Dad

As children, we rarely think about our parents’ lives. In fact, my adolescent self would have said with some certainty my own parents didn’t really exist until my siblings and I came along. (The “obviously,” if not spoken, would certainly have been implied.)

Now that I’m older I realize how lucky I am to have a mother who is still lively enough at ninety to answer some of the questions I’m sure I would regret not asking. (We use Bob Greene and D.G. Fulford’s “To Our Children’s Children” as a guide.)

However, my dad died in 2002, having been afflicted with Alzheimer’s several years earlier. This cut short any possibility of hearing much about the life he led before I knew him.

Oh, there were inklings of the past:

• The foreign money and Japanese teapot he brought back from World War II.
• Mom’s mention that he’d been in high school at age twelve.
• Him once saying there had been a fire sometime in his childhood, his family escaping with only their blankets.
• Also, he had a college education — a rarity in our neighborhood — a BS from Glenville State (in West Virginia) financed through the GI Bill.
• There, he finished his coursework in three years, planning to become a teacher … at least until the experience of student teaching convinced him otherwise.
• He was in a fraternity, and for a long time our spankings were administered with a paddle he’d received on joining. I realize now it was probably part of a hazing ritual. (A paddling by your future frat brothers seems positively innocent in these days of students dying by alcohol poisoning in similar rituals, although from the Wikipedia page, it’s clear needless deaths by fraternity hazing has a long and tragic history.)
• Somewhere there exists a picture of Dad at a bar in his Navy uniform, and I also remember Mom saying my grandpa told him he’d never amount to anything(!) because he evidently liked to drink.
• That may have something to do with another story he told me, about how while he was in college, he’d once bought and drank a six-pack. Since alcohol was forbidden on campus, he threw the bottles outside someone else’s window. That “someone else” turned out to be a football player who was either kicked off the team or banned for some games as a result.
  “Did you ever tell him?” I asked.
  Dad responded, “Are you kidding? He would have beaten the sh– out of me!”
• As kids, we each had a turn wearing his US Navy uniform for Halloween. It fit because he was just a skinny kid when he joined.
• Someone (maybe Dad himself) told me me he got two leaves while in the service. On one, he got the mumps. On the other, it was the measles.
• He also got miserably seasick when he first went to sea.

• 

  This teapot, which Dad brought back from Japan, was decorated with hand-painted yellow and red flowers, which eventually washed away after the pot was used for too many tea parties.

• 

  The flag from Dad’s funeral

Sometime after his death, in one of my genealogical research frenzies, I even sent away for Dad’s service records. And when my stepmother went into a nursing home, my stepsister kindly made sure I got most of his papers, some of which I’ve scanned and put into archival boxes.

Still, I never really pieced the information into a cohesive whole (and haven’t yet).

What I have done, just recently, is put together a timeline of his military service, and it’s that I’m sharing now. It’s not the story of a dashing hero, but a teenager from West Virginia who found himself thousands of miles from the mountains in a place very different from home.

In June 1943, Dad was considered available for work in an essential activity at his area of residence, which was Massillon, Ohio. Until I saw this form, I didn’t realize he had moved to Ohio with his parents before the war. They were in WV for the 1940 census, so this would have been a recent move. He was sixteen when he received the document, and it was good only until September of the same year.

From his separation papers, I learned he was employed by Republic Steel in Massillon as a “helper on open hearth furnace” from May 1943 to November 1944. My grandfather’s obituary said Grandpa he retired in 1964 with 21 years at Republic, so he probably got Dad the job.

I found an article from Indeonline.com that quoted a former Republic employee, “The area was ripe with manufacturing jobs. [Al] Longbrake remembers people joking that if they didn’t like their job they could walk down the street and find another one because someone was always hiring. The other joke of the time, he said, came from the West Virginians who came to the city for work. ‘They used to say that in West Virginia you studied the three Rs: reading, writing and Route 21.'” 

So, my family wasn’t the only one who made the northern trek to Massillon for work. The 1940 census also says Grandpa had been doing roadwork on “Public Emergency Work (WPA, NYA, CCC, etc.).” According to Mom, he dug ditches, and a well-paying job in a steel mill must have been appealing, even if it meant moving hundreds of miles.

But working in an essential industry didn’t keep my dad out of the war for long. From the same separation papers, I found the date of his enlistment, 4 October 1944. He always said he enlisted to avoid being drafted into the Army.

However, his “report for service card” instructs him to show up on 3 October of the same year.

From there, he was sent to the U.S. Naval Training Center, Great Lakes, IL, which naval archives tell us was (and is) on the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan. The change of address card above was sent to my grandmother on
15 November 1944.

Grandma got a similar card in February 1945 telling her Dad was going to Shoemaker, CA (in Alameda County).

Troops were sent to California by train, which I remember Dad once mentioning to The Engineer. That memory is fuzzy, but I confirmed by a Library of Congress audio recording of Raymond Harris’s oral history of his war. (I also remember Dad saying something about stopping in Kansas, but Raymond doesn’t mention that.)

This recording confirmed a lot of things I remembered hearing from my dad, and if you have any interest in hearing about US military veterans’ history, I highly recommend checking out that part of the LOC website.

Just two crazy sailors: Dad is on the right. His friend, Leonard Bujak is on the right.

Dad and Raymond (from the LOC recording) were both assigned to the USS Mount Olympus, although Raymond was discharged before my father. Mount Olympus was an AGC (Amphibious Group Command), launched in August 1943, sailing for the Philippines where she served as a floating headquarters.

From the naval military history website:

“… she called at Ulithi to allow Commander, 3d Amphibious Force, to disembark to travel by plane to Hawaii, while she herself sailed for overhaul at San Francisco, arriving 11 February[Kym’s note:1945] and leaving 22 April for Hawaii and Guam.

Arriving Guam 6 July, Mount Olympus sailed on for Manila, colliding en route with oiler Millicoma. The flagship was escorted to San Pedro Bay, Leyte, for repairs by Ajax, then continued to Manila, arriving 3 August. After the close of hostilities, Mount Olympus arrived Tokyo Bay 2 September with the 1st Cavalry Division on board for Yokohama. After 8 months moving occupation troops from the Philippines and other bases to ports in Japan and China, she left Shanghai 28 May 1946 for San Diego, the Panama Canal, and New York, arriving 7 July.”

This, in a nutshell, was my father’s war.

According to Raymond, the ship stopped at San Diego, Pearl Harbor, Guam, and the Philippines, where they were rammed. Another ship was torpedoed around that time and place. While the Olympus was in dry dock being repaired, those on board got the news that the atomic bomb had been dropped.

The Olympus led the convoy into Tokyo Bay, which Raymond described as being full of ships and “thick with airplanes, B29s.” Raymond compared the ship to the Pentagon because it carried the commanders. Dad had referred to it as a troop carrier.

When asked what there was to do on the ship, Raymond said not much, although there was a band and sailors got shore leave about once every four days while in port. He said the Navy was really confining, “not like the Army,” which “let you stay out all night.” Apparently, the Navy let you off around one o’clock, and you had to be back aboard by five.

I listened to a few tapes of men who had been on the ship, and one of them (possibly Raymond) described going on shore leave as being surrounded by sailors, that all he could see was the white hats of their uniforms.

According to both Raymond and my Dad, at one point Admiral Byrd was on the ship (interesting because it’s possible there is an extremely distant relationship between the two Byrds — my father and the admiral).

And Raymond also mentions them going back and forth between Japan and China.

I know Dad was in Tokyo for the official Japanese surrender because I have this.

I had wondered why Dad had saved an envelope and learned through my research that this is a piece of history. According to the Universal Ship Cancellation Society (who knew such an organization existed?), this is an example of a “fancy cancel” in honor of the surrender. When I looked more closely, I noticed the date (the day of the surrender) and the logo on the left side of the envelope which includes the letters “V” and “J” for VJ (Victory in Japan) Day.

On the Fold3 database, I found three muster rolls for Dad on the Mount Olympus, one for the quarter ending October 1945, one for January 1946, and one as he was being discharged in July of 1946. In October 1945, he was an S2c (Seaman 2nd class), but by January 1946, he’d worked up to being an S1 (Seaman), and his discharge paper lists him as having been AS (Able Seaman), S2/c,1/c. I couldn’t find out what the c,1/c means, but I believe Able Seaman and Seaman 1st Class may be interchangeable.

On 23 April 1946, they were in port in Shanghai when a tragedy unfolded on an LST (Landing Ship, Tank) that was also stationed there. A nineteen-year-old sailor just two months out of the US and fresh off standing a two-hour midnight watch “went suddenly berserk” and shot to death nine shipmates before stabbing himself. The quote is direct from several Newspaper.com clippings, leading me to believe the papers copied it word for word from a naval press release. The young sailor also injured a tenth shipmate before being knocked to the ground with a bench by another sailor.

Dad kept a clipping about the funeral services, and I can’t help wondering what he thought when he heard about the event.

Three months later, at age nineteen, Dad was discharged and given a travel allowance to find his way home from New York.

This paper provides a wealth of information — everything from how much money Dad got on being discharged, what medals he was eligible for, where he had worked right before the war, and what kind of additional training he was hoping to receive.

A further review of the document says he had three years of high school when he enlisted at seventeen. We know he was working at the steel mill by age sixteen, which means he had to have completed those years before going to work.

Ergo, he was in high school by at least age thirteen.

A deeper look at the 1940 census tends to uphold my mom’s version of events — that he skipped two grades and was in high school at twelve. From the census (taken in April), Dad is listed as having completed eight years of school at age thirteen. From this, we can surmise, he was in his first year of high school, having turned thirteen in November the previous year. Meanwhile, his younger sister, age ten, has completed three years of schooling.

If I had to guess, I’d say it’s likely the family moved to Massillon sometime after Dad’s third year of high school, and he didn’t re-enroll until after the war. If my grandfather’s obituary is accurate (and it may not be), Grandpa started at the steel mill in 1943. Of course, there’s no way of knowing if he started work immediately at Republic or if the obituary is accurate.

Moving forward from Dad’s discharge from the Navy, I found him mentioned in the 22 May 1947 issue of the Evening Independent (Massillon). This article says fifty-two of Massillon Washington High School’s 452 graduates (the largest class in history at that time) were veterans of World War II who completed their studies by correspondence. My father is listed among them.

Referring again to the separation document, I noticed under “Preference for additional training,” Dad asked for apprentice training (the handwritten copy spells out what “App. Tng.” stands for).

I wondered what happened to change his mind. But, then I remembered Grandma.

My Grandma Byrd was that unusual creature (especially in West Virginia), an educated woman. I wrote about her family in an earlier post focusing on the fact that at least three children of six in her family had some college education or vocational training.

Her husband, my grandfather, like many in that time and place, completed eighth grade. But Grandma finished the year of college necessary for her to teach school in a one-room schoolhouse.

One of her brothers attended Glenville State for two years, and a sister was in nurse’s training when she died of TB.

I know Glenville was a teacher training college, which makes me wonder if that’s also where Grandma went.

At any rate, I’m sure it was she who changed my dad’s mind and set him on a path to higher education.

Like so many others of his time, my dad’s life was changed by war when he was still in his teens. Although he never fought in any battles, I’m sure he saw the aftermath of those waged in the South Pacific.

I think about myself at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, and can only wonder how he must have felt.

Dad served one year, nine months, and fourteen days and is buried with many of his fellow veterans in the Ohio Western Reserve National Cemetery.

Marasmus

Until today, I’d never heard or read the term “marasmus.”

But this morning I had some free time before going to work so I was searching Findagrave.com and the birth and death records on the West Virginia Archives.

I do this sometimes, putting in a family surname and narrowing the search by county and date. Yes, this is a random way to approach genealogy, but I occasionally use the tactic anyway because it can yield interesting, albeit sometimes tragic, results.

Today was one of those times.

Findagrave.com popped up with a memorial for thirteen-day-old baby. When I placed her on my family tree, she turned out to have been my father’s cousin (my grandfather’s brother’s daughter).

Melba Jarushire Bird (as FIndagrave lists her) was born at the very end of December 1929 and died on January 9, 1930.

She was either twelve, thirteen, or fourteen days old (depending if you believe the death certificate, Findagrave, or the death register). Her name wasn’t actually Melba Jarushire either, at least not according to the legal documents. It was Melva Jearline.

Cause of death was listed as marasmus, which Healthline defines as: “… a form of severe malnutrition. It can occur in anyone who has severe malnutrition, but it usually occurs in children. It typically occurs in developing countries. Marasmus can be life-threatening, but you can get treatment for it.“

Well. That gave me pause.

To think Dad’s cousin, born three years after him in nearly the same place, died of what sounds like starvation … I can hardly wrap my brain around it.

Although Melva’s death technically happened during the Great Depression, I’m not sure that was the root cause. The Depression started in the US with the stock market crash in October 1929. Would two months of inadequate nutrition at the end of a pregnancy be enough to cause malnutrition severe enough that the child would die?

I don’t know.

I do know Melva’s parents had a son born in 1932, before losing another child in 1939, a daughter who lived only a day.

It’s impossible to imagine the grief they must have felt both with Melva and their second daughter, which makes the fact that their son lived until the age of 73 seem almost a miracle.

My grandparents raised my father and his sister during these years. In the 1930 census, the two families are on the same page, making them neighbors as well as relations. Melva’s father was a laborer, as was my grandfather.

It seems incredible that only now am I beginning to see the struggle these young families went through trying to survive.

Grandma was always extremely strict about not wasting anything. As a child, I didn’t understand. Later, as an adult, I barely thought about it.

Now, however, I think I begin to understand.

To have lived through such times, where these couple’s (and I’m sure many others’) very survival — and worse, the survival of their children — may have been in doubt, would leave a person forever determined to never live that way again.

Also, and this may seem a bit of a stretch to some, reading about this happening in my own family gives me empathy for parents around the world who take what seems to us to be ridiculous chances to migrate somewhere that seems to promise a better future. And I can tell you this, if I’d seen one of my children die of malnutrition, I think I would be quite likely to take any risk necessary to help make sure I didn’t lose another the same way.

Addendum: Since writing this, several friends have pointed out malnutrition could have been caused by issues other than lack of food — cleft palate inability to digest milk, or any number of physical maladies. I was viewing my father’s cousin’s death through the lens of a person raised much later, when such issues would have been problematic, but not life-threatening. Still, however it happened, it’s clear this family suffered their share of tragedy.

Our Ancestors: We Know We Can Make It Through Because We Know They Did

It’s been a weird few weeks, I think we all can agree. In all my born days, I never could have predicted something like coronavirus could scour the world as it has.

That’s not quite true. I’ve predicted a pandemic for years. I just never believed it would happen.

I find it hard to believe even now, even though I know it’s gone way beyond weird to tragic.

So many people are sick and dying, while so many more are unable to work.

Meanwhile, our so-called leaders can’t even manage to pass a bill to help those who need it most.

My answer: Do something now to help our country’s citizens. Argue about how to the big corporations later. And be sure to factor in more accountability than the last bailout.

But, this is not a political diatribe.

It’s a reminder.

We can get through this.

I know this because I study the genealogy of my family, and I know my ancestors made it through their own horrors.

There was Sarah Jane Daugherty Feathers Scott who married at nineteen, only to lose her husband in the Civil War shortly after the birth of their first child. Her three brothers fought in the same war, one for the Confederacy and two for the Union. All came home safely, but one died before the age of 20 from an accidental gun shot. Sarah later remarried and had seven more children, with four of them dying before she did. And yet, she and her second husband, Amos, took in and were raising three of his siblings the year before her death. Sarah was the sister of one of my 2x great grandmother, and her first husband was the brother of one of my other 2x great grandmothers.

Sarah’s brother Jacob was the one who fought for the Confederacy. He and his wife Julia lost two children within eighteen days of each other at a time when their home counties were in the process of seceding from the Confederacy to become what is now West Virginia.

On the other side of the family, there was John Garman and his many children. And you already know about Montcalm. 

And I can’t forget about my Great-grandfather Lang, who was an RFD mail carrier, carrying out his rounds on a mule in West Virginia. If you’ve ever been to the hollers of that state, you can imagine what that must have been like, especially in the winter.

There was my Grandpa Byrd, who dug ditches for one of the Federal works projects during the Great Depression so he could feed his family.

His father, Andrew Warren Bird (the spelling varies) and mother, Clara Olive Summers (one of my favorite names ever!) lost a child, Mary A Bird, in 1898. She was only twenty months old, and I came across her by accident when I was looking for the death record for another Byrd/Bird. It says “caught fire from open grate, never rallied.”

Every time I read that phrase, I get tears in my eyes.

Mary’s Death Registration

Still, Clara and Andrew soldiered on until Clara’s death at age 66 in 1938. Andrew lived to the age of 96, remarrying a woman 41 years his junior when he was 78, although — and I find this detail amusing — he claimed to be a sprightly 72 to Alice’s 37.

Alice’s life was a difficult one. She was first married at 15, to a fifty-two-year-old man, with whom she had nine children.

Writing that makes me cringe, though the nine children and the fact that Andrew bequeathed his land to her on his death makes me think theirs was a marriage of economical necessity.

She died at seventy-five, having married a third time, this time to someone closer to her age (only six years older).

Although she isn’t my direct ancestor, I find myself hoping her life with Andrew was a pleasant one, and that the acreage she inherited enabled her to achieve some independence after what sounds like a life of drudgery.

My parents also knew challenges, growing up in the Depression, and that experience was reflected in how my siblings and I were raised, with a big garden and two large cupboards in the basement, filled with home-canned food.

Grandma and Grandpa Byrd would come to stay for a few days in the late summer or fall to help, but we were all expected to contribute, by lugging water to the garden, stringing beans, pushing apples through a ricer to make applesauce, or washing dishes.

The first time I made and canned jelly, I was so proud of myself, feeling like I was maintaining a connection with my parents and grandparents.

Then I realized if Grandma could look down from heaven, she would be laughing at me — so smug about over a few jars of jelly.  She, along with Grandpa and my parents, would churn out seemingly endless jars of multiple varieties of jelly every year, along with applesauce, green beans, tomatoes, tomato juice, grape juice, peaches, pears, plums, and more.

So, here’s the thing: I come from a long line of resilient people. They suffered the deaths of spouses, siblings, and children, lived through wars and the Depression, and raised their children. Every generation has had its challenges, and yet, we persevere.

Your family’s story is probably similar, though you may not know its “narrative.” This might be a good time to learn some of it because research shows that such knowledge makes a person more resilient. (If you’d like to read more about this study, there’s a good artice in the New York Times. )

It makes sense. If a person knows their family’s stories, they know that there have always been difficult times, and that people — not all of them, obviously, but many — manage to find a way to survive. When we know that, it makes us more confident we will find a way through our own hardships.

We can do that best, I believe, by learning to depend more on ourselves and on each other, even though right now that interdependence with others must, of necessity, be from a distance.

Though we may not be able to deal with difficulties in the same way as our ancestors, we too will find our way through.

Also, I take heart from two of my favorite quotations.

“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” — Ghandi

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” — Margaret Mead

We don’t have to do everything to fix things. We just have to do something, preferably something that takes us out of ourselves and helps others.

So, be kind. Check in with friends and neighbors.

And, for heaven’s sake, quit hoarding toilet paper and hand sanitizer!