Glenn Beck’s blast from my past

Beck keeps coming up on my radar, because of my exercise regime around 5 p.m., when I turn on the TV and usually surf between CNN, Fox and MSNBC.

I wrote about Beck last October because of his peculiar eccentricities. Here’s a guy who bills himself as all opinion and commentary – not a reporter. And yet he was giving viewers breaking news! Of late, he seems to have abandoned news for history, but even with all of his passion and spin, it is nevertheless grounded on real historical events or written documentation.

He’s giving us chapter, line and verse of the Constitution, the writings of Jefferson, Madison and many other iconic founders. I just wish he’d figure out something better than that chalkboard – maybe an overhead projector and larger letters.

I was absolutely stunned the other evening when he did a piece on the German-American Bund – Nazis really – and Camp Siegfried in Yaphank, Long Island that the Bund opened in 1936. I was there as a little kid. I thought this obscure bit of my history had died, but here’s Beck with this blast from my past.

A little background: My mother died when I was 5, and my dad had to do something fast with my sister and me. My dad worked six-and-a-half days a week and so my sister and I were farmed out to different families, until my dad heard about this German camp from someone who worked for him.

My father was a chef at Garfield’s Cafeteria in Brooklyn, heralded as the largest cafeteria in the world and important to this story for two reasons. Back in those days all continental chefs and their staffs were Europeans, like my dad. Nobody spoke English that well, if at all. My father spoke five languages, because he needed to. And in New York it seemed that all bakers and butchers were German.

One of them, Hans Merkel, a baker, (who had pictures of Adolph Hitler over his fireplace that my dad didn’t know about then) convinced my dad to send us to Camp Siegfried. My father had no idea it was a German “Nazi” camp. Someone else must have taken us there – probably by train – from Brooklyn.

We lived in sturdy tents built on wooden platforms contiguous to a large field where rallies were held on weekends. A speaker’s platform with a high podium was erected. Even at my young age, we were required to drag out heavy wooden folding chairs and set them up in the open field. It seemed as though we needed hundreds of them. If you have any recollection of film of Adolph Hitler speaking to the faithful, you’ll have an idea what these events were like. Big shots came in from Nazi Germany and New York City to spread the message.

We had to share a swimming lake with Boy Scouts. As I recall, our cadre were tough and young who thought all Scouts were wimps. We would get to the lake early and the older kids would string something like piano wire in between stakes, ankle deep in the shallow water, so when a new bunch of Scouts arrived to swim, they’d cut their ankles as they charged into the water with their troop leader. These Nazi wannabes were teaching us wholesome American values.

We ate in a screened-in porch of what probably had been part of a huge farm house. The food was great. I can still recall the delicious scrambled eggs and pancakes and having to haul in those big cans of raw milk from a dairy barn.

It all came to an end when my father arrived to check on us for the first time on his half day off. We were eating breakfast. He came in – didn’t see us – and went down this dimly lit hallway to the office of the camp commandant. He knocked on the door, went in, and was greeted with “Heil Hitler.” He was dumbfounded. I heard his booming voice say, “Where are my children!”

The next thing I recall, we were enrolled in a Czech camp in Boonton, N.J. – Camp Sokol, I think – which was big on gymnastics, polka and adult beer drinking on the weekends. We saluted the Czech flag every morning with a hail that sounded like: “zdar, zdar, zdar.” But they loved America.

The second reason Garfield’s Cafeteria is interesting is that my dad tried to enlist in the Navy when the war started. (He had been in the Dutch navy.) He was a patriot. A typical Dutch liberal who worshiped FDR. I recall that a fleet admiral wanted a French chef on his flag ship, so he offered him a direct commission. It’s possible the admiral ate at Garfield’s.

I remember an argument my father and my step-mother had. She was adamantly opposed to his enlistment. But nothing ever materialized. Years later, I hired a retired FBI agent who told me my father’s name was undoubtedly on an FBI list of suspected Nazi sympathizers – recall Camp Sigfried – and in all probability Nazi supporters also worked at Garfield’s where my dad was boss!

Now back to Beck. You have to wonder if Camp Siegfried could happen again. Only now we’d have authoritative European socialist wannabes as cadre – kids interning for Pell grants, or federal direct student loans that would be forgiven for federal “community service” – sort of a “civilian national security force” or “public sector leaders,” as president Obama calls them, “being asked to serve … ” by a man who cut his teeth as a community organizer and leadership trainer for ACORN.

Does this sound that implausible? After all the German-American Bund tried to promote national socialism – Nazi style – in the United States, and I was in one of their camps.

Beck is not a pure spin-jock. He starts with a factual premise – at times sounding like a seminar speaker of the type you might see on C-SPAN. This is what I like. But then his emotion takes over. He is anything but professorial.

My preference is for the printed, rather than the spoken word, because print is usually more thoughtful and measured. Motivational speakers or performance artists are not my cup of tea because they are more inclined to evoke feelings rather than thought.

But I’ll take my history lesson from anyone. British historian Philip Guedalla observed, “History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other.”

Right now Beck is the only talk jock doing history. The rest are just talking.

John Reiniers, a regular columnist for Hernando Today, lives in Spring Hill.