My Turn: Unkie lived a life with lessons for us all

“Fireman Catches on Fire on Way to Fire.”

That was a front-page headline on Long Island papers more than 60 years ago. The fireman, Maurice Levenbron, was my uncle, but I always called him “Unkie.”

How that man loved his pipe! So it was no surprise that when he jumped aboard the back of a Huntington Station firetruck, one hand was still grasping his smoldering pipe. After several minutes, his companion mused, “We must be getting close to the fire, I’m beginning to smell the smoke.” Turns out that something was my uncle’s pipe, burning a hole in his pocket!

Unkie entered World War II as a private, returning four years later as captain. He was stationed in North Africa and Italy during most of those years, facing heavy artillery, leading his platoon in fierce battles; but he never dwelt on the hardships he faced, the tragedies he witnessed. By the time he returned to the United States, his uniform was decorated with badges and ribbons, but miraculously, none included a Purple Heart.

A great storyteller, he had the uncanny gift of forever focusing on the positive. When I learned that he and his platoon had been entrenched in a foxhole for 96 hours, I was filled with questions: What was it like in there? Did any of your comrades get killed?

Unkie didn’t answer those hard-to-recall events, but instead focused on the bright side: how he discovered an old rug sitting by the side of the road and dragged it into their hideout. My eyes opened wide as he recounted that incident with the words, “You’d be surprised how cozy we made it in there.”

Yet years later, when I watched “New York War Stories,” a 2007 public television video to preserve the experiences of World War II veterans, I was taken aback when Unkie suddenly appeared on screen. He spoke about his role in the battle of Monte Cassino: “The first two platoons had already been wiped out and I was leading the third platoon up the hill to that old monastery. We lost our surgeon and about a third of our platoon that day.”

Oh, he remembered all right, but he preferred not to dwell on such harsh realities.

After the war, Unkie served as attorney for the South Huntington School District for 50 years. They soon noted that whenever he anticipated the arrival of a particularly challenging legal question, he would pull out his pipe, slowly fill it with tobacco, sit back in his chair and take a few leisurely puffs. As the room filled with smoke, he would quietly be weighing the best option to resolve the issue at hand.

In 2018, Unkie shut his eyes for the last time at age 104. True to form, several weeks before he died, we sat together discussing the book “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln” (2005, Simon & Schuster). You see, Unkie had an intellectual curiosity about him that put the rest of our family to shame.

Whenever I think of Unkie, especially with the approach of his upcoming birthday, on Sept. 4, I can’t help but smile.

Lois W. Stern,

East Northport