CBA Record May-June 2022

35 TH ANN I VERSARY OF THE CBA RECORD

whiskey drinking and democratic palaver. We always had a piano which my mother played for enjoyment and for the singing which occurred at parties hosted by “Red and Nell.” Every time I hear Clair de Lune or Golliwog’s Cake-Walk, I can see her at the keyboard. She had a token drink or two at parties and special events. On Northwestern football game days during the 30’s and 40’s, our Evanston home would be filled with burly, red faced male farm equipment company steel buyers gathered around my mother on the piano bench bellowing Big 10 and Notre Dame fight and alma mater songs. Almost all of them were combat veterans of World I. The rhythm section for the piano and the steel buyer baritones was the thunky clicking of ice cubes tossing around in waves of bourbon in durable double old-fashioned glasses. Everybody, including the tweedy, sensible shoed, iron gray-haired wives of the steel buyers, seemed high. Nobody seemed drunk. Similar gatherings at our house fea tured the survivors of my father’s World War I squadron. Many of them had gone either into the steel business or businesses which made great big wheeled things out of real thick steel bars. At parties hosted by my parents in our home, my brothers and I acted as bar tenders and waiters. We did not sample what we served – we wouldn’t have dared. I never had any prejudice against or for alcohol. I did notice, however, that my classmates from Evanston Township High School who got into various kinds of trouble involving cars, had wretched grades and were not sports minded, were usually beer consumers. Outside of class they generally had a cigarette dangling from their lower lip. They aroused small ripples of jealousy in me because, despite their troubles and indifferent personal hygiene, they seemed to attract girls of the more spirited sort compared to those who might from time to time accede a date to me. In June of 1944 I commenced college

at the Northwestern Univer sity Institute of Technology in Evanston as a candidate for a mechanical engineering degree. I was sixteen and had never sipped, much less guzzled, an alcoholic drink. My first drink was imbibed at a fraternity “rush” party. I was asked if I drank beer. My response was, “Is the Pope a Catholic?” During college and law school days (1944-1950), my drinking was, I used to believe, social and minimal. However, sometime during the 1980’s at some social gathering, a wan and weathered woman sidled up to me and said. “Pat O’Brien – I remember you!” For a reply I nervously murmured some thing about the possibility of

the same. There were many boozy and jolly Air Force nights in which I was a player. But I was never involved in any incidents that marked me as someone who couldn’t hold his liquor. However, there were incidents which probably would not have occurred if I had not been drinking. One night I was celebrating in the St. John’s Newfoundland Officers’ Club my promotion to Captain after six months as a 1st Lieutenant. A problem developed with a regular Air Force former Sergeant who had gotten a 2nd Lieutenant’s Com mission decades ago and had just made Captain. He was unhappy with my lack of military demeanor and noisiness. He sharply questioned me as to “how the hell a loudmouth like me got an Air Force Commission.” I asked him how he got his Saturday Evening Post. He answered, “By mail.” I replied, “That’s how I got my Commission.” His immediate attack on me was thwarted by friends of both of us. A “bird” Colonel who knew that I knew he was being investigated for seri ous fraud once stepped into my path in the same Officers’ Club. I was carrying

her enlightening me as to the exact nature of her remembrance. She said it was all the beer I drank at beach parties in the Summer of 1944! Service in the United States Air Force Advocate General’s Department (1951 1953) involved me in many court martials as either prosecutor, defense counsel, Law Officer (Judge) or reviewing officer. Excessive drinking by the accused was almost always the root of the crime. I recall that drunkenness was no excuse for criminal behavior except possibly where the defendant drinker had reached a state of “ambulatory stupefaction.” I also han dled administrative cases often involving outrageous drunken behavior by officers who were removed from the Air Force practically overnight. The Air Force world that I knew was a heavy drinking society. At the Air Force Base Officer Clubs where I drank (Great Falls, Montana; Elmendorf, Alaska; Son drestromfjord, Nasarsuak and Thule, Greenland; Goose Bay, Labrador, and St. Johns, Newfoundland) hard liquor cost 25 cents a shot, a bottle of beer – about

CBA RECORD 19