Easy Company Soldier
Page 2
Though not rich by any means, we were better off than a lot of folks during the Depression. My father, Leo, owned an insurance business in an office above the Liberty Theater on Commercial Avenue. I still remember his ads: “Tick Malarkey: That Man Insures Anything,” a slogan that the Evening Astorian-Budget would say “was for a long time as familiar to local citizens as the Columbia River or Coxcomb Hill.” He picked up the nickname at the University of Oregon, where he played football. As part of his athletic scholarship, it was his job to wind the clock at Villard Hall. Thus, “Tick.” He made enough money to send us to Star of the Sea and my brother John to prep school in Portland. Also enough so he could play golf, and my mom, bridge, at the country club.
I was born July 31, 1921, one of four children. John, about two years older than me, taught me to fish on the Nehalem, near our family cabin, when I was six. Bob was five years younger. Marilyn—I called her Molly, and it stuck—was fifteen years younger.
My father wasn’t around much. When we were at the cabin, he would work in town and come out on Wednesday nights. Then he’d go back to work two days and return to the cabin for the weekends. So, most of the time, it was my mom and my brothers and me.
Besides my brother John, Louie Jacobson taught me outdoor stuff, too, like how to shoot a bow and arrow and trap a chipmunk. He was half-Indian. The way I spent so much time in the woods, some people joked that I was full-blooded. I remember shooting what I thought was my first quail. When I ran to where it had nose-dived into some tall grass, I realized it wasn’t a quail after all, but a robin. I felt like two cents.
Sometimes I was made to feel bad even when I hadn’t done anything wrong. Like when I got nabbed by a Catholic nun at school for carrying around a chipmunk in my shirt pocket. I don’t know why she was mad; I hadn’t killed the little critter. Still, an angry nun was nothing compared to the terror I felt one day in the summer of 1933, when I was twelve.
My father had gotten me a job on a dairy farm outside town, on land where our cabin was, working with Jack Bay’s nephew, Einar Glaser. Einar, in his mid twenties, was the strongest man I knew; he made Charles Atlas look like a weakling. I started every day at 5:30 A.M., milking cows, then cleaning the barns, and, finally, delivering milk in Einar’s old Chevy pickup. I enjoyed the job; it made me feel important. Out on the Sunset Highway we’d deliver milk to logging camps and a construction company. The logging companies would send riders on horseback to pick up their orders. One day, while on a delivery, I was in a camp mess hall, eating a cookie and drinking a glass of milk—a cook named Oney Kelly always pampered me—when an out-of-breath farmer burst through the door.
“Everybody out!” he shouted. “Forest fire’s headin’ this way! Headin’ for Ben Gronnell’s place.”
We fled west, down Sunset Highway and back to the dairy farm. I spent the entire day with a bucket in my hands, dipping water from Lost Lake Creek and dispersing it to farmers as they yelled for it, trying to save the farm. And we did. My hands were bleeding from the handles on the pails; I’m surprised any water was left in that stream, given how fast we were working, but it made me feel sort of heroic, like a real man instead of a little kid. I’d been up since sunup. It was now about 10:00 P.M. Finally, my boss, Mr. Glaser, drove me back to our family cabin. My folks were worried sick, which made me feel a little guilty and a little good at the same time, if you know what I mean.
I got a sandwich and some water to drink, then went to bed; my brother Bob and I had a double bunk. An hour later, I heard people stirring.
“Bob, Donnie, get up!” my father shouted. “Fire’s comin’.”
The winds had shifted. Our cabin was smack in the middle of an old-growth Douglas fir forest. Limbs were torching into fireballs and falling far too close for comfort. You could hear the crackle, nearly feel the heat. We threw everything we could into the car and a little trailer—I took the stuff I valued most, my camping gear—then all five of us headed out to a hundred-acre hayfield that had been harvested. Safe from the fire. I remember being under this old wooden wagon. I lay there all night long in a sleeping bag, watching this wall of flames gradually gobble up trees and head for our cabin. About 3:00 A.M., a fireball exploded on Red Bluff, across the Nehalem. By morning, we all knew what we later confirmed: Our cabin was gone, swallowed by what would become known as the Tillamook Burn, one of the largest forest fires ever to burn in the United States. In one night, that wall of flame traveled thirty-five miles and took away the one thing that meant more to me than just about anything else. Just like that, our cabin: gone.
I would lose other things in my life in the same sort of way: here one moment, gone the next. I would lose other things more gradually. Like my father.
We were proud to be Irish. Proud to be Malarkeys. And proud to be Americans. When needed, Malarkeys served their country. I never knew my uncles, but I grew up with the stories about them and felt as if I knew them. Stories about how Gerald had died in France; he was barely nineteen. Stories about how Bob was gassed in the Argonne Forest. He survived and came back from the war, coached football for a year at Stanford, and spent the rest of his life being shipped from one veterans’ hospital to another. His lungs were like burnt toast. He died at thirty-one.
My uncles were legends in Astoria and revered in our home. In my eyes, they were the equal of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Notre Dame football, and the marvelous basketball teams at Astoria High. The scrapbooks with stories about Gerald and Bob were permanent fixtures in our living room. I looked at them often, showed them to my pals. On July 10, 1918, my grandfather Daniel Malarkey wrote to his son Gerald in France:
I do not know when you will be at the Front. However, I wish to state that, were I your age, I WOULD BE THERE. I have every confidence that you will acquit yourself like a true American and that fortified by your Catholic Faith you will be prepared for anything that may befall. Son, you are as much a crusader as any knight of old who wore the cross and went to battle with the slogan “God wills it.” Therefore, notwithstanding the tender heart of your dear Mother, don’t forget that we both want you to do your full duty and know that you will.
Gerald died almost a month later to the day, in Château-Thierry in eastern France, on August 11, 1918. He’d been hit by shrapnel from a German shell. He was barely nineteen, the first soldier from Clatsop County to die in World War I. At the request of the mayor, businesses closed for one hour for his memorial service at Ocean View Cemetery in Warrenton. The Oregonian newspaper in Portland, where Gerald had briefly attended prep school, wrote he was “a mild tempered, quiet, lovable young fellow … talented and painstaking in his studies, strenuous and enthusiastic on the athletic field.” An army honor guard, the Astoria paper reported, “fired a parting salute to the youngster who proved his mettle when his country called and who, in asking permission of his parents to enlist, said simply, ‘Somebody must go.’”
My other uncle’s death from World War I was painstakingly slow. Bob was playing football at the University of Oregon when, as a sophomore, he enlisted. After struggling to survive for years after being gassed in France, he came to be known as Fighting Bob. One Portland newspaper columnist said when told he was going to die, Bob said, “Tell me another funny story. I’m just starting to fight.” In 1926, my grandfather Dan Malarkey was in Denver at the bedside of his dying son. He sent this Western Union telegram to my father:
Chaplain Sliney and I were called to Robert’s bedside at two this morning. He is growing gradually weaker. His mental attitude is inspiring and it is his request that I send this message (stop) He is fully resigned to the will of God (stop) If he is to pass at this time he begs of you all, especially Mother, Edith [his wife] and his sisters not to grieve unduly for he will be released from suffering and at peace (stop) He sends his dear wife undying love and blesses Mother for all she has been to him (stop)
His death made big news in both Portland and Astoria. He was buried next to his brother, Gerald, at Ocean View.
The
Evening Astorian-Budget wrote an editorial called “Two Graves”:
Today, the tired, battle-scarred, pain-racked body of Robert Malarkey is laid to rest amid the peaceful dunes of Ocean View. The new made grave close beside an older one beneath whose mound there lies in sleep eternal his younger brother, Gerald, who died on the field of Château Thierry.
In those graves there lie the broken bodies of two young heroes and there, too, the broken hopes of a father and mother. There is grief and sorrow there, but there is pride and joy, too, and there is victory and triumph and glory. But there must be something more than this if “the dead shall know that they have not fall’n in vain” and if the mourning parents shall know that the big price they have been called to pay is not wasted. Those graves and others like them must remind us that peace is the fruit of war and that the victory such graves have bought is a vast defeat unless it shall become an enduring victory for the cause of peace.
Because I wasn’t even alive when Gerald died and only five when Bob died, I never mourned their deaths. But in hearing and reading about them, I took a pride in my uncles that I didn’t take even in my own father. In part, that’s probably why I felt so close to their mother, Ida, my grandmother Malarkey. The reasons for my feeling so distant from my father were far more complex.
My father, Leo, met my mother, Helen Trask, in Portland when he was a college sports reporter for The Oregonian newspaper. They were married in 1918. She was a gracious lady who worked hard, loved her family, and remained loyal to the man she married, which couldn’t have been easy.
My father was a well-liked guy with a life-of-the-party personality; at the University of Oregon, he starred as a halfback on the football team, though an eye injury forced him to miss his senior year. So he became an assistant coach; in fact, he coached his brother Bob, a starting halfback, in 1916, the season the University of Oregon beat the University of Pennsylvania in the Rose Bowl.
The best thing about my father was hearing him tell stories of his being a football hero. He drank a lot; he was, after all, Irish. But, early on, I don’t recall its being a big problem, other than the time he came home loaded and made some slanderous remarks in front of my mom’s sister, or the time he walked into the Liberty Grill on Commercial Street, where I was busing dishes as a high school senior. He looked at me and said, loud enough for everyone to hear, “There’s my no-good son.” You don’t forget something like that. Ever.
Mom was a loving woman and the family disciplinarian. She gave us our chores. She took us to church every Sunday at St. Mary’s Parish, where I served as an altar boy. She also took us berry picking along the Nehalem. I loved to pick blackberries and blueberries. It was much more fun than being an altar boy and, for a kid who felt most alive when he was outdoors, was maybe the place I felt closer to God, too. Those were the happiest times: me and my mom and sister and brothers out picking berries. Pick three. Eat one, throw one at a brother or sister, and save one for jam. Your hands and face would be the color of deep bruises, and it smelled good and life was safe and easy.
But the Depression changed everything. With money short, in the summer when I was fifteen I started working at a seining ground located on a tidal island fifteen miles up the Columbia called Jim Crow Sands, on the Oregon side of the river. The salmon were so thick people joked you could walk from Oregon to Washington on their backs. Our job was to corral them in nets and get them in boats. Until I ran up and down a mountain in Georgia called Currahee, it was the hardest work I’d ever done. I was a boy among men.
The seines were laid out by two tugs. One pulled the head of the net, the other the tail. When full, the nets were towed to the sandbar, where the tail of the net was passed to a team of horses that pulled the half-moon configuration in until the net was compact enough so our crews could get at the fish. Some of the salmon were nearly the size of ironing boards—and up to fifty pounds. We’d transfer the fish into wooden boats called “slimes” that would transport the catch to the canneries. We lived in logging camp-style rooms and were paid $3 a day, plus a fifty-cents-a-day bonus if we lasted the whole season. I did. For three summers.
In 1938, my father’s insurance business, like the occasional dead chinook or sockeye we’d find in our nets, went belly-up. Bankrupt. He was a good salesman but a terrible bill-collector. He trusted people too much. Didn’t want to go after money that was owed him. And I admired him for that. Hell, you can’t blame someone for being blown over in a storm. But you can blame them for not even trying to get back up.
Months later, we lost the house. The folks told us they were moving out to a replacement cabin in the Cow Creek Valley, not far from our old one that had burned down. John, my older brother, was already living in southern California with relatives, but Bob, then thirteen, and Molly, three, were going with Mom and Dad. I would live with Grandmother Malarkey in Warrenton, across Young’s Bay.
There went our family. There went my friends in Astoria. There went my dreams of playing basketball at Astoria High; I’d made Catholic All-State in basketball for two years at Star of the Sea, but though I’d transferred to Astoria for my senior year, it was impossible to live in Warrenton and find rides home from practice each night; instead, I played intra-murals.
It’s not that I didn’t like living with Grandma Malarkey. She was a wonderful human being. She was that woman who’d be visiting all the down-and-out folks who needed visiting. She had a certain holiness to her, almost as if she were a saint. She lived on Main Street in a yellow, two-story bungalow shaded by Douglas firs and fronted by a white picket fence, with a huge garden out back. But she was recently widowed. She’d already raised her children, two of whom had been taken by World War I, and now she was being asked to do it again—at age sixty-four.
Meanwhile, my father retreated deeper and deeper into the dark, like a hermit crab wedged deep in the crevice of a couple of rocks, watching but seldom coming out. Years later, after he died, The Oregonian newspaper would say he “retired because of ill health in 1940.” But I don’t remember him being sick. I just remember him going numb as if he didn’t want anything to do with any of us, partly because of the bankruptcy and partly because of the bottle he relied on to make him forget the bankruptcy. He was not exactly the guy who the Evening Astorian-Budget had once reported had endeared himself to the University of Oregon football coach because of his fight. “Malarkey literally works himself to death on the field,” a reporter had written. “When it is just about dark, and that is the time that [Coach Hugo] Bezdek says nowadays, ‘take a lap around the track easy and then go in on the jump,’ ‘Tick’ has just as much pep as ever.”
He and my mother weren’t separated by law, but by every other measure. Mom would stay in the cabin and he’d spend time in Warrenton or Astoria, doing who-knows-what. So with John gone, I became the one who had to help keep the family together, financially and otherwise. That’s not why I was disappointed in my father. I could deal with having to take on more responsibility. What I couldn’t deal with was my father giving up on himself. On life. On us.
I don’t remember thinking, I’ll never be like my old man. Looking back on it, I believe somewhere down deep I vowed I would never do what he did. No matter how bad it got, I would never quit. On myself. Or on those around me.
As a high school student, I would never have been confused with my grandmother the saint. Oh, I wasn’t a big-time hell-raiser, but if some garbage cans were getting kicked around on Halloween, you could bet my buddies and I were somehow involved. We rolled a few tires down from Fourteenth and Jerome, which was a little like rolling tires off an Olympic ski jump. When Leland Wesley, at Star of the Sea School, made a rank remark about my girlfriend, Bernice Franetovich, I slammed him against the wall and threatened to kick the hell out of him. Bernice and I had pretty much fallen for each other ever since freshman initiation when we were blindfolded and I took her hand to help her up the stairs.
I suppose I had a touch of rebel spirit in me, probably more s
o after our family broke up and I moved to Warrenton. I began smoking, not that other guys didn’t. Music was a more serious addiction. The Big Bands. Glenn Miller. Tommy Dorsey. We’d gather at the house of someone who was a good piano player, like Bernice. Or go somewhere to listen to records. Or belt out a few songs around a beach fire some Saturday night, if the wind wasn’t blowing us from here to hell’s half acre as it often was.
Not to brag, but I was a pretty decent singer. Before the big split, my mother would have me sing to her. In 1939, when Dorsey came out with that “Hawaiian War Chant” song, I could nail it, tricky though it was. In the midst of the Depression, music was a release. Music was like salvation. Music made you forget that life was no longer as simple as rowing up the Nehalem to find a good place to build a fire and camp for the evening.
At Star of the Sea, a Catholic school with thirty pupils, I was a decent student. The nuns made sure of that. Math was not their strong suit, but they pounded the other subjects into you, especially English. They made you break down sentences and examine every part as if you were some sort of word detective. They had us sing until we all thought we belonged onstage, and memorize poetry, which I actually learned to enjoy.
As a senior, I was allowed to transfer to Astoria High, though an injury wiped out football for me and I couldn’t play basketball because of the difficulty of getting a ride for the ten miles to and from Warrenton. Once, a teacher asked our class if we’d read the editorial in the previous day’s Evening Astoria-Budget about the possibilities of Adolf Hitler invading the Low Countries—Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. I was the only one who had.