Mr. Armstrong made vanilla wafers for us. Homemade vanilla wafers. I’d never had any except from the grocery, and these were good, really good. Once he brought hot loaves of bread to the class; they lasted about 5 minutes after we tore into them. Quite different from the Wonder Bread most of us ate with our sandwiches from home.
He was the only Room Father I ever knew as a child – or as an adult, for that matter. His wife worked somewhere, but he was a baker. His day started at 3am, so he was free to bring us stuff in the afternoon. The teacher was a little nervous about it, and the Room Mothers didn’t approve. He always did what he was supposed to do, so there wasn’t any good reason to keep him from being a “Room Father”.
After we moved several blocks from the school, I’d walk home with Mr. Armstrong and his son Joe, who was in my class. Joe and his dad held hands, which was strange. I never saw any of the other boys holding their father’s hands.
I asked Mr. Armstrong why he was a baker. He told me that loaves of bread, the things people eat, are important. “They are simple,” he said. “Always needed to live. I want to do something important, to help people live.”
Mr. Armstrong said strange things, I thought. Baking is important?
My dad told me that Mr. Armstrong had been in the war, like him, so one day as we walked I asked Mr. Armstrong what he did in the war. Did he fight? Did he get hurt?
“Oh, no,” he said. “I sort of cleaned up things.”
“What?” I persisted. I could imagine Mr. Armstrong washing dishes, or doing laundry, as my dad did once in a great while.
“Well, there was this place, a beach named Omaha, and our soldiers . . . there was a mess, they fought there, and other guys with me, we cleaned things up. And there was this camp, (he mentioned a foreign-sounding name that I recall sounding like “Buckwall”), with very sick people in it, and we cleaned that up too, lots of those people in the camp had died.
I didn’t really understand, at the age of 7 or 8. A few years later I learned Mr. Armstrong was in Graves Registration in the army. He spent the war taking care of the dead, at Omaha Beach following the Normandy invasion, and after a time, his unit had been present when one of the concentration camps was liberated – probably Buchenwald.
Before the war, he had been a student leader at his college. Planned a career in law. He was outgoing, handsome, well spoken, and a leader. Not the quiet, shy father I had seen. Not the man who chose to work while most people slept. Not the man who walked his son to school, holding his boy’s hand. After the war he gave up his plans for law school, and baked bread.
Bread – necessary for life.