The choir assembled when Hell stormed the Lord’s Day on December 7th, 1941. 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 my office. 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 Rudyard 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. 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.
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 Pearl Harbor, I watched an elderly Japanese lady toss a lei made of orchids onto the oily surface of the waters that barely cover the glorious 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 7th 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!
(“The Whiffenpoof Song” was written in 1909 by Meade Minnigerode and George S. Pomeroy)
© 2021 by Mike Tully
PUBLISHER’S NOTE: I first wrote this column in 2003 for the “Inside Track” website, back when I co-hosted the “Inside Track” radio show with the late Emil Franzi. I have reprised it every year since.
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Testing, Testing, Testing
The line at Tiki’s Grill & Bar queued up eight feet from the hostess station. A young woman, with a marker in her hand, asked everybody in line to show her their COVID-19 vaccine information and identification. Once they did, she stamped their hand with a red mark and they were seated inside.
Tiki’s is located on the third floor of the Aston Waikiki Beach Hotel, overlooking Kalakaua Avenue and Waikiki Beach. While the red stamp was unique to Tiki’s, most businesses on the Hawaiian island of Oahu require proof of vaccination. I pulled out my driver’s license, along with a digital vaccination card in my iPhone Wallet. The island of Maui has similar restrictions.
Kauai is not as strict as Oahu. Kauai is more bucolic; people are not crowded together as in Honolulu and Waikiki. The Oasis on the Beach restaurant took our temperature, but most businesses on the Garden Island were more casual. The prevalence of mask-wearing was much higher than on the mainland, however. Very few people on Kauai went around unmasked, at least while among others. Masking on the beaches was rare, which made sense. The brisk trade winds constantly cleanse the air and you’re about as likely to catch COVID on the beach as to contract VD from a fantasy.
The “vaccine passport” debate is over in Hawaii. In order to avoid being quarantined, visitors must obtain an exemption from Safe Travels Hawaii. That involves registering on a state-owned website, answering a questionnaire, and uploading copies of your COVID-19 vaccination card. Once the State is satisfied you are fully vaccinated, you are issued a QR code that is downloadable to a smart phone. We had to show our QR codes when we checked our bags with Hawaiian Airlines at Phoenix Sky Harbor, as well as when we checked into the Hanalei Bay Resort in Princeville on the island of Kauai.
All of us except the one-year-old were fully vaccinated and boosted before we traveled to Hawaii. We all wore CDC and FDA approved N95 face masks. But Omicron is relentless. Notwithstanding our precautions and Hawaiian state requirements, three of our travel party contracted COVID-19. One person began to suffer symptoms the day after we arrived back in Tucson. They took a home test the next day, which showed the presence of an infection. Two others developed symptoms a day later.
Kris and I were asymptomatic, but needed to be tested, since we were obviously in close contact with infected persons. Home testing was not an option. I scoured the CVS and Walgreens websites and none of their stores had test kits in stock. Ordering test kits online required a three-to-five-day shipping delay, but that was irrelevant. They weren’t available online anyway.
The next best option was to sign up for a test at one of the County’s testing sites. I visited the Pima County Health Department website and registered Kris and I for testing appointments at a Paradigm Health testing center on East Grant Road. I naively believed we would walk into the facility, sign in for our scheduled testing, and be done within a matter of minutes. That is not how things work in COVID land.
The line was more than two blocks long. The temperature was in the low 40s. The line was not moving. Just getting inside the testing facility would take at least an hour, probably more. That raised the absurd prospect of getting sick to find out whether we were sick in the first place. We left. Dozens remained in line, many of them elderly. I wonder how many of them developed a serious illness from prolonged exposure to the cold air.
A member of our traveling party, who needed a test to authorize COVID-19 leave, stood in the same line later that day. The wait was an hour and a half. Why didn’t the lab have employees reach out to the people in line and offer them test kits to take home and self-test? You had a line with dozens of people who were not socially distanced. Even though there were separate testing locations for asymptomatic and symptomatic people, there were no separate lines. That’s right: symptomatic individuals were crowded into a packed line with the asymptomatic. The geniuses who ran the program turned a COVID-19 testing opportunity into a super-spreader event.
Kris and I were tested at our nearby Walgreens a few days later. We made appointments for drive-up testing. Mine took a total of four minutes. Kris, who had vehicles in front of her, took a few minutes longer. Both of us tested negative.
I don’t know why we old farts escaped COVID-19 while our younger travel companions did not. We were obviously exposed. Perhaps we enjoyed a kind of super-immunity because we got our COVID-19 vaccine booster at the same time as our flu shots. Or maybe – more likely, actually – it was just dumb luck.
The person with the most severe symptoms had not yet gotten a flu shot. They may have been suffering from COVID-19 and the seasonal flu simultaneously. That would be the most lyrical malady in the history of disease: Flurona.
♫ First there’s a sneeze
Then a cough, then a wheeze
Then you’re down on your knees
‘cause you’ve caught Flurona.
Just wear a mask
Quarantine is your task
It’s the least we can ask
‘cause you’ve got Flurona
M M M My Flurona
M M M My Flurona ♫
Nice beat. Easy to cough to.
© 2022 by Mike Tully
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