfordsville was about five hours’ drive from Peoria. Fortunately, George was able to stay with his parents in Crawfordsville on the weekends, and he came to see Genevieve and her two small boys, Bob and Don.

Don & his brother Bob

Genevieve and George’s courtship stretched over two years. George came from a large German family and had twelve brothers and sisters. He inherited a strong German work ethic, was highly intelligent, and was an excellent planner. He worked hard to put himself through college at Bradley University in Peoria and majored in business with a strong concentration in world trade, transportation, shipping logistics, and commercial insurance. Once he graduated from Bradley, George taught in a local Peoria high school.

After teaching high school for a couple of years, an opportunity presented itself for George to manage a local Grocery store. He discussed the opportunity with Gen (Genevieve), who encouraged him to get into the business world and leave academia. George took the job as a manager at a local grocery store and did well. His strong work ethic, enthusiasm, and reputation for fairness were a blessing to the family and to all those he worked with. After their two-year courtship, George asked Gen to marry him, and she accepted. They rented a small home in Peoria as he managed the grocery store. Bob was seven, and Don was six when they were married.

It was the Roaring Twenties. People were working, and times were good in the United States for a few years. Then suddenly on October 29, 1929, the stock market crash occurred and changed everything! The bottom fell out of the economy; and people were without work, hungry, and discouraged. For cost containment reasons, George was asked by his employer to begin managing multiple grocery stores in different locations throughout Peoria. George and Gen considered themselves very fortunate that George even had a job and could put food on the table even though there was only a little pay increase for the many increased job responsibilities for many stores.

It was due to those increased responsibilities that George and Gen had to move each year into various rental homes to enable George to manage grocery stores at multiple locations. These annual moves greatly affected Bob and Don because they were uprooted often and had to attend many different grade schools at a time in our national history when people were hurting badly.

Don…Character Development

Each time Bob and Don had to change grade schools, a pattern developed that affected them for the rest of their lives. As soon as the school bell rang at the end of their first day at each of the new schools, there would be a line of school bullies that were waiting for them just off the schoolyard property. The script would go pretty much like the following scenario with various local variations, of course. Bob and Don were generally told by the crowd of school bullies that they would have to fight individually. Occasionally, Bob and Don were allowed to fight together against opponents, but usually they had to fight alone against one of the bullies. Bob and Don were often given the choice of which of the school bullies they would fight first. Generally, they would have to fight many fights one after another to determine their place in the new pecking order. At least there was usually a Depression code of honor so multiple individual fights occurred instead of Bob and Don being jumped in a gang-like manner.

Don would sometimes be able to talk their way out of fighting, but those occasions were rather rare. Don (Dad) told me (while we were drinking morning coffee at our kitchen table) that he developed a personal strategy for fighting bullies. At first, he would pick one of the bullies whom he thought he would probably be able to take on successfully and win. However, he said that strategy would often backfire because even if he won the first fight, he would still have to fight all the other guys one by one (who were probably tougher than the bully he thought he could beat).

So his final strategy was to pick the biggest, meanest-looking bully and fight him first. But he would have to do his very best to bruise and bloody the big, mean, and stronger first bully. Don had to take the initiative of the fight from the beginning by doing aggressive offense and quick speed of attack to gain an element of surprise. Even if Don lost that first fight to the bigger, tougher bully, if Don was able to hurt him, at least the guy would respect Don. Sometimes if he gave a good account of himself in the first fight, the others would be too scared to want to fight Don since Don had hurt the biggest bully and the other bullies wanted no part of that!

As you can imagine, Don and Bob became quite good at defending themselves in the face of sometimes discouraging odds. Don told me that those qualities of courage, hope, determination, and toughness helped him when the Allies were fighting the Axis powers during WWII. He said that hope was one of the most valued character qualities during WWII. In the first three dark years of the war, the Nazis won almost every battle. American officers needed to be courageous, full of hope, and tough enough to set a good example for the men who followed them.

When Don and Bob were sophomores at Peoria Central High School, they started working after school in the grocery store to help their stepfather, George. They both grew strong by unloading the trucks that brought in the grocery store supplies. Don said his and Bob’s eyes were also opened to see how hard people were struggling just to feed their families during the Great Depression. Seeing the desperate needs of others developed a sense of deep compassion that remained with