Walking Backward in My Father's Footsteps

By William J Burghardt

The story my father told me long ago goes like this.

Sometime during his Army career, at a time and place unknown, probably 1943 or early 1944, he would routinely check a certain bulletin board for the names or numbers of those soldiers slated to go overseas. One day, he noticed his name had "flopped" from the "not going overseas" list to the "going overseas" list. My father also noticed he had been "switched" with another soldier who, the day before, was going overseas, and suddenly, he was not but my father was. This usually did not happen. So he decided to try and find out how he had been "switched."

He wrote a letter to an off-base name as high in the Army hierarchy as he could find. He explained the mysterious switch and waited. He wanted to know how and why his name had been switched with some other guy. He was twenty-two and away from familiar surroundings for the first time and was panicked and in fear. He prayed.

After some time, my dad was summoned to the office of his camp head honcho who told him: "I'm not sure who you are or who you know, but I am holding orders to personally transfer you to any place you want to go in the Continental United States for the duration of the war."

My father said, "Florida."

His military record was skeletal at best.

I decided to find out where he was and when.

That is the story of this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 5, 2024
• ISBN: 9798887939315

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Walking Backward in My Father's Footsteps

William J Burghardt

Copyright © 2024 William J. Burghardt

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2024

ISBN 979-8-88793-918-6 (pbk)

ISBN 979-8-88793-931-5 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

War Games

Chapter 2

The Path Avoider

Chapter 3

Maggie and Squirt

Chapter 4

Herb Boerchers vs. Phil Rizzuto

Chapter 5

The St. Louis Fire and the Boilermaker Thesis

Chapter 6

Stats and Notes

Chapter 7

Searching, Searching

Chapter 8

Florida

Chapter 9

FDR and Baseball

Chapter 10

Testing an Experimental POW Program

Chapter 11

Coaching: LaGrange, Rich, Homewood-Flossmoor

Chapter 12

Influence Game

About the Author

Walking Backward in My Father's Footsteps

To Squirt. And Maggie.

William J. Burghardt

Chapter 1

War Games

On that sunny June day in 1962, we were playing war, which, in an oxymoronic way, sounds retrospectively ridiculous; as I recall, it involved shooting people with sticks used as musket-like rifles, followed by an endless choral claim of "You're dead. You missed. Bang, bang." If you were hit, you would lie down to the count of thirty, get up, then repeat. I guess this has evolved into present-day paint ball.

This led to talk about where our dads served in World War II; one kid's dad was in the Pacific near Midway, another dad was in Belgium, and another dad marched into Italy with General George Patton. I didn't know where my dad served. Never came up, never thought to ask. So I went in and asked him.

He was reading the paper. I stood there until I made sure I had his attention. He lowered his paper, and our eyes locked.

Hey, I said, you were in World War II, right?

Yes, I was.

Where were you, you know, stationed?

Florida.

You weren't overseas?

No.

Why not?

The story got complicated. After what he told me that day, I never brought up the military portion of his wartime experiences again. But I had to drag his odyssey out of him.

Where did you serve during World War II?

Silence.

The eyes.

I told you. Florida. I was stationed at a prisoner-of-war camp. Taught German soldiers volleyball, softball, and went through magazines with them to help them get used to America. Showed them movies.

You did this with the Nazis?

Well, not Nazi-Nazis, you know, guys who actually said ‘Heil, Hitler' and believed the whole program. Not them. No, I had regular guys who were just soldiers doing what they were told. Regular folks, really. Just like the rest of us, caught in a world war. What we were trying to do was Americanize them, in some way. That was it.

He went back to the paper.

The story was full of holes; the in-between stuff was unknown. I knew he was active in sports and was initially at Camp Grant in Rockford, Illinois, and was married in Cleveland. There's a photo of four people coming up the aisle at a chapel at Crile Hospital in Cleveland, he and his best man, Jack St. Germain, in uniform, my mother and her sister in flowing white lace, everybody arm in arm. But I had no idea what his service entailed.

And Florida? POW camps?

But he didn't want to revisit his wartime experiences. As I learned through life, people who experience war do not wish to talk about it. Of course, you don't pick up on that when you're eight years old. So I unintentionally kept pressing him.

I asked him how he landed in Florida. He lowered his paper and looked at me and asked me to come closer. This was private daddy-son time. I sat in his lap. I don't remember every detail, and I can't remember exactly how he told me. I do know that he explained it in a straightforward way, rather perfunctorily. I just listened. I think he felt good telling me. He told me in a way that I was, at eight, satisfied. He was emotionless, and he really did not want to get into it. But he did. Went something like this:

I was stationed at a base where they had a huge bulletin board in the hallway with all our names listed. There were numbers, rankings, and all the stuff that would go with a name and an army roster. There were also two boxes by each name, one headed on base and the other headed going overseas. We would check it out every day, and usually, soldiers would move from the on base box to the going overseas box in groups of twos or threes or fours.

One day, I went by, and I had been moved from on base to going overseas. Staring at the two boxes for a long time, I realized I was the only one who had been moved. As I said, they usually would move these people in groups. On this particular day, it was just me. I didn't understand. I went back to my room and just stared. Didn't know exactly what to do.

But I did not want to go overseas. I was not gung ho about going over there to shoot some German kid I didn't even know. And I knew I didn't want to get shot.

Well, I looked around and found some publication with some high-sounding military names in it; I looked for the highest-ranking name in there—some Army honcho I could find who was not stationed on