The Paper Trail

Toward the bottom of the story, The Post reported: "Lieutenant Oertel, 24, a graduate of Gordon Junior High School and Western High School, completed three years of study at George Washington University before his induction. A star outfielder on the university's baseball team, he also played with local baseball clubs such as the Heurich Brewers. Besides his wife, he leaves his father, a Treasury Department employee; a six-month-old son, George C. Oertel 3d, and a brother, Charles Henry Oertel, all of Washington."

The long-dead soldier in my attic finally started to come alive: a star ballplayer from Washington, cut down in his youth, and leaving behind a wife and an infant son, bearing his name, who would now be about 60 years old, wherever he might be.

With the names of his widow, Louise, and his brother, Charles, I redoubled my phone-calling explorations.

"Oh! That's my husband's brother!" exclaimed Lorraine Oertel when I reached her at her apartment in Northwest Washington. Her husband, Charles, had died several years ago, she said, and George's widow, Louise, had long ago remarried and moved to Florida with her baby. Lorraine Oertel, who is 78, told me that she had married into the family after World War II and had never met George or Louise.

"He went overseas when she was pregnant, so he never saw his son," she said. "It was really sad." She continued, "Louise remarried when the child was still very young. It broke my husband's parents' heart when she changed the [boy's] name, because there are not many Oertels in the world."

George Oertel's widow had married a man named Allan Lang and moved away in the 1940s, Lorraine said, but she didn't know where Louise now lived or even whether she and her son were still alive. Lorraine also told me that Louise Oertel's father, Andrew Hopping, had been an Army general during World War II. Only then did it dawn on me that an Andrew Hopping and his wife, Gabrielle, had owned our house. The Hoppings purchased it on May 31, 1945, just after the war ended, and lived there until August 1947. It was during that period that their daughter Louise, widowed with a year-old baby, had probably moved into our house and eventually left behind her husband's keepsakes in the attic.

Lorraine Oertel invited me over to see a scrapbook her in-laws had meticulously and proudly assembled over nearly a decade to memorialize George's considerable schoolboy exploits. At age 16, George Jr. played together with his father, George C. Oertel, 37, on a sandlot baseball team that won the city's Industrial League title. George Jr. grew into a slender but muscular 5-foot-8 speedster, a slap-hitting, left-handed center fielder for the now-defunct Western High School in Georgetown. Oertel led his team to the city championship in 1936, Western's first title in more than a decade. He'd gotten his picture in The Post in 1938 when he was named to the newspaper's All-High School Baseball Team, with a phenomenal .619 batting average, by far the highest in the city.

At the D.C. school system's archives, a 1938 Western High yearbook showed a handsome, dark-haired teenager, "known as 'Orty' by his friends," who was "one of the most active Westerners" in sports, a fraternity and an engineering club. His senior picture is captioned, "Besides all of those various activities, he has two hobbies, chewing gum and redheads, mostly the latter."

Graduating from Western, George Oertel Jr. entered George Washington University on a baseball scholarship in September 1938 in a world that would soon be haunted by war. By the time Oertel started his sophomore year, Adolf Hitler had invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. The French and British declared war on Germany that week, but the Americans were staying out of it -- at first. Oertel was studying accounting at GW, where he starred for the college team and entertained the hope of becoming a professional baseball player.

"Oh, yes, Georgie! Very enthusiastic. An outfielder, good base-stealer and a real gung-ho competitor," recalled Eleanor DeAngelis, who served as GW's official scorekeeper in 1939 and 1940 when her late husband coached the team. "He would run like the dickens!" she said, remembering with a laugh how Georgie would often beat out infield hits and then flash her the thumbs-up sign to try to persuade her to score it a hit, rather than an error. DeAngelis said Oertel's family frequently attended games, and Lorraine Oertel said that George often brought his little brother along on the bus for road games. By this point, I'd seen smiling photographs of the two brothers together, and they appeared genuinely affectionate. I pictured George as the kind of older brother it would be easy to idolize.

George Oertel's college education and his baseball career were cut short as Hitler expanded his assault on Europe, and America began to mobilize. In 1940, Congress authorized the then-astronomical sum of $9 billion to begin creation of the fabled "arsenal of democracy," and 20-year-old George Oertel was among the 16 million men who registered for the draft that autumn.

In the summer of 1941, even before Pearl Harbor, Oertel got his draft notice just after finishing his junior year. His family told The Post in a later interview that before George left for his Army induction, he had already talked to Bucky Harris, the manager of the Washington Senators, about trying out for the major leagues after he got back from the war.

MY CONTINUED SEARCHES for George Oertel III and his mother, the former Louise Hopping, were unsuccessful. But after scores of phone calls, I located an Andrew Daniel Hopping who lived near Tampa and who turned out to be the grandson and namesake of Brig. Gen. Hopping. Danny Hopping told me that his Aunt Louise had died about 20 years ago and that he had long ago lost touch with her son, his cousin, who was known not as George but as Sandy. Hopping also said that his Aunt Martha, Louise's youngest sister, was living in Florida, and he offered to contact her to find out how to get in touch with my soldier's son, whose name I now knew was not George Oertel III, but Sandy Lang. Hopping took my phone number and e-mail address, which he said he would try to pass along to Lang.

Meanwhile, I continued my research, following leads from the Oertels' scrapbook, Post clippings, Internet sites and interviews with military historians, all of which yielded some details about the military life of George Oertel. He was inducted into the Army in Richmond on September 25, 1941, and was assigned to Camp Lee, Va., near Petersburg. Once a Revolutionary War battle site, Camp Lee, named for Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, had been created as a World War I mobilization and training point. After the war, the camp near the James River had become a state game preserve, but with the outbreak of World War II, the Army hastily rebuilt it as the processing point for hundreds of thousands of new draftees.

It was here that Pvt. Oertel and the other newly inducted men were tested, interviewed, and issued eight pairs of socks, five pairs of drawers and undershirts, two dog tags, two uniforms, a mess kit, a field manual and everything else the Army thought they might need in a world that was exploding into full-blown war stretching from Europe to the Pacific.

Pvt. Oertel was then assigned to infantry training at Camp Croft, S.C., near Spartanburg, where the federal government had relocated more than 250 families and had quickly constructed 674 buildings to house up to 20,000 men at a time for three or four months of basic training. Here, young men who had been farmers, store clerks, factory workers, mechanics, waiters, insurance salesmen and college boys were all thrown together in wooden barracks for a relentless routine of weapons training, military drills, all-night forced marches, Army cuisine and live-fire simulations, in which they had to crawl through mud under barbed wire with machine guns firing overhead.

Here, George Oertel mixed with thousands of other newly minted GIs, including some who later became famous: Among those who trained at Camp Croft were Henry Kissinger, New York Mayor Ed Koch, Sen. Alan Cranston, actor Zero Mostel, broadcaster Mel Allen and bandleader Mercer Ellington, Duke's son, according to several historical Web sites.

Among the thousands training there, Oertel quickly distinguished himself and was selected for noncommissioned officers school at Camp Croft. He completed the course in July 1942, becoming an NCO, or a sergeant. He clearly kept in good shape, winning the camp championship in the 100-yard dash, which he ran in 11.2 seconds while wearing a full Army uniform.