Maxim

My parents were good friends with Judy Parker.  In the 1950s, between the ages of 10 and 14, I spent a dozen weekends with her son Maxim at their house in Long Beach.  Judy was about forty and had been through 5 husbands, which I thought at the time deserved some discussion, but the subject never seemed to come up.  I was certain it had something to do her daily vacuuming and dusting regimen.  Maxim and I would always be required to pitch in and help.  My dad used our vacuum to paint with more often than it was used to clean our floors.  Even at the age of ten, it was obvious to me that this was irrational behavior.  What did she think had taken place on the living room carpet in the brief 24-hour span since it was last vacuumed?  The worst part about this for me was that I had to keep quiet and go along with it.  My upbringing had required that I display good manners, always be polite (even if it meant telling a lie), and to conform with the local traditions when a guest in someone else's home. 

There were other things that made my stays at their home less than ideal.  Judy's brother Carl would show up on occasion making things awkward for everybody.  He was retired Navy, had a voice like a gravel truck downshifting, and was incapable of completing a sentence without swearing.  It never bothered him but it kept the adults, Maxim and me on edge.  The most unfortunate thing about the whole arrangement was that Maxim and I didn't really click; we were together only due to our parents' friendship.  Neither Maxim nor I had any siblings.  We were not used to putting up with another kid, let alone one not of our own choosing.  In the end, being kids, we just tried to make the best of it.

Judy's fifth husband had worked for Vultee Aircraft in Downey, California.  Perhaps this had something to do with Maxim's obsession with the military.  In addition to sharing his first name with the world's first recoil-operating machine gun invented in 1883, most of his waking hours were devoted to war in its various forms.  His favorite television shows were Navy Log, West Point and Victory at Sea.  He had dozens of models that he had assembled and now displayed in his room.  The models were the expensive ones, frustratingly detailed and time-consuming to complete.  The models were WW II replicas of fighter planes, bombers, an aircraft carrier, and a destroyer. 

He also had a drawer full of Dinky Toys.  These were expensive, die cast, military tanks, vehicles and artillery pieces made to scale by a company in Liverpool, England.  All of the Dinky Toys were small, very realistic in detail, U.S. Army green in color, and very hard to come by.  I never knew another kid who had more than a couple of these.  The models were for show, the Dinky Toys were for war games in the back yard.  The backyard looked like the Maginot Line in miniature.  Maxim had used discarded things such as match books, cardboard, ice cream sticks and thread spools to built fences, pill boxes, retaining walls, gun emplacements and underground bunkers.  When we weren't vacuuming, we'd be in the back yard with the Dinky Toys.  Maxim had lots of magazines that he would use to learn the names and profiles of as many airplanes as he could remember.  When we were in the backyard orchestrating a battle with the Dinky Toys, he would identify any planes that flew over.

A few of the times when I was visiting, a male acquaintance of Judy's would take us on a tour of a ship docked at the Naval shipyard in Long Beach.  I don't remember who these fellows were, but they were all in the Navy.  One time we were given a walk through a submarine and we once had dinner in the officer's mess on a cruiser.  I remember that the officer's mess had green felt covering the dining tables and being served veal cutlets.

Victory at Sea ran on television from 1952 to 1953.  It covered mostly the naval warfare from WW II in 26 installments making it perhaps the first mini-series.  The program was pieced together from actual wartime footage selected from more than 60,000,000 feet of film.  The sound track came out on an LP album, a portion of which was played at Nixon's funeral.  Maxim played the album every time I visited.  He didn't need the television to visualize what the music was depicting.  We would listen to the record and he would call out the intent of various parts – Morse code, rolling seas, sonar pings, anti-aircraft fire, etc.  When we weren't soaking up Victory at Sea, we were watching war movies. 

Hollywood had released 176 war movies from 1940 to 1945 and they seemed to run non-stop on television throughout the 1950s.  The runaway all-time best was A Walk in the Sun, directed by Lewis Milestone.  A 2-time academy award winner for best director, Lewis Milestone was black-listed as a communist sympathizer after the war and his career as a director never got back on track.  His most well-known films are All Quiet on the Western Front, Of Mice and Men and The Front Page.

A Walk in the Sun was released in 1945, is based on the novel by Harry Brown, and stars Dana Andrews, Richard Conte, Huntz Hall of the Bowery Boys, John Ireland, Lloyd Bridges, Sterling Holloway and Burgess Meredith as narrator.  It has several unusual things for a war film from that era.  A U.S. infantry platoon comes ashore on the Italian coast and wanders about, abandoned and confused due to leadership casualties, mental breakdowns,  and communication equipment problems.  John Ireland plays Windy, who despite being the antithesis of the typical type A, gung-ho super hero, calmly suggests a solution to their predicament which saves everybody's ass.  The repetition of the phrase "nobody dies" takes on a surrealistic tone as casualties mount throughout the movie.  The back-and-forth banter between Rivera (Richard Conte) and Friedman, two yanks from Flatbush, is the best part of the movie.

The other movie that stood out was The Steel Helmet which was released in 1951.  This was a bad movie about the Korean War but with a couple of odd scenes that we never tired of watching.  The entire movie takes place in a Buddhist temple except when the main characters are stumbling around outside in a dense fog.  One similarity this film shares with A Walk in the Sun, is once again, a group of soldiers that are confused, without a clear mission and for the most part, simply adrift. 

One of the scenes we found interesting, had an enemy soldier being held in the temple, attempt to turn two U.S. soldiers (one African American and the other Japanese American) by pointing out the racial prejudice that thrives in America.  This was not mainstream dialogue for the 1950s and we wondered how the people that made the movie had gotten away with it.  We decided it was overlooked since the words came from the mouth of the enemy. 

In a later scene, the same captured enemy soldier is critically wounded.  One of the American soldiers is frustrated by what they've had to deal with to protect the enemy soldier, who despite their efforts, may not pull through.  The American soldier grabs the enemy soldier by the lapels of his shirt, and with their faces only inches apart, screams, "If you die, I'll kill you!" 

The scene in The Steel Helmet we liked best, was a scene in the Buddhist temple where a record is placed on a phonograph.  The music on the record fills the temple and the American soldiers are surprised to find it is the tune to Auld Lang Syne.  A South Korean teenager that has been holed up with them in the temple, jumps to his feet and begins singing in Korean at the top of his lungs.  One of the Americans says, "I'll be damned, where did the kid learn the words to Auld Land Syne?"  The African American soldier says, "He didn't, he's singing their national anthem".   This always made us curious.  As it turns out, the music for Auld Lang Syne is an old Scottish folk melody that has been used for national anthems by a few countries including South Korea for several years until it was replaced by another tune.  

Although I never stayed at his house again, he did go on a couple of camping trips with me and my dad while we were in high school.  These trips were the last time I ever spoke with Maxim.  After high school Maxim went off to college in Michigan and joined the ROTC.  His goal was to earn his bachelors and move on to the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida and become a flight officer.  Maxim's mom would update my parents, and they would pass it on to me.  During this period, Viet Nam began to fester and I dedicated myself to avoiding it.

In 1967, Maxim was among more than 2,000 graduates from the Pensacola Naval Air Station.  In recent years, the flight school had doubled the number of graduate flight officers to meet the growing demand called for by the Viet Nam War. 

On March 18, 1967, Maxim was killed on the first day of his tour in Viet Nam.  He was survived by his parents and his wife of seven weeks.  Maxim was in a Navy Phantom jet fighter assigned to support ground forces.  The Phantom had a crew of two, the pilot, and Maxim the radar officer.  On their 4^th pass over the target area, the plane was observed to veer off course and crash.  No official cause was ever determined for the crash.  The remains of the pilot and Maxim were not recovered until 1993.  Maxim shares a marker with the pilot at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery in Point Loma, California.