DECEMBER 1941
That Sunday, Jim Feltz parked his black ’34 Plymouth in front of the dollar store on the Woodson Road in Overland, Missouri, and stepped outside to wait for his manager, Ed, to return from lunch. The three great storefront windows of the dollar store, where Jim worked six days a week and where Ed managed the staff as a floorwalker, brimmed with dependable merchandise, with new lines of porcelain dolls and men’s ties, a small Philco phonograph, boxed sets of cutlery, a blizzard of Christmas cards pinned to a wooden hutch they used as a prop, most of the would-be presents artfully poised on shelves you could barely see for all the product. Over all, on a ledge above the building’s center entrance, was a life-size mannequin of Santa Claus, arms akimbo, as if to say Isn’t it about time you bought something? These windows, like many of the storefront windows of the shops up and down Woodson, were Ed’s doing. He had a knack for decorating, and he’d recruited Jim as a gofer that day.
Monday through Saturday, Jim worked as a stock boy at the dollar store, or the dime store as they also called it, or Siegal’s for the name of the proprietor. He earned $9 per week and gave half that to his mother, Irene. Much of the rest, he’d poured into a ’27 Nash that his brother Charlie had picked up and that had been nothing but trouble. Jim had junked that clunker for $7.25 after removing the new battery he’d purchased, and then bought the Plymouth for $120, which left little enough for that Philco, and the likes of “Elmer’s Tune” and “Chattanooga Choo Choo.” Still, that he acquire a phonograph was now imperative.
Two months shy of seventeen, Jim was slightly below middling height, eager and industrious for a kid, fresh-faced and good-natured. He had a crooked smile, which was something of a trademark in the family, and hair that he swept back off the forehead with only the slightest consideration of a part. He made friends easily, and fast, and was still tempted on occasion to indulge the shooting games they played up at the town dump with .22 rifles and a tin can.
Through that early afternoon, Ed orchestrated one winter wonderland after another. It was the usual holiday fare—a Christmas tree with a toy train circling the base, more mannequins of Santa Claus and elves, gifts wrapped and hung from the ceiling by fishing line. While Ed wedged himself into the window fronts and worked off his hands and knees, Jim hovered nearby, cutting colored paper and garlands to length, and retrieving props as Ed called for them.
Mid-afternoon, they started on a ladies’ dress shop, this one with a dousing of cotton that was far deeper than the snow ever seemed to get in Overland. There’d been less than an inch so far that month, and the temperatures this afternoon had climbed above freezing. While Ed manipulated his props inside the window, a horn started sounding at the far end of Woodson, paused, and then came closer. In between bursts of the horn, Jim heard someone shouting. It was a disconcerting thing to have happen in Overland on a Sunday afternoon, on any afternoon, and he went to the door as a man in a truck came down the street with his head thrust through the window. “The Japs!” he was shouting. “They’ve bombed Pearl Harbor!”
That winter the war pulled a plug on Overland, draining the town of its young men, imperceptibly at first but then with a swirling, ineluctable force and a sucking sound that was hard to ignore. Three kids from town and a nearby parish had been killed in Hawaii that morning of December 7, two of them on the Arizona at Pearl Harbor. A short time later, two of the town’s Baker boys lost their lives, one with General MacArthur in the Philippines and another off an aircraft carrier in the Coral Sea. Their father was so distraught he gave up a $500-per-month job as a locomotive engineer and enlisted in the Navy, while his wife went to work in an aircraft factory and poured her money into war bonds. The Japanese dimension to the war was as surprising to Jim as the attack itself: In grade school, he’d met refugee children who’d come into his school to talk about how hard life had been under the Nazis in Germany.
Though still more than a year from draft age, Jim was in no rush to go anywhere, not since he’d seen what he’d seen at the dollar store one day. Mickey Betts, a saleslady who’d already come up into her twenties, was chatting with a girl who had wavy brown hair marcelled off her forehead and then down to the shoulders in a cascade of tresses. She had massive brown doe eyes and a skeptical way of smiling, as if alert to the possibility someone was trying to give her the business. He’d caught all this in a glance, and he wondered whether to hazard another but didn’t. He’d seen enough.
Over the next week, Jim moderated his work habits, paying less attention to what he managed in the storerooms and more to what he was putting up on the shelves. The appearance of the brown-haired girl could have been a fluke. Overland was bigger than neighboring towns, and Siegal’s did draw customers from those places, though Jim figured he’d have recognized most of the people who shopped the store from the likes of nearby St. Ann and St. John: She might have just been passing through. But then it happened again. She came into the store. She talked to Mickey. She didn’t buy anything. Now he knew this was no mere customer. Mickey knew her, somehow, and there was a very good bet she was going to return and strike up yet another conversation with the saleslady.
Indeed, the girl was Mickey’s niece, and a refugee from St. Charles County, where the government had recently seized twenty thousand acres by eminent domain, including the towns of Howell and Hamburg, for the development of a $15 million munitions plant. Jim had heard about all of this activity downriver, but like so much of the doings of the wider world, none of this had mattered as much to him as what was happening in the orbit of the dollar store, and his home on Tudor Avenue: the crystal set he fiddled with so he could listen to pilots talking to the control tower at the nearby airport; the shooting games he played with Charlie Page; the adventures he still tuned in to on the radio, of Fibber McGee and Molly and The Green Hornet. But all of those priorities were on the verge of reorientation, gradually, in the days leading away from that first glimpse of Betty Kneemiller, and then dramatically after he and Ed finished dressing their last storefront on Woodson.
Overland in 1941 was a fair-size town of not quite three thousand people, named for the emigrant trail that routed northwest out of St. Louis, bound for a Missouri River crossing. Local lore said Daniel Boone constructed a single-room cabin here in the early 1800s. Downtown wasn’t much longer than five blocks, with most of the merchants lining Woodson and Ashby. Kroger’s and A&P supplied groceries. There was a bakery, a funeral parlor, a movie house, and clothing stores—more clothing stores (ladies’ dress shops), it seemed, than anything else. Only one little diner was open at the time, a greasy spoon, serving hamburgers it would continue to serve for the next seventy-five years and then some.
The Feltzes lived in a small, four-room stucco house, across from Ritenour High School. They had plumbing, and a radio, but no phone. Jim’s mother and father had repurposed a dining room as their bedroom. His sister Juanetta and her husband, Charles, kept another room as their bedroom. His brother Charlie and Charlie’s wife, Cora, slept on a fold-out sofa in the living room. Jim slept in the living room, too, on a cot. Jim’s father was the son of a German immigrant, who’d enlisted in the Union Army in the waning days of the Civil War—a fact Jim didn’t know until he was in his nineties, neither the part about his grandfather being from Germany nor his service during the Civil War. Around the time of Jim’s birth, his father had quit work as a farmer and was working as a laborer. One day, he and a coworker were driving an old Mack truck when some railroad cars carrying coal uncoupled from their train and smashed into their vehicle. John Feltz’s partner was killed, and he himself “was dinged up pretty good” and lived on from there as a “crippled-up man,” who sometimes worked at a filling station at the corner of Red Rock and Woodson.
Jim had worked there, too, the summer of 1940, pumping gas into a ten-gallon reservoir on top and letting it out for sale a gallon at a time. He sold papers at the same station, earning 3 cents for every five papers sold. After his freshman year in high school, he decided he wanted to make work, any work, a regular thing. His mother, who worked as a janitress at the high school, agreed to let him quit school on one condition: that he got a job first. Not a temp job selling papers, or pumping gas, but something established, something that might serve as a building block for whatever else Jim might do with his life. And so one day, Jim lied to Mr. Siegal about his age and got a job at the dollar store.
He worked twelve hours a day six days a week, keeping the store’s inventory in his head, and his eyes on the makeup counter. He didn’t have any plan for what to do when he saw her again. Asking Betty Kneemiller out required an ambition that hadn’t yet fully formed within him, but Mickey had her own ideas about what she wanted to happen. One day she suggested that Jim go to the movies on a Sunday night. “And I’ll get Betty to go, too,” she told him.
They met at the dollar store and walked up Woodson to the movie house, Betty and Mickey talking all the way, more like sisters than an aunt and a niece. Jim wasn’t sure she’d known he was coming along with them, and throughout the evening, whenever he perked up with a comment, he noticed a slight, birdlike jerk of her head in his direction, as if he was continually surprising her by still being there. He was a kid and still looked like a kid, but she’d already graduated from the gawky throes of adolescence to the mature elegance cultivated by her aunt. He understood that first date to be their last date, but then Mickey suggested he go to the show again, and then to join them for a trip to a ballroom in St. Louis.
The dance floor at Tunetown was as vast as a roller-skating rink, and low-ceilinged alcoves stretched along its length for tables. That was where Jim parked himself. Betty and Mickey took to the floor immediately, with Mickey’s friend, an Italian fellow who’d anglicized his name to Joe Jaye, doing double duty as a partner, first with Mickey, then Betty, then all three of them in a clump. An orchestra commanded an elevated stage, with saxophones, trumpets, trombones, and a rhythm section, and broke from a series of medium-tempo tunes to a fast-tempo number that sparked the dancers into all kinds of new manipulations. Men rolled women over their backs or shot them sliding between their legs. Jim couldn’t make sense of it. He looked for patterns and similarities and saw nothing of the sort, but instead: men with their arms forming two sides of a triangle overhead while their heads pecked in and out like a hen from its house. Women twirled everywhere, some with skirts that seemed purpose-built to flare in a circle rippling horizontal to the floor, their legs and hips sheathed in modest undergarments. Though his eyes zoomed about as couples erupted in all sorts of sudden flights, he was tethered to Betty and what he was coming to see as her distinctive flourishes, the rock back on her heels and the swivel of her toes, and best of all, the quick stop, when she’d freeze in one pose or another, as if caught suddenly by a photographer’s lens. She never held the same pose twice; it was always something new, something dramatic, and something that filled him with a desire so strong he couldn’t help but remember each of those images in turn, like a collection of photographs of a girl so wondrously beautiful he couldn’t quite believe he was there with her.
Jim couldn’t dance and what’s more couldn’t imagine himself dancing. It was a constitutional thing. You had it or you didn’t have it, like an aptitude for spelling. It was a world beyond his world, with a language all its own, where people talked about the Shorty George, and the Lindy Hop, and how to be a “hepcat.” Cats were what people seemed to become when they came onto the dance floor. And Jim felt disqualified from that world, from the things they did, and the things they said. “When the jitterbug bites,” they said, “it bites deep.” But it wouldn’t bite Jim.
His time with Betty was over, he thought, after that first night out to Tunetown. Accompanying an uncommunicative date to the movies—well, that was her problem, not his—but to show off a timidity so overwhelming he could not bring himself to budge from an alcove at the ballroom, that was his problem. He wasn’t timid in every department, but he couldn’t reveal as much to Betty. Telling her about the time he and Charlie Page had shot biscuits out of each other’s mouth with their .22s, and Jim’s reputation as an excellent shot, was not going to impress this girl. Hopping onto that dance floor might, and he’d resolved to do as much when Mickey, unaccountably, invited him again to Tunetown, where he leaned against an arch of the alcove—all night long—and watched her. It was over, he kept thinking, but Mickey kept inviting him out, and then one day, again unaccountably, Betty invited him to her house for dinner.
Archibald Kneemiller worked at the TNT munitions plant in Weldon Springs, salvaging that much opportunity at least from the home he’d lost when the government cleared the county of its residents for the new munitions plant. He made money other ways, too. He sold Chevrolets, and then he purchased another farm and worked that land when he could and had men work it for him when he couldn’t. Meanwhile, he was cultivating a growing reputation as an auctioneer on the weekend. He had a firm command of vigorous language, and a bearing reminiscent of those Civil War colonels who used to auction off plunder, and so he, too, became known as the colonel.
Betty had grown up attending school in a one-room schoolhouse, going back and forth by horse, but when the Kneemillers moved to the western fringe of St. Louis proper, close by Overland, she transitioned into the Stanford Brown business school. The colonel believed his oldest child was on the road to a bright future, not merely as a secretary but into a career and a vibrant life that might be hobbled if she latched herself to a stock boy whose father pumped gas down on the Rock Road.
The dread that overcame Jim after that first time out to the movies, and then Tunetown, depressed him further after this first dinner at Betty’s. The dancing, that might come in time, but Betty’s father’s bias against what his work today as a stock boy said about his prospects tomorrow, and moreover what his father’s work revealed as a precedent, was a hurdle altogether higher. Fortunately, Jim didn’t get the sense that Mr. Kneemiller was actively campaigning against them. He didn’t prevent them from dating. The Kneemillers set a place for Jim at dinner occasionally, but every time that phrase sounded—“the dime store”—at dinner or in reference to their plans, Jim heard a clock ticking. Mr. Kneemiller would wait him out. That, or the war would do the trick.
That spring, no matter how consumed he was by the need to be with her as much as he could—on the phone from the drugstore, at the movies, out to Babler State Park, where he’d rig an old phonograph he’d finally acquired in the backseat of the car to play records, and even to Tunetown again and again—and no matter that he’d only just turned seventeen in February and wouldn’t be subject to the draft until February of 1943, the undercurrent of war streaming through Overland was more than Jim could resist. It was better, they were telling him, that he go to it before it came to him. The Navy, they said, was the way to go. The food was hot, and you had a dry bunk for a bed.
“I want to join the Navy,” he told his mother one day.
“You don’t want to join,” Irene Feltz told him.
“They’re going to draft me anyway. I want to join the Navy, and I’ll need your signature,” he said.
In the same way she signed off on his decision to drop out of school, she signed off on his decision to enlist.
When Jim arrived at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center outside Chicago on the evening of June 10, 1942, the Navy issued him a bonanza of clothing that enabled “a change a day,” something new. There were three white uniforms, two blue uniforms, a dress jacket, a pea jacket, a pair of boots, two white hats, a dress blue hat, a work uniform, a pair of galoshes, low-top white tennis shoes, a mattress, pillow, two blankets, a pair of gloves, six pairs of socks, and “lots more,” he catalogued in a letter to Betty.
It was a luxury, all that clothing, but a bunk for a berth was a fiction, at least it was in basic training. The Navy berthed new recruits in hammocks, and there were a lot of them. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, there’d been just six thousand recruits on the five-hundred-acre base. With the country’s declaration of war, the base almost tripled in size, and by the time Jim arrived, there were eighty thousand recruits segregated into companies of one hundred men. In the morning, they’d rise at 5:30, make up their hammocks, air out their pillows and blankets, then fall out for exercise. Only afterward did they get chow. There would be drilling or a lecture before lunch at 12:30 and then they’d clean their barracks. In the evening, there would be an opportunity for a show or a ballgame, and time to write.
“Write every night so I’ll get one a day,” Jim wrote Betty, telling her he’d feel sick and lonesome if the mail came and there wasn’t a letter from her. Betty did her level best over the next couple of months. Though she had access to a typewriter at school, Jim asked her to refrain from typing. “I’d rather have you write for they seem more from you,” he wrote. The penmanship “isn’t bad at all.”
That first week apart was all the more wrenching because they’d spent most of Jim’s last evening in Overland together, pushing their affection for one another as far as they dared. Betty hadn’t known how hard their parting of the ways was going to be. She couldn’t tell sometimes whether she was “eating or sleeping,” and once while taking a speed test on dictation at school, she inadvertently wrote his name twice. Jim wasn’t faring much better. One day at drill, he was so preoccupied by the memory of their last night together that he missed an order to turn and “walked straight.” He brought her into his prayers every evening, and one evening after everyone went out to a show that he wouldn’t go to because it would remind him of the shows they went to together, he lay on the floor of his barracks and penciled out a poem.
There are many men around me
But still I’m all alone
My heart is aching inside me
There is an ache in every bone
My mind is homeward wondering
Of the girl I left behind
Wondering if she’ll be waiting
Though Betty shied away from Tunetown after Jim left, the compulsion to dance exerted a force too powerful. Soon, she and Mickey were back at the ballroom, and out to the Admiral, too, a boat on the Missouri that shoved off evenings with an orchestra. Jim had heard about the Admiral, and about the “smooching” that sometimes took place on the top deck. “I hope I won’t have to worry about that,” he wrote.
Betty preferred Tunetown. Tony Pastor started leading the band after Jim left, and “Brother, has he got the jive,” Betty wrote. She started wearing new high heels to the dances, and she’d had her hair permed, finally. One evening, she’d let an Italian fellow take her out. His dancing impressed her, but his ethnicity didn’t impress her mother. “Mother is against me going with any Italian fellow,” Betty wrote. But “they are good dancers and since that is all I go for I can’t understand what is wrong with them.” Jim didn’t know much about Italians, but he allowed to Betty that “mothers are right most of the time.” Betty’s father, and his feelings for his daughter’s company, were another matter.
At the end of July, Jim got his orders and told Betty there wasn’t any chance he’d be coming home before he shipped out. On July 31, he arrived in New York and was put up at Pier 92 in Brooklyn while the Navy decided what to do with him. The Navy referred to the pier as a ship, but it wasn’t, no matter the piping boatswain and the captain who made the sailors stand at attention even when his wife was passing. Pier 92 was an old, two-story industrial warehouse, jutting one thousand feet into the East River, nothing but steel girders and brick, and tiers of bunks that stacked would-be sailors eight high. It was a dingy place, and though it might have been redeemed by the food somewhat, because the Navy was renowned for its good food, the Army was dishing out the grub here, resorting to such dishes as beans and catsup on a regular basis. The famous radio announcer Walter Winchell called Pier 92 a “concentration camp,” and Jim confirmed it in a letter to Betty. The accommodation was “awful.” If he wasn’t doing calisthenics in a parking lot, he was standing on a neighboring pier, guarding the Normandie, a luxurious French ocean liner that had caught fire and rolled belly-up months earlier.
Two days after Jim showed up, the Queen Mary set sail, unescorted, from a neighboring pier, carrying all fifteen thousand troops of the 1st Infantry Division. Every thought about what Jim wanted from his next assignment in the Navy, including the possibility of submarine school, was now subsumed by a desire to get off Pier 92. He and a fellow sailor named Petry cornered the master of the pier, asking for advice on how to expedite their departure. Get up early in the morning, the pier master told them, and check the calls for volunteers on the bulletin board. Jim and Petry checked the next morning, but there was nothing. Guarding the rolled hull of the Normandie the next day, they confronted the pier master again. He wanted to know what time they got up and then told them to get up earlier than that. At 3 a.m. the next morning, Jim and Petry found a call for volunteers from a destroyer then tied up at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. They put in for the duty, and they both got orders later that day to cross town for assignment on the USS Plunkett.
That summer of 1942, they’d painted Plunkett in a new camouflage scheme that was heavy on the pink, so much so that after another destroyer came into its mooring nearby, its skipper sent a message to the ship’s wheelhouse: “Send over three quarts of tootie-fruitie.” That was how Jim found the ship, in razzle-dazzle and ready, literally, for its close-up. A Navy photographer snapped pictures of the ship the day after Jim came aboard, and Plunkett readied for departure. It was August 5, 1942. This had been the summer of the Battle of Midway, and Guadalcanal, the summer of Anne Frank’s first diary entry, and the end of the U-boat’s second Happy Time along the U.S. East Coast. It was the summer Walt Disney’s Bambi made its debut in London. Bandleader Kay Kyser’s version of “Jingle Jangle Jingle” was everywhere that summer, but rival Glenn Miller was going to master that year’s soundtrack. He’d commanded the airwaves with “Chattanooga Choo Choo” in the No. 1 spot for all of January, and then “Moonlight Cocktail” through April and May. And he was going to see off Plunkett that afternoon. Jim was standing by the depth charge racks as Plunkett shoved off and the Navy Yard’s speakers crackled with a song about a freckle-faced kid. The song kicked off with drums, and then a trumpet plunged for wah-wah and a chorus of trombones before a vocal group known as the Modernaires queried saxophonist Tex Beneke on his new romance.
The temperatures were perfect, in the mid-seventies and climbing toward the mid-eighties that day, but with little of the awful humidity they’d be dealing with back in Overland this time of year. All around the Navy Yard black iron cranes stood off the piers like salutes, and the sky was smudged with dissipating clouds of industry spewed from the smokestacks around the bay. In a few weeks, Eleanor Roosevelt was going to launch the battleship Iowa from the yard, a ship that displaced more than twenty-five times what Plunkett did, and they’d already begun work on another of the big battle wagons, the Missouri. Listening to the yard’s speaker, Jim knew the song at once and could all but see the long slides of the trombones pumping like pistons for “Kalamazoo.” Brother, has he got the jive, Jim thought, and then thought once again of days that spring when he and Betty would drive with Mickey and Jay out to the park, where he’d rig his Victrola in the back of his Plymouth and play it as if he drove a car that actually had a radio—a fiction that lasted only as long as a song because he had to keep running back to change the record with every play.
That morning in August, he’d dropped a letter to Betty, telling her he’d been assigned to a ship that was about to get underway, and who knew when he’d be able to post another letter. He knew now he couldn’t expect Betty to wait on him for the duration. He loved her, and though he dutifully signed off his letters “With love,” he couldn’t really declare as much. “I like you lots,” he told her over and over again in his letters that spring and summer, and Betty returned the favor: “P.S. I still like you.” They were sixteen and seventeen years old, and all that affection was a thing Jim knew he could not bank on, not with other local boys prowling about, and the Italian fellows, with Tunetown like a siren sounding and her father’s reservations. He was “4 years signed,” and he wanted to be prepared for the worst. In that last letter to Betty before he shipped out, he acknowledged that he knew she’d be out on dates. He didn’t ask her not to go, and he wouldn’t ask her to tell him all about the other fellows, but he did ask her to tell him some, “so I’ll know what to expect when I come home.” As the ship made to clear Wallabout Bay for the East River and Gravesend in New York Harbor, where they’d take on ammunition for a convoy of troopships ferrying soldiers to Scotland, Jim clung to the song receding from him, the music in his ears as light and fetching as Betty’s fingertips on his arm. He strained to keep the song going—“Years have gone by, my my how she grew,” Tex was singing. When Plunkett left port, the only thing that mattered to Jim was getting back to Kalamazoo.