Thought it time to refurbish a former column and chapter from my book Threading the Needle describing the 80-year anniversary of the 1944 New Haven Christmas Parade on York Street that I spent with my grandfather, the eponymous Jacobi Press.
During World War II, Yale professors still wore tweeds, but the boys they taught would soon graduate into khakis. Behind Woolsey Hall are the many rows of names of the boys who never returned.
My grandfather’s sons left J. Press to serve Uncle Sam for the duration. My dad, Paul Press, was a riveter at the Winchester Repeating Arms Co. factory on Dixwell Avenue that manufactured firearms including the M1 Garand rifle, M1 and M2 carbines. His brother, Irving, ran the PX (Post Exchange) store at Camp Ritchie, Maryland. Camp Ritchie was a military training facility in Maryland where soldiers, particularly a large group of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany known as “the Ritchie Boys,” were trained in intelligence gathering and analysis. Grandpa Press performed his civilian duties overseeing the multitude of custom-tailored uniform orders for candidates at the Officer’s Training Schools at Yale. J. Press was on a wartime footing along with the rest of America. The Princeton store closed shortly after the Declaration of War as the entire staff was drafted into service coincidentally completing their military basic training at Fort Dix nearby Old Nassau.
I was six years old in 1944 when Grandfather Jacobi set up chairs and blankets for us to watch the Christmas Day Parade on the balcony in front of his second-floor office at the J. Press store. Viewing the wartime spectacle from the balcony offered a key spot to view brigades of Sherman tanks and armored vehicles clanking their treads to the war bond rally on the New Haven Green.
Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines blared their bugles and beat the drums in military cadence to “As The Caissons Go Rolling Along.” At back end of the parade on top of a Ford truck bauble and beaded in Christmas hoopla, was All-American Yale Football Captain Paul Walker, the Dink Stover and Frank Merriwell of his time. He was appropriately festooned in a Santa Claus suit and beard as he pointed a Winston Churchill “V for Victory” clinched finger salute directly to me on the balcony.
Stiffly at attention, I returned Captain Walker’s salute as the parade and the Grand Old Flag passed me by proudly attired the military uniform my grandfather tailored for me as if I were one of his customers at Yale Officers Training School.
The Winds Of War On York Street
RICHARD PRESS
7 comments
Norman Holmes Pearson, eminent Yale professor of English and founder of the American studies department, was recruited into OSS in 1942 and, a Lt, Colonel, stationed in London, became chief of the ENTIRE counter-intelligence operation in Europe, with a direct phone line to Dwight Eisenhauer.
There is a biography of him — CODE NAME PURITAN — available at University of Chicago Press.
Nice
Thank you