My dad was wounded in the Second World War and was sent home from the Phillipines in June of '45 to recover...so the story goes. We (family members) had some fairly different versions of his WWII experiences; he didn't talk about it much but we know he did come back with some very, very old Japanese fabric (that he cut up) and gave each of us a piece. I've got his Captain's bars, the piece of a 20mm shell that they dug out of him and his purple heart. In the midst of some cleaning up of an old book of his I came across this menu.
No such luck that the F&M Grill exists today in Berkeley, Ca. On the back of it, however, is a note to take the 7:41/Oakland. That is in his handwriting. That is totally untraceable even on the internet - particularly with all the troop trains etc. so I'm going to hope that he spent a few weeks in Oakland and San Francisco and went back home to find his family (one version of the story). The other is that he shipped back out for the invasion of Japan as Okinawa was going on right at this very time. .. and the piece of fabric came from his days in Tokyo (as he sometimes said) after the surrender as that was another story.
I know he married my mom in July of 1946 (last weekend by the way) so he didn't have a lot of time to go bouncing around the Pacific. He has been dead for 15 years now so I can't ask him nor anyone actually. Funny how a 70 year old menu makes you think.
And wonder about a life you know so little about.