Play On!

My education was a piecemeal development, partly planned and partly doled out in the haphazard way in which human doings usually unwind.

My last two years in college were revolutionary because of my “out-of-the-blue” affair with Kristine, the stunning mother of my college roommate.

Kristine and I met frequently at her Brattle Street house in Cambridge, and in the summer more often at her North Shore cottage.

For me, our association was quite wonderful, and I was exalted, without troubling my mind too much about the future.

My roommate, Cranston, continued to look at me simply as a close friend of the family.

In December of my senior year, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Next morning, I caught the subway to Boston and joined the Navy.

The Navy told me to go back to college until they called me to active duty. They were so flooded with volunteers that there was no place yet to train us all.

My last semester in school was a fitful daydream, with Kristine and the war as a constant backdrop.

With my college degree in one hand and my suitcase in the other, I headed for South Bend, Ind., where I spent a month at Notre Dame as an apprentice seaman, saluting everything that moved.

We sailors then went on as midshipmen officer candidates to Northwestern University’s downtown Chicago headquarters. For 12 weeks near Lake Michigan, we trained to be ensigns in the Navy. Weekdays, we midshipmen were free from 5 in the afternoon until 8 p.m., when we had to sign in at Abbott Hall. On those days, we were not allowed to go more than three blocks in any direction from the Hall.

The Navy gave us weekends off with no restrictions. During my Chicago stay, Kristine rented a comfortable suite two blocks away on Lake Michigan where we could meet briefly on weekdays, and for whole weekends.

The idyll ended for Kristine and me when I was ordered to active duty on the USS Spence destroyer, which I boarded in San Bruno, Calif.

We cruised southwest through mostly light seas stopping briefly at Pearl Harbor, and then sailed to Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides. There we moored in the middle of a jungle harbor alongside a huge supply ship, with a hospital ship nearby.

Our duty for almost two years was to make the round trip as protective anti-submarine escort for oil tankers running up and down “The Slot” from Guadalcanal and Bougainville.

Late in 1944, under way to the Philippines, we had skirmishes with several Japanese craft, all of which we sank. We were zigzagging north of Leyte, where there were lots of Japanese subs.

Two weeks afterward, the seas were very high and the wind was approaching gale-force. Most of us guys were wearing our life jackets topside as green water crashed threateningly over our ship.

My destroyer, USS Spence, went down with two other destroyers in that typhoon off Leyte on Dec. 18, 1944. In the typhoon, some 790 American lives were lost on the three destroyers — 68 of us survived. I was one of them, for some inexplicable reason.

Harvard’42—Distinguished Prof, Em.—UCF

2004 Fla. Alliance for the Arts award

(Assisted by beautiful wife Joy Roney)

John Kennedy later said, “Life isn’t fair.”

Maybe. But in my 20s, fate saw to it that I get damn well acquainted with what young men are uniquely equipped for: Love and war.