We Who Are Alive and Remain Read Online Free PDF

didn’t come off the lake. You had to get it at the place that made all the ice. Everybody would buy it. I delivered newspapers for a while, if you call that a job, but there just wasn’t no places to work.
    I had one other brother who went into the service. He made it through the war. Afterward he got married and lived pretty far away, but I managed to see him quite a bit. His name was Charlie, but we called him Chubby. I don’t know why we called him that—he wasn’t chubby. I had another brother, Gerald, and we called him Softy. I asked him, “Why do they call you Softy?” He worked in a coal place, so he said, “because of soft coal.” I couldn’t connect that, but that’s what they called him anyway. I had another brother, Robert, and we called him Bibs. How the hell did he ever get that? Another brother, James, we called him Pep—I don’t know why they called him that either. I was the only boy in the family who didn’t get a nickname.

Al Mampre
    I grew up in Oak Park, Illinois. Our family is Armenian. Dad was a carpenter early on but switched to Oriental rug repairing, which he did most of his life. My father managed to keep us going during the Depression. He worked hard day and night to keep us afloat. My mother was a housewife. During the war she participated in the Gray Ladies (Red Cross). There were two boys in our family, my brother and I. He was with Jimmy Stewart’s air force [General James L. Stewart] as a teletype man.
    As a boy, I had no idea I wanted to be a medic later on. I was a Boy Scout and took first-aid classes with them. My family is Episcopalian, so when I graduated from high school I thought I might want to go into the ministry. I went to a Methodist school first, Ohio Northern University, then a Baptist school, Hardin-Simmons, in Texas.
    At Ohio Northern I joined a fraternity. I was the only fraternity boy who was a member of the Timothy Club, for preministerial students. My fraternity brothers could hardly wait until I became a preacher so they could sit in the front row and heckle me. They called me the PPP. One time at a fraternity dance somebody called me that and a girl wanted to know what it meant. I didn’t want to tell her it meant piss-poor preacher.
    Faith became more personal for me as the years went on, nothing I wanted to impose on anybody else. I also thought it would be unfair of me to go into the ministry and get married—in those days it was assumed that your wife would go into the ministry with you. So I didn’t want to impose that on a wife who maybe didn’t want to choose that sort of life. I went into psychology after the war.

Herb Suerth Jr.
    My name is Herbert J. Suerth Jr. My dad was Herbert J. Suerth Sr., that’s how I ended up with the nickname Junior in the outfit. My dad sold insurance for a living and also had a couple other jobs. In the Depression you did about anything and everything you could. He ended up being a model maker in a furniture manufacturing business. Dad was of German descent. Our last name traces back a thousand years from Cologne (sometimes spelled Köln), Germany. Our last name used to have an umlaut over the u, but it was dropped before World War I because of the anti-German feeling that existed in those days, and even worse as we approached World War II. My grandparents were both born in the United States.
    I was born in Chicago, Illinois, on October 28, 1924, an only child. My dad did not speak English until he went to grammar school, but I never knew that until years later because he never spoke with an accent. I learned a little German from him but not enough to get me a drink of water in Berlin. We were middle-class. Dad inherited a few thousand dollars in 1937 and he and Mom bought a house in a nice middle-class neighborhood. They lived in that house until they moved in with me and my wife in 1956.
    I grew up in Chicago. I’m a product of a very Christian/Catholic family. I went to a Catholic grammar school, then spent