The Washington Post has an interesting profile of a man who lived quite a life, and died recently here in Asheville:
Barely two years out of Sidwell Friends School, Bryan M. Battey was sent to Colorado to learn to speak and read Japanese. He was one of a select group of college students asked to undertake an intensive program during World War II to learn the languages of the nation’s enemies.
Mr. Battey had been valedictorian of the class of 1942 at Sidwell Friends and seemed to do everything well. He was class president four years in a row, editor of the school literary magazine, and he could play half a dozen musical instruments at a near-professional level. While in high school, he was invited to go on the road as a guitarist with trumpeter Harry James.
Instead, Mr. Battey went to Dartmouth College, where after two years he was admitted to the Phi Beta Kappa honor society — which is how he found himself sitting in the mess hall of a Navy Officer Candidate School in New York in October 1944.
With the outcome of the war still in doubt, top students were recruited to study Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Indonesian and Burmese at the Navy language school at the University of Colorado. For reasons he never knew, Mr. Battey was chosen for the intensive 14-month program in Japanese. Because the Navy’s requirements were so rigorous, Dartmouth awarded Mr. Battey a degree, even though he never returned to campus. His training kept him off the front lines.
“We were tested regularly,” he wrote in a private memoir. “Motivation was high. Failure meant Okinawa, or Iwo Jima.”
Mr. Battey’s early studies led to a lifelong passion for the Japanese language and culture, which he retained long after his career in the Foreign Service ended. By the time he died May 6 in Asheville, N.C., of congestive heart failure at age 84, Mr. Battey had taught the Japanese language to thousands of U.S. residents, from preschoolers to working professionals.