by John Darnton
Charles, another brother, also rode the rails. One day, as family lore has it, he jumped off a train on the outskirts of Ames, Iowa, and made his way to a hobo camp. A bunch of bedraggled men were cooking cans of stew over an open fire, and sitting there with them was Clifford. He and Charles fell into each other’s arms and vowed to stick together and find work at a local cement mill. They got the jobs but didn’t keep them very long. In hearing these stories, I didn’t tell my cousins that I, too, had picked apples in Washington or that during my hitchhiking days I had once been held overnight in a jail in Ames.
The stories about Barney were tales seen through the eyes of children. They described how he loved to play with them and how he was quick to invent games. One recalled a Christmas day when he was five and his family had been summoned to Adrian because his maternal grandmother was dying. Barney, fifteen, spent the day with him, dressed up as Santa Claus, sack and all. “It was a sad day for my parents, but he wanted to make sure it was a traditional day for a young believer. He was the only one in the family who expressed his feelings to me in terms I could relate to.” Another cousin remembered an occasion when his younger brother, Paul, suffered from mumps: “Uncle Barney came for a visit and sat across from him on a davenport, and every once in a while he’d make a funny face, and each time it’d make little Paul smile and every time he smiled, it hurt. I think my mother was not genuinely pleased with your father’s humor, but I know Paul was.” He told how the family was plagued by a hornet’s nest just above the back door, until Barney took a baseball bat to swat it down, then dropped the bat and ran for his life, just making it back indoors.
I came upon a letter written twenty years ago by my deceased cousin Robert. It was filled with recollections about Barney. He remembered seeing him train with National Guard troops in an Adrian park in 1917 and then, one morning, being awakened by his grandmother to watch them march from the armory to the railroad station for the trip to Camp Custer, near Grand Rapids. “That was the last time I saw your father until after the war in 1919,” he wrote. The armory was where the town’s citizenry had convened in the spring to unanimously elect Barney’s father president of the Patriotic League, an organization that raised money for the war and took on the isolationists. I imagine that a son coming of fighting age at this time must have felt incredible pressure to enlist.
I recalled a piece my father had written in 1939, on the eve of World War II, entitled “Letter to an Imaginary Son.” It described war in a no-nonsense way and what it was like being an infantryman. He wrote about overcoming the fear of cowardice, contending with exhaustion and boredom, and dealing with incompetent officers who made life-and-death decisions. He told how disillusionment and dehumanization settled in and how soon the man on the front lines felt alienated from civilians, even family, who wrote determinedly optimistic letters. At one point, he described for his imaginary nineteen-year-old son a mass meeting in the local opera house; he attended it as a buck private in the National Guard, along with his brother Tom, due to report to the navy. It was to approve a resolution for the draft. “All the town’s public figures spoke at that mass meeting—the mayor, the editor of the paper, the county judge, and your grandfather. Nobody on the stage was under fifty years old. There were some rousing speeches (I can still hear old Judge MacIntosh, his bony finger pointing aloft, shout: ‘As long as there is a God in Heaven we will spend our lives and our treasure that the right may triumph!’). The draft resolution was adopted unanimously. Afterwards Tom turned to me and said: ‘Did you notice that they didn’t ask for any remarks from the guys that are going to be drafted?’ On our way home we talked long and seriously about the fact that old men decided there were to be wars, and young men fought the wars. We didn’t come to any satisfactory answer.”
Barney was sent to Camp MacArthur in Waco, Texas, and then in January 1918, the 32nd Division sailed for France. He saw plenty of tough fighting—the Red Arrow was the first to break through the Hindenburg Line, the major German fortified defensive zone. In six months, the divison had only ten days of rest and suffered more than fourteen thousand casualties. Among those from Adrian alone, seventy young men did not come back.
I discovered letters that Barney wrote home to his brother Robert. His youthful script seems to make light of the hardships of battle. He used vague terms to describe the fighting, like “the excitement” or “our licks against the Boche” or “another shot at it.” He asked his brother to calm his mother’s fears. “It’s only once in a while that one gets the sensation of the backseat occupant of a car going sixty miles per hour over a rough road, you know.” But he did write one sentence that spoke volumes about conditions at the front: “I have not yet got accustomed to sleeping with rats playing around in my hair and on my face and I’m afraid I never will.” War, he wrote, was impossible to describe. “You can hear stories from thousands of chaps who have been there, but I don’t think human imagination can conceive the thing. One has to see it. Bob, the thrill and glory is sadly lacking from the real thing. That stuff is all supplied between the battlefield and the printing press.”
After the war, Uncle Bob wrote, Barney enrolled in the University of Michigan and had top grades in his freshman year. In the summer of 1919, he went to Flint to live with Bob’s family while working a night shift at the Buick plant. He drove finished cars from the assembly line to the yard’s shipping station. Barney’s father had been given a Buick coupe that Easter as a reward for his war-bond drive, and his son taught him how to drive. There was, however, a hidden motive: After the lessons Barney used the car on dates, disconnecting the odometer to cover his tracks. In his sophomore year, he joined a fraternity off campus, stopped studying, and watched his grades plummet. He dropped out. “My own assessment,” Bob wrote, “would be that he was older than his peers and his war experience had begun to influence his life.”
He joined the Port Huron Times Herald and within a year became its legislative reporter. In the state capitol building at Lansing he had an encounter with a black man who had grown up across the street from him and who had been a close friend. Now the man was a barber—a dead-end job that was the best he could expect—and he was bitter and estranged. That encounter helped to make Barney a lifelong advocate of racial integration. I recalled a letter that Robert Sherrod, the Time correspondent in the Pacific, wrote to the Times. Describing my father’s grave site, he noted that he was buried near “an American Negro and a native named Wotia of the Papuan Infantry Batallion.” He added, “That would have pleased Barney. He had firm convictions that all men would one day be brothers, or they would be slaves.”
Once Barney moved east he lost touch somewhat with his family, especially after his father died in 1925. He did not take his first wife to Michigan for a visit, and his letters to his brother Robert crossed a political divide that was widening. Robert, like his father, was a died-in-the-wool Republican and Catholic. Barney had distanced himself from both the party and the church. Once, after interviewing Eleanor Roosevelt, he predicted in a letter to Robert that one day historians would conclude that FDR had rescued capitalism, a thought his older brother could not abide. Still, Robert wrote to my brother, Bob, “If you thought your father’s family had labeled him with ‘black sheep’ tendencies, you may correct those impressions. I think most were quite aware of the life style of some members of the press but were not passing any judgment.”
I found myself asking one of Uncle Robert’s sons whether he thought his father had been a bit straitlaced. He began to answer; then his throat tightened and tears came to his eyes and he said, “This is a little hard.… I’ll try to pick it up later.” For a few minutes we talked about other things; then he cleared his throat and resumed. “Let me see if I can put into words what I was trying to say before. My father was a long ways from being a saint. And … he had a relationship which I doubt if my kids know about, and I don’t know that I ever told them. He had a relationship with a woman who worked in the Buick plant that he worke
d in, and it got to be a serious bone of contention. And my mother in her wisdom said, Let’s have this out. I’m putting it in words that she never said to me, but I’m suspecting what might have happened. Let’s have this out. If you want a divorce, I’ll be reasonable and give it to you with one understanding. And that is, there are two little boys left in this family—that’s my brother and myself. She said, They go with you. And if you’re going to have another relationship, whoever is in that relationship is going to have to raise those kids. I’ve already raised three for you and that’s all I’m going to do. And so … I have no idea why we did this … but my brother and I were dressed up in our best Sunday school clothes and we went three or four blocks, up Patterson Street to east Patterson—we lived in west Patterson—and we went into a sitting room and we were told to sit there. And soon a door opened and this woman came out and she looked at us for a while, looked us up and down and then went back out. And she was the woman my father was having a relationship with. She looked at us and she … didn’t want to take us. And so he had to break the relationship off.”
The following morning Nina and I left and drove south along the lake shore and then down toward Adrian. I wanted to see the house on Comstock Street where my father had grown up. We crossed southern Michigan. The road was straight as a razor’s edge and the corn on both sides was five feet high, waving slightly in the breeze. The sky was lead gray, but with a softer gray light on the horizon. A storm seemed to be brewing, but it never arrived. When we entered Adrian, we could see the place had fallen on hard times. Some stores were boarded up and the streets were pretty much deserted at one o’clock in the afternoon. We ate at one of the two diners, Mr. Ed’s, the only customers.
We found the house at 526 Comstock Street without any trouble. The porch had been closed in and a room had been added on in the back and the roof crest had disappeared, but it was recognizable as the house that Robert Darnton built in 1902, replacing a smaller house, which was moved to the back of the property. I had seen the earlier house in a family photo from 1919 in which the entire Darnton brood posed before the steps, twenty-six in all, counting spouses and children and a lone spinster aunt—the women seated demurely on chairs, the men in their jackets and ties standing stiffly behind. They seemed handsome and healthy as they stared out at the camera, all of them lean and tall. Barney, the handsomest of the lot, was standing on the left end, his temples prematurely gray.
I took photos of the house. A man from across the street wandered over to ask what I was doing—the sign of a good neighborhood, I thought. I explained that my father had grown up there many years before and we talked for a while, until he lost interest and left. The house appeared empty, but I didn’t knock on the door. Later, dropping by the imposing Romanesque castle of the Lenawee County Historical Museum, I learned that the house on Comstock was occupied by the president of the historical society, Jan Richardi. That was a stroke of luck. We got in touch and she bombarded me with material from Adrian. She mailed old clips about Robert Darnton’s family from the local papers, the Times and the Daily Telegram. They conjured up visions of a time and place when news reckonings were of a smaller caliber: a blaze coursing down the wiring of a chandelier stem in the Darnton dining room—“the daughter had the presence of mind to turn off the switch and the trouble was over”; a prowler on the back porch while Miss Darnton, the same daughter, was home alone—he lingered for five minutes and left moments before the police arrived; a lengthy front-page lead story on the death of Robert Darnton, accompanied by a fulsome editorial on his accomplishments.
Jan also sent on booklets that resurrected Adrian’s prosperous days in the early twentieth century. Located where the industrialized East met the boundless prairies of the West, it was a young city of eight thousand. Every year, it seemed, a new building was going up—a city hall, a school, an opera house. Close to a dozen factories produced wire fence, an industry that made Adrian “the fence capital of the world.” (The Page Woven Wire Fence Company, where my grandfather worked, had sold some 625,000 miles by 1916, “enough to encircle the earth more than twenty-four times,” noted one pamphlet.) Great hopes were placed in the nascent auto industry, in particular the home-produced luxury “Lion Car,” which had a collapsible canvas top. A young man named Thomas Edison, sixteen years old, worked at the local telegraph office.
In reading this material, I found it amazing to think that my father’s life and mine, touching three centuries, occupied such different worlds. He was born in November 1897, and I have lived into the twenty-first century. I’ve seen jet planes and the moon landing and the rise of computers—none of which he could have imagined. Our lives had spanned the golden age of newspapers: his when Adolph Ochs bought the Times, mine before newspapers fell into decline.
When Barney was young the packed-dirt roads of downtown Adrian were ruled by horse and buggy. Outhouses sat in every backyard, so that the smell was oppressive, especially in summer. As a child he saw electricity come in, as well as telephones and running water. I imagine him riding horses to the outlying farms and in the winter trudging through two-foot snowdrifts to school. The high school yearbook, the Sickle, carried a darkly brooding photo of him in 1913, when he was president of the freshman class. A bit of doggerel recalled that he rallied his classmates to fend off the “disdain and contempt” of sophomores.
They soon intrusted the class
To Byron Darnton as leader
And learned to hold high their heads.
So that when by the enemy challenged,
They valiantly conquered their foe,
And made those impertinent Sophmores
To experience misery and woe.
I went to my father’s grave in Oakwood Cemetery, a short walk from Comstock Street. It was in a family plot not far from the gate of the main entrance, a prominent position, perhaps due to his father’s status. Barney had a small headstone—with only his name and dates. It was located to one side of his father’s and mother’s, which seemed fitting, since I had been told he was his father’s favorite child. Luckily, his father died before he did; I don’t know how the old man would have stood the pain.
I stared at the tombstone. I felt the shock of seeing his name, and then a double shock because his name in full, Francis Byron Darnton, was different from the one I carried in my head. I knew the grave site intimately, the slight slope of the ground, the presence of trees off to the right side, the slant of the sky. I recalled these details from the funeral I attended when I was a small boy. Then it had been crowded with people and covered over by some sort of canopy, and my attention had been taken up by the firing of the guns. Still, knowing that something was sacred about the ceremony and the place, I had reduced the landscape to its essentials and absorbed them.
Returning there, I imagined the casket underground, long gone, and my father’s bones, long disappeared. Then I tried to stop thinking of that and instead made an effort to imagine what my father had been like before died. This was easier to do than it would have been five years earlier. When I began this project, I wrote down all the facts I knew about him and found they covered barely half a page. Since then I’ve talked to some of his contemporaries and, thanks to my brother, read interviews with some of those who are now dead.
I’ve been able to connect some dots and fill in some blank spaces. I’ve picked up some traces—a humorous crack here and there, an image of him in the trenches during World War I, the knowledge that he dressed well, that he was attractive to women, a sense of his enthusiasm for adventure and for drink. I have a feeling of his calmness and his integrity. But I still don’t know the whole man, what motivated him or why he made the decisions he did. I’ve been looking at an empty room—the occupant having long since fled. How paltry are the traces left behind by a life, even one concentrated around those supposed things of permanence called words. We spend our time upon the earth and then disappear, and only one one-thousandth of what we were lasts. We send all those bottles out into th
e ocean and so few wash up onshore.
One thing that I had achieved in Michigan was an evocation of the life I might have lived had he not died. It was in the resort town of Charlevoix where we would have come for visits. I would have learned to sail and gone water-skiing and listened to concerts on the town green, and maybe explored the Upper Peninsula on camping trips. My mother would have enjoyed drinks during the summer evenings and probably would have gotten tipsy, but she wouldn’t have become a drunk. I would have had a whole second family and been more secure and less lonely.
On impulse, after visiting the grave, I found a phone booth and called my cousin Bill, who had welcomed us so warmly at his cottage in Charlevoix. He seemed glad to hear from me. I thanked him for his hospitality and then stammered out the one question I had forgotten to ask: When I came for a visit at the age of thirteen, had they been aware that Mom was an alcoholic? He answered quickly. “No, I had no knowledge of that. I don’t remember anyone ever saying that to me. It’s a question that never came up.” He paused, seeming to search for the right words to say what he wanted. “I can’t tell you enough,” he said slowly and solemnly, “that your feeling that you were the only Darntons in the world was not true. Please know that you have family here. We’re always here and the latch is always open for you.”
I thanked him again. I knew the sentiment behind the words was genuine but that I would not take him up on the offer.