Wendell Affield - Author / Chickenhouse Chronicles

This print book includes the first singles catalogue that my stepfather ordered after he returned to his farm from World War Two in October 1945 and began his search for a wife. The $2.99 PDF download includes the compete book plus all the singles publications he ordered and a preview of Pawns (The Farm, 1950s), Chickenhouse Chronicles, Book II.

A few months ago I received the Minnesota Humanity Center “2017 Veteran’s Voices Award.” The following week I was interviewed by our local television station–I guess I forgot to post it on my blog.

Local Veteran Honored With Award For Community Work

This past week, we reached a milestone. In March, 2014, I visited with my former employer about a vision I had to supply our local food shelf with ground beef. The late Mr. Joe Lueken liked the idea and the program kicked off two months later. Sadly, Joe passed away, but the program continues on strong. This past week we reached our 10,000 lb milestone.

Here’s an excerpt from the article our local newspaper, The Bemidji Pioneer ran in 2014:

BEMIDJI — For 14 years, Wendell Affield helped his late friend’s family as they battled through homelessness and hunger, providing them meat from his farm butcher shop.

On Tuesday, he stood inside the Bemidji Community Food Shelf as those efforts were extended to the community at large.

Affield is part of a collaborative program between himself, Joe Lueken, the now-employee-owned Lueken’s Village Foods, the food shelf and the community.

Joe Lueken personally paid for a commercial “stuffer” — the machinery needed to push 30 pounds of ground meat through a tube into smaller one-pound sacks — as Lueken’s Village Foods donated $1,500 toward the newly created community meat program.

Affield, while helping his friend’s family over the years, long envisioned such a program.

“We helped the one family and there’s hundreds and hundreds of families in this community that need help,” he said. “If everyone that can pitches in a little, it makes life a little better.”

Lueken’s staff members — and Affield, who from 1985 to 2001 was the the butcher shop manager for Lueken’s — were on hand Tuesday to train two food shelf volunteers on how to process the meat.

“This has actually been fun this morning,” said Dea Paine, who has been volunteering at the food shelf since 1995 and has been on its board for about 15 years. “Except for the cranking — I’m short.”

Pam Johnson, a community member who began volunteering in September, usually works in the warehouse unloading trucks in the morning. But this day she wore gloves as she held the bag to the stuffer’s tube. As Glenn Carroll, a meat department manager with Lueken’s, turned the crank, the bag was filled with beef and Johnson then passed it to Paine, who would tape it shut, place it in the tray, and add it to the dozens awaiting food shelf clients.

In total, they bagged 400 pounds of ground beef.

“The theory behind this whole program is that labor is such a big part of the price of meat. So if the food shelf could purchase it direct, and the meat is processed by volunteers, all of that overhead is eliminated and it makes it all that much more affordable,” Affield said.
reached

About six months after my friend, Deland, died in 1999, his widow and her family came to our farm, homeless and hungry. Angie is a proud lady and offered to repay our help. I told her that anything we shared with her was a gift. So began a journey that continues today.

Deland and I first met in a therapy group. We had been diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a result of combat in Vietnam. Too often, PTSD sufferers go through life battling depression, reliving traumas, and feeling they are victims. There is another way for some.

Posttraumatic growth is a relatively new concept. UNC Charlotte, Dept of Psychology, describes it this way, “It [posttraumatic growth] is positive change experienced as a result of the struggle with a major life crisis or a traumatic event.” When Angie and her family arrived at our farm 17 years ago, she unwittingly became an instrument of healing for me.

Today, when I do readings and talks about my Vietnam memoir, Muddy Jungle Rivers, I discuss PTSD and how my journey with Angie and her family has been rewarding.

I am deeply honored to have Laura Schroff include Angie’s story, “Six cups of Coffee” in Angels on Earth.

Miigwech [thank you], Angie and Laura.
Click on:

Meet the Angels

I recently read Thomas Childers Soldier From The War Returning (2009) in which he explores the lives of three Second World War veterans and their families. The book documents a part of our collective past—an inconvenient truth—that has been airbrushed from our national memory. Yet millions of Baby Boomers grew up in the shadow of that history.

By the spring of 1964 I was tired of my mother and stepfather’s constant feuding. As soon as school was out I left our farm in northern Minnesota and spent much of the summer riding freight cars and living in hobo camps—jungles—across the Northwest. I look back from more than fifty years out and try to recall the men I met. They’re faceless now but I remember a story passed around in the Wenatchee jungle that prompted many of them to hop a freight car. Witnessing the way this story spread like wildfire, even through the prism of a sixteen-year-old worldview, I realized it was somehow unusual.

The tale circulated that there was a state program in the South—I don’t recall what state—that was giving every homeless veteran fifty dollars, no residency requirement necessary; all one had to do is show up at the disbursement office. Younger men gave older and crippled men a boost up into slow-rolling freights. I realize now those old men were probably First World War veterans—possibly a Spanish American War veteran or two. The helpers, the majority of the hobos, were Second World War veterans. How I wish I had known to take notes; to visit with those men.

Statistics in the “Introduction” of Childers’ book are what first grabbed my attention. For example, he writes, “By 1943 the U. S. Army was discharging ten thousand men each month for psychiatric reasons, and the numbers increased as the war dragged on. During the Battle of Okinawa…the Marines suffered twenty thousand psychiatric casualties. …Veterans Administration (VA) hospitals were swamped with “psychoneurotic” cases, and two years after the war’s end, half the patients in the VA medical facilities were men suffering from “invisible wounds.” Post traumatic stress disorder was not diagnosed until 1980….” (page8)

My stepfather was one of those men who was discharged early but slipped through the cracks when he did seek help in 1948 from an overwhelmed VA system.

The majority of those hobos I lived with the summer of 1964 were no doubt a remnant of the legions of rootless veterans from those earlier conflicts. It was that summer I met my first Vietnam Veteran—of him my strongest memory is his drunken, unpredictable rages.

My grandmother’s diary entry: 11-18-1945: Walked through Central Park—a telegram from John Curry saying he had arrived in San Francisco from Tokyo and was leaving for New York on Friday.

This picture, taken two years before I was born, jumped out at me perhaps because of the date. My mother Barbara, oldest brother Chris, about two and half, and Tim, fourteen months, pose with a Japanese flag their father, John Curry, purchased while in Tokyo.

The picture, taken in Barb’s apartment, is very telling: Note the bare bed springs and cracked wall. Barb loved Chris’s “Little Lord Fauntleroy” look and the fantasy happy ending for the protagonist and his mother.

Two more of my grandmother’s diary entries add a layer of understanding to this time.

11-27-1945: John Curry called me much to my surprise—he’s a nice boy. He said he’d call again.

12-02-1945: A great event happened today. Barbara, John, and the 2 boys drove up in their car and spent the afternoon with H (Henry) and me. H. was very favorably impressed with John. He looked very well in his Naval Petty Officer’s outfit. The little boys are so cute—they were very good but rushed into everything. Barb did pretty well but she is not all right yet. I think John managed very well with her. She’s thrilled over the car—I gave her the lovely auto robe grandfather gave us—Henry was thrilled it all went so nicely. He returned to Camp Shanks about seven—I rode cross town with him. I’ll be glad in many ways when this Army business is over but a money security is a comfort after so many bad years.

A few months later John Curry filed for a divorce.

In September 1939 my mother wrote,
Eva Barbacka was a typical Slavic type—a very pale complexion, a round sweet face, large grayish blue eyes and a head of reddish brown waving hair. To tell the truth I had always been a little afraid of her. At that time I did not know that the Slavic race had an exceptional gift for foreign languages. It seemed to me that Eva spoke French amazingly well. At Institut Droissard she spoke better than any other foreign girl and in her Secretarial School it was known that she made brilliant success of her examinations.

In the evenings she would come up to my room or I would stop at hers. She always did most of the talking, telling of all the sufferings of her people. Poland has always been under the tyranny of Austria or Germany or Russia. She adored the Emperor Napoleon but said he had always deceived the Polish soldiers, making promises of their liberty which he had never been able to fulfill. She had an enormous will and flair for political argument.

1939-07-22 my mother, Ann, and Eva in front of St Mark’s Basillica, Venice

The Polish spelling is Ewa; my mother knew her as Eva. The young women attended Institut Droissard the Royal Brussels Conservatory from 1937-1939 and studied under Master Emile Bosquet. The summer of 1939, Eva, my mother, and another student toured Europe, their destination, Eva’s home near Chelmiec, Poland. On August 26, 1939, Eva’s father put my mother on a train and told her she must flee because Germany and Russia had signed a nonaggression pact and German troops were massing on the borders of Poland.
My mother mentioned Eva a few times over the next sixty years but I think she must have believed that Eva had perished during WWII. This past week I learned that she married in 1942 and had three children. I am attempting to contact her youngest son, Tomasz N.
Eva died in 2003. What a tragedy that my mother and Eva were never able to reconnect.

Next week I plan to post a proposal letter written by a young Polish soldier, asking my grandparents permission to marry my mother. I could use help translating it.