‘He was a great American’

I was one of the lucky ones. After moving into our new two-story home in Tuscaloosa, I received an upgrade in my accommodations. I was elevated to an upstairs bedroom, about 20 feet from the luxurious attic fan.
 
With the blinds and the windows open late at night you could look out that window and see the red light atop the Radio Station WTBC winking at you at exactly five-second intervals. Back then, I wondered who could possibly turn the light on and off all night long.

We had one radio in the house and it sat silent most of the time by my fathers chair. He was the supreme leader, in total control of the command center. That radio came alive when he wanted it to and went off at the time he decided. It was a prized little white radio. It even had six push buttons set to pick up nothing but the news and maybe, if we were lucky, an occasional Amos and Andy show. I asked him a time or two to tune it to WTBC, but he said that station carried only bop, pop and slop – young people shouldn’t be allowed to hear.

Well, I wanted to hear it. Dad thought music should be by an Italian tenor and we could get a good dose of that. I still wanted to hear WTBC and “the man”, Mr. Bert Bank. I was making 20 cents per hour cutting grass with a push mower in the city parks and I saved up my money and quietly ordered my own radio. It was a crystal set. A rather marvelous little device that you assembled on your own. It was even featured in my Cub Scout manual.

The kit contained a tiny crystal, a magic piece of stone and mineral and what the directions called a ‘cat’s whisker.’ It was really a little needle, like a phonograph needle. You had to have a coil, too.

I made mine from the small tube left over when all the toilet paper is gone. I wrapped my copper wire tightly round and round that tube, hooked it up to the stone, added a pair of ear phones, used the screen on the window as an antenna and then started my search for that one secret spot on the mineral stone when WTBC’s signal might by hiding.

I searched for four days, moving that cat’s whisker from place to place, rewinding my coil and adjusting the antenna.

Then it happened, just as if I’d hit three sevens on a slot machine. There was a voice, very faint. It must have been the way Alexander Graham Bell felt when he was heard, over his homemade telephone saying, “Watson come in here.” I heard the master’s voice, Mr. Bert Bank.

There was a suddenly a voice to go with the name.

I was a boy, he was a man, a giant of a man.

Through the years we became friends, good, close, personal friends. We made a deal 25 years-or-so ago that I would present the eulogy at his funeral. Almost every month the postman brought by a letter from Bert Bank, and it contained a clipping about another honor he had received. “Put this in your file for my obituary,” he would remind me. I have a trunk filled with clippings and stories about Major Bert Bank.

I did everything he ordered and on Thursday, I delivered that eulogy. I thought it was going to be hard, but it was really quite easy. I had written a long piece to read as I stood my by his casket, but I never even glanced at it.

You could really do it with five words, “He was a great American.”

His sons, Ralph and Jimmy, didn’t want any weeping and mourning. They just wanted his story told, his accomplishments acknowledged. They wanted some laughter, they wanted some earned praise.

Who was this man?

He was a highly successful businessman, founder of the University of Alabama football network, a two-term state representative and a one-term senator and one of 15,000 soldiers forced by their Japanese captors to march 90 miles though the steaming jungles of the Phillippines and one of the 512 soldiers who survived the infamous Bataan Death March.

He survived 33 months in the hellish prison camps, eating fishhead soup and an occasional monkey. He came home weighing 102 pounds and blind.

The Japanese took his body, but not his mind. He roared back, regained most of his sight, took on the injustices he found back home and won those battles, too.

Maybe it was the way he was reared or maybe due to what he survived in World War II, or a combination thereof that made him the man that he was.

I remember once during a campaign, the Ku Klux Klan, which was then headquartered in Tuscaloosa, used a small plane to circle the city and drop their hate leaflets. Voters were cautioned that Major Bank was a beer distributor and “a Jew.” The were correct on both issues.

Bert came to see me and told me what was going on. That was on Friday. He jabbed three fingers into my chest, making me take a step backward.

He was angry and on the verge of tears.

“I’ve paid my debt to my country, but there’s more I wanted to do. Now, it’s all over.”

I told him I would pick him up on Saturday and break all the journalist rules by helping him campaign. I picked him up before seven and was well armed with a case of penny balloons and a case of Double Bubble gum. We handed it all out before the sun went down. He won that battle, too.

I stood over that casket and remembered again his words:

”I was not angry at God. Who was I to second-guess God?

“But I was theologically confused,” he said. ”Why had I been spared? Why had my friends died? They were good people. They loved their families. They were honest and true.

“You ask these questions all the time, and you never get a satisfactory answer. God does strange things. But sometimes you can feel a presence. You can sense that this is all happening to teach us something about the nature of free will.”

Gone at 94, having outlived three wives.

Under a sweltering sun, we all said goodbye and as a 21-gun salute shook the graveside silence, my hero, Bert Bank, was lowered into earth.

Paul Davis writes a Sunday column for the Opelika-Auburn News. You may contact him at