Ken Lenzmeier, U.S. Army Veteran

[gene odom]

Friends, this bit of prose was written by one of our Trieste veterans about his experiences in Trieste in 1947. Ken went on to become a professor at a small college in Minnesota. Regrettably Ken passed away last week in a Hospice in St. Paul, Minnesota. I believe he was 83 years old. He wrote a lot of prose similar to the attached. Also he was a talented painter. I am fortunate in that he copied me on some of his writings about his days in Trieste. If you find this narrative informative, I shall be pleased to copy the ones I have.

Gene Odom




Hi, Family and Friends:

As I was writing before I was so rudely interrupted last fall...


Memoir: 88th Div. Drivers Hotel (Part 1)

At the end of World War 2, United States servicemen were found living in the strangest places, especially the Army. In Italy the 88th Division's soldiers were dwelling in requisitioned casermas (camps), hotels, former castles, beach houses, a former hospital, Quonset huts, tents, fancy villas, apartments and more. A few soldiers cohabited with attractive local women off campus, so to speak. All this did not go unnoticed by the visiting Navy men, most of whom claimed some kind of gray-painted, iron room on a ship as home. I preferred my cot not to pitch and roll, thank you. But I did envy those swabbies their food, especially PIE and ICE CREAM. They in turn envied us our dry-land living as well as our unending panorama of attractive girls to keep company. Greener grass and all that.

Previously you’ll recall, I was wondering why nobody in this whole consarned Army seemed to want me around. After regimental HQ was convoyed by trucks from Tarvisio down to the big city of Trieste, it happened again and I responded with an anxiety complex. Within days of making myself at home in another regimental headquarters building in the hilltop suburb of Opicina, I was unceremoniously uprooted and shuttled to downtown Trieste to the Albergo Alla Posta.
Off Piazza Alla Posta.
Smack on Via Roma.

The 88th Division had requisitioned half of two floors of this older residential hotel for the use of transient military personnel. This they called the Drivers Hotel. Most of our supplies—food, ammunition, spark plugs, toilet paper, whatnot— had to reach the far-flung troops of the 88th by train or truck traveling from the sprawling quartermaster base at Pisa, all the way across Italy, from the Ligurian Sea to the Adriatic. This travel involved not only drivers, but armed guards for the trucks or convoys; and the Albergo Alla Posta was where they all stayed—but not unloaded—in Trieste.

The rest of the building was occupied by permanent civilian residents, tourism being somewhat in the doldrums just then—la guerra, you know. GI drivers and civilians—and now one odd artist-journalist—coexisted here just fine.

There we were, on Post Office Square, advertised with a 4x4-foot sign on the front as the “88th Division Drivers Hotel”, and another 1x6-foot stickout sign reading, “US Army Pro Station.” The Stars and Stripes waved from a second-story balcony. You couldn’t miss it. Up one flight, first door to the left, always open. was our orderly room, manned by CQs just like in a regular company. There was even a first sergeant in charge.

What’s a PRO Station? PRO is short for the word “prophylaxis,” which means “measures to preserve health (of society) and prevent disease,” so says the dictionary. Here we are referring to venereal disease specifically. There was much of this going around, destroying health and morale of the troops. Any military person who had an unprotected sexual encounter could come here for immediate free treatment. For those who forgot theirs in camp, do-it-yourself PRO kits were distributed here also. Since passion observes no office hours, the little dispensary was manned 24 hours a day by specially trained Army medics.

Whether it was painted by a GI signpainter or a civilian, the cartoon of the Blue Devil on the sign was perfect for the PRO business. He was grinning as it to day, "See what can happen when you stray from the straight and narrow?" (More on VD in a separate essay.)

You’ll remember, in Italian buildings the first floor is called “piano terra”: plan floor, and the second floor is called the first (prima) floor, etc. Whatever; I lived one story above street level and had a cot and a footlocker in a larger room featuring—other cots and footlockers. Bathroom was down the hall.

My newspaper work was catch-as-catch-can, totally inefficient in finest Army tradition. There was no place to work where I lived, so I wrote and did most of my artwork in the Spearhead’s Opicina office, commuting up and down the mountain by tram or Jeep. Or at other times I did my specialties in a room of the big Grand Hotel over on the waterfront, where my editor-in-chief and his No. 2 resided. Although these characters slept in that fancy hotel, they were not invited to eat there, for the Albergo Grande restaurant was for officers and VIPs only.

So the two of them would hike maybe a mile over to the Drivers Hotel and we’d convene for a leisurely breakfast daily and go over plans for the day: who writes what, who interviews whom, who goes where, who uses Jeep One (we never got a Jeep Two), who uses which typewriter. Actually we didn’t have enough typewriters to go around. There were two portables at Opicina and one in the Albergo Grande, and we took turns. One in Opicina was a captured German Adler, with "umlaut" keys and such to work around, but somehow we put out six pages every week.

4-Star Restaurant
The restaurant at the Albergo Ålla Posta was under GI management and closed to civilians, but it had most of the prewar native amenities. It was around the corner from the hotel entry. Our waiters were the finest. They had worked the elegant cruise ships that once sailed from Trieste: the Saturnia, the Vulcania, and the Rex, They considered themselves lucky to have jobs in their previous profession. The Rex was once considered an equal to the Queen Mary and Normandie. Recall that the Normandie, France’s greatest ocean liner, had burned at her pier in New York City during the war; and now the Italian liner Rex lay half sunk right in Trieste harbor, a casualty of allied bombers.

Anyway, our crew of hash slingers was as good as any, we opined. Multilingual, polite and smiling , swift, efficient, and self-effacing, they were a topic of conversation every time we ate at the Alla Posta. A lowly private couldn’t even light his own cigarette in peace: by time he opened the pack and got the cigarette to his lips, a waiter materialized with a flame to ignite the young man’s Lucky Strike or Camel. And get this: there was no tipping. You didn’t want to spoil these conquered people, right?

The food was as good as Navy chow, which is saying a lot. Unfortunately, we diners were too young and unworldly to realize the luxury we were enjoying. I sometimes wondered what the restaurant for the officers at the Albergo Grande must be like.

As mentioned, the meld of American GIs and permanant civilian residents in the Albergo Alla Posta was good. Since Trieste was under an international magnifying glass, our military command stressed that we individual soldiers were to be ambassadors for the good old USA. And for the most part, we played that role well.

The Soiled Doves
It came to pass that two of the permanent hotel residents were discovered to be “ladies of the evening.” These girls seemed a bit elderly to us, probably in their late twenties, early thirties. They did not look like how I expected prostitutes to look, but then all I knew was from books and movies. These women were not unattractive, they dressed sedately, and were well-mannered and friendly. They would always stop at our orderly room door to or from work to chat, sometimes joking that they needed the prophylactic services of our on-duty PRO Station medic. While every medic expressed willingness to donate his skills any time, they never took him up on the offer. The girls-for-hire were subject to inspections by the local vice squad and had to say VD free.

Ah, the temptations of youth. This naive reporter from the American Midwest was fascinated by them, having never met any one of their profession before. I was at once prudish and prurient but tried to be nonjudgmental. They both spoke passable English, obviously a job requirement. Of course, my questions went along the lines of “How did a nice lady like you get into this kind of work?” The general answer was simple: they were both farm girls from the hills around Trieste and they couldn’t find a “regular’ job. It was hook or starve, and we believed them. Many women over there had a similar story.

They were too close to tempt us clean-cut American youth living in the Albergo, if you can understand that. Maybe we felt it would be like shooting fish in a barrel. Or maybe they were almost like maternal mascots to us. GIs were always adopting mascots. That was OK, right?

continued...

As ever, if you wish to be taken off this list or someone new included, please let me know. Still under consideration: a web page. Comments, suggestions, corrections welcome.

Ken Lenzmeier

[AdlerTS]

Friends, this bit of prose was written by one of our Trieste veterans about his experiences in Trieste in 1947. Ken went on to become a professor at a small college in Minnesota. Regrettably Ken passed away last week in a Hospice in St. Paul, Minnesota. I believe he was 83 years old. He wrote a lot of prose similar to the attached. Also he was a talented painter. I am fortunate in that he copied me on some of his writings about his days in Trieste. If you find this narrative informative, I shall be pleased to copy the ones I have.

May Ken rest in peace. Thank you for the interesting narrative, we will welcome any other letter you have.

[gene odom]

Here is Part 2 of the Drivers Hotel article.

Gene Odom

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

. 11. 2005 !!!

Just when you thought this was getting interesting, we now turn our attention from sex to politics.

May Day, 1947 at the Drivers Hotel Part 2, Final
Communists all over the world used to make a big thing about May Day; maybe they still do in places. The First of May was International Workers Day. Newsreels in my youth always showed Russians making a large whoop-de-doo out of May First. Tanks and trucks and troops and girl gymnasts paraded through Moscow’s Red Square. USSR fighters and bombers throttled down to low gear and droned overhead. Josef Stalin, with a cohort of Communist Party favorites, was shown watching and saluting all this from his Kremlin viewing stand. Stalin had been running Russia forever, it seemed, and he had a mean reputation. This whole Iron Curtain business was all his fault. Now I can say, "Thanks, Joe" but not then.

Now recall that there were enough Communists in Italy to win local elections from time to time. The Triestine Communists tended to be Jugoslavs. The Social Democrats were generally Italian. Europeans loved to demonstrate, waving flags and singing anthems such as the Communist “La Bandiera Rossa” (“The Red Flag”) for their causes. We Americans just watched and scratched our heads. We calculated that Demonstrating must be the second most popular sport in Europe after Soccer.

Here we were, United States troops on the sidelines with a mission to keep the peace (and to keep Trieste under Western influence?) as Red Communist sympathizers showed off their power at this southern anchor of the infamous Iron Curtain. While the Italian faction also watched. Or so it was assumed.

The two sides had a surefire tendency to get unruly when confronting each other. Later that summer I saw a bomb (probably a grenade) go off at a such a demonstration. Well, I honestly didn’t see it. Heard it, is what I did. Roy, our driver and I were parked in Jeep One observing some kind of rioting in a piazza when it went boom. Our street-smart driver “Beachhead” did not have to be told, he just up and, in Army vernacular, hauled ass out of there. Which was perhaps not good reporting practice, but then we’d been warned not to get involved in civilian mischief. Besides, few of these fracases were ever newsworthy for our paper.

So in anticipation of the usual May Day melee, and to avoid trouble, the Army wisely restricted all its non-essential Trieste personnel like me to base. Which in my case, happened to be the Drivers Hotel and PRO Station in downtown Trieste. With the very prominent Stars and Stripes flying front and center.

On the chosen morning the GI population of the Drivers Hotel congregated on hotel balconies directly over the street. Most Italian buildings sported balconies, otherwise how’d we ever have gotten Romeo and Juliet? So we balcony guys stuck our chins out like Mussolini (no, we didn’t really) and waited. Here they came.

MayDay 1947 Communists march southbound on Via Roma.


Well, you didn’t think anybody would let just any mob take over the streets, did you? The Jugs (GI word for Jugoslavs) were preceded by an American Jeep with an officer and two MPs sporting carbines. I had a sneaking notion that there were a few other Jeeps and more armed Americans lurking on nearby side streets. And that the Jugs were made known of this.

Under a leaden sky they came, down Via Roma from the North. The Communist mob was orderly but we hoped for a snappy goose step here and there; no, it was all civilians, no Jug military allowed in our zone. The column oozed along with its professionally printed banners (in two languages). The marchers were serious and measured—something about l’imperialismo, and the rest was beyond my mere street Italian. The walkers all looked so deadly dour and glared up at us and our flag that you wanted to laugh. A few of our guys heckled them. One Yank who must have had Czechoslovakian ancestry, shouted to them : “yoksy mosh” a few times. (I know I'm not spelling that right, but it means, “How goes it?” in Bohemian.) But to see real “Jugs” in the flesh was enlightening. They were not the demons of our minds, just people.

There must have been two thousand Communists marching below us in that May Day parade. On and on they came for blocks and blocks. There was no music. Gone was any reference to the plight of the world’s workers, as far as I could determine. The intent was plain political and territorial from the get-go. Tito wanted Trieste and the Slavic residents preferred Tito to be boss over Trieste too. We got the point.

Finally came the tail end of the Red marchers, followed by a lone US weapons carrier. We GIs began to leave our viewing spot when somebody noticed—surprise—another parade a-coming. So we rushed back to our positions to see the Italian response, again with an MP Jeep leading the way up Via Roma. This march was coming from the South! How the military could put two such strong demonstrations on the very same street, at virtually the same time, was a wonder.

The Italians were less organized, with no banners, just some small Italian flags here and there. No music either, but much friendlier faces. And better dressed. Of course we applauded them and some waved to us as they passed by. They walked faster, seemed more relaxed, and definitely were having a good time. It looked like so much fun we yearned to join them. There were those among us who liked a good time too.

MayDay 1947. Italian response northbound on Via Roma.


Finally the smaller bunch, say a thousand Italians, passed too. There was no clash, no violence as the two groups never met each other. About noontime we Americans were released from our restriction, but by then nobody could find the party. There had to be parties.

By this time I was writing for the Spearhead as well as doing its artwork. Again I had an exclusive story here, replete wiih a roll of photos I had shot on Kodak Plus-X . But again, there was no interest in publishing my May Day stuff. If only one Slovene would have bopped one Italian guy on the beezer to start things off—you can imagine where it might have gone from there—all the way up to an international incident, maybe. But nobody in our Army was going to give any free publicity to any Jugs for any less reason.

I should have known that.

Stay tuned.


Ken Lenzmeier

[Ursus Canadiensis]

It's always interesting to here from the folks who were there and who, as far as we Triestines were concerned, were totally foreign to us, though we might have met and known the occasional one of them here and there.

Arnie

[gene odom]

Would you like to read one of Ken's blogs? He wrote blogs for about three years before he died. If this is too much please delete it. Later I will try to forward some of his painting.
Gene




Saturday, November 3, 2007
PAVAROTTI SANG HERE. Us too.

The news of the death of the great Pavarotti reminded me of a certain entry from the memoirs and thought it might be good for a smile. For your edification and divertment, then:


Dotty and I "sing" at La Scala Opera House in Milan


It is June 6, 1993. We are on the city tour (of Milan) now. We'd seen art museums and palaces, gypsy children pickpockets, and the highlight, Santa Maria Delle Grazie, the church where Leonardo painted his "Last Supper" fresco on the wall. It's a bit disappointing for they are restoring the thing and you can't get near the actual painting, which is obscured by scaffolding, tarps and floodlights. One of the bummers of travel. Oh, well, we'll see it in the news back home when they're done. Tomorrow we'll visit the magnificent cathedral for Mass. Let's hope that will be open for business as usual.


Another bummer. The tour bus pulls up to the last stop and it's everybody out. The tour is finito. Find your own way back to your hotels, you rubbernecks. Hey, gimme back my tip! Well. We have been dumped at the world's first shopping mall, Galleria di Milano. It is an expansive glass-covered area with shops of all descriptions, some of them handling fashionable stuff you see advertised in the slick magazines back home. We were tempted to wreck our travel regimen: don't buy anything to add weight to our luggage because I'm the designated lugger. For instance, in Venice Dotty bought heavy glassware to be shipped home later. You wanna carry this fragile stuff? Not me. We didn't break our rule.


We come out of the Galleria arcade into the brilliant Italian sunshine and there’s a piazza with a big statue of who else? Only Leonardo da Vinci, that’s who. Seerms he used to hang out around here. And right across the street is a nondescript yellow building: no big signs or flashing lights, no queues of people to tell us that this is the Teatro Alla Scala, the most famous opera house in the world. La Scala is unbelievably plain on the outside, but massive. We cross the street and enter.


Inside, like so many other tourist spots, there it is, looking just like the pictures you’ve seen all your life; except now you’re HERE. In the grand lobby area we wander around the displays of opera memorabilia: photographs of well-known personalities, sheet music, old musical instruments, conductors’ batons, costumes, playbills, and what-not. Dotty knows way more about this than I do and she happily spots famous names and photos from her Italian youth. Here are pictures and mementos of Caruso, Beniamino Gigli, Toscanini — the who's who of Grand Opera. You see original musical manuscripts by Verdi, Puccini, and others. You got your famous batons of famous conductors.. You got costumes, maybe even one that The Fat Lady donned to indicate the opera was over.




Now we enter the theater proper. You've seen it in the movies: big, opulent. The main floor is closed off to visitors, but we are permitted to drift in and out of the box seats above and to the rear, farthest from the stage. Dotty and I enter a box and run our hands over the upholstered seats and gawk at the magnificent interior of this building put up by the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria after the previous theater burned down. It is quiet but not silent, for there are dozens of other people in the place. Plus imaginary ghosts of singers, conductors and cheering audiences.




I say to Dotty, let’s sing, see how we sound at La Scala. We are hidden from view up here, not many would hear us singing even at the top of our voices — which we most definitely are not going to do anyway. So we sing, Dotty intones an aria in her nice little alto. Then I in my nasal baritone choose for my first number the famous Toreador Song learned in my Boy Scout days:




“To-re-a-dor-a don’t spit on the floor-a:


Use the cus-pi-dor-a; that’s what it’s for-a.”




Bravo! I bow to my imaginary wildly cheering audience.

Nobody kicked us out. We felt almost famous. We did sing at La Scala.


30

[serlilian]

Thank you, Gene, for posting the letters of Ken Lenzmeier.
I'm very interested in the history of my town.

[Larry]

Ken Lenzmeier. I read of his death on the Yahoo Trieste forum which I frequent now and again. Very good writing too, the two articles posted plus the additional piece bhy Gene.
D'you know, in the old Trieste.mia forum I, too, also posted quite a few articles about the life of a British soldier, first in Opicina and then down in Via Donadoni. About the time that Lela was also posting snippets about her life in Via Udine and the special school to which she went.
I still have these on my computer. Maybe I should dig them out and repost them? Unfortunately, they are all in my finest Triestine/Italian.
I could of course, translate them into English and spruce them up a bit but oh, the work involved. I'm getting lazy in my dotage.
OR, I could post them in Italian and some kind lady with lots of time on her hands could translate them for publication here. Liliana???
You must be joking, she replied!!
Larry

[serlilian]

Hi Larry

[AdlerTS]

Larry, no matter the language ! do what's easier for you