MEN I HAVE MET IN BED:
A WARTIME SKETCHBOOK

LILA OLIVER ASHER

Countless faces in countless hospital wards tell the real story of war

This is not really my story. Rather, it is a patchwork of stories about the many soldiers and sailors who came back from World War II less than whole. These wounded, some walking, others not, spent long months in military hospitals in the United States. During the war and after, I made nearly 3,500 drawings of these American servicemen, many of them not much older than boys.

By 1943, the war had become something that affected everyone’s life. At the time, I was a student in art school in Philadelphia. At the request of the Stage Door Canteen, which catered to servicemen home on leave or about to ship out, I would go to the canteen in the evening to sketch portraits of servicemen. I soon learned that sitting for a couple of hours in a corner talking to my steady following of servicemen and pushing the charcoal around the paper was real work. With a waltz playing, it wasn’t so hard. But when a jam session started, the rhythm made drawing a bit difficult.

Later on, the USO began to sponsor artists, and I was invited along with some well-known artists to join the Sunday excursions to Atlantic City, New Jersey, where the luxury hotels were being used for R&R (rest and rehabilitation) and also surgery, especially plastic work. We would be assigned to different wards and draw all day. Occasionally, one of us was asked to help a surgeon by drawing what we thought the missing parts of a face should look like. This was something a computer might be used for today.

But a couple of evenings a week and an occasional Sunday didn’t seem like very much, especially when one read of the sacrifices of our servicemen. I wanted to be a part of this war effort, and to be able to tell eventual grandchildren who might want to be proud of grandmother’s having done something worthwhile in the war. I also had seen enough in those hospitals to realize that if there were more I could do than pay regular visits to the blood bank, I wanted to do it.

So, one day I took myself off to New York, with photostats of my work and letters describing my local experience, and volunteered for the USO Camp Shows’ newly formed Sketching Unit. I thus became an official, one-woman USO Camp Show, and spent 1944-1946 traveling to military hospitals throughout the United States. I was booked to spend six days sketching bed patients at each one, traveling on Sunday to the next. “Drawings,” the USO officials said, “have an entertainment as well as therapeutic value for those GIs who stay in the wards and can’t see the shows, as well as for those who are too sick to have noisy or exciting diversion.”

I was “IN,” and I was terribly excited! I breezed down Fifth Avenue and, by way of celebration, bought my father a tie in the first store I passed. At home in Philadelphia, the mailman brought forms, endless ones, in quintuplicate. I had to trot upstairs at City Hall to have the whorls of my fingers recorded; I had to decide whether being class treasurer of Grade 10-A, art editor, or Girl Scouts should be mentioned under “participation in organizations.” Perhaps, too, I should have noted the small scar on the bottom of my right foot as an identifying mark. Would all these things be considered withholding information? One of my references also received forms in such detail, she thought I had joined the FBI.

These were young men, boys really, who probably never saw what hit them.

OFF ON ASSIGNMENT

Not long after, an itinerary for my first trip arrived, along with an official USO pin. I hurried down to the railroad station to claim the tickets reserved for me. Afterward, I stocked up on my weapons and ammunition... plenty of charcoal and drawing paper, fixatif, and a handled box for carrying everything. I decided which of my clothes would travel well, bought a darling little knitted hat that would take crushing, and was farewell-luncheoned by several friends. Yes, I was being shipped off to join the war effort, even if it was only to spend a week near Pittsburgh and another week near Cleveland.

The folks took me to the train Sunday night, Dad a bit silent, and Mother a little tearful. I checked in my Pullman reservation and we followed the porter up the long platform. We thought we had walked halfway to Pittsburgh when finally he led me into a car, shoved the luggage under the berth, and extended the palm side of his hand. I assured my parents I would be safe and not get lost. With last-minute instructions about strangers and money jingling in my ears, Mom and Dad said goodbye and then, parentally, stared at me behind the window, enduring those long, awkward minutes before the train wheels grind slowly forward. Frankly, I had no intention of not talking to strangers, provided they looked interesting. This was the beginning of my many adventures in wartime train travel.

When I arrived at the Pittsburgh hospital, there was a big billboard, near the main entrance, which listed the Post Theatre and Red Cross activities, and also listed me!

Lila E. Oliver
Artist and Illustrator to sketch you
Wards Only
October 23 to 28
It’s Fun     It’s Free

A gracious Red Cross worker conducted me through a maze of corridors and then up an elevator to my ward-for-the-day. I opened up shop in the recreation room and started drawing a dark-haired boy with glasses. He was in a wheelchair and part of both of his legs were missing. It seemed that a German mine had done the damage, but he could still smile. I caught him in a reflective mood and sketched him that way.

Other patients wandered in on crutches and canes, leaned over my shoulder to watch and ask questions, and gathered nearby to wait their turns and tease the boy who was my model. All the while, we heard ping-pong balls flying back and forth. The ping-pong players were wearing plaster casts on broken legs. The cast had rubber heels or the knob from the bottom of a crutch fastened right in with the plaster as it was molded. As their legs grew well enough, the kids could walk around on the heels without damaging the casts. It was wonderful to see a boy still on crutches play a pretty fast game.

A tall kid, a native of “New Joisey,” spent the afternoon enthusiastically hobbling up and down the halls singing lustily. He paused to explain that he was out of bed for the first time in seven months and then continued bellowing a song of his own creation. The tune was the “Three Blind Mice” and the lyrics, three meaningful words: “No more bedpans!"

Several nurses were anxious to have me draw a swarthy young Italian in bed a couple of rooms down the hall. After the first questions... “Where are you from?” and “How come you do drawings for free?”... he told me he was a woman hater, how much he disliked females, and why. (That he was addressing one affected him not at all.) His main reason was that on a recent furlough, he had seen wives of “buddies,” still overseas, going out with other men and generally running around.

Rather than talk about himself, which was what most of my subjects would do, he preferred to describe his friends and their adventures “over there.” I could not excuse or explain the women’s actions any more than he could explain those of some of the GIs I was to meet on my travels. But, like most of the boys, he didn’t really want my comments or any advice; he needed someone to listen. And so I listened.

Next, I drew a good-looking young man. He told me his father was an Army flight surgeon, a major, and his mother an Army nurse in China. In fact, almost all the family had been connected with medicine. He, the exception, worked as an assistant librarian at the Library of Congress before he received his “Greetings from the President.” And now he found himself at the receiving end of the medical profession.

At first, it wasn’t easy to hold conversations with strangers all day, and entering the ward was even worse. I would open the door and feel myself virtually X-rayed by all those eyes. My feet would develop minds of their own and stubbornly insist on going the other way. But the boys were just as funny, as interested, and as interesting as those at the Stage Door Canteen and the hospitals around Philadelphia. I always felt somewhat amazed at the sameness of people. Why, there seemed to be the same type, and sometimes the identical kid in each of the wards. They joked, bantered, and made the same kind of silly remarks, and always seemed pleased to watch me draw and have something to do to break up the day.

When I started drawing the hospital portraits, I drew what I saw, boys sitting in wheelchairs or lying in bed. They were often scruffy-looking in their official hospital garb, which consisted of rumpled gray pajamas and maroon bathrobes. The robes were marked with the initials “MD USA” (Medical Department, US Army), which the boys claimed stood for “Many Die, U Shall Also.”

Later, I learned to ask if they preferred to be shown in their uniforms, with which I was familiar enough by this time to fabricate the collar, tie, and insignia. I could also include imaginary shaves and haircuts, as needed, so that the sketch arrived home with the look they chose.

One young soldier was very pleased to have a sketch sent home, but said he didn’t take “nothin’ for nothin’. ” So he insisted on “paying” me two quarters for the drawing. I quickly dodged the issue of payment by claiming I would be grateful to have his military shoulder patch instead. I ended up with quite a selection of shoulder patches showing the insignias of many different branches and units of the United States Armed Forces.

Throughout my assignments, I was housed with the hospital nurses, with the WACS, or at nearby hotels, but usually took my lunch with the patients. One lunchtime, I selected two of the men on crutches who had been particularly faithful in watching over my shoulder, and they “took me” to chow. The length of the corridors and their crutches slowed our progress. Those with new false legs who wanted to be polite faced another problem: they didn’t know how hard it was to pull open a heavy door and stay balanced. But when we finally reached the mess hall everyone seemed very happy to see a girl, and a civilian at that.

Chowtime was always the most popular thing in the hospital, and with good reason. There was food a-plenty, partly, no doubt, because we were rationed at home.

Dinner typically consisted of vegetable soup, macaroni, ham, lettuce salad, and lemon jello with whipped cream, lots of it. All the butter you wanted for your bread was there, along with several kinds of jam. There was a choice of milk, buttermilk, or chocolate milk. Most of the patients had trays brought to their beds. Those who were ambulatory made their way to the mess hall and a cafeteria chow line.

The orthopedic patients usually could not handle their own trays, so they would get table service. The crutches were arranged in diagonal rows underneath the table, and everyone managed to keep slings and bulky leg casts out of the way of the waitresses. Besides the motherly looking civilians who waited on us, I was almost always the only girl in the room, and the only one with four sound limbs among all those long rows of people. It was hard not to feel momentarily ashamed, almost as if I had no right to my good health.

VIVID PICTURES

The sights and sounds of the many hospitals I visited are all as clear today as they were then. Iowa, Illinois, Michigan—hospitals for war injuries were everywhere. Once, in a particularly severe winter, I asked to be sent south, hoping for some gentler weather. I found myself dispatched to the Navy hospital in South Philadelphia.

The wards for the blind were always the noisiest. The boys sang songs, told jokes and stories, and never stopped talking, always loudly.The colostomy wards, too, were a gay and noisy place. All of those in the long rows of beds in the whole ward had the same problems and the same exterior equipment. They would call themselves the “colosotomy kids” and they had no idea of the problems they would face in the world outside.

The “closed” wards for psychiatric patients were also part of my assignment. The two sets of double doors would be locked behind me, and I would be in a ward with lonely and bored patients, not too different from those in the other wards. Once, the nurses persuaded a very young GI in one of the psych wards to sit for a sketch. He had not been able to speak since his arrival at the hospital, and would never look at anyone. I ended up doing a profile drawing so he could look away.

Perhaps the most poignant memory, though, was entering the military hospital in Battle Creek, Michigan. Once a luxury hotel, the hospital had a beautiful, sunken reception area. Bored GIs, now ambulatory but with nowhere to go, crowded the two raised, broad steps that ran all around the outer edge of the room. This was a hospital for amputees. Not one of the servicemen had both arms and both legs.

The Red Cross gave me a list of those who had requested portrait sketches. As I made one of the sketches, the serviceman explained that his mother would telephone often to ask how he was and how soon he would be “on his feet again.” He wanted to send the drawing home before his mother could see him. He had no legs.

Someone once told me that I had probably seen more of the war than those actually shipped off to fight. Certainly, the faces of those I sketched and their trussed-up, broken bodies are as vivid today as they were over a half-century ago. These were young men, boys really, who probably never saw what hit them and had even less idea of what to expect once they finally left the hospital. Perhaps, in some small way, the drawings helped relieve the boredom of hospital life.

At the end of each weekly stay, before I packed up my things, I presented the Special Service officer with all the drawings, each with a clipped-on card with the name, rank, and serial number of the subject. Also included on the card-form was the name of the person chosen to receive the drawing. The Special Service officer forwarded all of the drawings to the USO in New York, which mailed each off in a large tube to the designated wife, mother, or sweetheart.

Once, a wife wrote to thank me for the drawing her husband had had sent home. I couldn’t help but remember her husband as a real flirt, someone I couldn’t get rid of once I had done his likeness! And for years afterward, I would receive notes and Christmas cards from the families of the servicemen I had sketched, painstaking notes from people who probably didn’t write many letters. In addition to my sketchbook and the copies of drawings I kept for my portfolio, I ended up with a special patchwork of memories, a large quilt embroidered with all those shoulder patches I collected as “payment.”

next: "They Also Serve", by Frederick J.O. Blachly

Lila Oliver Asher (CC ‘89) recently retired as the senior professor of the Department of Art at Howard University. Her work has been exhibited widely throughout the world, and she continues to work in various media, including oil, blacksmithing, stained glass, watercolors, and printmaking.

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