 |  |  |  |
| | | |
- Foreword: Discovering Dad
© 2005 by Peter H. Green
All Rights Reserved
Oh dream of joy! Is this indeed
The lighthouse top I see?
Is this the hill? Is this the kirk?
Is this mine own countree?
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 1798
I thought I knew my father pretty well. He was an accomplished advertising executive
who had started some side businesses with varying degrees of success and was in
the midst of another one, a retirement venture, when he died. He was fond of using
the telephone—for making airline reservations, for founding and running three
franchised Patricia Stevens Finishing Schools, “For Models and Career Girls,” in
Indianapolis, Cleveland and Philadelphia, and in interminable sessions with the
Diners’ Club to untangle travel charges on his credit card. It seemed that during my
high school years, whenever he was home and not traveling, he was always on the
phone and seldom available to talk to the rest of us. He talked down to clerical
employees, addressed his staff is if they were idiots and lectured telephone
operators on the basics of common courtesy—something I was sure he didn't know
the first thing about. And, oh yes, he was in the Marine Corps for a year and a half,
beginning when I was barely five years old.
In his relations with me he could be impatient, demanding and demeaning. He often
tried to micro manage my life. But I usually and stopped short of challenging him
outright, allowing that he had greater knowledge and experience, and assented to his
power over me. If he appeared coldly indifferent when I complained, I overlooked
these slights and attributed them to his high hopes and seemingly unattainable
expectations in my regard. In short I was a respectful, timid and obedient son who,
like Cordelia, accorded my parent his due respect and love and seldom chose
unreserved expression, like that of her sisters, Goneril and Regan. Although I felt a
tremendous sense of loss for years after he died, I never really understood why,
because my love for him had been cool and—in my perception at least—never
passionate.
Only recently, and almost accidentally, did I begin to unravel this mystery and to
realize that there was a lot more to discover about Dad. In May of the year 2000 we
took a trip to attend my college reunion on the East Coast. Connie, my wife of thirty
years, and I used the occasion to visit family and friends in the area. The reunion
itself featured an afternoon session with the provocative title, “What are you going to
do with the last third of your life?”
In fact we were all nearing a stage when we might begin considering retirement and
new directions. And anyway, ran the theme, with the modern miracles in health care,
isn’t life expectancy creeping up these days, to 85 or 90 for many? The thought of all
that time of relative ease stretching out in front of us beckoned like an unexplored
continent. One by one six of my more forthright classmates got up and told of their
plans. The first, a college dean in his second marriage, humorously related his
struggles to pay for the education of numerous offspring—“mine, hers and ours”—
on a college administrator’s salary. He expressed his relief that, by age 65, he might
finally stop paying tuition and begin saving for retirement, and “all that travel and
recreation that people talk about.” Another told about writing a book on his
fascinating experiences over a distinguished diplomatic career in several South
American countries. My favorite was the guy whose family was grown and gone who
had begun taking flying lessons. He was told by more than one of his friends, “You’re
a damned fool. Now that you've really got something to live for, you’re going to go off
and get yourself killed!” His cheerful rejoinder was, “Yeah, but now I can take those
risks, as I've always wanted to. I don’t have anybody that I have to stay alive for!” Not
a bad outlook. Taking risks. Trying something new. Indulging yourself and fulfilling
your heart’s desire. These were the thoughts buzzing around in my head as we set
out in our rented car for that voyage back in time.
On our first trip east in years, we resolved to keep pledges made over that time to
see friends, classmates and relatives scattered all over New England. History was all
around us. Along the way we paused for lunch in gracious and historic Concord—
imagine, a mere pit stop in the birthplace of the American Revolution! A main
objective of these rounds was a visit with Connie’s high school and college
classmate, Mary Oates Johnson, and her husband, Dan, in Andover. She, her
husband and Martin, their talented, opera-singing eighth-grade son, lived in a frame
duplex on a sycamore-lined street not far from the celebrated college preparatory
school that a cousin of mine had attended. Her tour of that institution’s grounds was
one of the many unexpected pleasures of this memorable eastward journey—like our
afternoon in the Plymouth colony, with its student actors affecting old English accents
and living the daily life of the original settlers, and the day and night in Newport,
playground of the rich, complete with a tour of The Breakers, Stanford White’s last
residential masterpiece—a passage back into history, not just American history, but
family history, personal remembrance. But our visit with Mary marked, if not the
beginning, the turning point, the germ of an idea, my determination to revive a long-
held ambition, and the wellspring of the story.
My first hint the there was a story to be told grew out of my casual comment to Mary
that I spent the summer when I turned six just up the coast with my mother, sister,
aunt and her family in a rented seaside house at Annisquam, while Dad was off to
war. On the third day of our visit, which after several days of rain promised to be
sunny and bright, Mary proposed to take us on a tour through the historic fishing
village of Gloucester on Cape Ann. An author and editor of text books, including
some on American history, she thought it would be a great tour and a sentimental
journey for me. By ten on Saturday morning we found ourselves inching through
traffic in the busy and storied seaport town. I commented that Gloucester had
certainly changed since the summer of 1945, when cars were a rarity and fishing
boats and dinghies were a much more common way of getting around. As we broke
out of town into our first full view of the sea, Mary exclaimed, “There’s the famous
statue!” and we were confronted with the bronze sculpture of the old mariner at the
wheel in his slicker and hat with the down-turned brim, steadfastly guiding his craft
through a sou’wester. I was quick to confirm its authenticity: I had studied and
discussed the [same] image, emblazoned on Lipton tea packages, with my Irish
grandmother, since early childhood. Our determined guide pressed on toward the
tiny hamlet of Annisquam and headed for the beach. Suddenly, I said. “Wait! Stop.
Turn here.”
“Oh, my God!” Connie exclaimed. “He knows where he is!” Mary dutifully turned
right into a road dead-ending at the beach.
Gaining confidence in my familiarity with the scene by the second, I blurted, “There’s
the old flagpole,” as I pointed to the obelisk centered at the end of the road, still
anchoring a waving American flag. As we approached, a sign, CAMBRIDGE BEACH,
came into view. There it was stretched out before me: the very cottage where we had
stayed, the beach, the bay west of Cape Ann, and beyond, the open sea.
“This is it,” I declared with finality, hardly believing my eyes. I studied the house on
the right side of the road: the kitchen steps, the neat white clapboard siding and the
wraparound screened porch facing the sea. These were the very steps leading from
the kitchen (which, I could see through the window, was still painted a sunny yellow),
where the black milkman had stood when my baby sister had pointed to him, saying
her equivalent of the word for milk; she had not yet learned to pronounce her L’s and
suffixed all her favorite words with the diminutive Y-sound. “Mon-kee!” she had
squealed — to the extreme embarrassment of the hapless milkman and the shocked
dismay of my liberal mother. This was the screened porch where Uncle Joseph had
lined up my seashell and starfish collection on an old wooden table in the sun to dry,
and like Aristotle on his extended honeymoon on the isle of Mytilene, had given
names to each of the living creatures and revealed (Aristotle to all mankind, Uncle
Joseph to me) a system of biological classification. Here it stood, worn, but
unchanged after 55 years, timeless. I was finally home again, at the scene of my
Summer of 42—that glorious and (to me) seminal film in which a worldly-wise Jennifer
O’Neill befriends a young beach-combing boy as he awakens to the joys of nature
and the feelings of adults—which so vividly captured what I remembered of the 1940s
wartime seaside setting.
I ran onto the beach. It was almost high tide. Seagulls mewed. A light surf broke on
the rock seawall and a brisk onshore breeze pierced my nostrils with the briny
perfume that to me evoked all the seaside memories of my early childhood. I peered
out into the bay; it was all there, just as I recalled it from some primeval memory
store. To the right sat Annisquam Light, a tiny white tower with its black lantern on the
land’s furthest visible extremity. In the left foreground were the rocks with the chasm—
a geological split, Uncle Joe had explained, in an uplifted promontory—worn smooth
by time, with Wingaersheek Beach on the far shore beyond. In the center was a wide
expanse of the familiar bay, with a faint line of the opposite shore on the horizon,
where stood, we had always been told, the town of Ipswich.
In a joyful mood from our voyage of discovery, we wound our way back through a
labyrinth of local roads that only Mary could have negotiated and arrived at the fish
market and liquor store in a village where she and Dan were accustomed to stopping
for the day’s catch on their way back to town. As Mary and Connie selected some
choice lobster and shrimp for the evening’s feast, I got interested in the shop’s wide
variety of wines and made several selections. So fascinated I became and so grateful
was I to our hostess for her skillful guidance, I filled my shopping cart with half a
dozen bottles of reds and whites, including some reserve selections and special
harvests of the modestly priced California varieties that I fancied I knew something
about. While this expenditure seemed to Connie more extravagant than would
normally be required as a thank-you gift to our hosts, between Mary’s enthusiasm for
wine and my appreciation of the day, I felt that this treat was the least I could do to
express my feelings and to leave a little memento of our wonderful visit long after we
had gone.
That evening we pitched in together to prepare and serve a sumptuous shore dinner
for the five of us. It is my conservative nature to finish one bottle before uncorking
the next, but Mary was the hostess, and after all, we had given her the wine. Besides,
she was Irish, and this was a very special occasion. In the face of the suddenly
available ample supply, Mary proved unstoppable. She defended possession of her
corkscrew, and we sampled a new wine with every course: a soft Sauvignon Blanc
with the shrimp, a light Chardonnay with the salad, and ultimately a zesty vintner’s
reserve red Zinfandel to pique our appetites and complement the pièce de
résistance. And we hadn’t even gotten to dessert.
The conversation began to flow as freely as the wine. Mary, never so much in her
element as when she was playing historical sleuth, mulled over the facts I had related
during the day on how we got to Annisquam when my dad was in the Marine Corps.
The talk drifted to the hardships of the war, the blackout curtains on every window of
the coastal cottage—to deceive spying or attacking submarines—and rationing, and
we began to reconstruct the scenario of that summer: “Helen and her two boys, Mom,
my sister and I lived full time at the Fairbanks cottage,” I explained.
“That’s it!” concluded Mary. “Joseph could commute on the weekends because he
was a doctor and could get enough ration stamps to buy gas.”
“Of course!” I replied, getting into the spirit of the exercise. “And that’s why I went
barefoot all summer—because the pair of shoes that had been bought for me in
Chicago with our only ration stamps never arrived in the mail.”
My thoughts then wandered to Dad’s “war stories.” His final wartime assignment was
on the island of Guam, I mentioned, running the Armed Forces Radio Station. “How
could that happen?” I mused out loud. “He was only a PFC. Normally, judging from
my own military experience, they don't run anything but floor buffers.” I remembered
the time I had visited with his service pal from Guam, former New York Giants star
and St. Louis broadcaster, Buddy Blattner. Bud had told me about some of their
adventures, and particularly about the beer. “Your dad and I cooked up the idea of a
sports quiz and figured out that if we gave away beer as prizes to the contestants,
we'd have audiences flocking to watch our show.” The idea apparently caught on; the
beer multiplied. “We ended up with so much of it, we had to bury it in the ground,” he
said. “Why, I'll bet if I took you to Guam today, I could show you where hundreds of
cases of beer are still buried all over the island.” I reflected that there was more to
Dad than I had ever really fathomed.
I reflected on the fact that I had also met Dad's radio announcer friend, Mike Wallace.
We had met him, his first wife, Kappy, and his two sons, Peter and Christopher, when
he came back to live in Chicago after the war. Family lore had it that Dad had given
Mike Wallace his first Chicago radio job, provided that Mike went out and bought a
decent shirt and tie. Perhaps there was more to Dad than I had been admitting or
had hitherto given him credit for. Now that Dad had passed on, I was more mature,
and I had made a family life and a decent career for myself. I could afford myself a bit
more distanced objectivity and reflectivity—to allow myself to explore and analyze the
good and look beyond my past memories of perceived hurts and slights. I realized
there was something important here. There was something that I needed to explore
and understand; luckily, I had lots of clues.
At this point in our evening’s reminiscences I mentioned that my memories weren’t
the only source of information I had about my parents’ World War II experience.
Recently, I had rediscovered, on an obscure shelf in the basement, a cardboard box
that Mom had given to me before she died; it contained letters from Dad’s Marine
Corps days. “I like to think that she felt I might do something with those letters
someday,” I said.
A haze seemed to envelop the room and appeared to thicken. I don’t recall that
anyone was smoking; it was just an alteration in my perception. The scene was
bathed in that lovely, warm chiaroscuro that develops after a few drinks in good
company. We had opened and sampled five of the wine bottles by now, and we were
mellow. Abruptly, Mary turned head and shoulders to me and sat bolt upright.
“Peter, you've got to do it!”
“Do what?” I muttered, through the comfortable, dreamy fog.
“You've got to write it—the story of that summer, of your father's war experience, and
how your family coped during the war!”
I sat up myself, suddenly sobered and alert. “My God, I can! I have the documents. I
was there. I lived it!” I cried, with mounting excitement.
That was Saturday, June 3, 2000. It dawned on me that it was the 87th anniversary of
my mother’s birth. That wouldn't be so old, really, we mused. As we had said at the
reunion, it’s getting more common all the time to live that long, although I had lost her
seventeen years before. Our thoughts turned to Mom, and we mourned her early
demise. We opened the last bottle of wine. So much for the long-lasting memento of
our visit, although the next day’s hangover was not soon forgotten. Martin, the gifted
singer, who was up way past his bedtime with this excitement that had burst into his
home, began noodling at the upright piano in the dining room. “Happy birthday to
you…” When he came to the chorus, all of us, as if sharing a single thought, and
without prompting, filled in my mother’s name: “Happy Birthday, dear Alice/ Happy
birthday to you!”
While my family had always been interested in our history, relating important family
names and dates in the oral tradition, I had paid only passing attention. But I soon
realized that, through their diligence and thoughtfulness, I had been given the tools
to recreate my family’s experience: Dad’s senior autobiography from high school,
some 400 letters Dad wrote home during the year and a half he served in the Marine
Corps in California and then in the Pacific, a collection of six essays, appropriately
titled, My War with the United States Marines, that he wrote and presented at the
Chicago Literary Club in 1965 and finally the script Mom wrote for Dad’s 48th “This is
Your Life!” birthday party. At that moment I realized that by default and by inner
necessity I would soon become, like Mom, Dad and, more recently, my sister Linda,
the latest family historian. I soon set out to accomplish the task.
Dad’s favorite stories were always the funny ones that he and his military buddies
would relive at our house after the war. As I listened with rapt attention, my mother
would cover my too-big ears in a vain attempt to shelter me from their rough
language. In fact, those stories formed the basis for Dad’s post-war literary club
essays. But it wasn't until I organized the legacy in Mom’s cardboard box
chronologically, over 400 letters, read and re-read them in sequence and placed
them in the context of the wider war that I began to appreciate the serious side and
true import of his, and so many of his comrades’, wartime service, both to their
families and to the country they served.
Only a small proportion of our armed forces in World War II saw combat. The vast
majority of those who served were in critical support positions, serving in backwaters
of the war or caught up in the pettiness and absurdity of the bureaucratic war
machine. But it was because of the willingness of so many to serve that those who
were on the front lines at the right time got the job done. Dad was one of those many
behind-the-scenes personnel; what made his experience different is the fact that not
only was he a skilled writer, but that he used that skill as a way of passing on his
experience to his wife to keep them close, and to his son, to whom he bequeathed
the legacy which was to become that son’s understanding and, eventually, this book.
Through almost daily letters home, he recorded his keen observations and sardonic
comments on the wartime proceedings, as he and other support personnel
experienced them. In a similar and reciprocal manner, Mom kept him informed of
family doings: her daily crises, my progress and problems in school and my baby
sister’s progress in learning to walk and talk. This conversational correspondence
melted away the 8,000 miles between them and eased the pain of separation.
In spite of a bureaucratic military system that conspired against individual initiative—it
was designed that way to enable unified action by large battle groups—my father
nevertheless, like so many others, did end up making his own unique contribution to
his fellow service men and women and to the progress of the war. Although
circumstance, the lack of a college degree and {official} bureaucratic indifference to
his talents denied him the leadership rank for which he was surely qualified, he
persisted and used his writing, organizational and persuasive skills to bring news of
the wider war to the troops. Assigned to the radio station on Guam in the Marianas, a
group of islands halfway around the world, he also brought them the sounds of
home—baseball, tennis, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Jack Benny, Burns and
Allen, and Fibber McGee and Molly—and he taught them a little about the ancient
and beautiful culture of the people of Guam. His tiny place in history, and his brief
day of glory, grew out of these dedicated efforts to serve his country: and, for a few
splendid moments, he alone held[ in his hands a reporter’s dream: a scoop—the
biggest news story of the war—one that would shape the future of the world! But I am
getting ahead of my story.
As I put the documents together with the stories that my parents told, I began to
appreciate more fully the depth of my dad’s commitment—to his country, to building
his career and to his family. I understood him better and appreciated how the events
of his life unfolded and where his key decision points were. The father that I had
always respected, and even feared, I now admired, for his patriotism, his loyalty to
family and friends and his wisdom.
Dad enlisted at age 35, despite having a wife and two children, with the intent of
helping fight the war as an officer in combat intelligence; he ended up training with
tough angry kids half his age in the Marine infantry. He never complained about his
lot; he did his job. Back home, the family coped with making ends meet, running the
household, growing up and fear of the unthinkable, as we waited in terror for the
news of Dad’s assignment to the next island invasion. Like Luther Billis in James A.
Michener's Tales of the South Pacific, however, Dad adapted to the absurdity and
opportunity of military life. He learned how to work the system—to save his skin for
his family's sake, and to eke meaningful service to his country out of the chaos. This
is the true account of a man and his family swept along by the tides of history, yet
managing to manage and in their own small way, ride-out and even conquer those
tides. It is a story remembered, as seen and documented by those of us who lived it.
It is the story of how first Dad and then the rest of our family dodged bullets (literal
and figurative ones) continuously, from the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor—
leading to a time when my mother, sister and I were deprived for a year and a half of
my father—and how we have dodged them ever since.
Using his wits Dad survived, and he came home to teach my sister Linda and me
about love of our country, life, friendship, schoolwork, business, advertising,
promotion and how to write. This book is for all the sons, daughters and
grandchildren of those who lived through the war, and of those who did not; it is
dedicated to those well-known heroes of the war. But it also honors those who did not
see combat and were willing to put their lives on the line. As John Milton said, “They
also serve who only stand and wait.” They stepped up and did what had to be done.
Dad strove to do something that he knew how to do well, so that his best talents went
toward serving the cause. His key role in military communications at the climax of the
war has never been told, and one purpose of writing this book is to transcribe that
story into the historic record of World War II. His radio, television and advertising
career, and the help that he gave to many people along the way, some of whom
became very well known, help to flesh-out and] illuminate a golden age in the history
of broadcasting that has been too little documented. The elements and experiences
that went in to fashioning such a man and the manner in which he gave of himself to
serve his country, his profession and his family, are also tales worth telling.
In a talk he delivered in St. Louis in January 2005, Ehud Barak, Israel’s most highly
decorated soldier and its tenth prime minister, when asked what challenges lie
ahead, praised those that comprised what Tom Brokaw called the “Greatest
Generation.” Speaking from the background of a country that has lived with terrorism
for the past 40 years, he said that nations absolutely cannot progress economically,
socially or culturally without the ability to rely on an established peace. Prime Minister
Barak went on to say that the our resolve and refusal to yield to terrorism are
essential; that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s words are as true today as when he spoke
them: “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” and that the World War II generation’s
single-minded determination to prevail over evil and determined enemies are the
model for our time. He also warned that without social justice, offering the promise of
progress to the disenfranchised people of the world, our own future will not be
secure.”
Dad was an authentic member of that generation: he cared first and foremost about
defending his country and its ideal of justice for all. His story, while only one of many,
stands for the aspirations of his fellows. This account of his hopes, fears and foibles
in his war with the military bureaucracy is an epic of the common man. Dad, like the
millions of other Americans who so willingly served in the world’s biggest war, nobly
struggled for all of us and secured our way of life. As Ehud Barak reminded us, that
kind of idealistic determination has not gone out of style: it is essential to the survival
of our civilization.
Our friend Mary died young, the year following our visit, after finding herself among
the unlucky small percentage of those that succumb to Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a
commonly curable disease. But, I will long remember her initial encouragement and
enthusiasm for my story: she launched me on a project to begin the last third of my
life. As I look back over our family’s life together, I can see that summer playing on
my mental video screen, with the characters we had been and known and loved alive
again in my consciousness. We were playing on the beach, splashing in the bay,
eating together at the big round table in the Fairbanks cottage and speaking to each
other in long unheard voices. Reviewing the collected materials evoked many more
memories and revealed many new facts I had not known. The story is as true a
description of our lives as I have been able to render. The events are faithfully retold
from Dad’s letters and stories, Mom’s script, and my memory. What follows is a
record of what I have so vividly seen on that screen.
Foreword: Discovering Dad