“If only my uncle, the general, was here.”

Those were the magic words that allowed my parents to get married in Baltimore on August 1, 1944. And they were the words my mother loved to repeat when she told the story, which she did so frequently that her grandkids could (and would) mouth the words as she told it, particularly when she got to that crucial line.

George Luberoff, my father’s uncle, really was a brigadier general in the Quartermaster Corps. However, he didn’t attend the US Military Academy at West Point, which was founded on March 16, 1802 and is pictured on today’s #stampoftheday, a 5-cent stamp issued in 1937 (as part of a 10-stamp series honoring the US Army and Navy.

Rather, he had run away from his home in Alliance, New Jersey (a Jewish agricultural community founded in 1882) to join the army at the start of the Spanish-American War. Uncle/General George, who lied about his age to enlist, served in the army for the next the next 46 years.

Somehow he wound up in the Quartermaster Corps where he caught the eye General John “Blackjack” Pershing who later made him chief quartermaster of the First American Army, the main American fighting force in Europe during World War I. In the 1930s, he was the commanding officer of the Boston Quartermaster Depot, which was responsible for purchasing all of the Army’s shoes. According to family lore, he once accepted a particularly low bid for 5,000 pairs of shoes. When they were delivered, he supposedly discovered they were all left shoes. The manufacturer supposedly pointed out that the contract did not specify that each pair had to include a right shoe and a left shoe and offered to make 10,000 right shoes – at a much higher price. (I have no idea if this was true, but my father loved telling the story).

In 1940, General/Uncle George took command of a Quartermaster Depot in Jeffersonville, Indiana, a massive facility that had produced more than 700,000 shirts during World War I and was responsible for purchasing all of the Army’s tents during World War II. He retired in May 1942, was called back into service a month later, and served until the beginning of 1944.

So he actually wasn’t a general on Tuesday, August 1, 1944 when my 19-year old father and 18-year old mother, were standing in the study of a rabbi and army chaplain in Baltimore. They were there because—having known each other for seven months (only three of them when they were both in New York City)—they had decided to get married. My father who had a several-day pass from boot camp in Kentucky came to the Bronx, where my mother lived. Their plan was to go to Maryland, where you didn’t need to wait for a blood test to get married. Men from both families met to decide if they would give permission for them to elope. Finally, as my mother loved to say, my father’s tall (6 foot) father her own short father came out and said something like “we decided not to decide” and to instead let “you kids” decide instead.

Off they went, complete with a wedding dress my mother had gotten from Gimbel’s bargain basement. But there was a problem, the rabbi told them. Baltimore City Hall closed early on Tuesdays so they couldn’t get a marriage license until the next day, which presented several logistical problems, including their sense that an unmarried couple shouldn’t have one hotel room. And that’s when my father mumbled, just loud enough for the rabbi to hear, “if only my uncle the general was here.”

The rabbi did hear him and asked him to repeat what he had just said. He thought for a minute and then took out a book listing all of the army’s officers. When he realized that there was a General George Luberoff he said something like, “by god, you’re telling the truth. Let me see what I can do.” He made a few phone calls, got someone to open up the license office and married my parents. And, as my mother loved to recall, while my father had enough money to pay for a taxi to the rabbi’s house, he had to borrow money from her to pay for a streetcar back to the hotel and for dinner, which, if memory serves, was fried egg sandwiches.

My mother loved telling the rest of the story, which included my grandmother telling her that she “had such a nice girl picked out for Ben;” how some of my father’s relatives lent him a car and gave him gas coupons so they could have a brief honeymoon in a cabin in a state park, which my mother almost burned down when she nearly tripped on a full bearskin rug (complete with head) while carrying a kerosine lantern. There’s another story about how she almost killed my father while he was changing a flat tire.

And she enjoyed recounting that my father figured out where the east bound train for New York and the westbound train for Kentucky would be stopping at around the same time. He drove there, went to the hotel near the station and, as my mother loved to tell, asked (while in uniform) if he could rent a room for a few hours for himself and his wife. “Sure,” the manager said with a cynical smile, “but bring her in; I want to see if she’s one of the local girls.”

When my father got back to Kentucky, no one in his barracks would speak to him because although he had been told that the unit wasn’t going overseas for some time, his shipping orders were on his bunk. But that is a story for another post.

For now, I hail General George Luberoff, who rose through the ranks despite the fact that he never went to West Point.

Be well, stay safe, fight for justice, pull strings if you need to, and work for peace.