Cousin Walter wasn’t really my cousin, but I guess his being married to my real cousin Helen made him sort of a cousin-in-law, as if there ever could be such a thing. (Yes, there is such a thing, I checked.) Walter was an intelligent, happy and patient man. He sold cars for a living.
Walter had several brothers and sisters who died young from heart problems. He was the only one left. Walter had his own worrisome heart problems, but was reluctant to get open-heart surgery. In the 1950s, open-heart surgery wasn’t far beyond the experimental stage, and had a high mortality rate.
One day after playing eighteen holes with his father-in-law Uncle Rob, he realized that during the round he had finished off an entire vial of his prescription nitroglycerin pills to stave off his chest pain .He decided to risk the surgery. It was a grand success, as proven by Walter living to be 87.
The 1920 U.S. census records show an oddity: according to the records, Walter’s parents were born in Russia but spoke German, and emigrated to the United States in 1909. At that time, Europe’s national borders were fluid, so “Russia” might have meant what later came to be called East Germany. Walter grew up speaking German.
During the war, he served with the U.S. intelligence agency Office of Strategic Services, the OSS. After the war, the duties of the OSS were assumed by the newly-established CIA. Walter never talked about what he did in the war, but he most likely interrogated German prisoners, and perhaps committed ungentlemanly acts of war similar to what the CIA does for us today. Here is an href=”https://arsof-history.org/articles/v3n4_oss_primer_page_1.html”>an overview of the OSS’s wartime activities.
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After the war, Walter sold cars for a dealership in Nutley, keeping his eye peeled for clean trade-ins for his family. I bought a nice, sensibly-driven used 1951 Chevy through Walter. A few months later, I tested his patience a bit when the car threw a rod on the Garden State and I got him to convince the dealership to repair it, even though it was well past its 30-day warranty.
After I enlisted in the army, I imposed one more time on ever-patient Walter, getting him to convince his dealership to buy back the car. Just one of the semi-unreasonable things that teen-age me expected people to do for him.
Thank you, Walter. You were a true patriot and friend.