Asking Dad

I want to base my search for information about my grandfather in online media, but I need a jumping-off place. So, on this Sunday morning, I decide call my father.

My dad was born in 1961, and his dad died in 1965. This isn't a large window, but Dad is certain to know more than I do, so I plug my cell phone into the wall and perch in my bed, laptop at the ready. The time is 10:40 a.m. Due to years of conditioning to be a fast typist, I was able to transcribe the following, pretty much verbatim, from my dad:

"I'm pretty sure he was born in Dubuque, Iowa. I would say that for sure. Wasn't it like, January 24 of 1924? I might be wrong about that because it has the 24 twice. I know it was January, to be sure. Here's an oddity. His real name is James Richard Kane, not Richard James Kane, and don't ask me why he wanted that changed around. He liked to be called Richard or Dick first. James Kane kinda sounds almost like it rhymes, or sing-songy, you might say. Maybe that wasn't what he wanted. He went to Loras Academy for high school, kinda like the predecessor to Dubuque Wahlert was the Loras Academy. In fact your grandpa Paul might have more of this information than I do. You should ask my aunt Benita, my aunt Carol. I’ll email you Benita’s email address.

“I don’t know if he started at Loras College, but I’m pretty sure he got drafted into the army or enlisted in 1943. I would bet he enlisted. The situation was, Hannah, that if you enlisted you got a little bit better assignments and stuff like that than the people who were drafted, and you were pretty much on the hook that you’d get drafted anyway, so… He was in the first armed, 69th division, and then there was like a certain regiment. Neil might know. [asks Neil, my brother] 273rd regiment? I’m gonna say 273rd. I’m gonna have to look around. I’ve got, somewhere, his medals and stuff like that, because I also have a box that I was gonna put somewhere, and this kinda disturbs me a little bit that I can’t put my hands on it, the flag that was on his coffin as a veteran. You know, they do the veteran’s burial and they fold the flag and do the 21-gun salute and play taps… you went to my Uncle Red’s version of that, a pretty powerful scene.

“I would say 273 was his regiment, and, as I say, that was not a tea-and-cookies group. They were shooting their weapons, watching their comrades get shot, coming up to concentration camps and all of that. But he didn’t get deployed until after D-Day, it was actually like winter of 1944-1945. He was, you know, a private, had the designation of sharpshooter, and the 69th division, that was the group that met the Russians outside of Leipzig, Germany. I have that picture on the refrigerator. There was a concentration camp over there, too. I told you that story about the concentration camp survivor I met who was at that camp outside Leipzig… they were actually kind of happy, they got all cleaned up to meet the Americans. The day they were expecting the Americans, FDR died, and the American forces were at rest for 3 days… but in the meantime they hauled all the prisoners at this concentration camp out of Leipzig, Germany to someplace in Austria or something like that, literally death-marched all these prisoners, all because FDR died. Even the Germans were upset about it, they wanted to end up with the Americans, not the Russians. It wasn’t long after FDR died that the war was over.

“Somewhere I’ve got a copy of a letter that my dad wrote to his mom, my grandma Marcella, and of course you can’t give a lot of information in letters, so the letter just has a hand-drawn picture of himself – he was a pretty good artist – and it started with ‘Somewhere in Germany…’ because he couldn’t give up his position, but he said he wished the Germans would just give up. They were nice to him. They would feed him dinner, wish and fix his clothes, stuff like that, because a lot of the Germans, if you think about it, had relatives in the United States. Then, he got out of the Army and then I think he went to college at Loras for a year or two, worked at a gas station in Dubuque, then got into dental school.

“Well he worked at a gas station that was owned by my uncle Fred Hantelman, who was dating Mary Jane Eckstein, who was my mom’s sister. Ruth Eckstein would come to the gas station where Mary Jane Eckstein was dating Fred Hantelman, and that’s where she met Dick Kane and they hit it off. They [the city] widened the highway, so it’s gone, but I can point to the place where it was. It’s probably some toxic waste site now.

“He went to dental school in Iowa City, graduated in ’52. They got married in ’49. My brother Terry was born in ’51. They lived in essentially a barracks in Iowa City because the military had all these Quonset buildings that were used for housing soldiers, and after the war they were getting rid of ‘em. Places that needed housing bought ‘em up, including the University of Iowa. I remember as a little kid seeing these barracks, Quonset buildings, on the property that is now the nursing building, almost right across from the IMU on the hilltop. This was probably, early early ‘70s. They were dirt poor. Grandma Ruth remembers that for desert they would have saltines with jelly on ‘em. Sometimes that works.

“He graduated and set up - with a guy from Dubuque, Joe Locher – set up a dental practice in Dubuque in the early ‘50s. Then he worked as a dentist until he died in September of ’65. He had heart problems and was going down to Iowa City on a regular basis, trying with the medical technology of the time, which is archaic now, to work something out. They would have worked something out today. Stop smoking cigarettes would have helped a lot. That’s why I used to keep a big Sharpie marker in the car to write FUCK on cigarette ads at gas stations so they’d have to take them down. That or FUCK CANCER. Lo and behold a couple days later the ad would be down. I’d get concerned about security cameras, but go ahead and send the police after me, charge me with defacing property because I wrote a slang word on a cigarette advertisement. Oh yeah, chase that person down. I used to also, I made up some labels, mailing-label size, that I would put on the gas pump, next to where the dollars are, just a little sticker that says, ‘the Saudi Arabians thank you.’ Just so people think, there you go.

“Well, for whatever reason – I don’t know what reason – he was always interested in trains and railroad operations, that was like his hobby type of things. Building model trains, vacationing to these mountain areas where they had these unique railroad setups. Let’s go to Colorado, drive around in the mountains, that type of thing. But my memory is, they say your memory is what you’ve been told, because I was only four years old. How much can you remember? You remember odd things. I used to get him a beer and that type of stuff. I remember back in those days you got up and turned the dial on the TV, a fine-tuning dial. You turned a handle that changed the channel but then there was like an outer ring on the thing that you could spin to make the channel come in clearer. It was pretty archaic. You had no remote controls, I’m trying to think of what it even resembles nowadays. Like turning on an oven or something like that. Fiddling with antennas, that sort of thing.”

His dad, Eldon Kane, was a police officer for the City of Dubuque
Military numbers verified by note left by Grandma that Dad found during this conversation

“My dad, you know, Benita was substantially younger than he was, caught on that this priest was having sex with her or whatever, and he confronted him about it. Apparently a heated exchange came about, which ultimately ended when the priest, at gunpoint, told my dad to leave him alone.”