http://www.mcall.com/features/all-auddec30.story?coll=all-features-hed
December 30, 2001
Editor’s note: “Before the Colors
Fade” is an occasional feature by Frank Whelan that celebrates and preserves
snapshots of history.
Some people might call Aud Klaveness
Cutshall a survivor.
The 81-year-old Allentown woman’s
father, a civilian sea captain, died in World War II. For 30 years, she
served as the primary care-giver for her husband, Richard Cutshall, who
had polio. Currently, she is dealing with multiple sclerosis, a disease
that struck her late in life, leaving her in a wheelchair.
But Cutshall wants neither pity nor
praise. What she does want is to send a message to the country in this
year of the terrorist attacks. Motivated by a deep Christian faith, she
wants to try and reach out to the family and friends of those who had died
by telling her own story.
“My message is that despite hardships,
life is special and precious,’’ she says.
Cutshall and her twin sister, Gerd,
were born in Trondheim, Norway, in 1920. She also had two brothers, Odd
and Alf. Her childhood was spent far from that land of snow and fiords.
When she was 4, her father, William Klaveness, a seafaring man since he
was 17, took his family across the Atlantic to New Orleans
The Klaveness family owned a steamship
line, founded by Cutshall’s grandfather and run by her two uncles. But
her father wanted to branch out on his own. So he joined the Vaccaro Line,
a fleet of one-funneled steamers registered in Honduras that carried bananas,
coconuts and Palm Beach-suited planters for the American Fruit & Steamship
Corp.
In a box of family mementos, Cutshall
keeps her memories of that long-gone era. A worn-but-still-readable map
from the late 1920s shows the routes of the Vaccaro Line in red. Its ports
of call included most of Central and South America.
Another item in Cutshall’s box is
a menu. It is from the Vaccaro Line’s S.S. Granada, then commanded by her
father and dated Aug. 29, 1932. The menu, which featured roast prime rib
of beef au jus, baked Virginia ham, roasted stuffed young turkey with cranberry
sauce and plum pudding in brandy sauce, sounds a little heavy for the tropics.
Cutshall, with her mother and sister,
often accompanied her father on these trips. She still has vivid memories
of sailing into Nicaragua in the late 1920s when a revolution was raging
and there was a particularly nasty hurricane that they were all sure the
ship would not survive.
“It was terrible,’’ she recalls.
“We were tied in our beds for days as the ship swirled in circles. My father
was on the bridge the entire time. I don’t think he slept for four days.’’
In the 1930s Cutshall was going to
school in Baton Rouge, La. Her father wrote her long letters on American
Fruit & Steamship Corp. stationery, its letterhead complete with the
shorthand cable address “Stanfruco” in the upper-right-hand corner. Mostly
the letters are full of fatherly advice to pursue her education, listen
to her mother and enjoy dancing, but not to get too serious with boys.
By the time the United States entered
World War II in 1941, the Klaveness family had already been touched by
its tragedy. The family shipping line in Norway had been taken over by
the Nazis when they invaded that country in 1940. “When they refused to
cooperate with the Nazis, my uncles were taken to Germany and put in a
concentration camp,’’ says Cutshall. “They were tortured. One was driven
insane and the other’s hair turned white from fear.”
In early 1942, Cutshall’s father
was a Merchant Marine captain in command of the Vaccaro Lines ship S.S.
Ceiba. “It was his favorite ship,’’ says his daughter, who has a picture
of the freighter. That March when family friends in Havana wanted to get
to New York, Capt. Klaveness agreed. Cutshall’s pile of yellowing newspaper
clippings give the details of her father’s last voyage.
On the evening of March 16, 1942,
about 200 miles off the coast of New Jersey, a Nazi U-boat commander found
the S.S. Ceiba in the crosshairs of his periscope. Survivors were later
to recall the time as 8:45 p.m. when a single torpedo struck the ship’s
port side, just below the bridge where Klaveness stood. The Ceiba sank
in roughly three minutes. Crew members had no time to launch lifeboats
but did unloose two life rafts.
There were 44 people, 32 crew and
12 passengers on the Ceiba. One of the rafts with eight aboard capsized
and sank. The other with six survivors made it to New York two days later.
A survivor recalled how shortly after
the sinking, the U-boat suddenly surfaced. Its captain emerged and, in
perfect English, asked a crew member on the raft the name of the ship,
its tonnage and cargo.
Although it is not in the articles,
Cutshall learned from talking to the survivors after the war that the U-boat
captain then plucked her father, who was injured, from the North Atlantic
and took him aboard the submarine. “We had heard that the Germans would
sometimes do this in order to get shipping information.’’
At war’s end Cutshall’s family tried
to find out whether her father might be alive in Germany. Gerd, who had
gone into the U.S. diplomatic service and was vice consul in the American
embassy in Hamburg, did all she could. “But we could never find anything,’’
she says. The same newspaper that included the account of her father’s
sinking might hold the answer to his fate. It told of beefed-up Navy patrols
firing depth charges along the New Jersey coast to sink submarines.
If 1942 brought Cutshall tragedy,
it also brought her love. It came in the form of Lt. Richard L. Cutshall.
The Allentown native, a son of former Lehigh County District Attorney John
L. Cutshall and his wife, Naomi, a real estate broker and saleswomen, had
gone South to attend Louisiana State University. While at a church-sponsored
social event, the couple met over hot dogs.
On Dec. 2, 1942, they were married
in New Orleans. Her husband served in the Field Artillery in Europe, became
a paratrooper and later was with counterintelligence. They returned to
Allentown in 1946 where the Evening Chronicle announced their arrival as
“a charming addition to the young married set.’’
Cutshall’s husband created an insurance
and advertising business. They eventually would have a son and two daughters.
But their comfortable life was shattered on Nov. 7, 1952, when Richard
Cutshall was admitted to the hospital with polio.
The newspapers recorded Richard Cutshall’s
creation of a special harness to help him attempt to walk and the need
created by his 6-foot, 6-inch frame for a larger-than-normal iron lung.
But when the reporters and cameramen
went home, the Cutshalls were left to cope as best they could with their
problems. She remembers vividly the times her husband crashed to the ground
and fractured his skull trying to walk. Once he fell and got his feet jammed
under a radiator. “I tried but I just could not move him,’’ Cutshall recalls.
It took the aid of the police to get her husband up again.
Cutshall says her husband’s sense
of humor and religious faith got him over the really tough moments. “He
conducted his business from his bed,’’ she says. It was the Rev. Paul Couch
at Calvary Moravian Church in Allentown who helped her and her husband
deal with some of the burdens of their difficult life.
“He came to visit my husband every
day,’’ she says. “You don’t have any idea what that meant to him and me.”
Despite adversity, the insurance
agency flourished. Richard Cutshall received six Oscars, a special award
given by the Insurance Advertising Conference. He also was a staff writer
for the “The Local Agent,” a trade publication. In 1970 Cutshall’s husband
retired. He lived until 1982.
Despite the multiple sclerosis that
put her in a wheelchair, Cutshall is far from depressed or inactive. She
stays as active as she can at Bethlehem’s Central Moravian Church and counts
its pastor, the Rev. Douglas Caldwell, as a friend.
“Adversity causes us to grow and
develop,’’ she says. “I’ve always looked for the good and tried to look
for something to laugh about.”
Reporter Frank Whelan
Copyright © 2001, The Morning
Call
By FRANK WHELAN
Of The Morning Call