A member of the Greatest
Generation, Ed Pawlick has done many things
in his lifetime.
This includes raising his four young children
in Weston as a single parent by himself, without
a nanny, while founding Lawyers Weekly newspapers
across the country. He ran the business from
its inception in 1972 until its sale in 1997.
At that time he employed forty lawyer editors,
twenty reporters, and many business types for
a total of 120 persons.
One of his daughters is a PhD clinical psychologist
who has run an Iron Man triathlon, another is
a cum laude lawyer and the third is happy being
a mother. His son and Kiwi wife live in New
Zealand. Ed has seven grandchildren and another
on the way.
The blood of his children
is Italian, Jewish, German, Irish and Belgian.
Two of his grandchildren also have a wonderful
father who just happens to be black. People
will say thatthe
fact that his daughter
After
raising three girls and a boy as a single parent
for fifteen years, Pawlick married Sally McVay
in 1985. They have ten grandchildren between them,
and two more are imminent.
married him has nothing to do
with Ed. But he disagrees because he always taught
his children that the color of a person's skin is
not important. It is obvious that this message was
heard. He does not talk publicly about his children
because they deserve their privacy, but this is difficult
for him when some fanatic says Ed is a hater or a
bigot, as fanatics are wont to do.
Ed joined the U.S. Navy at the end of World War II,
just out of high school, and still can't understand
the people who wanted him to charge the beaches of
Japan and help kill many more people than the two
atomic bombs did. He often wonders if these people
realize that we had to drop a second bomb before the
Japanese finally surrendered. He understands how lucky
he is that he was saved from killing and being killed.
He
was drafted in 1952 and sent to Korea as a private
in the Infantry to fight the Chinese Army. Luckily,
Dwight Eisenhower ended that conflict while Ed
was on a troop ship. So he was spared the killing
part again. Although he disliked the Army, particularly
as a rifleman in the Infantry, he has great respect
for what they accomplished in taking large numbers
of young men who did not want to be there and
making an army out of them. Since it was liberal
Presidents (Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman and Johnson)
who led us into the terrible Twentieth Century
wars, he wonders how anyone can blame the military
leaders for what the teenagers of this country
were asked to do.
Ed
Pawlick (right), a 25-year-old rifleman in the
Infantry with a shipping tag on his shoulder,
prepares to board a ship for Korea in 1953 to
fight the Chinese Army.
This is particularly true of Woodrow
Wilson who gave us what he called "the war to
end all wars" with his attempt to solve the centuries-old
problems in the Baltic. We are back there again today
in Bosnia. Instead, Wilson gave us Communism in Russia,
unconditional surrender of Germany which led directly
to WWII and a century of war all over the world. Although
Ed disliked the Navy and Army, he sees no fault in
our military leaders who were following the orders
of their civilian commanders.
He thinks often of his roommate at Williams College
who was a hero who never came back from Korea because
he volunteered to fly in a light plane over Chinese
enemy lines and scout their fortifications. He hopes
his roommate was killed and was not one of the Americans
who were deserted by us and taken all over China and
Russia as captives.
He wonders how many people even know that American
teenagers were forced to fight the Chinese Army only
a few years ago in savage winters with summer uniforms.
(Ed even went through bivouac in a foot of snow while
training in the Pennsylvania mountains in a summer
uniform in 1952.) Having served as a guard at an Army
stockade for a few weeks before shipping to Korea,
he guarded the teenagers who had gone AWOL to return
home. They had been seized by the FBI and brought
back to the Army to be put in a stockade before being
shipped to kill and be killed. These boys were literally
dragged from their homes.
Ed was given a loaded carbine and told to march these
prisoners in front of him around the base to medical
appointments. The rumor was that if anyone escaped,
you took his place. No one ever escaped.
If you talk with anyone in the "Great Generation,"
you will find that the vast majority agree with everything
he writes and encourage him to keep doing so. They
know without any doubt that it was a different and
better country before the 1960s.
There was an enormous difference between WWII, when
almost every teenager was in the service, and Korea,
where most college people were able to avoid it. This
caused many guys to have a twinge of guilt, although
they didn't deserve it. Ed never knew anyone in the
service, particularly those in the Army, who wanted
to go to war. But if they were called, they did their
best to serve.
This became really bad in the 1960s when the liberals
dragged the boys out of their homes for Vietnam.
That trauma damaged an entire generation (which has
never understood the issues) and our whole society.
(The boys who went to WWII did not relish killing
people any more than the boys of the 1960s. It was
not a more "noble" war. Ed says most of
them just did their job and hoped that someone else
would finish it before they got there.)
Whether our country will ever recover is open for
conjecture.
If the present Massachusetts establishment disagrees
with those of the "Great Generation," it
is their duty to tell why. But when you look at the
painfully obvious problems that the Bill Clintons
of the 1960s have brought to this country - especially
to young children and teenagers - everyone must have
doubts about the way they have us headed.
All persons of good will must be concerned about personal
attacks against someone who is spending his own time
and money to help the vast majority of citizens with
their desire to keep intact the moral foundations
of our society.
