Christmas and New Years being over, 1945 begins with Grandpa Knowlton heading to Okinawa, via Honolulu, near where the attack had taken place on Pearl Harbor four years before, though he can’t say where “down under” he will be. He has met the cast of characters which will appear in the New Yorker on February 10, 1945 in the article “Letter from Honolulu”, which includes a fellow who calls himself “Stan the Doughnut Man”, and several others who also appear in John Lardner’s New Yorker article.
Incidentally, my own father taught math in the radar school on Oahu, and was probably there at the same time Grandpa Knowlton and Stan the Doughnut Man, and John Lardner, were there. They never met, but World War Two brought a lot of people to distant places…