Busy day in class. We set up blogs, talked about news critiques — I started in with the obvious, showing them Antoine Dodson.
So we talked about news critiques, and we started talking about resumes. We’ll talk a lot about those this semester.
So I prepped for that, read, talked much, stayed long and so on.
Lunch was jambalaya. Dinner was enchilada. I feel very cosmopolitan.
I was a trending topic on Twitter this evening.
A former student noticed it and pointed it out to me. Of course it wasn’t me. There are three semi-famous to extremely famous people with whom I share the name. There’s the talented bluegrass musician, Kenny Smith, the former football player Kenny Smith and The Jet, the NBA basketball star turned TNT analyst.
Turns out that Kenny Smith and his colleagues Ernie Johnson and Charles Barkley had Tracy Morgan on their show tonight. You can find the clip on YouTube yourself, but suffice it to say that we learned that Morgan makes Barkley look soothing and responsible in comparison.
And some days you wish the random person on Twitter could distinguish between a man with two NBA titles and a guy 11-years younger who is a bit slower and could only barely touch the rim of a basketball goal on his very best of days.
I’m also three or four inches shorter, but let’s not quibble over obvious differences.
(Editor’s note: I shared a part of this story in December, but here’s the rest of the history and remaining mystery. This was reprinted, with minor edits to improve clarity, from a piece I wrote at The War Eagle Reader. It was again updated in December of 2013, with tiny additions to Dean’s time at Auburn, and also to reflect Adam’s time there as well. )
Dean E. Hallmark would be 97 today.
He died during World War II and this part of his life, his heroic service, and his sacrifice, has been well documented, but he has become one of those names almost lost to the whispers of history.
Like all war stories, Dean Hallmark’s is gripping, unique, and worth retelling. It is tragic, frustrating, and ennobling. But the end of his story is where it actually starts.
It was the 1944 classic film of the famous Doolittle Raid, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, that caught Maj. Adam Hallmark’s interest. Adam is a modern-day military man. He serves in the Army. He’s a history graduate of the University of North Alabama. He’s an Auburn man, too, graduating in the fall of 2013 with a master’s degree in public relations. When he’s not in uniform he serves as the family historian.
Adam was watching Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, but it wasn’t the period’s special effects or the actual war footage of the B-25s or the recreated section of an aircraft carrier flat top built to hold four B-25 bombers that caught his attention. It wasn’t the stars, leading men like Van Johnson, Robert Mitchum and Spencer Tracey, that made him think twice.
It was the family name: “There goes Hallmark.”
Adam asked around to find out if there was a chance that this Hallmark in the film was a part of his family. Though no one seemed to know much about the pilot, there was a connection. The Hallmark mentioned in an otherwise throwaway line in the movie was Dean Hallmark. He was the pilot of The Green Hornet, the sixth plane off the aircraft carrier in Doolittle’s daring attack.
That revelation started Adam on a years-long journey of discovery about his fourth-cousin. Dean had never married and never had any children. He left behind only his parents and a sister. And while his war years are perhaps the best understood there is much of Dean Hallmark that remains lost to time. Adam’s search continues to learn more about the boy of Texas, the Auburn man, and the young pilot who would be called off to war.
Dean Hallmark grew up the son of a cattle farmer in Texas, in a time when if the livestock wasn’t prospering the family might whither away. That may be why the west Texas native became a boy of east Texas. He played football in high school, appearing unnaturally large next to his teammates. He towered over others at six-feet tall. He could push around opponents with his ranch-hardened 200 pounds of muscle.
With Dean playing on the line his team almost won a state championship. He graduated from high school in 1932 and eventually played a season of junior college ball in Paris, Texas. Soon after he got a scholarship offer to play at Auburn.
He spent one year in the Loveliest Village, majoring in education and playing for the Baby Tigers. Back then freshmen didn’t play on the varsity squad. Dean’s reasons for leaving Auburn remain unclear, though Adam has learned that about this time Dean’s father lost a leg in a farming accident. Perhaps he went home to help the family.
Back in Texas he turned to aviation. It turns out a friend at Auburn — Col. Roland B. Scott ‘38 — helped Dean find that passion. One of his flight instructors in Texas was also an Auburn man, Adam said.
His early aviation career would take Dean to South America where he flew petroleum workers in and out of hard-to-reach locales. During that time Germany invaded Poland in 1939.
Dean joined the Army Air Corps in November 1940, before the United States was drawn formally into the war. He would become one of the first men to fly the North American B-25B Mitchell medium bomber, earning the attention of Col. Jimmy Doolittle.
Aviation buffs know that Doolittle was a folk hero already, having been the first to fly across country from Florida to California. He would become a war hero for leading Hallmark and 78 other brave young men in the aerial raid of Japan in April of 1942.
This was the first offensive strike at the Japanese mainland by the United States. The goal was to shake the Japanese faith in their leadership. At home, the aim was to boost morale after the devastating surprise of Pearl Harbor and bad outcomes elsewhere in the Pacific. The raid wasn’t the largest military success, but served notice that things were shifting in the Pacific.
The Raiders’ launch was actually the first time a B-25 had ever used a carrier deck. Dean watched five planes lift off. This had been done exactly five times. All of their practice runs were on land. When Dean Hallmark pulled back on the controls of his bomber he was 28 years old.
Dean Hallmark, photo via Maj. Adam Hallmark.
A VFW hall in Greenville, Texas, is named after Dean Hallmark. A bond drive was named after him in Texas during the war. His service earned Dean Hallmark, the pilot, several awards of distinction. Dean Hallmark, the man, has proved elusive.
“No one in the family had a clue,” Adam said.
Tales from surviving Doolittle Raiders have been a wealth of information. The old men have told Adam that, “They can still hear his voice and the things he said to them in their memories.”
“My generation and that generation are separated by what, 60 or 70 years? There’s no separation between soldiers,” Adam said. “They were kids. We were kids when we started off. Kids are going to be kids. And some of the stories are hilarious.”
From those memories, the few clippings Adam has rescued from dusty library collections and the last remaining family source — a niece and nephew Dean never met — the story of Dean Hallmark, the man, is starting to come together.
“I think he was one of those guys who would tell you there was a place and time for everything,” Adam said. “When it was time to work it was time to work, but when it was time to play it was time to play.”
Picture the handsome young man with time to kill with buddies at a place called Top of the Mark. It was, and is, a bar in San Francisco, popular with soldiers for its commanding views from the highest point of downtown San Francisco. As Dean’s friends told the story they were throwing dollar bills from the balcony to the street below. After a while one dollar landed on the ledge, but the greenback was clearly destined for the ground. Dean talked his friends into holding him by the legs so he could grab that dollar and throw it on down to the street.
The Raiders could recall another time in Los Angeles, where Dean enjoyed down time in a revolving bar. A man walked up to Dean as the flyboys walked into the joint and tried to start something of a confrontation. Dean sat down in the slow-moving rotating bar. With each turn of the rotating bar Dean would turn away from the view, gather up his six-foot frame in that impressive uniform, walk over and smack the guy in the head. This happened four or five times. The other man finally got the message, got up, said nothing, and left.
Lt. Dean Hallmark, front left.
Those “kids” would soon play their small part in reshaping the world.
It was a choppy day at sea and the deck was wet when Dean flew to Tokyo with the rest of the Raiders, dropped his bombs, made a second pass to drop more bombs, before finally making his way to China.
He ran out of fuel though, a by-product of being forced to launch early, and had to put his plane into the sea just off the coast. Dean was catapulted through the windshield in the crash, the pilot’s seat still strapped to his body. He was hurt, but he and his fellow officers survived. The two enlisted crewmembers on board drowned.
Once ashore the officers evaded the Japanese for eight days before being captured.
They were tortured and malnourished. Dean’s navigator, Capt. C. Jay Nielsen, grimly wrote of his time as a POW at war’s end.
“They had put straps on (Dean’s) legs and arms and pulled them until he thought his joints were coming apart.”
Nielsen would also tell of having bamboo shoved under their fingernails. Their captors would light the bamboo on fire, demanding to know how they’d gotten to occupied China. Another captive would later write of being water boarded shortly after their capture.
They were about to be executed, Nielsen said, but the Japanese soldiers’ orders suddenly changed. That meant more torture.
Dean came down with beriberi and dysentery. The Japanese military tried Dean, his surviving crew and five crewmembers from another bomber on trumped up charges. Nielsen said Dean dropped 50 pounds and was on a stretcher, because of his illness, during the farcical court martial. (After the war Gen. Henry ‘Hap’ Arnold, commander of the Army Air Corps, wrote that it was “a mockery of justice and all the things we fought for.”)
Nothing was translated for the eight Raiders. Adam has learned through his research that the soldiers weren’t given any defense and were forced to sign confessions of war crimes that were written only in Japanese. Even after the trial was over they didn’t know they were going to be executed.
All eight were sentenced to death. Five of those sentences, including Nielsen’s, were commuted.
In the spring of 1943 President Roosevelt announced the bitter word that some Raiders had been executed, but there were no details for worried families.
Hallmark and two others from the other bomber — 1st Lt. William Farrow and Sgt. Harold Spatz were executed by firing squad on October 15, 1942. It was, as one of the captives described it, a gray, foggy day.
Dean’s family wouldn’t learn about his execution until after the war.
“His parents both died broken people,” Adam said.
Indeed, part of Dean’s father’s obituary a decade later was devoted to the pilot.
His sister, even in her later years, was an “emotional train wreck” if anyone brought up Dean.
Dean wrote three letters to family while he was a POW in China. The idea was that the letters should be sent home through the Red Cross, but his captives held the letters and they weren’t uncovered until after the war by American investigators. Adam isn’t sure that Dean’s parents ever saw the letters. (Letters written by Spatz, who was executed with Dean Hallmark, did find their way to his father.)
The three letters are a part of the mystery. There are emotional expressions that suggest that the torture and solitary confinement was either impactful — the first-hand depictions immediately after the war are horrendous — or that perhaps Dean was writing under duress.
“I didn’t want this war in the first place,” Dean wrote. “I came on this mission because I was told to.”
But Adam points out that the Doolittle Raid was a volunteer mission. Despite such inconsistencies there are what Adam considers an element of truth to the letters. He wrote of the southern meals he missed and his girlfriend back home.
His last letter begins: “I hardly know what to say. They have just told me that I am liable to execution. I can hardly believe it. I am at a complete loss for words … It still seems that I am in a dream and can’t believe what is happening.”
After the war details of Dean’s death were finally pieced together. The three men condemned to die were taken outdoors, tied to small crosses, forced to kneel, and shot near a race track. Their bodies were cremated and buried. It has been suggested by Japanese scholars that those deaths were meant to absolve the Japanese military of some of the raid’s embarrassment.
Capt. Nielsen, who wrote of his experience for the wire services, was the only member of Dean’s crew to survive the war. The Green Hornet endured the highest casualty rate of the mission. Of the 80 Raiders, 73 survived the mission. Dean is remembered as one of the finest pilots on the mission, but, as one survivor wrote, luck didn’t break his way.
In 1946 four Japanese officers were sentenced to hard labor for their role in the executions. American investigators ultimately found the remains of Dean and his fellow Raiders. Today Hallmark’s ashes are at Arlington National Cemetery, where he was interred in 1949.
There was an article about the Raider written in The Auburn Alumnus by his old friend Col. Roland Scott, who also named a study carrel in the RBD Library in honor of Dean. There’s also a plaque in the Letterman’s Lounge inside Jordan-Hare Stadium bearing his name. A few years back Auburn Magazine ran a feature as well, but they are short on Dean Hallmark’s time at Auburn. That remains one of the biggest gray areas in the story.
Dean Hallmark died a hero to his nation. Part of how he lived is still being discovered from the faithful searching of his fourth-cousin. He now knows Dean lived on Glenn Avenue while he was in Auburn. There are a few pictures from the elder Hallmark’s college days that Adam has recently received. One is of the strong, handsome young man sitting on a motorcycle with friends. There is another on one of the local benches, and another outside a church. Dean knew Shug Jordan. Dean shows up a few times in the Glomerata. Adam has matched some of the background structures in photos to views we still have today.
Also, after Adam enrolled at Auburn he visited the university archives and found this picture of Dean in a random stack of random photographs the archivists haven’t organized. Right on top of the stack, there he was:
Auburn football, circa 1935. Dean is in the background, lined up at left end.
And so the search continues, even as the Doolittle Raiders are slipping away. As of the most recent 2013 update to this post, there are only four Raiders remaining. In November of 2013 Adam was there, as was NBC, when they held their final reunion, in Ohio.
For more on Dean Hallmark and the Doolittle Raid, please visit:
Cam Newton says it is time for him to fly off to the NFL. And this is how I’ll remember the guy, a big joyous balloon-like creature — because balloons make you smile — flying out of the light holding something that I’ll choose to think of as a popsicle stick. Because if balloon creatures make you smile, then a balloon creature bringing popsicle sticks is all the better.
By happenstance I was taking that picture at about the same time Newton was announcing his goodbyes.
Yes, yes. Cam Newton was at the center of a controversy that was either manufactured or so shady as to be disbelieved, depending on whom you believe. I don’t know, and you still don’t either. What is definitive is that he was a nice part of a renaissance of fervor in the Auburn community and he did nice things while he was here, too. All of that won’t soon be forgotten, I’m sure.
We’d told ourselves the last several years that Tim Tebow was one of the greatest to ever play college football. And he was. So was Cam Newton. Consider: the guy played on three national championship programs in a row at Florida, Blinn and Auburn. Statistically you can’t get much more gaudy than his 1,473 yards rushing and 4,327 yards in total offense for the year. His 51 (!!!) scores — 20 rushing, 30 passing and one receiving — are more than 80something teams in big-time college football manufactured this season.
He wasn’t Auburn’s entire team, but he alone was statistically better than most of what you could see on Saturdays. He broke records previously owned by men named Tebow and Bo Jackson and Jimmy Sidle.
(That last one stood for more than 40 years. Newton would pick up the AP Player of the Year, the Walter Camp, the Maxwell, the Davey O’Brien and the Heisman awards, all as a matter of course. Best ever? If he was not he was darn close.)
His teammate, Lombardi award-winning defensive bear-dragon Nick Fairley will declare for the draft tomorrow. I can’t show a representation of him. Balloons can’t be twisted into savage rage machines. (He’s apparently a very nice young man off the field, though.)
So good luck to them, and all of their departing teammates, two dozen seniors in all. It has been a pleasure cheering you on and it’ll be nice seeing you when you return to the plain for a visit. War Eagle.
The Yankee is back from New England. Picked her up at the airport, which is, I think, the low-water mark for people watching.
It could have been my mood. After the drive to Atlanta, which was fine, if drizzly in places, I found a traffic jam in the parking deck. I made it inside 10 minutes early, to see the arrivals board already had her plane on the ground. This was really a statement of confidence on the part of the airline and the airport. The plane was still in the air, but close. They were supposing that they could get the plane down, or that gravity would lend a hand.
Thankfully for all involved the prophecy proved true. I stood at the landing by the escalators that bring up passengers from the underground trains. There a woman was more than a little miffed to have to wait for her husband. It was as if, she implied to her children, that the entire unseen process of landing a plane, gathering one’s things, disembarking and traveling through an airport the size of a small city was entirely his fault and he was doing it on his own schedule with complete disregard for her.
No wonder he was taking his time.
Two other young ladies were waiting for their friend. There was a great deal of texting between them, the expectant waiters and the unseen traveler. When that broke down — “How did she get to baggage? Where’s baggage? Why isn’t she here? Where am I!?!?” — they reverted to an actual phone call. Their friend had exited the train and entered the wrong terminal. So they hung up the phone and left.
Sadly I’ll never know if they were able to find their friend.
An airport steward came along and instructed us to get out of the walkway. We were a fire hazard, he said. We were standing between an escalator and the restrooms. No one moved. He did not put up much of a fight, convinced by our logic that, in the event of a fire in the area, we would no longer be a hazard.
Finally The Yankee rode up the escalator. We were like peas and carrots again.
Picked up her bags, which were being belched onto the conveyor as we walked up and quickly left the airport before much more of this tragic comedy could hold us up. People are very stressed, inattentive and not really prone to thinking for themselves at the airport.
I know this because the stories she told of her entire adventure pretty much backed up the idea. Someone should do a study.
movies / Thursday / video — Comments Off on Is that you John Wayne? Is this me? 23 Dec 10
That’s holiday of the future, ya know … Hallmark is just waiting for the right time to spring this on you. Possibly the next time the economy ticks. There will be cards, new presents you must get — if you love your children — and an all new backstory. What did those wise men do before they made it to the stable? Why isn’t a tacky restaurant riffing on that idea for their commercials already?
Every so often I get on a John Wayne kick. I prefer Clint Eastwood, I think because that’s what my grandfather preferred. And there was something creepy about Wayne as an oil fire fighter. There was something creaky about him as an old fighter pilot. But, then, to me John Wayne had always been old.
Rio Bravo is probably my favorite, just because Dean Martin was trying so hard not to be Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson was trying so hard to not be cool while simultaneously being the unhip kid, generationally speaking. It is a bizarre dynamic, but I like that story for the most part.
I’d never cared for Wayne in The Longest Day, he just seemed to … sit there. Those regrettable Turner color crossovers put a bad taste in the mouth of anyone watching basic cable at that point in the 1980s. But that wasn’t the Duke’s fault. In the last few years I got around, in one of these kicks, to seeing his last film, The Shootist, which was really stirring. For the most part though, I can take him or leave him. If nothing else he’s good to have in the background.
I had AMC’s John Wayne marathon on last night and part of today, just playing quietly as I read and did other things. He’s good for this. You can tune him out as I did in The Horse Soldiers — apparently John Ford’s only Civil War film — and just pay attention when he’s speechifying.
And, also, when he punches someone. The man could throw a film punch like no one else. Here’s a good one from McLintock!, which was also on today.
He’s punching out Leo Gordon, who was one of the big screen’s perennial baddies. He worked until 1994 and died a decade ago. Only because G.W. McLintock let him live that long. He was married to a woman named Cartwright, which just seems appropriate, given the times and prevelance of westerns. She was also in showbiz. Her last role was in A League of Their Own.
If you want to amaze your friends, put in A League of Their Own, turn on the subtitles and learn how to say “There’s no crying in baseball!” in French. Call your friends out of the blue with this expression. Repeat it two or three times and then just hang up.
Someone did that to me a few years ago, because they felt the need to learn, and to share, the phrase. And I was amazed. So give that a try.
Anyway.
Rambo came back today. We have a Rambo in our lives. He is an appliance repairman and, as such, we are none too thrilled about having a Rambo in our lives, because his existence is predetermined by a failure of some mechanical apparatus, the absence of which we have deemed less than optimal and, thus, begun the process of bringing Rambo into our home.
It would be perfect if the guy talked like Stallone, or even a shade tree mechanic, but he knows his business and seems to be a thoroughly decent, happy and well-spoken fellow. How he got the name Rambo will forever be a mystery. It isn’t a written rule, but you just don’t ask people named Rambo about their origins. You can pretty much guess anyway, and you can also be sure he’s not pleased with the whole situation. It only gets worse if you think about what his name could have been if he’d been born a few years earlier, or a few years later. Hollywood does no favors to men who want to name their kids after action stars. And the kids know it.
Right now some guy in his mid-late-30s named John Shaft Kurzweil is in complete agreement with me.
Rambo is here today to replace the pumperator on the dishwasher. He has brought a colleague. When you are in a different room and listen to them speak intelligently about the issue in a soft, un-intrusive tone they sound like Boomhauer.
I asked about the proximate cause of the problem, which, I’m told, could be hoses, seals, pumps, motors, engines or the motors on the seals that pump the hoses into the engine. Either way, the water wasn’t escaping into the drainage system in a pleasing manner, but was taking the gravity assist and going everywhere. Ultimately, Rambo’s colleague said “If it is man-made it will eventually break.”
Not to get geological here, buddy, but other stuff breaks too. Mountains, for instance, are susceptible to change and diamonds aren’t exactly forever, never mind the marketing. Now back to the problem at hand.
I was doing laundry while they worked. When the spin cycle turned on Rambo must have seen dollar signs. My washer sounds like a bronco with ADD and self-control problems. But the clothes come out smelling nice, so there’s that.
I asked Rambo what else was going to break — this was his fourth visit to our house, which still sits firmly on an ancient and sacred burial ground, I’m sure of it — and he was afraid to commit to anything. He bade me Merry Christmas and then said the best thing possible.
“Don’t take this personally, but I don’t want to see you again for a while.”
That’s my joke. And unless you’re rigging something else to go out on a time delay basis, or if you have trained the cat where we have failed, I’m hoping to not have to call your fine establishment anytime soon. On their invoices they do the company initials on a clothesline graphic. It is cute, but nothing I need to see again for a while.
More working and getting ready for the holidays. Amazon failed me. Not that it matters, but they promised delivery on Christmas Eve in the spam and on the website. The followup Email says December 27. I wrote a note, accusing them of treachery of the most grievous kind. Someone sent back a nice copy and paste Email which suggested they did not read my note. Where’s that John Wayne punch now? I canceled the order, which is a delightfully efficient process. I think they’ve done this before.
Meanwhile, on Overstock they were also promising Christmas Eve delivery. I bought the last of something there. How thrilling! The very last thing and I didn’t have to pinch other fingers or box out or throw elbows like a rebounding forward. Their followup Email assured me the Christmas Eve delivery date would be met. As of this writing the item has gone from Maine to New Hampshire and Louisville and is projected to be on time.
What a world we live in. Let’s compare and contrast.
On Monday I watched total strangers clap and cheer for soldiers returning home to their families at the airport. Oh that was just a special joy to see. It was even an honor to say welcome home to a bright eyed young lady from the Army who already had tears in her eyes as big as the pack on her back.
Later that night I couldn’t get a stranger to help give my car a boost.
Today I ordered something, shipped from Maine, and be placed in my hands tomorrow. That thing is coming in with Santa.
It took more than two weeks to get the dishwasher’s new pumperator for today’s install.
For symmetry’s sake I’m looking for a fitting John Wayne quote, but the man never talked about dishwashers or the vagaries of our national supply and distribution lines. We are the lesser for it.
