Lest We Forget:Capt. Howard Goodman, USMC

By Nicholas Stix When I was a little boy, I used to see Cousin Howard’s face all the time, in a painting over the mantle at Aunt Rose’s. Aunt Rose lived in Long Beach’s West End, one of the last Jews in that Catholic and majority-Irish enclave. Howard was in his officer’s uniform, the painting surely done from a photograph. He was a handsome fellow, if memory serves. I recall a couple of medals; the only one I can name was a Purple Heart. Hundreds of thousands of “Gold Star mothers,” as the mothers of soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen who had died in battle were called, must have had them. Howard fell at some point during the battle of Guadalcanal, “the longest, single military campaign in U.S. history,” which lasted from August 7, 1942 until February 9, 1943. He was one of 1,700 men, most of them Marines, that we lost on that Pacific island. Aunt Rose had been a realtor, and though she never officially retired, she couldn’t have done any business for years. Heck, she could barely walk. She still had the sign out, though, and the little house still doubled as her office. Howard had been her only child, and so she had turned her home into the Howard Goodman Memorial Museum. With her husband long gone, along with five of her six brothers and sisters, the little house didn’t get a lot of traffic. Although Aunt Rose had dozens of nieces and nephews and grand-nieces and nephews, she was pretty much left with her kid sister, Fanny (our Nana), and my sister and myself. Every morning for the last few years of her life, Aunt Rose would either call Nana or receive a call from her, a call which would always end the same way. Aunt Rose would shout into her receiver, “Oh, Fan!,” Nana would shout into hers, “Oh, Rose!,” and they would simultaneously hang up on each other. Oh, those Hungarians! Although Rose and Fanny Frank, their parents, and five siblings were all born in Hungary, had come over in steerage circa 1896 (having left seven siblings in the ground in Hungary), and the children probably learned English as a third language on the Lower East Side, after Hungarian and Yiddish (their aging parents never did learn English), I never heard either sister speak anything but English, or speak with any but an American accent. (I said “circa,” because it was years after arriving, before anyone learned to use a modern calendar, as oppose dot the Hebrew calendar they were used to. And so, everyone had to choose not only a birthday, but a year of birth. Aunt Rose chose the Fourth of July, Nana May 26.) Aunt Rose had an old-fashioned sink, with separate faucets for hot and cold water. Thus, you could wash with scalding or ice-cold water, but warm water was not an option. My mother used to stick my sister and me into a taxi to visit Aunt Rose, who lived at least three miles away. She always served us fish cakes for lunch – the worst, driest, fish cakes in the world. I remember her once having the TV on, playing a rerun of the show, The Millionaire. I was only eight when she died. My mom says that Howard was admitted to the New York bar just before he shipped out, by a special dispensation via Columbia University. But institutions made such special dispensations so often at the beginning and just after the war, that they really can’t be called “special” at all. That’s why you read of so many veterans graduating college in record time, right after The War. It wasn’t that they were geniuses, though they were as bright and as motivated a bunch as ever went to school, but colleges gave them credit for their time in the service. In any event, I’m glad for Aunt Rose’s sake, that Howard got that recognition. Not that she was one for self-pity, though Lord knows, she had cause. It’s one of those paradoxes of life, that the people who have the hardest lives, tend to be the least sentimental or prone to self-pity. I guess they just never had the time. As soon as the Frank kids finished grammar school, it was off to work, to help support their family. I never once saw my Nana or Aunt Rose cry. Nana just couldn’t. Once, when she was about 79 and I was about 14, and she was having a hard time with me, she acted like she was crying. She covered her eyes, and made the correct sounds, but I knew her too well, and shouted, “You’re not crying!” She gave up on that tack. If you’ve never known anyone like that, check out the movie Lost in Yonkers, from a Neil Simon play, set during The War. The immigrant Jewish matriarch in that story, played by the great Irene Worth, couldn’t cry, either. The character was just about Aunt Rose’s age. Howard Goodman was 25, when he was felled by the proverbial “Jap sniper.”