World War II vets are a special class
By Carl Heintze
Last week I had an acrimonious telephone argument with a representative of the alumni magazine for the university from which I received my bachelor's degree.
It revolved around to which university class I belonged. It is an argument I am bound to lose, but one which frustrates me. It's also an argument which probably is a waste of time. It galls me, nonetheless. So please bear with me as I explain.
Like many old men, I am a veteran of World War II, and like many old men, my education was interrupted by the war. I started college in 1940 which under normal circumstances would have meant that my classmates and I would have graduated in 1944.
But years intervened--in my case two and a half, but in some others as many as five--before we could get home, collect our GI Bill benefits and finish our degrees. Thus, the women in our class graduated in 1944, but few of the men in our class were so fortunate.
They returned to be members of the classes of 1945, 1946, 1947 and even 1948. They were, indeed, members of the war classes. That's not the way the university sees it, however. They supposedly classify us by what they call our "social class," that is, the year we started college, not when we finished.
And then sometimes they don't.
Sometimes we get mail addressed as if we were members of the class of, say, 1944 and sometimes we get mail as if we belonged in 1946 or 1947, the years when we actually walked up the aisle and were handed our diplomas. My caller, who seemed never to have heard of World War II, or of the fact that veterans might not necessarily graduate when they were supposed to, could not get this through her head.
It is a matter of some importance, but not much, because I had volunteered to be the secretary for the class of 1947. She found it difficult to see how I qualified for this job when my social class was 1944. I explained to her that I really considered myself to be a member of that class and not of the class of 1947, but she didn't get it.
I finally hung up in a snit from which I am slowing recovering. But, in the meantime, I find myself in limbo. Am I in the class of 1944, whose ill-conceived class slogan for a time was "Enjoy the War With '44," or am I member of the class of 1947, a strange conglomerate of women who started college three years after the men in the class?
(I am ignoring the fact that a lot of the men in the class of 1947, for better or worse, ended up marrying the women in 1947, regardless of their "social" class.)
The class of 1947 remains, however, a polyglot. Few of its members passed through college during a single set of four years. Most of the men were veterans. All of the women were younger than the men. All of the women waited through the war, some on accelerated programs so they could get degrees early. Class unity is, at best, a fragmentary thing.
Social class or what I guess you would call chronological class to the contrary, the class of 1947 is not filled with class spirit. It was a class in search of a lot of things, but rah! rah! was not it. Most of the men in '47 thought they had lost part of their lives and youth. All they wanted to do was to get out of school, to get to peacetime work, to start raising families (if they didn't already have them) or perhaps to move on to graduate school.
My telephone caller seems unaware of any of this or of the fact that the unifying factor for all war classes was The War, not "social" class.
It seems to me there's a way to handle this, although my university--I have to confess it is Stanford--has not done so. And I also hate to confess that that institution on the other side of the Bay, whose initials are UC, has.
At Berkeley war classes are lumped together for most purposes as (how logical) The War Classes. The War Classes at Berkeley, oblivious of their "social" class recently banded together to raise a couple of million dollars with which to landscape Memorial Glade, a fitting tribute to those in the War Classes who did not return to graduate.
Stanford instead seems intent on maintaining separate "social" classes, oblivious of the fact that the classes in question are members of a special group, subjected to special circumstances who would like to be remembered in a special way.
It's still not too late to do something about it if the university hops to it. But they'd better hurry. Most of the members of 1945,1946 and 1947 are in their late seventies. They aren't going to be around much longer (indeed, a lot of them already have passed on) and soon it won't make any difference to which "social" class they belong.
They'll be members of that same big class in the sky.
Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.
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Los Gatos, California Since 1881
