The summer after I graduated from the Eighth Grade at Holy Family School, I worked selling tickets for the Louisville, Kentucky’s Iroquois Amphitheater’s summer musical productions. The ticket office was located on Broadway in the Baldwin Piano Company near Third Street. Miss Mack was my Supervisor and Mr. Settle was in charge of Management. Mary Catherine Hans, a friend of the family, worked there as a bookkeeper and she arranged for my summer employment.
On Monday evenings after our ticket office closed, Mr.Settle would take me to the Amphitheater where I would stand at the Box Office window, handing out Season Tickets as customers came to collect their passes. When the box office closed, I was free to take a seat and watch the production after which Mr. Settle would drive me home.
That summer I enjoyed watching Billy Gilbert perform his amazing sneeze routine and hear Elaine Stritch sing in “Call Me Madam”.
I was preparing to take my seat one Monday evening when an announcement was made. I recall standing at the back of the theater, hearing the words that the Korean War was over. I kept standing there frozen in that moment. It was a droning slow-motion moment. The crowd was silent. I wondered why they were not cheering.
My brother was coming home from the war! My eyes burned with tears. Paul was coming home to his room upstairs on McKay Street. He would tease his sisters again. He would give my father his utility cap to wear in the garden. In time he would tell of being lost behind enemy lines. Because he had been a Boy Scout, he had learned camouflage enough to hide himself from enemy soldiers walking near his location.
Brother Paul would be among the next year’s summer Season ticket holders who would step up to the Box office and pick up their passes but I would have moved on to work at Stewart’s after school hours.
Someone else would hand him his passes and he would enjoy the musical productions for many summer hours. For him, the war was over.
Years would pass and the last summer of his life I stood in the back yard of McKay Street and took a black and white photo of Molter J. Kernen posing in the garden behind the garage. He is holding a rake with D.J. also holding onto that rake standing in front of his grandfather. Molter J. Kernen is wearing my brother’s utility cap that told all of us the war was over and far away. In a short few months after that photograph, we would face our own family disaster.