Good morning. I would like to talk this day about my brother, James Conlon Devine, a professional dramatic tenor with bluish green eyes. He grew a Clark Gable mustache after high school, trimmed at the Ambassador Hotel in downtown St. Louis every Saturday morning. He refused to get his mustache and his thick black hair cut anywhere else.

Jim’s favorite job, outside of setting pins in the neighborhood bowling alley, was singing in local restaurants and a myriad of friends’ weddings.

When Jim left high school, Pat Powers, a neighborhood police detective, got him a great job on the city’s downtown headquarters call center. That job covered our city’s red call boxes and all the radios in the black and whites that covered St. Louis neighborhoods.

But Jim continued to sing at every one of his friends’ family weddings, their kids’ baptisms and their parents’ funerals, at no charge. He padded his income by painting houses.

This amateur musical life crashed when Pearl Harbor happened and turned every American upside down and their dreams into nightmares. Just like your family at the time, the five Devine brothers disappeared into a world of blue water, blue uniforms and letters, leaving his 10-year-old brother to sit by the mailbox and wait for five letters that slowly arrived via Victory Mail, the military postal system.

War changed the notes in everyone’s love song, and Jim’s was no different. He remembered standing on the top platform of the U.S.S. Massachusetts, where he waved signal flags across the Pacific. On one such dark night, a group of ships floated by. Jim saw his oldest brother’s ship, the New Orleans, limp by with near fatal damage. He signed with his flashing light: “Matt Devine — engine room.” The returned flash read “Chief Petty Officer Devine — alive — safe.”

Imagine. Two brothers who grew up together, dated the same girls, passing one another after a battle. “Alive — safe.”

Today, years later, the baby brother gets paid for remembering what he tried to forget and suddenly finds himself holding a framed photo of the two of them. That is what writers do — put pain in black letters on a white piece of paper.

After the war, Jim spent the rest of his life studying and mastering the tenor roles in four Italian operas. Not an easy job. He paid me five bucks to sit in his apartment every Sunday afternoon with his group of singers and listen to him. A year of his Sunday groups culminated in Italian suppers he prepared himself.

Because of this brother I loved, I fell in love with “Madama Butterfly,” “Tosca” and the sad “La Bohème.” Yes, I did.

For many years, Jim labored as a housepainter and spent winter afternoons with “Tosca” and pasta practicing for his big break. One winter just before Christmas, his best friend, fellow singer Bob Wamser, called to talk Jim into going to New York with him to audition at the famed Metropolitan Opera. Jim was accepted, of course, but being accepted by the Met at that time meant standing on stage with a spear and dozens of other voices, all choosing to live on 50 bucks a week — in New York — the most expensive town in America — for God knows how long.

Jim went home instead, as many prospective spear carriers did, to sing at weddings and baptisms and paint houses. I honored my big cop and singer house painter the best way I could. Because there was already a Jerry Devine in the formidable entertainment unions, I simply changed my name to “James” Devine.

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.