Farewell Louis Zamperini, Local Hero

  Happy Fourth of July everyone - and since red white and blue are also the colours of the Union Jack, I can wear them today and no one will suspect I'm toasting the Queen Over the Water, as it were. Not that I mind celebrating with my American friends of course.
  But a bit of sad news today - the death of Louis Zamperini, an American hero and what's more a local hero at the ripe old age of 97.

Coincidentally, I'd just written a piece about him for the Catholic Times in England. It went to press just before his death was announced. So here it is, as I wrote it.

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  Our local small town, Olean,  in New York state, isn’t normally feted as the birthplace of heroes. It’s an unassuming spot and like many parts of western New York,  has seen better days.

  At once time – something like a hundred years ago – Olean was a centre for oil production, hence its rather fanciful name, which is meant to make you think “City of Oil”.

  It had an exciting period in the 1920s when some gangsters, including Al Capone, frequented the town but these days, well, it’s got a few industries,  some pretty houses, many now dilapidated, a few nice churches, a YMCA, a run-down shopping mall and a main street that was once picturesque but fell prey to “urban renewal”, losing its old theatre and many of its quaint flat-fronted shops to a Rite Aid chemists and a fast food chain.

  It’s still a good place to live, though, with some big-hearted people who would be very pleased to hear about anything that could put Olean on the map and encourage some visitors.

  And the other day I heard an interesting tale about an Olean local hero, one who I never knew was born in the town.

  One of the most popular books in America  in the past couple of years has been Unbroken , by Laura Hillenbrand. (She wrote a previous bestseller about the racehorse Seabiscuit ).

  Unbroken is about an extraordinary man called Louis Zamperini, who was born in 1917 in, yes, Olean, New York.

  It’s one of those stories that’s a dream for biographers and strikes any number of chords with the American public.

  Zamperini was the son of Italian immigrants and here I have to admit that he only lived in Olean until he was two years old and then moved to California but don’t let that spoil a good story.  Young Louis had a troubled childhood and youth, apparently smoking, stealing and drinking before he was even nine years old. Then a police officer suggested he put his skills at running away from trouble to better  use.  He pulled himself together and became a noted athlete, running  in the 5,000 metres in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. He didn’t get a medal but ran the last lap so fast that Hitler insisted on shaking his hand. (Apparently he also shinned up a flagpole and stole the Fuhrer’s personal flag.)

  In 1943, during the Second World War, Zamperini was a bomb aimer. His  B-24 Liberator bomber crashed into the Pacific and he survived for 47 days on a small rubber raft, subsisting on rainwater and raw fish and close to starving to death. Only one fellow crewmember survived with him.

  As if that wasn’t bad enough, he was captured by the Japanese and languished for two-and-a-half years in a Japanese prison camp, enduring  gruelling punishments, beatings  and humiliation.

  But fate had still more to throw at Louis Zamperini.  After the war, he suffered from alcoholism and post-traumatic stress disorder  but yet again,  with the help of the evangelist Billy Graham, he picked himself up, became a born again Christian and was determined to become a missionary to Japan where he preached forgiveness for his former captors . (In the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, his hosts asked him to carry the Olympic flame as part of the torch relay. )

  Back in America,  he set up a charity for troubled boys and became an inspirational speaker, which he still is, at the age of 97.

  In 1957 there was a project to film Louis Zamperini’s life, starring Tony Curtis but it was never completed. But now Angelina Jolie is directing a new film about him, written by the Coen brothers. It’s due for release in America in December.

  Now Olean citizens want to honour Louis Zamperini with a granite marker and a bench and are sending out an appeal for funds.   Says the Tribute Committee, “We hope to provide the youth of Olean a real life, hometown, inspirational hero to look up to and respect , as opposed to a cartoon, comic book or video character.”

    So what if Louis Zamperini moved to California?  I’m sure he’s still a western New York boy at heart.

Welcome to the Jungle

 As I settled down to cheer on Team USA (well someone's got to do it - the much vaunted new American love affair with soccer is conspicuous by its absence in rural western New York) it was partly an excuse not to bite the bullet and tackle the garden. After 3 week's absence, coinciding with a period of steamy heat and rain, everything has exploded into a lush green tangle of weeds and soon-to-be flowers. But mostly weeds.
  Here's one of several hundred baby sumac trees that have popped up in the flower bed I painstakingly dug out using our local master gardener's "lasagne method". This was a combination of compost, mulch and old newspapers and three weeks ago it looked great....

These weeds sportingly colonised the whisky barrel planter. Now I don't need to buy flowers for it.

Others grew up around the wheelbarrow. That, I repeat, is three weeks' growth and there was a lot more before I got the whacker out.

I sometimes wonder why we bother planting flowers. The weeds do so much better on their own.

Back Again And No Flying Turkeys!

 Well hello again everyone and here I am back in Western New York. And I am very pleased to report that I have not awarded a single Flying Turkey Travel Award for this particular trip. Not even to Air Canada (yes we're back to our old nemesis for the summer as they have proved cheaper than United and you can drive to Toronto and not have to change planes).  I have to say, though, that  I was sorely tempted to award a Special Mention to Heathrow's new Terminal Two but I'll forgive them as they struggle with their growing pains.

Thing is, Heathrow Terminal Two is in fact glorious - if anyone should be sad enough to dream about their fantasy airport terminal, this would be it. The shops were out of this world and there was hardly anyone else there, it having just opened. But the unfortunate thing was, I didn't have time to go to a single shop. We queued for 40 minutes for check-in, the fabled automatic machines having gone on some sort of sympathy strike and no sooner had we got into the departure lounge and within eyeshot of the tantalising emporia than we had to start the long hike to the gate. T2 appears to have taken a leaf out of Toronto Pearson's book and you have to walk up hill and down dale and past endless walls of glass and futuristic sculptures (though at least T2's aren't black) before you so much as get a sniff of a plane. But it has potential. Next time I'll be there early and with a second mortgage. 

See You Next Week

  The Blog is heading off on a short holiday to somewhere blissfully lacking good internet access.
See you in a week! Among the items coming up in the not too distant future: thoughts on a couple of local heroes and on one of America's most bizarre secrets...
  Watch this space....

Meanwhile, here are a Canada goose and goslings up our lane.

Spotted at An American Airport

They're learning.......

Western New York Idyll: Some of Our Neighbours

I always like to make a detour to see the Highland cattle.

Their owner told me they only once slaughtered one and served it up for  a family reunion. "Someone at the table asked, 'Is this someone we know?' And nobody would eat a thing." I think this is an interloper.

The old farm machinery makes a nice touch.  Sometimes, around here, you're never quite sure if it's decorative or not.

A Londoner's Rant: Mrs Miniver

. The other day I thought I’d give my American husband a treat.  He’s an Anglophile -  well he would be, wouldn’t he - and he also enjoys old films.

  “I’ve got just the thing for you!” I said, “A real classic and it gives a wonderful picture of Britain. You’ll love it!”. As it happened, it was showing on TV.

  The film was Mrs Miniver,  the multi-Oscar-winning  1942 gem starring Greer Garson as the  plucky British housewife at the start of the Second World War,  comforting her children in the air raid shelter,  welcoming her husband back from taking his boat to Dunkirk, single-handedly disarming a downed German airman, while life in her idyllic village goes on, interspersed with stoically-borne  tragedy.  In the iconic final scene, the congregation gathers  in the bombed village church, the vicar delivering a Churchillian oration and through a hole in the shattered roof, a shot of the RAF flying overhead in V formation to the strains of Land of Hope and Glory.  Stirring stuff.

    In 2009, it made the American National Film Registry, for films worthy of preserving for posterity. It “pictorializes” (sic), they said, “ the classic British stiff upper lip.” 

  It’s well known that Mrs Miniver was intended as propaganda, albeit charming propaganda, to get  Americans to support the war effort. After the credits appeared the words,   “America needs your money. Buy defense  bonds and stamps.”

   Never mind. It was a massive hit in America – and in Britain too. When I first saw it I loved it and cried my eyes out at the end.

  So hubby and I watched. And after a bit we looked at each other,  “Hang on a minute!”

  Living in two countries  does that to you. I was suddenly seeing dear, familiar Mrs Miniver with new eyes.

  What I hadn’t grasped before was that the perfect British wife had an American husband (or a Canadian, turned American husband)  in the shape of  Walter Pidgeon and an American son and a daughter-in-law, played by Teresa Wright, supposedly from an ancient English aristocratic family,  who, in her touching death scene, asked for a glass of, not water, but “wahdurr”.

  This wasn’t a British family;  it was an American family.

  There it all was,  the white picket fence, the giant fridge, the bedside telephone,  the grotesquely large sports car,  the  choir singing Onward Christian Soldiers with an unmistakable Yankee twang. I’m no expert but I’ll bet you the birds twittering in the English garden were American too.  All patched together with a few Cockney accents of varying degrees of phoniness.  

  Not to mention that this wartime  “average middle-class British family” had several servants, wardrobes full of fancy hats and fox-fur stoles  and an apparentlylimitless supply of eggs.

 And they banged on in a very un-British way about the “feudal” system dying out. (Posh girl marrying middle-class boy and lowly station master allowed by Lady of the Manor to win at flower show.)

     Hollywood wasn’t showing  Americans the real Britain.  How could it? Like many other films of its time about “Britain”,   it was filmed in a studio in California. But it showed  something Americans could identify with and so reach deep into their pockets for – and perhaps it also gave British people an image of themselves that they secretly  wanted to see. 

  “So what?” you might say. It was enjoyable,  helped win the War and was made decades ago. Things are different now.

    Only I don’t think they are.  Mrs Miniver , however benign, is a lesson in the manipulative power – and  inherent untrustworthiness - of the silver screen.  We can all name films that blatantly distort historical facts – and America certainly doesn’t have  a monopoly of those. But I’m talking about seemingly innocent examples – like 101 Dalmatians, supposedly set in Britain, which features American  raccoons scampering all over the place. Even the British-made  Downton Abbey,  hugely popular over here, appears to have sprouted an unlikely number of American characters, though at least they’re not pretending to be British.  

    We should be worried.  But no matter how much I tell myself to keep a  critical mind,  I have to confess that Mrs M second time around still made me cry.