Three men died in recent days. They never knew one another; the one thing they had in common was that the news of their deaths appeared on the obituary pages during the same month of 1996. But if history is composed of small moments and hidden smiles, their lives contributed to the endless tapestry.
Retired Navy Vice Admiral John D. Bulkeley, a World War II Medal of Honor winner and one of the most decorated men in the history of the United States, died in Silver Spring, Md., at the age of 84.
In a lifetime filled with examples of service to his country–during the Normandy invasion, he commanded minesweepers and torpedo boats that cleared sea lanes for the invasion fleet–Vice Adm. Bulkeley compiled a resume that was the stuff of war fiction, except that it was real.
Before he died, his family sent me some of his memorabilia. Included among it was an artifact that spoke not only of Vice Adm. Bulkeley’s life, but of the vanished life of the nation.
In the mid-1940s he was featured in a comic book–Real Life Comics (subtitle: “True Adventures of the World’s Greatest Heroes!”; price: 10 cents). His chapter was called “Bulkeley of the Endicott”; it was illustrated with line drawings of ships at sea (“Boom!” “Blam!” were some of the words drawn over the illustrations). Bulkeley’s exploits were set up with dramatic one-sentence cartoon panels (“There was an American craft . . . a destroyer with one gun . . . and Bulkeley!”).
The comic-book America may be long gone–at least the America of comic books that celebrated war heroes and sold the stories in drugstores. But however proud John Bulkeley was of his Medal of Honor, he was no doubt almost as proud of being immortalized in Real Life comics (final panel: “With men like Bulkeley running the show . . . the dwindling Nazi Navy can count on many another painful double feature!”).
Larry Laprise, who died within days of Vice Adm. Bulkeley, was famous for a different kind of accomplishment. He wrote “The Hokey Pokey.”
At least his family thought he wrote “The Hokey Pokey.” Several days after Laprise’s obituary ran in newspapers, there were challenges raised to his claim to Hokey-Pokey immortality. Laprise–he died at age 83, in Boise, Idaho–was said to have written “The Hokey Pokey” in the late 1940s “for the ski crowd at a nightclub in Sun Valley, Idaho.” No one who read of Laprise’s death was likely able to get to the end of the story without hearing those maddeningly simple lyrics: “You put your right foot in, you put your right foot out, you put your right foot in . . .”
There was even a certain poignancy to this; according to the story, “The Hokey Pokey” really took off after bandleader Ray Anthony bought the rights and recorded the song on the flip side of “The Bunny Hop.” So “The Hokey Pokey’s” popularity was really just something that perched on the coattails of “The Bunny Hop.”
Perhaps. World War II veterans who read Larry Laprise’s obituary said that they had done “The Hokey Pokey,” or a variation of it, in England during the war, years before Laprise supposedly wrote it. Thus, the identity of the father of “The Hokey Pokey” remains in question–lost in the mists of time, a time of war heroes on the pages of comic books, and men in uniform who, as a form of leisure thousands of miles from home, chose to do “The Hokey Pokey.”
The last death is closer to us. Carmen Reporto–a photographer for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1944 to 1981–died in a nursing home. It made many of us who knew him think about the passing of the years when we read that Carmen was 81.
Dapper, charming, sophisticated and a fine lensman, Carmen was a friend to anyone who ever worked with him, and represented that not-so-distant era when newspapering really did seem like a game. Get the assignment, hop in the car, and see what will turn up by the end of the evening . . . the world in which Carmen and his colleagues worked might not have consisted solely of good times, but it often seemed that way.
And anyone who worked with him will understand this lovely line that appeared in his obituary:
“Before his death, Mr. Reporto requested there be no services, saying, `I covered too many funerals and wakes in my life to want one myself.’ “
