Confirmation and History

Non-confirmation

The only thing I remember about confirmation class at our Lutheran church was that we had to watch these really tedious filmstrips.  I will refer you to Wikipedia for info on filmstrips but will simply say that if anyone posted something on YouTube today of that pathetic quality they would be laughed out of cyberspace. Unfortunately for the person conducting our classes, I was the only student actually paying attention (I believe I was also reading The Communist Manifesto around this time). I started asking questions which the teacher could not answer. Alerted to the problem, my parents were given a list of clergymen in the San Fernando Valley who were “good with youth” and we visited some of them. If I had known about Socrates at this point I would have found this highly amusing. Alas, even the “good with youth” clergymen proved to be unhelpful (because, as I learned later at university, there were no logical answers to the questions I was asking). At length I withdrew from confirmation class and, to my surprise, my parents also stopped going to church. Apparently they had only been going because it was felt to be “good for youth.”

History

Not even a good apostate can live on Marx and Lenin alone, so I spent many happy hours in the local branch library reading sports biographies and whatever came to hand.

Going to this library involved crossing the LA river on a precarious pedestrian bridge. During a flood the water would be rushing only inches below my feet. I was not surprised to see in Google Map that that bridge is gone.

Because of my father’s service in the Pacific Theater during WW2, I happened to notice Samuel Eliot Morison’s  History of United States Naval Operations in World War II -- in 15 volumes -- and proceeded to read it all. Most books about the War in the Pacific refer to this work so it was a happy accident that I started at the source, as it were.

I’ve continued to read about military history in general and the Pacific War in particular ever since and, while there are some better books about one aspect or another of the war, nothing really compares to Morison. His coverage of the crucial battles in the Solomon Islands is especially valuable because he was actually there and can talk about the role physical and mental exhaustion played on the U.S. (and undoubtedly also the Japanese) side.

Lenin and Morison would be hilariously strange bedfellows, but they somehow put me on the path to where I am today intellectually.