people.
Al Sulka
Al Sulka, the son of Polish immigrants, was born on July 12, 1922, in Blue Island, Illinois, on the far South Side of Chicago. He spent much of his childhood playing basketball (“we had an old bushel basket nailed to a post in the alley”) and, when he had the dime to spare, watching Roy Rogers westerns. During his summers, his father and mother—a railroad stevedore and a hotel maid—would send him, along with some of his six siblings, north to his uncle’s farm in Michigan to pick strawberries and weed onions. In return, Sulka was paid ten cents an hour (which he promptly spent on school clothes) and his uncle would send his family sacks of potatoes, corn, and apples for the winter. Sulka also caddied at a local golf course. “I got fifty cents a round, and if you got a dime tip, then hallelujah! That meant you had a milk shake. It was tough during the Depression, but we pulled through.” At seventeen, Sulka, along with his only brother, joined the Civilian Conservation Corps, one of the public works programs of the New Deal, and went to Oregon to build roads and fight brush fires. About three years later, in 1942, he enlisted in the navy, where he spent three of the next four years on the water off the coasts of Italy and Africa, repairing amphibious landing craft. He was lucky enough to be stationed in Staten Island on VE Day, May 8, 1945. “We had a three-day pass to go into Times Square, and I don’t know if we slept those three days or not. You couldn’t even move! Oh, we snake-danced. It was a big deal!” After the war ended, Sulka moved back to Illinois and in 1946 married his wife, Helen, whom he’d met at a town carnival just prior to enlisting. They had two children, and to support his family Sulka worked several jobs, including bartender, steel bender at a local factory, and even trash collector. Helen passed away in 1994. Now Sulka lives outside Chicago, in Crestwood, where he calls bingo (and breaks hearts) every Wednesday night, and entertains his three grandchildren and one great-grandchild with his very funny jokes. He has a lot of them.
Chuck Tatum
Though HBO’s miniseries The Pacific drew upon his self-published book, Red Blood, Black Sand , about his experiences fighting in Iwo Jima, that’s only part of Chuck Tatum’s story. He was born on July 23, 1926, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. His father, an oil field builder, died of pneumonia when Tatum was just eight years old, and his mother, who later moved her brood to Stockton, California, raised all six kids single-handedly. Despite the hardship, Tatum recalls a happy childhood, shooting marbles, playing sandlot baseball, and collecting dime-store novels. “I became very interested in reading about airplanes and cowboys and crooks,” he said. By age fifteen, Tatum, struck by a patriotic fervor, began begging his mother for permission to enlist in the marines. “I was afraid the war would be over before I could get in it,” he said, adding that he selected the marines because “they had the best-looking uniforms.” Eventually, she relented, and in July 1943 he went to Camp Pendleton in San Diego, where he trained as a machine gunner under Sergeant John Basilone, the famous war hero and Medal of Honor winner. The two fought side by side in the battle of Iwo Jima. In the thirty-six days it took to take the island, 6,821 marines, including Basilone, were killed, and more than 20,000 others were wounded. Tatum, then only eighteen years old, earned a Bronze Star for his heroism on the battlefield. In the summer of 1945, he returned to Stockton, where he became a fireman, married, had two children, and divorced. In the meantime, he decided to try his hand at car racing. “I found out that you could make good money. Some nights you could win fifty dollars! I wasn’t making that in a week !” It turned out he had quite a talent for it, and eventually he designed and built his own race car, The Tatum Special, which was featured in