Ramblin': One lucky veteran Cascade man served on Eisenhower’s staff

CASCADE - Sixty-four years ago today, Adrian “Ade” Kurt was riding in the liberty ship Thomas Jefferson with 500 soldiers as it tossed on the waves of the Atlantic Ocean. Boarding ship on Thanksgiving Day, the 30-day crossing would finally end on Christmas Day in Boston. It would be three more days before Ade, on Dec. 28, 1945, would meet his parents in Dubuque.

“God, yes,” he recalls about the joy of finally being home. “Yes, I was.”

And with him that day, as it had been all through the service, was his lucky charm.

In fact, Ade, 86, opens his wallet today to reveal the second-class relic of a St. Teresa “Little Flower” given to him by a nun before he left.

“I carried that all the way through,” he says. “I still carry it today.”

Because, Ade says, it made him the luckiest man alive.

First, after graduating in 1941 from St. Martin Catholic High School, he was able to hang around Cascade for a couple of years.

Second, after being drafted into the Army's 29th Infantry Division, Ade was transferred before the division invaded Normandy, France, on D-Day (June 6, 1944).

Third, his transfer was into SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces), where he became part of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower's support staff.

In November 1943, after traveling with 20,000 troops aboard the Queen Elizabeth to Glasgow, Scotland, and riding a train to London, Pvt. Adrian Kurt interviewed with an officer from Des Moines for the transfer.

“We've got to have one guy from Iowa on Eisenhower's staff,” the man said.

The first assignment: set up headquarters in London for 1,500 troops. But the German Blitzkrieg that continued into 1944 changed plans.

“The brass decided that was no place to be,” Ade says, “so they moved us out 30 miles west of London to Bushy Park.”

That's the king's hunting grounds, a place where quonset huts and pup tents went up, a place where Ade posed with three fellow soldiers in a picture that hangs on his refrigerator door.

Of the four - in fact, of the 20 men in his close circle - Ade is today's lone survivor.

He opens an album of photos he took during the war, sending the film back to his mother to be processed and printed. On the surface, the photos seem like a travelogue. There's Ade in front of Big Ben in London, beside a destroyed German Tiger tank in Germany, in front of “The Little Red Schoolhouse” in Reims, France, where the treaty ending the war in Europe was signed.

But still attached to Ade's keys is his dog tag - No. 37671858 - a reminder that this was war.

Ade carried a carbine rifle - “Thank God I never had to use it” - and saw such unbelievable destruction in London, France and Germany as headquarters moved.

“You just couldn't believe ... those people lived in basements without sewers, without water, without food,” he says. “A horse died on the street,” he adds, “and it was pretty much consumed there. Not consumed, but it was butchered right there.”

Lucky Ade ate in mess halls. And he came home to marry his sweetheart, Dorothy, to raise six children, to run a drugstore for almost 60 years until retiring last year.

As an officer in the American Legion post for 64 years, he has recently told his story in schools.

“I was,” Ade says, “one of the luckiest kids that ever came out of Cascade.”