23 hours Ago
The Easter Sunday of 1972 was memorable for me and my siblings in several ways. Some ordinary. Others .
..extraordinary.
For many military families of that time, it was the same. Our fathers were deployed in Southeast Asia, engaged in the final, heart-breaking months of the Vietnam War. For S/MSGT George Karges, father of five and the Flight Line Supervisor at Da Nang Air Force Base, Vietnam it was an especially grim holiday.
History books now record this particular time as the Easter Offensive, when a big push to salvage the failing military undertaking in Vietnam involved an influx of tactical aircraft and the massive C-130 Hercules planes that kept supplies and soldiers on site. My dad was one of the guys keeping the runway open and flights on time. His letters had become less frequent that spring and sometimes included references to an orange powder that fell all over the aircraft, the flight line and the men.
That powder, Agent Orange would later take my father’s life along with the lives of many of his men. But that Easter, we only knew that things were bad. Daddy didn’t tell us that.
Walter Cronkite did and we believed him. Every night, we watched the news report, because it often included video footage of Da Nang Air Force base and the airstrip itself. A few times, we thought we saw dad in the background.
Mostly, we watched our mother perched nervously on the living room couch, waiting for Walter to deliver the daily body count. I’m not sure how we were to discern that S/MSGT Karges was safe or not from that number, but it was a critical part of our day. Things were tense and our mother wasn’t doing well.
She wasn’t sleeping. As the oldest of the brood, I remember lots of tears, lighting candles at Mass, and phone calls to her mother and sister in Queens, New York. We were in Charleston, South Carolina, where mom and dad had purchased a small, but tidy brick home using the blessed GI loan money.
Charleston and Astoria, Queens are approximately 800 miles apart as the Ford station wagon flies and we learned that intimately when mom decided that she couldn’t face another holiday with five kids and no husband and decided to leave on Holy Thursday morning 1972 around 5 a.m. and drive straight through to have Easter with her family.
It was a trip and a holiday that defined me as a young woman. Dad had promised to call mommy that week. He said so in one of the letters that arrived in transparent tissue paper blue airmail envelopes and that mom kept in a special mail holder shaped like an owl.
Nobody was allowed to touch those letters. She read us parts of them. Sometimes.
Mostly, she just held them in her hands and sobbed or yelled. Once in a while, after a letter arrived she would clean or bake furiously or go to Mass when it wasn’t a Sunday. But dad didn’t call and mom melted down.
I couldn’t tell if she was furious or sad, but the outcome was the same. Her mother, Grandma Anna, wired some money, because we didn’t have much and told us to come back to New York. Later on, I realized there had probably been about an 80 percent chance that we would never return to the South, but instead remain in Queens and go to the Catholic School on the corner.
My grandmother had had enough of this situation and had correctly assessed her daughter’s fragile mental health. She wanted eyes on the situation, that situation being her five grandchildren, ranging in age from 2 to 13 with a set of twins included. The trip was long and I sat in front with my mother, both of us drinking coffee from a plaid thermos and discussing all the joys that awaited us in New York.
I attempted to assist her with the map, which is a ridiculous notion since I was and still am hopelessly spatially delayed. Mostly, we listened to the AM radio. We kids liked the song The Lion Sleeps Tonight .
.. the one that goes Wee-hee-hee-hee, dee hee-hee-hee-hee Wee-oh aweem away Wee-hee-hee-hee, dee hee-hee-hee-hee Wee-oh aweem away I remember mom singing along to Roberta Flack .
.. The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face .
She got the 8 track tape from a street vendor that weekend when she and her sister Josephine went out to purchase our Easter finery. We did make it all the way to Queens you see. We drove straight through in a little over 12 hours, stopping for bathroom breaks at Stuckey’s pecan places.
You remember ...
the yellow signs and the gooey pecan logs. We didn’t have enough money for pecan logs, but there was no shortage of pretzels, sandwiches and animal crackers to sustain us in the wood-paneled station wagon. Once there, my grandmother and aunt took over and we really didn’t see mom much until Easter Sunday.
She probably slept, when my grandmother wasn’t feeding her or neighbors weren’t stopping in to see if she was there because the “Fly Boy," our military dad had met his demise. It was an amazing time. I could be a kid for the first time in my dad’s 18 month deployment.
My brothers and sisters and I were all over the park and streets of Astoria, eating Italian ices and pizza slices from the little window in the bakery and watching cartoons in the basement den. In between, we were outfitted for Easter as my grandmother Anna LaPorta saw fit. That included dresses, hats, gloves and the ubiquitous “Spring Coat," a necessity for a Northern Easter.
I had experienced a growth spurt that spring, approaching age 13 and nothing fit me, so my godmother, Aunt Josephine, splurged on nice things. I had always been her pet and the healthy child she had been denied, so a pale blue mini dress, kitten heeled shoes and a luxurious coat were mine. I remember it all so clearly, especially the panty hose that I’d been allowed to wear for the first time.
I felt like an goddess. Aphrodite maybe. My sisters were still little girls and had to wear frilly socks.
What a triumph. I have the pictures of us gathered in front of my grandmother’s brownstone in Queens. Mom’s hat was the size of a pizza, but with lace and net instead of cheese.
We were all decked out, my brothers, Georgie and the baby Michael, one of no less than five Michaels in the immediate family circle, wore jackets and bow ties. We were spectacular and we were in Queens for Easter. My mother did it.
Mary LaPorta Karges took all that sadness and fear and worked it up into a ball of energy and sent out an SOS to her mother and sister and drove that beast of a station wagon straight up Highway 301 ( No I-95 yet) to her safe place, to her family. Easter is the time to celebrate new beginnings. To recognize the sacrifice of the cross.
To trust in a God who is bigger than the evil and turmoil that surround us. Easter 1972 stands in my memory as a testimony to that kind of faith and hope. We press on in spite of our fears, trusting in our faith and in our families.
I still don’t know quite how my mother and all five of us made it to Queens that Easter of 1972, nor why we returned back to Charleston later that spring after school had already resumed. For that matter, why S/MSGT Karges made it back to the states more or less in one piece. It is probably some kind of miracle and that too is the stuff of Easter.
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