I have been ordering many of the long lead items that will be needed to complete the River House construction. Items are arriving almost daily at the Road House where I have learned to unpack and inspect each one even if the packaging looks fine. Today, one of the medicine cabinets that will go into the main bedroom arrived via FedEx. The outer box showed no signs of trauma. The interior packing was very robust and also intact. Despite this, when I removed the cabinet, I discovered one corner of the frame and mirror were damaged. I am glad I caught this now rather than in mid-summer when this cabinet would have been installed. Still, I am not looking forward to the replacement process which generally involves a lot of finger-pointing and paperwork.

Of all the choices we have had to make for the River House, none have been more difficult and time-consuming than those related to the siding; materials, colors, and patterns. We received the rendering above from our architect today which illustrates the patterns we will use. The horizontal boards will be used between vertically aligned windows and extend from the foundation to the roof line in between black trim boards. The vertical boards will cover the remainder of the house and be of variable width in either a shiplap or open joint profile. As much as we both love wood, we ruled this out as a material early on because of the ongoing need for maintenance. Leading candidates for the vertical boards are Boral Tru Exterior (principally made from fly ash) and Modern Mill Acre (principally made from rice hulls). The horizontal boards will be either Resysta (rice hull) or metal. We have developed a provisional color pallet, not the one shown here, but that is still in a bit of flux. We need to nail down all of the final choices this week if we are to stay on schedule.

Jeanine and I drove into Somerville this evening to have dinner with Maya at the Bow Market, a short walk from her apartment. She appears to have fully recovered from her bout of mononucleosis that left her totally incapacitated for the last week. Kyle is visiting with friends in Padre Island, TX and Nicolai is in San Diego for an amputee soccer event so our family dinner was much smaller than usual. Earlier in the day, Jeanine and I met with our interior designer to review the tile design for the bathrooms, and are getting close to a final version. I subsequently spent several hours at the River House relocating 16 electrical boxes for the bathroom sconces and outlets so that these fixtures would be optimally aligned with the new tile plan.

Just found this video clip of Nico on the Instagram account of AdaptX Sports. The organization is committed to teaching fitness professionals how to address the unique needs of clients with intellectual and physical disabilities. It looks like they put Nico through quite an extensive fitness evaluation. I would be interested to see how his numbers compared to other professional athletes.

Joseph Smedley was a childhood friend of Nicolai’s when we lived in Indianapolis. He died in 2015 in what police ruled a suicide. His sister Vivianne has been on a crusade to have the case reopened convinced that foul play was involved. From what I know of the facts of the case, I am of the opinion that Joseph died at the hands of one or more members of the Sigma Pi fraternity. The note he left behind in his room, is all you need to study to reach this conclusion. It read: “Had to leave country. don’t try to contact me via cell it won’t works. will contact you once setup overseas. ~Smedley 9/28.” First, this is not a suicide note. It is a note written by someone who wanted to create a narrative where Joseph is nowhere to be found (his body was found in a local reservoir with a book and stone filled backpack strapped to his chest). Second, his sister does not believe it is in his handwriting and it appears to have been written by a left-handed person. Joseph was right-handed. Third, it was dated. Who dates a note like this. It was dated to establish a time line, probably to create an alibi for the perpetrator(s). Fourth, it was poorly written and sloppily scrawled. Joseph was very bright and had excellent penmanship. Fifth, Joseph did not have a passport nor the financial means to leave the country. All of this leads to one obvious conclusion. The note was written by the person(s) who were involved with his death. It was left in the apartment which he shared with fellow members of the Sigma Pi fraternity. He was last seen with members of Sigma Pi on the night of his disappearance. A text with a similar message was sent to his sister on the following morning. It was sent by someone who knew who Vivianne was to Joseph and had access to his phone (which was not found with the body or at his apartment). The coroner ruled the cause of death as drowning. A subsequent autopsy revealed hemorrhaging on Joseph’s back, suggesting to me that he drowned while being held underwater by one or more people who were kneeling on his back. His body was found in 3 feet of water with a pair of binoculars around his neck in addition to the weighted backpack strapped to his chest. There is no way this was a suicide.

I believe Joseph’s death was not premeditated because the cover-up was so ill-conceived. I think the most likely scenario is that he was killed by one or more members of his fraternity either as part of a hazing that went tragically wrong or as the result of an altercation.

Please join me in signing a petition for the police to reopen this case. Details of the case can be found here.

We were joined today by Tom and Karen Metzold for a tour of the River House followed by lunch at Firorella’s Cucina. Tom was my wrestling partner in high school and is my oldest friend. Karen and I share the same birthday and have much more in common. The couple lives in Westwood and is just back from a skiing vacation in Colorado. They leave shortly for their home in Florida so we were fortunate that we could spend time with them today.

Maya shared this photo of a magnificent Cooper’s Hawk she took from the sink window of her Somerville apartment. Notice the way she used the branches to frame her subject. Regrettably, Maya is suffering from mononucleosis and reports that she is feeling worse than her very difficult bout with Covid. Jeanine is fighting the urge to rush over with chicken noodle soup out of respect for her autonomy and with the knowledge that her roommates are taking good care of her.

With framing completed it is time for the mechanical systems to be installed. Drain lines depend on gravity to operate properly so plumbing is the first mechanical system to be installed allowing for maximum flexibility in pipe placement. Next comes heating and cooling because they have the largest ducts, and then ventilation followed by electrical. I can already tell I will be pleased with the work based on watching the skill with which the two-man team from M&R Plumbing operates. Pictured above is the laundry room washer dryer supply and drain.

Up until today, all work on the River House has been additive. We added a foundation, added framing, added sheathing, added windows, etc. Today, for the first time, the process of subtraction began with the arrival of the plumbing team. They began drilling holes throughout the house for drain and vent pipes. I decided to join them in my capacity as the ventilation system installer. The Zehnder ERV system we are using requires 32 runs of 3″ tubing to various rooms in the house. I completed drilling all the necessary holes today, a task that was as strenuous as it was satisfying. A lot of the work was done overhead which rained down sawdust that found its way into very unexpected places on my body. In several areas, I had to drill a 3-1/4″ hole through a 3-1/2″ wide 2×4. Much harder than it sounds, I was quite pleased with my results as pictured above. Each bore hole had to go through the 2×4 and the 1-1/8 inch flooring below for a total of 2-5/8″ which made for a lot of work, not to mention sawdust.

The kids and two bonus daughters (Fiona and Grace, two of Maya’s housemates) joined us for a pancake breakfast this morning. Jeanine was on the griddle for banana pancakes and I was in charge of the standard Calabria recipe with options for pecans and/or chocolate chips. Regular and turkey bacon completed the meal.

Now that I have placed the mounting brackets and boxes for ceiling lighting, I am moving on to outlet boxes. Placing them is a matter of compliance with the electrical code and, more importantly, thinking ahead to furniture placement and use cases. Before all is said and done, there will be more than one hundred such boxes distributed throughout the home. Once again, the bulk of my time is spent thinking rather than installing since there is no going back once the drywall is installed.

Burton Craige is the husband of my cousin Heather. He is in Boston this weekend with his brother and sister-in-law to donate some 300 wartime letters written by their father to Harvard University. Jeanine and I joined him for dinner in Cambridge this evening and learned of his father’s exploits which our eloquently summarized in the letter Burton wrote appended below.

BEHIND THE SILENCE

In recent weeks I have been working with my brother Tito and sister-in-law Kim in compiling my father’s wartime letters. Ernest Craige graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1939. A brilliant student, he won a Rhodes Scholarship, an award he was unable to accept because the program was put on hold when the war broke out on September 1, 1939. Instead of going to Oxford, he entered Harvard Medical School, joining a class whose education was compressed so that newly minted doctors could be deployed to the war zones in Europe and the Pacific. Ernie graduated from Harvard in 1943 and, after a brief internship, joined the Army that fall. Sent to Texas, he was assigned to the Fifth Auxiliary Surgical Group. 

After months of training and many false starts, the Fifth Auxiliary made its way to Normandy in late August 1944. The surgical teams followed the troops across France and Belgium and into Germany, treating injured American soldiers and Nazi victims, including allied POWs, slave laborers, and concentration camp survivors, as well as German POWs. In the spring of 1945 in western Germany, Ernie, age 26, was given the enormous responsibility of directing six rapidly improvised hospitals with thousands of beds in the chaotic conclusion of the European war. In June 1945 he and the Fifth Auxiliary were sent to Marseille, where they waited for their redeployment to the war in the Pacific. Only days before they were to be shipped to the Far East, the atomic bomb forced Japan’s surrender and the end of the war. 

For his entire life, Ernie was a remarkably gifted and prolific cartoonist. To the delight of his classmates and comrades, he captured their experiences with a keen eye, a deft hand, and a trenchant wit. Immediately after the war, he published a collection of cartoons documenting the wartime experiences of the Fifth Auxiliary. Brilliantly executed, “Our Hearts Were Young With Gay” is a timeless record of the miseries, absurdities, and joys of army life. 

While in Europe, Ernie (“Tito”) sent dozens of letters to his parents in El Paso, Texas, and his brother Branch, an Army doctor who was directing a malaria research project at a federal prison in Joliet, Illinois. As children, we treasured our father’s cartoons. But beyond the cartoons, we knew nothing of his wartime experiences. He never spoke about the war. 

In reading these letters, I am again amazed by our father’s extraordinary talents, wisdom, and humor. At the same time, I regret not having known, read, and talked about the letters with him while he was alive. In the last year of his life, while he was confined to a bed in the assisted living facility at Meadowmont in Chapel Hill, I read him the collection of letters his grandfather Ernst Kohlberg wrote to his family in Germany in 1875-77 as an émigré to El Paso. My father took great pleasure in hearing these letters. I wish he had asked me to read his own wartime letters, many written from Germany not far from the towns that his Jewish grandparents left to come to America.

Like my father, many veterans of World War II were reluctant to talk about the war. These letters have caused me to reflect about the reasons for that silence, for that generation in general and for my father in particular. 

Perhaps the first reason, shared by millions of veterans, is the horror of war. My father’s letters –muted because of military censorship and fear of alarming his family– describe experiences that no one would want to relive: 

[A German insane asylum converted into an American hospital] is intact and was somehow bypassed by the avalanche that came through this area. All the other towns are completely destroyed — just heaps of rubble, furniture tumbling out of shattered second stories, burned out tanks, tracks all along the road, and scores of swollen dead horses, carts, a mess of clothes, ammunition, etc.  (3/2/45)

The Stalag [for Russian POWs] here was perfectly incredible – patients had to eat each other; they were shot if they poked their heads out of the door, etc. The Russian doctor tells me that 60 dead daily in a camp of 18,000 was routine. (3/4/45)

With this new field hospital we moved to this little town … less than a day after the tanks moved through. …The roads have occasional roadblocks … [a]nd some well-placed machine guns. These obstacles apparently were not as formidable as planned and the roadblock is pushed off to the side and plenty of Krauts are lying around. A lot of them died in their foxholes and can be seen clutching a potato grenade or a burp gun.  (3/5/45)

This camp we’re in now is also inhabited by several hundred refugee slave laborers from all over Europe gathered up by our advance. They had hidden in caves and holes until the Germans went by and then delivered themselves to the Americans. They are of every nationality and are very motley looking.  (3/12/45)

The way the [allied] armies are knifing across Germany prevents any very effective defense. We had quite a busy run of it for a few days being the only field hospital this side of the river for three days in the army area….The casualties that we got were as usual very severe — traumatic amputations, chests, bellies. 80% required either thoracotomy or laparotomy.  (3/31/45)

All along the roads there were thousands of Belgians, French, Russians, Polish, liberated POWs and slave laborers. They were very down-at-the-heel looking. Occasionally you pass the grimy gray barbed wire enclosed barracks in which they have spent the last 3 – 5 years. Many such camps kept a large herd of police dogs to catch escapees. In order to free one group of prisoners our soldiers had to machine gun a large pack of these brutes. These foreigners have a few camps along the road but in general there is a considerable degree of disorganization and they wander in the general direction of France or Russia living off the land which must be a source of terror to the natives.  (4/13/45)

If one goes across Germany more and more examples of the incredible brassy cruelty of these people are uncovered. It’s like rolling over a stone and having all the foul crawling insects revealed scurrying about. The citizens however are unperturbed, impenitent – whereas yesterday they gladly benefited from the slave labor of these thousands of Russians, Poles, etc., today they would indignantly demand protection from ravages of the unfortunate creatures…. We have been getting several bullet wounds and squashed skulls daily from the sporadic episodes of violence which followed the wandering in search of food and roof by these foreigners. (4/18/45)

We are open now as a station hospital which apparently is what most evacuation hospitals will do in occupied areas. Some evacs are needed in the horrible pesthole concentration camps that are constantly being liberated.  (4/20/45)

You can believe anything you read about these incredibly ghastly German concentration camps. There are four kinds of camps as far as I can make out.

1. For regular POWs: some bad and some not so bad
2. Stalags for foreign workers: Black bread and soup, barracks etc.
3. POWs and workers boarded out on farms, bakeries etc. OK
4. Concentration camps political prisoners etc. ghastly  (4/23/45)

More frightful POW camps full of Americans have been uncovered. A hospital moved in to take over. A major back from there gave a most horrible description: four in a bed, three dead, the other too weak to push them out. Other dead: buried in such a shallow fashion that to scuff the earth would reveal the decaying remains of American boys. The average citizen here though is bland about the whole thing and considers himself as guiltless as somebody in Joplin.  (4/26/45)

Did you see the description of those death traps at Buchenwald etc. in TIME last week? The Stalag a couple of miles from here was not so spectacular but the same story.  (5/8/45)

My new assignment is a 300-bed hospital which runs along all right without me. It has mostly surgical wounds with many, many amputations and 100 infections as is true in all German hospitals I have seen. (5/19/45)

At present I’m near one of the big cities in the Ruhr…. The city is an absolute ruin in the downtown area…. The air raids did most of it I guess. The [German] doctors here say the problem of taking care of casualties was terrific. They had to let almost all guts & bellies go and take care of what they could of the extremities. The latter ones 100% foully infected with amputation as common as flies. (undated, probably June 1945)

I’m glad we won’t have to patch up any more American boys who have just had parts blown off. (8/14/45, after Japanese surrender)

So for my father and many others, the war was a violent interlude that one longed to forget, not an uplifting story to be told and retold. Their aversion to reliving the past was reinforced by their dreams for a radically different future. In these letters, my father began to envision a new life back home, where he could build a family and launch a career. He declined an offer to take the Rhodes scholarship after the war, telling Branch “I will have had enough of these foreign countries after this campaign and the next one.” (4/20/45) He applauded Branch’s engagement and marriage to Jean McCracken in 1945, and said he hoped to follow their example (6/26/45). He rejected an offer to work with Branch on the malaria research project in Illinois. (7/5/45) Instead, he decided to apply for a residency at Massachusetts General Hospital or Boston Children’s Hospital. (8/7/45) 

When Ernie returned to the United States, his final army assignment was to treat wounded veterans at a hospital in Denver. There he met and fell in love with Hazel Fischer, an army nurse from Minneapolis. Married in September 1946, they settled in Boston, where Ernie began a cardiology residency under the guidance of the great Paul Dudley White. With a busy schedule of patient care, teaching, and research, a new marriage, and four children arriving at two-year intervals, Ernie decisively turned the page, leaving the war far behind.

While most returning veterans made a similar transition after the war, Ernie’s personality ensured a deeper level of silence. Although he had multiple talents, recognized by all who knew him, he never spoke of his accomplishments. He was incapable of telling a story that placed himself above others. While confident of his talents, he was the epitome of self-deprecation. He knew that whatever he had done, suffered, or lost in the war, others had done, suffered, and lost more. Perhaps he felt that to speak of his war would have dishonored theirs. 

Finally, Ernie’s silence about the war may have reflected painful losses at home that coincided with his army service. His beloved mother Else died of breast cancer in El Paso in early 1944. On the final day of 1944, his father Branch died of a heart attack in El Paso, while Ernie was encamped with the Fifth Auxiliary in Belgium during the final German counteroffensive. Because of delays in mail deliveries, Ernie did not learn of his father’s death until the evening of January 25, 1945, when he received a letter from Branch II listing unresolved issues about their father’s estate. Ernie wrote his brother the next day: 

This letter of yours hit me about 9:00 o’clock last night. We were having a little party for one of the nurses whose birthday it was. I had to get out — to think this over — and put on my coat and walked about 5 miles. It was the most magnificent night I have seen. Bitter cold but with clear sky, full moon — the ground covered with thick snow. You could see a block or two away with ease it was so light. I hate to be stuck here in what seems to be the end of the world while you must have had your hands full at home. I wish I could have been of some help.

Of his father Ernie wrote, “I know of no one more kind, loving, devoted.”  

His father’s distant death was forever linked to the terrible sights that Ernie witnessed in the final months of the war. To protect himself and his family, he closed the door on the past, leaving these letters behind.

Burton Craige

February 6, 2023

Less than two weeks ago on February 4th, we experienced a record-low temperature of 10 below zero. Today we had a record high for this day of 64 degrees as shown on my car’s temperature display. When I took this photo, I was returning from Home Depot where I purchased 4 combination smoke/CO detectors, 6 smoke-only detectors, and 2 heat detectors, all required to meet the fire code for new home construction. The six hundred dollar bill was small compared to many other purchases for the house, but it irks me that this expense will be incurred every ten years when the internal batteries reach the end of life and all the units will wind up in a landfill. I would love to see an investigative report on how this requirement made its way into the fire code.

With the flooring and drywall completed the next phase of Kyle’s basement renovation project is the installation of the kitchen. It is a compact space but he has room for all the essentials.

The Concord Academy Wrestling Team finished third in the end-of-season Eastern Independent League tournament with one champion at 128 pounds. This will mark Nico’s fourth season as the assistant coach.

The last and largest window was installed on the River House today. It is 13 feet wide by 8 feet tall with a 4-foot sliding section. If I had to guess, I would say the triple pane unit weighs close to 800 pounds. Much of the morning was spent repairing a corner that was damaged in the last attempt at installation. I was skeptical that it would be done to my satisfaction but was pleasantly surprised by the quality of workmanship. The house is now fully enclosed. The front door assembly is the last opening to fill and will remain boarded until we finalize a decision and await delivery.