Bill Mauldin. A man to remember.

What?!?
It's snowing.
Again.
ON THE COAST in North Carolina!
Please. Alert Al Gore.
Somebody has stolen his global warming plan.


Oh, well.
On to another topic.
Seems the US Post Office has gotten something right.
Very right.


This is from an e-mail making the rounds, and I'm please and proud to spread it around. I don't know the author. But, it was a man who knew Bill Maldin.
"Bill Mauldin?", you ask. Who in the world was that.
Time to listen up. And, read a little about a young cartoonist who was, perhaps, one of the biggest morale builders during all of WWII.

The story picks up...

…get out your history books and open them to the chapter on World War  II.  Today’s lesson will cover a little known but  very important ‘hero’ of whom very little was ever really known. Here is another  important piece of lost US history, which is a true  example of our American Spirit.!”
Makes  ya proud to put this  stamp on your envelopes........

 
Bill  Mauldin stamp honors  grunt's hero. The post office gets a lot of criticism. Always has, always  will.  And with the  renewed push to get  rid of Saturday mail   delivery, expect complaints to intensify. But the United States Postal  Service deserves a  standing ovation for something that happened last month:   Bill Mauldin got his own postage stamp.
Mauldin  died at age 81 in the early  days of 2003.   The end of his life had been rugged.  He had  been  scalded in a bathtub, which led to   terrible injuries and infections;   Alzheimer's disease was inflicting its cruelties.  Unable to care for himself  after the scalding, he  became a resident of a California nursing home, his   health and spirits in  rapid  decline  

He  was not forgotten,  though.  Mauldin, and his work, meant so much to  the millions of Americans who fought in World War  II, and  to those who had waited for them to  come home.  He was a kid cartoonist for Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper; Mauldin's  drawings of his muddy, exhausted, whisker-stubbled  infantrymen Willie and Joe were the voice of truth about what it was like on the front  lines.

Mauldin  was an enlisted  man just like the soldiers he drew for; his gripes were  their  gripes, his laughs their laughs, his  heartaches their heartaches.  He was  one of  them.  They loved him. 

He  never held back.   Sometimes, when his cartoons cut too close for  comfort, superior officers tried to tone him down.   In one memorable incident, he enraged Gen. George S. Patton, who informed Mauldin he wanted the pointed  cartoons – celebrating the fighting men,  lampooning the high-ranking officers  – to stop.   Now!  

                        "I'm beginning to feel like a  fugitive from the' law of  averages." 

The  news passed from  soldier to soldier.  How was Sgt. Bill Mauldin going to stand up to Gen. Patton?  It seemed  impossible.

Not  quite.  Mauldin,  it turned out, had an ardent fan: Five-star Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied  forces in Europe . Ike put out the word: Mauldin  draws what Mauldin wants.  Mauldin won. Patton lost.

If,  in your line of work,  you've ever considered yourself a  young hotshot,   or if you've ever known anyone who has felt that  way about him or herself, the  story of Mauldin's  young manhood will humble you.  Here is what, by  the  time he was 23 years old, Mauldin  accomplished:  

                                      "By the way, wot wuz  them changes you wuz 
                                     gonna make when you  took over last month, sir?"

He  won the Pulitzer Prize
He was featured on the cover of Time magazine.
His book "Up Front" was the No. 1 best-seller in   the United States.

All  of that at 23.   Yet, when he returned to civilian life and grew  older, he never lost that boyish Mauldin grin, never outgrew his excitement about doing his job, never big-shotted or high-hatted the people with whom he worked every day.

I  was lucky enough to be  one of them.  Mauldin roamed the hallways of the  Chicago Sun-Times in the late 1960s and early  1970s with no more officiousness  or air of  haughtiness than if he was a copyboy.  That impish look on his  face  remained

 
He  had achieved so much. He won a second Pulitzer Prize, and he should have won a third for what may be the single greatest  editorial cartoon in the history of the craft: his  deadline rendering, on the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, of the statue at the Lincoln Memorial slumped  in grief, its head  cradled in its hands.  But he never acted as if he was better than the people he met.  He was  still Mauldin, the enlisted   man.

During  the late summer of  2002, as Mauldin lay in that California nursing home, some  of the old World War II infantry guys caught wind of it. They didn't  want Mauldin to go out that way. They thought he should know he was still their hero

                                             "This is th' town  my pappy told me about."  

Gordon  Dillow, a columnist  for the Orange County Register, put out the call in  Southern California for people in the area to send their best wishes to Mauldin.  I joined Dillow in the effort, helping to spread the appeal nationally, so Bill would not feel so alone. Soon, more than 10,000  cards and letters had arrived at Mauldin's bedside Better than that, old soldiers began to show up just to sit with  Mauldin, to let him know that  they were there for him, as he, so long ago, had been there for them. So many volunteered to visit Bill that there  was a waiting list  Here is  how Todd  DePastino, in the first paragraph of his wonderful  biography of  Mauldin, described   it: "Almost every day in the summer and fall of 2002 they came to Park Superior nursing home in Newport Beach, California, to honor Army  Sergeant, Technician Third Grade, Bill Mauldin. They came  bearing relics of their youth:  medals, insignia, photographs, and carefully folded newspaper clippings. Some wore old garrison caps.   Others arrived  resplendent in uniforms over a half century old. Almost all of them wept as they filed down  the corridor like pilgrims  fulfilling some  long-neglected obligation." 
One  of the veterans  explained to me why it was so important: "You would have to be part of a combat infantry unit to appreciate what moments of relief Bill gave  us. You had  to be reading a soaking wet Stars and Stripes in a water-filled foxhole and then see one of  his  cartoons." 

                        "Th' hell this ain't th'  most important hole in the  world. I'm in it." 

Mauldin is buried in Arlington National Cemetery . La st month, the kid cartoonist made it onto a first-class postage stamp.  It's an honor that most generals and admirals never  receive.  

What Mauldin would have loved most, I believe, is the sight of the two guys who keep him company on that stamp. Take a look at it.
There's Willie. There's  Joe.

 
And  there, to the side,  drawing them and smiling that shy, quietly observant smile, is Mauldin himself.  With his buddies,  right where he belongs.  Forever.

      

What  a  story, and a fitting tribute to a man and to a time that  few of us can still remember.  But I say to you  youngsters, you must most seriously learn of and  remember with respect the sufferings and sacrifices of  your fathers, grand fathers and great grandfathers in  times you cannot ever imagine today with all you  have.  But the only reason you are free to have it  all is because of them.

Those who remembered Mauldin, I'm sure, can remember this nostalgic moment. Others, those who have not studied yesteryear, may have learned something.