At the 11th hour, on the 11th day, of the 11th month

It's Veterans' Day, so I'll be thinking in general about those who have served our country by being in the military, and about the many veterans I have known and loved, foremost among them my father, who spent four years in the Navy during World War II.

This day used to be called Armistice Day, after the Armistice that ended the "war to end all wars." It was renamed once World War II made it clear that the bit about ending all wars didn't happen. So the world war that took place between 1914 and 1918 became known as World War I.

I think about both of those wars because they played an instrumental role in making me the me who I became.

My mother was born in 1919 in Romania, in a town called Neue Banat. She was an ethnic German. Everyone in Neue Banat was. My grandparents had also been born in Neue Banat, but the country wasn't Romania at that point. It was the Banat region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After the war ended, the Banat region was declared part of Romania.

My grandfather had been a soldier during the war, fighting in the army of whoever it was who succeeded Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assissination triggered the war in 1914. A number of his brothers were also in the army. Jacob Wolf came from a large family - 9 or 10 children, almost all boys - and several of those brothers were killed in combat. My grandfather survived, but his war had been hell. To get home, he hitched part of the way riding on the undercarriage of a railroad car, strapped to the struts by the big leather belt that he wore over his greatcoat. I grew up believing that, to survive, at one point he'd eaten rats. My sister Kathleen claims cats. (I'll need to check with my Aunt Kay, the lone surviving Wolf child, but she was only seven when my grandfather died,  so she may not know the story, which I likely heard - or misheard - from my grandmother.)

Anyway, once Jake Wolf got home, he promptly went and married his fellow Neue Banater, Magdalena Folker, who promptly got pregnant with my mother.

The family decided to emigrate, as many members of the Wolf and Folker families chose to do before and after World War I, and after World War II, for that matter. There were relatives who were immigrants in both the US and Canada, but Jake and Lena decided on the US, on Chicago, where my grandfather had a brother. 

Why did they come? An economic decision, to be sure. Even with several brothers killed during the war, there were still plenty of Wolf brothers contending for the small farm. But I also think that they'd seen enough. At least my grandfather had. And he wanted his family to find prosperity and peace in the new world. So off they went. 

They came through Ellis Island, which my mother - then nearing the age of four - had vague memories of. They were there a while, as my grandparents had misunderstood the amount of money their sponsor - my great-uncle Joe Wolf - had to put up for them. They thought it was $25 a family. It was $25 a head. So they had to wait a while for the cash to be raised and wired from Chicago. The family was separated: Jake over to the men's dormitory, Lena and little Lizzie off to the family unit. My mother remembered my no-doubt bewildered grandmother crying. No surprise there. She was all of 23 years old, no English, and still grieving the two-year old who had died shortly before they got on the boat. 

All ended well enough, and they were off to Chicago on the train, where they built a good life. My grandfather was a butcher who ended up opening his own market, and also investing in rental property. The family owned a nice Chicago bungalow, and a summer house on a lake about 50 miles north of the city.

So when I think of World War I on Veterans' Day, I'm not thinking "Over There" or the Fighting 69th. I'm thinking about Jacob Wolf suffering through it and making the wise decision to get out of Europe while the gettin' was good.

The other part of my origin story involves World War II.

As my father always told us, if you were in the service, you went where Uncle Sam sent you. And Uncle Sam sent my father to Norfolk, Virginia. To Trinidad. And to Navy Pier in downtown Chicago.

My parents met on a blind date - one of his Navy friends conspiring with his girlfriend to find a nice Catholic girl for my father. And the rest became history. That first date was in early January, 1945. They became engaged while at a football game at Soldiers Field right after the atomic bombings, when my father figured he wouldn't be sent to the South Pacific - his likely next stop. They married in late November and my father moved into that bungalow on 4455 North Mozart, where my parents lived - along with Jake and Lena, my Aunt Mary (who was 20), Uncle Jack (15), Bob (5), and Kay (2) - until March 1946, when my father and his war bride moved back to my father's home town of Worcester. 

They had to leave Chicago because they couldn't find a place to live, even in one of my grandparents rental units, and there was only so long that my father and pregnant, as of early 1946, mother were going to be able to stay at 4455 North Mozart.

The rest is history...

Happy Veterans Day to all who served, with a special posthumous shout out to Jake Wolf and Al Rogers. Thanks, guys.