Louis Roney: Friendships for a time

I have often ignored the inherent limited elasticity of chance friendships. I must admit to indulging in the exercise of trying to stretch even longtime friendships far beyond the capacity they may be capable of — seldom a successful venture.

During WWII, when I was training as a Naval Officer Candidate, I lived with 11 other midshipmen in an expanded double-deck-bunked Chicago hotel room.

Three of us Midshipmen became “pals” of highly entertaining dimensions. In our free time we three were inseparable, and went together to football games, debutant parties, nightclubs, and elaborate Sunday “brunches” at the Ambassador East. We were invited to many more social occasions than our spare time allowed us to accept, and I shall never forget the elaborate invitations extended to us Navy guys during that wartime training period. The Drake Hotel Bar on Michigan Boulevard was a kind of meeting place for us Navy guys where we were sure to get immediate invitations to events all over the Chicago area.

That a full-fledged shooting war awaited us in the South Pacific in the near future was momentarily put aside in the high spirits of our youthful and close friendship. In fact, we three somehow assumed that we would be pals forever — after we got our Navy Commissions, did our various wartime duties, and returned home to peacetime life. The first time I saw Jay again was some years after the war was over, when he and his now wife took me to lunch on La Cienega Boulevard at a Hollywood restaurant.

Jay looked like every other successful young businessman with a briefcase full of contracts. His good-looking wife could have come out of an ad in any one of several-dozen fashion magazines.

As for me, I was singing a Verdi opera that evening in a big hall in L.A. My pal Jay and his wife were clearly not candidates to bump heads for the first time with Italian opera. When we said good-bye after lunch, the word meant exactly what it prophetically implied and I never saw Jay and his wife again.

I first ran into my second Navy pal, Don, in the South Pacific, in one of the strangest coincidences of my life: In the middle of WWII, while walking alone up a jungle pathway on the island of Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides, I ran smack into Don who was coming alone down the same pathway!

A couple of years after the war, when I sang an opera outdoors one summer evening with the New York Philharmonic, in New York’s Lewisohn Stadium, who should come on stage afterwards but Don, with his tall, slender, chic wife in tow.

Don was now in Madison Avenue advertising, and the only advertising I knew anything about was in trying to make my name well known in the music world. Don was not personally familiar with opera, and it was not my life’s work to convert average American business Joes into culture-hounds.

From then on, Don and I sometimes met for lunch, and he, MariJo and I often went to see New York Yankee night baseball games. Don and MariJo lived high above 86th and Lex.

Jay and Don are both gone now, and I am the only one left of the three Navy officers who enjoyed a brief sojourn in an oversized Chicago hotel room all those years ago.

I’ve talked every now-and-then on the phone with Don’s widow MariJo, who remains unmarried, and now lives in Atlanta. She is friendly enough, but I see little point in our getting together. The war has been over a long time. And everything connected with the war is over, no matter how much value some of us may find in what we have lost irrevocably along the way.