Mourning the death of world's most cheerful man

(655 words)

I’ve lately been waking up angry Dick Guenther taught me to drive when I was 16.

I wish Dick Guenther hadn’t taught me to drive until I was 50.

I was thinking this as I was listening to loved ones memorialize this truly great man on Saturday at Christ United Methodist Church in Bethel Park near his Castle Shannon home.

See, I was just so stupid when I was 16. Stubborn, selfish, sass-prone — and those are just the character flaws that begin with the letter “s.”

Val asked me why my own old man didn’t teach me that rite of passage. I don’t know. Maybe Dad didn’t have the patience, thought we’d clash or maybe he didn’t want the obligation to cut into his bar time.

Like father, like son!

Or maybe he wanted his impressionable young son to spend one-on-one time with one of the most kind, cheerful, generous and loving men any of us have known. Dick and his surviving wife Bernice were two of my parents’ dearest friends.

Guenther, 92, was a retired postal carrier whose route included Willow Avenue in Shannon. Tony’s Barber Shop was on Willow. It’s where Dad used to take Eric and I for buzzcuts when we were kids.

Our visits, it seemed, always coincided with Dick’s daily delivery. More than four decades later, I remember the details still. 

He'd spring through the door like his blood was carbonated. He’d razz Tony, Tony’d razz back. They’d belittle Pirate pitching from the previous night’s game. Some local politics would be disparaged and, boom, like that he’d be gone. You could hear him resuming his chipper whistling before the door even closed behind him. The whole conversational tornado lasted fewer than 40 seconds.

In its windy wake were smiles. I believe we can truly take soulful nourishment just by observing a happy person living their happy lives.

Guenther was the reason I became so confused when the term “going postal” began to signify workplace violence.

How could anybody who wore the same uniform as Dick Guenther ever have a bad day?

It’s my understanding Guenther’d had only one bad day his entire life. He was visiting France when some strangers tried to kill him.

They were Germans. It was about a month after D-Day. Had I been there, I’d have said, “Whoa! You can’t kill Dick Guenther! This war is the reason the world needs men like him. And he has so much left to do. He’s going to raise three wonderful children and dote on more generations of grandchildren.

“Now, put down those weapons and let’s talk this all out. Who needs a glass of lemonade?”

I hadn’t seen his son, Danny, in nearly forty years. We had a good hug. He said he couldn’t remember ever hearing his Dad complain about anything in his entire life.

I told him I’d found four things to complain about just crossing the church parking lot.

I’m not kidding when I say I regret he taught me to drive when I was 16. Being a bone-headed young fool, I’m sure I asked this truly great man questions about the finer points of parallel parking, proper braking distance and what to do when the lights on the stupid school bus blink red.

Had I been older, more seasoned, more aware, I’d have asked him the really important questions about just how he did it all.

How in this world of hurt and hate did he remain so cheerful? How did he make the daily joy and well-being of others his life’s priority over his own? Did he ever have any idea how inspirational he was being just by being so happy?

Dick Guenther teaching a snotty 16 year old kid how to drive just seems like a blatant squandering of a magnificent natural resource.

He’s a man who could have taught the whole world how to fly.

Related …

R.I.P. Arnold Palmer: A lucky local says goodbye

R.I.P. Buster the 19-year-old cat

A day for real mourning: R.I.P. Angelo Cammarata

R.I.P. Mom: Why feeling sad is so elusive

Reacting to our celebrity death epidemic

RRS: Q: War: What is it good for? A: War movies!

I see AMC is running “Saving Private Ryan” four times tomorrow, which I guess makes it to war movies what “SlapShot!” is to hockey flicks: the one best representative of the genre. Either way, I’ll be in full war movie overload by tomorrow at this time. I hate war, but I love war movies. This is from 2013.

Happy Memorial Day! Remember to say a prayer for those who gave all.

(701 words)

Being born with a philosophical bent, I spend a good deal of time wrestling with the great questions of the ages.

“Why are we here?” “What happens to us when we die?” And, “If God created heaven and earth, who created God?”

Those are all topics for another day.

Today, Memorial Day, I think I have an answer to a question that has puzzled great thinkers since it was first posed in 1970. The question?

“War: What is it good for?”

After much soul-searching I’ve come up with an answer. It is as follows:

Without war, there would be no great war movies.

I understand my answer is unlikely to salve the wounds of the veterans and widows for whom today means so much more than a traditional basic cable war movie feast.

I know of very few males, the gender primarily responsible for launching and fighting wars, for whom war movies do not resonate.

I wonder if the two are related.

But I know many men who today will be tuned in to watch, “Patton,” “The Guns of Navarone,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “The Longest Day,” and other epic films based on man’s inhumanity to man.

I think it’s because most men wonder how we’d react under fire. Would we flee or advance?  Would we respond like our fathers did?

In my case, the answer is probably yes.

Like many descendants of The Greatest Generation, I come from military stalk. The declaration seems to be bestow me with reflected glory.

My Dad served. He stood on the bright line that helped save the world from tyranny.

Did he storm the beaches at Normandy? No.

Dad was a U.S. Navy chaplain’s assistant.

The only less hazardous military title I can imagine is Army Pillow Tester.

He had no war stories about heroics. In fact, my favorite war story of his was the one he told about he was waiting to board the U.S Pocono to be shipped off to the Pacific on August 7, 1945, when someone told him we’d dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima.

Dad’s question: “What’s an atom bomb?”

Military historians will argue the ethics of the point, but the atom bomb forced a swift Japanese surrender and likely saved the lives of my father and millions of others who would have perished invading an entrenched and motivated Japan.

We naturally tend today to memorialize only of the ones who fought on the front lines, the wounded and dead. In fact, the original intent of Memorial Day was the memorialize those killed in action. It has somehow morphed into an omnibus military appreciation day and I’m cool with that.

I tend to believe heroics are often the result of circumstance.

In that regard, I’m like the protagonist of what to me is the greatest war movie ever made, a war movie that shows not a single gun being fired and the only notable death is unseen, but merely mentioned in a letter read aloud.

It’s “Mister Roberts.”

The 1955 John Ford movie stars Henry Fonda as beleaguered Lt. Doug Roberts, the executive officer aboard the cargo supply ship Reluctant.

Roberts itches for action, but so excels at his mundane duties that his tyrannical captain, played by James Cagney, won’t approve his repeated requests for front line transfer.

In the end, his beloved crew secretly rigs the transfer and Roberts is thrust into combat.

The movie concludes with the bored crew getting two letters from Roberts’s new ship: the first is from Roberts who relates how his destroyer is in the thick of the action near Okinawa. 

In hindsight, he has an epiphany about his old shipmates and that the “unseen enemy of this terrible war is the boredom that eventually becomes a faith and, therefore, a terrible sort of suicide. I know now that the ones who refuse to surrender to it are the strongest of all.”

The second letter is from one of Roberts’s shipmates. It conveys Roberts was killed in a below-decks kamikaze strike. He was drinking coffee and never saw it coming.

Just another example of a sad, useless death in war’s grim ledger.

But, geez, it makes for one hell of a movie.

Related . . .

In a world awash in pix, Kodak not the only bankruptcy

Deer me, a story of venison & valor

Bee stung “vet” on Memorial Day