My Dad

Earlier this month my dad had his birthday. He would have been 95. He died too young at age 61. 

He was the most important person in my life and he is still my moral compass. "What would dad have done?" is a question I ask myself often. Lawrenceville '41, Peleliu '44, Okinawa '45, Carleton '49, Yale Law '52, Cleary Gottlieb till '84, father of 6, husband to our mother for 42 years, grandad to 9 kids.

Then there was his civic work to make this world a better place. Board Member on the Staten Island Mental Health Counsel, President of the New York County Lawyers Association, President of the Carleton College Alumni Association. He dedicated two of his month-long vacations in consecutive years away from his family in the mid-60s working in the deep south to institute voter registration after the passage of the Civil Rights Voting Act, among other things. My mother was a stalwart angel, a partner to him, as she took care of six young children during those hot, steamy New York July days, seamlessly even while she was probably worried sick about his safety.

He taught me the lessons about the slippery slope, that the best is the enemy of the good, and that the law is merely the minimum of morality. He showed me through his manly but loving and sensitive manhood how we men should strive to proceed through a man's life as a man, both intellectual yet physical if presented as such.  I miss him still.

Happy Birthday, Dad. Glad to have known you.

My father had his 95th birthday this month. As is my wont on birthdays important to me, I contributed a dollar coin, along with my regular contribution, to the collection basket in church on the Sunday closest to it as a talisman to marshal my thoughts and prayers for him. It's what I did for my middle child as well earlier in the month near his birthday. Then I reflected on that person as I knelt for a few moments after taking communion and prayed for him, in the ethereal or the physical world.

I didn't have any specific thoughts that struck me about my child earlier in the month (I haven't heard from or anything about him in 13 years) other than I prayed that he was alive, well and happy and asked God to continue to give me strength to keep on loving him as a father would.  But as I knelt in prayer for my father at a later service (he died at age 61), something fantastic happened, and for 3 or 4 minutes his life flashed through my mind's eye amidst images I saw of him, even 60 or more years ago, during my life and the superimposed images of him as he was when he was a young man or a boy, even decades before I was born, created from memories of what I knew or imagined of his life when he was growing up and a struggling young family man during and after the war before he became a successful (and affluent) Wall Street lawyer.

I saw him as a red-headed boy hunting with his dad, or alone, in the wetlands around his hometown in Winona, Minnesota. I saw him as a stand-out student and athlete at his boarding school (I subsequently went to the same one) and taking weekends to listen to jazz in New York City and during his matriculation at Princeton walking down Nassau Street. Then he went off to war and survived two harrowing battles in the Pacific, and I saw him at the few supposedly funny or descriptive combat tales I heard (one involved him bathing and unarmed on Peleliu when a squad of armed Japanese troops came upon him--[pause] ["What happened!"]--""They all got away.") (and another involved him getting hit by lightning during a rainstorm on Okinawa when the bolt came down his radio antenna as he was transmitting radio coordinates with the nearby fleet while he was set up on a ridgeline--["I remember hearing a tremendous noise and watching sparks fly from one set of fingertips to the other."] ["What happened next?"]--"After a few moments of sitting there, I got up, ambled about for a minute or two, decided I was all right, and I went back to transmitting." I saw the sparks fly as I knelt in prayer, and I saw him return and greet his wife, my mother, after being away for two years and all the gnawing anxieties about the continuing marital compatibility of this man and woman, who knew each other for mere weeks before they wed as teenagers a few days or weeks before he shipped out, fade away in those first few delicious moments of reconciliation. I saw this war veteran attend four years of college in snowbound Northfield, Minnesota, then three years of law school in New Haven, Connecticut, where I was born.

Then I saw him through my eyes and my long-stored memories at our first apartment in Falls Church, Virginia, with him working in the District at a law firm. I saw him in our yard in autumn lift too large a load of raked leaves in a blanket with a grunt and stagger off to the metal barrel where we burned them. I watched our move to Staten Island when he was transferred to New York City by his law firm and him fix up our ramshackle house there, and stagger through snow a yard high after a blizzard to get to the bus stop so he could go to work.  Then I saw him moving boxes as we moved from Stapleton to Westerleigh, I saw him breaking up a fight on our porch between a gang of four toughs and a friend of mine being bullied and me when we accepted the challenge, were being overwhelmed and dad sent them packing with that war-instilled killer's look (the only time I ever saw it) in his eyes.   I sat beside him again as he drove me to my boarding school, or picked me up from it. I watched from above as he steadily climbed a 14,000 foot peak in Colorado during a summer vacation because he thought, unknown to me because I was already at the peak and fine, that I was in trouble; when I saw him I waved and he thereupon immediately took a break and smoked a cigarette, probably in a fury, before he continued more slowly to the top. I saw him in Brooklyn when we moved there, and at his retirement house in Santa Fe. I saw him in his sickbed in the adobe house there when he had lung cancer, and I watched him die. These were a precious three or four minutes for me as I knelt with my eyes pressed closed and my hands clasped in prayer earlier this month focusing on him.  I murmured "God bless you, Dad," just as I had said that terrible summer morning in Santa Fe thirty three years ago when I bid goodbye to his spectral being as it slipped from his failing, ravaged body and passed over to God's right hand. The flashing images inside my head completed, the spell broke and I opened my eyes and sat in my pew. After the final hymn was sung, I went forth from the church more enlightened than when I entered it.

Happy Fathers Day

Happy Fathers Day, dad.  We all sure have missed you these past 33 years.

Happy Birthday, Dad

My father was born in January in the mid-twenties.  Obviously he came of age during the Depression and as a young man was thrust into the maelstrom of combat in World War Two to become a man practically overnight.

Then he returned from overseas, a husband already, to use the GI Bill to go on to receive his higher education at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota.  Somewhere in my house is a picture of a handsome young man, exuding confidence and grace, standing with snow shovel in hand outside a Quonset hut living unit next to a mountain of shoveled snow, alongside a beautiful young wife looking lovingly at him.

Yale Law school followed, where he had three children, including me.  Three more children followed as he practiced law at a Wall Street law firm and engaged in civic and humanitarian work.  I am most proud of the fact that he used his entire yearly vacation time two years in a row to go to the deep south in the mid-sixties after passage of the Civil Rights Voting Act to help register historically disenfranchised voters, a dangerous and potentially deadly task in those days.

Warrior, husband, father, son, brother, grandad, activist, lawyer, the list could go on and on for this principled man. Taken away way to early at age 61 by cancer, I still miss you and think about you often; I love you dad!

The invasion of Japan... .

On this day in 1941, the Japanese launched a sneak attack on the U.S. Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, decimating it, and plunged us into WW2. The U.S. brought the war to an end in 1945 by dropping two atomic bombs on Japan, forcing her to surrender. I am reading Hell to Pay by D.M. Giangreco, written in 2009 and updated this year, which lays out in sobering detail the U.S. plans to invade Japan in 1945 (Kyushu) and 1946 (Honshu). It also examines detailed Japanese plans for homeland defense.

U.S. casualties were estimated to be one million. Japanese casualties were estimated to be ten million. The book makes clear that Japan would not have given up without the shocking event of the two nuclear detonations, as it was a militarized nation of fanatical, committed people who were induced by their leaders and culture to fight to the death, as epitomized by their asymmetrical and effective use of kamikazes against American warships.

 

It would have been a bloody battle to the death for U.S. servicemen against soldiers, old men, women and young children, many armed with sharpened sticks. For instance, the Japanese civilians on Saipan famously leaped to their deaths off cliffs, carrying their children with them, rather than surrender to U.S. personnel who were beseeching them to give up in end-of-the-battle mopping up. The U.S. estimated it would lose 10% of its fleet to kamikazes in the invasion of Japan, figuring on Japan having 5,000 such planes. The Japanese actually had 12,000 planes hidden away, with ample supply of fuel for the purpose of one-way flights, and estimated they would destroy 20-50% of the U.S. fleet. They also had thousands of small, wooden motorboats ready for use in deadly nighttime suicidal attacks against U.S. ships, explosive-laden fast boats which, being wooden, would evade radar. 

The book points out that after three years of war, Japan had "figured out" American tactics and invasion strategy and knew exactly which beaches the U.S. troops would storm ashore on and had been preparing to meet them in these final two battles for half a year or more. The Japanese deductions were 100% correct, on both islands, and the defenses were becoming more formidable by the day. They planned for massive kamikaze attacks on the fleet, opposition at the shoreline and a defense in depth, all the way up the large (compared to previous island battles) island. The kill-ratio of Japanese deaths to U.S. casualties had been dropping steadily as the war progressed from 5-1 to near equality. The opposing forces at or near the beachheads would have been at approximately a one-to-one ratio, not the preferred 3-1 ratio when launching an attack against heavily-defended positions. Civilians on both islands were being mustered into and trained in quasi-military brigades for use as cannon fodder, damage repair, road-building and even infiltration. To avoid the Americans' overwhelming superiority of firepower, especially from naval guns, the Japanese had several reserve divisions a day's travel by foot away from the battlefront, ready to appear at a disputed zone overnight.

Japan is a mountainous country with a rugged spine of mountains perfect for guerrilla warfare, which was being planned on if and when the battle went against the Japanese military forces. Japanese forces on previous island battlegrounds such as Guam successfully evaded U.S. forces for decades after the war, not knowing or believing that the war was over. Operations in Japan would likely have dragged on for years.

 

Japanese planning for homeland defense figured on using 100% of its population in the fight to the death. The Japanese supply lines were mere miles long, the U.S. supply lines stretched back thousands of miles with every single item having to arrive by ship. The Japanese even had some tanks on hand, and had modified an existing automatic hand-held weapon to be a deadly and effective tank-killer, overcoming a serious drawback they suffered from in other island battles, the inability to counter American tanks.

 

Consider how protracted, bloody and savage the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa had been, and multiply that horrendous experience ten-fold for U.S. forces thrust into the maelstrom. The U.S. planned on having five more nuclear bombs by the fall of 1945 when the first invasion forces went ashore on Kyushu in Operation Olympic, and planned to use them tactically at or near the beachheads. U.S. forces, with dangers unbeknownst yet in the nascent nuclear age, would have been fighting over radioactive ground!

 

My father was a Pacific war veteran who survived two horrific battles, Peleliu and Okinawa, where casualties ran one in three, and I have no doubt he would have been killed or maimed in participation in another all-out no-quarter asked for or given invasion. The author James Michener, a Pacific War veteran, has a letter in the appendix of Hell to Pay which lays out the feeling of indescribable relief such young men felt upon hearing that a super weapon had been used and the war was over and they would live!

 

Anyone who thinks that dropping the bomb on Japan in 1945 was obviously wrong, or that it was obviously racist (we used it on the only enemy we had left when its development was completed, as Germany had already surrendered, and the U.S. was in an almost desperate quandary as casualties mounted and more bloody fighting loomed because Japan would not surrender despite being beaten already and having its country totally devastated by conventional bombing), should read this book, become informed on the subject and think further on the matter.

Happy Birthday

Happy birthday, Dad.  You would have been 92, if you hadn't passed last century, but in your too-short life you got so much done.

Reader, don't believe me, read the NYT obituary.  Yes, from the dishonest press, so it couldn't be right, right?

Child of the Depression, combat veteran, scholar at two prestigious schools (three if you count his high school), father to six, loving husband to our mother, Wall Street lawyer, civil rights fighter, constant volunteer, advocate, my hero.  I'm glad one of my three sons got held by you before you departed.

You wouldn't recognize where America is headed now, the country you fought for with your utmost in desperate hours as your fellow Marines bled and died around you.  But resistance is back, Dad, and I've been there and I'll be there.

Dad Died 30 Years Ago Today

My dad died 30 years ago today at age 61, a lung cancer victim.  The government  provided him with three cigarettes in every C-ration while he fought in two of the bloodiest battles in WW2 as a nineteen year-old rifleman.

Of course he smoked the proffered cigarettes, and he continued to smoke when he came home from the war (tobacco is addictive).  His wasting disease at the end, after he had stopped smoking years earlier, wasn't pretty and took him away painfully.

But I was fortunate, along with my mother and my brother, to be at his bedside in his house as he passed, holding him as he died.  All I could think of to say at that awesome moment was, "God bless you, dad," as he went to sit at the right hand of the Father.

He was my hero, the most principled man I ever knew.  I  miss him always and think about him practically every day.

"It takes time to tell the Lord about her two sons in battle."

My Grandmother wrote a weekly column for the local newspaper in the small town in Minnesota where she lived.  During the early forties, everybody's young sons were overseas fighting either the Nazis or the Japanese empire, and both of Grandmother Gretch's two boys were so engaged, both Marines.  Each of them saw heavy, desperate action, and she occasionally recorded her thoughts or her fears for their safety in her otherwise light-hearted column.

Her oldest son, my uncle Harry, a teenager when he enlisted, was an officer commanding the anti-aircraft batteries aboard a heavy cruiser with Halsey's Fifth Fleet.  He earned the Bronze Star for meritorious service during a day of hellish combat of ships versus planes as he and a sister ship accompanied a gravely wounded aircraft carrier limping out of range of land-based aircraft at about three knots after a fast-carrier task force strike upon Tokyo the preceding day.  The rest of the fleet sailed out of harm's way during the night.

Her youngest son, my father, a teenager when he enlisted, was a radioman at two of the most ferocious land battles in the Pacific.  The brutality and bloodletting of the second one, Okinawa, is the reason why we dropped the atomic bomb on Japan to force it to surrender rather than face a projected million American casualties in an invasion of Japan.  He was 20 years old when the war ended, a wisp of a deadly fighting man who tipped the scales at 120 pounds.

Here's how Grandmother Gretch, a keen observer, described troubled people coming spontaneously into church on June 6, 1944 to pray for the safety of their loved ones, most of whom were barely out of their teens.  It starts off with her observation in the third person of an "older woman," who really was herself:

"Near us an older woman with a coat thrown over her house dress slipped to her knees and rested her head against the back of the next pew.  She knelt for a long time, oblivious of the hymn, and her body sagged a little.  It takes time to tell the Lord about her two sons in battle.

"Up ahead knelt a woman in a beautifully tailored suit and a hat that was perfection.  Her hands clapsed and unclasped, clapsed and unclasped through the whole service.  Her only son is in the thick of it.

"Two grave-faced fathers whose boys are in it, and dangerously, sat together and bowed their heads.  A couple whose only son has just left these shores sat anxious-faced, and when they rose to sing their hands touched when they held the hymn book together.

"A very young bride whose husband is in it came in with her face white and her eyes frightened.  Like a lost child she sat as close to her mother as she could.  On her feet were frivolous, high-heeled scarlet slippers that one felt she had worn to keep up her morale.  There is something very reassuring and gay about red slippers, even more so than a flowery new hat.  A girl in a shabby gray coat sat stiffly upright and kept ducking her head to wipe her eyes.  Both of her brothers are in Europe.

"Many people were there who had no sons in it, and they seemed anxious, compassionate.  It was as though they were humbly eager to do what they could by the comfort of their presence and their prayers.  A thing that shocked us was that we saw no young men between about 17 and 35.  How blessed a thing it will be to have them back."

By Gretchen Leicht Lamberton, excerpted from "D-Day",  appearing in Reflections and Recipes by the Casual Observer, Gretchen L. Lamberton, c1966 by the Leicht Press, Winona, Minnesota.

Happy Birthday Dad

Happy Birthday, Dad.  You would have been 89.  You left us way too soon at age 61.

Husband (married 42 years till death did him part), Warrior (two island campaigns in the Pacific Theater with the First Marine Division), Athlete (selected captain of his high school team, split end on his college team), Scholar (finalist for a Rhodes Scholarship, Yale Law School), Father (six children), Lawyer (Wall Street law firm partner), Liberal (humanist, he had a heart), Activist (he went to the south twice in the mid-60s to help enroll voters), Leader (President of the New York County Lawyers Association, President of the Carleton College Alumni Board), Provider (he sent six kids through college), and so much more.

He taught me a guiding principle in my life, even beyond trying to be like him, confident, unafraid, action-oriented, smart.  He believed in Voltaire's refrain, The Best Is The Enemy Of The Good, and so do I now.

His lawyer associates were in awe of him.  The other partners always talked about his successful insistence that the firm accept less money than they had billed for in the bankruptcy settlement of a major client, W.T. Grant, because it was in the best interests of the client.  Imagine that!  The firm litigator, several associates once rushed into his office during the lunch hour because one of their lunch party had responded to some construction workers' catcalls and gotten himself beat up while the rest of the party of young educated men stood by horror struck, taking names and threatening legal action.  They wanted my dad to file a civil law suit against the construction company.  "Did you go help your friend while he was getting pummeled?" he asked.  "Well, no."  My father picked up the newspaper on his desk, opened it and said to the band of young men, "Good day, gentlemen."  He left the law when he thought it had changed from a profession into a business.

When I was in high school, my best friend came over to our house and rang the bell.  When I opened the door, he was on our porch next to two young toughs, one with a sawed-off broom handle, with two more toughs lurking on the sidewalk, who had been tailing my friend and harassing him.  I ordered the two young men off my porch, was invited to "make them" which I did by shoving the one with the stick towards the sidewalk and the fight was on!  Four on two, with one armed (with a wicked stick).  It wasn't going particularly well for the good guys, especially since after absorbing a few wild swings from the stick I got inside on the tough wielding it and punched him--and broke my hand!  My friend was doing steadfast work as he was wrassling with the other three.  Fortunately my father felt a draft and came to close the door.  You never saw a desperate situation change so rapidly, or such a transformation in a peaceful man.  There was a sound of tearing cloth as my father grabbed the collar of the ringleader with one hand while his other hand was clenched menacingly into a fist and kept low but prominent.  He frogwalked the eighteen-year old off the porch and the two warring groups separated and sort of spilled after those two as the one was marched up the street by the other who was issuing low and commanding questions like, What is your name, What are you doing here etc., that were getting answered in hysterical yelps.  The four toughs were last seen hurriedly leaving the neighborhood, never to be seen again, Lew was fine except for some bruises where he had been kicked (in the back of the neck--nice fellows!), I had the broken bone in my hand set at the ER and my father went back to his football game on TV.

What he took away from the Marines is their truism:  Never complain, never explain.  I try to adhere to that (it's hard).

After he died, I read some consolation letters sent to my mother.  One was from a WW2 buddy who'd seen the elephant alongside my Dad.  He wrote, as best as I remember, Jim was always an uplifting spirit on Peleliu.  Even in the most desperate moments he was always calm, encouraging and steadfast.

He taught me by example how to be a man.  Whenever I'm in a situation I don't know how to handle, I always think, What would dad have done?  Love you always, Dad!

Father's Day 2012

My father passed on prematurely 26 years ago from lung cancer at age 61.  I was with him the moment he passed.  He was the greatest man I ever knew.

I am a father too.  My three children are all the victims of a form of child abuse known as Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS), a Western phenomenon where adults prey upon immature children and turn them for life to the adults' agenda by stripping a parent from them extra-judicially.  Sharon, Meg, Bill, Joe, and Victor, and your associated "professionals," intimates and underlings, j'accuse.

So Jimmy, Johnny and Danny, I'm sorry for the three of you.  I coudn't protect you from these murderers of your childhoods.  The system was stacked against me by judicial adherence to the driving force in domestic law which my lawyer termed, Mother Knows Best.

None of you has communicated with a single blood relative of mine in almost a decade, nor with me in about half a decade.  That's cold, men.

Honor Roll

Happy Memorial Day to my Grandfather Lamberton (WWI) and my Dad (Peleliu & Okinawa), Uncle Harry (Fast Carriier Strike Force, Bronze Star), Uncle Bill (Philippines), Uncle Bob (B-26 pilot in the Mediterranean & North Africa) and all the other World War II veterans I knew growing up, as well as my brother Jack (below in Lebanon in 1982).

Also to my Great-Great-Grandfather Daniel Webster Clark (Andersonville POW camp), my friend John (Vietnam), my friend David (Special Forces Army), my friend Bill Hovanic (helicoptor pilot in Vietnam who lost a leg), my former workmate Larry (Vietnam era Army), my cousin Bob (Vietnam era Army), my nephew Ben's Uncle Willis (on the Vietnam Wall), my ex-wife's Uncle Billy (Normandy Landings), her Dad (Korea era Army), her cousin Brad's son (1st Iraq War), my former neighbor Rich (Korea), my friend's Dad Seymour (Patton's Third Army) and my running acquaintance Adam (KIA Afghanistan).

I honor you all, and anyone I failed to mention. Thank you.

The New Norm

While having lunch at a restaurant yesterday with my running buddy John, he asked me how my business trip was to Dallas. I told him it went fine, except that I'd had a lifetime moment that was truly startling to me.

"You know my three sons haven't communicated with me for years," I said. "In the office late one night preparing for a hearing the next day, a co-worker asked if I had any kids and I just said, 'No.'"

John knows of my heartache for the last decade due to the estrangement that came out of my divorce, when my three precious then-adolescent boys had their malleable young wills overborne by a willing cadre of "professionals" headed by their Mother and they were turned against me. It's called Parental Alienation Syndrome, or PAS, and it's thriving in the West.

"Yep," I went on, "I just said 'Nope, I don't have any children.'" Telling me that I was finally truly healing, John extended his knuckles across the table for a fist bump.

Happy Father's Day, Dad

I hated losing you when you were just 61 in 1986, Dad. I'm glad one of my three sons was held in your strong hands, and I'm sad the other two never encountered you.

I salute you as the father of six, husband to one, son, brother, combat marine, attorney, intellectual, liberal, volunteer, difference maker, fearless example and principled person.

In times of trouble I think of you, Dad, and ask myself what you would have done. I love you.

Happy Birthday, Dad!

James Wilson Lamberton, lawyer; b. Winona, MN, [mid-1920s]; Henry M. & Gretchen (Leicht) L.; m. Barbara Ann [maiden name]; children: [six]. A.B. magna cum laude, Carleton Coll. 1949; J.D. Yale U. 1952. Bar: D.C. 1952, N.Y. 1960, U.S. Supreme Ct. 1963. Assoc. firm Clearly [sic], Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton, N.Y.C. 1953-62; ptnr. Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton, N.Y.C. 1963-1982, ret. ptnr., 1982--; dir. Western Union Corp., Western Union Telegraph Co. Bd. dirs. S.I. Mental Health Soc., 1965-1973, Community Action for Legal Services, N.Y.C. 1968-74, Carleton Coll. Alumni Bd., 1981--; chmn. devel. com. Carleton Coll. Alumni Bd., 1982--. Mem. ABA, N.Y. County Lawyers Assn. (dir. 1973-82, pres. 1981-82). Clubs: Yale (N.Y.C.); Nantucket Yacht. Home: POB Santa Fe NM 87504-8366

Source: Who's Who in America, 43rd edition 1984-85 (Published by Maquis Who's Who).

Happy birthday, Dad. There's a lot that didn't make it into the book, like your wartime service with the First Marine Division, and those two month-long summer "vacations" you spent in 1963 (Jackson, MS) & 1964 (Gainesville, FL) volunteering your services in the civil rights movement. I'm glad that you were able to hold at least one of my three sons (the one named after you, even though he has since changed his name) in your strong hands before you passed on at too early an age when you were 61 years young.

Full circle

I remember as a little boy standing in our yard, looking up at my Dad perched precariously on the roof line of our house adjusting a television antenna. All rooftops in the fifties sported them, long upright slender rods bristling with short horizontal wires.

He was up there in his socks, turning the antenna this way and that. I worried that he might slip and fall, because all small children know that socks are slippery. I hadn't learned yet that on sloping roofs, penny loafers are even more slippery. I had this image in my head that if he fell, I would run inside, grab a mattress off a bed, drag it outside and put it under him to break his fall, before he hit the ground. Too many Saturday morning cartoons, I guess.

From his perch above the attic, my Dad called out to my Mom who was on the first floor watching TV. The windows were open.

"Barbara, is this any better?"

"Jim, it's fine! It's good! Please come down!"

"Come on Barbara, tell me if it's better or not!"

"It is, it's better, I can see the station perfectly. Now please come down!".

My Dad rotated the rod a quarter turn. "How's this? Better?"

"Jim, come down!""

"Barbara, try CBS."

"Jim!"

I was five. I watched and listened in wonder as my parents tried to adjust our over-the-air TV.

The day I resigned from my running club, I went to Best Buy and bought a digital TV. Since I wasn't coaching anymore, I would have plenty of extra time each weekend to watch TV.

I don't have cable and my analog TV hadn't worked since the conversion to digital in June. Oh yeah, I had tried to hook up the government-sponsored conversion box I had bought with the coupon subsidy. That was a wasted 2 hours, and a squandered $10. What a scam.

I told the sales clerk over and over that all I wanted was something that I could take out of the box, plug into the wall, turn on and watch NFL football on. Lke in the olden days when you brought a TV home from the store, plugged it in and it just...worked.

Oh yeah, yeah, she kept saying. She sold me a Dynex 22-inch LCD TV HDTV 720p High Definition Multimedia Interface. I kept asking, Is it a TV and will it work right out of the box? Oh yeah, yeah.

Upon the clerk's recommendation, I also bought a TERK Amplified HDTV Indoor Antenna for seventy dollars. At home I set up the TV, plugged it in, attached the antenna to the set and turned it on. A menu came on the screen that indicated the apparently sentient being was scanning the area for channels and asked me to please wait. The clerk had told me about this procedure.

After a couple of minutes, the set came to life and presented me with a rugby channel. I had a very clear picture of a giant Australian amoeba undulating around the pitch in a scrum. It wasn't quite Tom Brady to Randy Moss but my TV set was alive again after many months of pure snow. I kept cackling, "Houston, we have liftoff!" as I clicked through the channels.

You're supposed to get all sorts or extra, extraneous over-the-air channels with HDTV. A bountiful boon from the government, upon mandating conversion, to us citizens too cheap or poor to purchase cable TV.

They were there alright. Two cooking channels. The rugby channel. A Japanese channel in Japanese with Japanese subtitles. Al Jazeera. Two weather channels. Two shopping channels. An African channel. RTV showing obscure 50s television series.

No NFL football. Round and round the channels I surfed. No CBS, NBC, ABC or Fox.

In frustration I called my bother-in-law, the college professor with an Ivy League doctorate. He can figure out anything. I spent the next hour on the phone with him while he researched TERK and Dynex on the Internet. I did exactly what he told me to do.

Yes, I had read the manual. No it was not helpful. I even read it to my brother-in-law but it was not helpful to him either.

He conjured up from the Internet a template on his computer screen with my exact remote on it. After half an hour he determined that the problem was the set was programmed to scan for channels only the first time it was activated. We had to fool the set, antenna or remote (I'm not sure which) into thinking it had to conduct another scan for available channels. I kept thinking of the Star Trek episode where Kirk and Spock destroy the supercomputer threatening the universe by tricking it into questioning itself endlessly.

My brother-in-law told me to pick up the the antenna and said, "Hold it pointing exactly north, northwest."

"Excuse me?"

"Just hold it up, pointing north, northwest until I say otherwise."

I thought of CPR protocol, to keep doing chest compressions until a qualified person tells you to stop. I've been there, doing compressions upon a dead person.

I so love the Redskins, apparently. I thrust this metal column aloft, alone in my living room. I held this short thick rod bristling with horizontal flanges pointed north, northwest. Towards Fairfax County, I guess, where the TV transmitting towers for the Washington stations are, I suppose. I'm sure my brother-in-law had already researched that information in the last hour.

A minute passed. I felt foolish, like I was engaged in a secret initiation rite during Rush Week.

The voice of NFL announcer Phil Simms suddenly came from the TV set. I looked, and Sunday Night Football was on the screen! I thanked my brother-in-law for finding NBC for me and hung up.

I discovered that when I moved the antenna even 15 degrees off the direction I had it pointed, the channel blinked out. When I lowered the antenna, the pixels broke up and the picture disintergrated into a set of herky jerky disjointed still images.

Now I watch TV with the antenna perched atop a towering contraption I have built next to the set. Atop a box resting upon a footstool which stands on a chair sits the amplified antenna, pointing exactly NNW. When I move in front of the antenna, the picture momentarily fails. If the rube goldberg device gets jostled, the picture blinks out. Then I have to pick up the antenna and rotate it just right for the picture to come back. It seems our society hasn't progressed very far in 52 years.

"Barbara, try CBS."

"Jim!"

Personally, I have given up. I ordered cable.

Dad, I hardly knew ye

Happy birthday, Dad. Winona born, Lawrenceville class of '42 (Raymond), WWII vet (Fifth Marines, Peleliu at age 19, Okinawa at age 20, post-war duty in China), Carleton grad, Yale Law School, husband for 43 years, father of six, ethical and activist lawyer. I have missed you ever since 1986 when I was a mere pup of 34 and you were only 61.

The way it was

Today is Veteran's Day, formerly known as Armistice Day. On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, they finally stopped the bloodshed in World War One, the War To End All Wars. My grandfather fought in that war.

But the fates were just getting warmed up. World War Two, the Big One, came next.

I rode a tank
Held a general's rank
When the blitzkrieg raged
And the bodies stank

My father fought in that war.

At a place called Peleliu. Never heard of it? Then you're obviously not either a former Marine or the descendant of someone who was there. Because no one else knows a thing about it.

On that island in 1944, the First Marine Division, 15,000 strong, locked itself in a struggle with 13,000 Japanese defenders in a fight to the death. Strategically it was insignificant, but the enemy garrison was wiped out entirely while 5,000 Marines went down. You do the math.

The Marines fought for three months amidst razor-sharp coral hills in places with names like Bloody Nose Ridge and the Valley of Death, in temperatures soaring to 118 degrees. It was hell on earth.

As a young boy, I wanted to hear war stories. My Dad was a likely source, because he had seen the elephant. But he only told funny stories. Like the time he wandered down to the river alone on Peleliu to bathe, naked, with only a towel in his hand. Nineteen year-olds obviously don't always make the best choices. He encountered an enemy platoon in full combat gear.

What happened? As my Dad related it, deadpan, they all got away.

Anyway, he had another story he thought was funny. About the time he was crawling along a trench when he encountered two riflemen and a flamethrower hunkered down trying to deal with an enemy machine gun nest some thirty yards away. The flamethrower didn't want to stick his head up and draw fire so he stuck the nozzle of his weapon over the lip of the trench and, moving it around blindly, asked the other two Marines, "Over here? Is that the direction?"

Those Marines assented that he seemed to have the nozzle pointing about right and he discharged his full load without ever looking. Those heavy flamethrowers only had about an eight-second capacity.

My Dad thought this image of a flamethrower firing blindly, one-handed, was funny. This was the end of the story, and it was always told with a twinkle in his eye.

But I was a persistent young boy. One day I insisted on knowing what happened to the machine gun nest.

"Why, we got it."

I wouldn't let it go. "But how do you know, Dad?"

I remember my Dad's voice tightening and his eyes losing their lustre. His look became distant and detached.

"Well, because we got up and charged them, and they were burning so we shot them."

He never told the story again.

You can't imagine how much I miss my Dad. He was a hale and hearty 60 year-old before he fell ill with lung cancer and died the next year, in 1986. I was only thirty-four. I regret that only one of my three children was ever held in his strong hands.

Happy Birthday, Dad

My father was born on this day during the roaring twenties. I was present when he died in 1986 after a courageous battle with lung cancer. I remember my mother standing over him weeping quietly, my brother sitting next to him with a long, set face, and my father obviously choosing that exact moment to leave us because it was time.

He was the most influential person in my life. Father, husband, lawyer, scholar, soldier, leader, doer, ethical man.

He just got things done with no fanfare. In WW2 he was a radioman in the Marines. At the battle of Okinawa he was atop a ridgeline during a torrential downpour when his aerial was struck by lightning.

This was one of the few war stories he ever told, none of which involved "combat." It came up in relation to another family member's description of a close encounter with lightning.

He said he was alone on a hilltop transmitting in the rain when suddenly there was a brilliant flash and a terrific sound. He was dazed and looked down to see sparks shooting from his fingertips. Then it got quiet and he realized that a lightning bolt had struck his extended antenna.

That was all he said about it but I asked him what he did next. I had visions of the forties equivalent of dialing 911 to get medical attention there fast, at least to look him over.

He said, "Oh, I got up, ambled around for a minute, decided I was okay and so I went back to transmitting."

Those were the days. That's the type of man he was. That's how he spoke. He was a hero to me.