An Early Mentor

Been thinking about an early mentor, Hank Tegee. Hank was a pressman at the West Chicago Press back in the late 1970’s, early 80’s. He used to run his Web Press and read from the dictionary. “Bronk, what does the word “obfuscate” mean?” I was a kid, sweeping floors and had no clue. Hank and the other printers used to call me “Bronk” because I moved to West Chicago, Illinois from Colorado.

Thirty years before, Hank went ashore under fire as a USMC corpsman during the battle of Iwo Jima. He joined the Navy and had experience as an embalmer in a funeral home, so they made him a corpsman in the Marines. His vivid, candid, first-hand descriptions of combat helped me understand what honor, duty, and faithfulness are all about.

Hank told me a story describing an announcement after the battle. His unit was still on Iwo Jima preparing to invade the Japanese homeland. Hank’s unit was called into formation and addressed by a colonel who said, “A bomb has been dropped on Japan that destroyed an entire city. The Japanese have surrendered.”

“It was like the weight of the world had been lifted off my shoulders,” Hank related. “It brought to mind an article I’d read in Popular Mechanics back in the 1930’s about nuclear fusion.”