Rupen had not had much childhood; he had grown up working. All of the Ademian family worked and, regardless of their actual ages, were expected to be as responsible as adults. Rupen had operated the roadside stand at which vegetables and eggs from the Ademian family farm were sold until the twins—Haigh and Mariya—were old enough to take his place. Then he had gone to work in the factory. Rupen’s father did not believe in coddling anything except eggs and sick horses. Therefore, neither his eldest nor Haigh, who later joined him, received any preference in their employment; they started at rock bottom, drawing no more wage than did any other beginner—two dollars a day for eleven and a half hours of work, when Rupen started, though it had increased to almost three dollars by the time Haigh came.
The Armenian employees afforded the brothers a measure of respect initially simply because they were the sons of Der Vasil Ademian, but the two soon enough earned respect and friendship on their own. As the plant grew in size, however, the workers of Armenian antecedents became a smaller and even smaller percentage of the total work force and Rupen began to make friends not related to him by ethnic background or race, just as he had in the public schools; he made friends easily, always had, fighting only when he had to do so as a last resort, but then hard, to win.
At the time of the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, Rupen was twenty-one years of age and Haigh had just turned nineteen. Due to the nature of their employment—in a vital defense
industry—neither expected to be drafted, and they possibly would not have been, at least not until much later in the war, but war fever was gripping the nation, government and citizenry as well. And on a snowy day in January 1942, Rupen’s father summoned him and his brother to the executive offices, newly refurbished, refurnished, and extensively modernized, in the older part of the plant.
“Sit down, my sons,” he said in his heavily accented English. When they were seated, he set a small glass before each of them and himself and filled all three from a bottle of fiery arrack. He offered the dark, strong Egyptian cigarettes he preferred, lit Rupen’s and his own, then spoke again.
“It is time that we speak now of debts and of the repayment of debts.”
Rupen had squirmed and forced a straight face, wondering just how in hell the old man had found out about his highly profitable small-scale gambling enterprises.
After a long drag on his cigarette, Vasil Ademian said, “My sons, the accursed Turks and the Kurds, they took all that we had, your mother and me, they tore the girlchild, the infant, who was our firstborn, from your mother’s arms and threw her tiny body high into the air, catching it on their sharp bayonets. They drove us all like cattle from off our land to the deserts of Syria, where you two and your sister, Mariya, were born, given to your mother and me in the mercy of God that our family and race live on and become again strong. It was also through divine mercy that we were able to leave Syria and come to America.
“As you both know of old tellings, when we came first to Orange County, I had in my pockets less than six dollars and your mother had ten dollars in gold hidden on her person. But the country was good to us all, the people and the land, they gave us all we now have, and now the time comes to repay that debt, that just debt.
“These Nazis and Japs, my sons, they are evil, evil people. They are just like the Turks and the Kurds, and they must be both stopped before we find them trying to drive us from America, too. These Nazis may even have learned their evil
from the Turks, for I am told that these Nazis are mostly Germans and I remember that the Kaiser of Germany was a friend and ally of the sultan in the last war. From all that I am told of the brutalnesses of these Nazis, they sound very Turkish to me.
“I have but just this morning earlier returned from the place where they take men for soldiers to fight these Nazis and Japs and keep their evil from out of this fine country that has been so very good to us all. But they will not have me, my sons, they say that I am too old for their use, even though 1 am more man at my age than many they said they would have for soldiers.
“And so, my dear sons, since I cannot go to repay the debt that the Ademians owe to this great and generous United States of America, you must go in my place.*’
There was never any questioning the dictates of Vasil Ademian, not by his progeny; they went—Rupen into the Army, Haigh into the Marine Corps—and by the time that Corporal Ademian, Rupen S., landed in North Africa, Marine Private Ademian, Haigh R., was already dead at Bloody Ridge on Guadalcanal.
By the time of the Sicilian invasion, Rupen was a platoon sergeant. His sister, Mariya, having completed her nurse training at the Medical College of Virginia, had been ordered by their father into the U.S. Navy Nurse Corps, and seventeen-year-old Kogh Ademian had forged his father’s signature and followed his dead brother into the Marine Corps before Vasil knew anything about it all. In the fierce fighting on the drive from Palermo to Messina, Rupen became by attrition first platoon leader, then company commander, was awarded a battlefield commission of second lieutenant by his own army and a 7.9mm rifle bullet by some rifleman of the Hermann Goring Division, but had recovered in time to lead his platoon ashore into the hell that they called Anzio. More than half his platoon were killed or wounded, but Rupen lived to see Rome.
Commanding a company of infantry in the bitter, muddy, rainy mountain campaign that followed the fall of Rome, First Lieutenant Ademian, Rupen S., received another German gift, this one so meaningful that he was shipped back to a hospital in the United States. By the time they were ready to release him from that facility, the war for Europe was ended and that against Japan on its last legs, and the United States Army seemed not at all anxious to retain the services of one slightly battered citizen-soldier who still was more or less convalescent and consequently in no shape to be considered for the upcoming invasion of the Japanese homeland.
A week after he arrived back home, his sister’s ship docked at Norfolk, Virginia, and Lieutenant j.g. Ademian, Mariya Z., came up to Fredericksburg with her friend, Lieutenant j.g. Bedrosian, Margaret L., the first blond Armenian woman Rupen had ever seen. She was not pure Armenian, of course, only a quarter Armenian, in fact; her father’s father’s family had come to America in the nineteenth century and she did not even speak Armenian, but she was beautiful, charming, and vivacious, and Rupen had made up his mind less than a full day after he first met her.
Marge seemed to like Rupen, too, and she wrote often to him during the five months that she and Mariya nursed aboard ship ferrying ill and wounded servicemen home from the European Theater of Operations.
Meanwhile, Japan had surrendered and Vasil informed Rupen that for all that he fully approved of the proposed union, no marriage could or would take place until the younger Ademians, Kogh and Bagrat, had returned to witness the ceremony, and that was that.
It was during the preparations for his wedding, which finally was celebrated in the summer of 1946, that Rupen first got the idea of organizing and forming talented and musically minded local Armenians into an ethnic-type band; his father had had to pay to bring one down from Massachusetts. But it was years before Rupen did any more than think or occasionally talk about that idea.
It was at the wedding itself that Vasil, chock full of arrak, vodka, and old-country spirit, made an announcement to his three sons who had managed to survive the war that was to have considerable influence on the future of Rupen’s marriage and life.
“My sons, my brave sons, you don’t know it, of course, and that’s why I tell you now, but Ademian Enterprises is worth ten million dollars, the lawyers tell me. And I told the lawyers and now it’s down in writing with them and I’ve signed it that the whole damn business will go to the first one of you who gives me a grandson and names him Haigh, in memory of not only your brother what the Japs killed but my brother, your uncle, what was murdered by the damned Turks.”