by Larry Colton
Indeed, Gordy, in his eighties, could be a bit of a grouch when he talked about reparation for POWs or “the lazy shits who don’t know anything about an honest day’s work.” For most of his adult life, he was a loyal, punch-the-clock employee for a host of manufacturing companies in Washington and Oregon. On this warm summer afternoon, however, he sat in his living room, lighting up one Pall Mall after another and recalling his work history since the war. By his recollection, he’d had well over a dozen employers, not counting the jobs that lasted only a week or two, or his time spent in the tavern business. As he talked, Janice was in the kitchen, preparing lasagna for dinner. She too was smoking, and the house reeked of cigarette smoke. They had both enrolled in a stop-smoking clinic fifteen years ago, shelling out $600 each, money that went straight out the chimney when they quit the clinic after the first session.
Janice is Gordy’s second wife. He met his first wife, Jeanne, at Dopey’s, the drive-in restaurant popular with Yakima’s young people after the war. She was an attractive nineteen-year-old telephone operator—5 feet 2 inches, brunette, dark brown eyes, one-eighth Indian. When he first asked her out, she turned him down, choosing to go out with one of his friends instead. On a double date, however, she decided she’d rather be with Gordy and the switch was made. Soon they began seeing each other regularly, although she put the brakes on when it came to “going all the way.” He asked her to wait for him when he went off to Seattle to check into reenlisting. Gordy wasn’t gung ho about a career in the Navy—he was still a seaman first class—but without a high-school diploma, his job prospects were limited. He’d thought about becoming a cop, but when he applied to the Yakima Police Department they told him that at 5 feet 5 inches he was too short. He’d been fooling around with photography, and hoped that if he reenlisted he could be assigned as a photographer’s mate, but at the Navy office in Seattle, he was told they wanted him to work shore patrol for two years, and then possibly move up in rank. He didn’t like the officer’s attitude, so he asked for his discharge and headed back to Yakima, eager to get back to partying. He had no clue what he would do for work.
The first thing he did back in his hometown was drive to the telephone company to see Jeanne. As he wheeled into the parking lot, she was getting into a car with another guy. Impulsively, Gordy angled his car to block their way, a move that impressed Jeanne. She hopped out of the other guy’s car and climbed in with Gordy, signaling him to drive away. A couple of weeks later, they eloped to Lewiston, Idaho, consummating their relationship on their wedding night. The next day he learned that she’d lied about her age: she was seventeen, not nineteen. When they returned to Yakima, he discovered that her father was looking for him, possibly with a shotgun. Jeanne was able to calm her father down, and soon she and Gordy moved into a dumpy one-bedroom apartment.
Desperate for work, Gordy returned to a job he’d had as a kid: picking fruit. With Jeanne now pregnant, he knew he needed to do better, so taking advantage of the newly enacted GI Bill, he enrolled at Perry Trade School in Yakima, focusing on aircraft maintenance. Upon completing training in late 1947, he, Jeanne, and their infant son, Ron, moved to Ellensburg, Washington, where Gordy got a job painting aircraft parts for $1.25 an hour. A couple of months later, everyone at the plant got laid off, but Gordy got lucky and was hired as a mechanic by United Airlines in Seattle for $1.55 an hour.
At United, he worked the graveyard shift; Jeanne stayed home with the baby. To help make ends meet, Gordy also worked days, selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door, or at least trying to sell them. He quickly learned that being a salesman wasn’t his thing. Between the two jobs, plus his beer drinking, he was often exhausted, sometimes falling asleep on the job or in the middle of a conversation. He also suffered from nightmares, usually about being trapped or unable to move. He’d wake up kicking and flailing. Jeanne was having problems, too, trying to cope with severe headaches, the cause of which doctors couldn’t pinpoint. In 1949 they had a second child, Sharon.
Gordy continued to work as a journeyman mechanic until the spring of 1953, when he packed up the family and moved to California, where he heard that Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica was hiring.
On the drive south they stopped in Portland to visit with Jeanne’s sister and husband. They all got to drinking and partying, and pretty soon Gordy’s money for the move was gone, so he had to go out and find a job in Portland. For the next several years he worked jobs in manufacturing, including one for a plastics company that took him to Houston to work on the project to build skylights for the Astrodome. He tried looking up Tim McCoy but was not successful; he learned later that his old shipmate was on a ten-day bender at the time.
Gordy was likewise doing quite a bit of drinking during those years. He and Jeanne were spending so much time at the Rockwood Tavern that they thought maybe they should look into buying a tavern of their own.
The kids were now in school and Jeanne was restless. Their marriage was shaky. Jeanne had a bad temper, especially when she’d been drinking. Her headaches had not gone away, not even after she had surgery on her nose in an attempt to open up her sinuses. Eventually, they found another couple—their drinking buddies—to go in half with them on a tavern. After shopping around for months, they finally found one in a working-class neighborhood on the east side of Portland. Gordy scrounged up the $1,000 for their share of the down payment, but then the other couple bailed. Jeanne insisted that they go through with the deal, so they refinanced the fixer-upper home they’d recently purchased. During the day, Jeanne ran the tavern while Gordy continued his job as a supervisor at the plastics company. At night and on the weekends, they both worked behind the bar. There was a side room where the kids slept while they worked. At closing time, they’d bundle up the kids and head home. Neither Gordy nor Jeanne was shy about having a drink on the job.
In the summer of 1962, Jeanne had to be hospitalized for her headaches. She wasn’t the easiest patient, throwing tantrums, berating the staff, and physically attacking other patients. Gordy wasn’t sure if it was because of the headaches, the alcohol, or just her personality. Because she was unable to work at the tavern, Gordy convinced Jeanne that they should sell it. In October of that year, her condition worsened. Gordy and his thirteen-year-old daughter, Sharon, took turns staying home during the day to take care of her. But within a few days Jeanne suffered a seizure and died on the way to the hospital. The doctor listed the cause of death as a swelling of the brain caused by acute alcoholism. She was thirty-two. Gordy was now a widower, responsible for raising a fourteen-year-old son and a thirteen-year-old daughter, a task for which he knew he was completely ill-equipped.
It was another beautiful day in central Oregon. Gordy reached for the remote control. Most days he sat in his easy chair, switching channels and smoking. Not much of a sports fan, he preferred the History Channel or old movies.
He got up to let his Australian sheepdog into the house, then sat back down in his chair, waiting for a coughing jag to pass before lighting another Pall Mall. On shelves behind him sat dozens of Avon beer steins that Janice had collected over the years. “My motto was: ‘I drink it, she saves it,’ ” he said. “But that was before I sobered up. My drinking was at its worst after Jeanne died. I pretty much went on a five-year drunk. Probably had something to do with why I wasn’t a very good parent.”
The mementos of his war experience sat in a small display case: his POW photo, eight medals, including a Purple Heart and a Prisoner of War Medal, and several photo albums with pictures of his old war buddies. “It’s depressing to look at those now. So many are dead.”
For thirty years after the war he didn’t see any of his Grenadier crewmates, but in 1975 he attended the crew’s first reunion, held in Nashville, Tennessee. Twenty-two men showed up, including Captain Fitzgerald, who was thinking about writing a book about his experiences. At the reunion, Fitzgerald tried interviewing several of the men, but his tape recorder kept malfunctioning and he ended up with nothing.
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During the reunion, Gordy overheard several men talking about Fitzgerald, and he realized that some of the men had changed their attitude about the captain since the war. They still held him in high regard for the torture he endured as a POW, but they now questioned his decision to take the ship to the surface in daylight.
Late one night during that reunion weekend, Gordy was walking back to the hotel and encountered Captain Fitzgerald on the street. Gordy couldn’t recall having ever talked to the captain while he was on the sub, but on this night Fitzgerald was in a talkative mood, perhaps loosened up by the large amount of alcohol everyone had been consuming. He asked Gordy if the men blamed him for their getting captured. It seemed almost sad to Gordy that this man, whom he respected so much, and who had gone on to reach the rank of rear admiral, was still tormented by guilt that he might have been responsible for his crew’s fate. Gordy decided to tell the captain that wasn’t the case, and the two men walked amiably through the Tennessee night back to the hotel.
Following Jeanne’s death, Gordy struggled to raise the kids. Sometimes his mother or father traveled to Portland to lend a hand, but for the most part the responsibility of fixing the meals and keeping the house in order fell to Sharon. In school and at home, she was never a problem. The same couldn’t be said for Ron.
Soon after Jeanne’s death, Ron started acting out—skipping school, drinking, hanging with the wrong crowd. Every time he’d get in another scrape, Gordy would bail him out, rationalizing it by conceding that Ron had been close with his mother, maybe even a bit of a mama’s boy, and her death was especially hard on him.
The tavern and Jeanne’s spending had put Gordy in debt; life was a constant financial struggle. When Sharon was sixteen, she came into the tavern where Gordy was drinking one evening and announced that she and her boyfriend were eloping. Gordy had no choice but to wish them good luck. That same year, Ron dropped out of school. Gordy warned him that he was on a path that would surely end up in prison.
Gordy was in a grumpy mood. It was an overcast, dreary day in Portland and he’d spent the morning at the VA Medical Center for a follow-up visit to the doctor who had diagnosed him with lung cancer several months earlier. It wasn’t the diagnosis that had him in a bad mood as much as it was dealing with the VA bureaucracy. He and Janice were grabbing a bite to eat at a Denny’s before the return three-hour drive to Culver, on the other side of the Cascades. As usual, Janice would do the driving in their Dodge Caravan.
“At least the VA and Navy aren’t as bad as they used to be,” he said.
He was referring to the difficulties he and other Grenadier crew members, as well as vets in general, had had in collecting benefits. Despite being plagued with back pain ever since being beaten on the Asama Maru, he did not receive any compensation until 1974. And not until he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in 1999 was he able to receive 90 percent disability compensation, even though he’d been haunted for decades by nightmares and physical problems relating to his imprisonment.
But it wasn’t just his lack of compensation from the Navy or VA that he was venting about. A registered Democrat, he was blasting away at whatever came to mind:
George Bush: “He made me want to move back to Canada.”
Government: “I haven’t trusted our government since LBJ had Kennedy killed.”
Shrinks: “Now, that’s another good way to make a living without working. When I got examined in 1999, the guy asked if I had any friends to go fishing or do other things with. I said no. He said, ‘That’s it, you have PTSD.’ I said, ‘Whatever you say.’ ”
POW speaking engagements: “One time my daughter’s teacher asked me to come to the school and talk about my experiences. I said that I would but I wouldn’t sugarcoat it. I’d tell them about the starvation, beatings, death, and torture. The teacher said she didn’t want her students to hear all that, so I decided I’d never speak publicly about it.”
Osama bin Laden: “Bush let him escape because it gave him another reason to be over there trying to steal their oil.”
God: “I don’t believe in a heaven above and a hell below. If you get to go to heaven, does your dog get to go with you? Your horse? If there was a God, why has he made so many errors?” (At this point, Janice, a regular churchgoer, interrupted to call him a “pagan.” He told her to mind her own business.)
Death: “I believe there’s a big pool of energy that invades everything. It’s what makes the grass grow, the trees, people. Our bodies and spirits become part of that energy. We become dust, but that becomes part of the soil, and that supports life. My theory is you do what you have to do for as long as you do and that’s the end of that.”
Barbara Palmer: “She claims that she didn’t know Bob was a POW and still alive. But if he wasn’t reported as a POW, he was the only one out of the entire crew of seventy-six who wasn’t. I’ve talked to a lot of people about this, and it’s true that the prisoners who went to Ofuna, including Fitzgerald, didn’t get reported, but they eventually all got transferred from there to Omori or Ashio, and all those prisoners got reported.”
Whatever Gordy tried, it did little to straighten out Ron’s miscreant ways. He was constantly in and out of trouble. When he turned twenty-one, Gordy put him to work in the tavern, which he’d reacquired, but that proved to be a mistake. Ron borrowed money from the till and conveniently forgot to pay it back. He instigated fights. In one barroom brawl with members of a motorcycle gang, he lost two teeth and then tried to recruit his father and friends to help him get even. Gordy and the friends turned down that offer.
When Ron stole a Corvette Stingray and got caught, Gordy reluctantly bailed him out. But it was hard for him not to get discouraged. Ron stole his tools and sold them; he started using drugs; he couldn’t keep a job, even when Gordy pulled strings to get one for him. Gordy concluded that his son was one of those guys who thought it was easier to steal than work for a living. It bothered Gordy that every time Ron got into another scrape, he conveniently used his mom’s death as an excuse. But there was also a part of Gordy that felt guilty that maybe his own shortcomings as a parent contributed to his son’s behavior.
When Gordy married Janice in 1968, she was a single mother with a five-year-old daughter. Janice seemed to have a steadying influence on him. He got out of the bar business and continued his work in plastics manufacturing, and he and Janice acquired all the burdens of a typical blue-collar, working-class couple in the late 1970s and 1980s—debt, blended families, and disaffection with a government they felt had not properly supported Gordy for his sacrifice during the war. His emotional and financial load was lightened when Ron drifted to the Bay Area and moved in with a girlfriend and her child.
In 1980, Gordy and Janice left Portland and moved to central Oregon, and two years later they purchased the ten acres and prefab home near Culver. When they first moved in, there was no plumbing or electricity, but Gordy’s handyman skills helped build them a comfortable home. They were, however, $91,031.18 in debt, the big majority of it owed on the house. Within ten years, though, they paid off their loan and became debt-free, owning their land and house outright. In 1991, Gordy retired and started collecting Social Security, which supplemented his VA compensation. Janice retired in 1997.
Ron’s move to the Bay Area did not solve his problems. He spent a couple of years in prison on a drug charge, and then was busted again on charges of fixing cars with stolen parts. As badly as Ron’s life had gone, Sharon’s was a success story. She was still married to the man she eloped with at sixteen. They had raised a family and made good money running a storage-tank business in Klamath Falls, Oregon, with nice cars, boats, and a big house to show for it.
Then, in October 1991, Gordy got a call from Ron’s ex-girlfriend saying that Ron was in a hospital and close to death. When Gordy got to the hospital, he learned that Ron was infected with HIV. According to Ron, he had gotten infected from a shared needle.
Gordy stood next to his so
n’s bed, holding his hand; he felt Ron squeeze back. Gordy felt it was as if Ron was letting his father know that everything would be okay.
Ron died later that day. Gordy had him cremated and then brought his ashes back to Portland, where he buried him in the cemetery next to Jeanne.
Gordy and Janice had made the trip back to the Portland VA Medical Center again for another series of tests. Vets filled the waiting room; every seat was taken by men waiting to be called for their appointments. There were canes, walkers, wheelchairs, and oxygen tanks, but no smiles. One man was so fat that he couldn’t button his pants, leaving his belly exposed. Most of the men looked like they had served in Vietnam, maybe a few from Korea. In the cancer ward, where as an inpatient Gordy shared a room with a Vietnam vet, he was the only World War II vet.
The tumor in his chest had continued to grow, but the doctors had decided not to operate. They said that Gordy’s lungs weren’t in good enough shape. But it was now over two years since he’d been diagnosed, already doubling the doctor’s prognosis for survival, and Gordy was nowhere close to throwing in the towel.
He stepped outside to a courtyard to smoke. Leaning against his walker, he looked frail and sickly, but he’d clearly lost little of the orneriness that had served him well during his hardscrabble life. Over the past few months, he had poured his energy into writing a detailed account of his life in longhand. Janice entered the text on a computer and assembled the pages—including photos, maps, and statistics on American prisoners of war—in an 8×10 spiral-bound notebook with a powder blue cover. The narrative began with an apology: “Knowing that flunking English in school does not qualify for great writing, I’ll proceed.” On the final page was a drawing of a pelican with a squirming frog hanging out of its mouth. The caption read: “It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over.”
Gordon Cox was that squirming frog. Toward the end of his account of his life, he wrote this: “It irritates me when I hear someone from Viet Nam complaining today that they had no parade when they came home like the World War II vets did. There were no parades for most of the soldiers and sailors that fought that war. The celebrations were over by the time we got home.