It’s hard to realize how different things were

 

It was 1940 and Frank Sinatra and Tommy Dorsey often performed at the Cavalier Beach Club and the Surf Club at the Oceanfront. Young people could go to the Beach almost any night of the week and listen to the big bands playing at the boardwalk night spots. And, like Sinatra, get away from it all.

But in Norfolk there was no escaping the war that was about to engulf the country. A young teenager watched as more than 100,000 sailors began pouring into the city and changing it, fast, from reputable to disreputable.

“It was a pretty seamy place,” says Brad Tazewell, who grew up on Pembroke Avenue in Ghent. “Main Street had some of the country’s finest brothels and certainly some of the finest and seediest bars, and my father thought this was probably not a good place for a 14-year-old to grow up in with all those things going on.”

Tazewell was sent away to a private school in Alexandria. Then, three years later, like almost everyone else he knew, he went to war.

Maybe it wasn’t because of the heat in Texas where he trained, but Tazewell soon decided to apply for a position with what would become the famed 10th Mountain Division’s Ski Troops. After training in Colorado, they sailed for Italy in December 1944 and soon found themselves snowshoeing up treacherous hills against Nazi troops.

In a series of daring assaults, the division pushed the Germans back, but at a cost of heavy casualties.

“I was a radio operator, which was a mixed blessing,” says Tazewell. “The good side was you always knew what was going on. The bad side was you had to carry this radio in a backpack, which weighed about 25 pounds. You were always right next to the company commander, and in World War II they all had their insignia painted on the front of their helmets.
The commander was usually up front – we’d go on patrol and we’d often get shot at. In fact I had two company commanders get shot right next to me.”

They began a major assault on April 13, 1945 – the day after President Roosevelt died – and on that day, as they advanced up a hill, a machine gun opened up on them, killing the commander and a nearby sergeant.

Tazewell, now 85, is sitting in a conference room at Clark Nexsen, an architecture and engineering firm in Norfolk, wearing a crisp blue shirt and UVA tie. He points to his left arm near the elbow.

“I got shot in the arm and the hip. I was lucky that the people that picked me up turned out to be from MCV [Medical College of Virginia]. They patched me up in a field hospital and I went home in a hospital ship.”

Tazewell was back in the states still recovering from his wounds when the war ended and got home shortly after VE (Victory in Europe) Day.

He went to the University of Virginia under the GI Bill and would become one of the most prominent architects in the region, helping change the look of that once seedy place.

Sailors celebrating VJ Day on Granby Street in 1945.