I’m writing this on Saturday. It’s a beautiful day. Warm and sunny. Carol spent the morning planting flowers. I did the grocery shopping. I also went to the craft store and bought a couple of glass jars so Carol can transplant her bamboo shoots. While I was there I bought a bouquet of artificial roses for my dad’s grave. In an hour or so we’re going over to see my mother. On the way we’ll stop at the little cemetery in Bennett’s Corners and put the flowers on his grave. More than likely my brother will have already been there. The VFW, too.

My dad died 2 ½ years ago at age 89. He could have died much earlier. In his twenties. In World War II.

My father enlisted in the Army a year before Pearl Harbor. Like a lot of Ohioans, he was in the 37th Division. 145th Infantry. After basic training they sent him to hot and swampy Camp Shelby, Mississippi, to get him ready to fight in the Pacific. They were teaching him to shoot a machine gun. Everybody knew war was coming.

Three weeks after Pearl Harbor, my grandfather died. Christmas Day, 1941. My father was given a furlough to take care of the family business, a corner grocery there in Bennett’s Corners. While my father was home, the 37th Division shipped out to the Pacific. Had his father not died, my father probably would have. The life of a machine gunner in combat was measured in minutes.

So my dad was a soldier without a unit. He joined the Army Air Force and signed up for cooking school. After his training at Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indiana, he shipped out to an air base in northern England. He went from corporal to staff sergeant. Soon he was in charge of an “officers’ mess.” It was his job to see that the new bomber crews flying over the U.S. were properly fed while they awaited deployment to bases closer to the English Channel. He also fed the home-bound crews lucky enough to complete their 25 missions. There weren’t many of those.
My father was incredibly proud of his three years as a mess sergeant. He was so good at it, that when the war was over, he was given a special commendation by the War Department.

While in England my father had appendicitis. Almost died. Had he been on some island in the Pacific, he surely would have died. He used to tell the story about how doctors performed experimental surgery on him. His recovery was so miraculous that they had him stand up buck naked in front of hundreds of doctors and nurses in London while the surgeons explained what they did.

Anyway, my father loved running his mess hall. He loved creating recipes to feed hundreds of men. He kept them all in a little brown notebook.

In 1996, while doing some genealogical work on the family, I came across that notebook. I simply fell in love with those recipes. Yes, they were just lists of ingredients, and how to mix them together, but the pride and sense-of-duty of that young mess sergeant was present in every misspelled word.

I was so taken with them, in fact, that I included one of them in my first published novel, Going To Chicago.

So, here it is, in remembrance of my father, Staff Sgt. Clyde A. Levandoski:

CHOCOLATE PUDDING FOR 1000 MEN

78 eggs
13 lbs. Cornstarch
22 ¾ qts. Cold milk
65 qts. Water
26 lbs. Sugar
4 7/8 oz. vanilla
9 ¾ lbs. Cocoa
4 7/8 oz. salt

Dissolve cornstarch in cold milk, add beaten eggs. Dissolve sugar and salt in heated (not boiling) water. Add water to milk/corn starch/eggs mixture. Add cocoa and vanilla and stir until pudding thickens.

I bet it was delicious.