LETTERS: Walk down memory lane
To the Editor:
With Brother Bing Hayen on the telephone last night (10/02/02). Bing and spouse live in the suburbs of Houston. I called to see what his weather predictions were concerning the onrushing of Hurricane Lili, as this massive storm bore down on the Louisiana/Texas coastline.
We did our weather discussion and then moved on to some of Bing's rememberings of those post-WWII days, as a young Air Corps pilot bugging around the world.
Our brother Don Hayen and spouse are in Shanghai, China, for a few months, teaching English to medical personnel. They have sent pictures via e-mail to us. Bing was taken by the changes in Shanghai.
He remembers in 1947, he and his crew landing there on a mercy mission to pick up cholera serum to be transported to Cairo, Egypt, to help combat an epidemic there.
Shanghai was a wreck. Mao's Communist army was just miles away as the revolutionary war in China moved to finality. Bing remembered Shanghai as it was then, and Don's pictures fascinated him at the development which had taken place in Shanghai. He remembered his flight from there to Bangkok, then into Karachi, Pakistan, which is so in our minds and our news reports these days.
All of those places, for Bing, are remembered in contrast to what he sees in news reports and on the Internet. As a "war baby," who never saw what Bing saw, never experienced that Era of his Greatest Generation, I have a hard time getting my mind around his stories.
Change is always amazing, but more so for Bing, the OE, and their generation. Thanks for listening.
Jan Hayen, Parson
