had made up my mind. Anyway, my pal and fellow boy soprano, Billy Young, was
going to join his brother in the seminary in September. I wasn’t going to do this
dumb choir thing by myself!
When the Young boys came home from the seminary during the summer
vacation of 1935, our friendship picked up where it had left off.
Along came Brother Patrick - George W. Dull. Pat was a young man who had
come to Saints Peter and Paul’s monastery to become a Capuchin brother - an
unordained monk who would serve the religious community in duties not restricted
to priests. During free times, he would walk the short distance down Fayette Street
to Youngs’ or Wallaces’ and sit for hours on the front porch talking to us boys on
religious subjects. He was gentle, soft-spoken. We never questioned his motives, as
one well might in today’s climate.
Then tragedy blighted my summer.
In the summer of 1934 my father had been diagnosed as having tuberculosis
of the lungs and was admitted to the Maryland State Sanatarium at Sabillasville,
Maryland. Presumably he was progressing satisfactorily. For a while he edited a
patients’ newsletter at the sanatarium. He came home once for a visit, and I went to
Ma and Jeanette’s apartment to see him. He was gaunt and looked much older than
I remembered him. In December he sent me a Christmas card. Eight months later, on
August 6, l935, he developed uremia, brought on by chronic nephritis, or Bright’s
disease, and he died on August 13. He was 40.
Though distanced from my father for years, I hurt badly.
My father’s body was brought to Cumberland, then taken to Keedysville,
Maryland, for burial in the Rohrer lot at Fairview Cemetery. I refused to go to
the gravesite and stood by the car in the distance and cried. Daddy received
military honors. The United States flag was removed, folded and brought to me.
Then the family went to the home of relatives for a meal before the motor trip
back to Cumberland.
My father had never talked to me about his service in the United States Army
during World War I, except to tell me once that he had been a corporal. Ma, Jeanette
and Florence used to remark: Charlie was gassed and had pneumonia in the war. His
lungs were weak and that’s probably why he picked up tuberculosis. That was the
extent of my knowledge, until much later, in 1992, I did some research and found out
what a traumatic experience the war had been for my father.11
47
11 Charles William Rohrer, monograph: Charles Webster Rohrer, Army Service in World War I, February 14, 1993.
