Memorial Day

ABOVE: My father's sister Vi and brother Tony (US Navy), Milwaukee, WI, 1945. She was twenty, and Tony was eighteen.

My favorite uncle, Tony, was a US sailor in World War II and served in the US Air Force during the Korean War.

Tony wrote this email to me [below] in 2008, when he was eighty years old, telling me how he met his life partner, Hal (Harold), in 1950. (I posted it at the time, and am reposting it now, eleven years later.)

Hal (b. 1910) had died in 2006, at ninety-six years old. [His obit.]
Tony (b. 1927) died in 2012, at eighty-five. 

I exchange emails daily with Vi, who turns ninety-four this summer. I just wrote her, asking whose shadows are in the bottom of the photo.
[She replied, their older sister Carmella and little brother Gabe. They are also gone now.]
____________________
Uncle Tony wrote:

Once upon a time there was a gorgeous butch guy who went with a few of his friends to the local area elementary school playground to play touch football on an early fall afternoon in 1950.

After we had proved our masculinity, we went to the house of one of the guys to quench our thirst. While there, we were introduced to a doctor who was making a house call on the father.
We were with the doctor no more than 5 minutes and I didn't see him again for 8 years.

That fall the US went to war with North Korea and either having a death wish or wanting to surround myself with young studs, I enlisted in the Air Force.
(Mind you, I had already spent a short hitch as a sailor in the Navy at the end of WW II.)

After spending 4 years in the military I decided it wasn't for me so at the end of my enlistment I took my discharge and went home.

After wandering around, not knowing what I wanted to do with my life, I even married a gal during this period (lasted less than a year). I was talking with this guy I had played football with so many years ago.
I don't recall if I was having a health problem at the time or not but I asked him if he still knew that doctor we had met at our mutual friend's house. He told me his father was a patient so got the name, etc.

I must have been brave and called for an appointment and he had remembered me. Come to find out later, he had been keeping track of me, all these years, through this guy's dad because this guy and I were still writing to each other during that period.
Anyway, I think that is when the courtship started.

I never had so many X-rays and blood tests in my entire life.
I guess I passed because we started going for dinners occasionally. Don't know if it was because of the X-rays or the blood tests.
No matter, it worked for us.

The following June after about 8 months of hanging out and, can you believe, no hanky-panky, we moved in together.

It was funny, my mother and my sister had gone to St. Louis to visit a relative at that time and my sister told me later that our mother said to her, "I wonder if your brother got married while we were gone, he looks so happy."

Well that's part of my story.
He gave me 47-plus years of happiness.

 BELOW: Tony (left) and Hal, 1978