Martin Wenglinsky

One of those companies that checks your DNA sent me an ad saying they could find my grandparents' World War II military records. Grandfather? My father was a soldier in World War II, not my grandfather. I clicked "grandfather" anyway and got the draft registration for my father, known then as Martin Wenglinsky. It showed his address in the Lower Park Heights neighborhood of Baltimore, his parents' address, in an apartment building off Grand Concourse in The Bronx, and the name and address of his employer, David Wendell, who lived in then-tony Ashburton in Baltimore. David Wendell was my grandfather's younger brother.

M. Wenglinsky and Sons was the family business, making pieces for mens' suits and wholesaling them out to manufacturers. "M." was my great-grandfather Mendel, who went by "Morris" in the United States, having brought his family to New York from Russian-occupied Poland around 1903. Someone tried to sandblast the name of the company off the side of the Cluett Building, but one can still see it at 22 W.19th St. in Manhattan. M. Wenglinsky had contracts with the government for clothing and supplies in both World War I and World War II. Mendel had six sons, and at one time, in addition to New York, there were factories in Paterson, New Jersey, London, England, Havana, Cuba, and Baltimore, Maryland.

My American-born father, I suspect something of a hipster, was not much of a student, not stupid by any stretch, but not well-disciplined. They gave up after he left his third high school, and he went to work in the family business. He told me that at some point he found out he was being paid less than anyone else in the plant, so he joined the union to make more money. When the union went on strike, he still went in to work with his father, but they had nothing to do. Someone gave him a package to deliver across the street, and the union people saw him and would not allow him to be hired back after the strike.

"No problem," said my grandfather, "you can go work for your uncle in Baltimore, and he'll teach you the business." Only Uncle Dave, who was much younger than my grandfather, had an infant son, and didn't want my father to learn the business. Apparently, they never got along well.

So, it's 1942, and my father is twenty and renting a room in a row house in a working class Jewish neighborhood, and I know that 1942 was not a good year to turn twenty in the United States. He was drafted, sent to Needles, California to train for desert combat, then shipped off to the Pacific.

My father was not much of a talker, and I was able to get very little from him about his war experiences. When we were children, we lived in a suburb full of kids, and most of our fathers were veterans. On summer nights they would sit outside and talk about the war with each other, but would clam up if any of us kids were around. 

It's hard for me to imagine how lonesome he must have been in Baltimore, and how terrifying it would have been to be drafted during World War II. At twenty, I was in college and protesting the war in Vietnam. It was when the shootings at Kent State happened, and the patriotism my father had evaporated from my thoughts. 

I might write more about this another time.