number one gun fired, and the shell came down practically on the mark. Bill was elated and congratulated the group on their skill. But when the number four gun was fired, he suddenly found the earth opening up around him, and “tons of dirt blown all over us.” Crawling through the dirt, he discovered that the gun had been trained directly on him and his team. It was only a miracle that had saved them.
Bill was still in that mountain town on the day the Armistice was signed. He was kept in France until spring, and was just developing a taste for French wine when he was finally shipped home, to be separated from the service.
“Like all returning vets, I ran into a few difficulties,” he later recalled. “Unlike most of them, I was heading toward a destiny that lay in directions I could not conceivably have anticipated when I stepped off that ship onto the New Jersey shore and into the waiting embrace of my lovely wife.’’
1. One explanation for the big discrepancy in Bill’s memories of that time is, as he himself suggests, that he was struggling to win his mother’s approval during this 1914-15 period, and deliberately lied about the fraternity bids to explain why he did not belong to one.
2. The famous epitaph actually reads: “Here sleeps in peace a Hampshire Grena- dier, / Who caught his death by drunking cold small Beer. / Soldiers, be wise from his untimely fall, / And when yere hot, drink Strong or none at all. / An honest Soldier never is forgot, / Whether he die by Musket or by Pot.”
Chapter Three
By the time Bill was mustered out of the Army, he had proved himself a leader, and the men of his artillery battery had given him a special token of appreciation. He had an acknowledged ability to get along with others; he had some college education, an aptitude for science and mathematics, and lots of drive. He had, too, the constant support of a loving wife who was confident of his imminent rise to great heights.
He also had a sinister new companion — alcohol. Not yet apparent as a problem, a drinking pattern was nonetheless already established. When he drank, it was often excessive and sometimes accompanied by odd behavior and blackouts.
In May 1919, Bill found himself a free man. Intensely ambitious for himself, full of great dreams for the future, he had no specific plans for the present, and like many another veteran, found it difficult to adjust. For him, it was hard to accept the status of ordinary person again, without the rank and privileges of a commissioned officer. “I was much surprised, for example, in the New York subways, when the guards failed to salute me, and when the passengers pushed me around,” he said.
Because he hadn’t finished college and wasn’t really trained for any trade or profession, he also had trouble finding a job.
Lois’s father, Dr. Clark Burnham, with whom Lois and Bill were living, was a prominent man in the Brooklyn community. He used his influence to help Bill get a job as a clerk in the insurance department of the New York Central Railroad. “In fact, I worked for my brother-in-law, Cy Jones, who was at that time the head clerk.
“Well, it was a tremendous comedown from being an officer and awfully, awfully hard to take, especially from a brother-in-law. I worked there some months and turned out to be such a very bad bookkeeper and manager that the New York Central fired me. And that produced a mighty rebellion in me that I would show that town and that I would show these friends of Lois’s, in fact, I would show the whole goddamned world.’’
Bill’s resentment toward the railroad was so intense that it actually moved him, for a short time, to turn his back on the conservative economic views he had held all his life. “At that time, the socialist plum plan for taking over the railroads was in vogue, and very briefly, despite my Vermont training and origin, I turned quite socialist — a reaction, I expect, against the New York Central.”
Bill then had what he remembered as a period of “flunking and slumping’’ in his quest for another job. “Finally, I took a job on one of the New York Central piers, driving spikes in planks after the carpenters sawed them off and laid them down, and that got me up very early in the morning way over in Brooklyn, and I had to work up around 72nd Street, and I ran into the New York unions.
“Well, I wasn’t so socialistic now. I objected very much to joining the union, and I was threatened by force, and I left the job rather than join the union. And meanwhile, the drinking had been crawling up.”
It was partly to give themselves time to think and partly to get Bill away from drinking that Lois persuaded him to take a walking trip with her in Maine. From Boston, they took a boat to Portland, Maine, and walked, carrying packs and Army pup tents, from Portland to Rutland, Vermont.
A passage from the diary Lois kept on the trip shows how lighthearted and happy they were:
“Met an ultra modest red-haired man with his shirttail hanging out through a hole in the back of his pants, who, most properly, kept his eyes away from the shocking spectacle of a woman in knickers. When asked about the Saco River, he said it was three miles down the road but that he hadn’t been that far this summer. . . .
“We got a fairly early start but stopped at the first brook we came to and took our morning baths. Although almost in the center of a place called Ross’s Corners, we managed somehow to find a secluded spot. An auto with a horse hitched on behind passed us. . . .
“Spent the night on the shores of Lake Winnepesaukee. We spied a mink hunting among the rocks and heard a loon calling in the stillness. The northern lights were wonderful on this cold night. . . .
“We met a joyous farmer with a broad-brimmed calico hat, who sang to his team as he drove them down the hill. He explained to us his singing encouraged the horses not to stumble.’’
After their return to Brooklyn, Lois found work with the Red Cross, as an occupational therapist at the Brooklyn Navy Hospital. She had taken a course in occupational therapy while Bill was overseas. Unlike Bill, she never had any trouble holding a job.
Bill, too, finally found a job as an investigator in fraud and embezzlement for the United States Fidelity and Guaranty Company. He had also given up his somewhat vague ambition of becoming an engineer, and had enrolled instead in night classes at the Brooklyn Law School.
It was at his grandfather’s insistence that he had abandoned engineering and taken up the study of law. Although he was not sure that he wanted to become a lawyer, he knew that a knowledge of the law would be useful, whatever he finally decided on.
While Bill was completing his plans to go to work, he had answered a blind advertisement in the New York Times. To his astonishment, he now received in reply an invitation from Thomas Edison himself. Bill was requested to come to Edison’s laboratories in East Orange, New Jersey, for an employment test. A heaven-sent opportunity — Edison was one of Bill’s heroes! Though the inventor was very old and his greatest achievements were behind him, he was still active.
When Bill arrived at the Edison facilities, he and a number of other applicants were taken into Edison’s own laboratory — a long, unpretentious room — and given a written examination. Edison himself was there, seated at a cheap and battered desk in a corner.
It was a difficult test, containing 286 questions, Bill remembered: “In one question, they would want to know what was the diameter of the moon, and the next question would be what are overtones on a stringed instrument, and the next question was where do they make the most shoes, and the next question would be what kind of wood do they use for oil-barrel staves, and it just covered the gamut. The obvious idea was to see whether you’d been observant in your reading and in your observation of things in life in general.
“Well, the afternoon wore on, and people finished their papers and turned them in, and I hadn’t finished. I answered all the questions I could immediately and then went over, because a lot of them were capable of estimate. Comparative populations and some scientific things could be estimated, and others you could remember if you kept working at it. So I answered a very large proportion of the questions in some fashion or other, and the old man came over and asked if I found the exam hard, and I said yes, that I thought it was very difficult.