 | Jane is on the left and Jane's father Frank is on the right. Frank was in the army for 33 years and served in WWII and in Korea. He was in Germany and Poland at the end of the war when Jews were liberated from the death camps. |  |
| | Jane is on the left and Jane's father Frank is on the right. Frank was in the army for 33 years and served in WWII and in Korea. He was in Germany and Poland at the end of the war when Jews were liberated from the death camps. | |
When I arrived at the address on my typed orders, the cab driver asked me if I was sure this was where I wanted to be. There was no one around. It was an overcast day in Washington and the street was empty. It all seemed very surreal. Here I was with my duffle bag and in my uniform getting out of a cab on a street with no cars and no people in a warehouse district and not only the cab driver thought this was strange, so did I.
 (First car - a 1939 Simca in 1960)  |
The building had garage doors and a side door with one of those privacy peep holes. I knocked and waited. A few minutes later someone on the inside said, "Put your orders in the mail slot."
After about five or ten minutes I heard the door bolt slide and the door was unlocked. A guy in civilian cloths opened the door and told me to follow him. I was led through what appeared to be a garage with limos and some regular cars into a back room where I was told to have a seat. After a few minutes Chuck, who was obviously in charge, but also in civilian cloths so I didn't know if he was a private, a sargeant, or a colonel came over and introduced himself as just "Chuck."
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Chuck was actually a master sargeant and he was the crew chief of a maintenance team which was in charge of the "shop" which included radios and automobiles and limos and they kept everything running. We became good friends and even after he retired from the army I would sometimes get together with him in Boca Raton. After the military he became a teacher in a college there and I lived in South Florida. We would talk about these "old" times.
There were always a bunch of secret service people in the shop just hanging out or waiting for a call. It was early 1959. There was only one Jew in the Secret Service. And I was the only Jew in WHASA, the White House Army Signal Agency.