Charter. Internet. Problems. This problem has lingered on for three weeks.
The people on the phone have been nice. The technicians that have visited the house have been nice. There is a great disconnect between the two aspects of the company. It has been my experience that any company with the word “Communication” in its title doesn’t do an especially good job communicating within itself.
So we’ve had Charter troubles for a good long while and everyone who’s had the experience understands. Finally I became a little more insistent on the phone yesterday. A serious, sturdy fireplug of a man visited, fixed things and left. But the problem wasn’t fixed. So I called again and they rescheduled, but the guy apparently didn’t return last evening based on the phone call we didn’t receive. So we called again today, when the problems continued again, and I talked with a supervisor.
She listened patiently, said the guy had returned last night for outside work (but the story changes, so who knows) and professed her inability to do anything more than give a little discount before sending someone else out.
Someone else came out and worked outside, a condition upon which I insisted, as every variable inside had been tested and approved. We shall see.
All of this fussing, though, has resulted in two different Charter employees following me on Twitter. I told one of them, as I told Helen, the supervisor, that Charter needs a secret handshake. I appreciate that things occasionally go offline and need repair. I’m willing to accept it on good faith that the company has been responsive and is trying to find and fix the problem. By and large that has been the case during all of this. The frustrating part is having to detail all of this to each random person I meet on the phone.
“That’s a good idea!”
Write up a memo, then. Get a raise.
Brian is here, and Wendy too. They’ve each come to visit for the weekend. Brian made it this afternoon and we took him to the swimming and diving meet. Brian was a swimmer and The Yankee was a diver. I have watched both on television and covered the sport, but just sit and nod to their observations.
Auburn has one of those powerhouse swimming and diving teams. They have 13 national championships in the last 15 years or so. When I was in school I did a coach interview show where I had the great pleasure of regularly speaking with then-coach David Marsh. He coached 22 Olympians at Auburn and 89 individual NCAA title winners. This is the most important thing I learned from him.
“You have to respect someone willing to spend hours and hours, swimming hundreds of laps, to shave a thousandth of a second off of their best time.”
When David Marsh talked about swimming you sat quietly and listened.
So Auburn (the men were ranked sixth, the women 12th) upset visiting (5th/6th ranked) Florida, proving Tigers are better than Gators in the pool. Florida does well at distance, however.
But the sprints today were all Auburn. This is the men’s 50-free:
Auburn’s swimmers Adam Brown, Karl Krug and Marce Chierighini swept the top three places in that event.
Wendy got in this evening as the rest of us finished a delicious dinner The Yankee made. Tomorrow we’re going to Auburn’s national championship football celebration.
(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:
I learned today a photograph of mine is being published in a book. Perhaps more than one. The Email reads “We are happy to inform you that one (or more) of your photos has been selected for publication … ”
They could be more specific, but, then, it is a coffee table book. Perhaps they can’t. Maybe the coffee table book industry is in flux about the size of their margins and page counts and that’s left everything up to a last-minute design by some machine tech who’s going to be doing the actual heavy lifting. Maybe there’s some question about whether a book should have odd or even pages and an extra photograph or two hangs in the balance. Maybe they just like to keep their options open. This is for a book on Auburn football. You can find out more about it here.
Spend some time on campus this afternoon. We had a meeting about a class which is set to begin next week. We’re teaching three sections of the same class and are trying to standardize things a bit. One of my colleagues has done a very nice job pulling all of this together, and so this was a great meeting.
This is a survey class where we take new students and give them the opportunity to learn about various types of media and public relations and advertising. In the overview we take field trips. Now I just have to line up a television station, a magazine publisher and a PR firm. That’s for the rest of the week.
We had a late lunch at Moe’s Original BBQ with Brian. I think we might have been the only people in the place. For a while I wasn’t sure that the one employee was there. But the barbecue was good.
We stopped at the mall for The Yankee to exchange something at Sephora. She exchanged her product there and the lady running the counter complained of gas prices. I told her to try a horse. Government regulations have improved their oats mileage, you might have heard.
We drove home in the darkness. As we got off the interstate I learned that my wife has, improbably, never heard Biz Markie’s classic hit. So, for her, and for you:
That spent 22 weeks on the Billboard chart in 1990, earning heavy rotation from January to June, peaking at ninth that March. Only Phil Collins, Michel’le, Billy Joel, Bad English, Taylor Dane, The B-52s and Janet Jackson topped Biz at his height of popularity, and three of their songs were number ones.
We live in a miraculous age, really. Every time someone goes to the hospital you hear about some new procedure doing some amazing thing in an incredibly un-invasive way. And then the patient is back on their feet again in no time.
Scientists make great strides with impressive frequency on many of the big issues of our day.
I can beam a movie into my computer, just because I want to sit in my library and read, rather than walking into the next room to watch the same movie, beamed into the television.
These are amazing things.
I can’t keep an Internet connection when it rains.
Just before we moved here the good people voted to invite in some cable and ISP competition. Just before Christmas they dug through our neighborhood to install their new equipment.
Tiny flags sprouted up throughout the area marking underground this and buried that. Asphalt and sidewalk are painted in cryptic codes. There were two big holes in our yard. The came back along and fixed that part, at least.
But without fail the Internet turns demure at least once a day.
I stopped counting at six times today. Sure, I grouse and complain. A nice guy on Twitter who works for Charter in Missouri tried to help. But he’s in Missouri. The local folks are nice enough, too, when you can get them out here. They haven’t fixed it, yet, but at least they’re kind.
Science can do this: “We have built a wireless implantable microelectronic device for transmitting cortical signals transcutaneously.”
Get a guy out front with a shovel? You are sure to get rainwater into your conduit.
So I listened, when the Internet connection worked, to The Damned United while I read today. It was based on a friend’s recommendation, and is the fictionalized biopic about an English club manager in the 1970s. If you can’t study over that you’re just not trying.
It didn’t work out very well for the guy. He held the job just 42 days.
Later there was Death at a Funeral, last year’s American version. I’m betting the English version was better. IMDb agrees. It was probably more nuanced than the remake. Nothing is subtle about Martin Lawrence or Tracy Morgan, though.
After the rain stopped this evenin, and the Internet connection returned — Is there a list, somewhere of things that are disproportionately, irrationally disappointing? Does this top that list? — I watched Brothers, without reading.
This was the one to see undistracted. It has a reasonable flow and it possesses a sound story (it is based on a Danish story). I’d buy Tobey Maguire with a lower rank, but Jake Gyllenhaal as an ex-con works. The trailers, if you’ll recall them, did not do the film justice. The build is much slower and the end is almost uncertain.
Elsewhere, I read and studied. I tinkered with the site. You’re reading a new font. Thrilling, I know.
Tomorrow’s adventure will make today’s adventure look like … movies and reading and fonts. I hope your Wednesday is equally impressive.
history / memories / Monday / video — Comments Off on “May we be ever unswerving in devotion to principle” 17 Jan 11
I’m doing this new thing on Twitter, starting the day’s incessant babble with a This Day in History. It is so useful when radio announcers do it, I figure why not bring it to the new format. It really sets the tone. Much like radio announcers.
I never did this day in history on the radio. It was dumb then, too. But, if you find the right things, pull the right threads and put things together just right …
And here were today’s things:
1991: Operation Desert Storm began 1961: Eisenhower warns of the military-industrial complex 1949: America’s first sitcom airs
Draw your own conclusions what these things mean. I’ve no idea.
Back then the talent did their own promotional spots. If you consider what she’s shilling you have to marvel at how things have changed.
Mrs. Goldberg seems to run the thing — she created the radio program prior to television, of course she’s the central figure. The dialog moves quickly, but the style would be lost on a contemporary audience. But dig this first exchange:
“A gangster killed a man in a telephone booth … ”
That’s just the beginning of the first sentence of the episode.
Alabama inaugurated its new governor and other elected officials today. There was a parade. There were clouds, but then a great clearing out by the sun just before Gov. Bentley address the crowd.
There were other speeches, and a flyover, and singing. There was also artillery. I watched it on television. The advisor of my master’s thesis was one of the studio analysts.
Our new governor, it seemed, had to wear an ID lanyard. That’s going to be my lasting impression, I’m afraid. If ever there was a man, and ever a day for a man to note require a brightly colored cloth necklace with a plastic sleeve containing information about his name and title, this would have been that day.
The new lieutenant governor is very excited. Kay Ivey has a perfectly shaped south Alabama accent. I always enjoyed interviewing her when she was the treasurer and I was still reporting. She had nice answers and delivered everything in her lovely tone. I thought she’d jump out of her shoes today.
The new state auditor could not be there for the ceremony. She was welcoming home her son. He’s an army captain who’s been deployed in Afghanistan. This isn’t a problem because her husband sits on the state Supreme Court. He swore her in later today. They have another son who’s a mechanical engineer at the huge steel plant in Mobile. That’s an interesting dinner table.
Spent the rest of the afternoon and into the evening writing. Writing, rewriting, moving blocks, reshaping words of clay, lumping it together and rolling it between my fingers. Finally I made a lumpy little ashtray — or something — out of it. It’ll be around on Thursday, I think.
And that’s it. That’s enough, says my mild, persistent headache.
The quote? That’s Eisenhower. It doesn’t strike you so much as rhetoric as an old man who has seen a thing or two and who knows a thing or two. Fifty years ago tonight he said that. It was a Tuesday, and that was his last big speech before leaving office on Friday. You wonder if he went to bed the rest of the week, hoping we’d listened.
