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Notes
a. Note:   Robert John McMenamin was born so very far away from today... on a gray, frozen, February’s winter day
 on the flat prairie expanse of Northern Illinois
 in an isolated white farm house heated by a stove--
 a breach birth in the kitchen.
  Vignettes from Bob’s Life (as recounted in some of his favorite stories)
  Young farm boy: “Sometimes, when my brother Joe and I got up in the morning, the chamber pot under our bed was frozen.” In the out house, what did we use? . . . [smile] well, the good old Sears Roebuck catalogue . . . and some pages were better than others.”
  Farm Boy: “I was trying to make a little bit of money gathering fur but some one was breaking into my traps near the creek. One morning, I got up early, and I saw a man walking near one of my traps. I fired my shotgun in the air. . . I never saw the man again.”
  Teen Age Farm Boy: [1928] “I was sitting next to my father on the farm truck, going into Waterman [a small town near DeKalb]. There were some people parading in Ku Klux Klan clothing. I asked my father who these people were. He said: ‘Oh, just some darn fools who don’t like Negroes, Jews and Catholics’. I thought for a minute and then said ‘Yeah, but Dad, there are no Negroes out here. And there are no Jews. And we’re the only Catholics!!!!”
  Young Salesman: “I was trying to sell an automatic milking machine to this old German farming couple. The husband was all for it but his strong looking wife kept the pocket book and she was dead set against it. So, I asked her how her husband’s health was. She said, ‘Pretty good but he has pretty bad arthritis in his hands.’ I made the sale.”
  New Husband, to his War Bride: [prior to his 1944 embarkation and at a Lime of “loose lips sink ships’] “Margaret, you will know the ship very well.” [Mom had taken the U.S.S. Manhattan to Europe in the l930s as a child as part of a luxurious family summer vacation. Dad took the same ship with 10,000 soldiers across the cold North Atlantic.]
  Soldier in War: [at liberation of Landsberg, a Nazi concentration camp] “It was terrible and, as a result, our soldiers were pretty rough with the camp guards. I walked into one of the smoldering buildings. Sitting on one of the wooden bunks, a shrunken woman, one of the survivors, kept saying in broken English: ‘Why? We are good people. We are good people.”
  Soldier in War: [August, 1945] “I got a weekend pass and was able to jump onto a DC- 3 cargo plane headed to Paris. I had not flown very much and became nauseous. Oh, how the nurses on the plane were cracking up as they saw this officer throwing up in a bucket at the back of the plane! When we landed at Le Bourget, where Lindbergh had landed in 1927, I went to find a taxi. The French newsboys were screaming: ‘Bombe atomique! Bombe atomique!”
  Father of Large Family [1960]: “The family finally joined me in Paris and we went up to the house that I had been able to rent after much difficulty. The owner was very strict and she had made sure that I would have no dogs and no eats but she had never asked about the size of my family. She was at the house when we arrived and counted the number of children emerging from the two ears. And then she said very loudly in terror:
 “Dix enfants Americains. Oh, mon dieu” [Ten American children - - - Oh, my God!!!!!!]
  Son-in-Law: “Your mom’s father was a prominent, successful North Shore lawyer. Late in his life, I asked him why he let me marry his daughter when, at the time I was dating your mom, my family had lost the farm and my own father was in a state sanatorium suffering from a nervous breakdown. Grandpa McNamee said: ‘Bob, all I saw was that you loved your mother and your father.”
  International Businessman: [Algerian-French Wail “I came into the Paris office one morning and my French colleagues were very upset. Our Algerian subsidiary had just received a message from the Algerian Nationalists that members of our Algerian staff might be killed unless the American company paid a $10,000 protection fee. I had to figure out how to save the staff without getting Chicago headquarters all up in arms.”
  International Businessman: [Moscow, 1970s] “We were down to a few remaining open points on the big deal with the Soviets. Our team went back to our Old World hotel room to discuss whether we should compromise on anything. We thought our room was bugged and so we went out onto the old balcony, which started to make some unnerving sounds as all four of us stood on it. We decided to go back into the room.”
  Elderly Husband: [Overheard by his daughter shortly before his death] “Margaret, let me sing you a love song.”
  . . . saw the KKK marching and had the chance to vote for Barack Obama. He raised farm animals. He had a lot of children.
  . . . experienced the Great Depression and told his children that fortunate Americans must always help the less fortunate.
  . . . witnessed the Holocaust: “Never let any one tell you it did not happen. I saw it. It happened.”
  Robert John McMenamin lived a long life and often said, “We are so lucky, Margaret. It is wonderful.”
  Died of complications of late stage Diabetes, contracted at about age 90.


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