The Storm on Our Shores

by Mark Obmascik

  And that was just the man-made depression. On the Great Plains, where Laird’s father had grown up, Mother Nature had vanquished any thoughts of the family returning. Drought and wind had conspired to turn more than 100 million acres of farmland into a Dust Bowl of despair. The natural disaster left a half million Americans both homeless and jobless. Billowing mile-high walls of black dirt clouds had blotted out the sun half a continent away in the Ohio River Valley. As if Appalachia needed the world any darker.

  At home, Laird expected more cuts at the mine and more bottles from his father. He needed a new direction.

  In September 1935, Laird joined a buddy for a weekend trip twenty miles up the Ohio River, to Wheeling, West Virginia. The plan was to cut loose, drink whiskey, and meet girls. Then the buddy persuaded him to stop inside a military recruiting office.

  The more Laird heard about the U.S. Army, the more he liked. Being a soldier was a job, a steady job, and it was above ground where you could breathe deep and see the sun. Sure, the military was all about confronting danger, but this was peacetime. America was still weary from the last world war, and Laird knew no one who had the appetite for another. Could his odds of being killed in the peacetime Army really be any worse than his 1-in-340 chance at the Powhatan mine?

  Best of all, the Army was his gateway out of Appalachia, a fresh start in a new place. He could serve his country, and, with a dependable salary, his family, too. He knew his parents would approve. This was the break he was looking for.

  But there were a few big hitches. For starters, to be accepted into the Army, Laird had to pass a written exam. Recruiters assured him the test was no big deal, but it struck at the heart of Laird’s worst insecurity. He had no book smarts. He could drop a squirrel with a headshot from three trees away, but he didn’t know anything about algebra, geometry, chemistry, or physics. His knowledge of U.S. history was sketchy, and he knew even less about the world beyond. He didn’t read books. In the how-to manuals that explained the practical, such as car repairs and home electrical wiring, Laird usually skipped the text and went straight for the pictures. How could he ever pass a written Army test?

  Luckily, in the few years that Laird had gone to school, he had paid attention. He remembered multiplication and long division. He could name the president (Franklin Delano Roosevelt, elected after pledging “a New Deal” for the American people); vice president (a Texan, Cactus Jack Garner, who famously described the nation’s No. 2 job as “not worth a bucket of warm piss”); and the number of stars on the U.S. flag (forty-eight, with the admittance of New Mexico and Arizona). Recruiters told him he scored an 85 on his test. He was in.

  Or so he thought. Laird soon learned that he faced another obstacle. He had to pass a physical exam. The recruiters hadn’t given this test a second thought—Laird was six feet tall and 160 pounds, with the sculpted shoulders and arms that came from working coal all day—but Laird sank into a panic. He had been forced out of Golden Gloves boxing by a heart murmur. Would the same ailment end his Army enlistment?

  Laird mentioned his fear to his buddy, who mentioned it to another guy, who told somebody else. Next thing he knew, Laird was drinking some mysterious liquid that, the stranger claimed, would suppress the heart murmur in time for the physical a few days later.

  Did the elixir work? Was the Army doctor incompetent? Or was the military so hard up for peacetime recruits that it turned a deaf ear onto a teenage recruit’s bum ticker? Laird never figured out the true answer, but the Army gave his heart a passing grade.

  Two hurdles down, one big one to go. Laird was to report for duty in September, or three months before his eighteenth birthday. There was no wiggle room in the military age requirement—a seventeen-year-old could not join the U.S. Army.

  He had no way around the age problem. His birth certificate couldn’t lie. His birthday was December 18, and there was no changing that. After coming home from the Army recruiting office, though, Laird had felt like he was in a different place. He’d told his parents about his sign-up, and, as expected, they approved of it. He’d quit the mine and said his goodbyes to all his family and friends. In his heart and his mind, Laird was already in the Army. If only the Army would take an underage soldier.

  Laird decided to chance it. He boarded an eastbound train in Bellaire, Ohio, and rode 130 miles west to Columbus, home of the Fort Hayes Army base. It was the furthest from home Laird had ever traveled, and also the furthest west. Columbus was hot, flat, and, with a population of 300,000, extremely crowded. It smelled better than Pittsburgh, though.

  At Fort Hayes, Laird fell in line behind other recruits. He filled out his paperwork, but had the feeling no one was examining it very carefully. When an Army admissions worker asked for his year of birth, Laird responded, truthfully, 1916.

  That was it. Nobody asked him about the month or date of his birth. It was all spelled out on his forms, but no questions were asked. At the age of seventeen years and nine months, Charles Warder “Dick” Laird was accepted for training in the United States Army.

  7

  * * *

  Escape

  She was out of his league, a real looker, the kind of woman who made serious men go mushy. She had eyes like Marlene Dietrich but a face that just wanted to smile. Her dimples proved it.

  Her name was Rose Thompson. She was Dick Laird’s blind date, set up by an Army buddy, and he couldn’t believe his luck. He had been assured that his blind date had a “nice personality.” As they walked the sidewalks of Columbus, Dick in his service uniform and Rose in a pretty dress, she was turning heads. Laird couldn’t decide whether to feel proud or angry that so many men were eyeballing his date.

  Laird was naturally shy and had little experience with girls. He couldn’t think of what to say to Rose. He didn’t want to mess this up. He could tell that she felt a little nervous, too. She compensated by talking, not quite a babble, but enough to carry much of the conversation by herself.

  There was the weather, and life in Columbus, and how Laird had survived his six-week Army recruit training. Most of all, though, were the stories from the heart. On their first date, and then the second, and the third and beyond, Laird was struck by how much they had in common.

  Like Laird, Rose Thompson had grown up in the Ohio River Valley, but about 160 miles farther south, in Huntington, West Virginia. She had lived in houses with no running water or electricity, and had to use cardboard to patch holes in her shoes. She’d also had a miserable family life.

  Rose’s parents divorced when she was four. Her mother died soon after, and Rose moved in with her grandmother until she died, too. Rose then spent years being bounced between aunts, grandparents, stepmothers, and other relatives who didn’t want her. On many nights, all that stood between Rose and another merciless whupping was her older brother, Hen. When he married at age fifteen, Rose lost her main source of love and protection.

  On their date night walks around town, Rose confided to Dick that she was treated as a “slave girl” who labored mainly to raise two daughters of another aunt. Rose called them “society girls,” though they never wore white gloves or sipped tea. To Rose, a society girl was someone who didn’t have workdays that started before dawn to fetch water, make everyone breakfast, clean the house, do the laundry, make dinner, and help the girls with their homework. Around all this, Rose tried to fit in time for school.

  Like Laird, she found refuge in the classroom. She idolized her teachers and dreamed of leading her own students one day. She worked hard enough to finish at the top of her high school class, but panicked at the idea of delivering a valedictorian or salutatorian speech on graduation day. Rose did not want to be the center of attention, so a classmate delivered the commencement speech instead. She couldn’t afford college tuition, and enrolled at a secretarial school.

  Hoping for a break from raising someone else’s children, Rose moved in with yet another aunt, Ora. She was fine, but had a husband, Adam, who drank all day, every day, and a brother w
ho sometimes joined him.

  Something had happened to Rose at Aunt Ora’s house. Rose wouldn’t tell Laird what—she was private like that—and Laird didn’t feel that he had any business pressing her on it. All he knew is that Rose left home in a hurry to seek a fresh start in Columbus. She kept in touch with her family in West Virginia about as often as Laird did—hardly ever.

  With the shared experience of an awful childhood and broken family life, Laird really felt something for Rose. Sometimes it felt like lust, and sometimes it was love. Either way, she was on his mind a lot. He thought about her during Company D’s fifty-mile marches along Highway 23 from Fort Hayes to Chillicothe. She was on his mind between blasts of mortar fire at the training range, and during his hours-long marathons of painstaking work copying maps.

  When Laird had won expert marksmanship scores on the .45 caliber pistol, and the .30 caliber machine gun, and the .30-06 rifle and bayonet, he was proud to tell Rose. When he was among the select few chosen for security duty at the Kentucky Derby, he told Rose all about it. Rose was also the first to know when Laird gained promotion to private first class.

  “The Army must have been my calling because I took to it like a duck to water,” Laird wrote in his journal. The military gave him everything that his life in Appalachia did not. He had structure, rigor, rules, routine, and camaraderie. On top of that, he got a daily breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Army life was boosting Laird’s strength and confidence. The regular meals also boosted his weight.

  His wallet, however, still needed help. The problem central to most of Laird’s dates was figuring ways to stretch his meager military salary. A typical night out for Laird and Rose was seeing a 15-cent movie, then walking arm in arm across East State Street for a bowl of 10-cent chili at the diner. Laird and Rose repeated the ritual often enough to become friends with a waitress, who occasionally favored them with free refills of chili and extra handfuls of crackers. The one free entertainment Laird and Rose enjoyed on date night was playing Let’s-Sneak-Past-Rose’s-Landlady. She had banned men from visiting the apartment of any female tenant. Laird learned how to shinny up the apartment building’s rain spout.

  When Laird won his second Army promotion, to corporal, he beamed and told Rose how his pay was rising from $21 a month to $45. That night at the diner, they ordered steak.

  Not all was bliss. Every time Rose felt that Laird was settling down, and thinking about making a life with her, he did something wild and reckless. His Company D had a reputation for debauchery, and Laird decided he was honor-bound to meet it. Residents of Chillicothe had learned to fear visits from Laird’s unit. “When Company B comes down from Fort Hayes,” the Chillicothe locals warned, “bring in all the girls. But when Company D comes down, bring in all the girls—and the dogs.” With the rest of Company D, Laird drank and brawled in bars and raised hell on the streets. His father would have been proud.

  At one point, while on a training mission in Fort Knox, Kentucky, Laird met a fellow soldier who also was from West Virginia. In the minds of Laird and Private Russell Hull, the states of West Virginia and Kentucky held in common one great thing: moonshine. They believed that West Virginia’s must be better, but just to make sure they forked over $3 for a gallon of hooch that, true to stereotype, came in a jug with a finger hole.

  Several hours later, Laird and Hull were sprawled beneath an oak tree and swapping slurred stories about their West Virginia fathers, Laird’s the menacing coal miner and Hull’s the Appalachian preacher. Laird grew so drunk that, when he stood up to relieve himself, he misfired. When the drinking buddy finally stopped laughing, he managed to direct the wobbly Laird back to the Company D barracks and into the shower, where the young soldiers had the misfortune of being seen by their squad sergeant.

  If he were back home in West Virginia, Laird would have used a simple left jab and right hook to dispatch Sergeant Taczanowski, who stood just five-foot-two and carried the nickname Squeaky, for a voice that reminded troops of a barking squirrel. But Laird was in the Army now, and Laird had to respect rank. Even drunk, Laird knew he should not fight his Army superiors, though he seriously considered it.

  The next morning, as punishment, Sergeant Squeaky assigned an extremely hungover Laird to garbage detail. The first whiff of cafeteria garbage, combined with the smell of coffee grounds, made Laird keel over with nausea.

  “I’m too sick to be doing this today,” Laird told his sergeant.

  “No, you’re too young to be getting that drunk,” the sergeant replied.

  Rose agreed. There were things about Laird that she just didn’t understand. Laird kept telling Rose that he loved her. If he really did love her, though, then why was he going on those big weekend benders? Couldn’t he control himself? He’d always seemed so honest and sincere. Why couldn’t he just grow up? She knew Laird had a strong inner compass, if only he would heed it. Was it possible to turn him around? Did she even want to try?

  And then, one day, these questions were no longer just abstractions.

  Rose was pregnant.

  It’s hard to say who was more flabbergasted by the news.

  Laird felt like he had been run over by a train. In his last few months in the Army, he was finally making way in the new direction in his life. The coal mines were behind him, and he was a world away from the misery at home. He enjoyed regular meals, a warm bed, friends, and, for the first time in his life, some sense of security. On weekends off, he largely had the freedom to do as he pleased. He was making something of himself. A baby? Marriage? Fatherhood and family? He wasn’t ready for that.

  Rose, however, had no choice. In the 1930s, motherhood without marriage was shameful. It would make her a social outcast. She was barely making ends meet now on a typist’s salary—she’d had to hold off the landlord a few times while she scraped together enough for the rent. How could she support herself and a baby, too? She had no family, no money, and no prospects for help. For Rose, marriage with Dick Laird wasn’t just the right thing to do. It was the only thing to do.

  On top of this, there was the issue of Rose’s secret, the whole reason why she had moved to Columbus in the first place. Two years earlier, long before she had even met Laird, Rose was living with an aunt and uncle when she was raped by another relative, though Rose was reluctant to use the word “rape.” As she wrote in her diary, “It wasn’t really that. It was just that he was older and held me down and I really didn’t know what was going on.”

  The result, though, was devastating. Wrote Rose: “I got pregnant in just one time.”

  Aunt Ora and Uncle Adam threatened to kill the relative, who responded by running away, never to be seen or heard from again. This left Rose alone and sixteen years old, with a baby on the way.

  Rose couldn’t tell if her father and brother were disgusted or just ashamed. Either way, they did not want an unwed teenage mother in the family. They gave Rose a grand total of $4 and put her on the bus to Columbus to “deal” with the baby. Unfortunately, that $4 could buy only half the bus fare. Short of cash, the pregnant Rose was forced off the bus in Chillicothe, where she stood by the side of the road to hitchhike the remaining fifty miles.

  Fortunately, she was picked up along the way by a sympathetic farmer and his wife, who offered Rose a room to sleep in, plus $5 a week, if she helped them with vegetable canning. Rose worked until her pregnancy’s eighth month. Just before Christmas, she moved out of the farmer’s home and into the Florence Crittenton Home for unwed mothers in Columbus.

  On the night of December 31, 1934, Rose gave birth to a girl. It was late enough on New Year’s Eve that the doctor wondered aloud whether he should try to hold off on the delivery until after midnight. The first baby of the New Year always received a story in the local newspaper and a cascade of gifts and prizes from local businesses.

  The Crittenton manager, however, set the doctor straight. Her pregnant residents were considered bad girls, and a bastard child put up for immediate adoption was definitely not somethi
ng to be hailed by the Columbus business community. Even if Rose’s baby was the first of the New Year, nobody was going to celebrate it. Rose put her baby girl up for adoption. She never met the couple who accepted the baby.

  After childbirth, Rose did not return to West Virginia. No one back home wanted to see her, and, considering the way she had been treated, she had no one back home she wanted to see. She stayed in the Crittenton home, patching together odd job after odd job in town, until she had saved enough money to move into a room, with a roommate, at a nearby boardinghouse.

  That’s when she met Dick Laird. She liked him a lot. He was tall and handsome, strong enough to go jaw-to-jaw with an Army rowdy in a bar, but with a gentle streak that led him to bring a handful of flowers, sometimes picked from a stranger’s garden, on some of their dates. He wasn’t a smooth talker. He fidgeted when he ran out of words, which was often. Still, he was honest and sincere. He looked her right in the eye. Rose wanted to tell Laird about her past—the rape, the pregnancy, and the baby—but she was afraid the story would scare him off. She really didn’t want to scare him off.

  Now Rose Thompson was eighteen years old, single, and pregnant for the second time. Dick Laird was the best thing she had going. In fact, he was about the only thing she had going.

  But the more her pregnant belly grew, the less Laird saw of her. At first he blamed his absences on increased training at faraway Fort Knox. Then he claimed other weekend obligations. Finally, when Rose pressed hard for marriage, Laird responded bluntly: He couldn’t marry her because he didn’t rank high enough in the Army.