FreeForAll. . . Sunday? I wanted to get this out in time for some folks to read before their Monday doings. If you like what we do here, it’s free once a week. If you’d like more, it’s $8 a month. Happy Memorial Day.
Dick Kerin, teacher and coach, in 1970. (Enquirer file)
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On this Memorial Day, I write of Dick Kerin with longing and regret, pride and worry, frustration and hope, fear and a sad wonder if any of it matters. I’ve written about Mr. Kerin three times previously. Time 4 comes with a different feeling, one I’ve never experienced and frankly am unable to articulate.
The only constant is the lump in my throat as I type. I’m painting with a palette of colors an America in bleached and faded shades of red, white and blue. It’s an ill feeling. We’ve not done right by you, Dick Kerin. I’m sorry about that.
The last column I wrote about Dick appeared Jan. 19, 2019, a week after he died at age 94. Here it is. It explains in some small way the dignified glory of his life. A poster-man for The Greatest Generation, insufficiently explained in 800 words. Please read it.
On Dec. 7, 1941, Dick was a 17-year-old living in storybook central Ohio, Mt. Vernon to be precise, where he lived the Rockwell-ian ideal. After going to a movie matinee, Dick and his friends went to the drug store which, as you’d expect in 1941 America, had a soda fountain in back.
The boys heard the sound of a crackling radio. It wasn’t Benny Goodman’s clarinet. It was a news alert. The soda jerk said, “The Japanese just bombed Pearl Harbor.’’
Dick and his buddies had the only logical response to such news.
“Where’s Pearl Harbor?’’
Four years later, Dick Kerin was thigh-deep in scorching black sand. His unit, the 27th Marines, 5th Marine division, had just landed on Iwo Jima, a remote island in the Pacific Ocean, a bombing-run away from Japan.
Dick had been in the Pacific Theatre more than three years. He left college after one semester, to enlist. He witnessed first-hand the iconic flag-raising on Iwo, then spent the next few months fighting there and hoping not to die.
A photo that originally appeared in the Washington Post showed Dick with a bullet hole the size of a baseball in his shoulder. He was days short of his 21st birthday.
Dick survived Iwo. He left the war with a Silver Star and two Purple Hearts. He went home to Ohio and got on with it. For 34 years, Dick coached high school football and wrestling at Taft and Western Hills and Aiken and the old Greenhills High. He taught history.
Dick taught and coached at Greenhills from 1971 until he retired in 1983. After that, he spent every Veterans Day in the local schools, educating students on what World War II meant, and why they should care.
Oh, that we still had an army of Dick Kerins watching over our nation.
From my 2019 Enquirer column, which could have been written today:
We’re searching for something in America now. A purpose, a unity, a tie that binds. Something to hold onto. We struggle with who we are, we’re divided over whom we should become. Loving our country is more complicated than it used to be.
More complicated? No. No, it’s not.
It’s under siege, certainly. But it’s not more complicated. Loving America should never be so complicated that we have to, well, ponder it. Or fight over the proper way to go about it.
On this Memorial Day, we wouldn’t recognize Dick Kerin.
Oh, we’d honor him, the way we honor vets these days. We’d stand him atop the home dugout on Sunday afternoon, announce his name and cheer. We’d do the de rigeur flyover and feel good about ourselves. From the mountains, to the prairies. . .
But the hard work of freedom? The routine courage and patriotic selflessness displayed by Mr. Kerin?
Could we manage that in 2024?
The casual way we treat our great Republic now, the assumptions we make of its freedoms, suggests we could not. Americans are intellectually lazy and morally indifferent, myself included.
If you believe in polls, a recent one revealed 17 percent of those asked thought Joe Biden was responsible for overturning Roe-v-Wade. We have lots of crises now. They stack up like cordwood. Pretty soon, the pile will be a pyre and burn us all to the ground.
We ker-bump from crisis to crisis. We always have. The difference now is, the crises are mostly internal. Self-generated. Our greatest crisis is one of intellect. Americans are willfully stupid and proud of it. We’re spoiled, which only aggravates our condition.
A communal sense of duty and gratitude is missing, replaced by selfish grievances. We act as if we deserve our freedom. We don’t. We’ve always had to earn it, be it through our words or our deeds. We’ve forgotten that freedom mandates responsibility. We take freedom for granted. We storm our own capitol. Imagine that. The greatest country in the world, fighting itself over imagined grievances that no less than 50 courts shot down.
If only we understood our privilege. If only we respected it.
Our political leaders and our most lofty jurists have let us down, but not as much as we’ve let down ourselves. In the common parlance, we are better than this.
In February 1945, Dick Kerin lay in scorching sand on a hellhole-of-an-island 7,000 miles from Mt. Vernon, OH. He spent six weeks defeating the Japanese, who wouldn’t quit. He’d been fighting in the Pacific for more than three years.
He risked his life every day, for. . . us?
I’m sorry we’re not doing better by you, Dick. We’re not the country we ought to be. We might have honored your everyday heroism back then. Now?
On this Memorial Day, don’t just shake a vet’s hand or buy him a beer or offer nice, easy, lukewarm words of appreciation that make you feel good about your patriotism. Take a minute to think about Dick Kerin and the millions of servicemen and women who’ve made our cushy existence possible.
Then think about the mess we’re in today, who we are and how we got here.
And do better.
Thank Dick Kerin that way.
Flag is out. Generator is running. No actual damage on the property except for the small already dying redbud tree that tipped over into the front yard. Could have gone a different direction and landed on cars.
Son in law is winding down his long stint in Naval Reserves. Dad served 15 months at the tail end of WW2. Spent his time stateside as a pharmacist’s mate. Older brother walked away from student deferment at the wrong time and saw a lot of Ho Chi Minh Trail with 101st. Infantry, not airborne. He came home but carries a lot of ghosts with him.
I always text him that I’m thinking of him on Memorial Day.
I used to tell our Marine friend that I slept better at night knowing he was watching over us. He is retired, but they are still doing that.
There is a Thornton Wilder play The Skin of Our Teeth. Humanity continues against all odds, by the skin of its teeth. We all have our obligations, and so it goes.
A terrific message, poignant. As a Vietnam veteran and US Army Captain, I feel your words about our people/country today. OG’s like me served in a war we didn’t understand because our country needed our service. I get frustrated/angry today at the attitudes of my generation which may conflict with peace/compromise with other age groups. Well written Doc and thank you Dick Kerin!