MR. FIELD DIED THIS WEEK

Amongst all the other bad news this week comes a message this morning informing me that Al Field died this week, three months after his 99th birthday. He passed over peacefully.

Unlike all the rest of the news this week, I immediately burst into tears on reading that. I didn’t cry as hard when my father died.

So, who was this guy, Al Field? you ask, I never heard of him before.

Let me put it simply:

If Al Field hadn’t lived and I hadn’t met him and known him, you wouldn’t know who I am.

Not one of you.

Nor anyone else I have ever known, either.

Al Field opened the door to my life, and gave me the key. Despite a close friendship with him over the past seven years, I’ll always think of him as Mr. Field, the way I knew him when I was 11.

According to Mr. Field’s grandson, my good friend Alex Waugh, who sent that email, Mr. Field doesn’t want a funeral or any memorial of any kind.

So I guess I’m going to have to revert to being that rebellious kid sitting in the fourth row back in Mr. Field’s sixth grade class at Washington Park Elementary School in Denver Colorado.

Because - particularly in this week of all weeks - Mr. Field needs to be memorialized and remembered.

Mr. Field grew up in Denver. He fell in love with skiing back when it involved heavy wooden skies so long that you had to stretch to reach up to the tip, with cable bindings where if you fell your foot came off before the cable came loose, and you got up the hill to ski down either doing “the herringbone” walk or using a rope tow.

In 1942, when he was 18, he joined the Army and was one of the original members of the Tenth Mountain Division, the ski troops - many of the original members were well-known American outdoorsmen, including several Olympic champions. Mr. Field wasn’t any of that. But he knew how to ski and he knew the Rocky Mountains.

In January 1945, the division was sent to Italy. On the night of February 18, 1945, the 1st Battalion and Fox company of the 2nd Battalion of the division’s 86th Regiment assaulted Riva Ridge, the key to taking Monte Belvedere, the mountain that guarded the road to Bologna, the last major Italian city under German control.

That night, in the middle of a blizzard, 500 men climbed up a 1,200-foot sheer rocky cliff, carrying 70-pound packs and all their weapons.

The Germans were so certain the ridge could not be successfully assaulted that they only stationed two companies of one reduced battalion of troops to hold it.

By dawn, the GIs held the ridge. That day, the other two battalions of the 86th regiment, with the 85th and 87th regiments, made a surprise bayonet assault on Monte Belvedere itself in the continuing blizzard, without covering artillery fire. After a hard fight, they took the peak. Over the next two days, as the storm laid down three feet of snow, the Germans made seven failed counterattacks. In conditions no other American unit had ever fought in, the Tenth Mountain Division took 850 casualties, including 195 dead and held Monte Belvedere. When the battle was over, they had breached the Gothic Line and the Po Valley lay open to the Allies.

When the final attack on Bologna was made following the spring melt in the Appenines on April 15, with the Tenth Mountain Divison again in the lead, Allied Fifth and Eighth armies took the Po Valley. The German Tenth and Fourteenth armies in Northern Italy surrendered unconditionally on April 24, 1945, two weeks before the rest of the Wehrmacht surrendered in Germany.

If you’ve ever skied at Vail, the Riva Ridge run there is named for this battle and the statue of the ski trooper at the entrance to the resort memorializes these men. The founder of Vail Resort was one of them. So was Mr. Field.

After the war, Mr. Field, now married with a year-old daughter, went to college on the G.I. Bill. He planned to go on to graduate school and get a degree in history and hoped to become a college professor.

While he was there, he joined a student group called American Youth for Democracy.

In 1951, he was visited by the FBI; the agents questioned him about his membership in American Youth for Democracy, which was now on the Attorney General’s list of communist-influenced subversive organizations.

Thoughts of a career in upper Academia went by the wayside. Mr. Field got a job in the Denver Public Schools as one of the very rare men teaching elementary school students. He was the only male teacher outside of the gym teacher when I attended the school. When we later re-connected, he told me that the senior women teachers (in those days, they were all what was known then as “old maids” - middle-aged women who had not married) were not happy with a man in his late 20s “invading” their space. The principal (whose bench I often “polished”) was often upset at him for “failing to maintain classroom discipline.”

Every kid in the school liked him and wished he could be their teacher.

I wasn’t supposed to be in Mr. Field’s class. There were two teachers for each grade from Kindergarten to Sixth Grade. Classes that were organized the first day of kindergarten moved together through the next six years with no transfers between the two. I was not in the class that would have Mr. Field as their teacher.

After I was labeled a “disruptive influence” by my fifth grade teacher for arguing with her during our science class that there were 107 elements when she said there were 98, and ending my argument by saying that I knew there were 107 elements because the discoverer of the 107th element had been to dinner at my house after meeting my father at his job, the teacher decided it was her or me.

For once, my father was on my side of my frequent authority issues that resulted in every report card reading “does not respond or listen to properly constituted authority.” He went to a long meeting with the principal in which he presented an argument (as he told me many years later when I asked about this) that I was in need of “male authority” and would benefit from being in Mr. Field’s class.

Amazingly, I was the only kid who ever got transferred between the two class groupings. When the first day of sixth grade opened in September 1955, I was sitting in Mr. Field’s class.

That was the one good year I ever had in public school.

I became the champion of finding countries on the map when we played “The Map Game,” I beat everyone, no matter how much they studied the map to compete. Once I had found a country on it, I never had any trouble pointing to it again. Fast. Zap! Finger there!

It was OK if I got bored in class and drew pictures of airplanes and dinosaurs. Especially since I drew pictures of specific airplanes and specific dinosaurs that were identifiable representations of the original.

I got to read the books I wanted to choose in the school library, and Mr. Field never questioned my choices, as all the others had when I picked books they determined were “too old for me.” (When they gave the Iowa Tests that year - those of an age may remember the comprehensive tests in Third, Sixth, Ninth, and Twelfth grades; those were the Iowa Tests, created by the Department of Education at the University of Iowa - I scored College Freshman on my reading comprehension level. No wonder I was mostly bored by school.)

Mr. Field didn’t treat me like the Pain In The Ass Kid all the other teachers had treated me as. The one time we had a private conversation about my behavior, he told me I was “a great kid” and suggested I act like it - nobody in authority in my home or anywhere else ever used those words to describe me.

He took us on field trips to places like the University of Denver observatory, where we got to look at Mars during perihelion that year through the big telescope. When we took a field trip (Some of us used to call them Mr. Field Trips because they weren’t like the ones we’d had before) to one of my favorite places, the Denver Museum of Natural History, he let me identify all the dinosaurs and ancient mammals on display and tell people what they were and how they lived. Which I knew.

Mr. Field was also the first World War II veteran I ever met who would talk about his experiences. He didn’t talk about Riva Ridge, but one time he did take an afternoon to show us pictures he had taken during their training at Camp Hale, up on the Continental Divide in Colorado.

Sixth Grade was great. The best year I ever had in 12 years of public “education.” Which made the next six years a grind during which I got so bored and frustrated with the teachers I had that I would deliberately do things like fall asleep in class and when they woke me up to answer a question, I always did - having read the class book back in the first three weeks of the semester. We graduated from high school on a Friday and I was gone the next Monday to the Navy.

But I never forgot Mr. Field. The year I came back from Vietnam, I was shopping in Sears over at the Cherry Creek Shopping Center one time in 1965 when I was home from school, and ran across him there. We had lunch at the counter and he was interested when I told him about the Navy and about what I was doing in college. He had left classroom instruction to become the head of course development for elementary education in the DPS Superintendent’s Office. He told me when we departed that he was glad to see me doing what interested me.

I didn’t see or speak to him again until 2016. Not that I hadn’t tried to look him up when I had been back in Denver visiting my family, but I hadn’t found him (that was because he’d moved on to Arizona where he worked in education development, as I later discovered).

When I was writing “The Bridgebusters” I put in the story of the Tenth Mountain Division and the battle of Monte Belvedere. I thought it would be interesting to see if I could track down Mr. Field and talk to him about that event. It took about an hour on the internet to find an Al Field in Phoenix who matched the age, and another 30 minutes of googling to get enough background on that person to conclude I had found him. I didn’t find a phone number, but I did find an organization he was a member of and emailed the “contact us” including my contact information. I got back an email that he would like to hear from me.

The first conversation was about two hours, and he did indeed remember me from 60 years earlier. I found out the story of how he was “hiding” from McCarthyism there at Wash Park Elementary, and told him my family was “hiding out” from the insanity also. We had a lot in common.

When he learned I was a screenwriter, he later asked me if I would meet his grandson, who had left his “good job” in finance and come to Hollywood with plans to become a screenwriter. Mr. Field was worried about his grandson doing that and asked if I would meet him and see if he had any chance of success. I didn’t tell him that if I did find his grandson had talent it would have no bearing on whether or not he lucked into success here or not.

Alex Waugh and I met for lunch and really hit it off. I asked to see one of his scripts and he showed it to me. The talent was obvious, and then he demonstrated the real talent of being a writer when I gave him a critique of the script that he took and used as a suggestion guide for a rewrite that smoothed out and improved everything I had noticed.

When a producer came along a few month later and wanted to option “The Frozen Chosen,” I asked Alex if he’d like to work on an adaptation with me. I told him the worst that would happen was I would pass along the tricks of trade I had learned. He signed on and we spent two years off and on working on the adaptation, and his contribution had a helluva lot to do with the finished draft getting the notice it did, before COVID shut down the possibility of production.

We’re still friends.

In 2022, I sent all four volumes of the PacificWar Quadrilogy, signed, to Mr. Field. I learned afterwards that he had said to a friend that when he thought about what he had accomplished in his life, he would pick up those books. When his daughter asked him if he had really remembered me, he said “Of course! He was this great kid!”

It’s too bad everybody can’t have a Mr. Field in their corner cheering them on.

He’s the last of my World War II guys. I miss every one of them. They really did make the world a better place for being here.

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