ghosts at the barbecue
It's Memorial Day here in Lincoln Square. Folks are getting together to enjoy the first really good weekend in Chicago. It's 66 degrees and cloudy. Anywhere you go, a wonderful barbecue smell wafts up from backyards, porches, and decks. And anyone doing a little shopping near the corner of Western and Leland won't miss the neighborhood's ongoing memorial to our soldiers killed in Iraq.
The
Chicago Printmakers Collaborative has been putting these pictures in the upper windows of their building since
August 2004. The memorial is very powerful because you can't possibly avoid the pictures. You can see them if you bike north on the east side of Western Ave. You can see them if you're waiting for a city bound train on the platform of the
Brownline station. When the pictures started going up there there was only enough space for 648 pictures. Now the windows on each of the three floors are completely covered. And as of
Sunday, the total number of our soldiers killed in Iraq has reached 4300 and the wounded now total 31,285.
Each time I pass it I'm reminded of two relatives who died in WWII.
Robert Klippel, my mother's brother, flew
P-51s out of
Iwo Jima in 1945. This photo was taken a few days before he shipped out to the Pacific. On 1 June 1945, a little over two months before Japan surrendered, he flew escort for the B-29s called up on a last minute bombing mission. Before they reached their targets over Osaka, a tsunami engulfed the planes. Only a few ever returned. My uncle was one of the unlucky ones. He and his plane were never found. In 1946 his
Missing in Action status was changed to
Killed in Action.
Some of his
friends who survived visited my mother's family soon after the war. They said that the last time they saw his plane it was trying to climb out over the storm. Years later I got my hands on the
afteraction report from a veterans' organization. It states that this mission was the largest loss of life and equipment in the Pacific Theater.
The other relative on my mother's side of the family,
Frederick Klippel, was killed in the European Theater. As you can probably tell from the photo here (he's the one with the canteen), Frederick served in the German
Wehrmacht. In 1942, his infantry reserve battalion arrived in western Ukraine to
consolidate the huge gains made by the German invasion of the Soviet Union the previous year. He was killed by Russian artillery fire on
12 February 1943 when the Wehrmacht
retook Kharkov.
As as a young boy, every time we visited my grandmother she would show us Robert's Army Air Corps insignia and medals. The stuff was always cool to look at; in fact, I've had a bit of an obsession with this uncle who had died 17 years before I was born. Thanks to the web, I've done a lot of research on his squadron and fighter group. A couple of years ago, I even made contact with the veterans from the figher group. But they were in different squadrons and didn't remember my uncle. It wasn't until I was an adult, many years later, that I realized that Robert's death had torn the heart out of my mother's family. My grandmother firmly believed that he was still alive somewhere on Pacific island or in Japan. Her eldest daughter, my aunt, started to suffer from bipolar disorder at the end of the war. And my mother still can't talk about my uncle with getting extremely emotional.
As for Frederick's family, I don't really know how much his death has affected them. I've never met them myself. I didn't even know they or Frederick existed until I googled
Klippel. One of the results was a Klippel genealogy posted by a distant cousin who lives on Stanton Island. Since then I've visited him several times. Just like with my grandmother, we look at the pictures and documents he got in Germany when he visited Frederick's family.
But I do know that once a soldier's ghost sits down at the dinner table it doesn't ever really go away. The one that started sitting with my mother's family in 1945 now sits with me as well as with my cousins and their children. This is why those 648 faces staring out of the windows of the
Chicago Printmakers Collaborative have become an important part of my bike travels along Western Ave.
Today there are too many ghosts sitting at dinner tables or in backyards or on porches and decks around Chicago and the country.
Labels: Lincoln Square, serious shit, war stories
Over at the NYTimes, David Byrne reviews Jeff Mapes's new book, Pedaling Revolution. Byrne highlights two fascinating points. First, biking won't truly take off until more women join the Vélotariat. This is especially true with celebrity women such as actress Jennifer Aniston and model Agyness Deyn. Second, the challenge of getting women on bikes is the crazy, contradictory attitudes most Americans have about biking. On the one hand, bikes are viewed as bright, shiny toys. Angry cagers typically demostrate this when they yell at street bikers to get back on the sidewalks. On the other hand, bikes are aften associated with extreme sports. As Byrne writes,For decades, Americans have too often seen cycling as a kind of macho extreme sport, which has actually done a lot to damage the cause of winning acceptance for biking as a legitimate form of transportation. If your association with bikes is guys in spandex narrowly missing you on the weekends or YouTube videos of kids flying over ramps on their clown-size bikes, you’re likely to think that bikes are for only the athletic and the risk-prone. Manufacturers in the United States have tended to make bikes that look like the two-wheeled equivalent of Hummers, with fat tires and stocky frames necessitating a hunched-over riding position that is downright unsafe for urban biking and commuting. But that’s been changing for at least a few years now. Whew.
Certainly this type of 
