Wilma Lee Elaine Isaacs was a divorced woman at 18. She was a divorced woman with a child. She was a child with a child. And like a child will do with something with which she has no idea how to deal, she asked her mother to keep the child, until she could figure out what to do with him. And, although she did not know it then, that could not happen until she grew up.
She was also a gorgeous woman-child with flowing auburn hair that came down well below her shoulders, naturally wavy and thick. She had a flawless light olive complexion with thick natural brows and lashes. She was small, barely 5’ 2,” and small boned. A wasp waist and size D breasts gave her 110 pound body what was thought in 1944 to be the perfect figure: 36-24-36. She was what they called then “a knockout.” And she knew it.
She also could sing. She could sing in a husky contralto which hinted of things not normally mentioned in polite company. And as the lounges in Topeka began to fill up with returning veterans she had no trouble finding work. She also convinced her father that his coal mining company should host a half hour music show featuring her singing once a week on the largest radio station in Topeka, WIBW.
Word about this hot new singer got around Topeka fast. And the local musicians union signed her up knowing that she would make a perfect “pick up” singer when the big bands came to town to play the two big ballrooms, Meadow Acres Ballroom and the Kansas Hotel Starlight Ballroom.
What most folks did not know was that when the big bands, like Tommy Dorsey, Les Brown, Sammy Kaye, or Guy Lombardo, would tour, playing a series of one or two night stops across America, they would only bring the key band members, maybe six or eight total, and the rest of the band would be filled in by “pick up” musicians from the local union. And most big bands did not travel with either a “boy singer” or a “girl singer.” Which was how Wilma got to sing with most of the big bands that came through Topeka in 1944 and 1945.
And so she used her looks and her voice to get ahead in the big city of Topeka, Kansas. Only someone who was from a village of barely 900 people, Burlingame, Kansas, some 30 miles south of Topeka, would possibly mistake Topeka for a big city. But everything is relative when you are 18 and you are beautiful, talented and ready to have some of the fun that you missed because you got married and had a child at 16.
Alva Amos Galemore was barely 19 years old when he arrived in Topeka in the Spring of 1945. Alva came to Topeka lying flat on his back on an Army ambulance litter that carried him from the Forbes Air Base south of Topeka to the Stormont-Vail Veterans Hospital in southwest Topeka. Alva was lucky to be alive according to all the medical personnel who had seen him in the last month.
The corpsman who dug him half frozen out of the snow, ice and mud during the battle of the Colmar Pocket in January, 1945, said it was a miracle. The bitter cold and the mud probably saved his life because it helped freeze and clot the blood pouring from his thighs after the machine gun strafed him as he strung communications wire to a forward lookout post.
The doctors in the field hospital just inside of France said that the sulfa poured into his wounds by the corpsman probably kept him from getting gangrene and blood poisoning given all the filth that had been driven into his legs by the bullets, to say nothing of the filthy mud that he lay in for almost two full days before they could get help to him.
Al didn’t hear much of this talk as the morphine had spared him a bit of the pain as his body warmed up. The ether did the rest as the doctors proceeded to remove much of the muscle in the front of his thighs, and reconstruct his penis which was shot clean through. Much later he would say that he was shot “in all three legs.”
When the concept of time was completely lost, and he was patched up enough to move, they drove him to an airfield and after a short flight to another airfield near London he was moved to a hospital for a few days and further stabilized.
Then he was transferred directly to a larger plane and spent a day in Deleware before being transferred to yet another plane and flown to Forbes Air Base at Topeka, ending up at Stormont-Vail. The pain from all this travel was excruciating and Al was to the point where he really didn’t care where he was or whether he lived or died. He actually thought that dying sounded better.
Had he asked a doctor about his prognosis at that time the doctor would have told him that he would likely never be able to walk, or, if he could, he would have to use crutches because there was not enough thigh muscle left to support his body. But he was too sick and tired to care. And so he never asked.
Had he given a damn about it he could have looked back on a short military career that could only be described as brutal and that would almost inevitably have led him to this end.
He had lied about his age and enlisted in the Army when he was 16. Al was assigned to the Third Division and after boot camp he was shipped to North Africa to help in mopping up what was left of Rommel’s Africa Corp. It was hot and dirty work but not particularly dangerous at that point in the war.
But danger was coming as he was loaded into a troop ship, transferred to an LST, and found himself in water up to his neck wading toward the beach at Anzio. Anzio was a blunder of the first magnitude and the boys had to dig into the sand of the beach for what little protection they could get. Casualties were high as the weeks dragged on, but Al somehow missed getting shot.
Eventually the beach head was established and most of his Division was pulled out and sent to take Monte Cassino near Rome. That was a slow tough slog but he escaped being hurt there as well.
That should have been enough for any soldier, but there weren’t any limits on tours of duty or the number of beachheads a GI could make. So after Monte Casino they gathered up what was left of the Third Division and filled in with some raw recruits, put them back on a troop carrier and, once more, transferred them to LSTs and dropped them off at Toulon beach in southern France.
From Toulon they fought their way north through France and, as fate would have it, he ended up only 19 years old on a frozen hillside outside of Colmar, trying not to die.
Now as he lay flat on his back with a IV dripping into his arm and with pain that morphine couldn’t really quell, he wondered why he tried so hard to live.
To be continued….
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