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Call Me Gaz by Gaz Green ISBN 978-1-891429-63-7 Memoir/History, 326-pages $17.95 |
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FOREWORD
I was always a dreamer. Yet I could never have imagined I would meet the people I have, travel the way I have, and share the love of such a beautiful, wonderful, caring family. The people I mention in this book are real. Many names might not be familiar to you as they lived in a different era. My father took me to Yankee Stadium when I was 12 to see Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Bill Dickey, Tony Lazerri beat the Red Sox 4-2. Each time the Babe came to bat everybody in the stadium stood up so show their respect. That day he did not let us down. He got two hits and drove in the winning runs. My brother took me to see the Lincoln Memorial the morning Marian Anderson was denied the right to perform in Constitution Hall. She got out of the car in front of us to make plans to sing at the Lincoln Memorial instead. A little boy took me inside the White House grounds. He needed a “grownup” so he could get in for the Easter Egg Roll. There, in front of me, big as life was Eleanor Roosevelt, the First Lady. Who would ever believe that I would meet John D. Rockefeller Jr. and be invited to his Memorial Service at the Riverside Church in N. Y.; be asked by Laurance Rockefeller to deliver the lay sermon in the Union Church of Pocantico Hills; become Board of Trustees President in that church and preside over a meeting with the Governor and future Vice President of the United States Nelson Rockefeller on the Board. David Rockefeller enabled me to spend an hour with Marc Chagall, serving as our interpreter as we discussed the creation of the “Good Samaritan” Memorial Window honoring “Mr. Junior” at the rear of Union Church. We were invited to Rockefeller wedding receptions, private memorial ervices, to play tennis in their famous million-dollar playhouse, and to their private homes. We taught their children in Sunday school, sat across the aisle from them in Church, and visited informally on the church lawn. After living 10 years adjacent to the Estate I probably had enough material to write a book just about the Rockefeller Family. I met and shook hands with Presidents Harry Truman and George Herbert Walker Bush; knew Secretary of State Jim Baker, Secretary of Energy Charles Duncan, Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy, and met Senators Walter Kerr, Jim Buckley, John Tower, Phil Gramm and Alan Simpson. Cab Calloway and I attended homeroom parents’ meetings together; Victor Mature and I ate ice cream on the deck of my ship in Greenland. I’ve had dinner with Desi Arnez and Lucille Ball; introduced Dr. Deepak Chopra, Dr. Wayne Dyer, Dr. Bernie Siegel, Og Mandino and Alex Haley to audiences. I met Ted Williams and Johnny Pesky the day they joined the Navy Flight Cadet Program; Otto Preminger invited Doc. Straub and me to visit him on the set of “Centennial Summer” that he was directing and asked Cornell Wilde and Linda Darnell to be our guides. I have sat in the Houston Astros broadcast booth with Gene Elston, Harry Kalas and Lowell Paas, been told an unbelievable story about Jack Kemp by Ray Scott, Voice of the Green Bay Packers, and, with baseball Hall of Famer Joe Morgan, watched Muhammad Ali prepare for a World Heavyweight Championship Fight. The Houston Oilers drafted their first soccer-style kicker after I gave the General Manager a demonstration of why they should; I conducted a press conference with Paul Richards, Astros GM, with Arthur Daley of the NY Times, Jack Hand of AP, and the leading baseball writers participating. I visited the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown and saw the plaques honoring many of the all time greats I had seen play. Likewise the Football Hall in Canton where I saw honored among others, Clarke Hinkle the great Green Bay Packer whom I met as bat boy for his Bucknell baseball team. I kept his broken bat for years. At Chautauqua my good friend, Jim Roselle, who has conducted live interviews of the featured lecturers for 33 years introduced me to such people as historians Michael Beschloss, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and her husband, Richard, speech writer for Lyndon Johnson; Columnists David Broder and E. J. Dionne; Bishop John Shelby Spong; Prosecutors Ken Starr and Elliott Spitzer; Poet Laureates Stanley Kunitz and Robert Pinsky; and, last but not least, satirist Mark Russell who became a good friend. Having completed one lap around the famous Indianapolis Speedway, I was thrilled to meet A. J. Foyt, Mario Andretti and other Indy Drivers. Likewise Evil Knievel, the most famous daredevil of all time. I know nothing about horse racing but I did know Bill Young, whose horse won the Kentucky Derby, and Frederick J. Lennup III, who was principal owner of the Wolverine Raceway in Detroit and the Track in Ft. Lauderdale. He had to be one of the most unusual persons I ever met. My sister Adelaide, four years older, let me ride in the rumble seat when she went to dance to the Big Bands at Hecla Park. There I saw Louis Armstrong, Horace Height and the King Sisters, whom I would meet in Syracuse many years later. I’ve been a sports fan all my life. I have had so many thrills. I saw Cooper French throw the lateral pass to Yutz Dietrich on a punt return to enable Penn State to beat Lafayette 6-3 after their 1932 game had ended. I was in the Astrodome opening night in 1965 when the first baseball game was played, President Lyndon Johnson was there. The NY Yankees were the Astros’ opponent and Mickey Mantle hit the first home run. While in high school I saw Bill Tilden play. When we lived in New York I saw great matches at Forest Hills. I have been to Newport RI., home of the Tennis Hall of Fame. In Bradenton FL, Andre Agassi and Monica Seles were at Nick Bollettierri’s Tennis Academy just down the street from us. We saw Bill Cosby and Robert Redford at John Newcomb’s Tennis Ranch in New Braunfels. My original title to my memoirs was to be “SHAKE THE HAND THAT SHOOK THE HAND OF, OR ALMOST DID” of interesting people I have met in my lifetime. But my wife Pat convinced me they are only incidental to this book. This collection of vignettes is dedicated to my children, grandchildren and great grandchildren so that they may have an intimate portrait of my life and share some of the experiences I had While in high school in State College, Pennsylvania, I was a part-time sports reporter for the Centre Daily Times. My pay: 2 1/2 cents per column inch for every story I got published. For a one-column, ten-inch article I could earn 25 cents. I worked my way through Penn State as assistant to the Sports Information Director, Ridge Riley. Also, I had the good fortune to play left halfback on two undefeated national championship soccer teams in 1939 and 1940. That was good enough to get me into one of the best fraternities (Phi Gamma Delta) and a couple of honor societies, Friars and Parmi Nous. I loved college – so much in fact that it took me nine years to get through. I met and married my college sweetheart, Deenie Wickersham, and we had almost 60 years together before she passed on after we moved to Sun City. I joined the Navy just before Pearl Harbor, served as an enlisted man for 15 months before being selected to go to Midshipman School at Notre Dame where I received my Deck Officer Commission. My first ship was the USS LARAMIE (AO16), an old World War One tanker carrying aviation gas and bunker fuel to Greenland. On my second ship, the USS MANATEE (AO58), we earned eight battle stars in seventeen months helping Admiral Bull Halsey’s Fast Carrier Force reclaim all the lost territories in the Pacific and were 200 miles from Tokyo when the war ended. After the war I had one semester to go for my BA in Business before I began a wonderful 25-year career with Procter & Gamble and the Coca Cola Company in Sales and Marketing, including ten years as Sales Manager in New York for P&G. At age 52 my wife, Dee, and I decided literally to take a year out of our lives to see what we wanted to do. We looked into the Peace Corps and lay church work. While we had other ideas, our kids thought we were going to become hippies and applauded. For 15 years we operated our own real estate company in New Braunfels as entrepreneurs and developers. At the top we had six offices from San Antonio to Austin. Profitability was like a giant roller coaster, but we had fun. Our company name was Gaz Green Real Estate and Investments. We had four company cars with license plates, GAZ 1, GAZ 2, GAZ 3 and GAZ 4. I wanted everyone to “Call me GAZ.” Our office in the historic Village of Gruene was, naturally, “Gaz Gruene Real Estate”. I figured that every time someone called out my name in public it was free advertising. After one year in Kansas City studying at the Unity School of Christianity, Dee and I retired to the Sarasota, Florida area for ten years, then came to Sun City in March 1997 to be near our daughter Lois, who with her husband, Scott & White Surgeon Dr. Charles Reiter, lives in Temple. As it turned out Dee received the best possible care at Scott & White before she died. My wife Pat’s deceased husband of 23 years, Bob Cords, was a dear friend of mine in the Coca Cola Company. Pat discovered I was here when she read my “Gaz Green Recommends” column in the Stacy Letter while looking for a home in Sun City. Now, at Age 87, as I finish my memoirs, I have started a new career writing a weekly “Profile” column for City Week, the new Community Newspaper for Sun City Texas. I got the idea for writing these Profiles from reading obituary notices. I would read about somebody who had lived here and passed on and say to myself, “I wish I had known that person.” There are so many interesting people here that I will never run out of subjects. I tell my friends I plan to do this for three years, until I am 90, and then I will decide what I really want to do with my life. At this age, can you imagine someone having this much fun and getting paid for it? This is the story of my life. CALL ME GAZ
—Gaz Green |
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Call Me Gaz by Gaz Green ISBN 978-1-891429-63-7 Memoir/History, 326-pages $17.95 |
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Out of Hungary by George Neuvirth ISBN 1-891429-07-8 Memoir/History, 109-pages $14.95 |
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Imagine you’re an upper-class male who summers in Switzerland and comes home to your parents’ mansion overlooking Budapest, when it still claimed the title, “Paris of the East.” It’s 1939, and you’re a young teenager, ready to begin high school. You have a good life before you. Then Hitler annexes Austria, of which Hungary shares a governing alliance. In the near future, your homeland must decide to take sides with either the Axis Powers or the Allies. It wants neither, but eventually makes a deal with Germany, opening its doors to Nazi terrorism and surrendering its Jews to certain death. Your mother is Jewish, but your father’s Aryan blood saves all of you. The Germans turn your home into a party headquarters, permitting you and your family to live in the basement. Once, you are interrogated and then jailed in a hotel room with twenty other men. Another time you are sent to the Eastern Front to work in a labor camp. You are then called to fight on the Western Front, but are spared from going. As the end of the Second World War approaches, the Russians surround Budapest. The ensuing six-week siege debilitates the city’s sources of water, food, and heat. Then the Russians break through and your street becomes a barb-wired war zone. Your backyard becomes a cemetery for German soldiers. You don’t like the Germans, but you will like the Russians even less. The best years of your life have been swallowed up by blackouts and air raids. You will not know physical freedom again until you escape Hungary after its short-lived revolution, a decade later. Your parents will have died and you will be sharing your house with “comrades,” when you were once the only child of a wealthy merchant. You don’t whine, however, because you have met someone who gives you hope, love, and peace in your heart. A National Revival has introduced you to Jesus Christ, your Personal Savior. He is your friend, your comfort, your way to spiritual freedom. Although you’ve been able to earn a Law degree, the Communist regime sentences you to a lifetime of mundane jobs, simply because you had been one of the bourgeois. By 1956, after “the war to end all wars,” your city and your life have been ravaged by a Nazi dictatorship, a crippling siege, and Communist rule. You witness a student uprising against that regime, which fails, resulting in Russia’s tighter grip. You hear about people leaving your homeland, and you see no reason you shouldn’t. You are alone anyway-you might as well be alone in a better place. And you know that God will always be with you. After a train ride which takes you just outside the border zone, you hike twenty snow-drenched, yet moonlit miles into Austria, first escaping Hungarian guards, then machine guns, finally spotted by Austrian searchlights, beaming their welcome. That morning, when you see oranges and bananas, you begin to taste freedom. You haven’t seen such exotic delicacies since your childhood. After several stops-first at your uncle’s in Vienna where he helps you begin to adjust, then to barracks where you learn about the ways of the New World-you board a plane for America. There, under a blue sky, across a vast expanse of land, you take a journey you could have never imagined a year before. With sponsors, you learn English, you find work. With the bidding of your new American wife, you return to college and earn a teaching degree in German and History. Your son is born and you move your family to Colorado, where you teach at a high school. Your daughter is born, and you live a long, happy, prosperous life, serving the Lord. You took a trip with your wife, back in time, to Hungary, to see the battered buildings, your once-beautiful home, and sad yet grateful that you escaped that life. Now, forty years later, you face old age and more hardship. Yet God still guides you. Perhaps He told you to write this book. It is your way of thanking Him, of reaching out once more, sharing with others how they can survive almost anything with God’s help. You know, because you did. |
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Out of Hungary by George Neuvirth ISBN 1-891429-07-8 Memoir/History, 109-pages $14.95 |
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The Red Arrow: An Infantryman’s War Account by Robert S. Hiatt ISBN 1-891429-57-4 Memoir/History, 128-pages $14.95 |
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One
The evening of February 5, 1944 was brisk and cold in Amarillo, Texas. I began my journey at approximately ten o’clock after a prolonged farewell to my family. Fort Ord, California was near Monterey and was my destination. It was to be our port of embarkation for overseas shipping. I arrived at Fort Ord three days later and remained there eight days that were neither pleasant or unpleasant, but just satisfactory, I suppose. I was eighteen years old, a high school graduate a few weeks beyond U.S. Army Basic Training and also Advanced Infantry Training at Camp Fannin located near both Tyler and Kilgore in East Texas. On the Sixth day of March, along with a trainload of soldiers, I headed for Camp Stonman, California, near Pittsburgh. The movement got underway in the early hours of darkness. Men were crowded into railroad coaches without concern until the train was loaded to its capacity. Then, six hours of train travel passed in what felt like twenty-four hours and brought this trip to an end. Upon detraining, we regrouped and upon command grounded our backpacks, helmets, gas masks and duffle bags. Then, long lines were formed near a dispensary and we marched through receiving shots and inoculations. Our stay was brief again—six monotonous days of early rising before the sunrise. Then, breakfast, calisthenics in the cold, invigorating air of California’s closing winter, several annoying hours of close order drill and finally free time with the exception of continual formations for drawing equipment. My group was alerted. The rumors were wild. On the morning of March 13, we were moved in an army truck convoy to the Pittsburgh docks where we waited for a rickety old river ferry. The rumor mill was flooding as we sailed up the channel to the San Francisco Harbor, where our far-from-flashy little boat chugged into its stall. After several hours we unloaded, bags slung haphazardly over our shoulders. The cycle of waiting to which one soon becomes adapted, slowly progressed through an hour or so of anxiety. Then it came. Men hoisted duffle bags to their shoulders and the processing began. Checking and double-checking of names—up the gangplank at dusk and on shipboard—a new experience began in our lives. The Hermitage, commonly called the Unowho throughout our voyage, was not filled to its maximum capacity that night, for only the advance details had been sent to make preparations for the remainder of the troops. The night passed with us in our assigned bunks. Then dawn came. We ate breakfast by shifts. Shift after shift ate and afterwards we were assigned to various details. At noon, we sailed for Mare Island where our ship dry-docked for repairs. Our few days were spent busily. Each man entertained himself by watching the crowds during the few hours off from details and by attending movies in the evenings. Then, the final moments were at hand—the new prop securely placed and we steamed back to San Francisco, loaded the remaining troops and got underway for the fighting fronts of the Southwest Pacific. It was March 20, 1944. We sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge into a vast reservoir of water—the King of the Seas—the Pacific. The hills of San Francisco seemed so near as I turned and glimpsed for the last time at the wonderful sight, so near. The first night out, nausea and seasickness ruled. The choppy sea initiated its recent transgressors. Cool evenings full of moist ocean air prevailed the first week. Sleeping was natural and easy in those days. It seemed like a dream—crossing this enormous body of water—but torpedoes and submarines constantly lingered in ones thoughts. However, the immaculate, deep blue of the huge ocean filled with beauty was very fascinating during the early days of our travel, but the spell soon lost its power. The monotony began. The beauty was absent. What had once been was no more. The sea was a vast body of nothing but dark water. The new experience was old. It was no longer considered humorous to stumble over feet and squeeze through sleeping compartments. Card games were a popular entertainment. Reading followed in popularity. Men with books spread out on the decks. A game of chess was seen here and there. The rails on the ship’s decks filled with troops scanning the water and the horizon for interesting sights was common on most days. But, nothing was all they could see. ... |
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The Red Arrow: An Infantryman’s War Account by Robert S. Hiatt ISBN 1-891429-57-4 Memoir/History, 128-pages $14.95 |
