A gem of an interview from 2004

Eugene Sand, left, and Edward "Smoky" Stuever

    Over the years, as I attended reunions of my father's tank battalion from World War II, there were several veterans I would see almost every year. As a result, I interviewed some of them on several different occasions, sometimes recording a casual conversation in the hospitality room with other veterans at the table, at other times doing a longer, one-on-one interview. As a result, I would sometimes have several different taped versions of the same story, each time with a few more details, or, frustratingly, a few details that differed from the time the same veteran told the same story two years earlier, sort of a one-man version of "Rashomon." Once, for example, I was listening in as Jim Flowers told the story of Hill 122 to a youngster who came to the reunion with his grandfather. I had heard Jim tell the story dozens of times, but as he grew older, he would sometimes have to reach for a detail, which would result in a lengthy pause. At one such pause I provided the detail, which prompted Jim to admonish me by saying "Who's telling this story, me or you?"
   There was one veteran, Ed "Smoky" Stuever, who had so many stories, about growing up in the Depression as the son of two hearing-impaired parents, about helping to build the Skokie Lagoons with the Civilian Conservation Corps, about having his tonsils removed, about life in the horse cavalry, about repairing and changing engines on tanks, about the death of his buddy Marion "Shorty" Kubeczko, that I resolved to sit him down and get his story from start to finish, which I finally did in 2005, when he was 88 years old. One of my earliest recordings, going back to 1991 or '92, was his account of how he got the nickname "Smoky." He was in the veterinary detachment of the 11th Horse Cavalry in California in 1941. His lieutenant's wife gave birth one night so the lieutenant passed out cigars in the morning, and the men sat around smoking their cigars before they began working on the horses. There was one horse which nobody wanted to deal with because it had a reputation for meanness, but it had a "stub" -- I believe he meant a thorn -- in its hoof, and somebody had to take it out. So Ed said he would take it out. He then said, "Watch my smoke."
   He had the horse's leg cradled in his crotch and was about to remove the thorn when the horse suddenly lay down, causing Ed to turn his head. He still had the cigar in his mouth and the horse's side made contact with the lit end of the cigar. "Watch my smoke," Ed repeated at that reunion. "There goes Smokeeeey!" as the horse sent him flying into several bales of hay.
   It was only after I'd heard that story many times that Ed remarked that he never liked the nickname, even though at every reunion all the other veterans would still call him Smoky.
   That 2005 recording was one of the highlights of my so-called career as an oral historian. Ed filled two 90-minute cassettes, then we broke for a battalion luncheon, and when we returned he filled another 90-minute tape. After digitizing and transcribing it, I realized there were several stories he didn't even cover, but that I had on earlier tapes.
   My New Year's resolution this year was to go through my old tapes and digitize some of the ones that I'd overlooked over the years. I digitized and transcribed two interviews -- with Bob Hagerty and Morse Johnson of A Company -- in January and here it is the middle of July, but this month I got back to keeping that resolution, and just the other day I discovered a hidden gem among my 600 hours of interviews.
   I didn't realize, or had completely forgotten, that the year before that 2005 session with Ed Stuever, I had interviewed him at the 2004 reunion. His daughter, Rita Cascio, was with him and she helped with the interview by asking him to provide some details which he might have overlooked.
   Ed Stuever passed away in September of 2014. He was 97 years old.
   Following is the audio of that 2004 interview. The full three-hour 2005 interview is available in my collection of "More Tanker Tapes," in my eBay store.

Track 1

Track 2

Track 3

Track 4

Track 5

Track 6

Track 7

Track 8

Track 9

Track 10

Track 11

Track 12

Track 13

   Purchase "More Tanker Tapes," which includes the three-hour 2005 interview with Ed Stuever, in my eBay store.

   Thank you!

(Ed Stuever passed away in September of 2014. He was 96 years old.)

Edward H. Stuever beloved husband of the late Genevieve (nee Schmitt); devoted father of Tom, Mary, Rita Cascio, Therese, and Lora (Steve) Hall; dear grandfather of 10; great-grandfather of 15; great-great-grandfather of four. Edward was a US Army veteran of World War II and the founder of Stuever & Sons Draft Beer System. Funeral Monday, 11 a.m. from Salerno's Rosedale Chapels, 450 W. Lake St. (¾ mile west of Bloomingdale/Roselle Road), Roselle, to St. Matthew Church, Glendale Heights, for Mass at 12 noon. Interment Elm Lawn Cemetery. Visitation Sunday, 3 to 9 p.m. at the funeral home. Please omit flowers. For information, 630-889-1700.

Published in Chicago Suburban Daily Herald on Sept. 6, 2014 - See more at: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/dailyherald/obituary.aspx?pid=172371586#sthash.QQZqA1Yq.dpuf

A juxtaposition of events

   A few weeks ago through Facebook Cleo Coleman's granddaughter asked if I had the interview I did with Cleo and her uncle Doug on CD, as she would love to hear Cleo's voice again (he passed away in 2006). I searched my computer, and even picked it up, turned it over and shook it a few times, but no audio fell out. Since I did the interview in 1996 and used a transcript for my third book, "A Mile in Their Shoes," I figured the audio is on the hard drive that I rescued from my old computer. Unfortunately, that hard drive is more corrupted than Whitey Bulger and his FBI handlers put together.
   Not one to be easily deterred, I promised Cleo's granddaughter I would re-digitize the original tape, which usually means searching through about 30 cases of 15 cassettes and cursing my lack of organizational ability, except I knew Cleo was in B Company and because I only interviewed a handful of B Company veterans from the 712th, I'd put them all in one case, unlike my A and C Company interviews, which are scattered throughout the three bookshelves which call themselves my archive.
   Around the same time, as I attempt to increase my presence in the Amazon on-demand and Kindle catalogues, I began transcribing one of the four interviews I did with Marine veterans of World War II. Two of the four were already transcribed, and I figured if I transcribed the other two and carefully edited all four, I could put them together in a book and call it "Semper Four."
   And then an odd thing happened. In listening to my interview with Cleo -- in addition to the interview with Cleo and his son I also re-digitized a kind of informal 1994 interview I did with Cleo poolside at the Drawbridge Estates Inn in Fort Mitchell, Ky. -- I heard a passage that was, on an emotional level, eerily similar to an incident described by Bob Hamant that took place on the other side of the world, and which, I daresay, was repeated countless times in countless variations throughout the Second World War.
   Cleo was describing the death of Stanley Muhich, a sergeant in his platoon. Muhich had a bit of a short temper, and this was toward the end of the war, during the battle for Mainz, so it was probably in March of 1945. A round jammed in the barrel of the tank's 75-millimeter cannon, and the only way to free it was to stand in front of the tank and push a long wooden pole with a bell shaped thing called a rammer staff down the barrel. Instead of maneuvering the tank into a relatively safe area, like behind a building or beside a copse of woods, Sergeant Muhich jumped out of the tank, began the process of freeing the round, and was killed by a sniper.
   Sometime that evening, an infantryman marched two young Germans, one of whom may have been the sniper, past the tank. A fellow tanker who'd been a buddy of Muhich's since their days in the horse cavalry in 1941, through three years of training and almost a year of combat, took the two prisoners and shot them both. Coleman recalled that after doing this, the tanker was visibly shaken and his face was white as a sheet.
   Cleo named the tanker who did this but I won't disclose it here, as it's not something the person's descendants should maybe ought to find if they google his name.
   At about the same time as I was digitizing the Coleman interviews, I was transcribing the audio of my interview with Bob Hamant, conducted in 2000 in Cincinnati. Bob was a Marine on the island of Tinian, and I made that interview into a separate two-CD audiobook simply titled "A Marine on Tinian," and then included it in the four-interview audiobook called "Four Marines," the name of which I'm also going to change to "Semper Four."
   Early in the interview, Bob described witnessing the famous "Marianas Turkey Shoot" from on board ship off Saipan. He witnessed an incident close to his ship in which a Japanese plane shot down an American P-38, and the pilot bailed out. As he helplessly headed toward the sea, the Japanese pilot came down to his level and machine gunned him to death in his parachute. Then "about 15" American fighter planes converged on the one Japanese fighter, shot it down, and multiple times raked the sea with their machine guns.
   One of these events occurred in the European Theater of Operations, one in the Pacific, and yet it seemed as if there was a purpose in my processing them at about the same time, as if it were a hint that I should make a blog entry out of them. And so I did!

Clip of the Day: Tonsillectomies

Art Horn at Camp Seeley, California

The inscription on the back of the photo, which Art sent to his girlfriend

In 1941, some 500 recruits from the Chicago area were sent to Camp Seeley, California, to fill out the ranks of the 11th Cavalry. Two of those recruits were Art Horn and Ed "Smoky" Stuever.

For some odd reason, Stuever in recent years came to dislike his nickname. Nevertheless, he always loved to tell how he got it. When he was working in the veterinary detachment, a horse was brought in with a thorn in its foot. Stuever's lieutenant had just become a father and passed out cigars, and Stuever went to remove the thorn from the horse's foot while the cigar, lit, was in his mouth. The horse shifted and its thigh came in contact with the business end of the cigar, and the next thing Stuever knew he was flying through the air. "There goes Smoky!" one of his colleagues shouted.

Interestingly, there was a popular comic strip at the time called "Smoky Stover," and I've often wondered if that didn't have something to do with his being given that nickname as well.

At one reunion, Stuever and Art Horn were reminiscing, Stuever about his days in the Civilian Conservation Corps and Horn about his time in the cavalry, when the subject of tonsils came up. Which leads me to today's "Clip of the Day." Be forewarned, however, this story is not for the faint of heart.

Clip of the Day: Tonsillectomies