For Milagros

James Edward Hanger

This one's for you, Milagros.

You're just 3 years old as I write this in the spring of 2011, but in a few years you'll come to appreciate the story, so here goes:

Once upon a time -- a long, long time ago -- a boy who would grow up to be a hero was born on his family's plantation near Churchville in Augusta County, Virginia. James Edward Hanger was a bright child, curious by nature, and he did well in school. When he was 16, he left his home for the first time to study engineering at Washington College (now Washington and Lee College) in Lexington, where he worked hard.

But when a great war between the North and the South broke out in 1861, he left college and came back to Churchville to tell his parents he wanted to enlist. His parents supported the South, but they hoped their 18-year-old son would stay behind rather than fight.

When James persisted, his mother suggested that he consider joining the Churchville Cavalry, in which two of his brothers were already serving. The Cavalry was then stationed to the west, in Philippi. His mother sent him off to war carrying food and clothing that she had packed for him and her two other sons. This all happened in May of 1861, which was 150 years ago this very month.

An ambulance corps carrying supplies for the Confederacy happened to pass through his hometown on its way to Philippi, and James tagged along. He arrived on June 2, 1861, and formally enlisted in the Churchville Cavalry.

Young James spent the night in a barn with a small group of untrained and badly equipped Confederates. Little did they know that a force of Union soldiers numbering 4,500 had learned about the 750 Confederates in James's unit and were marching on Philippi.

James was on guard duty the next morning when the Union soldiers surprised the small Rebel unit and a fierce battle began. James headed for the stable to get his horse and join the fray. It was at that very moment, as James was mounting his horse, that a six-pound Union cannonball ricocheted inside the stable, striking James and shattering his left leg.

James was one of the first casualties in the first land battle of the Civil War.

In a puddle of his own blood and lying on a bed of hay, James was in agonizing pain, lapsing in and out of consciousness, as Union troops routed the small band of Confederates. It was hours before Federal troops found him and summoned a doctor. Using a barn door as a table and with no anesthetic, the doctor amputated young James's leg with crude knives and a saw, smoothing the bone's end, seven inches below his hip, with a file.

The amputation -- which is believed to have been the first during the Civil War -- was almost like medieval torture.

Against enormous odds, the operation was a success. After weeks of convalescence, James was fitted with a crude wooden leg, literally a straight wooden affair that ended in a peg. It was rigid, awkward and painful.

Two months after he left his home in Churchville, James returned to his family following a prisoner exchange. He disappeared into his second-floor bedroom and insisted that he not be disturbed. His mother took his meals up to him on a tray; an hour later the clean plates would be found sitting outside James's bedroom door.

Weeks passed, and the only indication that James was upstairs was the noise his family heard as his wooden peg thumped across the floor.

Now and then, James would make odd requests. He asked for barrel staves and willow wood from the trees that surrounded the plantation house. He'd leave wood shavings in a bucket outside his door. For three months he remained isolated.

Then James emerged from his bedroom and ambled downstairs with a smooth stride that seemed incomprehensible to the family. Using his engineering skills, James had created for himself a wooden leg with joints at the knee and the foot -- out of willow, metal and barrel staves. He had broken a technological barrier that had stood for thousands of years. A newspaper editor called James's prosthesis "one of the most complete legs we have ever seen."

Word spread of what James had done, heartening the many thousands of soldiers who underwent amputations. Soon James relocated to Richmond and began creating prosthetic limbs. At first, he offered his services at no charge, but as demand grew James formed a business. The Commonwealth of Virginia chose the J.E. Hanger Company to manufacture artificial limbs for its wounded Confederate veterans.

James's business prospered. Within 20 years, he had opened numerous branches, and soon his company began international operations with offices in London and Paris. James died in 1919, but his children carried on his work.

By the mid 1950s there were 50 Hanger offices in North America and 25 in Europe. Today, Hanger Prosthetics and Orthotics sees about 650,000 patients annually.

And you, Milagros, are one of them.

The Hanger company makes the lifts for your shoes that make it possible for you to run and play and keep up with your older brother, Carlos. The company also made a prosthesis for your amputated right arm -- the result of injuries sustained in a fire before your mother, my niece Terry, and her husband, James, adopted you. Right now, you think you can do more without that artificial arm than you can with it. But you're only 3 years old, and your attitude will no doubt change.

And so, as the country remembers the awful Civil War that killed and wounded more than 600,000 Americans 150 years ago, you, my sweet Milagros, can remember a Virginian, himself a victim of that war, who changed for the better the lives of so many, including you.

James Edward Hanger of Churchville, Virginia, was a hero whose life we can all celebrate.

No escape

Reminders of the past are abundant in Richmond. This cannon in the median strip on Monument Avenue is just east of the Jefferson Davis monument and marks the spot where a large earthwork for the inner line of defense of Richmond was constructed in 1861.

I can't think of many American cities other than Richmond -- with the exception, perhaps, of Washington -- where the past is still so much with us.

I think that's a good thing.

The constant reminders of Richmond's history keep us in touch with both the greatness of our past and our terrible mistakes. There are lessons to be learned from both, and knowing the differences today, perhaps even especially today, are important.

A visit to St. John's Church on Church Hill brings to mind in tangible form the important role Richmond played in the battle to separate ourselves from British rule. It's impossible to see the interior of this unimposing, yet charming, house of worship without imagining Patrick Henry and his "Give me liberty, or give me death" clarion call to the Virginia Convention in 1775, as he sought to persuade the Virginia House of Burgesses to deliver Virginia troops to the Revolutionary War. Among those who sat in the pews, listening, were Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.

A drive down Richmond's (and perhaps the nation's) grandest residential boulevard, Monument Avenue, calls to mind vividly the South's tragic effort to dissolve the union that had been so dearly won almost a century before. When the avenue's monuments were erected, they resonated far differently than they do now. Today, a century or more later, we no longer celebrate the Lost Cause memories that comforted a defeated people. Instead, those magnificent statues of men such as Stuart, Davis, Jackson and Lee -- the latter being one of the finest works of public art on view anywhere -- remind us that times change and wrongs can be righted, that lost causes are not always considered by history to be noble causes, despite the mantle of nobility their proponents might then have worn.

The past is inescapable in odd ways here in Richmond. When I go to the grocery store on Brook Road, just north of the city's limits, I'm confronted by a carefully tended remnant of the breastworks that protected Richmond from Union General George B. McClellan's forces, bent on seizing the Confederate Capital.

This leftover bit of temporary fortification, now a mound covered by lush, green grass and evergreens, is surrounded by a wrought-iron fence and stands in a parking lot in front of a Martin's Food Market. Yes, just imagine that for a moment, and you'll know what I mean when I talk about Richmond's unfailing history lessons.

Now, with the 150th anniversary of the Civil War upon us, the reminders are even more present. Just after Richmond fell, Abraham Lincoln and his son Tad visited Richmond's still smoldering ruins, on April 4 and 5, 1865. Among the stops he made were the White House of the Confederacy, the State Capitol and Libby Prison.

And, yes, there is a historical marker that offers details of Lincoln's tour.

And as if those monuments, buildings, and markers were not enough, word came yesterday that Steven Spielberg will film his biographical drama "Lincoln" in Richmond this fall. Based on a book by Doris Kearns Goodwin, the movie is expected to be released in 2012. Keep your eyes peeled and you might spot Academy Award-winning actors Daniel Day-Lewis (Abraham Lincoln) and Sally Field (Mary Todd Lincoln).

William Faulkner, the revered Southern writer, put it succinctly in his 1951 book "Requiem for a Nun." His character Temple Drake, who first appeared as a college student in his novel "Sanctuary," is now a grown woman with a child and is coming to grips with her own turbulent history. Faulkner wrote:

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."

The dogs of war

Author Robert Leckie is pictured at work for the Associated Press in Buffalo, N.Y., two years after the end of World War II.

I've spent a lifetime reading books about World War II in the Pacific, trying to understand what my father and my uncle talked about only in guarded terms when I was growing up.

My father was a Navy Seabee during the campaign to wrest the Solomon Islands from the Japanese, and my Uncle Joe was stationed with the Army on Corregidor in the Philippines when the Japanese attacked; he spent the rest of the war as a POW.

I've read fiction and non-fiction alike. There can be much truth in fiction. I couldn't turn the pages fast enough when I first laid hands on Norman Mailer's "The Naked and the Dead," written in 1948. I devoured "Battle Cry" by Leon Uris, written in 1953. Both novelists served in the Pacific and were what Shakespeare called "the dogs of war," meaning they were soldiers.

On the non-fiction front, I spent a summer about 30 years ago reading books by survivors of Japanese POW camps in an attempt to understand what my Uncle Joe had experienced. I remember sitting under the big maple tree in my back yard on hot, sticky days feeling a chill as I read accounts of the brutality they endured.

Perversely, fiction was more engaging -- probably because the novels were by men who went on to have illustrious careers as authors. To be blunt, they were better writers.

The first-hand, non-fiction accounts were more powerful. Their authors might have had only one book in them, but theirs were tales of unvarnished truth.

Now I have found a book that is a personal account of one Marine's experiences in the Pacific that is as engaging as any World War II novel and as powerful as the best non-fiction.

It's "Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific," a 1957 non-fiction account by Robert Leckie. While some might consider the title to be trite, the book is riveting, laced equally with bravery, wit, pathos and humor, and I highly recommend it.

Leckie served in the 1st Marine Division as a machine gunner and intelligence scout during the Battle of Guadalcanal and in later campaigns. "Helmet for My Pillow" and another book, "With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa" by Eugene Sledge, were the cornerstones for the scriptwriters of the recent HBO series "The Pacific."

Leckie, who later wrote many more books on military history, was also a sportswriter. (Despite having spent my life as a journalist, I've only written perhaps a handful of sports stories. But I admire good sportswriters and their colorful and insightful way of stringing sentences together to put the reader in the center of the action.)

Consider this from Leckie's description of his part in the desperate, deadly battle for Peleliu at the end of "Helmet for My Pillow":

"I ran with the heat shimmering in waves from the coral, with the sweat oiling my joints and the fear drying my mouth, with the shells exploding behind me, closer, ever closer -- and the air filled with the angry voices of the shrapnel demanding my life. I ran with an image in my mind of the Japanese gunner atop his ridge, bringing each burst carefully closer to my flying rear, chasing me across that baking table in a monstrous game of cat-and-mouse, gleeful at each greater burst of speed called forth by a closer explosion -- and then, tiring of the sport, lifting the gun and dropping one before me."

The war ended moments later for Leckie. A nearby ammunition dump was hit. The shock wave smashed into him with all its force. "I had been shattered. No good, a dry husk. Modern war had had me. A giant lemon squeezer had crushed me dry."

Fifty-four years and too many wars later, the words resonate still. And Leckie's story is as compelling as the snatches of stories I overheard my father and my uncle hinting at -- when they thought the children weren't listening -- in the years after they came home from World War II.

Say what?

Proofreading menus is easy pickings. Like shooting fish in a barrel. I see so many menu errors that it's hardly worth mentioning them.

But this one caught my eye today. Here's what the menu board said at a cafe where I got a cup of coffee this morning.

Today's Specials

Creamy Tomato Basil Soup

Roasted Beef and Goat

Cheese Salad

Apple Cobbler

After reading it several times, I asked the woman behind the counter about the roasted beef and goat.

She paused a moment, and then she told me that roasted beef and goat cheese salad just wouldn't all fit on one line.

Too bad. I was kind of tantalized by the thought of a roasted beef and goat entree.

Scary times

President John F. Kennedy was photographed in the Oval Office during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

I wasn't even a teenager yet when we learned the principles of "duck and cover" in elementary school.

I was born during World War II, but I have no memories of the war. By the time I started school, in the late 1940s, I might have had some vague understanding of nuclear weapons. But my world was a safe place, I believed, and the duck and cover exercises we practiced in elementary school seemed like a game.

(As a practical matter, hiding under our desks in the event of a nuclear attack would have been about as useless as tits on a boar hog, as my grandfather used to say. But that's beside the point.)

I was never really scared by world events as a young child. I had too little understanding of them. Overhearing parents and relatives talking about the horrors of the Great Depression and World War II made me anxious, to be sure, but I rationalized my fears by believing, as children do, that those things happened a l-o-n-g time ago and would never happen again.

Naïveté can be so comforting.

But when I was 20, the Cuban Missile Crisis scared the bejesus out of me.

And I knew by then that ducking and covering wouldn't do much good.

On Oct. 14, 1962, a U.S. reconnaissance flight over Cuba discovered the presence of what turned out to be an SS-4 construction site. The SS-4 was a Soviet Union ballistic missile deployed during the Cold War. It was capable of attacking targets at medium ranges with a megaton-class nuclear warhead. If there were Soviet SS-4s in Cuba, most of the eastern United States would be within range.

Richmond didn't seem like much of a target to me. But Washington was. And so was Norfolk, with its massive military bases. That was profoundly scary.

For the next few weeks, the U.S. was on the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

Like most Americans my age, I'd never been so frightened before. And I don't think I've been so scared since.

Unlike the Great Depression and World War II, the Cuban Missile Crisis was something of my own time, and naïveté was no longer a comfort.

It didn't help matters any that I had read "Alas, Babylon," the 1959 novel by Pat Frank that was one of the first apocalyptic stories of the nuclear era. (The novel centers on the aftermath of a nuclear attack in a small town in Florida.) Having seen the movie "On the Beach," based on Nevil Shute's 1957 novel, which I had also read, was no comfort either. (The story, set in Australia, envisions the aftermath of a nuclear war in the Northern Hemisphere and a slow and inexorable cloud of fallout that dooms the planet.)

The Cold War spawned its own style of "entertainment," and none of it offered much solace.

If you're a few decades younger than I am, you probably learned all about the Cuban Missile Crisis in history class.

We're all alive today, and we know that the clash between the Soviet Union and the United States was resolved within a few weeks of those U.S. reconnaissance flights in 1962. There have been no nuclear attacks on the U.S. The Soviet Union is no more. Nuclear arms stockpiles are being reduced. The Cold War ended in 1990.

The world is a safer place.

Right.

If you believe that, you're as naïve as I was in the 1950s.

* * *

By the way, I highly recommend "Alas, Babylon" and "On the Beach." They are today, as they were then, compelling and thought provoking.

Different times

This postcard from the 1950s depicts Broad Street looking West from about 8th Street. The State Theater, showing the movie "No Down Payment," is at the near right, and Thalhimers department store is the 6-story building on the left. Downtown was then still a safe place for a kid to explore on his own.

There's been a discussion of the word "playdate" this week on an email list of copyeditors.

It's a fairly new word. I certainly never heard it when I was a kid in the 1940s and 50s. Our parents didn't arrange playdates. We just went outside, found our friends, and played. Often, our parents told us to go outside and play just to get us out from underfoot.

It wasn't unusual for us not to tell our parents where we were going or what we'd be doing -- as long as we promised to be home in time for supper. My friends in those days all lived within a couple of blocks. The neighbors looked out for us. If we misbehaved, some adult would tell us to "stop that this instant!"

We dreaded having a neighbor call our parents to say we'd done something wrong. Unlike today, the adults were believed automatically, without question, and the kids were not. If Mrs. Johnson who lived across the street and down the block, or whoever, said I had done something, there was no question that I had done it. (The same trust applied to teachers. If I messed up at school, I'd be punished once by the teacher and again when I got home.)

The world was a safer place in those days, and the freedom from supervised play that we enjoyed then can only be appreciated in retrospect.

By the time I was 10, my world opened up even more. If I could persuade my mom to give me 30 cents, I could take the bus downtown, by myself, and go to a movie (I became adept at winning free movie tickets on radio quizzes), or explore the State Capitol building's underground tunnels (which were sorta, kinda scary), or wander through Miller & Rhoads or Thalhimers and look at all the things I'd like to buy if only I had the money.

(Persuading my mom to give me 30 cents for the bus wasn't always easy. Back then, 30 cents would buy a carton of Cokes or two loaves of bread.)

We were never totally free of adult supervision. If we got rowdy on the bus, somebody who knew who we were would call our parents, who would be waiting to give us holy hell once we got back home.

Downtown Richmond, just like my East End neighborhood, was safe for a kid. (This is not to say that the blue-haired ladies at the White House of the Confederacy didn't look at me oddly as I explored the exhibits. They did, and I'm certain that they wondered what the heck a 10-year-old was doing wandering around looking at Rebel uniforms with 80-year-old bloodstains on them.)

To be sure, there were times I could have used some adult supervision. When I was about 7, my friend Bobby Johnson and I were playing in a field not far from home when we discovered a pint of gin in the weeds. Stupidly, we drank it. I staggered home drunk as a skunk, and my mother was horrified. She called our family doctor. "What should I do?" she asked him. His advice: "Put him to bed and let him sleep it off."

A couple of years later, another friend and I were out riding our bikes. We were about a mile from home when I tried some stupid stunt, went flying over the handlebars, and broke my arm. A stranger came along in an automobile, picked me up, carried me to his car, put my bike in his trunk, and took me home. I shudder to think what my mom must have thought when she opened the front door to find me in the arms of somebody she didn't know. But she was grateful for his help, as was I. (I have no memory of what my young friend did. I suspect he rode his bike back to his house.)

As I said, the world was a safer place then -- not safe from our own stupidity but safe from people who wanted to hurt us.

Much has changed. Now a parent would be foolhardy to allow a child the freedom we enjoyed and took for granted. Today, parents arrange playdates. Back then, they might have asked "Where are you going?"

And we would have said, "Out."

"What are you going to do?"

"Nothing."

And that was okay.

She's b-a-c-k ... maybe

LBJ nest No. 3 is about one third completed. (Don Dale photo, 2011)

My determined little LBJ has returned for the third time to build a nest in my front-porch light fixture.

Three days ago I saw her fly away as I ventured out onto the front porch to pick up the morning paper.

I decided to reward her singular determination by letting her have her way. To help, I set off for the hardware store to buy a 15-watt bulb to replace the 40-watt bulb in the fixture. I thought a lower-watt bulb would produce less heat and -- maybe -- this time her eggs wouldn't be cooked before they hatched.

(Who knew 15-watt bulbs would be twice as expensive as 40-watt bulbs? But no matter. I bought the damned bulbs.)

Since then, there has been no progress on the nest, and I haven't seen the LBJ.

It's been wet and chilly here for the past few days. Maybe she doesn't want to harvest wet grass from my front lawn. Maybe now that it's drier and warmer she'll come back to continue creating a place to lay her eggs. Or maybe not. What do I know? I really don't fathom squat about birds and their nesting habits.

But I hope she does come back. Her perseverance ought to be rewarded.

This all reminds me of the time a few years back when I had another domestic encounter with wildlife. It was the dead of winter, and I was reading a good book when I hard faint scratching noises coming from the woodstove insert in my fireplace.

Boo and Atticus, my two cats at the time, went on full alert. They parked themselves in front of the woodstove and began making quiet curiosity chirps.

Was there an errant bird trapped in my woodstove? And, if so, what to do?

I had heard a first-hand account from one of my co-workers who had faced the same situation. When she opened her woodstove door, a soot-covered bird flew out. Using a broom, she eventually chased the bird out of her front door, but the cleanup bill -- she had to hire a professional service -- was staggering. There was soot on the draperies, the rugs, the furniture, the walls and ceilings. A panicked, soot-covered bird can make a world-class mess.

So I did nothing. I didn't open the woodstove door. I tried to ignore the faint scratching noises. Better a dead bird who lacked the good sense to stay out of chimneys than a giant cleaning bill. Think of it as Darwinian.

Trust me, though: I felt bad about it.

Gradually over the next four days there were fewer and fewer scratching noises. Boo and Atticus lost interest.

On the fifth day, I decided to open the door.

When I did, a startled squirrel was looking out at me.

I slammed the door shut.

And thought about what to do next.

And wondered how he had survived for five days without food or water.

At least a squirrel wouldn't be flying around the room leaving soot in his wake, I thought. He'd stay on the floor. A vacuum cleaner would take care of any problems.

I propped the front door open. I s-l-o-w-l-y opened the woodstove door. The squirrel looked at me, shook himself, and scampered for daylight and up onto a lower branch of the willow oak in the front yard.

He sat there for a moment, staring at me. I stared back at him.

Then he cussed me out, longly and loudly, then scampered further up the tree, screaming squirrel imprecations all the way.

Perhaps, as with the squirrel, I'll be lucky with my LBJ. She'll return, finish her nest, lay her eggs, raise her babies, and live happily ever after.

And once again I'll escape without metaphorical wildlife blood on my hands.

That's what I hope, anyway.