Discovering Dad. A son realizes his father's love for his family

Foreword: Discovering Dad

,2009

by Peter H. Green

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 Marine

r, 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, including
Connie's classmate, Mary, a writer and close friend in Amherst. The reunion itself featured an afternoon session
with the provocative title, “What are you going to do with the last third of your life?”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 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.

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.

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