By Jim Russell

On 12 October 1968, a Saturday, Army hosted Cal-Berkeley at West Point.  Rain and cold had cancelled the regular Saturday morning full-dress parade on the Plain.  The weather was not what the favored Cal team (ranked 16^th) was accustomed to.

For some reason that I’ve forgotten, I was invited to help man the chain gang at Michie Stadium¹

I had never done that before, so all my senses went into high gear.  “Don’t screw this up!” Seeing the game up close is quite different from standing in row 35.  You get an intimate sense for how tremendously kinetic the Division 1 game is, and how phenomenally athletic the best players are.

 

The foul weather and good defense on both sides kept it a low-scoring game.  Somewhere in the third quarter, Army had the ball and was moving toward the Cal goal line, at the south end of Michie.  I was holding my first down pole on the east side of the field, around the Cal 30, when the ball snapped and our big tight end Gary Steele exploded off the line, heading straight for me.  He was flying, a lot faster than he looked from the stands, and his defender matched him stride for stride.

As the play developed, Steve Lindell ² threw a pass toward Gary.  From my unique perspective, it was obvious that the pass was long and too high.  Gary couldn’t possibly reach it. It would go incomplete.  Too bad.

 

Wrong!  Gary kept on at full tilt, and at the uniquely perfect instant, jumped what looked like ten feet off the ground, a good two feet over his defender.  He hauled in that pass and got two feet in just before momentum took him out of bounds, a couple feet from me. Wow – Unbelievable catch!  First down!  A couple plays later, Army scored our only touchdown, and ultimately upset Cal, 10-7.  Grateful plebes fell out at tables all over the Corps.³

That was our senior year, and Gary’s best.  He caught 27 passes for 496 yards and three touchdowns. Against 4^th-ranked Penn State, possibly our toughest opponent that year, he caught eight passes for 156 yards, breaking the Army single-game record set by “Lonely End” Bill Carpenter, Class of ‘60.  Gary was a huge contributor and a big part of our memorable 7 and 3 season, including beating Navy, again.  He was hugely respected, and much loved in our class.

Decades later, at the 2008 Founders Day dinner at Fort Lewis, a tableful of classmates reminisced about how much that football team had meant to us.  Gary’s name came up.

 

 

“Great athlete.”  “Great guy.”  People nodded.  One of my classmates said, “You know, Gary was the first African-American ever to play football for Army.”  Everyone emphatically protested.  That couldn’t possibly be true, we argued.  For one thing, we had come to West Point in 1965, and African-American players in Division 1 weren’t exactly a novelty by then.  For another, well, we just all would have known about it, if that had been the case.  Gary was such a seamless part of the team, and of the class, we would surely have known that.

Someone took out his smart phone and looked it up.  Sure enough, Gary had in fact been Army’s first African-American varsity football letter- man.  And even as well-known as he was in our class, most of us didn’t even know it decades later.  We were stunned. But that’s exactly what kind of classmate Gary was, and what kind of man he became.

 

 

Footnotes:

1. Michie Stadium (MIKE-ey) is West Point’s football stadium, named for Dennis Michie, USMA 1893, who played football at West Point and was Army’s first football coach. He was killed in the Spanish American War in Cuba in 1898, aged 28.
2. Steve Lindell, USMA ’69, was Army’s starting quarterback.
3. Until the mid-1970s, plebes were required to eat their meals sitting at an exaggerated position of attention – “bracing” – and in silence. For special occasions, the plebe class could be temporarily excused from bracing at meals, which was known as “falling out”.  Winning an important football game would often get the plebes a “fallout” for the week following the game.

Jim Bachta was our perennial Brigade Boxing Champ at 132 lbs¹.  He graduated 189^th in our class.  I was 35 files behind him at 224.²

We both branched Armor.  Luck of the draw moved us nearly simultaneously from the Armor Officer Basic course to Airborne School (where we shared an apartment with classmates Lew Riggsby and Don Smith) and Ranger School to a tour in Germany to a tour in Vietnam to a second tour in Germany.  During the second tour in Germany, we’d occasionally weekend together, touring parts of Europe we could reach on our BMW motorcycles.  One summer we traversed North Africa, which is another story.

When the Army had finished with us in 1975, we moved into an apartment near Heidelberg and enrolled in an international relation master’s degree program, intending to find civilian work that would allow us to stay in Germany.  It turned out that employers were hiring only MBAs for the interesting jobs.  We should have checked first!  We dutifully got ourselves into the MBA program at Stanford, and again rented a place together off-campus.  Among the things the sparsely furnished house lacked was a coffee maker.

To economize, we went looking for a used Mr. Coffee at the local Goodwill store.

We found three.  One looked much better than the other two.  I picked up the nice one and headed toward the cash register.  “Just a minute,” says Jim.  “Maybe, we should plug it in first, to at least see whether the little pilot light comes on.”  I thought that was overdoing it for so simple a device, but out of respect for my classmate and friend, I sought out a power outlet.

When I plugged in the nice-looking Mr. Coffee and switched it on, we heard a large circuit breaker nearby open, and all the overhead lights went dark.  And no pilot light on our Mr. Coffee.

We told the staff about that defective Mr. Coffee, and selected one of the scruffy ones to replace it.  When the store lights came back on, we plugged that one in.  The little pilot light came on nicely, and the hotplate under the pot began to warm up. The store lights stayed on. We bought that one – $6, I think – and took it home.  It was still working fine when we graduated from business school 18 months later.  We donated it to the rental house.

The lesson:  Class rank matters. 

 

Notes:

1. Boxing was and remains a mandatory plebe (Freshman) physical education course, and also a winter intramural sport. The best boxers are encouraged to enter the annual Brigade Open Boxing Tournament, where single-elimination matches determine a brigade champion in each weight class. Unlike most other sports at West Point, boxing was new to practically everyone, so it was a good measure of native athletic ability.  Usually cows (Juniors) or firsties (Seniors) won these individual brigade championships, because it took experience to develop the skills. Jim Bachta was an exception to the rule. He won the championship during his plebe, yearling (Sophomore), and firstie years.  During cow year, he had broken his nose sparring with Jim McDonough, a heavier classmate and, I think, our only Golden Gloves alumnus. The boxing program in 2019 is similar, with two additions:  1. When women joined the Corps in 1976, they initially took a female-oriented self-defense course in lieu of boxing.  Over time they demonstrated their toughness and lobbied for taking the same boxing course as the men.  From 2016, they have taken the same boxing program as the men, boxing other women.  2. In 1976, boxing returned to the intercollegiate sports world with the birth of the National Collegiate Boxing Association.  Army has fielded a team from the beginning of this era, and is consistently dominant, having won seven national championships.  At this writing, Army is the defending national champ.

2. Class rank: Most things cadets do – academics, leadership, sports – are graded in one way or another.  These grades are continuously tracked and combined into a single evaluation, “General Order of Merit”.  Individuals’ GOM scores are rank-ordered to determine class rank. For firsties, class rank determined order of selection for branch and first duty station.  At graduation, we received our diplomas in order of class rank.  Everyone’s class rank was published, and we all knew well where we stood.  Although class rank has other components, academics are most important.  We commonly gauged our classmates’ intellectual capacity by their class rank.

Cadet photos courtesy of the Jack Engeman Collection, the Photography Collections, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Editor’s note: Every five years, the Class of 1969 meets for a reunion. At each reunion, a memorial service is held to commemorate the lives of those classmates who have died. It is a solemn yet beautiful occasion that reminds all that these men who once shared the classrooms and fields of West Point have been taken home, but they are not forgotten and cherished still by their classmates, family and friends. Jim Russell presented this reading to the assembled classmates and families as they marked the 50th year since their graduation from West Point and remembered 124 of their classmates.

 

I’m going to read an excerpt from a book by a 20th century German Jesuit theologian, Karl Rahner (1904-1984). The book is structured as a series of letters to God, each posing a complaint about some aspect of the human condition.

One chapter, about losing long-term intimate friends, seemed particularly salient now, as we’re losing about a classmate per month. And unlike the combat losses we fully anticipated 50 years ago, these losses to the ravages of age are in some ways harder to accept.

Here’s Karl Rahner on losing his friends:

O Lord, I should like to remember my dead to you, all those who once belonged to me and have now left me. There are many of them, far too many to be taken in with one glance. To pay my sad greeting to them all, I must travel back in memory over the entire route of my life’s long journey.

When I look back in this way, I see my life as a long highway filled by a column of marching men. Every moment now, someone breaks out of the column and goes off silently, without a word or wave of farewell, and is swiftly enwrapped by the darkness of night stretching out on both sides of the road.

The number of our marchers becomes smaller, at first slowly, and now more quickly. The new men coming up to fill the ranks don’t really replace those who have gone. The only ones really making this pilgrimage with me are the ones whom I set out with, the ones who were with me at the start of my journey, the dear ones who are close to my heart.

The others are mere ”companions of the road”, who happen to be going the same way as I. There are many of them, and we all exchange greetings and help one another along. But the true procession of my life involves only those bound together by real love, and this group grows ever smaller. One day I myself will break off from the line of march and leave without a word or wave, never to return.

My heart will always be with them, with my loved ones who have taken their leave. There is no substitute for them; there are no others who can fill the vacancy when one of those, whom I have really loved, departs, and is with us no more.

In true love, no one can replace another, for true love loves the other in that depth where he is uniquely and irreplaceably himself. And thus, as death has trodden roughly through my life, every one of the departed has taken a piece of my heart with him.

So, that’s Karl Rahner on the subject.

He wrote these words in 1938. I doubt he ever heard of West Point. But he captures the experience we’re having, losing our brothers, brothers who in our case have been with us nearly since our birth as men, and certainly since our birth as a class.

We West Pointers are privileged to love one another better than most men can do in their lifetimes. What a gift, but also what pain, as we watch our brothers “breaking out of the line and going off to the darkness of the night.”

God bless our classmates.

God bless our class.

Karl Rahner, Encounters With Silence, written in 1938 and published in the US in 1999 by St. Augustine’s Press, South Bend, IN

(Over 800 classmates and family members assembled from all over the world for the 50th reunion.)

One of the things I turned out to be pretty good at during high school was music. I could always find the right pitches in church songs, and jazz and orchestral music really spoke to me. As a small child I had wanted to learn piano, but we couldn’t afford the piano or the lessons. In high school, the marching band had some instruments to lend. The question was, “Which instruments were available for free?”

The answer turned out to be narrower than I had hoped: drums and tubas, or more accurately, sousaphones, as this was a marching band. My reluctant pick was the tuba. I had pictured myself playing Harry James licks on the trumpet but the band already had plenty of trumpets players, including several good ones who had started in grade school. Same thing on trombone, and the other fun instruments. And none of those were available to lend in any case. So, in freshman year I took up the tuba. It came easily, and I liked it a lot. By sophomore year I was the strongest player in the section. I spent my summer wages on a real, upright orchestral tuba which was a much better instrument. I often won seats in competitive bands and orchestras filled with serious musicians, many of whom became professionals. It was fun.

Had I not gotten into West Point, I’d have attended an engineering school with a strong music program, in part to see how far I could go in music. I was accepted to Lehigh, Penn State, and Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon), which all had strong engineering and music programs. Of course, West Point neither offered music, nor allowed much time for it. I joined the Cadet Band, but the repertoire was limited to simple fight songs for mess hall rallies, a pale shadow of what I had played before. In the Army, life in the cavalry filled up the days pretty well, not leaving much time for frivolous pursuits.

I did not touch the horn again until post-Army grad school at Stanford, 1979, where the music department ran a no-tuition, no-audition band for non-music majors, like me. I had forgotten how much fun it was. I had also largely forgotten HOW to play the horn. It came back slowly, like riding a bicycle or speaking another language. Shreds of it had stuck in my memory.

When I escaped the Bay Area to Seattle in 1982, I stumbled into a thriving amateur music scene. I was invited into a community orchestra that needed a tuba. The principal trumpet there asked me to join his brass quartet to make it a quintet. The quintet, which I had never played in previously, was amazing. Improbably, our principal trumpet was a professional who had played in one of the Army field bands. We were his “fun quintet”, where he could just play music and drink some beer, without needing to argue with the other pros in his real quintet about interpretations. Our trombone player was then in music grad school and later became a composer. Our second trumpet and horn were not at that level, but were much stronger musicians than was I. I was the runt of the litter, and was fortunate that they needed a tuba.

Our weekly rehearsals were the musical equivalent of sitting down to a military strategy session with Omar Bradley and John Pershing. I learned a whole lot about playing my horn and playing quintet music, and very fast. When our two stars ultimately moved away for music jobs in other cities, I was a much stronger musician from their weekly poop sessions, also known as rehearsals. Since then, I’ve upgraded to a much better orchestra (www.thaliasymphony.org) and to a much better tuba (a German B&S Compact CC).

When our principal trumpet left, I inherited the quintet music folder (~ 150 tunes), which makes me the default organizer of the successor quintet. Amateur quintets are

a little challenging to keep afloat. The music everyone wants to play, because it’s interesting for all five parts, is generally difficult to play well. Professional level, really. Any group of five who can play it well generally includes active professionals. Some of them, not unreasonably, want to get paid to play this stuff, and often have other paying opportunities. Being artists by training and profession, many of them do need the money. Unless the organizer has the time to sell the group into paying gigs, the stronger musicians often balk at gathering just to rehearse. Working a day job, I lack that bandwidth, so keeping four strong brass musicians in the group has been a challenge. Way more turnover than ideal. Seems like we’re constantly getting acquainted. Reminds me of Cavalry squadrons in Germany during Vietnam.

During the halcyon days of the original quintet, our star first trumpet suggested inviting our musical friends to an outdoor backyard gathering one Saturday evening in July, when the northern latitude summer nights go on forever, and play quintet music for them, with a keg of local microbrew to lubricate things, and potluck for snacks. Someone coined “Brass in the Grass”, and it was born.

And it was a hit. About forty friends showed up, no beer went to waste, and everyone asked, “When’s the next one?”

Someone suggested we do it again in the winter, indoors, in a nice venue, wearing tuxes, and invite other quintets to join us. We were able to rent an elegant venue on the top (36th) floor of the old Smith Tower building with a great 360 degree view.

This event became “Brass in the Tower”. It went even better than Brass in the Grass. We had four quintets in total, playing from 7 to 11 PM, and this time went through two kegs.

Our dates seized the rare-in-Seattle chance to dress up, and people brought amazing food to share. It went so well that the next year we invited the Navy’s professional quintet from Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, and to our surprise, they came. A good time was had by all, including the Navy pros, and we repeated this event for five or six years. Its death knell was the Smith Tower being purchased by a savvier owner who quadrupled the rent for the penthouse, putting it well out of our price range. But by then, our star first trumpet had joined the Spokane Symphony and our trombone had enrolled in a composition program in LA. Their replacements were not as strong, nor as good friends, so the motivation to continue the event somewhere else waned a bit. Friends

often say we should revive the concept, even if in a lesser venue. It may become a retirement project for me.

Memorable for me in all this was my close friend and roommate Bill Rice, his wife Suzanne, and their daughters attending a couple iterations of each event. They were at nearby Fort Lewis where Bill commanded an artillery battalion. It was great to have them there.

Unlike the sports I love but never could play well, I seem to have talent for this. Sometimes I wonder what might have come, had I chosen music instead of West Point. But the wondering never gets to regretting West Point and my classmates. I’m grateful for them, and for the gift of music.