by Earley, Pete
“I was in ninth grade and it was Christmas when my stepfather suddenly told me that I wasn’t going to go back to school,” Barbara Walker complained bitterly to me. “He told me that I had to get a job, and he and my mother sent me to a fish factory where I cut frozen fish.
“Friday,” Barbara Walker continued, “was my mother’s favorite day because that is when she came to pick up my paycheck.”
Barbara told me that she hated her stepfather. “I left home on my eighteenth birthday – the minute I was legally old enough,” she said.
Barbara moved in with the family of a friend in Boston and eventually went to work as a keypunch operator at the Federal Reserve Bank.
At nineteen, she was an attractive young woman. She was five feet two inches tall, and weighed only a hundred pounds, but she had a Jayne Mansfield figure and shoulder length black hair. “Barbara was a very strong-willed person,” Annie Crowley Nelson said of her younger sister. “She was intelligent and was not snotty, but she carried herself with a certain pride.”
It took Barbara time to warm to strangers, and it was her haughtiness that first attracted John Walker, Jr., when they met at the rink. “Barbara could turn her nose up at anybody. She had that Boston better-than-you attitude,” he recalled. “She was good looking and was a real working girl. She got up every morning and took the 8:05 subway to work. She seemed to know exactly what she wanted out of life, and she was just what I wanted in a woman.”
John pestered Barbara for a dance, but she refused because he was a sailor. He jokingly told her that he could tell her fortune, but she continued to ignore him. When the dance ended, Barbara’s friend Mary Ellen announced that John had offered her and the sailor she had met a ride home. Reluctantly Barbara agreed to go along, but when John was a block away from her house she made him pull up to the curb and told him she would walk the rest of the way. “I didn’t want John to know where I lived. I didn’t want to see him again.” But Mary Ellen had given Barbara’s telephone number to John that night, and he called her the next day. “If you don’t go out with me, I’ll throw rocks through your windows,” he said, laughing. Barbara declined, but John persisted. Finally, she agreed to a date – a tour of the U.S.S. Johnnie Hutchins. Afterward, she and John ate fried dams and butterscotch sundaes at Howard Johnson’s.
The next evening they went out again, and soon John was dining regularly with Barbara and her surrogate family. By the summer of 1957, Barbara and John were in love. They also had two large problems. John’s tour on the U.S.S. Johnnie Hutchins was coming to an end. The destroyer was going to be decommissioned in Bayonne, New Jersey, and John had been told to pack his seabag, “I’m in love with Barbara,” he told a shipmate. “She is the first person I have ever really loved, but I don’t want to get married. I love the Navy and my job and I don’t want to get tied down yet.”
Barbara’s doctor had told her that she was going to have a baby. She hadn’t planned on getting pregnant, but she hadn’t taken any precautions either. She had simply hoped it wouldn’t happen. She told John the day that she found out. He knew that he didn’t have to marry Barbara. Other sailors talked about women they had gotten pregnant and left behind.
Barbara should have been more cautious, John said. “My first reaction was just to get the hell out when she told me that she was pregnant,” John remembered. But the more he thought about marrying Barbara, the more he liked the idea. “I thought, ‘Hey, this could be really good. I could have one of those great Italian families like my grandpa Scaramuzzo, you know, where I would come home from work and Barbara and the kids would be waiting for me and I would sit around and tell them stories like Grandpa did.’ Only I was going to do it right, not like my father and mother had done.”
Before John decided, however, Barbara told him that she had a secret she wanted to share. Her mother and stepfather had returned to Boston to live, but she had never mentioned them to John. She asked John to drive her to a store in a poor section of Chelsea, but wouldn’t tell him why. When they got there, he followed her upstairs into a cramped apartment. “It was a disaster inside,” John told me. “Barbara began introducing me to all these people who were living there and then she told me that this was her real family, not the nice Italian family that she was living with.”
After they left the apartment, Barbara said, “I’ve not always been proud of my family, but I wanted you to meet them and know that I want something different from this for myself.”
A few days later, she confronted John. “Well, what are we going to do – get married or what?”
“Oh, all right,” John replied. “Let’s get married.”
They eloped to Seabrook, New Hampshire, where a motel operator telephoned the police, who quickly drove around and informed the flustered couple that in this state they had to be twenty-one years old to get a marriage license. Barbara looked in a world almanac at a public library and discovered that couples could get married in North Carolina without waiting, if the woman was at least nineteen years old, and so they were married June 4, 1957, in Durham.
Barbara telephoned her mother to announce her news, but John didn’t tell anyone at first. He did, however, send a telegram to Arthur, who was stationed in Norfolk, asking for a $100 loan. Arthur and Rita had been married less than a year and didn’t have much income, but Arthur immediately withdrew the money from their savings account and was about to wire it to John when Rita caught him.
“Why does he need the money?” she demanded.
“He didn’t say,” Arthur replied.
“Then call and ask him!”
Arthur telephoned John. “Rita wants to know what you need the hundred bucks for, John.” John could hear Rita coaching Arthur in the background. “Tell him if he got some girl pregnant) he doesn’t have to marry her,” she was saying.
“I need the money for rent,” John said.
“Rent?” Arthur repeated for Rita’s benefit.
“Did he get somebody pregnant?” Rita asked.
“I got married,” John said. “Now are you going to send the money or what?”
Arthur wired the $100 that afternoon.
Now that Arthur and Rita knew, John decided to call his parents. His father sounded genuinely happy, but John could tell that Peggy was merely feigning enthusiasm. “If you’re happy, then I’m happy, Johnny-boy,” she told him with deliberate cheerfulness.
When Barbara developed toxemia, her doctor took John aside and warned him that the baby would probably be born dead. John was more worried about Barbara. He asked for permission to be with her in the delivery room, an unusual request in 1957. As John stood beside her, holding her hand, Barbara gave birth on December 27 to a pale but healthy girl. They named the baby Margaret Ann, after their respective mothers.
“We named her after you, Mom!” John told Peggy when he called her from the hospital. She sounded thrilled, but couldn’t help but feel sad after she hung up the receiver.
Later she explained that she had been thinking about her own marriage and comparing it to her son’s. She and Johnny had met at a dance, too. She and Johnny had been anxious to better themselves. She had gotten pregnant and gotten married in a brisk ceremony. She and Johnny had started out, just as John and Barbara were doing, not as newlyweds with time to learn about each other, but as a trio.
Clutching her rosary, Peggy prayed.
Chapter 9
Navy life was hard on the new family.
Six months after Margaret was born, John had to report to the U.S.S. Forrestal, an aircraft carrier in Norfolk. The transfer sounded terrific at first. Arthur and Rita were in Norfolk and John was eager for Barbara to meet them.
And the Forrestal was not just any aircraft carrier. It was the newest carrier in the fleet, the first ever designed to accommodate jet aircraft, and the largest ship in the world. It was longer than ten football fields placed end to end, and it reached thirteen stories above the water. Capable of holding ninety aircraft, it could move at an astounding spe
ed of thirty-three knots. Assignment to the 5,499-man crew of the Forrestal reinforced John’s belief that he was one of the Navy’s rising stars.
“I was really developing good self-esteem and self-confidence. By this time, I had aced the high school GED and had no difficulty passing a two-year college equivalency test. I was studying like a maniac and making every rank at the absolute minimum time. The thing I liked about the Navy was that promotions were based upon how well you did on exams, not how well you kissed ass. Your commanding officer might despise you, but if you did a good job, the Navy had to promote you, and I was thriving on that kind of competition.”
Unfortunately, John’s transfer to the Forrestal was a disaster. John and Barbara had assumed they could all stay with Arthur and Rita in Norfolk until they could find an apartment, but when they arrived, they discovered that Arthur and Rita were away on vacation. “We had to rent the first apartment that we saw, and we slept on the floor that night because we didn’t have enough money for a motel room and didn’t have any furniture,” said John. “We were really pissed at Art and Rita.” A few days later, John learned that the Forrestal was about to leave on a seven-month cruise of the Mediterranean. Barbara was unnerved. What would she and the baby do while John was at sea? She didn’t know anyone in Norfolk. John telephoned his parents in Scranton and made arrangements for Barbara and Margaret to move in with them.
John and Barbara were both miserable during the separation. John had promised her that he wouldn’t go ashore when the Forrestal docked in foreign ports because they wanted to save his pay to buy furniture and rent a nice apartment. John was also afraid he would be tempted by hookers if he left the ship. So when his shipmates went carousing, he stayed aboard and studied for his next promotion. At first, he received long, passionate letters from Barbara, but suddenly she stopped writing, and after four months of silence, John sent an angry telegram. Barbara replied with a curt: “Everything fine. Love you.”
“The reason I stopped writing,” Barbara claimed later, “was because I didn’t want him to know what his mother was doing to me, the hell that she was putting me through. Pop [johnny] and I did all the housecleaning and I did all the cooking and she didn’t do anything but go to work and come home and bitch, bitch, bitch.”
Peggy recalled Barbara’s stay differently, describing her daughter-in-law as lazy. “She expected to be waited upon.” Perhaps it was jealousy over John, but Barbara and Peggy couldn’t stand each other. As soon as John’s cruise was over, he and Barbara returned to Norfolk. “I’m quitting the Navy as soon as I can,” John suddenly announced one afternoon to Barbara and to his brother Arthur. “I can’t stand these goddamn aircraft carriers anymore.”
Arthur urged John to reconsider. “Try to get on subs once again,” he pleaded. But John had already tried and been rejected once more. “There might be a way for you to get assigned to a submarine through the back door,” Arthur volunteered. The next morning, Arthur drove to the personnel office at the Norfolk Naval Base, headquarters for the entire Atlantic fleet, and with luck was able to get John’s orders changed. He had been scheduled to go to another aircraft carrier, but instead was sent in May 1959 to a sub tender, the U.S.S. Howard W. Gilmore, based in Charleston, South Carolina. John was thrilled by the move. Arthur hadn’t gotten him on a sub, but this was close enough.
Barbara, meanwhile, gave birth to Cynthia, the couple’s second child, that same month. Two months later, Barbara was pregnant again. The couple’s third daughter, Laura, was born April 24, 1960. Barbara and John had been married less than three years, but they already had three daughters and their roles as husband and wife had been clearly defined.
“My job is to earn an income for my family,” John told Barbara the first time that she asked him to help change a diaper. “I work hard sixty hours a week on the ship and I’m not going to come home and change diapers or do dishes. You don’t work and you are the wife, so that’s your job.”
It made sense to Barbara. “I did very little to cross John or upset him early in our marriage,” she told me later. “I wanted things to be perfect when he was at home. If there was something that I really wanted to do and he didn’t want to do it, that was okay. If I really wanted to do it, I put it off until he was at sea.”
By May 1960, John had earned a total of five promotions, but he and Barbara were still living on about the same amount of money that they had when first married, even though their family now numbered five. “Every time John got a promotion and more pay, we put the raise into our savings account on the theory that if we don’t have it, we won’t miss it,” Barbara explained.
They also adhered to a strict credit policy: anything bought on credit had to be paid off within two years, and nothing new could be purchased on credit until all previous charges were paid. Saving money was an obsession with them, a testament that showed how much they cared for each other. Barbara bought powdered milk for her daughters even when she could afford fresh milk. John wore his shoes until they could no longer be resoled. Both refused to tip waitresses.
“When I first met Barbara,” John said, “I told her my plans for life. I had no intention of doing my twenty years and retiring and having nothing to show for it. I was going to save my money and invest it and have something going for me when I got out – a business run by someone else. Barbara knew that. She had to be prepared for it because I wasn’t going to be like my dad with no money, no future, nothing going for him.”
In June 1960, John passed an eye exam and was judged fit for submarine duty. It was the third time he had taken the test, and the only reason he passed was that the Navy had lowered its vision requirements. Five months later, John moved Barbara and his daughters back in with Peggy and Johnny in Scranton and left for sixteen weeks of training at the Navy submarine school in New London, Connecticut.
Barbara found life in Scranton more depressing than ever. She fought with Peggy constantly. A short time after Barbara arrived, Johnny moved out of the house and back in with his mother in Scranton. Barbara dashed to phone John and tell him that his mother had driven Johnny away. John rushed home and upbraided Peggy. “If you were half the wife that Barbara is, he wouldn’t have left you,” John said, Peggy seethed. It wasn’t really her boy talking, she said later. “It was that witch, Barbara.”
After completing submarine training, John was assigned to the U.S.S. Razorback, a diesel submarine stationed in San Diego, and he moved his wife and children there. The Razorback left on an extended cruise days after John arrived. On June 28, 1961, Peggy finally received her first letter from him. He had been at sea for four months and his letter contained an apology for his angry outburst at her over Johnny and was filled with sweet references to Barbara, whom he called Bobbie:
“Much to my surprise this afternoon, I received a phone call from Bobbie. I feared the worst, but she was just lonesome and wanted to call. In a way I wish she hadn’t called; it only made me very homesick. Like all women, she started to cry and I swore I would have also if there weren’t so many sailors around. So, if you get a chance, I’d rather have you write Bobbie than me. I think it’s harder on the girls than the men.”
After the U.S.S. Razorback returned, it was sent to San Francisco and John moved his family into subsidized Navy housing on the base. For the first time in their marriage, John and Barbara had a normal nine-to-five life together for a long period. They also allowed themselves some spending money to eat at restaurants and see movies. John bought a bicycle and rode it to the ship each day to save money.
The togetherness, however, wore thin. John discovered that Barbara spent most of her time talking about their three daughters and he was quickly bored by domestic discussions. She in turn grew weary of john’s endless sea stories. One evening John came home early from a short test cruise on the submarine and found the house in disarray. Dirty clothes had been dropped on the floor, and the kitchen was jammed with several days’ worth of dirty dishes and silverware. Barbara, who was pregnant again,
and the three girls were nowhere to be seen. When they arrived home a few hours later, John was waiting on the front step.
“What the hell is going on?” he demanded.
“I was too tired to clean up tonight so I took the girls to a drive-in movie,” Barbara said.
John told me later during an interview that this incident was a turning point.
“I have always been a neat person,” he explained. “I can’t stand an untidy house and that incident stands out in my mind. To put it in perspective, I was literally busting my ass, trying to get ahead at work, but my wife, who I thought was in the same mold, was becoming a typical lazy Navy wife who didn’t want to do anything but sit at home and raise kids. I began to sense that she was not the woman who I thought I had married. We had gotten married at an early age and both of us had a lot of growing up to do and I was growing up in a much different direction than she was. Things in the marriage were still okay, but I was beginning to see long-range things in Barbara that I was not happy with. Laziness was the main thing, which resulted in her being what I would call a slob.
“She had started watching television, and it seemed that she was watching it twenty-three hours a day and doing absolutely nothing to progress or improve herself. Technically, we were both high school dropouts, but I had done something about that. I had gotten my GED. When we first met, I viewed Barbara as someone who was poor as hell, but who had lots of ambition. She had pulled herself out of the sewer, and I figured she would claw her way to the top. We were very similar in that way. We were aggressive and had high aspirations. We were going to make something of ourselves. But after a few years of marriage, it became clear to me that she was falling to the side. She wasn’t doing anything. She talked about getting her GED. She talked about it endlessly, but she never went after it. I’ll give her this much: raising kids is tough. But I was out at sea a lot and I still managed to study hard enough to make all of my ranks.”