by Jeff Noonan
Of course, I protested that I was plenty happy anyway and all of that. But she was adamant on this point.
Then we talked about Patty and the fact that Mom couldn’t get out of the home to work as long as Patty was home. No one in town would babysit Patty. She needed specialized care and people were afraid to try taking care of her. Mom had looked into putting Patty in a state home, but she didn’t want to do it. She told me, “Jeff, I’m able to squeeze by right now with the help I get from Ida and the other grocers. But if it gets to the point that I can’t take care of the other kids, I’ll have to put Patty in a home and hope for the best. I don’t want that, but I just don’t know how long I can hold out. Frankly, it all depends on how long it is before Dad loses his income—and we all know that’s going to happen eventually.”
Mom was in a really tough place in those days.
The next night, I went down to the truck stop and was in the café, talking to the owner of the garage next door, when one of my coworkers came in. He came over and talked for a few minutes, and then he said, “Why don’t you come with me. I’m going to meet some of the guys from work at the Stag Bar.”
I said, “I’d love to, but I’m not twenty-one yet.”
“That’s bullshit, this is still Montana!” he said. “If you’re old enough to get shot at, you’re certainly old enough to have a drink.” I went with him and, sure enough, no one even asked for an ID, even though I had known Florence, the lady that owned the bar, for years. She just wanted to know all about the Navy and pumped me to tell her all about the places I had been and the sights I had seen. After a couple of drinks, I told them the story of my great Baguio adventure. After that, I was one of the in-crowd at that bar. Thank God! I had really started hating the downtown teenager scene. I had outgrown it.
I only stayed for an hour or so. I had to work the next day and I didn’t want to even think about picking stickers with a hangover.
The next morning, I went to work by myself, but I ran into Dad when I got to work. He was walking straight and was obviously sober. I just wondered how long it would last.
The rest of my time at home was uneventful. I would go to work in the morning and come home at night. I spent the evenings at the Stag Bar, shooting the breeze and relaxing. Some nights, I didn’t even drink. I didn’t care for beer, and, unless there was a big party, a lady to chase, or something else happening, I just didn’t bother drinking. I was just as happy with a glass of 7-Up, to tell the truth. I was also very determined that I was never going to end up like my father. I kept thinking about that during those days, and its been in the back of my mind continuously since then.
On the weekends, I tried to do things with the family as much as possible. Kathy, Tim, and I went swimming in the river several times. A few times, we took the smaller kids with us. Danny, Jim, and Eleanor seemed to enjoy these trips, and being with their big brother and sister. Only Lyle didn’t seem to really be interested in hanging out with us. He had his own friends and didn’t seem to want to be with the family. Of course, Patty couldn’t join us, although somehow she always seemed to show up in the same room with us whenever we were home.
Kathy and I went joyriding with some of her friends a few times, and we went to the movie in Superior regularly. I hardly ever saw Dad, except at work. All in all, it was a relatively quiet, nice, vacation with a lot of family bonding.
The time to leave came around, and Mom held a big barbeque the night before I left. The family was almost all there. Dad never showed, but the rest of us had a grand time, joking and having fun with each other. I had quit my job the day before and had been invited to come back and work there “anytime that you want to,” by both the foreman and the sawmill manager, so I was pretty proud of myself.
I got a good night’s sleep and was out of there early the next morning.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Great Lakes
I remember that trip, from Western Montana to the Great Lakes Naval Station as being one of the really pleasant times in my life. There was no interstate in those days, so all of my driving was on winding two-lane highways. I cruised across the states with the top mostly down and the warm breeze blowing around me. I had been home and everything there was as well as it could be. And, thanks to my sticker-picking job, I had plenty of money for the trip. I stopped every night and got a motel room. It was pleasant. Then the part of the trip that I remember best happened.
I was driving across the hills of South Dakota, almost to the Minnesota border, when I spotted a girl on a hillside above the road ahead of me. It was one of those classic pictures, with the girl in a long, flowing dress, walking along the hillside. The dress and her hair were blowing behind her in the breeze as she walked in my direction. She must have seen me looking, because she waved at me, and I waved back. I couldn’t help myself. I had passed her, so I stopped the car and backed up until I was a few yards below and ahead of her. I got out and walked over to the fence and waited for her to come to me. When she got there, I just looked at her and said, “Kiss me, please?”
She smiled and leaned over the fence and gave me a very tender little kiss on the lips. I backed up and looked at her.
I said, “This is magic. I’ll never forget this.”
Still smiling, she replied; “I don’t think that I will either.”
I got back in the convertible, waved, and drove on. I never forgot that sweet moment.
I often wonder what happened to the beautiful girl in that long, flowered dress.
Unfortunately, the magic had to end. Eventually, I arrived at the Great Lakes Naval Station, where I checked in a day early. I rapidly became inundated with the day-to-day make-work projects typical of any military base.
I received my class schedule as soon as I arrived. Much to my chagrin, it said that the first eight weeks of my school were totally devoted to mathematics! In eight weeks, going to school forty hours a week, we were scheduled to go from something called “Mathematics for Electronics” through Algebra and Trigonometry with the eighth week being totally devoted to Differential Calculus. This was foreign territory to me. I had not had a single math class in over nine years. Anything past eighth-grade arithmetic was totally new, and very scary, territory.
If I made it through this school successfully, I would be promoted to second class petty officer (E-5) and would be sent on to another school. But if I didn’t pass, I would be going back to the Fleet, and the possibility of a Navy career would be doubtful. I had to get this done if I was going to make that escape that I’d planned for so long.
If I could make it through the eight weeks of math, the next twenty-eight weeks was going to concentrate on advanced electronic theory. That part didn’t scare me. But I had to get through the first eight weeks, and that was going to be pure hell!
As I expected, when the school started, I was immediately overwhelmed. They gave us a test to see where we were in mathematics, and my results were abysmal. The instructor took me and two other guys aside after the test and assigned us to a remedial night school that was being held for extreme cases like us. That meant that I would be going to regular school for eight hours during the day, and then I would come back for three more hours in the evenings, plus eight more hours each Saturday. All in mathematics!
That first eight weeks was as close to purgatory as anything that I had ever known. Day by horrible day, night by agonizing night, I worked. With painful steadiness, we moved through basic arithmetic, advanced mathematics, algebra, trigonometry, and finally, calculus. Somehow I made it through the eight weeks. I studied every day and never left the base, even on Sundays. My final grade going through this segment of the school was 68 percent. A passing grade was anything above 67.5 percent. The other two guys that the instructor had singled out had flunked out and had been sent back to the Fleet. Three others in my class (of seventeen people total) had been sent back to repeat the segment. But somehow, I had made it through.
As soon as I completed the math phase of the schoo
l, and we moved on to electronics, I was good. Somehow all of the electronics theory made sense to me, where math never had. I went back to an eight-hour day, and my grades were in the top of my class. I even worked three nights a week as a pin-setter in the base bowling alley to put some money aside. Life became reasonable again.
Interestingly enough, I never used any of the advanced mathematics, in any way, through the remainder of the school. Nor have I ever used it since then.
Because my entire life had been wrapped up in the school, I had not gotten to know any of my fellow students beyond a simple “Good morning.” Initially, my fellow night-school students and I were a bit ostracized, since we were known to be the dummies that would end up going back to the Fleet. When I broke the mold and didn’t get shipped out, it took a while for people to warm up to me, so I didn’t have any real friends when it came time to celebrate my twenty-first birthday.
I had a long weekend free when my birthday rolled around, so I decided to just take off and go north into Wisconsin for the weekend. I had really enjoyed my trip across country, so I figured that I’d just get on the road and celebrate wherever I happened to stop for the night.
I made it to Madison, the home to the University of Wisconsin, that day. After driving around town for a few minutes, I decided that this was as good a place as any for a birthday bash. It turned out that it was a good choice. I don’t remember a lot about the evening, but I woke up (fully dressed) under a blanket on the floor in a sorority house dorm room, with a (also fully-dressed) coed on each side of me. It was warm and cuddly, but my left arm was asleep with one of the ladies’ heads resting on it; the other lady had flung her leg over my bladder, and that was fast becoming a problem. I have absolutely no idea how I got there, but it must have been a lot of fun.
The girls snuck me out without setting off any alarms, and I went back to my motel and slept for several more hours before heading back to the base.
All in all, I considered my twenty-first birthday to be a rousing success.
A few weeks after my birthday, my mother sent me the address of an aunt and uncle who were living in the Chicago area. Aunt Mary, my dad’s sister, was married to my Uncle Wayne. At that time, they had six children, ranging in age from two to twelve. Mom told me that Uncle Wayne was an Army colonel, so I was a bit intimidated, but I decided to go see them anyway.
I couldn’t remember ever meeting Aunt Mary or any of her family before. I knew that she had joined the WACs during World War II as an Army nurse and had married Wayne shortly after the war. But that was everything that I knew about them. I did remember that Aunt Ruth, in San Francisco, had talked to me about Mary and their childhood, but those memories were vague and fading fast, so my visit was really a blind one.
Aunt Mary, Uncle Wayne, and their family turned out to be wonderful. I stayed with them for the weekend, and they treated me as if I were a long-lost family hero. I never saw Wayne in uniform, and I was in civvies, so the difference in our ranks didn’t enter into anything. The fact that they were a career military family was very interesting to me, and I did get a lot of encouraging advice from them. They were totally supportive of my plans to make the Navy a career. In fact, I got the impression that anything that I decided to do that would keep me away from my dad was fine with them. I was never told the specific reason, but Mary didn’t seem to have anything good to say about her brother. She didn’t badmouth him. She just clammed up and had a tight look on her face whenever his name came up. But, even with that, I had a great time with them that weekend, mostly talking about my grandparents, about whom I knew nothing, and military life.
School was going well, but it had become boring. Now that I was able to have a bit of free time, I began to make some friends. Soon there were five of us who went places on the weekends and had a good time together. We were all classmates, and we ranged in age from me, at twenty-one, to a really nice guy named Roy who was in his mid-thirties. Only I and one other guy, Bob, were third class petty officers. Roy was a first class (E-6), and the others were all second class.
One of my new friends, Mike, was from Seattle and he was making plans to drive home for Christmas, so I signed on to ride with him as far as St. Regis. He found three other guys who would share in the cost and who he would drop off in Idaho and Washington, and we had a plan. We all put in for leave during the school’s shutdown period from December 20th until January 3, and it was approved. I was going home for Christmas for the first time in three years! I think that I was more excited by this than I had been even about the forty-five day leave that I had just completed.
When the leave period started, we got in Mike’s car and drove straight through; taking turns behind the wheel and catnapping in the back seat. We made good time, and I was home on the afternoon of the 22nd. Mike and the guys dropped me at home and took off immediately.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Home for Christmas
Nothing much had changed at home since I had gone away the previous July. Mom was really interested in my Navy school, so I spent some time telling her all about it. She had a big grin when I told her about the hell that I had gone through over the mathematics. She couldn’t resist a big, “I told you that not going to high school would catch up with you!”
I realized then that I had not told her about the deck force and the hell that I had lived through for months because of my lack of a diploma. So we spent most of the first evening that I was home talking about this.
Tim, Lyle, and the smaller kids listened raptly and I really laid it on all of them about staying in school and studying hard. They all eventually made it through high school, so I like to believe that a little bit of this talk may have stuck with them.
Tim and Lyle had cut a Christmas tree and brought it home a few days earlier. They and Kathy had had a “decorating party’ the day before I came home, and now we were sitting in the living room with the tree lit up for the holiday. It was a really comfortable evening.
Dad came in at about ten. He was drunk and looking for a fight. He threw a curt “Hello,” my way and went past into the kitchen. We could hear him stumbling around in there, and we all just sat still, waiting for the other shoe to drop. It did.
“Where the hell is the bread?” he roared.
Mom started to get up and go get it, but I stopped her. I knew that, if she went into that room, he would find a reason to start hitting her. “Mom, where is it? I asked.
“In the bread box on the table,” she told me.
I got up and walked into the kitchen. I took the bread out of the box and put it in front of him without saying anything. He stuck his face inches from mine and said, “Think you’re pretty smart, don’t you?” I just looked at him, turned, and walked back to the living room where we had been talking.
I remember thinking, “My God, I am as tall as him now!” That astounded me. Of course he still outweighed me by at least eighty pounds, but the fact that I could go eye-to-eye with him was something special in my mind.
Mom and the kids and I continued talking while Dad fumbled around in the kitchen. Finally he came back in to the living room. He looked at us, all contentedly gabbing, and then screamed at us, “This place is a pigsty! All of you get up and start cleaning, right now!”
Everyone started to move, but I held up my hand and said, “Stop.” I looked at Dad and, still speaking calmly, said, “You’re drunk, Dad. It’s late, and the time for cleaning is long past. Why don’t you go to bed and let us relax for a while?”
He had a half-eaten sandwich in his hand. He threw it at the wall and then turned threateningly toward where I was setting. I just sat there looking at him. Then slowly he turned and went to his bedroom. We never heard any more from him that night.
The next day, I rode around and checked to see if any of my friends were home for Christmas, but without much luck. Since I was now of legal drinking age, I stopped in all three bars in town and ran into some of my old teenage cohorts. We ended up closing the Stag Bar l
ater that night, having a great time reminiscing about “the good old days.”
On Christmas Eve, I stayed close to home, gabbing with Mom and helping Tim and Lyle with their chores. Actually, it felt good to cut wood for the stoves again and stretch some of the muscles that hadn’t seen much use since working at the lumber mill the previous summer. It was a pleasant day.
Dad came home after we were all asleep, so there were no confrontations that day, but we knew that there would be problems the next day. No holiday was safe from his temper any more.
The little ones got us up early on Christmas morning. It was a fun time, made special for me because of the last few years that I had been away for this day. I had brought presents for everyone, and so had both Kathy and Mom (although hers were disguised as Santa Claus’s). Even Dad got into the spirit, sitting by the Christmas tree, passing out the gifts to everyone. It was almost like old times in our home—old times that I remembered and missed very much.
That Christmas was one that I cherished for many years. It was great. Dad did not get drunk for the first time any of us could easily remember. He was almost his old self. He carved the turkey without incident, and we all enjoyed a real Christmas dinner. He even got out his guitar in the evening and sang some of his Western songs while Patty and the rest of us listened.
This was always Patty’s favorite time. She would crawl up to Dad’s feet while he played and sang and would sit there in rapt silence. We never did anything that would interfere with Dad when he was playing that guitar, mostly out of respect for Patty. This was her time; the only time that we ever saw her showing real enjoyment.
With a successful Christmas under our belt, we had high hopes of an enjoyable holiday vacation. But that was too much to ask. The next day, Dad was gone when we got up. I hung around the house, talking to Mom and the kids, munching leftover turkey, and just being lazy most of the day.