Buddies
French Countryside, 1947
French Countryside, 1947
Before the 1944 games were cancelled, he was recruited for the U.S. Olympic Team. “He was under two minutes in the half-mile when he was in high school,” recalls his
sister Carol. “And he got faster. He had long legs and was very strong,” she said of her 6-foot-4 brother.
Walt graduated from Stanford in 1943 with a degree in psychology. He was immediately drafted into the Army and sent to Europe to fight in World War II. During the war, as he was throughout his life, Walt was skeptical of authority. In 1944, he was in charge of a base newspaper in France, and he printed a separate batch of newspapers for the officers that said, “Vote for Wallace,” in reference to the vice president under FDR who was kicked off the 1944 ticket for his left-wing views. He was promptly summoned to his commander’s quarters for questioning, but he reassured his commander that he had printed the slogan only on the officers’ copies and not those of the enlisted men.
An excellent shot, Walt carried a gun during the liberation of France and the final Allied push into Germany. A small, blurry, black and white
photo that has long since been lost showed him with his rifle, as he led a liberated prisoner in a striped uniform away from Auschwitz. He once told me, and only
once, a tragic story where American soldiers were throwing food from a tank to emaciated survivors of a concentration camp.
Walt graduated from Stanford in 1943 with a degree in psychology. He was immediately drafted into the Army and sent to Europe to fight in World War II. During the war, as he was throughout his life, Walt was skeptical of authority. In 1944, he was in charge of a base newspaper in France, and he printed a separate batch of newspapers for the officers that said, “Vote for Wallace,” in reference to the vice president under FDR who was kicked off the 1944 ticket for his left-wing views. He was promptly summoned to his commander’s quarters for questioning, but he reassured his commander that he had printed the slogan only on the officers’ copies and not those of the enlisted men.
One man was so hungry and desperate that he was killed by the tank as he tried to grab a loaf of bread. In the final Allied advance on Berlin, Walt remembered
speeding through Germany aboard an American tank and passing by German aircraft parked in clearings next to the highway, grounded and useless for lack of fuel.
Although he never talked about fighting, I still have a vague image of units and soldiers moving through a dark and borderless land, with celebrations at night where they drank from kettles filled with any type of alcohol they could come up with. Fighting alongside Soviet soldiers, he told me he would visit with them, trade stories, drink and sing songs until late in the night. It was during the war that he decided to stop practicing his religion. Uncle Bill said Walt found he did not have faith while he was fighting. “He said he didn’t have foxhole religion.”
By the time Walt returned from the war, his father was preaching in the small town of Hollister, California. He recounted that when he went to register to vote, he told the young woman that he wanted to register as a Socialist. Her eyes grew huge, he said, as though an alien had appeared in front of her. She had never seen a Socialist.
In 1946, Walt moved to graduate school at the University of Chicago, working in professor Bruno Bettelheim’s program for emotionally disturbed kids. He used photo skills he picked up during the war for both his work with children and to establish a commercial portrait studio with his sister Ruthie. At the university clinic, he took a photo of a kid who believed he was a rabbit. He used a pair of cardboard ears to project a shadow of a head with big rabbit ears behind the image of the boy himself with normal ears, all in order to illustrate that the boy was not really a rabbit.
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Although he never talked about fighting, I still have a vague image of units and soldiers moving through a dark and borderless land, with celebrations at night where they drank from kettles filled with any type of alcohol they could come up with. Fighting alongside Soviet soldiers, he told me he would visit with them, trade stories, drink and sing songs until late in the night. It was during the war that he decided to stop practicing his religion. Uncle Bill said Walt found he did not have faith while he was fighting. “He said he didn’t have foxhole religion.”
By the time Walt returned from the war, his father was preaching in the small town of Hollister, California. He recounted that when he went to register to vote, he told the young woman that he wanted to register as a Socialist. Her eyes grew huge, he said, as though an alien had appeared in front of her. She had never seen a Socialist.
In 1946, Walt moved to graduate school at the University of Chicago, working in professor Bruno Bettelheim’s program for emotionally disturbed kids. He used photo skills he picked up during the war for both his work with children and to establish a commercial portrait studio with his sister Ruthie. At the university clinic, he took a photo of a kid who believed he was a rabbit. He used a pair of cardboard ears to project a shadow of a head with big rabbit ears behind the image of the boy himself with normal ears, all in order to illustrate that the boy was not really a rabbit.
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