![War, depression, devastating tragedy: Pandemic isn't their first, or worst, hard time (1) War, depression, devastating tragedy: Pandemic isn't their first, or worst, hard time (1)](https://i0.wp.com/bearswire.usatoday.com/gcdn/presto/2020/05/07/POEN/a676f9b7-4396-4b3d-87d7-f690d1f8ced4-AbbeyParkSeniorStories1.jpg?width=300&height=379&fit=crop&format=pjpg&auto=webp)
Get in line, coronavirus pandemic.
You're not the first, or worst, hard time endured by these seniors closing in on nearly a century on this planet.
These women and men lived through a Great Depression, fought a world war and suffered even worse. Theyoffer perspective as the world battles an invisible enemy.
No place like home
Jim Miles celebrated his 94th birthday listening to Johnny Cash and eating a sirloin steak dinner at American House Westland Hunter senior living community.
The birthday was a little different.He wore a mask outside listening to “I Walk the Line” and other tunes and is social distancing from family during the coronavirus pandemic. But one thing that he wasn’t going to do: “I’m not gonna sit around and cry.”
Miles doesn’t mind being at home, it’s the being away from home he remembers as difficult. Just out of high school, he left Alabama for the Army, where he was taught how to drive a tank and sent to Germany, where he served alongside Mel Brooks, the famous comedian.
Miles recalls how nervous he was at night, afraid and unable to fall asleep as bombs fell, thinking of home and how he wished to be there.
“I’d never been away from home before, but I went to Germany and met a lot of people over there and went through a war, and I drove that tank and that was the biggest thing— the urge to come home all the time,” he said. “Finally it was over.”
He says he received a lot of marriage offers while overseas, and he met a lot of people — good and bad — and just like here, you stay away from the bad ones and stay with the good ones.
Miles rejected the foreign marriage offers and eventually made his way to Michigan, where he got a job at Ford in Wixom and found the girl he would marry. Joan was employed by Ma Bell when he met her, but was even better at raising children, and they had five and shared a 39-year union before she died.
He learned in life that hard work is key and there are good people wherever you may go. And even when you can’t roam, “home isn’t such a bad place to be.”
Horrors of war
Robert Tessmer came from hardy stock.
His father, a tool and die maker, served in World War I and after he returned from France in 1918, he met Robert’s mother, an Alpena native who was working at Woolworth’s in Detroit. The couple married Christmas Eve 1923, and Robert was born Aug. 6, 1925, in a home on Park Street that Henry Ford had built for Dearborn plant workers.
When he was 5, just as the Great Depression was beginning, his parents decided west Dearborn was too rustic and moved across town to east Dearborn.
“We had a very tough time during the Great Depression, but I never knew it.We always had enough to eat and I had a lot of friends to play with,” he recalled.
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Tessmer was active in the Boy Scouts and recalls collecting aluminum pots and pans and rubber for the war effort while he was a student at Fordson High School.
He was drafted into the Army in December 1943 and the following fall TessmerleftNew York on a ship with 7,000 other men bound for Marseilles, France. They arrived Oct. 20, 1944, trekked 500 miles north to Alsace-Lorraine and less than a month later were in combat, advancing against the German troops, dug into foxholes and manning the winter line.
“We had to dig them out at a great expense to lives,” Tessmer recalled.
They lost a quarter of their company the first day in battle, and a third of their battalion. . In the final six weeks of 1944, they advanced 50 miles toward Germany. They had begun with 13,000 men, but by Christmas were down to less than half that despite reinforcements.
By mid-April, with his unit just outside of Stuttgart, the fighting had ceased with Germans surrendering in large numbers.
Tessmer recalls his 20th birthday present came with the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, which canceled his planned deployment to Japan.
On Easter Sunday 1946, Tessmer finally came home to resume civilian life. That summer, he went on a blind datewith Claudine, who was from Plymouth. They clicked. Four years later, on June 24, 1950, after he completed his engineering degree at the University of Michigan, they wed.
They raised three children in Dearborn and then lived in Northville for 12 years before they moved to Abbey Park at Mill River in Lyon. He owned a manufacturing business and traveled the world with Claudine.
Tessmer recalls that for years he never shared with his family the horrors of war: the men who died on either side of him, including his best friend; the extreme weather conditions that caused trench foot; the lack of proper food.
He has since suffered more tragedy,losinghis youngest son three years ago to pulmonary fibrosis, and just over a month ago,after nearly 70 years of marriage, Claudine died.
The pandemic is yet another blow, an unfamiliar enemy.
“The problem with coronavirus is no one understands it or knows what to do with it,” Tessmer said. “It’s like the bogeyman around the corner, ready to jump out at you… This will be a tough one for our country, economically and medically and for the whole world.”
Cup o' tea and laughter, best medicine
For Joan Morgan, who has seen her share of suffering, including losing two of her children in infancy, what sets the pandemic apart is the loneliness.
“Having to be away from people is the hardest time,” she said.
Morgan was born Dec. 11, 1925, in England. She was 13 years old when she and her family, gathered around the radio, heard Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declare war against Germany.
Her mother made tea, as she did during any catastrophe, something Morgan is doing a lot of these days herself and which her coffee-drinking friends at Abbey Park laugh about.
“It helps me,” she says simply. “If all else fails, drink a cup of tea.”
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Plenty of scary days followed that tea time, as London was bombed. She remembers in particular one Saturday night after walking home after meeting a friend. As the 16-year-old Joan passed a churchyard, she heard a “doodlebug” overhead, a German self-propelled bomb.
She crouched down to shelter in the churchyard as the bomb hit a farm a short distance away and then began laughing hysterically as she saw chickens hanging from the trees, flapping their wings.
“The farmyard was completely demolished, but to see that at that time, it looked so funny to see the chickens flapping up in the trees,” she recalled. “The bombings, it wasn’t something we dwelled on too much, it was an expected thing — Oh well, here we go again.Five years of the war, that was a long time.”
She joined the Royal Air Force at 17 with the permission of her father, a London police officer.
“I kept up on Dad until he gave permission, I just made his life hell,” she laughed. “I thought I was going to see the world, but I never did.”
She served for four years as a World War II ground radio operator.
Joan met Joe Morgan while in the service and theymarried in 1947, learning soon the meaning of for better and for worse.
The couplesufferedthe loss of two children in infancy, a trauma which Joan said makes the pandemic and every other hard time pale in comparison.
“I think, so what, I’ve seen worse, this is not the worst I’ve seen in my life,” Morgan said. “I feel strongly about those revolting, demonstrating;they have a lot to learn. They need to know a little more about life.Everybody is feeling different and out of their depth, but if we don’t hang together, we’re going to get lost. If you don’t hang together, there is no hope.”
The dark times early in her marriage were compounded when Joe couldn’t find work in England, driving him to apply for a job at Ford Motor Company. He landed an engineer position in Michigan for $200 per month and the family was separated by an ocean for two years.
One of her happiest times came from when the family reunited, one week before Christmas 1956, after Joe had scrimped and saved and bought a mobile home for Joan and their childrenMarilyn and Paul.
Joe walked to the airport in Romulus from the mobile home on Michigan Avenue in Wayne to pick them up, because he didn’t have the money for a round trip fare.
He wore his shoes out, the children were so unhappy thinking Santa wouldn’t find them, they had a Charlie Brown Christmas tree they hung some lights on, and they ate a chicken for their holiday dinner instead of turkey. Sixty-four years later, it remains Joan’s favorite Christmas.
“We were together, we were a family, they hadn’t seen their Daddy for two years,” she said. “It was the most enjoyable Christmas I ever had, the first Christmas I came to the States.”
But that, she notes, is how life goes; some of the best times are after the worst time.
Morgan, who lost her husband 20 years ago, has time now to think of that often. When her mother-in-law was in a nursing home, she said she would look at the people there and pity them, thinking of how lonely they must be as they sat and stared into the distance, at something beyond her vision.Now she sees clearly.
“I thought how lonely they are, but they aren’t lonely,” she said. “They are thinking of their memories.”
At 94, she thinks often of the good times, whichstill outweigh the bad.
“There will be happy times again,” she said. “These things don’t last forever… I don’t consider (the pandemic) harder, I consider it another episode in a lifetime. Each time something happens that is catastrophic, it is another part of life.”
Morgan said as a Brit, she is “not very emotional” but notes that times of stress are another matter. The key difference between this time and other difficultiesis the ability to come together.
“During World War II, if someone lost a son or daughter and you heard, you went to the house and there were hugs and tears and love all around,” she said. “That is what I miss now. I miss going outside and saying, ‘Hi, how are you?’ and giving a hug. I miss hugs, I can’t wait for them again.”
For now, while she awaits the embrace of family and friends, she goes on her balcony when she can, soaking in the sun, drinking her tea, and remembering the happy times, onesshe knows will return. She is here for it.
Rationing comes round again
Betty Hamilton was born Nov. 18, 1923, in Terre Haute, Indiana, and spent some of her elementary school years on her grandparents’ farm, whereshe and her parents had moved to help when they became ill. She milked cows and fed chickens whileher brother raised rabbits.
Betty looked up to her brother, a schoolteacher. When World War II began and he went into the service, she soon followed, enlisting in the Navy on her 20th birthday. She landed at the Great Lakes shipyards in Bay City, where she was a teletype operator for the duration of her service.
The grocery store shelves these days bare of toilet paper,disinfectants and meat draw some similarities to that long ago time. Hamilton remembers the rationing and getting couponsfor meatand cigarettes that she sent to her sister-in-law and shoes, which she sent to her mother.
Now, she has someone else to bring her the necessities in life. She is cooped up in her apartment and doesn’t get out, but tries to maintain her health, which is the most important thing. When she wakes, she does her exercises in bed, gets dressed, and breakfast is brought to her room. She does another set of exercises using weights in her room, and then likes to read, particularly books by James Patterson.
Betty married WWII Marine John Hamilton in Indiana after the war, but was widowed after just 15 years and finished raisingtheir three children alone when her husband suffered a heart attack in his early 50s.
The grandmother of six cherishes her health and urges everyone to take care of themselves.
“Everyone has problems, but we can always resolve them,” she said, speaking by phone from American House in West Bloomfield. “If you feel good and have pretty good health, that is a blessing. So stay healthy and stay safe, and right now, stay home.”
Contact reporter Susan Bromley at sbromley@hometownlife.com or 517-281-2412. Follow her on Twitter @SusanBromley10.