ICE DREAMS - CHAPTER SEVEN

I will be posting one chapter per week of my latest book, ICE DREAMS. Please note that the numerical chapters are autobiographical. The alphabetical chapters are pure fiction.

By the end of May, the warm summer temperatures were taking hold. By warm, I mean daytime highs in the fifties and nighttime lows barely above freezing. With them they brought fog as thick as soup. Fog made walking or driving on the Island treacherous. You couldn’t see six feet in front of you at times. This made it impossible for planes to land, which meant also that mail became irregular. Lorraine told me about my new sister being born on May 4. The letter in which she told me the news didn’t arrive until May 15. My new sister was named Donna Delania. The name was derived from my father’s only brother, Donald, and his wife, Delania.

We had two noteworthy visitors at the end of May. The first was the Air Force General who was Commander of Air Force Security Service to which all of us (except the Army personnel) were assigned. We enlisted men saw little of him, but we had to do a lot of extra work to make the Black Pearl look like a spit-shined boot.

After the General left, we had a more noxious visitor – a large, very dead, sperm whale washed up on the beach. While it rotted away, its putrid smell was wafted by the wind across the Island. Those who went near enough to take pictures did not stay very long.

I was thinking more and more about going into the ministry. While I was on Shemya and thinking about it, the Air Force issued a regulation which, in essence said, that if I completed my overseas tour and had fulfilled three years of my four year enlistment contract and had the endorsement of my denomination as a candidate for the ministry that I could be discharged in time to begin the Fall semester of seminary in 1961. That was really good news to me.

In the barracks there were three other men who were committed Christians, attended chapel, studied the Bible, and enjoyed getting together sometimes to talk about the Lord and their faith experiences. When I first arrived on Shemya the chaplain was a Methodist. He came once a month, held a Sunday worship service, stayed for several days, then left. The other Sundays, Master Sergeant Malcolm Donahoo preached and led worship at the chapel.  In June, the Methodist chaplain was to be replaced by a Cumberland Presbyterian chaplain. We heard that he would be stationed permanently on Shemya.

One of the three men was having a real emotional and spiritual crisis and, for a while, I spent a lot of time talking with him about it. Before he was sent to Shemya, he was involved in a romantic relationship with a girl who was instrumental in bringing him to a saving knowledge of Christ. As the time of his departure for Shemya neared, their relationship became more intense and more intimate until finally it resulted in having sex.

For the first four months he was on the Island, she wrote to him every day. Then for two weeks she didn’t write at all. He kept writing to her. When she began writing again, it was only once or twice a week and she was very cool in what she wrote. He was emotionally distraught over the sudden change in their relationship. Spiritually he was filled with guilt over having sex with her. She had been a virgin and he used the fact that he was going to be away for a year and lonely for her to coax her into doing it. Now he felt that God was punishing him and he was even doubting his salvation.

I tried to guide him with various Scriptures. I told him to confess his sin to God, ask forgiveness, then to write to the girl, tell her that he had asked God’s forgiveness and he was asking for her forgiveness.

Before I enlisted in the Air Force, I was being discipled and mentored by an Englishman, Dr. Verna Wright, who was doing graduate work in rheumatology at John Hopkins Hospital. He said repeatedly, “Principles, principles, principles, Bro!” One of the principles was that in personal evangelism and personal counseling there should always be a man working with another man or a woman counseling with another woman and never a man with a woman or vice versa.

It also made me think that chaplains ought to be enlisted men, living in the barracks. The chaplain was far more qualified to help this young man than I was. Being an officer raises a barrier to being able to talk to an enlisted man the way this man opened up to me. The chaplain was also not accessible. We never saw him except at chapel services.

Men would occasionally come into the radio station with reel-to-reel recorders. They would use the station’s records and turntables to record a reel of music by their favorite artists. Whatever records they played and recorded went out over the air as part of the broadcast. They would do this after midnight when the DJ had six or seven hours to play or say whatever he wanted. When they finished, I would ask them to let me make a tape to send home. I would either make a tape of me broadcasting or I would play a program that wasn’t scheduled from the records AFRS sent to us. While the program was being broadcast, I could talk to Lorraine on a mailable one-hour tape. The BX sold these tapes.

The BX was running out of many things. One of these was Brillo pads which were a vital necessity for cleaning the floor before inspections. I asked Lorraine to please send some Brillo pads and also some Air Mail stationery. The BX was also out of stationery.

One day when I was at lunch in the mess hall, I hung up my parka on the row of hooks on the wall by the door. When I was ready to leave, my parka was gone. I was frantic. If you lost a parka, the Air Force took several hundred dollars from your pay in installments for replacing the parka. They were special made with the dog fur hoods. Several days later, the parka appeared on the floor of my room like someone had slung it in the room from the doorway.

In one of her letters in the second half of May, Lorraine mentioned having a lot more energy. That should have alerted me that the birth of our baby was coming soon.

The mail was coming only once or twice a week and outgoing mail was only going out about once a week. Since I was getting mail so infrequently, my imagination ran wild about what could have happened or gone wrong. I was sure the baby must have come by the first of June, but I heard nothing. Then someone told me that they heard that Western Union was going on strike. I didn’t know if the birth notifications had to go by Western Union or not.

One night our trick was on break and we were to see a movie that had been sent out by Anchorage. We all crowded into a room, sitting on the floor. The man running the projector said, “You know how they have short subjects before the feature film in the movies? Tonight, I have a short subject to show that I think you’ll like.” When the film began, it was soon apparent that it was a “dirty movie”, pornographic. I wanted to get out of there. Men were crowded all around me. Then someone opened the door and switched on the lights. “Airman Pritt, you are wanted in the Orderly Room.” When I reached the Orderly Room, the sergeant on duty said, “Congratulations, Pritt!” and handed me the following message from off the teletype:

“A/2c PRITT – Telegram received from Red Cross at Elmendorf 1325, 6 June. Congratulations to Service Man. Wife delivered baby boy, Paul Troy, 7 1/2 pounds, June 6, both fine. From Baltimore.”

After I received the message I was so nervous I could hardly put the blue “It’s A Boy” stickers on the cigars.

There were a million questions I wanted to ask. How long was the labor? What color hair does the baby have or is he bald? A week or more later, my sister wrote and said that she and my parents visited Lorraine in the hospital the next day. When they were ready to leave, they said that they would go by the nursery to see the baby on their way out. Lorraine said, “I’ll go with you.” She climbed out of bed, put on her robe and slippers, and walked down to the Nursery with them.

Lorraine’s letters which followed had a lot more details about the baby. When she went into labor, Lorraine and her mother went to the hospital in a taxicab. Jim, the husband of Lorraine’s sister, took Lorraine and baby Paul home from the hospital. Lorraine’s sister, Ruth, came to stay several days when Lorraine and the baby came home. She showed Lorraine how to handle the baby, how to wash him, how to change his diaper. He would flail with his fists clenched. Ruth nicknamed him “Joe Palooka” and called him by that name until he started school.

At first Lorraine was breast feeding Paul, but he always seemed hungry and was not gaining weight as he should so the doctor told Lorraine to stop the breast feeding and start feeding him formula. After she made the change, he started gaining weight at the normal rate.

The pediatrician came to the house. Paul had early developed a habit of peeing when he was being changed. He had peed on the curtain and on a chair. The first time the pediatrician came to the house Lorraine thought, “My goodness, he wears shabby clothes for a doctor.” While he was examining Paul, when he took off his diaper, Paul shot a stream of pee onto the doctor’s sport jacket.

Lorraine’s mother had been ill for a month before he was born. She was feeling some better, but was not back to full strength. After he was born, she went out and bought a baby carriage that converted into a stroller and into a car seat. The sidewalk came up to the front of their house. There was a bench against the house where they sat on sunny days. Now Paul could take afternoon naps outside while they sat on the bench.

The mail situation took a strange turn in June. Northwest Orient Airlines began bringing our mail three times a week. Reeves Aleutian Airlines still brought it once a week. But Northwest was only bringing Air Mail. One day in late June Reeves brought 2 ½ tons of mail. We had not been receiving newspapers and magazines. In that delivery there were magazines and newspapers as much as a month old and every week in between.

I had been living in a barracks with men from all the tricks and some men who worked only days unless they were called out at night. Master Sergeant Donahoo was one such person. I was notified that on 1,2, or 3 July I would be moving into my trick’s barracks. That was going to be a major job. I would have to clean the new room, then carry my gear from the barracks where I had been living to the trick barracks. It was a walk of probably three city blocks.

I was still enrolled in the Greek course and was making slow progress. I was also taking a course in Air Force Personnel Management by correspondence. In addition I was reading an impressive list of literary books, as well as theology books, and daily Bible reading. In addition to “Arizona Highways,” I was subscribed to “Saturday Review”, “Harper’s”, and “The Sword of the Lord.” The latter contained several sermons in each issue, many by famous preachers of bygone years.

Lorraine was doing very well with our savings account. She had accumulated $325 before she quit work. When she sent me the baby’s birth certificate, I applied for an increase to the quarters allowance. That would increase the quarters allowance by $40/month. She obviously had her hands full caring for our newborn baby, but she managed to write long letters telling all the details of what he was doing. One time she said that the baby was smiling while she was writing to me.

David Brannon is the man who sat with me in the snack bar at McCord AFB and played “Georgia on my mind” on the jukebox over and over. He came in the barracks one evening at the end of June. He had a peculiar smile on his face. “It is the second wedding anniversary of Vanda and I. We have been strolling on the beach together for the longest time. We were talking and laughing, acting silly. I really hated it when I had to say goodbye, but it was starting to get dark.” All the time he had that peculiar smile on his face.

When the weather was nice and we were on break, I sometimes borrowed Jon Boettner’s bicycle and rode around on the roads on the Island. It was very generous of him to let me use it.

The Island was obviously going to be quite different for the men who would follow after us. The theater was almost complete and a USO show was scheduled in a couple months. They had already opened a four-lane bowling alley. On the other end of Shemya they were building a large barracks building which would contain the mess hall, orderly room, offices, and chapel all in that one building. One benefit we have they will lose. At the present our mess hall is run by Northwest Airlines. The Japanese and Filipino mess crews are contracted by the Airlines. We do not have KP duty. In the new barracks building, there will be Air Force cooks and there will be KP duty.

My sister, Beverly, seems happy and excited about her baby sister and about our baby. She is going to be married in July, so she may be thinking that someday in the not too distant future she will have babies of her own.

I told Lorraine in every letter that I was standing beside her supporting her in my thoughts and prayers and with my love during these first few months with a new baby. I said I knew how weary she must feel having to get up during the night several times, changing diapers almost every hour, wondering why he was crying this time, wondering if you were doing things right. I believed what I was writing to her, but I really was a jerk. I would read things in books or magazines. Then I would contradict what the doctor told her or what others told her. I would complain if she didn’t write to me every day.

I told her she should continue breast feeding because babies needed things that were in breast milk that couldn’t be duplicated in a formula. When she said something about buying cleansing cream for when she changed Paul’s diaper I said she should use soap and water and if it caused a rash, that was good because his skin would adapt to soap. When she mentioned wanting her figure to go back in shape, I told her to start doing sit-ups until she could do one hundred. When the doctor said to give the baby vitamins, I told her only to give him cod liver oil, that if she gave him vitamins his body would not be learning to extract vitamins from food.

At the same time, as though she could walk the six blocks to Broadway (where the stores and post office were), I was telling her things to buy and send to me – a three ring notebook with filler paper, for instance. Like I said, in hindsight, I was a real jerk.

In the latter part of June we had a visitor who might have been as unwelcome as our dead sperm whale – a DENTIST. He came out on a plane with the chaplain and held his own kind of services. Every military man stationed on Shemya had to attend. He gave each of us a thorough exam. We didn’t get a toothbrush. Anyone who had a loose or broken filling or a cavity had to sit in the chair while he made repairs. I commend him for his integrity and devotion to duty. He worked twelve or fifteen hours a day and stayed on the Island until he had seen and attended to every man.