Much is going on—my concept for the new Band Festival poster is at critical mass, I’m convening a cyclists’ meeting tonight to discuss our upcoming presentation before the City Commission, and the Medicine Woman is putting her moccasin firmly in the Graybeard Prospector’s hind end. That being said, I’m thinking about Seranus Victor Seitz, who turns 90 tomorrow.
My Uncle Si was born in the midst of the Great War, but the next time the entire world was back at war, he was more than old enough to sign up. Like Dadbo, he went into the USAAF and became a fly-boy. He named his fighter plane after his kid sister. Most of us learned about this only recently. Even Mombo had forgotten about it, and she was overcome with emotion when the fact resurfaced with an old photo. I think it has something to do with Uncle Si scrupulously avoiding any romantic entanglements before he shipped off. Apparently he didn’t expect to survive the combat that faced him. Neither did a lot of others, including the brass. These boys could “do no wrong,” because, hell, they probably wouldn’t make it back tomorrow anyway, so why give ’em a hard time? For example, when Uncle Si buzzed a control tower because some generals were up there and Uncle Luke was watching. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was one of the more tame episodes.
Uncle Si got to the skies of Europe as the Luftwaffe was fading into history. Air-to-air wasn’t the primary mission at that point in the war, so he provided ground support as a tank buster and dive bomber. But don’t be mistaken—the anti-aircraft defenses of a desperate Wehrmacht must have been pure wickedness. On top of that, Uncle Si said that every day he got into the cockpit, he might be sitting behind a new aircraft engine more powerful than the previous one he’d gotten used to. All he would know before takeoff was the numerical boost in horsepower. He told us once about the fine art of blasting a locomotive. The pilot needs to swoop elliptically at a low angle to avoid being caught above the massive steam explosion. You get the feeling he learned that by watching somebody else get it wrong, or perhaps he narrowly missed boiling himself like a lobster the first time he bombed a train. He tells stories like that without braggadocio, but you can always see the intensity in his eyes. Like most WWII vets, he doesn’t think of himself as a hero. In their minds, that word more properly describes all those pals that never returned. I guess you can’t differ with that kind of logic.
Uncle Si is known for inspiring a famous word in the Dixonary: Sicu. Basically it can be defined as a “lame excuse.” The original sicu was the time he said, “We’ll come down one of these weekends I take off.” It was no secret that Uncle Si might go months without taking a weekend off. It bummed us out to hear that, and so we were forced to bestow the dubious honor. Years later, when I was living in Dayton and my brother James was putting in long hours at AdMart, we laughed at my notion, “You’ll take off one of these weekends I come down.”
Uncle Si is one of those uncles that you love too much to ever tell him, and I know that doesn’t make any sense, but you just can’t tell a tough guy things like that because he’s made you tough, too, just because you’ve loved him. Like Mombo used to say, “Luke probably started the fight, and if Bob couldn’t talk them out of it, Si had to finish it.”
Eventually he helped finish the biggest one—over sixty years ago, up in the sky, above the devastated fatherland of his ancestors—but he came back home and made it to his tenth decade, with a sweetheart he didn’t think he’d ever get the chance to find.
God bless him!