The GI Bill Boys: A Memoir

Chapter 12. The GI Bill

C h a p t e r 12 The GI Bill As I read on, if the paper in my hands had said, “Jack Suberman, this is for you and all those other guys who have been sitting on your porch,” I would not have been surprised. What it was telling Jack, what it was shouting to Jack and to those other returning veterans and to whoever else had worn a military uniform, was that because of their military service, they had rights. And what they had rights to was a fruitful life. When Jack had been at Camp Blanding, when he had scrounged around among the scraps of paper on the bulletin board, he had found the GI Bill. As I continued to read, I thought of what this bill would mean to Jack and me, and to all those boys waiting and wondering on the porch, and, for that matter, to all those waiting and wondering veterans in the whole country. Did the other boys already know about it? If they didn’t, they would know soon, and when they did, they would know that what they were going to do with their lives had been decided. As I stood in the post office, I read and reread, and though there were items to be considered carefully, this was not the moment for that. It was a moment for me to take that precious brochure home to Jack. Jack, however, was still not ready to discuss a government-sponsored anything. And when calls started coming in from the boys to say that they were getting on board, the other Jack showed up, the one who wouldn’t learn to march, and this Jack said to me, “Just because everybody else is doing it doesn’t mean it’s a good thing for me.” It sounded to me, as always, like the thing my mother used to say—“Just because the other kids are 178 The GI Bill swimming in their underwear doesn’t mean you have to do it too,” which I had heard more times than I could count. It was the appearance of this Jack that had me pitching a fit—though not the fit with the tail on it that I would produce in the future. I just thought to remind Jack that we were still living with his folks and that Rick was being raised by two sets of advisors, and how long could we live like this? And when I had stomped around, threatened, and drawn what lines I could, Jack finally gave in. “I guess I could take a look,” he said. * * * After a hurricane, the air becomes very still and crisp and when the storm has finally whirled itself out of town, the moon glides out and bathes the land in a brightness so luminous that Mother Nature seems to be saying, “I can get tough, but I can be tender as well.” And what Jack learned in the brochure produced in him the same effect: the storm was gone, the moon was aglow, the light was the brightest ever. Somebody—some thing—had brought to our lives a new radiance. We never once overestimated what was in the brochure; it was impossible to overestimate it. It told us, first of all, that we were not alone, that our government was with us, that we had its guidance and support. Was this the bill that President Roosevelt had signed in 1944—when most of us had been too otherwise engaged to take notice? The one where he gave “emphatic notice” that America did not intend to let its veterans down? Yes, it apparently was. This Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, or the GI Bill, as it was already being called, had put bones and meat on President Roosevelt’s emphatic notice. The post office finally had the full text of the bill, the boys got a copy, and now when we gathered on the porch and talked, spirits were once more a-zoom. We read and reread the bill aloud and to ourselves. Jack and I took pages of it to bed and read it to each other. When we woke up, we grabbed for the copy on the nightstand. We told Rick about it as he ate his breakfast, and he seemed delighted. We summarized it to Jack’s father as he lounged in his rattan chair, and for the first time I saw the pre-Depression grin that I had...