Free Tom Brokaw by The Greatest Generation Page A

alive.
    As the New Year began, the end was near for the Third Reich. James was liberated by advancing Russian troops in May 1945. He was headed home shortly thereafter. Before he left he wrote to Dorothy, not knowing that the Christmas message had gotten through. The sentiments were the same from this determined young man: “. . . I am alive and well, can’t wait to get home and get married.”

    James Dowling and company

    Telegram to Dorothy Owens, December 27, 1944
    Dowling wrote it on a scrap of paper, folded the paper over, addressed it, and mailed it off with no envelope, no return address. Fifty-three years later James and Dorothy still have the note.
    H E STAYED in the service for another two years, hoping to become a jet pilot, but when Dorothy became pregnant he decided it was time to go home to Smithtown. But now what? Well, like a lot of returning veterans James was willing to take chances, so he went into business for himself with his father-in-law. They started a seafood trucking business.
    James would buy from the returning fishing trawlers late in the afternoon, load his truck, and very early the next morning set off for the Fulton Fish Market in lower Manhattan. He’d be back home at nine A . M . It was a thriving business, but James wondered what to do with all of the spare time he had before the fishing trawlers returned in the late afternoon.
    â€œSince I had my afternoons free I started organizing baseball games for the little kids, including my five sons. I’d buy the bats and balls and before long we had forty or fifty kids in the league. Then some local businessmen decided to start an official Little League and asked me to help. I agreed, as long as the little kids could play.
    â€œWe started with four teams and by the seventies we had six hundred boys playing. I was president of the League for eighteen years.” Little League was, in many ways, a metaphor for the postwar years. There were now so many children on the playing fields of America it was no longer feasible just to count on informal pickup games to keep them occupied. Little League baseball was a game of the suburbs, which were beginning to dominate the American social landscape. It was extremely well organized, reflecting the expanding and evolving codification of American life even at leisure.
    James didn’t confine his community service to the Little League, however. In the early 1960s another veteran, the town clerk, asked him to run for superintendent of highways in Smithtown. He had three hours to decide. After talking it over with Dorothy, he decided he could do a good job, so he ran as the candidate of the Democrats, even though he’d never been registered in either party. He defeated a man who’d been in the job for twelve years.
    This was no cushy, eight-to-five assignment. From the development of the interstate highway system down to the gridwork of curb, gutter, and asphalt in new developments, the construction of roads was a vital element in the social and economic expansion of postwar America.
    As James remembers, “I came into office at a time when all of the young ex-GIs were moving out of Queens and Brooklyn and into new suburban homes. I met with them. They wanted good services, and that meant good roads.”
    Smithtown was no longer a sleepy little Long Island fishing village backed up to potato fields. Although James had never built a road in his life, his military training had taught him how to organize and move men. He had 175 people reporting to him, and a big task ahead. He had to modernize the Smithtown road system so that it would fit seamlessly with the developments now surrounding it and feed easily into the shopping malls that were beginning to take hold at the edge of town.
    He was ahead of his time in many of his techniques. When he ripped up an old road, he’d reprocess the old material and use it as a base for the new road, introducing the concept of recycling to