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ering his normally gruff but kindly voice, he said, “Well, son, since you are a real Navy man, I guess you take a drink once in a while. Let's have one together for my boy."
I readily agreed even though I had not commenced drinking hard liquor at that time (soon corrected by farther intensive Navy “training"). He reached into a cabinet beneath his barbershop sink and drew out an unopened bottle of bourbon, got two glasses from the counter and poured two stiff ones, laced with water from his sink faucet. We raised our two glasses, sitting in the barber chairs, and father and substitute son gave a toast to Ensign Steven E. Spurlin on Christmas Day 1943.
Over yet another drink, the father wanted to talk about his son's brief life, call back to memory each small detail and I was content to listen and learn all about a good and impressive man who would now be forever young. Mr. Spurlin himself “joined the Navy” that Christmas Day and. if not now permanently “retired,” is surely a Navy man still. We returned “home" slowly along the wintry streets of the town, slightly aglow from the bourbon, and plotting like two teen-age boys to conceal our little “wake" from the ladies when we got home. We may have succeeded.
The funeral on the day after Christmas went off well, as such things go. A large gathering, including many of Spurlin’s young friends, had attended to say farewell to the aviator; the local V.F.W. had mustered a guard of honor to fire three volleys over the grave; their buglei sounded ‘Taps" as poignantly as it was ever blown. When I handed the carefully-folded flag from her son’? casket to Spurlin’s mother and bent down to kiss her, I felt compelled tc stand at attention immediately ir front of her to salute both the mother and the flag in her lap.
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