Born fifth of eight, 29 December, 1919, on a rock-strewn, hilltop farm in Richland Township, straddling a glacial river divide in Brookings County, South Dakota Lawrence Kurtz's first memory was of an open motorcar trip from Elkton to Chicago and back again with Grandmother and Grandfather over dirt roads.
Milking cows, burning corn cobs for heat, sleeping three to a bed, taking turns at the outhouse with diarrhea, trudging behind a horse-drawn plow for what must have seemed like years, walking (or, if Gus didn't need it that day, two to a horse) a mile and a half uphill both ways to Richland School #48 maybe through blowing and drifting snow at -20, day followed humble day.
For sixteen years his greatest joys were the Christmases when each child was presented with an orange. A favorite story recounted a day in 1935, when, in the worst of the Dirty Thirties, he and brother Kenneth walked across a completely dry basin that had formerly held Lake Benton.
To attend school in Elkton, Lawrence lived with Grandfather and Grandmother Kretsinger, a stern household at the home in which sister, Leslie and husband, Dave, live today. Although he recalled a mostly unpleasant experience, Lawrence excelled in track, played the kettle drums in band and earned the move to Brookings to attend his final year of high school then graduated to the Aggie course at South Dakota State College. His favorite treat in Brookings? Nick's, of course. Burgers were a nickel.
Since world war came as no surprise to most, enlistment represented an odd deliverance to Lawrence. The Army Air Corps seemed like the logical assignment for a twenty one year-old man with the skill and patience to fix those things that were unfixable. During his deployment in Guam, while strolling on the beach near the base, he espied a young woman walking toward him. It was his sister, Irene, who had joined the nursing corps and was also stationed at Guam, unbeknownst to both.
Fairmont Army Air Field, Nebraska, and its close proximity to the Union Pacific Railroad hub at Columbus brought Sergeant Kurtz (whose friends were now calling Larry) where he met a sultry, sassy, stenographic superstar with whom he would fall inescapably head-over-heels, ass-over-teakettle. Having helped build the aircraft that carried the bombs that led to the end of that war in 1945, he flew in an identical aircraft to take photographs, not only of the results of his B-29s built at the Martin Plant in Omaha, but also circled the signing of the Emperor's surrender on the USS Missouri.
A bright, blue-eyed daughter born a few weeks later accompanied her parents to a post-war Canal Zone, the outpost critical to arming continents for a stewing Cold War. In 1947, Larry, Harriet, and toddler, Leslie were assigned to the Department of the Air Force, newly created to execute that mission.
In 1954, while stationed at Castle Air Force Base near Merced, California, Harriet and Master Sergeant Kurtz (much to the dismay of a pampered eight and a half year-old sister) presented a breathtakingly handsome boy, now taking vaguely artistic liberties with sacred family history.
Reassigned to Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, the emerging brain of the Strategic Air Command, Dad and Mom delivered a sweet little brown-eyed girl in 1956. In 1957, Senior Master Sergeant Kurtz was ordered to Torrejon Air Base near Madrid, Spain, the passage on the SS Independence a vivid family memory, and a year later, he was awarded the rank of Chief Master Sergeant, one of 620 elite non-commissioned officers.
Maintaining the B-52s flying the sorties while cradling armed nuclear weapons every day to the margins of the Soviet Union and to forward bases throughout Europe from Franco's Spain as attache to the Inspector General of the Air Force for three and a half years, Larry still found time to shower his family with a richness of travel experiences. He took us to Expo 58, the Brussels Worlds Fair, to Paris and Lisbon. We saw Pompei and climbed Mt. Vesuvius. We saw Rome, where Pope Pius XII blessed our rosaries just weeks before he died. We saw the watery streets of Venice in gondolas and watched glass being blown. We boarded cable cars and ascended to a castle in Bavaria. In Las Palomas, base-housing families stood along la calle to wave at President Eisenhower, Generalissimo Franco and my dad driving by in a motorcade.
Kurtz hob-nobbed with colonels and played golf with generals; his uniform emblazoned with citations, airmen snapped to attention. But, living out of a flight bag took its toll, so in 1961 he made the decision to fly us home and retire. After a year at Dow Air Force Base, Maine, Larry called it quits after 20 years, nine months. He bought a 9' plywood travel trailer and put a hitch on the '60 Mercedes Benz 220 that he had purchased from the plant in Germany, our drive through Quebec and on to South Dakota now just another delicious memory.
But, in about 1970 or so, my very furious retired Air Force, Republican father wrote the Sioux Falls Argus Leader after it ran a photo during the Vietnam War. Dad cited Senator George McGovern with what he believed was the unforgivable offense of a civilian wearing a USAF flight suit. The letters in the paper that followed afterwards accused Dad of nitpicking while he got volumes of support in the mail from the likes of the John Birch Society. Dad never forgot it and clearly I haven't either.
In '71, after I used Mom's Singer to sew an American flag upside-down on the back of a fatigue jacket from Korea that Dad had given me, he threw it into the burn barrel, poured gas on it and set it afire. That he didn't throw me in there too is testimony of his love for my mother. In the late 60s and through the 70s Dad won conservation awards for terracing the farm, planting trees and avoiding atrazine. He remained "inactive reserve" for ten years and somewhat later on a night of quiet reflection he quipped, "I'm finally free of the bastards."
1972 was my first time to vote. I was a stupid punk, had a very high draft number, ignored a Presidential appointment to the United States Air Force Academy (an entitlement for a dependent of CMSgt Lawrence E. Kurtz, USAF (Ret)) because Richard Fucking Nixon was Commander-in-Chief; besides my glasses prevented me from being a pilot. Filling in the oval for Gus Hall, the Communist Party candidate, was a protest to somebody else's failed democratic adolescence.
In the 80s when he visited us in Spearditch Dad was able to see how most of the fertile land in Lawrence County was incrementally being covered with concrete and housing for white people. In the 90s and 2000s he wept as shelter belts were being cleared for center-pivot irrigation and fossil water was being pumped from fragile aquifers for the industrial agriculture now killing his once-beloved Brookings County.
Lawrence the Elder, whose often-close proximity to B-24s saw history's remembrance of George McGovern's military service as fabrication supported fellow Strategic Air Command alumnus Tom Daschle through his entire career but gave up on voting after his home state turned Senator Daschle out for Earth hater, John Thune. Dad died in 2010.