“My father hated war, so he fixed me.”

This incident can never be forgotten by me. My father Adolph blinded me in my right eye — the same eye one needs to look down the length of a rifle, over the sights, to kill an enemy soldier … before the enemy kills you.

No doubt about it, Adolph was positive that Nazi Germany would win the war, and for a time, winning they were! My father feared for his family’s lives. After Great Britain, he believed the Nazi would be at our shores next. Don’t laugh because you too, back then, the way the war was going at that time, would have expected the United States to be invaded by the Nazis and soon.

While I was a baby, my father worked in a steel mill in Bridgeville and one day he brought home some of his welding equipment. That late afternoon he bound up a thick blindfold over my left eye, stood in front of me and he did it; he blinded me in my right eye.

“Look at the light, Stashu. Look at the light,” my father told me. I saw the sun, yes, the sun, and that’s where the memory ends.

And the worst thing about this permanent partial blindness was no baseball for me, no football for me, no tennis for me, no golf for me, and no war for me, either. It was drummed into me by my parents that if I injured my left eye, blindness would be complete. They told others, told me to tell others, that I was born with scar tissue in my right eye.

But cross-country and track were for me. I got awarded letters for my sweater, my jacket. When I went off to college, the track and field coach gave me a stopwatch. The year after h.s. graduation, Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile.

My father embarrassed the hell out of one older brother. This brother joined the National Guard, schemed so that he was in it and eligible for the extra money, I guess. My father took me and my mother to see the impromptu parade where local people lined up on the sidewalks. The high school band played as the guard marched down Central Avenue towards the waiting passenger train at the train station, to take them away to the Korean War (actually, a “Police Action”). The Captain, I guess he was a captain, was leading his troops to certain victory and glorious adventure.

My father Adolph left the line of spectators on the sidewalk, went into the street right up to their leader and started an argument. The band music stopped, the column of young soldiers in uniform, staggered, stopped in mid-stride. My father handed the Captain a document which the man read. Then, the Captain yelled, “Nodvik, fall out!’

My older brother was crying, and crying. He could not look any of his friends in the eye with his head lowered in shame. He then followed my father with my mom and I in tow while we were led to our car. I later learned that the document was my older brother’s birth certificate. He had lied about being old enough in order to be in the National Guard just to get that extra money. What an embarrassment for him, in front of the whole town, there to see them off. He was left behind and out of the National Guard. My father would not allow him to go to war to be, as he said, slaughtered.

I was the youngest and, as I said, my father determined for me that I would not actively serve my county. I got my 1-Y draft deferment when I was a mere baby. Years, much later, when bused into Pittsburgh with other guys for our physicals, I was declared not A-1, but I-Y due to the scar tissue on the retina of my right eye.

Out of college, no jobs around then, so I took the Civil Service Test and was offered the choice of two jobs:

1) A syphilis tracer for the health department in Erie, Pennsylvania, where Governor Ridge came from to become the first director of Homeland Security (remember the color code warnings? That was Ridge.)

2) A programmer for the Department of Defense at the quartermasters in Philadelphia.

I aced the interview for the job with computers. I just needed to pass a physical to get the job. I was given a physical by a young doctor. He told me I failed because of my faulty eyesight. This other and older doctor (as old as my father) walked across the room, picked up some forms of mine, then said to the younger doctor, “Pass him. He’s not going to be carrying a rifle, he doesn’t need 20-20 eyesight.”

I recall Adolph telling my uncle Alex and me that he came to this country at 17 years-old and during W.W.I he was in the Army. They put him and other recruits like him on permanent K.P. at peeling potatoes. My father along with the others would only speak Polish; they acted like the 3 stooges, so much so that they were called dumb Polacks. But, the dumb Polacks were discharged, Adolph told us.

I don’t think my father liked playing war and killing people, and he fixed me, keeping me away from that “opportunity” to become a dead martyr. Half of one, half of another. Was my father right? Was he wrong?
Who knows, but I am alive to tell this story. That should mean something, I guess.

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