Here's to you, Uncle Joe

Let me take a brief pause in the middle of our game -- which, by the way, is coming to an end soon -- to remember my Uncle Joe.

Joseph Nichols was my mother’s younger, and only, brother. They were deeply fond of one another as children and stayed so when Uncle Joe returned from World War II and for the rest of his life. (For some reason, his pet name for my mother was Teddy; my mother never told me how that came about.)

Uncle Joe wanted to see the world, so he joined the army before the war began. His first duty station after basic training: Corregidor, the island at the tip of the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines. That didn’t work out so well.

Today marks the day in 1942 when about 15,000 Americans and Filipinos surrendered to Japanese forces who had swooped down the peninsula. Uncle Joe spent the rest of the war in unspeakable conditions in a POW camp in Japan.

A big, healthy man before the war, Uncle Joe came home weighing 85 pounds in 1945. He had a tough war.

Uncle Joe lived to be 65 and died on Christmas Day 1981.

So this evening I will raise a glass of something appropriate in his honor.