The choir first formed twelve select Sundays ago. It reconvenes
every annual remembrance of that first gathering. Every year the choir
grows. Those who join these days are gray, bent, proud and too
frequently forgotten. But their voices, when mingled with those more
ancient, reach the stars. We raise our glasses to the ones who didn’t
make it through on this day, and they silently return our toast.
Silently, that is, but for the echoes of an anthem of the Greatest
Generation.
From the tables down at Mory’s, to the place where Louie dwells,
To the dear old Temple bar we love so well.
I hear it on this day, that strange echoing Kipling parody that Dad
would break into three Cuba Libres after sunset. The song had the
same resonance as his war stories, his matter of fact admission that
caves were sealed on his orders, trapping Japanese combatants in a grave
of dwindling oxygen. Dad said he never pointed a weapon and killed
during the war. He merely gave orders and men died. The only weapon he
brought home was a sword taken from the battlefield that hangs in our
library. He never brought firearms home. My Dad, who hunted with weapons
for sustenance in his childhood and carried weapons in the Pacific
Theater, would not have them in the house.
Sang the whiffenpoofs assembled with their glasses raised on high
And the magic of their singing casts its spell.
When I was a boy I imagined the whiffenpoofs some manner of secret
society that met furtively at Mory’s, or the Temple Bar, or wherever
Louie dwells. I didn’t know the song was a spoof of Kipling’s
self-indulgent "Gentlemen Rankers." All I knew was that Dad must have
emptied glasses while belting its verses in some local iteration of the
Temple Bar, maybe in dusty old Tucson, maybe in a jungle best forgotten.
Whatever the inspiration, his singing cast a spell.
Yes the magic of their singing,
Of the songs we love so well:
"Shall I Wasting" and "Mavourneen" and the rest!
We will serenade our Louie,
Til health and voices fail,
What a carpe diem statement! I think that is what grabbed me,
young as I was, still unschooled in death and loss. We will serenade
our Louie Til health and voices fail. Damn! Of course! Why not! Sing
it now, sing it loud, sing it proud. We shall never grow old!
("Those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end." Gene
Raskin, recorded by Mary Hopkin, 1970)
The choir sings "the songs we love so well" every December 7th and every
succeeding choir is louder and stronger than those that sang before.
Today is the twelfth time December Seventh has fallen on the Lord’s Day
since the bombs fell on Oahu on the day that lives in infamy. The
Whiffenpoof choir has grown by more than a factor of ten since then and
adds members every year.
And we’ll pass and be forgotten with the rest.
There are few of them left now, stragglers on history’s beach, keeping
their memories and songs alive until they join the choir. It is fitting,
I think, that they revered "The Whiffenpoof Song" and adopted it in
tavern lore throughout the land. Fitting, because it is common-man
self-deprecating, no longer an ode to the glories of soldierhood, but an
ode to time spent with those we love, in whatever Temple Bar we love so
well. This is what sanctifies The Greatest Generation: they celebrate
their ordinariness. When they saved the world, they didn’t come home to
raise hell. They came home to raise kids. They didn’t think of
themselves as heroes. The heroes were the ones who didn’t make it back.
We are poor little lambs
Who have lost our way,
Baa! Baa! Baa!
We are little, black sheep
Who have gone astray!
Baa! Baa! Baa!
The Kipling parody of 1910 had a very different meaning after the two
World Wars of the 20th century. War had made "black sheep" of
the finest of the Whiffenpoof men. Unlike the regretful supplicants of
Kipling’s work, the Whiffenpoof men had not joined military service
because they were black sheep. Quite the contrary. They joined because
they were Americans, and not all of them joined voluntarily. War made
black sheep of all of them.
My Dad sang "The Whiffenpoof Song" and I heard the echoes of regret and
mortality in his song. We were all lost sheep, that is what he meant
when he sang, and he sometimes seemed the lostest sheep of all.
Once, during one of my visits to the Memorial of the U.S.S. Arizona in
Peal Harbor, I watched an elderly Japanese lady toss a lei made of
orchids onto the oily surface of the waters that barely cover the sad
old hulk. The flowered lei danced and bobbed in the calm Pacific as the
oil from the wreck wrote mute rainbows in the waters around it. I
quietly thanked the Japanese lady for sharing her prayer.
If you have not visited the Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor I advise
you to do so as soon as you can, because the survivors are dwindling in
number. They will share the visit with you. They still make the
pilgrimage, American, Japanese, and others.
But, the ones who lived it are joining the chorus. Soon, they will all
be gone and with them, the memory of what it was like to save the world.
The sky will be filled with voices every December 7 but the land will be
silent. The Greatest Generation will have passed and been forgotten with
the rest.
As long as I have breath I will salute them on this day.
Gentlemen songsters off on a spree
Damned from here to eternity
Lord have mercy on such as we!
Baa! Baa! Baa!
© December 7, 2014 by Mike Tully
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