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Harold’s wife Rita and his stepson Jerry take the steel hands as a matter of course
Harold, with Dana Andrews, gives emotional impact to “The Best Years of Our Lives”
Home is Cambridge. “We eat far too well for my figure. I’ve gained eighteen pounds.”
FOR thirty years I had hands just like everyone else. For the last two years I’ve had mechanical hooks instead — but just the same, I’m one of the luckiest guys I know. Why not? Since the day my hands were blown off, two wonderful things have happened to me: I’ve married my childhood sweetheart and I’ve been a star in the great moving picture, “The Best Years of Our Lives.” And my future looks full of promise.
Before you read on, you must face what I have to face every day: That I have no hands. Once that’s established, you can laugh at many of the things that have amused me. And I like to laugh.
Take what happened a couple of weeks ago, while I was crossing Harvard Square in Cambridge. Before the war, you know, I was a butcher in Cambridge. Well, this day I bumped into a little old lady I used to sell meat to. She took one look at my hooks and started moaning, “Oh, you poor boy.”
Then she caught herself, laughed, and gave me a sharp look. “What am I talking about?” she said briskly. “It doesn’t matter if you’ve lost your hands . . . the good Lord knows you sold them to me often enough weighing meat! They didn’t belong to you anyway — I bought them many a time with my pot roasts!”
That’s the kind of reaction I like to get — frank and sassy. The first time someone was that frank with me it put me on the right beam forever. It was during my first visit (Continued on page 107)