When my great-grandfather Harry was a young boy, he contracted meningitis.  His family began to fear he wouldn’t recover and so, according to Jewish tradition, he was given a new name, so as to confuse the Angel of Death.  Alter, one of the traditional choices for this deception, was added in front of his real given name and luckily the Angel of Death was confused by this new person named Alter Harry, who was left to get better and grow up.  Besides his new name, the meningitis left him with only one testicle (something he cited as a disability when registering for the draft in 1917).

At the America’s entrance to World War I in 1917, Harry filled out a draft card on June 5 and enlisted in the Army in New York City 11 days later.  By February 1918, he had been transferred to the Signal Corps, perhaps on the strength of his experience as a telegraph boy when he was in his early teens.  20 days before he shipped out to France on March 22, he married my great-grandmother Charlotte in front of a justice of the peace on Staten Island.  When he left for France, he wore a signet ring that his sister Sophie had given him (and wore it always despite the fact that they were not exceptionally close as siblings) though he probably did not wear a wedding ring, because most men in our family never have.  Three months after his homecoming and discharge from service on May 16, 1919, he and Charlotte were married again in a formal service by a rabbi, after which they set off for an extended honeymoon in South America.

Maybe it was his brush with death as a little boy that made Harry choose to seize opportunities before they could pass him by, or maybe he wasn’t conscious of making this quick decisive movements and just made them.  Whatever the case, I find this sort of seeming spontaneity admirable, perhaps because it is a quality I would sometimes like to see more of in myself.

A. Harry Fenning (1892-1955)