by Jeff Noonan
In the meantime, the family continued to grow. Eleanor was born in 1953, Jim in 1956, and Dan in 1958. My siblings were a large and rowdy crowd. I loved them all dearly, but I have to admit that I never got to know all of them as well as most big brothers do. I left the family home to work on the railroad in 1956 and only returned home for short stays after that. Growing up, Kathy and I had been close and had shared many good times as well as some not-so-good times. Patty we all loved and tried to help, but she really couldn’t take part in the events of daily life, so that was a different kind of relationship. When I left home, I was fifteen, Kathy was thirteen, Patty was twelve, Tim was nine, Lyle was eight, Eleanor was three, Jim was a baby, and Dan hadn’t been born yet. I do remember feeling very bad about leaving them behind when I left home, but I had no choice.
The winter of 1955 was particularly bad. It was a long winter and, by this time, Dad was perpetually drunk. I practically lived in the bunkers until the snow got too deep, and then I bounced from one friend’s home to another. I hated myself for not being able to stop Dad when he went on his rampages and beat the family, but I just couldn’t do it.
I was always a bit of a dreamer. I read everything that I could get my hands on, particularly adventure tales set in exotic parts of the world. I would spend hours daydreaming about visiting the places in the novels. But my daydreams always had one common element; when the adventure was over, I would always come home to a little cottage with a white picket fence where my wonderful, loving family waited for me. There was never a harsh word in this dream family, never a threat or a hardship—and I was absolutely certain that I would never become a drunk or an abuser. This constant part of my daydreams was the most important part, a part that has always been a part of who I am.
*
As always, the memories have run their course. The fear and trembling have subsided and my eyelids have grown heavy. I will sleep well now…until another creature comes to invade whatever hole I find myself in.
This story begins on Thanksgiving Day, 1955. It is a story of how a man, and a family, came through hell and lived to tell about it. This is a story of survival.
CHAPTER ONE
Escape, Please Escape!
Tim, my eight-year-old brother, whispered, “Mom, I’m freezing!”
I looked over and saw that Lyle had rolled over, pulling the blanket away from his older brother. Mom saw it at the same time and made some adjustments so the blanket covered all four of them.
I heard Tim grunt a soft, “Thank you” before he went back to sleep. The boys were snuggled on either side of Mom, who was holding little Eleanor on her lap. The blanket, the only one in the bunker, was stretched tight, trying to cover all of them.
I was across the dirt floor from them, partially covered by an old coat someone had thrown away. I was holding a baseball bat and guarding the hole that served as a door. I’d heard Dad prowling around above us a little while ago and I was prepared to swing the bat if he found our hideout and tried to enter.
It was Thanksgiving night in the Year of Our Lord, 1955. The five of us were hiding in an underground bunker and all of us were cold. It was good that Kathy had escaped to a friend’s home when the trouble started. The solitary blanket just wasn’t big enough to cover anyone else. Sleepily, I decided that I would have to find more blankets somewhere.
I had started building these bunkers when I was thirteen, almost two years earlier. That was when Dad’s decline into alcoholism and brutality became really serious. I now had three bunkers scattered around our forty acres. Hidden deep in the woods behind our home, each bunker had been dug about four feet deep, and then the holes had been covered with logs. Carefully placed sod, twigs, and old tree branches covered the logs. The only entrance to each bunker was a small hole on one end that was covered with a mesh of brush that was carefully woven to hide what lay beneath it. I had stocked the bunkers with water as well as some old blankets and coats that I had salvaged from the town dump. The bunkers were in place to give us shelter when Dad went on one of his drunken rampages, as he had done tonight.
Mom and I were now the only ones awake. I could hear the two boys and the baby, Eleanor, softly snoring. I whispered, “Mom, are you okay?”
She replied, “Of course, Jeff. But I’ll probably have a shiner tomorrow.” That was just like Mom; trying to make a joke out of a horrible situation.
I ignored her attempt at humor and said, “You know, we can’t go on like this, Mom. One day, he’s going to really hurt someone, maybe even kill one of us.”
She started sobbing. I knew that this thought was one she dreaded and I hated to bring it up. But I felt like I had to.
She finally cleared her throat and said, “I know, but I just don’t know what to do. I don’t have any way to feed us unless Dad’s there. I can’t work and take care of Patty. I just hope that Dad comes to his senses!”
Mom and I had talked about all of this before and I knew that neither of us had a solution. She kept praying that Dad would somehow come out of it, but I had no such hope.
I said, “I know, Mom. Next summer I’m going to get a real job, and maybe then we can escape.”
“Jeff, if you get a job, just get out of here! You didn’t make this mess and I won’t let you be dragged down by it.” It was her standard answer. Usually she would go on and on about the future and how I could put all of this behind me by working hard. But tonight we just let the silence of our little cave wash over us.
After a long pause, Mom spoke one more time. “Jeff, as soon as you can do it, leave this place! Escape. Please, escape. You have to show the way so the other kids can have some hope. Please, please, escape as soon as you can.”
I stayed silent and the words hung there for us to both think about.
Dad had just ruined another holiday celebration for the family. He just couldn’t seem to get through a Christmas or Thanksgiving without destroying it for all of us. This year, he had drunkenly decided that the knife wasn’t sharp enough when he started carving the turkey. He had thrown the turkey through the (closed) kitchen window, hit Mom in the face with the hand holding the knife handle, and then backhanded me out of my chair with his other hand. Kathy, who at twelve was my oldest sibling, had immediately run out the door towards a friend’s home. Mom had grabbed little Eleanor and headed out the back door, with Tim and Lyle following her.
I’d decided to try delaying his pursuit so the others could get away. Flat on my back, I’d yelled, “Leave them alone, you coward!”
That had done it. He’d thrown the knife after the turkey and reached down to grab me. I’d scuttled across the floor, but too slowly. He’d picked me up by my shirt collar and slugged me a glancing blow to the cheek.
I’d struggled, and my shirt had torn, loosening his grip, so I jerked loose and made a frantic dash for the front door, getting through it before he could recover his balance and catch me. He’d followed me outside, as usual. The rest of the family had all gone out the back way, so I’d led him away from them, and they’d escaped to the bunker.
Once I was through the front door, I was free. At fifteen, I was a lot faster runner than him, and I could run further, so he never had a chance of catching me. I knew which bunker the family had headed for, and eventually I circled around through the forest and joined them. My badly disabled sister, Patty, was still in the house, but I knew that Dad wouldn’t bother her. At least he had that much decency left.
Now I sat there, with my back against the bunker wall and the bat in my hands, sleepily watching the others. My mind wandered and I thought about the younger kids and the life ahead of them. I had a pang of real sorrow as I realized that these kids would never know their father as anything other than the beast that had chased us here. I thought this was truly sad. I felt very fortunate that it had not always been like this for me. I had known Dad in another time, in what now seemed like a different life.
My mind drifted and finally I slept, still holding the bat in my hands, slump
ed against the cold dirt wall. Mom’s words echoed in my mind: “Please escape.”
CHAPTER TWO
The Teen Years
During the “Bunker Years,” I became less and less of a student. A few years earlier, I had skipped a grade, so I went into high school at the age of twelve. But I stopped there. Every fall, I would start attending for a month or so to please my mother, but by the end of September, I would drift off to something else. School was incredibly boring. By the time I left home permanently, the only high school credits I’d received were in Physical Education, Driver’s Education, and Woodworking Shop. I had just never showed up for any other classes.
Instead, I became one of the local “cool guys.” I had a black leather jacket and my naturally bright-red hair was carefully shaped into a Duck’s Ass hairdo kept in place by a generous layer of hair grease. At that point, I didn’t drink or smoke, but I was the designated driver for those who did. Since we didn’t have a bathtub or a shower, I must have been pretty ripe, especially in winter, when it was too cold to swim in the river. But most of us were in the same boat in those days, so no one seemed to notice or care. Similarly, I always seemed to be plagued by swollen jaws since most of my teeth were in very bad shape. (I learned how to brush my teeth years later, when I was in the Army.) But we were the coolest dudes to be found in our small logging town—or we thought we were.
When I wasn’t in town being cool, I spent hours, days, and weeks in the nearby forest. I had an old single-shot .22 caliber rifle that I carried. With that and a hand-fishing line, I learned to subsist in the woods for long periods of time.
Once I “borrowed” a horse that was loose in our field and went into the mountains for over a month. Mom thought that I was staying with some friends a few miles from town, but I was many, many, miles from there, checking out the forest on the other side of the mountains in Idaho. I had the clothes I was wearing, a blanket, a fishing line, the old .22, and a box of shells, as well as a rope and an old bridle for the horse. I was as at home there as I have ever been anywhere.
I will never forget the reaction when I returned home from that trip. I was proud of myself and I did tell Mom and Dad about it. Mom was aghast and immediately grounded me. Dad was so proud that he bragged about it to all of his drinking buddies.
During the long winters of 1955 and 1956, I found Dad’s old LaSalle Correspondence Course and got very interested in it. I went through the whole course, studying basic electricity, basic electronics, and Radio/Television theory. Somehow this dry studying kept my interest and I was never bored with it. I could study at my own pace and, for once, I was studying something that I could honestly see a purpose for. In this way, I developed a little bit of knowledge that paid off handsomely a few years later.
During my teenage years, I went through several old beat-up cars, all of which I made as cool as possible. The first of them, acquired when I was thirteen, was a 1929 Model-A Ford Sedan that I was given as payment for work I had done for a neighbor. When I first saw it, it was setting in a field where the neighbor had parked it several years earlier. I borrowed a battery from one of Dad’s old cars, primed the Model A’s carburetor with gasoline, and the darned thing started right up! It ran, but the canvas roof and all of the upholstery had long since rotted away. So I gathered a bunch of cardboard boxes and drafted all of Kathy’s girl friends to upholster the car in carefully colored cardboard. We were all convinced that it was the coolest car in town.
I still hear at school reunions about the day I was driving the old Model A down a hill, ferrying a carload of teenagers, when the left rear wheel came off and passed me by, going much faster than I had ever been able to get the rest of the car to go. We were all late for school and had to go visit the principal. (When we told him what happened, he couldn’t keep a straight face and he sent us back to class. We could hear him roaring with laughter behind his closed door as we made our escape.) We fixed that problem, and ran the car for another few months before its old engine finally went to the Cool Car Resting Grounds. The Model A was followed by a multitude of Junkers. In those days, like today, it was hard to live in the vastness of Montana without wheels.
A very good friend of mine, Dave Bennett, lived about thirty miles west of me on a tree farm owned and operated by his father. I would often take the school bus home with Dave and stay overnight on the tree farm. The Bennett Family was Mormon and I would occasionally go to church with them when I was staying over for the weekend. I enjoyed the camaraderie of the church group and was very impressed with a couple of the girls who attended, so it was not long before I joined the church. I also became a regular at the Bennett home. They were a wonderful family who taught me a lot about how real families live.
As a youngster, I had seen the strain of the family finances working on Mom. In those days, all of our creditors, other than the electric utility, were local people and you saw them almost daily, so Mom was really mortified when she couldn’t pay the bills on payday. I tried to help when I could. I started delivering newspapers when I was nine years old. At about the same time, I built a stand and set it up along the highway, beside Ida’s grocery store. Then during the summers, I would dig worms and sell them from the stand to tourists and other fishermen. When I was twelve, I started helping local farmers during their haying season.
My first real job came in the summer of 1955, when I was fourteen. I was hired at the local sawmill as a water boy, carrying canvas one-gallon water bags to the sawmill workers twice a day. This lasted for most of the summer.
Then, one evening, Dad came home drunk and I didn’t move fast enough to get away. Dad was chasing me when he picked up a heavy stick and threw it at me. The stick went over an inch into the side of my right knee and stuck there. I went down, bleeding badly. He gave me a few kicks and then went after the others, who, by then, were long gone.
The next morning, I poured iodine into the hole, put a makeshift bandage over it, and wrapped it up with an old Ace bandage that we had in the house. Then I tried to go to work. But, the mill owner saw me hobbling around, trying to carry the water bags and laid me off. I hadn’t noticed, but there was a lot of blood coming through the Ace bandage, soaking the leg of my jeans.
The mill owner was kind, but firm, as he told me, “Jeff, I know that you’re trying to get the job done. But if that leg is as bad as it looks, you could cripple yourself carrying those things around and I don’t want that on my conscience. I’m sorry. Pick up your check at the office later today.” With that, he took the water bags and my summer’s work ended.
The following spring (1956), I really struck it rich. I talked myself into a job as a welder’s helper for the Northern Pacific Railroad, making the princely sum of $1.78 per hour! To do this job, I had to be mobile, because we lived wherever the job took us. So I lived with the rest of the welding crew in converted boxcars known far and wide as “Gandy Dancer’s Quarters.” Each of these converted boxcars housed three to four workers and contained bunks in the rear, a small kitchen, and a bathroom—with a shower! The crew and the boxcars were mobile, moving from town to town while we worked our way down the railroad line, performing welding repairs on the never-ending rail system. I held this job for about nine months and was promoted to apprentice welder before I had to move on. I hated to give it up, but someone reported my age to the railroad, so they had to let me go. They were nice about it and invited me back “when you turn eighteen.” But by then, my world had changed.
When I left the railroad job, winter was well underway. I went home and tried to work at whatever little jobs I could find, but they were mostly charity jobs given to me by people who worried about Mom and the kids. In the winter, no one in this little logging town had much money, so work was scarce. Dad worked until the mill shut down for winter, but most of his money was going to the bars and liquor stores by that time.
Without work or money, things were very tough. In desperation, I even tried to join the Navy. Although I was just sixteen years old, I tal
ked Mom into signing a form that said I was old enough to join and went to Butte to take the oath. In January 1957, I shipped out with a group of recruits headed to San Diego by train.
The thing I remember most about that trip was the Train Conductor. I remember him as a kind man who leaned on the side of my seat and talked with me for hours.
The conversation started with him catching me looking at him. He came over and said, “Can I help you, Sir?”
I was flustered and replied, “No. I’m sorry if I was staring, but you’re the first colored man that I’ve ever seen.” I was blushing then and horribly embarrassed, and I went on, “I mean outside of the National Geographic.”
He laughed easily and said, “Well, how do I stack up against the pictures?”
This disconcerted me even more. I didn’t know what to say, so he took up the slack, still chuckling, with, “Don’t worry, Son. You are at least the fifth person that’s told me that. It isn’t anything to get all in a tizzy about. But please don’t call us Colored People. I’m very proud to be a Negro.”
We exchanged a few pleasantries after that, with me telling him that I was on my way to join the Navy and him telling me about the time he had been in the Army during the last war.
Later on, after we had talked off and on for an hour or so, we got into a discussion that made a real impression on me. I asked him, “Is it true that Down South, Negroes have to use separate bathrooms from the rest of us?”
He looked serious for once and told me, “It isn’t just Down South, Son. Look around you. There are no Negroes on this train except me, and if I want to go to the bathroom, I walk all the way back to the little bathroom in the caboose.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because some of the passengers on this train would throw a fit if I tried to use any other bathroom.”