[Magdalen] thinking about my mid-twenties

[Jay Weigel]

I'm reading my dad's privately published WWII memoir right now, having only
dipped into it parts of it earlier. Dad was a very young graduate of the
University of Missouri in 1939; he'd skipped two grades (my mom had skipped
one) so he was barely 20 when he graduated--he was born in January, 1919.
He'd gone on to grad school at the University of Wisconsin the following
fall, but then transferred to a program at Cal-Berkeley the next year. He
and my mom, who was 10 months older than he was, were married on Dec. 28,
1940. He enlisted in the Navy in 1941 when it became obvious that neither
his marital nor academic status would keep him from being drafted and he
knew he didn't want to be anything *but* Navy. As a geographer, his talents
were much sought after, and at first he landed in the OSS in Washington.
Something I didn't know until I read this memoir more carefully is that he
had a part in the invasion of Sicily, by studying and mapping the beaches
of the island. This would be very valuable later on. He also studied andd
wrote commentary on maps of the fisheries of Japan's Ryukyu Islands, which
would also prove valuable. In 1942 he got tired of all this and wanted a
more active role in the war. He petitioned for a transfer to what was then
called the Naval Department of Aerology (we'd call it meteorology today). I
have just gotten to that part, and the part where my mother told him she
was pregnant with me. I do know that he was sent to the Naval Academy for
training (I was born there) and then to the Naval Air Station at Gearhart,
OR, and spent his active service as weather officer on a seaplane tender,
the USS St. George, survived a kamikaze attack, and was awarded the Naval
Air Medal which he NEVER talked about. He also spent some of the post-war
period in Japan and was not discharged home until March (I think) 1946. I
will add to this as I read further.

OTOH, in my mid-twenties, I had just broken free of my first marriage to an
abusive husband (mostly psychological and emotional abuse, but a couple of
times it had escalated) and I was a mess, completely adrift. Fortunately we
had not had children, but I was pretty psychologically screwed up and would
remain so for several years.

On Sat, Aug 19, 2017 at 9:08 AM, Marion Thompson <marionwhitevale at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I was married, living in the suburbs with three small children, laundry
> all over the place, reading 'The Feminine Mystique' and just about to enrol
> in first-year university as a mature student. Although I didn't stay the
> course, four decades later, those credits allowed me to be accepted in the
> Faculty of Divinity. Funny how life goes.
>
> Marion, a pilgrim
>
>
>