HAVE A LITTLE FAITH
JOHN JASLEY, FLIGHT SCHOOL, 1943.
JOHN AND CHRISTINE, DATING, 1944.
Pennsylvania Polka— LESTER LEE & ZEKE MANNERS, 1942
As the first strains of the Pennsylvania Polka drifted out onto the dance floor, Christine Seibert’s partner looked down at her, dismayed. “I don’t dance the polka, do you?” the soldier asked.
“Why, yes, I do,” she replied. The G.I. pondered the situation as they sat the dance out. Finally, he said, “I’ve got a buddy who can dance the polka; will you be here next week?”
“Sure,” she said, and promptly forgot the conversation.
But the soldier was true to his word. The next Saturday he and his buddy, John Jasley, were waiting for her. John remembers the day well. “It was October 24, 1942 in Jacksonville, Florida,” he said, smiling. When the band fired up a polka, Christine and John danced and continued dancing throughout the evening. During a lull in the music, he turned to his dance partner and said, “Close your eyes and hold out your hands.”
Christine wasn’t sure what he was up to. “I thought I was going to get a cockroach or a mouse!” Still, she did as he asked. She was pleasantly surprised. “He put a little box of candy in my hand,” she said.
John grinned at her from across the room. “She saved that candy until it turned white.”
The young soldier from New Jersey had enlisted in the Army Air Corps immediately after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and was trained as both a gunner and a radio operator. Shortly after basic training, his First Sergeant entered the barracks and barked, “Can any of you guys type?” John admitted he’d taken a typing course in high school. “They put me in the office,” he said. But soon the First Sergeant had another frustration—no one in the unit could pass the gunnery test. “Oh, I can pass that test,” John said. So off he went to gunnery school.
His training complete, he was ready to make time for the lovely Christine. After the dance, he invited her to see a movie the following week. She agreed. A few days later, he took the bus to her house and arrived early to find her dad waiting for him. Her father was reading the Wall Street Journal and asked John’s opinion about various stocks and bonds. John shook his head. “I was a Depression-era kid who knew nothing about stocks.” However, he quickly decided to learn. “The next time he asked me I was going to know something,” he said.
John had already decided Christine was an investment worth making. After their date, her father asked, “So, what did you think of that guy?” Knowing if she told him how much she liked John, her protective dad would find fault with him, Christine feigned nonchalance. She shrugged. “Oh, he’s okay.”
Her father replied, “Well, he seemed to have more brains that most of the fellows you’ve been bringing around.”
Christine’s mother encouraged her to invite John for Thanksgiving dinner. Later, Christine found out he’d been accepted to flight school, but cancelled his application so he could spend the holiday with her. “He told me he didn’t want to leave me, because he wasn’t sure I’d be there when he got back,” she recalled. At Christmas he arrived for dinner bearing gifts: razor blades for her dad and coffee for her mom—items hard to come by due to rationing. “My mom couldn’t get by on the coffee rations so he brought her five pounds of coffee from the mess hall!”
What he wanted to give Christine was an engagement ring. But when he told her he wanted to marry her, she replied, “Oh no you don’t!”
She explained her reluctance, “He was Catholic and I was Protestant. I didn’t want him to give up his faith, and I didn’t want to be Catholic.” In addition, they knew that John, who by then had completed flight school, would soon be sent overseas. Unlike many wartime couples, they didn’t want to marry, only to be separated. “If something happened to me over there—well, I didn’t want her to be saddled with that,” said John.
And the ever-practical Christine said, “We didn’t want to have a baby and then be apart.” Eventually, she accepted his proposal and promised to wait for his return. She asked him to write her dad a letter requesting permission to marry.
John shook his head. The task proved daunting. “My wastepaper basket was full of all the ones I tried to write.”
In March 1943 he shipped out to Italy. “I only had to fly 35 missions to get to go home, but I flew 50,” he said. “Some of them were ‘mulligans,’—training missions—but we still got shot at.” On one memorable mission John’s crew returned to base with 640 holes in their B-24. “They shot us up real bad,” he recalled. As he inspected his gear he noticed a tear in his parachute. “A hot piece of flak had gone through my vest, into my chute and fused into the nylon.” He still has that piece of flak—a reminder of the dangers he survived.
Others weren’t as fortunate. He shrugged and said, “Thirty-six went over in my group and only three came back.”
JOHN JASLEY, 1944.
One day Christine received a letter from John. “Samson got it,” John wrote. And that’s how she found out a mutual friend had been killed.
John looked down his hands and sighed. “Samson’s airplane blew up.”
John didn’t escape without injury. He earned a purple heart when a piece of flak pierced his flight suit on a mission. “I looked down and my leg was covered in blood,” he recalled. “When we landed, they pulled the flak out with a pair of tweezers.” In addition to his other duties, John served as a photographer. When they flew out of Italy, he took pictures of bridges, factories and railroad stations—photos that provided vital information for the Allies.
Finally, in October 1944 Christine got a call from a stevedore on transport ship. “A rough voice said, ‘Your boyfriend is home,’” she recalled. “I said, ‘Who are you?’ And he said, ‘What the hell do you care? Your boyfriend’s home!’”
JASLEY WEDDING PHOTO, NOVEMBER 1944.
One month later, on November 16, they married. When asked how they resolved the issue of their conflicting religious backgrounds, Christine replied, “We didn’t.” While John was facing imminent peril overseas, he said he realized everyone—Catholic and Protestant alike—prayed to the same God. Unfortunately, their families weren’t as open-minded. John’s family was so appalled that he wanted to marry a Protestant that they wouldn’t allow his brother to be in the wedding.
When John was discharged he accepted a job with National Cash Register in Reno, Nevada, far away from both sets of parents. “We were afraid they’d interfere,” said Christine. The couple believes that that long-ago decision, to live at a distance from their parents, contributed to the success of their union.
As they settled into married life, John rarely spoke of his combat experience. Christine said, “He’d lost all his friends—he just wanted to forget.”
In 1946 Christine gave birth to a daughter and three years later, a son. Sadly, the baby boy lived only one day. “That was the most difficult time of our lives,” said John. But they coped with their grief together and took delight in their daughter.
John worked for National Cash Register for 36 years before retiring at 62. Since that time, the couple brought together by the Pennsylvania Polka has made time for dancing, wine tasting and travel. And 16 years ago, their conflict of faith question was finally resolved.
“Our grandson was marrying a Catholic girl and we sat next to the priest at the rehearsal dinner,” Christine said. She and John told him that when they wed in 1944, they hadn’t been allowed to marry in the Church.
“Things are much different now,” the priest said, and promptly offered to marry them the following morning before their grandson’s wedding. Fifty-three years after their first wedding, they were finally married by a priest. When John called his mother to tell her the news, he said, “She was so happy she cried.”
At 95, they’ve both slowed down a bit. But their love and appreciation for the life they’ve built hasn’t dimmed. Christine smiled. “He tells me every day that I’m the best thing that ever happened to him.”
THE JASLEYS, 2010.