The Interview That Got Away: L.O. Hallmark

What did you do in the war, Daddy?

That’s a question that on a day like today, Veteran’s Day, I deeply wish I had asked of my father. Lawrence O. Hallmark volunteered for the Army at age 31 but he wasn’t one to volunteer much information. It seems strange now considering my undergrad degree in journalism that my father was the one interview I managed to screw up completely.

He went to his grave with most of his thoughts and secrets intact, sort of like my mother did with some of her recipes.

There was a lot to his story I never uncovered. My dad was 5 foot 7 and probably 135-140 pounds at most, a banty rooster who didn’t crow. If it was up to him to start a conversation then silence would do just fine. The less said the better was his attitude. A son learned to speak when spoken to and when not spoken to then pay close attention anyway.

You had to capture Lawrence O. in glimpses and even then the picture might be refracted a bit. A good example was the actual name behind the O. in the middle. I’ve heard him say it was “Otha” while my mother told me it was Othello as Grandma Hallmark read a little Shakespeare. My guess is my Dad saw a picture of the men in pantaloons from Shakespeare’s day and took an oath to be “Otha” forever afterward.

Lawrence was 43 when I came late on the family scene and had lived the majority of his life already, years that included the Great Depression and World War II. He had been a government trapper, a profession that even in 1940 probably didn’t promise a huge future. The GI Bill allowed him to make the rise to the middle class as a Federal Meat Inspector although I had to figure this out in retrospect after he passed at 65.

What my Dad did in the war was the Signal Corps. I didn’t know exactly what that meant, I thought he did the flags or something. It never sounded as glorious as what we saw on “Combat” on TV, the front line foxhole stuff. Only later did I research and realize my dad was probably pretty smart to have been picked for the Signal Corp as they were the communications arm of the Army. In World War II, they were pioneering radar and FM frequencies and a lot of other cool stuff a more gregarious man could have bragged about at the bar. But my Dad was a member of the Greatest Generation and what happened overseas stayed overseas.

Still, being picked for the Signal Corp wasn’t bad for a kid from Zephyr, Texas, a hamlet town named after a gentle breeze that was blown away by a tornado when he was young.

I know my Dad was stationed in the Pacific and spent time in Burma and India. We’ve got pictures he took of the Taj Mahal and he brought my mother back some precious stones from India. He told me once he went tiger hunting in Burma but didn’t have any luck. An excursion like that was a step up for a guy who on his first day in the Army was told by the sergeant to quit holding the rifle like a squirrel gun.

The only time any effect of the war leaked out from where he had it neatly bottled up was he went off on my Mother and I for watching “Hogan’s Heroes”. He ranted that there wasn’t anything funny about a German prison camp. Of course, he was right, but he didn’t elaborate. We turned the channel obediently.

I may be a little poorer than others because my Dad didn’t share his war experiences with me. But he shared something else that is precious to this day – The New York Yankees.

There were no baseball teams in Texas in the 1950s and my Dad became a Yankee fan for reasons known only to him. I think he liked Billy Martin because they were built about the same. I remember being about four years old and him being upset because The Milwaukee Braves had beaten the Yankees in the World Series. That was the series Lew Burdette won three games for the Braves in a performance every bit as dominating as what Madison Bumgarner just turned in for the Giants. And the ’57 Yankees were lot better hitters than the Royals.

I was about seven and following my Dad and Uncle Buddy Witten around a Central Texas field hunting doves. I think my brother-in-law, Henry Teague was also hunting and I know my cousins Sid and Travis Witten were there. I’m not sure if this was the trip Cousin Sid shot out the floor of my Dad’s new Chevrolet with his .410 shotgun but it could have been.

My dad and Uncle Buddy were arguing baseball and my dad said, “I’ll take Ford for one game and you can have the rest of the American League and the National too.” I figured anyone my Dad felt this strongly about I needed to explore. I discovered he was talking about Whitey Ford, the ace of the Yankees. As I studied Whitey it was a natural progression to learn about “The Mick”, Mickey Mantle. I had my boyhood hero and a team that would be the longest non-blood relationship of my life.

Dad, thanks for the Yankee Legacy and thank you for your service on this Veteran’s Day. I hope you and The Mick are hanging out in Heaven and I’m sure you’re both as disgusted as I am that AROD is going to be back this season. I say eat the $61 million as a sunk cost. The Yankee image is worth a lot more.