Draft 5 (5/24//01) Bill Nagle

RAGE, GRIEF, AND REMEMBRANCE

Late for lunch, I rushed to the school cafeteria. It was mid-January, 1946. Still very much on my mind was Don, my older brother, who had been shot and killed six weeks before. Cafeteria Manager Bill Oberhaus did not greet me. That was no surprise. As business manager of the school paper I had been trying for many weeks to collect his long overdue advertising bill.

I sat down with some freshmen.. Within minutes, Oberhaus started his clean-up. He proceeded to sweep our lunches into a trash can. “We're almost through, you can wait a minute,” I said. Oberhaus, his greasy apron over his huge stomach, loomed over me and snarled, “If the rest of the family's like you, they all ought to be shot.” I stood, flushed with rage. In that instant I knew I had not only the strength but the will to kill him---a scary thought that was to haunt me for years. As it happened, I only pushed my sandwich into his face. .Maynnaise dripped off his chin. Then I cursed him as I had never before cursed anyone.

As I stumbled out of the cafeteria, I could feel tears beginning to well up.

 

It felt like only yesterday that I had stood with what Oberhaus referred to as "the rest of my family" looking at the steel gray casket beside an empty grave in Mt. Calvary Cemetery. I could hardly bear to look at my mother's tear-stained face. She had been so worried about Don in the months he had been in service and was so relieved when he came home safe. What was my father thinking? He was no stranger to death by gunshot. When he was eight years old just 10 miles north of the cemetery he was walking alongside his father who was trying out a new rifle. When his father stooped to go through a fence, the gun exploded. The little boy watched his father die He was later to see comrades die of gunshot wounds in France in World War I. Beside them stood my brother, Jack, 24, and newly out of law school, and my sister, Mary Jeanne, 22, and a sophomore St. Marycrest College. I was 16 and a senior at St. Ambrose Academy.

A light snow covered the pile of dirt dug the day before. An eight-member Honor Guard, provided by the American Legion, stood at parade rest. Father Leo Kerrigan, our pastor, said: "Clad in the uniform he loved so dearly and wrapped in the flag of the nation he served so heroically, he is lovingly consigned to the grave." Two members of the Honor Guard came to the casket, folded the flag precisely into a triangle, presented it to my mother, and saluted. The Honor Guard raised their rifles. I knew it was coming but I still winced at the sound of the first of three volleys that echoed over the hills. Then from a nearby knoll came the sound of Taps.

The haunting, melancholy chords of Taps lingered in the hearts of the Nagle family as we climbed into our car. Mt. Calvary Cemetery was on the northern edge of Davenport, a city of 65,000 in Eastern Iowa.

The grave-side scene we had just left had all the trappings of a burial of a war hero. But Don had not died a war hero. He had died, three days before, face down in a Rock Island alley from a bullet in his back from a policeman's revolver.

Our car carried us over the Mississippi River to Illinois and the Rock Island County Courthouse for the inquest into the death of 22-year-old Donald Thomas Nagle. What a jolt it was to travel from the sublime rituals of the grave side to the banality of that courtroom.

 

Don had been discharged from the Army Air Corps two weeks earlier. Two days before, he had purchased his first civilian suit. Don had been a nose gunner on a B-24 bomber, In July, 1944, the family received word through the Red Cross that Don was "missing in action." Agonizing days followed with no news. Casualty rates for American air crews in Europe were very high. Then came a marvelous letter from the War Department. Don was alive and interned in Switzerland. Many months passed before we received a letter from Don, himself.

While on a bombing mission to Central Germany, anti-aircraft fire had shot out two of the plane's engines causing it to plunge from 25,000 feet to 7,000 before the pilot got it under control. He then headed for neutral Switzerland. The crew survived a precarious landing on a tiny airfield and were interned by the Swiss. Don eventually became bored and wanted to get back into combat. On his third try at escaping, he succeeded---by walking over mountains at night and sleeping at French underground farms during the day until he reached a part of France under U.S. control. His surprise homecoming a few weeks later was the most joyous day in the family's history. As a former internee, he could not be returned to combat. He was eventually sent to nn Army Air Corps Base at Sioux Falls, South Dakota. It was from there I was to receive his last letter to me. And it was from there he was discharged in mid-November, 1945.

At the courthouse, Coroner Leslie Banning, who came across as a kind and courtly man, invited my family to sit in the enclosed area where he had just impaneled his jury. Jack sat at a table on the left alongside Wayne Cook, the senior partner at the law firm Jack had joined four months previously. Cook was to represent my family at the inquest. At a table on the right sat Officer Orville Bryan, the policeman who had shot Don, and his attorney, Isadore Katz. Sitting next to me that day and for each of the four following days was my best friend, Mike O'Hara.

 

Bryan was not a regular member of the Rock Island police force but a merchant policeman, hired by business owners to protect their property. In the original news stories on the shooting, Bryan was quoted as saying he had suspected Don of ‘prowling.’ He also said Don's last words were, “You got me.” It was what dying criminals said in the dime detective novels of the time. Under prodding by his attorney, Bryan embellished his account. Don had been behind an enclosure and had vaulted over a seven-foot-high fence and without a pause had started running. This surprised me. Don was no more an athlete than was I. Nor was he tall enough to accomplish such a feat. I found myself envying Jack. I wanted to be at Cook's shoulder, whispering suggestions into his ear. I listened intently and read every word of the long accounts on the inquest in the Rock Island Argus and the Davenport Daily Times. I was afraid that some of Rock Island's leading businessmen who were Bryans's employers, might try to influence the inquest. My sister, Mary Jeanne, was convinced the Rock Island paper was slanting its reporting. She paid a visit to its editors.

She later said she wasn't sure if it was her powers of persuasion or her tears, but the paper assigned a new reporter to cover the inquest. Its coverage from then on more closely resembled that of the Davenport paper. I was proud of her.

Don had spent the evening with an old friend and former neighbor, Bob Ekelin, who, on his own discharge from the Army., was living with his father in Rock Island. They had visited various bars. Katz kept Ekelin on the stand for all of one day and half of another. He had to account for every minute he had had spent with Don. Katz was attempting to prove that Bob and Don had spent the evening conspiring to commit a crime, robbing a store, whatever., This likelihood was dissipated by Ekelin's report that after leaving Don and noticing he had lost his billfold, sought out a policeman to report the fact---giving his name, address, and phone number. Hardly the action of someone planning a crime. Midway through the inquest a former high school classmate of Don's, who had been out of town, called Jack to say he had talked to Don coming out of the Deluxe Café near the alley where he was shot. On their parting, Don had used a common Army expression, "my teeth are floating" meaning "I have a full bladder." Coroner Banning and the jury heard 22 witnesses that week, most of them called by the Nagle family in the longest inquest in the history of the county. By its end, it was clear that Don' s only "crime" had been that that he had entered the alley to piss away the coffee he had just drunk and the beer he had consumed earlier with Bob Ekelin. The banner headline in The Daily Times told it all: NAGLE UNJUSTLY SLAIN, INQUEST VERDICT.

 

Based on the jury's verdict, Coroner Banning recommended to the Grand Jury that Bryan indicted for manslaughter. Despite the fact Bryan was never indicted and never convicted, my family thought justice had been served in one important way: Don had been completely exonerated of any wrongdoing.

 

When I left the St. Ambrose Academy cafeteria that Friday in January, I had a problem. I had not cried at the funeral home, at the funeral, nor at the cemetery. I thought I was being supportive to my mother and my sister by not doing so, by being" manly." Now six weeks later, I wanted to cry. It was as though grief had used Oberhaus to break through my denial. Where does a senior in an all-boy school go to cry? I went to the chapel. And cry 1 did. The enormity of his death, all the pain I had been pushing down for weeks rose up to hit me in the stomach.

What was happening? Had I gone from an emotional under-reaction to Dan's death to now an over-reaction.? Of my three siblings, I was closer to oldest brother, Jack, and to my sister, Mary Jeanne, than I was to Don, six years my senior. I had helped him on his paper route and had inherited it from him. I could not recall one unkind word or act from him, but he hadn't been a best friend. I was looking forward to cultivating an adult friendship with him. It has taken me a long time to understand that the crying in the chapel that day went beyond Don. In the six weeks since his death my family, which I had taken for granted, had become important to me. I felt sad, when, on passing my mother's bedroom door at night, I could hear her quietly sobbing. Jack, Mary Jeanne and I seemed to be kinder to each other, more considerate. My sorrow that day went beyond my own; I was sharing the grief of the whole family and empathizing with them. Oberhaus’ stupid and insensitive remark had belittled not just my grief but that of the family.

            While I was in the chapel, word quickly spread among my classmates of my encounter with Oberhaus.  When classes ended for the day, the seniors in their fashion displayed their sympathy and solidarity with me by charging to the cafeteria and rioting. It reopened two weeks later under new management.

 

            I will have to become older and wiser before I fully understand all the ways Don’s death affected me. Now, looking back over 55 years, I think his death’s most important legacy for me may well have been to make me understand the importance of family. My brother, Jack, and my sister, Mary Jeanne, have been constants in my circle of closest friends. Their spouses and numerous children are important and precious to me. Would this have happened had Don not died in the way that he did? Perhaps. But I think not. My hope for my own adult children is that after their parents die that they will continue to be loving and supportive to each other.