John Rude's Life

2009-05-17T13:50:00.000-07:00

Transformation: 1962-1964

My father retired from the U.S. Army six months before my college graduation, and bought a house in Enid, Oklahoma. His mother Sara Ann had passed away while he was in Germany, and he and Louise decided to care for his elderly father and try to revive his Dad’s tottering hardware business. If all went as my father dreamed, Rude & Co. would stay in business for another generation. With his Army retirement pay my father didn’t need the money from running a business; he seemed to be searching for some self-respect that had evaporated while he was in the Army.

Louise and my father came to Spokane for my commencement, then drove me back to Enid with them in their Mercedes. (I sold my Henry-J for $50 to another unsuspecting Whitworth student.)

My Peace Corps training was about to begin at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. I had no idea what to expect, but started training like an athlete, immersing myself in books about the Horn of Africa, and circling the Enid High School track in newly purchased track shoes.

After several weeks in Enid, my father sent me off on the bus to the Oklahoma City air-port with a well-intentioned racist comment—“Don’t come back with any polka-dot children.” I include this comment not to denigrate my father, but to illustrate how widespread and natural such racism seemed to be in the 1960s. Bus boycotts and sit-ins were just beginning in 1962. The civil rights revolution had not yet kicked into high gear.

I arrived in Georgetown in the depth of the Capitol city’s muggy dampness. Milling around me were hundreds of confused, tired Peace Corps recruits, men and women of all races. The atmosphere was a mixture of Army boot camp and elite graduate school.

It soon became clear to everyone that the “Peace Corps” was still little more than a vague political dream. The actual organization was being improvised at Georgetown and other campuses around Washington. Our project’s 375 trainees would awaken at 6:00 AM and assemble in the dark on the soccer field. European coaches put us through calisthenics, after which we would run around the track. Classes in linguistics, African history and culture, and two sessions daily in the Amharic language followed breakfast.

We had lots of free time, because the schedule was still being formed. On the spur of the moment it seemed, we would be ushered into large auditoriums to hear lectures by Marga-ret Mead, Chester Bowles, or some other relic of the New Deal era. We would hustle off on hikes in the Blue Ridge mountains or along the C. & O. canal, accompanied by aspiring politicians like Jay Rockefeller (now a Democratic Senator from West Virginia.)

Many conversations were overtly political and reeked with the hubris of the Ivy League graduates in our midst, both trainees and staff. Our project’s leader, Harris Wofford, had been a close Kennedy advisor in the election campaign. He had arranged the letter from Kennedy to Dr. Martin Luther King while he was in Birmingham’s jail, an act which some historians claim won Kennedy the African-American vote, and hence the election. Wofford’s role in Ethiopia was to be plenipotentiary to all of Africa, using Addis Ababa as a base for fostering people-to-people diplomacy. An idealist of the first order, Harris both captured and molded the vision of what the Peace Corps was meant to be.

Information about Ethiopia was almost too exotic to absorb during training. The only useful discussions took place with our Amharic language trainers, Ethiopian graduate students gathered from around the U.S. They were relatively free to discuss politics and culture, expressing opinions that might have landed them in jail under Emperor Haile Selassie’s dictatorship. A coup by one of the Emperor’s sons had recently been quashed. We nervously probed the language trainers for details that might suggest there would be danger for Americans.

One of the trainers was from Eritrea, federated with Ethiopia, yet (because it was a for-mer Italian colony) also a protectorate under a U.N. agreement brokered in 1951. The Eritreans seemed more sophisticated and honest than the other Ethiopians. He also described Eritrea as a more friendly, enlightened place than Ethiopia proper. His affectionate tales about his homeland reminded me of Babar, a children’s story about an orphaned elephant who becomes king of the forest. Knowing that as soon as we arrived in country we would be bidding on assignments, I set my sights on Eritrea.

After seven weeks of training we were taken as a group to the White House, where we milled on the lawn and shook hands with our tanned, smiling President. A few days later, after an exhausting jet flight over 10,000 miles, we stood in a formal line to shake hands with the King of Kings, the Lion of Judah himself. I was in a dream-like state, a character in my own fairy tale. Reality was lurking just around the corner.

As we adjusted to the poverty and rainy summer weather in Addis Ababa, I scanned my new group of Peace Corps friends to find a potential partner. Most of the Italian-Americans were being assigned to Eritrea on the assumption they could easily relate to the Italians still living there. I also met a St. Olaf’s College graduate, Jerry Springston, who was determined to bag the most stereotypical Peace Corps assignment available—preferably a remote village in a harsh environment. Wanting to rise to his courageous (if foolhardy) challenge, I volunteered to go with Jerry to Tessenei, a small village in Eritrea near the Sudan border.

Before Jerry and I took the daylong bus ride to Tessenei, we spent two weeks in Asmara, Eritrea’s Italian-built capital. The compact city of 300,00 people was a refreshing contrast to grimy Addis Ababa. Asmara had lovely villas, palm-lined avenues, and bright bougainvillea vines spilling like laughter over sun-washed walls. There was a palpable sense of pride and autonomy in the Eritrean people, reflected in the country’s blue flag, which bore the olive leaf of the United Nations. The police, dressed in crisp uniforms and Aussie-style cocked hats, seemed more helpful than oppressive. A multi-racial city, permanent home to 30,000 Italians who had chosen to stay after 20 years of British and Ethiopian administration, Asmara in the summer of 1962 had all the markings of a successful transition from colony to self-sufficient democracy.

During the bus trip to Eritrea’s western border, at a stop in the desert town of Agordat, I had my first encounter with Africa. Trying to find shade from the intense heat, I wandered into a market place crowded with camels. Astride one of these ungainly beasts sat a princely specimen of the Beni-Amir tribe—a muscular man with bushy hair, three slashes on each cheek, and a four-foot sword dangling from his saddle, next to a curved knife. The camel shuffled and brayed at this strange white foreigner gaping at the scene, but the desert trader fixed me with a stare that sent a shiver down my spine. In that instant I knew I would never again be the same person I had been before enlisting in the Peace Corps.

The 375 volunteers in Ethiopia and Eritrea were the first qualified teachers ever to be as-signed to high schools and middle schools throughout the Empire. Our mission was to “jump-start” Ethiopia’s education system, to bring it into the 20th century. (This oft-repeated phrase became something of an in-joke, since virtually everything in Ethiopia was still struggling to move beyond Biblical-era standards. A jump from the 1st to the 10th century would seem like an accomplishment.)

Tessenei’s middle school, established a decade before our arrival, symbolized the challenges that plagued all small-town schools. Teachers had given lessons and faithfully produced annual graduating classes over the years, yet not a single graduate had ever passed the national entrance examination for admission to high school. With typical American optimism, Jerry and I viewed the situation as an opportunity. If we succeeded in helping only one student to pass the exam, the measurable improvement would be infinite.

With complete unconcern about our lack of teacher training, or the fact that we could barely communicate with our principal or fellow teachers (even though the curriculum was nominally taught in English) Jerry and I plunged in. All the students had moldy copies of Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, an English comedy of manners writ-ten in 1762. It was so wildly inappropriate as a tool for teaching English that we instantly threw the mandatory curriculum out the window and asked students instead to mimic our ESL pattern drills. Desks were crowded with students (even a few girls), but there were no blackboards—so we purchased Masonite panels and black paint, ordered chalk from Asmara, and—voila!—we had classrooms.

To be honest, we were having a ripping good time, despite days frequently hotter than 120 degrees. We made friends with Tessenei’s most powerful sheikh, as well as the Italian concessionaires who ran the local cotton farms. I picked up passable Italian just by playing billiardi with the farmers. Jerry and I sat in the market every evening, throwing down cards in the local version of gin rummy. I swore in Italian every time I lost a trick, but Jerry was too good a Christian to swear, and a weak linguist to boot. Nevertheless, it took only a few months for us to feel like we were entering into the village fabric.

One evening in November, 1962 all the shop stalls in town were unexpectedly shuttered, and Ethiopian soldiers at Tessenei’s street corners mounted machine guns. After a few days of rumors, Harris Wofford drove into town with a retinue of powerful Ethiopians. In the privacy of our rented house he gave us a full explanation of what had happened. The Emperor had long been disenchanted with the U.N. mandate, and managed to coerce enough members of the Eritrean assembly to vote for an end the federation. In what turned out to be a bloodless coup, Haile Selassie declared Eritrea as just another province of Ethiopia, sending troops to every village, adding exclamation points to his illegal seizure of the former Italian colony.

Although Wofford refused to concede the real reason (even years later during my conversations with him) all Eritreans and most Italians knew that the U.S. State Department acquiesced in the Emperor’s seizure of Eritrea because the U.S. National Security Agency leased a large, ostensibly secret listening station in Asmara. There was nothing “secret” about the American soldiers who roamed the bars and streets searching for beautiful, willing prostitutes. These antics, which seemed disgusting at the time, were hilariously described in I Never Did It For You, a history of Eritrea by B.B.C. correspondent Michele Wrong.

The serious side of American espionage was hard to miss, especially in light of the NSA’s domestic eavesdropping in the U.S. The National Security Agency’s powerful antennae, perched on peaks in Asmara’s highlands, could scoop up every radio signal transmitted by Russians, Arabs and even Israelis in the Middle East. Before the age of satellites, Americans needed Haile Selassie’s friendship far more than he needed theirs.

Life in Tessenei changed for the worse, but at first these changes were barely perceptible. Friendly leaders disappeared from town, either because they had been imprisoned or had gone underground to fight with Eritrea’s fledgling rebel movement, the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF). Our school’s principal became more insecure and autocratic. There was rising tension between Muslim students and teachers (the majority) and the handful of highlander Christians who were mostly children of police officers. ELF activity escalated, with roadblocks, frightening searches for fugitives on buses and a hand-grenade attack in Agordat. Babar’s African paradise had started to turn ugly.

I continued to improve my spoken Italian, and learned to read the language by studying my only available bilingual text: a Bible printed in both Italian and English. A young Muslim shopkeeper tutored me with spoken Italian and read my Bible to study English.

After several months of casual exposure to Christian scripture the unstable boy went to see British missionaries and told them he wanted to convert to Christianity—a dangerous transformation in a conservative Muslim community. Not long after his conversion he was murdered while preaching in another town. Far from admiring his martyrdom, I was depressed by the possibility that I might be indirectly responsible for a mentally unstable person’s death.

Tessenei had its faults, but like most desert border posts, the town had gathered a colorful cast of rogues, saints and wild men. The town was orthodox Muslim in a way that I grew to admire. You could count on people’s promises, and you had to lock your doors. Five times a day, the muezzin’s call and my students’ prayer mats told me all I needed to know about the discipline and integrity of Islam. The presence of the British missionaries from the Sudan Interior Mission seemed totally superfluous, if not sinister. They were systematically attempting to dismantle a culture that, given the history of Sudan and other British colonies, seemed to me to be in no need of replacement or repair.

On one blazing hot Tessenei afternoon I needed the British doctor to attend my body, if not my soul (which he assumed was already bound for heaven’s reward.) I had been losing weight after vomiting most of my food intake each day. I thought I might have a tapeworm in my gut, like the one Jerry had acquired. (His “intimate little pet,” he called it.) But the pain grew too sharp and localized for me to ignore. The doctor’s probing fingers revealed that my appendix was about to burst. Surgery could be attempted in the missionary clinic, but he advised Jerry to drive me to the U.S. military hospital in Asmara, 200 miles distant over bumpy desert tracks.
Thanks to morphine, good luck and Jerry’s frantic driving, I arrived at the hospital before my appendix ruptured. The Army surgeon treated the surgery as a routine matter, but seemed perplexed by my willingness to “live among the natives” in such a remote place. After a week in hospital and another week of recovery, with Asmara Peace Corps volunteers serving me dinners to put weight back on my skeletal frame, I felt ready to return to Tessenei.

Soon afterward, I received two letters from my father with sad news. The first informed me that our house at Pine Ridge—my only true home—had burned to the ground as a result of a leak in the antiquated chimney. The next letter from my father told me that his father had died peacefully, after a brief illness, from prostate cancer. These letters, along with growing tension with Jerry and the insufferable heat, cast me into a depression.

We ended the school year with the success we hoped for: a single Kunama graduate (Ali Abdu) had passed the national exam. In the end, however, Tessenei got the better of me. A Peace Corps doctor conducted a physical and psychological review, and recommended that I be transferred to another village. I moved for the summer to Asmara which, because it was perched on a 7,000-foot plateau, meant that I would be free from the scorching desert heat.
My growing ability to speak Italian allowed me to move about with ease in Asmara, but an Eritrean teacher commented: “You are starting to sound more like a colonist than an American who came here to help us.”

“What should I do?” I responded. The highland language, Tigrinya, was spoken only in Eritrea and parts of Ethiopia. It would be useless anywhere else in the world. He recommended that I learn Arabic, which I had encountered in Tessenei, but I considered too difficult to learn. The teacher persuaded me that if I faced up to the challenge, I would find Arabic useful for the rest of my life.

Several volunteers from Eritrea’s lowlands were given permission by Peace Corps staff to request an Arabic teacher (a "spook") from the NSA listening base in Asmara. After a difficult six-week introduction to Arabic, taught by a young American Monterey Language School graduate, several of us decided to travel the Middle East to practice our newfound language skills. Our one-month tour through the Sudan, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and finally Cyprus sharpened my Arabic somewhat, but I was mostly awe-struck by the impressive cultural heritage of the region. My brief visit to Jerusalem, which then was under Jordanian control, convinced me that the Holy Land was so encrusted by overlapping and conflicting myths (including my Christian religious traditions) that it would never be a safe city until it was placed under international control.

When I returned to Eritrea I learned that I would be re-assigned for my second year to Adi Ugri, a highland village with few Muslims and virtually no one (beside me) who could speak Arabic. Five volunteers were assigned to Adi Ugri. Three (including me) were from the first wave of Peace Corps assigned to Ethiopia, and two others, both women, had just arrived from the U.S.

Our assignment was to teach in a new high school (9th grade) in what was already a distinguished middle school named after St. George, the patron saint of Orthodox Christians in Ethiopia. Italians had opened the school during the Mussolini era, restricting education for Eritreans to the fourth grade. Despite this, some of Eritrea’s most assertive leaders were St. George graduates, proving that even a minimally educated population can destabilize an autocratic regime.

My partner Nyle and I helped our headmaster Iyob, who himself had only a fourth grade education, in devising a complex schedule for 200 ninth-graders. Thinking it would be an easy task, Nyle and I were forced to stay up late into the night working out the mathematics to equalize class sizes and schedules. Next morning, as we laid the schedule out in front of Iyob, he responded: “I thought of this solution myself this very morning.” We knew that he was merely taking undeserved credit for our work, yet self-serving complaints from us would be graceless, so we remained silent. Forever afterward as I watched others steal or take credit for my intellectual efforts, I would quietly thank Iyob for teaching me the value of remaining silent.

As months passed, and I heard “useless” Tigrinya being spoken around me, I started to pick up the language, despite its restricted usefulness. Formal study of Arabic helped me, because both are Semitic languages with similar grammar and sounds. My most relentless Tigrinya teacher proved to be Letey, an aging former prostitute whom we had hired as our cook and servant. She was shocked each day to see the messy condition of my room, and shouted at me in Tigrinya, her only language, until I began to understand her meaning and started to shout back—in Tigrinya. The mutual affection and anger of these exchanges opened a door to Eritrea’s highland culture for me that has never closed. I also learned Tigrinya in the best way to learn a language: by engaging your heart and adding new words and idioms out of necessity.

Midway through my year in Adi Ugri one of the strangest, most humiliating events of my entire life occurred. I’ve re-told this story so many times that it has taken on the character of a legend -- yet, like all good myths, it reveals new, unsuspected layers of truth every time I tell it.

Our students, most of whom were bright, and determined to follow our lead into the modern world, nevertheless clung tenaciously to some local superstitions. One day they revealed to Nyle (who was teaching science) their excitement about the imminent visit of Yifter, an Ethiopian illusionist who claimed that he had eaten a truck. Tickets to Yifter’s show were beyond our students’ means, but they begged us to go see for ourselves the wonders of this magician.

Nyle was as concerned as I was about our students’ wide-eyed naiveté, but he treated the matter as a joke, offering to take a frying pan to the show to test Yifter’s ability to improvise as an iron-eater.

At some deeper level, the magician’s challenge to modern knowledge angered me. I knew that our students were all too susceptible to the claims of authority figures, and the Emperor himself had requested a command performance from Yifter, thus adding to the magician's credibility. I wanted my students to think for themselves, to treat any claim, from any source, with critical thought and healthy skepticism.

When the day for our show in Adi Ugri arrived, Nyle and I sat in the front seats of the theater next to headmaster Iyob, watching the magician proceeded to swallow bits of glass and metal, some quite obviously quite sharp. At one point, to verify Yifter’s capacity to eat metal, his assistant passed around a plate of quarter-inch long nails that the magician was about to swallow.

When the plate was passed to me, a strange rebellious impulse welled up inside me. How could we let Yifter get away with this deception? Perhaps the nails were digestible fakes. They were, after all, only small bits of metal—not an entire truck. Why, I muttered to myself, anyone could swallow nails, including me.

Distractedly, I popped a handful of nails into my mouth and swallowed them. Flustered, Nyle asked me if I had done what he just saw me do. “Yes,” I replied, “but I’m not sure why I did it.” Other spectators shifted their attention from Yifter to me. An uncomfortable awareness slowly dawned on me: I was now in Yifter’s camp, an enemy of science, a friend of magic.

The iron-eating man’s show no longer mattered to me. I had to find a way to get the nails out of my stomach. I walked back to our house, missing Nyle’s triumphant exit from the theater with an uneaten frying pan. I was furiously at work in my bedroom, trying to find a way to vomit.

When Nyle returned I had managed to fill a small bucket, but was unable to see or feel hard objects at the bottom. Concerned about the nails perforating the lining of my stomach, Nyle suggested that we visit our local doctor (who happened to be Spanish) and request an immediate examination.

I remember a vein throbbing in the young doctor’s temple as I explained the evening in my halting Italian. He was close to exploding with laughter at the foolish American standing before him, awaiting examination. Nyle and I watched with fascination as he probed my stomach, looking for the nails through an ancient X-ray fluoroscope. “Quindici” (fifteen) was his final verdict. They were small. The danger would pass (along with the nails) in 48 hours. Or possibly, it might not – the nails could perforate. He told me to come back if there was conspicuous bleeding in my stools.

As he drove me back to our house in his Land Rover, the Spaniard lectured me on proper colonial attitudes. “If the natives tell you up is down, just answer: Va bene! (OK in Ital-ian). If they say black is red, say Va bene! And if they say they can eat nails, for God’s sake use the same answer: Va bene!”

At various Peace Corps reunions my friends have asked me to repeat the “Nail Story,” and I have obliged, playing the role of the fool once again without hesitation. Yet I cannot dismiss my actions as the excesses of a young Peace Corps volunteer who had “gone native.” The French have their own name for the weird behavior of Europeans on the Dark Continent—the mal d’Afrique (African sickness). But on that dark night in Adi Ugri I know that I swallowed something more profound, more potent and consequential than Yifter’s nails. I still decline to give it a name, but I am certain that the mysterious quality I swallowed that night is still inside me, and it changed my life forever.

A month after the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 I wrote an opinion that was published in the Los Angeles Times. It comes as close as anything I have written to describe the transformation available to anyone who struggles to leave his or her cultural cocoon:

Why celebrate the Peace Corps at all? What did it ever do to achieve peace? Why has anti-Americanism flourished even after our nation sent 140,000 of its “best and brightest” to spread goodwill? How many American volunteers served in Afghanistan? What did they ever teach other Americans about this complex Muslim culture? What did the fundamentalist Taliban ever teach us, if they hate us so?

I have more than a casual interest in these questions. Just as I graduated from college I heard the stirring words of President Kennedy: “...ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” A few months into this grand experiment I became a Peace Corps volunteer, and it changed my life.

Nearly 40 years later I am neither wise nor cynical about my own service, and I respect the efforts of my Peace Corps colleagues, failed or otherwise.

We have tasted deeply of other cultures. We love America, yet we are now comfortable as citizens of the world. We are people with a mission. This mission is what our nation must now heed in its battle against terrorism.

After I struggled to teach English in Ethiopia without books for two years, some of my students managed to get good scores on their national school-leaving exams. Quite a few became refugees and now live in the U.S. A larger number were killed in the generation-long war between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Some survived and became leaders in the newly independent nation of Eritrea.

Here is how you measure success in the Peace Corps: I established a small library with books sent from the U.S. Years after I left Ethiopia a nomad child picked up one of these books, a math text, and discovered that he had a talent with numbers. He is a committed Muslim and grew up among orthodox believers in Sudan. He could have grown up to be a terrorist. Instead he is a math professor in Toronto. He tracked me down on the Internet.

What is this small voice that keeps the Peace Corps mission alive?

It is the stench and buzzing flies of poverty, seared into our consciences.

It is the hope that the lessons we taught and the lessons we learned will tip the balance toward self-sufficiency for proud and resourceful people.

It is the conviction that guns, flooding the world in such quantities that their price is cheaper than bread, will solve nothing for the weak or the strong.

It is our respect for local traditions: the Sharia courts, the village headmen sitting under spreading olive trees, the lilting stories and songs of our new languages—Urdu, Tamil, Swahili, Amharic, Arabic—that make us believe that peace is possible.

The “other” is no longer strange, weird or threatening.

There comes a point in every war when people on all sides grow weary of killing. They accept the undeniable fact that their common humanity is more fundamental than what separates them. This defining moment is called peace.

Every Peace Corps volunteer has witnessed the alchemy of the exotic becoming familiar. This experience—and the belief that it can happen again and again, even among those who are most hostile to our nation—is what eventually will make America secure.

Man Emerging: 1958-1962

2008-10-06T19:13:00.000-07:00

Whitworth College was (and remains) an idyllic Presbyterian campus, with a curriculum that ensures escape from the world, even as it challenges students to identify the gifts they have to offer to the world. As a hyper-Christian liberal arts college, it was one of many academic enclaves that forbade drinking, smoking or dancing (the Devil’s trinity) and coerced students to attend twice-weekly Chapel on pain of expulsion.

Given my Young Life and church preparation, it’s not surprising that I thrived in this environment. What is more surprising, perhaps, is the high quality of discourse and inquiry in the classrooms I faithfully occupied — more eagerly, perhaps than most students. I sat in the front rows, made eye contact with lecturers, and raised my hand with questions so frequently that I came to understand that my curiosity could be annoying, even to professors. I acquired a passion for writing, and was soon rewarded with a string of As. Instead of the predicted C average in college, I soon made the Dean’s list (B+).

The campus’s intimate size and residential life gave most students a sense of identity which would have been virtually impossible at a public university. Friendships were intense, and several extended far beyond my college years. Professors were treated with reverence, and sometimes deserved to be held in awe. Any Whitworth student of this era will remember names like Dilworth, Simpson, Yates and Duvall with a sense of affection and deep respect. These were men who had honed their minds and lives into passionate teaching instruments. We submitted ourselves to their probing scalpels, knowing that love of inquiry was at the heart of the enterprise, and like good surgeons, they would do us no harm. Ever since Whitworth, these professors have remained my models for intellectual and moral integrity.

During the winter break, Sally and I traveled by train from Oakland, California (where she had started a teaching career) to Enid, Oklahoma, where we visited our Rude grandparents and cousins. It was sadly obvious that the senior Walter and Sara Ann were growing too old to remain active, yet my grandfather went to the hardware store every day nevertheless, aided by hired help. My grandmother seemed somewhat strict and cold to me during this visit. It could have been her age, or perhaps an arbitrary judgmental streak that was there all along. I recognized her behavior all too well, because she reminded me of my father.

At the end of my freshman year my father wrote to suggest that I come to Germany for the summer, and possibly explore continuing college overseas. I knew this could be my last opportunity to travel and live as an Army dependent, so I acquiesced, knowing that such a trip would never be possible with my own limited funds.

I crossed the Atlantic by propeller plane with a fuel stop in Greenland — passenger jets had not yet filled the skies in the summer of 1959. I arrived in Stuttgart tired after a day-long drive from the airport on the autobahn. After we arrived at my father’s house on the U.S, Army base, I insisted on taking a tram into town. I wandered aimlessly on German streets, feeling depressed and panicky because I couldn’t communicate with anyone. My childhood cultural fluidity brought me to a quick decision: I enrolled in a beginning German course as soon as I could find one.

The school happened to be in Salzburg, Austria in the very locale where Sound of Music was filmed a decade later. The summer was warm, and I fell into a brief, risky romance with the daughter of the school’s tyrannical Direktor. The school’s “immersion” study (amplified by my romance with Etta) somehow allowed me to acquire facility with the language in only one month.

I was self-conscious about Europeans’ near-universal dislike of American tourists. On one occasion I tried to pretend I was a Norwegian student with halting skill in speaking German. My German interlocutor spoke Norwegian, so I was exposed as a not-too-clever imposter. I spent several days in Vienna at the 1959 Communist Youth Festival, just to get a personal impression of the “Red Menace.” I was unimpressed by the rallies and propaganda, but when I returned to Stuttgart I learned that my visit in Vienna had alarmed my father’s superior officers. My father told me never to visit such places again. I felt that I was much too old to be tethered to a tree all over again.

Although my disguise as a Norwegian was blown, the incident got me to thinking about traveling north to the place where the Viking Rudes possibly came from. With a little research, I located a YMCA-sponsored international work camp in Alesund, Norway. After my arrival to this tiny village near the Arctic circle, I was enchanted by the small stave churches and sparkling fjords, which brought to mind the more remote parts of Puget Sound, near Seattle. Soon the mood turned to hard work — digging a long irrigation ditch in rocky soil by hand, to a depth of four feet.

For three weeks I labored in wet boots, shielded from the elements by a muddy, rain-soaked cape. My muscles began to bulge, but near then end of my Norwegian sojourn I caught a cold, which turned quickly into bronchitis. I boarded a train bound for Denmark and Germany, then passed out. By the time I tumbled off the train at Stuttgart, barely able to lift my head from the pillow, I began to suspect I was seriously ill.

My diagnosis was confirmed at the U.S. Army hospital in Stuttgart. I had a bad case of pneumonia, treated by bed-rest in the hospital for three weeks. After my vitality returned I began a reading binge on a randomly-chosen but prescient topic: Southeast Asia. I remember especially two books about Vietnam by Bernard Fall, a French war correspondent. When I was released from the hospital, I knew enough about the region to advise anyone willing to listen never to send U.S. troops there. No one was listening. A year later, after the CIA-led fiasco in Cuba, President John F. Kennedy sent the first Green Berets to Vietnam.

My nascent skill in the German language would have been wasted had I chosen to return to the U.S., so I decided to stay in Munich for at least one college term. By attending a branch of the University of Maryland in this relaxed Bavarian city I was able to continue receiving U.S. academic credits. I was blessed with a good German teacher, a challenging philosophy instructor (a French existentialist) and a small coterie of German and American friends.

Nevertheless, after making good progress in German (and fulfilling my dream of skiing in the Alps), I grew homesick for my Whitworth friends, and the simple pleasures of the small Spokane campus. After spending a tense Christmas in Stuttgart with my father and Louise, I boarded a ship crammed with Army dependents and crossed the stormy Atlantic toward — dare I call it home? Why not? I had no other place....

My linguistic talent and mid-year arrival solidified my image as an exotic world traveler at Whitworth. More significantly, my interest in medieval and Renaissance history was deeply enriched by my nine-month European sojourn. I declared myself as a history major, and made vague internal decisions about a career in either the law or ministry.

I was given several opportunities to volunteer while still an undergraduate. One of these was as a temporary minister for a vacant pulpit in a remote farming community. Each Saturday I would carefully type a sermon with elegant Christian insights — mostly gleaned from the college’s sermon-rich environment, rather than my own life. Then, early on Sunday mornings I would drive 75 miles over frozen roads, fire up the church’s potbelly stove, and wait for the dozen or so worshippers to arrive. The parishioners were already a tight social unit, bonded by farming, fishing and hunting together. This skinny Whitworth kid with his careful syntax and high-flown Biblical stories must have seemed as exotic (perhaps ridiculous) to them as the rural, poorly educated born-again Christians seemed to the kid. Possibly because of my determination, my preaching was well received. Each week, after the sermonizing had mercifully drawn to a close and the last prayers were uttered, I joined the congregation for deer hunting in the wind-swept hills and thick forests near the Canadian border. These were my fondest memories.

At the end of my sophomore year Sally announced that she would leave teaching to enter the Religious Society of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (as the Sacred Heart order of nuns is formally called.) I respected her decision, but knew that it deeply disappointed my father, who retained some anti-Catholic sentiments from his Calvinist roots. Either his duties or his aversions prevented him from leaving Germany to witness the marriage-like ceremony, in which my sister was installed as a novice. I was Sally’s only family member at the service, unable to truly participate because I wasn’t familiar with Catholic rituals. Other young women who entered the order from large Catholic families were well supported by numerous relatives. I stood alone with (and in heartfelt support of) my sister.

My junior year brought another unsought break in my attendance at Whitworth College. It started with an argument between my father and me, conducted by letter. He excoriated me for getting Cs in math and taking "easy" science courses. He placed no value on the excellent grades I was receiving in liberal arts courses. My father threatened to withdraw financial support if I didn’t choose more rigorous science courses.

My decision to leave Whitworth and escape my father’s controlling hand was impulsive, yet grounded in emotional and financial reality. Most young men are forced at some point to rebel against their fathers in order to discover their own identity. My moment had arrived somewhat later than most, perhaps, but I knew exactly what I had to do.

I gathered my books and transcripts, piled everything into the green Buick Sally had bequeathed to me when she was cloistered, and headed south to Fresno, California. There, on the strength of my tenuous connection with the Saver family and Shaver Lake, I was granted California residency status and admitted to Fresno State University. Tuition costs were nearly zero in 1961. All I needed was a job to pay for my living expenses.

By good luck (since I had no training) I was admitted to the firefighting unit based on the university campus. Dormitory life was rough — several of the guys drank heavily — but the technical aspects of dispatch, hose lays, driving, pumping and fighting real house fires in drills — all of this fascinated me. We never had a fire on campus during my six-months of service — just a few wastebaskets and prank fires. One successful suicide (a jumper from the water tower) made me think that firemen needed medical training as well as fire suppression skills. Others apparently agreed: today EMT certification is required in most fire departments.

My brief but happy stint as a fireman gives me special appreciation for my son Peter’s role as a supervisor on the ski patrol in Park City, Utah. He’s trained as an EMT, and well understands the discipline, teamwork and courage that save lives in emergencies. To an extent greater than both my father and me, he came to understand, as an outdoorsman and homebuilder, the warrior spirit that binds together men (and these days, women) when they face difficult challenges.

My academic record at Fresno State was strong; I was relieved somehow, to be free from the “hot-house” atmosphere at Whitworth (as well as my father’s hot temper). I took courses on Southeast Asian history, and happened upon a “psychology of religion” class taught by an elderly Jungian professor. While reading Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces I understood that my Christian faith, still central to my life, met a universal human need for spiritual security, and the response can take many forms. I was a product of a particular time and culture; therefore, I was a Christian. Others had made similar faith choices — Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus — yet all were pursuing deep truths that were accepted as both human and divine.

It occurred to me that this was the heresy that Christians (and probably most other religions) feared most — the possibility that there are many paths to God. Even so, the whole history of monotheism was strewn with so much bloodshed and suffering that I sensed intuitively that Campbell must be on to something. My “escape” from Whitworth resonated with my familial rebellion and spiritual emancipation. I was now responsible for my own choices in a way I had never been when I was submitting to my Father’s (or my father’s) will.

During the summers of my college years I often returned to Fresno to search for work. Most of the time, my Whitworth buddies accompanied me. We established local contacts through First Presbyterian Church in Fresno, and scored jobs as varied as truck driving, logging, janitorial work and house painting. We rented cheap apartments and drove miles through the San Joaquin Valley’s withering hear and endless rows of crops. While hauling cantaloupes in the fields one summer I learned some Spanish, and came to sympathize deeply with the plight of braceros, as migrant farmworkers were then called.

At the end of the summer of 1961 I faced a decision whether to spend my last year of college at Fresno State or Whitworth College. I would like to say that I made the decision to return to Whitworth on the basis of Christian principle or academic quality, but in reality I had an unresolved relationship with a young woman, and needed to find out whether our love was sustainable after my long absence. I patched up matters with my father, and received from him the tuition support I needed to graduate from Whitworth.

Sharon had become my first long-term girl friend after I returned to Whitworth from Germany. As we spent time apart during my absence in Fresno, I felt that I was falling in love for the first time in my life. Over time, however, my personality flaws were exposed: my hesitant, almost diffident attachment to Sharon, my lack of sentimentality, my intellectual insecurity in the company of a smart woman, my basic self-absorption, reinforced by chauvinistic attitudes in general toward women (echoes of my father’s soliloquies after marrying Louise.)

I was not alone among my male colleagues at Whitworth in erecting attitudinal barriers to intimacy with the opposite sex. It was part of the air we breathed. A group of 10 to 15 male students formed a dinner club, where we held seminars on our “unique” philosophy of “Mental Toughness.” Despite a strong element of self-mockery in all this, several members (all of whom were serious scholars) took our philosophy too seriously. I was among this group. I was disgusted when one of our most ardent advocates of celibacy chose to leave our group because he married his girl friend in a “shotgun” wedding. The Mental Toughness movement disbanded shortly afterward.

My relationship with Sharon collapsed midway through my senior year, although we maintained an uncomfortable friendship through my senior year. I had several intense encounters with women in the final months of college, including a renewed friendship with Millie Sweet, the girl I eventually married. Generally speaking, however, I was a ship without a rudder as I approached my “launch” into the world, armed with nothing more potent than my B.A. degree from Whitworth College.

My career choices had narrowed to a single default path at Whitworth -- the Presbyterian ministry. The only real choice I felt I had was which seminary to attend — Fuller, a conservative seminary in Pasadena oriented toward Young Life; Princeton, a middle-of-the-road seminary that my Uncle Buckley and other esteemed pastors had attended; and San Anselmo, considered the liberal choice for lesser scholars. I sent my application to Princeton, confident of my acceptance, because several of my friends had already received letters.

During a trip to downtown Spokane, on impulse I entered a U.S. Navy recruitment center. The idea of entering Navy Officer’s Candidate School after graduation had several attractions. First, it would fulfill my service obligation, which, in 1962, seemed to include the possibility of combat duty. Ministers-in-training were deferred from the draft while they were in seminary, but something inside me wanted to get my military obligation over with quickly. I was given a test, and told that I could qualify as a Navy pilot. My enlistment in the Navy would signal greater independence from my father, for several reasons. I had been raised to feel alternate repulsion and attraction toward the “other” service, which is still perceived as the most elite branch. The prospect of succeeding as a pilot, knowing of my father’s failure in flight school, further pushed me toward the Navy. Finally, having studied Southeast Asian history, I knew enough about the emerging conflict in Vietnam to realize that combat far above the ground would be preferable to trudging through “hell in a very small place,” as Bernard Fall had referred to the French combat experience in Southeast Asia.

A third possibility emerged in an unexpected way when my friend Paul suddenly left Whitworth to join something called the Peace Corps. He sold his car to me (how fondly I remember my battered Henry-J!) which I spent countless hours trying to repair. I thought about Paul and his adventures in a place called Somalia while I tinkered with his car. These ruminations led to one of my most capricious — yet consequential — decisions. I sent an application to the Peace Corps, which I understood to be newly-elected President John Kennedy’s quintessentially “New Frontier” organization still. I was not aware that the Peace Corps was still in the process of organizing itself.

Two weeks before I fell into formation at the long black line of college commencement I received an acceptance letter from the Peace Corps, posting me to the country of Ethiopia — a large blank space on the map of Africa as far I was concerned. I let my friends and family know that my mind was now settled: I was entering the Peace Corps. In my final Chapel appearance at Whitworth College, one of my favorite professors anointed me as “the newest light to shine in darkest Africa.” He had no idea how ethnocentric, nor how wrong, his generous comment would prove to be.

True Believer: 1954-1958

2008-10-05T18:16:00.000-07:00

On a fall weekend during my freshman year of high school, I met and befriended Jesus Christ. The occasion was a ski camp sponsored by Young Life, an evangelical group that skillfully introduces teenagers to the Christian faith. I remember the young preacher issuing a simple invitation to those of us gathered around the fireplace to meet a true friend of his, someone who knew our deepest needs, who would never let us down, who would always be with us in spirit.

As I tried to fall asleep that night, I had a conversation with Jesus, saying: “OK, I definitely need someone like you in my life. Welcome to my screwed up world. Show me how to be happy again, and I’ll do anything you ask. Almost anything.”

I clearly remember the immature, tentative quality of this commitment—yet it was the beginning of a spiritual journey that has waxed and waned, but never completely disappeared from my life. Others might judge this childish conversion to be nothing more than a wishful fantasy. I have judged it so myself, many times. But there is no denying the impact that becoming identified as a committed Christian had on my high school years and beyond.

A few months after the ski camp my father accompanied me to one of Billy Graham’s early crusades in Seattle. The idea of his conversion following on the heels of my own must have made him feel strangely vulnerable, but it created a bond between us that complicated and enriched our relationship. During the same period we enrolled together in a Dale Carnegie course in public speaking. My father’s shyness caused him great anxiety before every speech. I became the “star” of the class, however, discovering a spontaneous wit and fluency that may have been my mother’s gift from beyond the grave.

Through my Christian faith and a touch of “ham.” I began to find my identity. It was none too soon, because the angst of adolescence was breathing down my neck. The stakes were made somewhat higher by the fact that I had been advanced a grade in elementary school, and was therefore a year younger than all my classmates. While hormones raged among my friends, they merely trickled inside me.

Young Life presented me with a none-too-subtle hierarchy that mirrored the popularity contests in my high school. At first I was a nobody, but my regular attendance at Bible study, “clubs” (social evenings where young seminarians gave talks) and a string of camps run by the organization caused me to be gradually noticed and respected. My Christian friends were the cream of Lincoln High School (the working-class school I attended), and significantly, they included other scholars and athletes from much more affluent Roosevelt High School. Young Life became a micro-society where I achieved social status through imitation and identification. In a relatively short period of time, for reasons I could never quite discern, I became one of the leaders in a movement to introduce my contemporaries to my friend Jesus Christ.

I made friends outside this circle, of course—especially classmates who shared walks and rides with me to school. One of my best friends had an alcoholic mother and miserable home life that he escaped by shooting hoops in the alley, either alone, or if I was available, with me. I never developed any skill at basketball (or any other sport involving a ball)—but I learned to become a compassionate listener. Most of my Capitol Hill friends pitied me, and some mocked me, because I was the only kid they knew who didn’t have a mother.

My father and I continued our week-end ski trips, which were much more convenient than skiing from San Francisco— Stevens Pass was only an hour away, and Snoqualmie Summit (with night skiing for true fanatics) was only 45 minutes. My skill improved rapidly, and on a vacation at Sun Valley during my sophomore year, I surged past my father in ability. I also found friends with cars. With an unintentionally callous comment, I suggested to my father that he find people his own age to ski with. He did.

My father and I attended University Presbyterian Church together each Sunday. “U-Pres” had a large congregation with evangelical roots that resonated with both Billy Graham and Young Life. I loved the preaching, the music and even the Sunday School. When I was in 10th grade the church hired a youth minister (who many years later became the church’s pastor), Earl Palmer. His stand-up routines rivaled the best comedy on television, yet he had a serious strategy to make the youth program a magnet for young people throughout this part of the city. Under Earl’s leadership, and the elected high school leader (my best friend Ken) the Wednesday night gatherings swelled to over 300 kids.

By some fluke or miracle I was elected leader of the group after Ken’s term expired. I was only a Junior, still lagging behind my contemporaries hormonally, but I could sense—as everyone else seemed to—that I was thriving at the top of the pyramid. I had more responsibility and freedom than the student body officers at Lincoln High; in fact, many of them turned to me for tips on leadership.

Because I hadn’t developed any athletic ability, I was looking for a way to achieve the same popularity at school that I enjoyed at church. Scholarship didn’t seem to be an option: I was still a mediocre student, and found it difficult to concentrate in class. I was too busy at church to run for elected positions. I finally settled on the cheer-leading squad, which had me jumping in front of hundreds of screaming fans at least once a week. No thanks to our efforts, both the basketball and football teams at Lincoln won state championships, so we didn’t need to egg on the crowds.

At home, Sally and I both became so busy we rarely had time to talk. I remember a discussion at the top of our long stairway when she was a senior in college. She asked me about school and my career choices, if there were any. I don’t remember how I answered her questions, but I remember a “click” in my head during our conversation. Sally was no longer my big sister; we had both become persons in our own right, and we could now talk as equals, as friends. It was a shift that happened so naturally, with such positive life-long consequences, that I didn’t appreciate until many years later what an attitude of generosity and love this was on her part. This doesn’t always happen between siblings.

Sally’s curiosity about my intellectual development, reinforced by her own academic success, finally caused me to become interested in school. I remember only one English teacher—I can’t remember her name—who took me seriously as a student. She introduced me to magazines such as New Yorker, Atlantic and New Republic, where I discovered a world of ideas that I hadn’t realize existed. I read novels by Dos Passos and Stein-beck, and finally started to “get” Shakespeare. My teacher challenged me to read Russian authors, who in her view were the pinnacles of writing achievement. Outside of school assignments I started to devour “Crime and Punishment,”, “Anna Karenina” and “Fathers and Sons.” My readings resonated with my growing understanding of Christian theology, or in some cases propelled me into new, uncomfortable territories.

I became an enthusiastic and critical reader far too late to have any impact my 2.2 Grade Point Average. College options were limited; I finished an early prototype of the Scholastic Aptitude Test at the University of Washington with a score that predicted that my college GPA would be (guess what?) 2.2—equivalent to “C”s in virtually every class.

I wasted little anxiety on my academic prospects, however, because I was consumed with excitement for learning. In a strange metaphor (which I still apply to my life) I equated my spiritual and intellectual development with skiing. There comes a point in every run — in every turn, actually — where the skier must commit to the possibility of a disastrous fall. It is not so much the exercise of will or control as it is letting go and trusting which allows the skier to make graceful curves down steep hills. I was beginning to discover existential moments of trust that gave my life the flow and freedom I had been yearning for.

My home life shrank to invisibility as I became increasingly absorbed in school and church activities. Sally still struggled to put dinner on the table each night, but my father and I resisted with Swanson dinners and early escapes to our TV porch to giggle our way through “Our Show of Shows” with Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca.

Midway through high school my father purchased a 16-foot runabout, and I quickly became as expert on water as I was on snow. During one beautiful trip with a girl friend in the middle of Lake Washington, my father’s expensive 40 h.p. Evinrude motor fell off the transom. Except for sponged rides with friends on Lake Washington or Shaver Lake, my favorite sport was brought to an absurd (and abrupt) end.

In retrospect (and in view of later conflicts) my father’s commitment of time and money to my interests seems quite impressive. He was less involved in Sally’s life, but all three of us were spinning in our own orbits. After five years as an unmarried widower, my father was seeing women on a regular basis. He was a handsome man with a prestigious job, no doubt a desirable match for many widows and divorcees.

Once, soon after my mother’s death, I saw my father kissing a woman who had invited our family to her home for dinner. I was devastated and let my father know it. Gradually, however, I grew more interested in helping him emerge from his cloud of depression and get on with his life.

1956, my sophomore year in high school, was a year of courtship and turmoil in my father’s life. He had met and fallen in love with Louise Heinlein, a financially independent, attractive divorcee who was clearly smitten by my Dad. He gingerly introduced her to Sally and me, then seemed to pass through an agonizing period of indecision. I was mildly enthusiastic about Louise, but Sally had serious misgivings, which she kept mostly to herself. Finally he asked Louise to marry him, and a wedding date was set at approximately the same time as Sally’s graduation from Seattle University, causing some resentment on Sally’s part.

They honeymooned at Banff and Lake Louise, making plans afterward to live in an apartment in downtown Seattle. Sally moved out — or rather in stark, unfeeling terms, was exiled —and found an apartment near the University, where she began her M.A. studies in speech therapy. I had one more year of high school to complete, so moved into the downtown apartment with my father and his new bride.

This introduction to mid-life marriage came as a cruel shock for both my father and me. As an executive in the apartment building, and a woman with impeccable taste and self-confidence, Louise was at the opposite end of the dependency spectrum from my mother. I could hear her argue with my father for hours through the thin wall which separated our bedrooms. In our private conversations, my father unloaded misogynistic theories about women that both amused and depressed me. I played “the good stepson” but could not bring myself to bond emotionally with Louise. Sally’s palpable anger about the marriage reinforced my concern that my father had made a bad choice. Knowing his stubborn fidelity to principles, however, I knew that that my father would see the marriage through — which he did for the rest of his life, with courage and honor.

My own relationship with girls at Lincoln and Roosevelt High Schools echoed my father’s somewhat tempestuous relationship with Louise. In my junior and senior years I was still bothered by my hormonal age-lag, but my visibility and popularity seemed to make up some of the difference. I found it much easier to get girls interested in me than to build fires of passion inside myself. Some girls I dated were justifiably turned off by my passivity. I developed unrealistic emotional attachments to the prettiest, most popular and unavailable girls. Although I had not yet read Shaw’s Pygmalion, I was already practicing Professor Higgins’ arrogant method of distancing from authentic feelings. Only at the end of high school, in a brief relationship with a girl who had broken up with my best friend (a rebound romance), did I begin to sense the potential of mutual love.

My father’s five-year “sabbatical” from the Army at the University of Washington had come to end, but he was now too close to 30-year retirement from the Army to forego the benefits that one last assignment might accrue. My graduation from high school coincided with his departure to Germany, where he was assigned to Seventh Army headquarters in Stuttgart. Sally and I remained in Seattle. I briefly lived in Sally’s apartment building while she completed her M.A. thesis. Later, during the summer after I graduated from Lincoln High School, I stayed in the home of a wealthy friend who lived in a large estate on Lake Washington. We water-skied through the summer, preparing to enter Whitworth College in Spokane as roommates. Freedom from high school distractions and obligations ignited a spark of intellectual curiosity in me. I spent the summer of 1958 devouring Russian novels, and exploring existentialism.

Survival Unit: 1953-1954

2008-10-03T17:53:00.000-07:00

Christmas arrived a week after my mother’s death. It was (and has since remained) a bleak time of year, with my father’s parents visiting from Oklahoma, doing their best to reassure us that we would recover eventually. It became immediately clear that the Rude side of the family grasped our need for stability and support, while the Craycrofts (my mother’s brother Burr, his wife Jean and our three cousins) seemed embarrassed by my mother’s death, or possibly resentful of the price my mother’s military life had exacted. They lived only a few miles away in San Jose, but we saw them only once in the remaining six months that we lived on Chestnut Street in San Francisco.

The winter of 1952-53 was unusually cold, but my father seized an advantage from this. On Saturday mornings we would both awaken at 4:00 am, put our warm clothing and skis into the Chevrolet sedan, and drive five hours to Dodge Ridge or Squaw Valley near Lake Tahoe. Sally had learned to ski in Japan, and joined us on several weekend trips to Yosemite. But the long Saturday drives to Tahoe followed by joy on the slopes became a special healing ritual for my father and me. We talked very little during the ten hours we spent each week-end in the car together, or while we were sitting on the chair lifts. His strong presence and sporting nature were sufficient for my needs.

As spring approached I formed a bond with another adult male, Lacey, the husband of our housekeeper. He would show up on Sundays with fishing poles and walk me down to the docks at the Marina. From Lacey I learned how to string leaders and attach weights that would lower the bait to just the right depth to catch the perch swimming around the dock. Soon I was addicted, and spent many silent hours with this compassionate man, a rare instance of interracial bonding in those years. In 1965 the smooth voice of Otis Redding singing “Sitting On the Dock in the Bay” arrived as a perfect expression of my gratitude for having Lacey as a friend.
Sally’s memories of the aftermath of our mother’s death differ from mine, not least be-cause she was five years older than me, and viewed the world with a clarity that still amazes me. I asked for her recollections (especially focusing on her decision to become a Catholic). Here is what she wrote:

At the funeral I was so surprised to see that most, if not all of my classmates were there, although it was Christmas vacation. (Of course none of the nuns were there, as they were semi-cloistered and didn’t go out for such things, even their own family’s funerals.) We went up to Broadway [the Sacred Heart school] the next day. Mother Mardel gave you a card with a Hummel angel looking up, and said your mother was now taking very special care of you from heaven. The nuns also gave us a big basket of baked goods, and I have since prepared something similar for grieving families, remembering what a thoughtful gift that had been.

Grandmommy and Granddaddy came from Enid, and many Craycroft relatives as well. They came back to our apartment after the funeral and I remember having everything ready for them—coffee, cookies and small cakes on silver trays, etc. That was the last time we saw most of those Craycroft/Shaver relatives.

We had a sad Christmas, of course, but Grandmommy and Granddaddy did their best to make it a warm, familial one. We went back to school after the holidays to finish up that school year, before moving to Seattle. I didn’t go back to piano or singing lessons, because there was lots to do at home—cooking, cleaning, etc., as well as just family life and study. It was just taken for granted by everyone that we could get along without outside help, and we did.

I knew too that I would not go away for college, but would live at home and continue to do my part in caring for the family. Again, there was no discussion of this; it was just taken for granted. (It was only later that I realized that this was rather unusual—a lot to expect from a sixteen year-old.)

I think we all made a silent pact to take care of each other after that, as we’d probably been doing all along. We had our rough spots, and you may have had more than I did, but I too had my share. I do think we tried to care for each other lovingly. I know none of us wanted to be a “broken family”, although that is what we were. I remember wanting us to eat together every night with a well done, nicely presented meal. Each of us found ways to help do more than just survive this difficult time. And in a limited but meaningful way, I think we succeeded.

Daddy, for instance, treasured going skiing with you. I do remember looking for-ward to having dinner ready for you when you came home. I may have missed occasionally when I had a “big date,” but I think you usually came home to a good dinner on those Saturdays. He also loved going to church with you at St. John’s Presbyterian in San Francisco and First Presbyterian in Seattle.

Life went on as normally as could be expected. I finished my senior year with success. I remember at the ceremonies at the end of the year a nun explained to me that since we were a day school, Broadway did not give the highest award in Sacred Heart schools, the Prize of Excellence, “because we don’t know what you are like after school at home, as we would of girls in a boarding school.” I remember answering, and knowing my meaning would be lost on her, “Yes, you do not know what I am like in my home.” (I appreciated then and still do the distance I was able to put between my school and my home life, and try to respect that in students as well.)

I got the Prize of Good Conduct instead—sounds so old fashioned now!

At home we were busy packing for the move to Seattle which would be toward the end of June. The plan was to send our belongings ahead by moving van and then go on a vacation to Southern California and Pine Ridge before we drove up to Seattle.

On Wednesday of that week I went shopping, and as I was returning home I decided to say goodbye to the nuns before leaving San Francisco—a convenient time to get that little duty out of the way. I asked for Mother Mardel, the one I knew best, but was told she and almost all were in retreat, and I could speak to Reverend Mother, a woman who scared me a bit—a character definitely. I said my goodbye and simply to make conversation, I added something like, “Is there a Sacred Heart convent in Seattle, in case I should ever want to think about becoming a Catholic, or just visit the school?”

Reverend Mother Deming smiled somewhat remotely and said, “Let me call you to-night, dear.” She did, with this surprising message: “Why don’t you just go to Seattle as a Catholic? I can’t find anybody to baptize you tomorrow, but Monsignor Cantwell can do it on Friday at St. Bridget’s. It’s the Feast of the Sacred Heart and a good time for you to become a Catholic. You can make your First Holy Communion in our chapel on Sunday, before your graduation downtown, and then go to Seattle a Catholic.”

I replied that I needed to talk this over with my father and would call her back. Daddy and I were both flabbergasted at what she had suggested, but it did click somewhere deep in me. Daddy reminded me of the Catholic Church’s rather grim social history—Inquisition, et al. I remember saying it had a longer history than most groups, and that it had some pretty great high points as well—Francis of Assisi, for instance. All institutions have checkered histories—especially long-lasting ones. I wasn’t considering becoming a Catholic because of the church’s sterling social history, but because of the value it places on the person and presence of Jesus in the community.

He commented on things that sounded superstitious and wrong to him, such as worshipping Mary and the mysterious, almost primitive meaning of “Sacred Heart.” I said that Catholics don’t worship Mary, although some certainly do pay more attention to her than we ever did (or than I do even now.) And “Sacred Heart” just meant the love of God, something with which we were already quite familiar.

After our talk, Daddy called his brother Buckley, a Presbyterian minister, and they talked quite a while. Then he called me back in and said that he agreed with Buckley: This seemed to be of God, and not just fascination with the nuns or whatever. “You have been raised to seek and do the will of God, as best you can. If you believe that this is the will of God for you, you must do it.”

I can’t imagine what possessed Reverend Mother to call me with that message on the phone. It is completely unlike a member of the Sacred Heart religious community to do such a thing. I didn’t like her very much, so this had nothing to do with “doing what the nuns said.” But someplace in my being it was right anyway, and has continued to be. I can’t explain it more explicitly than that. God can speak to us in very unlikely ways. God is, after all, God.

I asked my best friend’s mother to be my godmother at my First Communion. At the little breakfast afterward, I said that I didn’t think things were supposed to hap-pen this way—no religious instructions or anything! Mother McDevitt let out a hearty Irish laugh and just said, “You’re already more Catholic than most of us. Thank God and don’t worry about it!” And I haven’t.

I went up to the Post Chapel at the Presidio to say goodbye, and told Chaplain Alexander what had happened, since I had taught Protestant Sunday School just the week before! He responded very seriously, with tears in his eyes, and said, “God bless you. You have made a decision for Jesus Christ. May it bring you great joy.” I doubt that a priest would have said that to a Catholic who decided to become a Protestant.

We each have love stories in our lives and this is mine. (As you know, I’ve had human loves too, but this is the deep, defining one, of which the others were expressions or “resting points along the way.”)

I did not want my decision to set me outside our close family circle. You know how very deeply grateful I am for our family. We’re not quite the norm I often see around me, but then, who really is. I like us, and thank God for us.

I hope I was present to you when you needed me to be. I know I tried to be.

Our trip to Southern California and Pine Ridge was another chance for healing—an inner journey we had become all too familiar with. It was painful to spend time in the mountains without my mother, but Pine Ridge had become our only home, the only safe harbor in our turbulent lives. The road trip to Seattle was leisurely; we drank in summer’s natural wonder at a string of parks, from Mt. Lassen to Crater Lake to Mt. Rainier.

By luck or compassion I can’t be sure, but the Army handed the perfect assignment to my father in his grieving condition. He essentially became a civilian, as professor of military science and tactics at the University of Washington, and head of the reserve officer’s training corps. (I learned to confuse friends who asked me what my father did for a living: “Oh, he’s P.M.S. & T. of the R.O.T.C at the U. of W.”) No more army bases, no more transient, temporary friends for Sally and me. My father rented a large Dutch colonial house across the ship canal from the U. District, and at age twelve I started to live among people who understood community and family in ways I had never known.

Seattle was a sparkling jewel in the summer of 1953. We arrived at the start of Seafair, a community outpouring of love for the city’s ubiquitous lakes and bays. The three of us enjoyed aquatic ballets at Green Lake, and joined the crowds along Lake Washington to watch the thrilling hydroplane races, where heroic speedboat drivers on occasion would hit a wave, go airborne, flip over, and emerge from the water with a wave — or some-times, as lifeless bodies. I was smitten by the city’s fun-loving spirit, and couldn’t wait to make new friends at school.
My eighth grade, spent in a dreary brick box named Alexander Hamilton Junior High, unleashed a flood of transitions that led pell-mell into puberty. My classmates thought my San Francisco wardrobe was strange, and ridiculed me until I had acquired fashion-able clothing. I joined the school talent show, only to discover that I had no talent. I was a mediocre student, usually enveloped in a cloud of Walter Mitty-like thoughts, pierced only by questions I couldn’t answer because I wasn’t paying attention. Compared to my friends, I was slow to show any interest in girls. To be honest, girls terrified me. Bullies forced me to demonstrate my courage with pointless fistfights in the lunchroom and playground.

My mother was right: I wasn’t very good at anything. But now, I no longer had her around to “love me to pieces.” Among my friends, I felt myself to be a weed, a strange intruder who found nourishment wherever he could, while they blossomed in neat rows of houses, cultivated by living mothers.

Our survival unit at home functioned reasonably well, despite my father’s persistent gloom. Sally, now a freshman at Seattle University, demonstrated skill and dedication as our cook, social host and emotional anchor. My father had a talent from making insensitive comments, and Sally had reason to doubt whether all her efforts were fully appreciated. On a few occasions her temper flared, and dishes or empty cans would fly across the kitchen, barely missing my father. He would erupt with angry words, but he never hit her, or me, that I can remember.
As the third party in this pressure cooker, I felt a desperate need to calm the waters, to become an effective peacemaker. During these crucial years I may have developed the calm, unruffled persona that has been my trademark ever since. I also learned to use humor to deflect attention and defuse conflict. My droll wit, a distinctive Craycroft trait, became my most valued legacy from my mother.

Themes in My Childhood

2008-10-03T12:50:00.000-07:00

Many writers have written about death and its horrific effects — murders, genocide, the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel and Fyodor Dostoyevsky are two of my favorite authors, perhaps because they boldly described the emotional terrain already familiar to me.

Only a few writers, however, have written about the death of their own mothers — possibly because it is a subject so painful to describe. Recently, I was given a book: “Our Mother’s Spirits: Great Writers on the Death of Mothers and the Grief of Men.” Some excerpts from this anthology provided me with a mirror for my feelings — both fifty years ago and today.

I went through a difficult period... of hating her for dying, and realizing that she wasn’t the perfect loving goddess I always remember; but lately the feelings are so incredibly jumbled, and the memories are such a scattered mess, I’ve pretty much sworn off trying to make sense of them. (Nick Davis, screenwriter)

It took me fifty years to realize that I had not grieved for the death of my mother. Had I closed part of my heart? When she died I was thirteen and had not been given the opportunity to grieve for her. I had never allowed myself to do so. I was too busy surviving to take the time to realize what had happened to me, what had helped form my behavior, my fears, and my way of dealing with the world. (Norman Sasowsky – artist and professor)

Since your death thirty years ago your presence is a film covering my experience, darkening it and making the world, the world of my life, seem farther away. Your unreality makes my life unreal. But I can’t— don’t know how — to pop you open, and as I move deeper into middle age, I wonder whether the attention I gave you was worth the effort. But still, I sense, until you are real, I will not be real. Some-times I reflect upon the women I have been involved with and I think: “It is all one woman underneath. At my deepest center, I do not discriminate, do not notice who is there at my side…At my deepest center is one woman I am responding to, tailoring my personality to, entertaining, impressing — my mother. (Timothy Beneke – writer)

I am my mother’s slow-moving footstep as she walks down the hospital corridor. I am the slow and reluctant boy who takes a couple of Mom’s things to the hospital where she will stay for the operation. And goes home and pretends nothing has happened. I am the disbelief of everyone as the news reaches us that Mom has died. I am not the pounds of makeup that hide the painful expression on her cold, still face. Just as I am not her shell that lies in an open casket. But I am her spirit walking somewhere about the room. I am the sorrow of all who watch her casket lowered into the ground. I was my mother. I am her spirit. (Gardiner Harris – newspaper reporter}

In three months I will be eighty years old, thirty years older than you were when you died. Except when I have to tie my shoelaces, I don’t feel eighty years old. I, the sickly child, have out-lasted you all… Instead of being embittered, or stoical, or calm, or resigned, or any of the things that a long life might have made me, I con-fess that I am simply lost, as much in need of comfort, understanding, forgiveness, uncritical love — the things you used to give me — as I ever was at five, ten or fifteen…. (Wallace Stegner, author)

One of the themes that shaped me, therefore, was the early loss of the only person I loved deeply, who (it seemed to me at the time) returned my love unconditionally. No wonder so few people write about this experience: death happens, it leaves its indelible stain, and we have no choice except to move forward as perpetual survivors.

I’ve made friends with a few men who also lost their mothers as children. Like combat veterans, we nod to each other in brotherhood, and then afterward assiduously avoid the major turning point in our lives. It is enough — a welcome gift— to be understood.

Boys who lose their mothers are members of an unacknowledged, invisible tribe. In a similar sense, children who grow up in military families lead lives that are forever shaped, and in significant ways distorted, by the experience. Another anthology found its way to my bookshelf recently: “Uprooted Childhoods: Memoirs of Growing Up Global.” One writer in particular, Pat Conroy, captured the feeling of a child who shapes his identity as he comes of age as an Army brat.

By necessity, I made my own private treaty with rootlessness and spent my whole life trying to fake or invent a sense of place. “Home” is a foreign word in my vocabulary and always will be... I was a military brat conscripted at birth who had a strong and unshakeable sense of mission. The military life marked me as one of its own. I’m accustomed to order, to a chain of command, to a list of rules, a spit-shined guard at the gate, retreat at sunset, reveille at dawn, and everyone in the world must be on time.

Because of the military life, I am a stranger everywhere and a stranger nowhere. I can engage anyone in conversation, become well-liked in a matter of seconds, yet there is a distance I can never recover, a slight shiver of alienation, of not belonging, and an eye on the nearest door. The word “goodbye” will always be a killing thing to me, but so is the word “hello.” I’m pathetic in my attempts to make friends with everyone I meet, from cab-drivers to store clerks. As a child my heart used to sink at every new move or new set of orders. By necessity, I became expert at spotting outsiders. All through my youth, I was grateful for unpopular children. In their unhappiness, I saw my chance for rescue, and I leapt at it.

Yet I can walk away from best friends and rarely think of them again. I can close a door and not look back. There’s something about my soul that is always ready to go, to break camp, to unfold the road map, to leave at night when the house inspec-tion’s done...

I brought so few gifts to the task of being a military brat. Most children learn who they are by testing and measuring themselves against the friends they grow up with. The military brat lacks these young, fixed critics who form opinions about your character over long, unhurried years or who pass judgment on your behavior as your personality waxes and wanes. But I know the raw artfulness of being an outsider.

Each year I began my life all over again. I grew up knowing no one well, least of all myself, and I think it damaged me. I grew up not knowing if I was smart or stupid, handsome or ugly, interesting or insipid. I was too busy reacting to the changing landscapes and climates of my life to get any clear picture of myself. I was always leaving behind what I was just about ready to become. I could never catch up to the boy I might have been If I’d grown up in one place.

In a nutshell, these were the themes of my childhood: cultural fluidity, unrequited love, irreplaceable loss and rootlessness. Yes, some damage was done, but I haven’t listed these themes to evoke sympathy. The salient fact is that I didn’t choose any of these themes, any more than I chose my height or skin color. As a child I might have in some ways felt responsible for Hiroshima or my mother’s death, but my adult self understands that these were simply the cards dealt by fate. My most urgent need at age eleven was to find a path to survival. The next few years were perhaps the most formative of my life, as others lovingly helped me find my path.

City on a Hill: 1949-1952

2008-10-03T12:08:00.000-07:00

Picture my joyful family on the foredeck of an Army transport ship, sailing beneath the Golden Gate bridge, singing with tears and heartfelt emotion, “Open up that Golden Gate — California, here we come!”

Picture me standing a few days later, being introduced to my new classmates just outside the Arguello Gate, entrance to the Presidio. My mother was at home, still moving into our quarters at Fort Scott. My new teacher stood with me at the front of the classroom:

Johnny Rude, you’ve traveled a lot in your short life. Please tell the boys and girls a little about where you’ve been.

This was my chance to make an impression. I told my new friends about my birth in Panama, a few exotic tidbits of Japanese culture, and our meandering cruise home, which took us to Okinawa, Guam, Manila and Honolulu.

Picture my mother sitting at home later that day among the boxes, taking a phone call from my teacher.

Mrs. Rude, we are delighted to have Johnny in our school, but I must insist that he stop telling these exaggerated stories about his travels.

My mother defended me as a truth-teller, and repeated the story with delight to her friends. This was a common theme of conversations in military families: we were nomads, misunderstood by civilians because, despite our humble possessions, we considered ourselves rich beyond measure in experiences. In the Madison Elementary class-room, I probably made myself seem as exotic as an actual Japanese exchange student — but this didn’t bother me. My mother, as always, was my staunchest defender.

Our family’s return to San Francisco brought other, weightier decisions with far-reaching consequences. Sally, five years older than me, was about to enter high school. San Francisco’s public schools might have been adequate (they certainly were considered so for me) — but Sally was showing signs of real academic potential. My mother, always at-tuned to social matters, had given some thought to San Francisco’s excellent private high schools — Hamlin, Holy Name, Immaculate Conception, Academy of the Sacred Heart. Because of the city’s rich Italian heritage, San Francisco’s private education was predominately Catholic education. Thus, Sally’s choice of a high school had religious implications for our Protestant family.

In the end (as Sally later explained) an accident brought her to the steps of the Sacred Heart Academy on Broadway. My mother and Sally went there to give a ride to one of Sally’s new friends, a girl who was required to stay after school for some infraction or other. During their long wait they received a warm welcome from a nun and a tour of the elegant Flood family mansion that housed the school. By the time they reached home, my mother was determined to convince my father to let Sally attend the Academy of the Sacred Heart.

Neither of my parents were at this point in their lives dogmatic believers in any faith — both came from families might best be called “cultural” Protestants. To complicate matters, two historical strains of Protestant faith were at war within the two families, a pale reflection of the war that had been waged for centuries. During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries, thousands of Anglicans and Calvinists had died gruesome deaths at each other’s hands. Virtually the only thing that English Protestants had in common was the fact that they despised and persecuted Catholics.

Religions tend to become more moderate when placed under the benevolent protection of American democracy, but it might be useful to contrast the world-views of my parents’ two denominations.

The Episcopalian tradition, my mother’s preference, had become he church of the upper class in most American towns, with parishioners enjoying the ornate vestments and sips of sherry at the communion rail. The theology was so stately (served up in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer) that I believe it had mostly ritual significance for my mother. Her personal theology was private but eclectic, drawing on the popular “positive thinking” books of Norman Vincent Peale and the Freudian reflections of her Army psychiatrist, Colonel Albert Glass.

Presbyterians, my father’s faith community, were a more austere, middle-class group. Their services featured long-winded, guilt-inducing sermons with strong emphasis on God’s predestined will, good works and tithing. I think my father’s Calvinist commitment may have been as much financial as it was spiritual. I always sensed that he believed there was a connection between God’s earthly rewards and the size of the checks he placed into the collection plate every Sunday.

Both of these belief systems might have influenced my religious development, (some-what), but the Army had prescribed a fuzzier kind of faith for its dependents. Like the other military services, the Army had created an inclusive Protestant liturgy for anyone in the military who happened to be neither Catholic nor Jewish. This was the watered down, all-purpose military church Sally and I attended.

The Presidio Chapel was a beautiful Mission-style sanctuary perched high on a steep hill beside the base’s vast cemetery. Above the pews, regimental flags commemorated the sacrifices of soldiers who had served in every war in America’s bloody history. In this awe-inspiring setting, Sally and I received our earliest instruction in matters of faith from friendly Army chaplains. Sally played the piano at Sunday school while I wandered the halls trying to find something to distract me from boredom.

My mother’s plea to send Sally to Sacred Heart met with initial resistance from my father, but a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle cinched her case: “S.F. High School Students Using Drugs.” In my father’s mind, drugs were one of the few things worse than Catholicism. I was often puzzled by my father’s extreme fear of addiction: at one point he even discouraged me from music lessons, saying: “The jazz men I played with all smoked reefers.” [To be fair to my father, the Army was in the midst of an epidemic of drug use. According to a Newsweek article (February 16, 1953) soldier addictions tripled within a year after the outbreak of the Korean war.]

One night after a family dinner in Chinatown, my father pinned a yellow rose on my mother’s lapel, with a jocular comment: “It matches your eyes.” I remember the look of alarm on my mother’s face, because her skin had indeed turned sallow, and she had been bruising easily and felt weak. The warning signs were sufficient to send her to the doctor. Soon afterward she was diagnosed with jaundice, caused by infectious hepatitis.

Thus began a series of fainting spells, ambulance calls and hospital visits that made life for all of us, but especially for my mother, a living hell for the next three years.

Hepatitis A is a tenacious virus that has largely disappeared from the U.S. due to better sanitation and hygiene. It is still endemic in many countries, however, and Japan had certainly not achieved the levels of sanitation required to protect us when we lived there. Over 200,000 G.I.s contracted hepatitis during World War II. My mother no doubt acquired it while in the hospital delivering her stillborn daughter, or receiving the butchered surgery on her shoulder.

After years of reflection, it seems to me that the string of tragedies she had endured accelerated the disease’s attack on my mother’s body. First, her father died in 1932, when she was only twenty. Then in 1943, her mother’s unexpected drowning broke her spirit. While still young and vital in 1947, my mother suffered a mother’s deepest loss: the death of her newborn child. Soon afterward, her beauty was blemished by a surgeon’s knife. Behind her for nearly two decades, and ahead of her for an uncertain future she had to face the Army, with its social rituals and unspoken (but ominous) demands on her husband, children and fragile self — body and soul.
My mother’s drinking was not acknowledged as a serious problem (even after she died) by my father and sister. Alcohol was too commonplace, both in the Army and society at large, to be viewed melodramatically as a quiet instrument of suicide.

As she grew weaker, I took to searching for the source of my mother’s bewitchment. What I witnessed from beneath her bed on afternoons after returning from school was reality — her unsteady walk to the bathroom cabinet, where her sherry bottle was hidden, and unsteadily emptied.

I watched as she drank from a new bottle each day, carefully wrapping the empties in shopping bags so she could spirit them out of the house. Later each evening I witnessed the results of her binges — her violent mood swings at the dinner table, throwing food at my father; her arguments with our housekeeper, her dashes to the bathroom, and the scar-let splash of bloody vomit all over the white tile.

Due to the alarming rise in casualties of the Korean War, Sally and I were well acquainted with suffering at tender ages. Thousands of blind, burned and amputated soldiers were crowded into Letterman Hospital, where my mother made her periodic (often long) visits as a patient. At age fourteen Sally became a Red Cross volunteer, helping desperately wounded men make toy animals. After two years of volunteering, the Army had to re-move Sally from the hospital wards, because she was “too young” (!)

I remember the feeling of disintegration within our family— we all felt it. My mother grew alarmingly thin, weighing at times only 98 pounds, despite her five-foot, six-inch frame. On a trip to Pine Ridge she dropped a heavy school bell on her foot, opening a new, gaping wound that had to be treated by an emergency clinic at Big Creek, requiring a dangerous, curvy drive from Shaver Lake. Later during this visit to the mountains my mother fainted and had to be driven to Fresno in an ambulance; then from Fresno to San Francisco for hospitalization.
My father had earlier that summer been reassigned to Camp Stewart, Georgia, and missed all this “excitement.” At age fifteen Sally handled each crisis with the same aplomb she had demonstrated beside the lake when our grandmother drowned. My sister, rather than our housekeeper, regularly took on the task of toweling up my mother’s vomit.

I looked on helplessly as I watched my mother’s unconditional love melt away like the wicked witch in “Wizard of Oz” — one of the only movies that I remember the two of us saw together. I did not expect her to die (although she seemed to have some sense that she would) but I felt the gradual loss of her laughter, her love of poetry and nature, and of course, the doting attention she lavished on me.

My father realized, of course, that my mother was too sick for him to continue his new assignment as a battalion commander in Georgia. He resigned his post, and returned to San Francisco. We moved off the post into a lovely apartment in the Marina district, in the heart of the city my mother loved more than life itself. I started a paper route, and made regular visits to Letterman Hospital, where my mother seemed to have taken up residence. No one told me so, but somewhere deep inside I knew that our little family was beginning a deathwatch.

Somehow, through her binges and depressions and days inside the hospital oxygen tent, my mother wrote a stream of letters to my father’s parents in Enid, Oklahoma. Except for Sally’s recollections, these letters are the only relics from this period of my childhood that can be pieced together into a coherent narrative. My own memories of this period of my life have always been too fragmented and painfully raw.

John says that he’s very interested in the violin. His teacher says that he is doing well, but she is being paid to say that. I am not going to force him to do it, because being forced is the reason that I hate the piano to this day. His squeaking sounds awful to me, and Red hasn’t been home enough to help. But I just try to encourage him. We shall see...

I am resting now, and the children get themselves off to school by 8:00 AM. Some-times I don’t wake up until nine. It makes me feel very lazy, but it is good for me...

Johnny loves his etchings. He has put them up all around his wall with Scotch tape. He spent the money you sent him for Boy Scout equipment. Last week he went on an overnight hike to Mt. Diablo. He came home with blisters, and fell out of a tree. He bit through his lip with his teeth. Both are healing, and he’s really being the “man around the house.” He’s not a little boy any more...

Remember Sonny, the half-wit who is son of Cliff and Linda Fields? He fell off his horse and had a concussion. From what I hear, he’s now only a quarter-wit...
Johnny is taking both the piano and violin at school. His squeaking on the violin nearly kills me, but he’s doing well on the piano, with Sally to inspire him....
Sally had a surprise party. John helped me with it, and six girls stayed all night. The week before, she went to her first real “formal” — a school dance at the Fairmont Hotel...

Our Cub Scout den, of which I am the mother, had a nice booth at the Boy Scout Exposition. Johnny and another boy were dressed as knights, and were supposed to explain their work. Of course, I kept losing Johnny just as he was about to explain something, because he was off getting cotton candy or popcorn. But we got a ribbon in spite of him....

Red doesn’t know it, but I had to go back to Letterman three times after he left. I have many good friends among the doctors. Last week I had four blood transfu-sions. It’s not fun to be so weak, and I try to be careful and quiet. Sometimes I wish I could be as happy and old as you are, and just enjoy my grandchildren...
I thought you would enjoy “Baghdad by the Bay” by Herb Caen. (As you will see, it is autographed.) I think some of his writing was quite vivid, unique and imaginative. To me, no place — not New Orleans, or to go farther, Hawaii, Paris, or any-place else — compares with the romance and beauty of San Francisco. (You can see that I am prejudiced)...

Sally has gone to Palo Alto to visit a friend. Red and Johnny are asleep and I’m in a writing mood. As for Johnny, he’s just himself. Not too good at anything, and a daydreamer, but I love him to pieces. His grades are just average. His teacher said that he has a very droll sense of humor, which is no surprise to me. He loves art, and the Mecanno set you sent him last Christmas...

Burr is keeping in touch with my four doctors. I’m certainly getting the best care for $1.65 per day. All the tests would cost a small fortune outside an Army hospital. I’m in a ward with five beds. Two are empty and the other two girls are very nice....

I enjoyed Gladys’ sweet letter and the prayers that they were saying for me. I be-long to a small group here — not exactly a prayer group — we all bring something to read that has inspired us, from any source, and talk about it. Today they were praying for me, and when Sally mentioned that I was ill at school, all the nuns and student body said prayers. God must have heard them, because the doctor said that I was just about gone. I knew I didn’t feel well, but I was conscious and kidding with the nurses. They gave me a blood transfusion, six pints — saved my life. Please tell anyone they can donate blood. .

[Her last letter? In pencil, cramped hand-writing.]

The doctors are splendid and use consultants, the best in their fields, come by frequently and suggest new methods, drugs, etc. Red has been ordered back here, so some good has come out of my illness. He was overtired and tense from the Camp Stewart assignment. Is happy and relaxed now. John goes to camp next Monday. love to Evelyn. Will write Gladys soon. Marian

In late Autumn of 1952 the doctors told my mother that she should prepare for an operation. During her brief visit home from the hospital, she put on her best clothes. With Sally to support her thin frame, she visited her favorite stores along Chestnut Street in the Marina. She lingered with each storekeeper, and bought a pair of gold shoes to wear to the Christmas West Point dinner-dance. This party, a few nights later, was too strenuous for her. My parents, on their last social evening together, were able to stay for only an hour.

Two days later, she entered the hospital for her operation. I remember helping my father carry my mother’s bags to the car while Sally, in a pensive mood, stayed upstairs, peering through the window. Two days later, before the operation could be scheduled, she fell into a coma. My father placed a gardenia on top of her oxygen tent, in the hope that she would awaken to see it, and smell its perfume.

Early in the morning of December 19, 1952 she died.

My father came back to our apartment, his shoulders slumped, her bags in his hands. He told Sally first. “Mummy died very shortly after I got to the hospital this morning, and she never woke up from her coma. I need to get back to the hospital, but wanted to tell you and Johnny first… “

My father spoke a few words, trying to comfort me, then put his arms around me and held me. I tore out of the folds of his raincoat and ran to my bedroom. “I am half an orphan,” I sobbed, struggling to grasp this profound change in my existence. After a long quiet, Sally came to hold me. Most other details from the hours and days that followed are blacked out from my memory...

Except for the funeral, where relatives and friends of my mother alighted like doves in numbers I never imagined possible. Her open coffin was a shock, but Sally had prepared me for this. We held each other’s hands in the Presidio Chapel pew, beneath the stately regimental flags and fragrant Christmas greens, and recited the Lord’s Prayer, as our mother would have said it with Episcopalian formality: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us...”

I remember the graveside service in the hillside military cemetery, with its new graves from the Korean war — enough ornate tombstones and simple white crosses to populate a city.
I remember being by myself for a moment and thinking: I am no longer a child. I have no one but myself to make sure I turn out all right. I can do it. It won’t be easy, but I can do it.

Many years later, I recounted this interior dialog with a therapist. He said (to my surprise): “Someone must have been doing something right. For a child attached so closely to his mother to be able to make that kind of decision speaks volumes about his love for her, and the love others had for him, a love that carries beyond the grave.”

As I now ascend into old age, I suspect that this moment at my mother’s graveside may have been the most precious gift I ever received from her. The energy we receive from those we love never dies, I learned. It passes to us, and from us to others, forever. I learned that day that a person who faces death, really absorbing its awful power, is capable of living each day as if it were his or her last day on earth. I came to know my mother as spirit — the spirit of the one I lost, the spirit of limitless, unconditional love, the spirit of God.

Shadows Etched in Stone: 1946-49

2008-10-03T11:36:00.000-07:00

I remember my first words of Japanese — Aka-i no ringo ri, The Apple Song – Ringo no Uta. The words (translated) went like this:

Red apple to my lips, blue sky silently watching.
The apple doesn’t say a thing, but the apple’s feeling is clear.
The apple is lovable, the apple is lovable. Let’s pass on the apple’s feeling,
The apple is lovable, the apple is lovable.

The postwar popularity of the song, which we heard over loudspeakers so often that we easily memorized the words, expressed a new optimism of the Japanese people, a determination to live in the present and an imagined, brighter future, and to forget the horrific past.

Japanese radio, the mainstay of communication in Japan (as it was in America), set about to teach the entire nation how to speak English. “Come Come English” offered daily lessons, along with a bouncy theme song, which we also heard whenever, we twirled the dial:

Come, come everybody—
How do you and how are you?
Won’t you have some candy?
One and two and three, four, five.
Let’s all sing a happy song—
Sing tra la la.

Japanese linguists, who previously had been required to prepare phonetic translations of Burmese, Chinese or Thai phrase books for the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” now turned their talents to English. “Conversation manuals” with instructions for speaking to Americans were distributed to every household.

San kyu!
San kyu ofuri!
Hau dei (or alternatively) Hau dei dou!

After many puzzling repetitions, those of us listening to these phrases gathered that the Japanese were trying out familiar, charming, expressions.

Thank you!
Thank you awfully!
Howdy (or alternatively) Howdy do!

What newly arrived American dependents discovered (to their amazement) was that Japan was neither a militaristic, aggressive society nor a hide-bound, conservative nation tied to its glorious, defeated past. In the midst of hunger and rubble, with the smoking ruins of houses destroyed by American bombers still visible in our neighborhood, the Japanese people were optimistically adapting to their new circumstances.

The “great man” for whom my father worked, General Douglas MacArthur, ruled Japan with an iron confidence, even more removed from the people than the Emperor he was trying to replace. In an attempt to be “charismatic” MacArthur (or “Mac” as my father felt privileged to call him out of earshot) worked inside the Dai-ichi Insurance building, located across a wide moat and boulevard from Emperor Hirohito’s grand palace and gardens.

All Japanese dignitaries (including the Emperor) were brought to MacArthur; he never traveled to see them. According to historian John Dower (in Embracing Defeat), during five years of occupation, the Supreme Commander of Allied force, Pacific (SCAP) met with no more than sixteen high Japanese officials. All vital information about the nation he ruled was transmitted military-style, by other Americans.

The general’s movements were as predictable as a Swiss watch: he commuted from his palatial home to SCAP headquarters twice a day, while crowds (sometimes including us) assembled to watch him give a slouched-hat salute during his arrivals and departures.

As a Lieutenant Colonel in GHQ (General Headquarters) my father was one of many Americans who were given the task of putting a defeated nation back on its feet. He worked in Section G-4, which in military jargon meant “Plans and Operations.” This was the economic branch of the occupation, where Americans who were skilled in the art of warfare negotiated with Japanese businessmen skilled in the art of black markets and Zaibatsu holding companies (complex interlocking businesses, which still predominate under new names in Japan.) I knew little about my father’s specific assignments, except that he was trying to increase the volume of shipping in Yokohama, Japan’s primary port.

We lived as luxuriously as any overseas American military family could have, either be-fore World War II, or possibly since. U.S. Army bases had not been built when the first dependents arrived. Therefore, the Army commandeered hundreds of fine Tokyo homes like ours, which had been (and still was) owned by the Yamadas, a wealthy family banished to their country estate for the duration of the occupation. Our gated house in the fashionable Shibuya-ku prefecture easily accommodated the four of us, two or three servants, two cooks and a driver. The colonial splendor of our lifestyle was somewhat embarrassing, because it so clearly contradicted the democratic values we were supposed to exemplify.

Somehow, we adjusted. My mother, who had been treated with loving respect by her Japanese gardener while she was growing up in Fresno, laughingly ridiculed the accents and linguistic incompetence of our Japanese servants in Tokyo. Bowing deeply to our cook (who returned the gesture with even deeper bows) my mother would say through grinning teeth: “You burned the toast, you stupid cow.” Such insults were never under-stood (thankfully), but our very presence must have been an insult to these proud people — who were nonetheless grateful for some form of paid employment. Keeping people from starving was the Army’s primary justification for hiring an excess number of servants who helped us to live as comfortably as we did.

The threat of starvation was real. It’s hard to imagine the wealthy Japanese we know to-day springing from such privation, but the evidence was before our eyes. Rats competed with dogs and humans to find scraps of food, especially garbage discarded from wealthy homes like ours. Midway through our three-year stay in Tokyo we acquired a magnificent dog with four white paws. We named him Tabi, after the white two-toed socks worn by Japanese. One day Tabi went missing, and we never saw him again. Japanese friends in the neighborhood told us that he had been captured by a hungry family and eaten.

In retrospect, it is remarkable that as a child of five or six, I was allowed to wander freely among the market stalls near the Shibuya train station, or poke through backyard vegetable gardens, which were numerous due to a lack of suppliers for grocery stores. As a tow-headed gaijin I certainly stood out, but I felt completely at home wherever I wandered — and I felt safe, because I was. America’s baggage of propaganda and prejudice had not had time to penetrate my young brain before I went to live in Japan. The Japanese, to their credit, loved children of any race. They must have felt some shame in welcoming tall conquerors into their midst, but I was certainly no threat to anyone. It wasn’t long before I was playing shuttle-cock during Bon Odori festivals, or inviting Japanese kids of my approximate age (my only playmates) into my house to read — nay, devour — American comic books.

I remember that our family traveled frequently to Japan’s fabled sights: Mount Fuji, the massive Buddha at Kamakura, cormorant fishing beaches at Gifu, the crowded Ghion district of Kyoto, the winter resorts: Akakura and Shiga Heights (where I received my first ski lessons). Our most significant trip, however, was one of our earliest — to the leveled city of Hiroshima. It was slightly more than a year after history’s first atomic bomb had been dropped on civilian populations, on August 6, 1945.

John Hersey’s landmark New Yorker article, Hiroshima, was published in late August, 1946, at about the same time American dependents were permitted to meander through the deserted streets of this once-great city. With moving descriptions, Hersey focused on the lives of six survivors — a minute-by-minute chronicle of how the blast changed the course of human history. While the Pulitzer-prize winning author focused (appropriately) on people, all we saw during our visit were remnants of buildings, and white dust every-where.

Freakish laws of physics had turned the city’s terrain into a giant photographic plate. On one side of a hill, where light and heat from the bomb vaporized everything, the land-scape had been transformed into a skeletal white. In the shadow of the hill, where structures were also leveled, the land retained a dark gray hue. The same effect could be seen on the steps of a Sumitomo Bank, which to this day demonstrates the awesome power of the atomic bomb. An unknown person standing on the steps was “photographed” by the intense light — and then was incinerated, leaving behind nothing but a shadow.

It should be obvious that as an adult, I now consider the deployment of the bomb by the Americans to be a despicable error. Yet it is not at all clear that the use of the bomb didn’t save a greater number of lives than the 150,000 innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki who were killed or maimed for life. I was too young to form any political opinions as we wandered through the ruined city. My most indelible impression, how-ever, was etched on my memory with the same finality as the shadow on the steps: Aggression and hostility between nations can never lead to positive outcomes. War is institutionalized madness. I knew this in my bones, because I absorbed the world’s most vivid, horrible consequence of this madness at a very tender age.

Life in postwar Japan could be tumultuous (Shinto festivals, May Day communist riots, general strikes) or it could be tranquil (swimming in Meiji pool, wandering through the cherry blossoms of Yoyogi Park, sitting beside a warm fire at Akakura) — but it was always fascinating. Sweeping changes in Japanese society were mirrored by changes in our family.

During an incredible period of several weeks in the summer of 1947, I was the only member of our family who was not confined to a hospital. Sally’s illness was the most alarming, but proved to be the least serious in its long-term effects. She casually revealed the reason for her hospitalization in a letter to Vivian Curtain in Fresno:

I went to summer camp for the first time. The reason I had a wonderful time is be-cause I never had to twiddle my thumbs. We climbed Mt. Fuji, went swimming, hiked and had a wonderful time. How is Fresno? Isn’t that an unoriginal question? Could it possibly be as hot as Tokyo?
By the way, I have polio. That is why Johnny and I didn’t go to Fujiya with Mommy and Daddy. I feel like a million dollars! No temperature, no aches, no pains, except my neck. Don’t worry. In two weeks, I will be as good as new.
P.S. Don’t worry!!!!

1947 was, in fact, the year of a global polio epidemic. Thousands of children contracted the disease while swimming at summer camps. Sally was lucky to come down with a version of the disease that didn’t paralyze her. After a painful series of spinal taps, she came home with a clean bill of health.

My father was hospitalized briefly with a recurrence of malaria, and possible side effects of mental instability. No doubt the pressures of his work were substantial; he was reluctantly placed under the care of an Army psychiatrist, and ordered to take a vacation.
Then, as seemed to happen so often, my mother was unexpectedly hospitalized. She was in the eighth month of her third pregnancy, which abruptly ended in a premature delivery, followed by the quick, merciful death of the newborn. Sally sent her eleven year-old condolences to her mother, who was staying in another wing of the hospital.

Dear Mommy,

I’m so sorry to hear about it. How long did she live? How much did it weigh? It was sure to be a girl, since the doctor said it would be a boy. Just like I said!
Tomorrow I get my tenth spinal tap. I hope you feel better soon.

Sally

P.S. I’m glad it was a girl.

My mother’s reply to Sally revealed her sorrow, as well as deep compassion for all of us.

Dearest Sally,

Of course it’s a shame about the baby. She would have liked having you for a big sister. But I’m so thankful to have you and Johnny — and to know that you are all right. You had us scared at first, but you have been such a good sport. Do you know that you’re pretty wonderful?
The baby only weighed 3 pounds, 3 ounces. She looked like you did when you were born. She was born at 3 PM Tuesday and lived until 8:30 the next morning. We mustn’t feel sorry for her. I have a feeling that Grandmother is happy to have her near her.

I’m feeling fine, but I’ll have to be careful about riding and climbing steps. Why does everything happen at once?
I’m hoping Daddy comes home tomorrow or Saturday. After all, we two are being taken care of, and Johnny’s all right too. Don’t feel bad if you don’t see Daddy on Sunday, because he should have a nice weekend at home. I’ll be thinking of you. I have a new room, good nurses, a radio and plenty to read.
I love you. XXXX OOOO - Mother

The baby, born September 1, 1947, was named Mary Rude. My parents had a cruciform marble monument placed over her grave in Yokohama’s American cemetery. Either for the graveside ceremony, or during later meditations, my mother composed a prayer for the daughter she never got to know.

Dear God,
Thou hast seen fit to bestow the blessings of another child on this couple, and in thy almighty wisdom, thou hast taken the child back into thy bosom. Please help this couple to see in this tragedy something of the meaning of thy greater wisdom, that this little child Mary came as a gift from Thee, and now that she is gone, she has endowed them with a greater understanding of thy power. Help them also to under-stand that little Mary, having been born into this world and breathed the breath of life, is not truly dead, but has passed into the world of everlasting life, where every thing and every person is freed from evil, even as this little child was.
Rather than grieve and feel that an injustice was done, help this couple to strive for Mary’s sake to do what they can to make this world more like the world in which Mary now lives. Help them to feel that, even as our blessed Savior gave his life in order that the world could see the true meaning of love and friendship, so Mary has given her life to strengthen the bond between them. Help them to do these things for Mary’s sake, for if she had lived, she would have wanted it so.
We ask these things in the name of Jesus Christ, who gave his life in order to bring infinite love and peace of mind and spirit into the world.
Amen

I cherish this prayer because it is the only clue I have (beyond dim memories of conversations about God) about my mother’s theology. It also provides some insight into her way of dealing with grief — both the loss of her mother, and her apparent anxiety concerning her fragile marriage.

Sometime in 1947, Sally remembers storming into my parents’ bedroom while they were having an argument and saying:

If you two can’t settle your problems like adults, instead of like children, then maybe you don’t deserve to be married.

Sally remembers the sound of their laughter as she stormed back out of my parents’ bed-room. Never again did she hear any talk of divorce.

It would not surprise me, however, given the stress that afflicted our family during the summer of 1947, to know that my parents were on the brink of divorce. Any such threat was overtaken by my mother’s physical decline after the birth and death of her third child. She was weakened by a strain of hepatitis that she picked up in Japan (possibly in the hospital?), a condition that she exacerbated with increased consumption of alcohol.

Sometime after losing her child, my mother started to complain of bursitis in her shoulder. An Army surgeon diagnosed the problem as calcium deposits in her rotator joint, and suggested that he could relieve the pain by scraping away the deposits. Possibly because her own father had been a surgeon, my mother went bravely under the knife, but returned from the hospital with a deep, livid scar that never healed. The grotesque wound prevented her from wearing sleeveless dresses or bathing suits for the rest of her life.

My father, sister and I, perversely or logically, rallied around my mother like passengers on a ship listing into port. Although we didn’t discover the true nature of her illness for another two years, our remaining time in Japan seemed to be for our family, as it was for the nation we were visiting, a time of determined, purposeful healing.

Because of the shadows cast over our personal lives, I’ve often projected negative feelings toward the American occupation forces, and even (for no logical reason) on the Japanese people themselves. In reality, though, historians agree that America’s five-year occupation of Japan succeeded almost in spite of itself. The military mindset had difficulty making the transition from the propagandistic wartime concept of Japanese as “monkey men” to postwar reality. Ultimately, both official and unofficial American opinions came round to the view that Japan was a sophisticated culture which, though extremely different from America, was anxious to assert a cooperative role in the world.

Many of the “experts” who advised the military on Japanese culture tried to instill a different, but equally false, idea: that the Japanese were conformists to a fault, and could be converted from fanatical militarists into qualified democrats by means of collective per-suasion. The myth that the Japanese — and Asians in general — have no core individual values, and are victims of “group-think” (the nail that sticks up gets pounded down) persists to this day. This foolish idea is more a product of American cultural arrogance than of real openness to alternative ways of viewing the world.

I was extremely fortunate to experience Japan as a child, with few of the preconceived ideas that the adults around me shared. All of my senses were attuned to the realities in front of me at any given moment.

I didn’t begin to understand how much of Japanese culture I had intuitively picked up until I started to read about Japan as an adult. By far the most resonant guide to Japanese culture for me (apart from films by Kurosawa like Rashomon) was an anthropological study written by Ruth Benedict in 1946 – The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. This important work, now considered a scholarly classic, was published for the benefit of U.S. occupation troops, who largely ignored Benedict’s advice as they went about their busi-ness.

Here are some highlights of Benedict’s study, excerpted from a review of the book by the Japan Policy Institute (July, 2004):

The hierarchy internal to Japanese groups involves at once protection and submis-sion, supported by the notion of debt (on) that individuals supposedly owe to their parents, ancestors, community, the emperor, and the society at large.
Another concept that fascinated Benedict is giri. Benedict maintains that giri is dis-tinguishable in two ways: first, giri to one’s name, second, giri to society. The for-mer is a kind of self-respect, but one deeply embedded in the notion of hierarchy. It does not necessarily mean the act of pursuing the highest possible achievement in terms of one’s social success. Rather, it is more closely related to the notion of “taking one’s proper place” within a group that is already set up in a hierarchical order. The second meaning is a public duty that one has to pay.
Loyalty to the feu-dal lord may result in leaving one’s father or in opposing him. But it is a public giri that ultimately justifies such a deed.

By far the most important notion that Benedict formulated about Japan, which heavily influenced both academic and popular discourses on Japan, is the notion of shame culture. Benedict contends that shame-based behavior involves the satisfac-tion of externally institutionalized social requirements. For this, no inner principle -- “one’s own picture of oneself” -- is necessary. Abiding by the rules and the capac-ity to come up to the socially set standard are all that is required. Benedict is not denying the positive values of shame culture. Because of the shame mechanism, postwar Japan found it easy to shed the dream of the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere and switch to a different set of performance criteria, those involv-ing peaceful coexistence within the community of (some) nations in the Cold War. This type of easy change Benedict calls “situational ethics.”

Her book explained the fanatic loyalty of the Japanese to the emperor as a matter of cultural psychology, not simply as madness: it explained the extreme militarism of the Japanese, which went far beyond that of western military training, in accor-dance with indigenous cultural rationality, not as irrational frenzy; and it explained the widespread belief in Japan that it would be victorious in the war because of its national character, which could be understood in its own right, not as a pathologi-cal illusion.

I’ve quoted Benedict’s ideas at length because I believe they offer strong clues to the de-velopment of my own character. Like the Japanese, I have a hierarchical sense of “my place” in the social order of things. I lack ambition to move upward or fear of falling downward. I operate unconsciously with a sense of on – debts owed, debts to be received from family, friends, community and government. The concept of giri has also been a subtle influence on my life, I think. I’ve never strayed from the ideal of public service – the belief that I should try to make my life deliver the greatest good to the greatest num-ber of people. Finally, my behavior has been formed by shame (fear of letting others down, or losing face) much more than by the Western/Christian notion of guilt (offending God or falling short of a personal, individualistic code of ethics.)

In summary, appearances can be deceiving. My childhood transformed me into a person with a curious internal mixture of Japanese and American values. Most significantly, the cultural fluidity that I acquired by good fortune between 1946 and 1949 has never left me — it has both enriched and complicated my life. Indeed, my curiosity about other cul-tures became progressively stronger over the course of my life. To borrow an allusion from Greek mythology (later adapted in a wonderful Japanese folk tale), my chameleon-like adaptability has often been a tempting “Pandora’s box.” Often — too often, some might say — I have reached for the most exotic box, and afterward was forced to deal with difficult consequences of this choice.

The Empire of Memory: 1943-46

2008-09-24T18:16:00.000-07:00

Not long after this horrible day, at about age four, my conscious memories start to come into focus. I have tried to be a reliable interpreter of the past up to this point in telling my parents’ story. Now I must use a new set of filters in recounting my life as accurately as I can. Each photograph or mental image comes with its own package of emotions, some very potent, suppressed for decades. Like the strangers beside Shaver Lake who told the sheriff about my grandmother’s drowning, I could, sixty years after these events, be considered a questionable narrator. I am reporting what I experienced, but what it meant to me then, and what these experiences signify to me now after decades of reflection, quite probably distort the reality of the events themselves.

In any case, you have been warned: I have entered the sometimes-treacherous terrain of memory.

One of the earliest images I can retrieve is of a tropical storm that swept up the coast from the Carolinas to hit the headquarters command of the Coast Artillery in Fort Monroe, Virginia. For reasons that are no longer clear to me, I had chosen this blustery afternoon to run away from home with my nursery school playmate, Johnny Spikelmeyer.

I remember the fast-moving clouds and the horizontal needles of rain. Urgent radio messages and MP patrols had cleared the streets; no one even saw two scared four year-olds, let alone came to our aid. Johnny and I recognized the officer’s club near our house, saw the canvas over the empty swimming pool behind it, and climbed down the ladder for safety. I don’t know how long we shivered and squatted in the darkness. I remember that I held back my tears until I saw the flashlights of our rescuers. The MPs bundled us in blankets, put us in the back of their jeep and brought us to their base, which happened to be a Civil War era jail filled with Italian prisoners of war. Later, in many re-tellings of this incident, I told people that I was forced as punishment to bunk with the prisoners all night, listening to them howl at their captors for putting children in jail. The truth is that my parents came to pick me up as soon as the storm had calmed sufficiently. I remember burying myself in my mother’s relieved arms. My father asked why I had done such a willful thing. I’m sure he was in no mood for punishment.

It’s understandable, perhaps, that my earliest memories carry with them the sharp stabs of pain I suffered as a child. Not sadistic pain, but normal childish accidents: a bite in the face from a German shepherd; a fall from a ledge when a flower-box crushed my shin-bone. I even remember my sister’s pain after she was shot, not in the flesh, but deeper in her rear, by a malevolent boy with a BB gun.

My lessons were mild in comparison to the hunger and thrashings suffered by children of the poor, or the victims of war – but they were indelible nonetheless. I learned that nothing, not even my mother’s love, could protect me from cruel, sudden pain. This is usually the first story we tell ourselves as we accumulate experience and try to make sense of life—we are not fully safe, something could happen at any moment to change everything.

Thankfully, I remember also my mother’s soothing laughter and bedtime stories. Despite Googling every available Aesop fable and Greek myth, I haven’t found the story I remember best: about Pomeanides—a little boy who confused his puppy and a stick of butter, and managed to drown one and melt the other, ending the whole affair by sticking his fingers in his grandmother’s pie. I won’t bother with the whole tale, but the punch line (which my mother shouted with glee) was: “Pomeanides, you haven’t got the sense you were born with.” Jungian psychoanalysts love to ferret out the formative influences of fairy tales. I lack the training to analyze this story of Pomeanides, but I suspect that I may have loved the fact that the child was forgiven (even while he was gently chided) for the many stupid things he did.

My mother also loved to read the poems of Eugene Field (1850-1895), a prolific collector and writer of children’s verse. Like many of my generation, I remember falling to sleep to the rhythmic sounds of a Dutch lullaby:

Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night
Sailed off in a wooden shoe---
Sailed on a river of crystal light,
Into a sea of dew.
“Where are you going, and what do you wish?”
The old moon asked the three.
"We have come to fish for the herring fish
That live in this beautiful sea;
Nets of silver and gold have we!"
Said Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.

Three years in Virginia that followed my grandmother’s drowning were doubtless a time of healing for our whole family. My father regained his confidence as an officer while he served as an instructor at Coast Artillery headquarters. The Army was quickly adapting to battlefield realities in Europe and the Pacific. As a stateside West Point graduate, my father was asked to focus on strategic (as opposed to tactical) problems. He spent a term at Yale’s War College, specializing in global post-war logistics. With Army psychiatrists now overwhelmed by true battlefield trauma, my father’s Panama difficulties, like the blunders of Pomeanides, were forgiven—and almost forgotten.

The war in Europe seemed to grind to an end slowly. In contrast, the war against the tenacious Japanese Army ended in a blinding flash—the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I remember none of the momentous events at war’s end: the death of Roosevelt, elation on V-E and V-J days, or General MacArthur’s carefully choreographed demand for unconditional surrender, and the humiliation of the enemy on the decks of the Battleship Missouri.

As a child, I remember only two things about the Second World War: my recurrent dreams of bombs falling endlessly, and my father’s sudden departure from Fort Monroe to serve on General MacArthur’s postwar occupation staff in Japan.

The end of the war was the beginning of a six-month vacation for the three of us as we waited (with some anxiety) for word that dependents would be allowed to join the first echelon of U.S. soldiers sent to Japan. My mother piled us into our little Chevrolet, and we began a meandering journey, the slowest trip across America I ever experienced.

For some reason, my memory of this trip conflates fresh paint and hotel corridors, miniature golf courses, “The Tennessee Waltz” on our radio, the Grand Canyon (with Navajo blankets) and roadside Giant Orange juice stops when we reached the end of our trip in California. When we arrived at our final destination, Pine Ridge, I burst through the door, oblivious to the tragedy that had happened just three years earlier. I cried out: “Grandmommy, Grandmommy!”—and my mother burst into tears. In the silence that followed, I realized for the first time that something horrible had happened to her, and I would never see her again.

This is perhaps a proper place to give a physical description of Pine Ridge, so the reader who’s never seen it can appreciate the pull of the place on my psyche (as well on the memory of others who enjoyed their visits there.) As a peripatetic “Army brat”, Pine Ridge was truly my only home. Our summer visits there from 1945 to 1958 (with the years in Japan excepted) grounded me as no other place has been able to, before or since.

As noted earlier, the main house on the ranch had been a hotel, first built in the 1890s, then purchased by Lena Shaver in 1909 or 1910. It became a summer home for my mother during her childhood, then was leased briefly and operated as the Armstrong hotel in the 1930s. “Pine Ridge” was the name given to the post office and general store that eventually moved from our ranch to another location (Cressman’s)—but we always claimed the name for ourselves. As Shaver progeny, we snobbishly felt that our ranch was the community’s true center of gravity.
The hotel was set back about 100 yards from a vicious curve on Highway 168, nearly five miles below the community of Shaver Lake. The 23-room white homestead sat on one side of the road; the picturesque slope-roofed red barn was nestled on the other side, in the interior of the horse-shoe shaped curve. We treated the barn as the Shaver time machine: a fringed carriage, buckboard and trunks with 19th century clothing sped our imaginations directly to our glorious, occasionally embellished past.

The sound of screeching tires (and the occasional crunch of metal and glass) reminded us that we could become hapless victims if we spent too much time near the highway. A chest-high stone fence, tall pines and a broad expanse of lawn kept young children near the house, away from danger.

Continuing with the exterior setting: a caretaker’s house sat where the store and gas pump had once been, with a detached garage beside, housing a tractor and snow-plow. Past the ranch house a short walk you would reach Auntie Minn’s cabin, humble enough on the outside, yet loaded with antique treasures. Scattered across the hillside near the house were 12 one-room cabins. Many had collapsed under the weight of snow; some were still standing, holding creaky beds and mattresses. Chamber pots stood ready beside the beds, although the cabins had not been rented for decades.

Beyond Auntie Minn’s cabin stood a large metal gate, the only opening through a fence that encircled two large meadows and an apple orchard. Between four and ten saddle horses grazed the meadows in any given summer; some years a few cattle also summered over in the pasture. In a genteel sense, Pine Ridge was a working farm, with livestock to feed, trees to pick, chicken coops to tend to and a delicious vegetable garden to keep the humans happy all summer long.
A few more outdoor amenities complete the picture: a bonfire pit where our neighbors Cliff and Linda Fields joined us with mandolin and guitar, as we all learned to harmonize to Down in the Valley, Little Red Wing, and dozens of other country standards. A well-used stone barbecue stood closer to the house. Beneath the limbs of the huge maple, a squeaky padded swing was the perfect place for curling up to read. My favorite spot, stretched between two peach trees, was a canvas hammock that could, if you dared, swing you out into the sky like a slingshot—you’d feel the ecstasy of weightlessness be-fore you hit the grass with a thud.

The piece de resistance, however, was the big house itself. The rooms held too many turn-of-the-century objects to list, but here are some of the more evocative items: a large round table in the dining room, with a “Lazy Susan” in the center for passing dishes of hot food; a player piano and Victrola, with countless rolls and records that played tunes from 1910 onward; wood stoves, kerosene lamps, pitchers and wall clocks in nearly every room; a large stone fireplace in the living room, with walls lined with books (Kipling’s Just So Stories, Mother West Wind, Baum’s original Wizard of Oz, Zane Grey westerns); a tufted leather fainting couch worthy of Sigmund Freud’s office; marble-topped Eastlake dressers and burl-grained high Victorian bedsteads; a capacious wood stove with a wood box nearby, which opened on the back porch (for loading) and in the kitchen (to take out wood for firing up the stove); a tack room with tooled leather saddles and bins of oats we used for coaxing the horses, preparing them to saddle and ride.
Several second-floor rooms stand out in my memory: the Gents’ and Ladies’ bath rooms at opposite ends of the L-shaped hallway; the cracked ceilings of my bedroom, with burlap exposed where the plaster had dropped; the Bad Room, where I was sent to cool off after my frequent tantrums.

Years later, when we were adults, Sally and I listed many more such features and drew scale drawings of each of the 23 rooms. Consider the power of memory, however: I’ve recounted everything in the last few paragraphs without consulting a single note or photograph. Every detail of Pine Ridge resides permanently inside my head, as close to me as my skin.

We must have spent a good part of the 1945-46 winter at Pine Ridge, because our passage to Japan was finally approved for May 1946. My father fulminated in his letters about “that Communist Harry Bridges,” the Australian head of the Longshoremen’s Union that had paralyzed shipping up and down the Pacific coast. The Army arranged for our ship to leave from Vancouver, British Columbia, out of the strike’s range. We piled into the Chevrolet again and began the long drive north.

My last vivid memory of youthful stabs of pain was a visit to the dependents’ medical clearance depot at Fort Lawton, in Seattle. Sitting among the gathered families, hearing the screams of healthy children who stepped behind the white muslin screens, I decided that the prospect of going to live in Japan was scary enough already. I slipped out of my mother’s arms, found daylight, then crawled under the building’s raised foundation. For an hour I ignored the frantic voices of my mother and sister. An orderly finally spotted me. His burly arms convinced me that the time had come for me to meet my awful, inevitable fate.

Wars: Without and Within: 1941-1943

2008-09-24T16:29:00.000-07:00

Two stateside matriarchs from very different circumstances worried about all of us in Panama when the bombs started to fall in Honolulu. My Oklahoma grandmother, Sara Ann, later captured the events of these days in a short story, with details undoubtedly supplied by my mother. Only my grandmother’s hand-written fragments have survived; yet, her words accurately reflected the mood of the moment.

“Yes, sir.” The major hung up the receiver and turned to leave the apartment at once. Out on the veranda, Marian rose to give him a hurried kiss. An officer’s wife must know that her needs are secondary once war has been declared.

“A U-Boat has been sighted off the Barry coast,” Major Rude said. “I may not be home tonight. Goodbye, dear. You’re the best girl in the world.”

It was a warm evening at Fort Amador. The tropical sun glowed in yellows and reds, making dark silhouettes of the swaying palms.

At times like these, Marian thought, it was good to have the officers plan everything, including making plans for their families. They needed to stay busy to ward off fear.

The thought gave her an idea. Marian called her friend Ethel. “We’re all going soon. Let’s plan a party.” Marian was close to Ethel because their children were born on the same day at Tripler General Hospital in Honolulu. Now the two of them, along with other Coast Artillery wives, would spend their last days in Panama preparing for a farewell. They would invite twenty officer’s wives. Marian would lay out her heirloom silver, then, after the party, have Teresa pack it for the trip home.

The party ended as hundreds of simultaneous parties had at Army posts across the globe; pleasant in outward appearances, but burdened by the awareness that their trails would lead them farther and farther apart. Back to whatever passed for home, back to security was all the officers could plan for their families.

Teresa worked happily, unaware that this was her last task in a home where every-thing had been just as she liked it. She packed the choice silver in tissue paper, ready to move at a moment’s notice. Marian nailed down the wooden slats of the crate, feeling more secure when all things were packed and ready.

Marian peered into the large dark closet, now empty, where she had passed many fearful moments during thunderstorms. She would hang quilts around the doors and turn on the bright light, and sit among the clothes and boxes to read until the storm passed. Thunder and bombs must be similar, she thought.

The maid left on the nine o’clock bus and Sally was tucked nervously into bed. To her usual prayers she added this sentence: “Oh, please take care of Daddy down in the deep rock.” She had seen the elevator which went far down into the mountain of rocks, where armies could live and wait.

The party lights were still burning, helping Marian feel safe, when the siren sounded suddenly. This was not the first blackout—all knew what it meant. Lights were doused, not even a candle or flashlight, then a car passed quietly by, and a voice announced: “To the air raid shelter. Captain Beal will take you at once.”

Out of each house on Officer’s Row and all over the fort, dark figures emerged. Carrying Johnny, with Sally close by, Marian hopped into the car, pretending this was a commonplace event. In minutes they found themselves groping in darkness down a long corridor with seats on each side. Sally sensed the courage and alertness of all the other families, which in turn made her feel brave. Johnny slept securely in his mother’s arms.

Minutes seemed like hours, but soon the all-clear siren sounded. Each family sorted itself out, just as their husbands did repeatedly, crossing the ample parade ground toward home.

Major Rude was waiting for them, just returned from his submarine alert—another false alarm. “There’s nothing at all to fear,” he said, then to Sally: “I’m glad to see you acting so brave.”

After putting the children to bed, the major held Marian in his arms. Each sensed that their separation was near. Pleasant memories passed through Marian’s mind—evenings on the beach, calm breezes, white sails on quiet azure seas. She knew that she would re-live this sweet embrace in the weeks and months to follow.

“Darling, there is a place for you in the Clipper leaving at five tomorrow.” The major’s voice was cheerful, as it always was when a crisis was near. “This is a great opportunity to get back to the safest place in the world,” he said.

“You decide.” Marian said with a sigh. “I know Mother will be glad to have me, and I’d love to see the spring wildflowers in California.”

“Not to your mother’s,” her husband said. “It isn’t safe in California yet. The Clipper will take you to Oklahoma, to my mother’s. When you’re safely there, wire me, so all this turmoil inside me can quiet down. You’ll be within 100 miles of the geographic center of the U.S. Out of the tropics and into the land of new beginnings! Hurrah for home!”

Late into the night, with light only from the moon and stars, they packed their remaining things in suitcases. Each time one was filled, they would light a birthday candle to see what the scale registered. The plane would carry only 250 pounds per adult, including person and suitcases. Children were allowed even less.

As the dawn light filtered over Fort Amador, Major Rude’s family made a quick visit to the General’s headquarters to request permission to leave. Then they made their way to the airfield, where the mammoth passenger plane reflected the morning light. A dark figure came.... [Here the fragment ends.]

The next two or three years of my story—for I am finally a character in my own biography—are a haze of blurry images from old photos and films. There were photos of my mother in Enid, dressed fashionably (and self-consciously) among the plain Oklahoma matrons—a rose in the desert. We left Enid shortly for California (apparently, after Japanese-Americans in 1942 were interned in prison camps throughout the West, California was considered “safe” for Army dependents) and my grandfather wrote a poem that was far less cultured than Sara Ann’s poetry. Yet it lacked nothing in sentimentality:

They took my Johnny far away
And left me all alone.
For Johnny has won my heart;
I’m lonesome when he’s gone.

As I said good-bye and kissed him,
I was fighting back the tears
For tears are not becoming
To an old man of my years.

How I loved to walk with him and sing
Old love songs, obsolete.
They seemed to make him happy
Though they were not very sweet.

It didn’t worry me at all
If he should chance to leave
Unknown to me a badge
Of honor on my sleeve.

And when he’s tucked away in bed
There’s just a sort of bliss
Thinking of my Johnny Boy
And that last goodnight kiss.

Along with memories of this gentle man’s love, I treasure films of my first steps, taken on the lawn at Pine Ridge. My grandmother Grace, with my mother and sister, became a major influence in my infant and toddler years, although I have no memory of living with her in Fresno or Menlo Park (where she “mothered” the Kappa girls at Stanford.)

The early war years were tranquil enough for my father’s wife and children, but his own “inner turmoil” (his mother’s phrase) must have reached a fever pitch as he carried out his Panama assignment without his family’s support. We know little about the two lonely years during which my father manned the big guns in Panama, expecting Japanese or German attacks at any moment. By geography and necessity, Panama was situated in the exact center of a “two theater” war. The long hours of duty at under-manned posts must have frayed the nerves of all Coast Artillery officers, who saw their careers and dreams evaporate with the advance of new military technologies. Then there was the tropical heat—not especially friendly to men with fair complexions—and the mosquitoes.

When the Canal was built, thousands of laborers had succumbed to yellow fever and malaria. New quinine-based prophylaxis was available to the troops at Fort Amador, but it was not strong enough, or did not arrive soon enough, to prevent my father’s malaria at-tack in 1943. After my service in the Peace Corps (in 1965), I visited a friend named Jimmy in the hospital. He had contracted malaria in southern Ethiopia. Normally he was an affable person, but now Jimmy’s speech was slurred, and he glared at his visitors malevolently. Recurrent high fevers were swelling and destroying parts of his brain. The fever was controllable, and attacks occurred with less frequency, but the spirochete lived on in his blood and weakened him. Although Jimmy died of AIDS in the 1980s, malaria haunted him all of his life. It’s possible, though still not documented (except through family stories), that malaria had a similar life-long effect on my father.

A malaria attack, exhaustion or an incident of mental paranoia—something of the sort caused my father to be shipped to a hospital in New Orleans in July 1943 for possible discharge from the Army for mental incompetence. The exact cause of his potential “Section 8” discharge is mysterious because the event was seldom talked about in our family, and seems to have been expunged from my father’s Army record. In any event, his breakdown was quickly superseded by more momentous tragedies in our family.

There was deep concern in the family when news of my father’s hospitalization reached California and Oklahoma. Grace urged her daughter to go be with my father in New Orleans, or to go wherever else the Army sent him.

I think I can take enough money out of savings each month to live very comfortably on Poplar Street, and keep John and Sally with me, if you and Red can go together some place, maybe another Army post. If I keep the children, you can teach. High ho! What a life! John is good—hasn’t had one tantrum. Sally is perfect and the boys are lots of help, and I enjoy them. Stay as long as necessary.

Aunt Evelyn (my father’s younger sister) had by 1943 competed her M.D. in Oklahoma and was in the midst of her pediatrics internship in San Francisco. Although she never trained in psychiatry, Evelyn told me years after my father died that she had traveled to New Orleans to try to convince the Army doctors to reinstate my father. I can’t imagine what effect the appeals of a young, female medical intern might have had, but Grace’s letters show that a medical discharge was no longer being discussed. Now my father, little more than a decade after graduating from West Point, was contemplating an early retirement.

Grace wrote from Menlo Park to Marian, who was staying for the summer at Pine Ridge:

If there’s any fighting [over retirement] to be done, I’m afraid you’re going to have to be the ones who have to do it. Red is just too crushed by all this, but I think he’s just as normal as I am, and just as capable of being a good officer as he was before this happened. He’ll be hearing from you through your letters I’m sure, but I still think he needs you there to give him courage… Cheer up, darling, it could be much worse, and it will all work out—but being in that hospital certainly isn’t helping Red any.

Finally Grace came to Pine Ridge to take care of Sally and me while my mother left by train to join her husband in New Orleans. Grace wrote more letters to Marian, weighing the benefits and costs of Red’s retirement.

Your voice sounded so tired this morning. Don’t let things get you down. John and Sally are fine and are going to stay that way, and so am I. Think of us a lot—but don’t worry about us. If Red worries because you came [to new Orleans], tell him that it was all my fault and that Sally’s college is going to be my responsibility—so stop worrying.

I just have a feeling that Red isn’t going to be retired, but if you think he shows the strain of this last month (and who wouldn’t?) don’t fight it. There is a possibility that he might not be equal to it, but too bad. The Army caused his crack-up and he is entitled to his full compensation. Maybe [retirement] will bring him real happiness. Anyway, it could be a lot worse. Red is as fine and normal as he ever was and this [retirement], if it comes, may be the very best thing for all of you. At least you can have a house and know that you are going to stay in it. It seems that Red would not advance as fast in the Army as others and get a high rank after the war. Tell him to get out while the “getting is good.”

Reflecting the frustration all family members must have felt as my father pondered his future, Grace unleashed her true opinion of the Army:

If the damned Army retires Red then stay there [in New Orleans] and be with him until he is ready to come back with you.

As August heat ascended from the floor of the San Joaquin valley, reaching our relatively comfortable summer ranch at 5,300-foot altitude, my grandmother busied herself in her vegetable garden. At seven, Sally was old enough now to watch me while I toddled awkwardly through the tall grass, climbed the low granite rocks and lunged carelessly toward rose brambles. Long horseback rides, bonfires and barn dances on weekends deepened the holiday atmosphere at the end of summer. On a warm evening, Grace sat down to write her last letter to her daughter.

I’m enclosing Red’s letter that [his mother] sent you. Red seems so resigned, and knowing him I think he’d even hate to take retirement pay if they granted it to him. But if being in Panama two and a half years isn’t in the line of duty, I don’t know what is. Mrs. Rude said the specialist in his case asked whether anyone with his complexion should stay in the tropics for more than a year and a half.

With the outcome in New Orleans still undecided, my Grandmother decided to pack all of us into the car for a day at the lake named for her father. I was too young to remember the sights and scents of the drive, but I’ve negotiated the four and a half miles of curves many times since, and now, with little effort, can see and smell the majestic sugar pines that lined the road to the lake. A short drive past Eckert’s and Ken’s Market, we had our first sight of Shaver Lake—one of the Sierra’s most accessible blue playgrounds, promising cool relief on a hot August day.

Grace’s footsteps were as carefree as those of the children who followed her along the familiar path to the beach. She had invited along two twelve year-old twins, Harold and LeRoy Christiansen, boys from a Fresno working-class family who rarely had the opportunity for such excursions. As Sally and I splashed at the edge of the water, the boys changed into their swimming trunks, and then joined us under Grace’s watchful eye.

The lake, which served as a reservoir for Southern California Edison’s hydroelectric power, was full this summer due to heavy Spring rains and late snowmelt. What Grace knew, but LeRoy and Harold could not be aware of, was that the shallow bench of beach dropped off steeply just fifteen feet out from the water’s edge. Grace knew the boys could not swim and warned them to stay close by.

LeRoy was the first to step over the hidden precipice, panic rising in his throat as he screamed for help. His twin was closer, but Grace leaped up and covered the distance to Le Roy in seconds. She struggled to subdue his strong flailing arms, but managed to drag him back to the beach with a length of rope, and calm him. As my grandmother struggled to recover her own breath, an identical cry for help came from the lake. Harold, stumbling to help his brother, had stepped over the edge. He was struggling to find solid ground beneath his feet.

Grace ran, then swam to rescue the second twin. He put up an even fiercer struggle than his brother, and then sank to the bottom, his lungs filled with water. Once, twice Grace dove into the deep, groping for an arm or chin or hank of hair.

Then everything, unaccountably, came to a stop. Grace floated face down on the water. She was close enough to LeRoy and Sally for them to pull her to shore and turn her over.

Sally enjoyed a special game she played with her grandmother almost every afternoon. Grace would read my sister a story, then pretend to go to sleep. Sally would reach over to pry open her grandmother’s eyelid; Grace would erupt with laughter and tickles, filling Sally with delight.

Sally opened her grandmother’s eyes again at the edge of the lake. Grace’s eyes stared back at her lifelessly. Delight was replaced with an image that would remain with my sister forever: the cold glare of death.

The three children stood on an isolated stretch of Shaver Lake’s beach, wondering what to do next. LeRoy was shivering with panic, wondering why his twin wouldn’t just come back to him from the deep water. Sally knew that someone had to run for help, but could not imagine carrying her chunky two and half year old brother all the way back on the path and another quarter mile along the side of the lake. Neither could she send the distraught LeRoy, who sat on a log, crying. She made a precocious decision: to tie me to a tree (Grace had used this technique to control my meanderings at Pine Ridge) and run for help.

For Sally the next hour was a blur of breathless running, begging strangers for help, answering questions, watching men struggle and fail to resuscitate Grace. A sheriff arrived; Sally remembers LeRoy and the strangers giving confused accounts of what happened, and my sister tugging on the big man’s sleeve. “No, it really happened this way....” She fell silent when she realized that no one was going to believe a little girl, even if she was the only one who saw it all.

An ambulance took Grace’s body away to Fresno, and strangers drove the children back to Pine Ridge. The caretaker, Mr. Bunn, knew exactly whom to call and how to comfort the children until relatives arrived. Sally and I were taken to Fresno to stay with friends. In another day or so, my mother and father arrived from New Orleans to make arrangements for the funeral.

My grandmother’s heroic efforts to save Harry Christiansen were noted at the funeral and in the press. Grace’s autopsy indicated that she had suffered a heart attack from the effort, possibly because she was fully clothed while attempting both rescues.

None of these facts were consoling to my mother. Marian had lost her most constant supporter and friend, her best (possibly only) defense against the inner demons of her anxiety. Sally and my mother’s friends all have told me in different ways that for the rest of her life, Marian never recovered from her mother’s death. It is quite possible, in fact, that August 13, 1943, the day of Grace’s drowning, stands as the fulcrum for each of the lives of her survivors. I was too young to remember any of these vivid events, but I had to be deeply affected by my mother’s grief, as well as the choices that cascaded from her grief in the years that followed.

Palms and Sultry Heat: 1934-1941

2008-09-24T16:03:00.000-07:00

In April, 1934 social pages of newspapers in Fresno, Los Angeles and San Francisco carried variations of the following article:

Announcement of engagement of Miss Marian Craycroft to Lieutenant Walter Allen Rude was made today at a luncheon given at the home of her grandmother, Mrs. C. B. Shaver of Echo Avenue. Miss Craycroft is a member of a pioneering Fresno family and a popular member of the young social set. After her graduation from Fresno High School she attended Fresno State College and the University of California. She received her degree from the University of California Los Angeles in 1933 where she is affiliated with the Alpha Phi sorority. Lieutenant Rude is stationed at Fort Kamehameha near Honolulu with the coast artillery. He was graduated from the University of Oklahoma and West Point. For several months Lt. Rude was stationed in Fresno, where he was the assistant adjutant at the Fresno head-quarters [Wawona Camp No. 2] of the Civilian Conservation Corps. Miss Craycroft, who sails on the Malolo on July 6, has been extensively feted with informal affairs given by friends.

Red Rude had finally fixed on the North Star of his hope for a career in the Army: the guns and ramparts of the Coast Artillery. Beginning with the Civil War clash between the Monitor and the Merrimack, and running clear through to the naval battles of World War I, military strategists believed that coastal metropolises like New York and San Francisco were excessively vulnerable to sea-borne bombardments. The only possible defense against five-inch naval guns had to be well-placed coastal artillery of even larger caliber, capable of scaring away enemy battleships and destroyers, or blasting them out of the water. The Army had dedicated an entire land-based branch to coastal defense, with its headquarters in Fort Monroe, Virginia. One of the branch’s forward bases, Fort Kamehameha, was dedicated to the defense of America’s most critical Pacific outpost, Pearl Harbor. We can only see in retrospect how flawed my father’s (and the Army’s) logic turned out to be. When on December 7, 1941 Japanese Zeros began to dive-bomb and sink the great ships of America’s Pacific Fleet—in that same instant, the Coast Artillery became obsolete.

An uncanny photo from the Honolulu Star-Bulletin shows Lt. Rude inspecting “Amy,” a howitzer used in harbor defenses. According to the article, “Amy” passed with flying colors, as did all her sister guns. The young lieutenant could not have known that his own granddaughter would bear the same name, passing his inspection many years later with highest commendations.

Following their whirlwind engagement in Fresno, Red, who was now stationed 3,000 miles distant from his beloved, could only communicate with Marian by letter. His frustration in becoming better acquainted with Marian in this awkward manner was all too apparent.

I wish I were wealthy and didn’t have to worry, but in the Army, that’s something we can’t look forward to. I really hadn’t known a thing about the Army before I came over here. I’d like to have a good time and go places, but I wouldn’t care to go into debt, as many married people do. It’s just a case of simple addition to stay out of debt—just not to buy what can’t be paid for.

I do believe we’ll have the jump on most married people. May I be so vain as to say we are a little smarter than a lot of them?

My father must have sensed that Marian had doubts, because he filled every letter with reassurances:

I have lots of faults but I’m going to correct them, and become what you’d like to have me be.

As I know you more, I love and admire you more all the time. We’ll have what it takes to make married life successful. Won’t we?

As they drew closer to their July wedding, my father’s insecurity became even more acute.

I’m the third bachelor around here to be getting married. I’ll take good care of your furniture when it gets here. I won’t open the cases, for one thing because I don’t have a house, and for another thing I might do something dumb and break something.

What do you think of marriage at this point? Does the full realization of it make you happy, as it does me, or are you a bit scared? I wish I were there so I could do some courting. I’d like to know how you feel all the time.

He ended his curious love letter with ambiguous certainty and moral anxiety, two traits that were prominent in many other ways throughout his life

We can undoubtedly count on July, pretty certainly. That’s a little over two months from now, so be good.

During this anxious period, Marian apparently had an operation to remove her appendix. Red was sympathetic, but also needed re-assurance from her about an important matter.

Have you received the ring yet? I hope you won’t think it too unusual or odd looking. I saw the work of the old jeweler who made the setting and thought it was wonderful. Not exactly perfect, so don’t examine it too closely.

To satisfy her curiosity about his work in the Army, he added a P.S.:

I figure out where the target is going to be, then tell them to shoot our big six-inch guns at them. Also, I see that the men are fed and the bills are paid. That’s my job.

Finally, on July 4, 1934 Marian steamed into Honolulu on the Malolo, with fireworks lighting the night sky. Pomp and ceremony of the Army and Navy were on full display; the young Fresno socialite must have been suitably impressed and pleased with her choice of husband. In the days that followed, Red started to open furniture crates in their Kamehameha quarters, while Marian stayed with Valkyrie Campbell, an Alpha Phi friend who lived in the upscale Tantalus district of Honolulu.

The day finally arrived—July 20, 1934. Lt. Rude and his new bride graced the society page of the Star-Bulletin with a memorable ceremony.

A military wedding was solemnized at St. Clement’s church Wednesday when Miss Marian Craycroft became the bride of Lt. Walter Allen Rude. St. Clements, with its simple altar decorations of Easter lilies, palms, maidenhair ferns and burning white tapers, was a beautiful setting for the impressive ceremony, which the Rev. E. Tanner Brown read at 4:00 P.M. Soft strains of bridal selections and the wedding marchers were given by the church organist. Col. Avery Cooper, commanding officer of Ft. Kamehameha, where Lt. Rude is stationed, gave the bride in marriage. She was attractively gowned in an informal afternoon model of white crepe with medium length jacket having a contrasting sleeve trip and collar of dark blue taffeta. All were in white uniform with sabers crossed to form an archway under which the newly married couple passed as they left the church to the strains of Mendelssohn’s wedding recessional. Following the service Lt. and Mrs. Rude were met at the entrance of Ft. Kamehameha by the officers of the regiment, and the bride and groom were given the traditional caisson ride around the post before re-turning to the officer’s club. After a honeymoon at Kailua, Lt. and Mrs. Rude will be at home at Ft. Kamehameha.

An anthology of storybook romances and weddings would deservedly include the experience of this young couple. As in all families, however, the union of two people in love provoked a twinge of jealously from other family members who felt abandoned or dis-placed. Marian’s brother Burr displayed none of his mother’s subtlety in his notes to his sister and her new husband. First, to his sister:

I am sure that Red, according to all reports from you and elsewhere, can take the place of both a brother, husband and anything else you would like. This seems like a little bit to say when I have so much to say, but you probably know what I would say if I wrote a lot more, so figure it out.

And to his new brother-in-law Burr wrote:

I have been away from home long enough now so I can write to you without prejudice. If Marian thinks anyone is a good guy, that goes for me, too. Marian is a swell girl and we are going to miss her a lot.

Marian’s mother Grace continued to send a stream of Fresno news in weekly letters. The clippings Grace sent to her daughter were dutifully (albeit somewhat more carelessly) pressed into my mother’s expanding scrapbook. She and her new husband recorded their Hawaiian adventures on 8 mm. film, which Grace projected onto their living-room wall at Pine Street, so Lena could see how Hawaii had changed since her visit years earlier. The pictures of leis, surfboards and Waikiki must have become too alluring for Grace. She booked passage to Hawaii for an extended visit with the newlyweds.

How I do miss you, dearest, but as you say, we’ll be together three months next summer, and some of these days we’ll be near enough to see each other every day. I can stand this just so long, then I will give up my job and be near you.

At some point between planning her trip and leaving, Grace learned that her daughter was pregnant with their first child. The tone of Grace’s letters became even more loving:

The trans-Pacific airplane is to leave late this evening for Honolulu. I’m not exactly anxious to make the trip that way, but would do almost anything for a glimpse of you. Some days it seems as though I can’t stand it much longer, I want to be with you so, but then I try to be sensible and happy in knowing that you are also.

I’m sure Grace’s presence was welcomed by both of my parents when my sister Sally was born on April 29, 1936. These were halcyon days: my father was promoted to Captain, Grace made a later visit, my father learned to surf with the legendary Duke Kahanamoku, and his star in the Coast Artillery was rising.

In 1938, when Sally was two years old, my father was assigned to Fort Monroe, Virginia to become assistant director of the Army’s Coast Artillery School. After only a year, he was reassigned to Fort Barancas, Florida, presumably to apply his knowledge of ballistics to the coastal defenses of St. Petersburg, Florida. With his family never living far from beaches, the 8 mm. reels my father sent to his parents in Enid or to Grace in Fresno continued to show a privileged life of swimming, boating and marlin fishing—a “Gentle-man’s army” entirely consistent with the relaxed guard of U.S. armed forces before America entered the Second World War.

German submarines were taking an increasing toll on European merchant ships, however, and the Japanese fleet roamed the Pacific at will. Strategists in the U.S. Army were increasingly concerned about the hemisphere’s most vital shipping link—the Panama Canal. Here especially (in the days and months before the Pearl Harbor attack) the Coast Artillery was America’s first line of defense. After his brief assignment in Florida, my father was sent to the real tropics—Fort Amador, Panama. His assignment: to help aim the largest guns in America’s service at the time toward any enemy vessel that dared to approach the Canal.

The Canal Zone basked in prewar torpor, another delightful posting for American families on a virtual vacation. The new assignment brought another promotion for my father, to Major—fast ascent through the officer’s ranks, even for a West Point graduate. For my mother, Fort Amador was an opportunity to accommodate to the sometimes-bizarre social customs of the Army, to relax under the care of servants, to sample the exotic Panamanian culture, and to become pregnant again.

On the cusp of a damp tropical summer, April 13, 1941—Easter Sunday—I was born in Gorgas Hospital, Ancon, Panama. I was a healthy baby, but you wouldn’t know it from the photos taken shortly after my birth: crossed eyes, bandy legs, feet splayed awkwardly, a look of intense confusion on my face.

I could not have been born into more pleasant circumstances. My mother doted on me, my five year-old sister considered me to be the best toy she’d ever seen, my father jiggled me on his lap, and even the servants sang (in Spanish) the popular song of the time, Oh Johnny, Oh Johnny, Oh! A sweet footnote: my deaf grandfather in Oklahoma also took up the refrain of Oh Johnny—in Spanish, a language he probably never otherwise learned to speak.

After a little more than seven months in paradise, my world—everyone’s world—was shattered by the buzz and blasts of Japanese Zeroes bombing Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. My father’s response must have been the same as the Army’s: quiet panic at the realization that “this man’s Army” was nowhere near being ready for real war. The big guns of Fort Amador could theoretically be aimed at the phantom Japanese fleet that might arrive any day, but Zero fighter planes could decimate the Coast Artillery and seize the Canal virtually without a fight. Suddenly, our family became plausible targets, like ducks in an arcade shooting parlor. Only this war was real.

New Deal, New Love: 1908-1933

2008-07-28T17:20:00.000-07:00

My father knew little of the privileged life of the Craycrofts and Shavers until he ascended the lofty heights of West Point along the Hudson River. His Oklahoma family had no reason to feel educationally inferior, but Allen’s social skills were acquired at some personal cost during his young adulthood—and they were never as fully developed as most of his contemporaries.

Allen and Buckley learned a bit of humility, as they toiled over vegetables in the family garden, then sold them door-to-door for pocket money. The Rudes survived the Depression not because of their great wealth, although a favorite family aphorism was: “You can’t have money and spend it at the same time.” Relatively comfortable, most members of the Rude family considered “going without” to be a normal life-style.

By contrast, my father secured his meager earnings in the railroad yards or oil fields, supplemented by his clarinet and saxophone “gigs.” He survived his college years on a pittance, sending surplus money home to his parents in Enid. The only car my father ever purchased before he left college was co-owned with two other friends. The ancient Model-T Ford was destroyed in a collision with another car as it was parked alongside an empty stretch of highway. My father, who was under the car attempting repairs, barely escaped with his life.

It’s not too surprising, therefore, that a giant leap from rural Oklahoma to the bright lights and sophistication of New York seemed daunting to Allen. In the letters he wrote to his father from Stillwater, he confessed his insecurities—but looked to West Point as a possible cure for his personal failings:

Here is the way I feel about that appointment. In my classes [at University of Oklahoma] there is the type of student who studies practically all the time, getting all there is out of their courses, without being forced to. That is the type that makes successful engineers. I know that I’m not that type. I can study and understand my lessons from day-to-day, but I do not apply myself as they do. West Point teaches a person to do that because there is nothing else to take your mind off studying.

Another thing, West Point instills in a person executive ability, leadership and self-confidence. I haven’t got that right now. I’m scared that I won’t be a success in a responsible job when I get out of school.

The allure and romance of the Army life, or the possibility of combat glory were most certainly not factors in Allen’s thinking.

I believe that the reason most West Point graduates stay in the Army is that they can’t do anything else. When I get through West Point I will be 23; if I go another year to M.I.T. I will be 24, the age most college graduates start working. I know a boy who graduated from West Point this year, then got an offer from General Motors, starting at $4,000 a year!

In a touching closing, Allen acknowledges that his father would understand the right thing to do.

I want you to know that I have never really worked hard on anything in my life, and I would like to learn to.

Then, in a P.S. to his Dad, Allen acknowledged that his mother was the person who truly made his life bearable:

Tell Mother to send my laundry. I haven’t got a thing to wear!

Allen accepted the West Point appointment arranged by his uncle (after it had been turned down by another applicant) and soon was writing letters with the dignified Eagle-Helmet-Shield letterhead of the U.S. Military Academy. He was especially grateful for having finished nearly four years of college before starting over at West Point, as he compared himself to his unprepared classmates.

I haven’t figured out yet how they expect men just out of high school to get the lessons they assign. I believe I’ll be “found out” when they start assigning lessons in math. We draw cards and go to the blackboard to answer random questions. You practically have to have the whole lesson memorized to be able to answer correctly.

My father’s life-long interest in being personally fit probably began at West Point.

We have gym every day, in which we take up boxing, swimming, fencing, wrestling and gymnastics. These certainly develop the body. I have drill parade every other day. I’ve also been going out for basketball in the afternoon.

At the end of this letter, a slightly more diplomatic P.S. was directed at Allen’s sister Evelyn, rather than to his mother:

I wouldn’t mind if you would have Evelyn make a cake or some cookies to send to my roommates and me. We are all in confinement for the next three weeks and get mighty hungry.

My father suffered the indignities of all West Point plebes (first-year students), which included demerits and “confinements” to barracks on weekends. Demerits were meted out at the whims of upper classmen whom the plebes were sure to encounter at the mess table (dining hall). One might ask:

How’s the cow? [Translation: how much milk is left in the pitcher?]

In an instant the plebe would be required to quote from the “Plebe Bible” (which they were given 45 minutes to memorize on their arrival day):

Sir, she walks, she talks, and she’s full of chalk. The fluids from the female member of the bovine species are highly prolific to the fifth degree. [Translation: the pitcher is half full.]

Walking around the corner in the K Barracks, my father might encounter a “Yearling” (second year cadet) who would ask him the time. His answer, delivered at attention with shoulders “braced” and chin tucked:

Sir, I am deeply embarrassed and greatly humiliated that due to unforeseen circumstances beyond my control the inner workings and hidden mechanisms of my chronometer are in such inaccord with the great sidereal movement by which time is commonly reckoned that I cannot give you the exact time at this moment, Sir. However, without fear of being very far off, I would say that the time is approximately oh-eight hundred, ten minutes and two ticks, Sir.

Allen—or “Red” as he was starting to be known—was able to endure some of West Point’s rigidity because he acquired privileges as a bandleader. He also acquired perspective (and inner resiliency) as demonstrated in these comments in a letter to his father:

Mainly from the glamour attached to it from the parades, etc. West Point men rank high everywhere. They are good men, no doubt. But they are military men, and they can’t get away from it. They have the idea that they have to nose it up to the men higher up, and to run it on those lower down. How far does that go in the real world?

In his letters home, Allen advised his sisters not to become too “worldly” —a concept he possibly became personally acquainted with during his frequent weekend passes to New York City. Allen depended, as always, on his father for ethical advice on many subjects.

I know you know what’s best, and I want exactly your views. I want this strictly confidential between you, mother and me.

He concluded one letter with a viewpoint he probably held, secretly, during his entire 33-year career:

The Army may be all right, but what I know of it, I don’t like.

1932, the year of “Red” Rude’s graduation from West Point, was a year of unprecedented upheaval in the United States. The 1932 Presidential election had been a cry for help from a desperate American people on the brink of panic. Accepting the Presidential nomination on July 1, 1932, New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt planned a fight against soil erosion and declining timber resources, utilizing the unemployed labor available in large urban areas. After his November election, in what would later be called "The Hundred Days," President Roosevelt revitalized the faith of the nation with the Emergency Conservation Work (ECW) Act, more commonly known as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). During its nine years, the CCC recruited over three million young men for a massive environmental salvage operation. It was the most popular experiment of the New Deal.

Mobilizing the nation's transportation system, the U.S. Army moved thousands of enrollees from induction centers to over 1,200 work camps. The Army used virtually all its regular and reserve officers, together with regulars of the Coast Guard, Marine Corps and Navy to temporarily command CCC camps.

My father and his father were life-long Republicans, but even the opposition favored the CCC (a position of popularity similar to the Peace Corps in another generation.) I remember my father swearing and gritting his teeth whenever Roosevelt was mentioned at the dinner table, but ironically, it was this President and his radical programs that bridged the distance between East and West coast, bringing my mother and father together.

By June 1933 five Civilian Conservation Camps were established in Yosemite National Park, near Fresno, California. At Wawona Camp about two hundred young men were supervised by a superintendent, Captain William. S. Rockwell, and his young adjutant, Lieutenant Walter Allen Rude, a recent West Point graduate. The men in the camp worked six hours per day, thirty hours per week on fire suppression and trail building, under supervision of the camp superintendent and foreman.

Lieutenant Rude had initially wanted to join the Army Air Force, and completed flight training at Randolph Field in Texas. A near miss and a bad landing raised doubts about his suitability as a pilot. My father viewed the Yosemite assignment as a useful diversion, giving him a period of time to choose his career path within the Army. The CCC’s light work schedule meant that Red Rude could readily spend his weekends in the nearest city of any size—Fresno. My sister Sally recounted for me the story of how our mother and father met.

During his West Point years, our father had struck up a respectful friendship with a military science professor, Col. Williams. When Col. Williams learned that his bright student would be stationed near Fresno, he advised him to look up one of his daughter Sydney’s friends, Marian Craycroft. Our father forgot his teacher’s re-quest until he received news from Col. Williams that he had been re-assigned to Fort Kamehameha, near Pearl Harbor. He had already decided to pursue the exotic postings of the Coast Artillery, and knew that Col. Williams might be able to land him an assignment in Hawaii—if he treated his superior’s requests seriously. So our father picked up the phone and called Marian.

Our mother’s recollection of the phone call was probably romanticized, but it’s clear that to her, this conversation was a rare example of love at first hearing. Al-though she was engaged to Max Hayden, and our father was engaged to an East Coast socialite, Marian ended the long conversation, put down the phone, turned to her mother, and said: “I’m going to marry the young lieutenant I just spoke with.”

Their meetings were brief and furtive, but they must have been intense. One story Sally remembers is my mother returning home far later than her promised curfew, because she and her new love had been drinking, and my father (who had not yet met Marian’s mother) wanted to be reasonably sober at his first appearance. Late at night, they returned to the Pine Street home, not knowing that they were being observed by Lena, Marian’s formidable grandmother. It was a rainy night, and my mother kissed her beau goodnight, then tiptoed up to her room. As my mother’s door creaked, she heard Lena call from her bedroom: “He seems like a nice man.”

Marian was fascinated by my father’s uniform and handsome looks, but there is a slight possibility that his Oklahoma origins caused a small stir in the Craycroft/Shaver house-hold. California newspapers and the gossip of her friends could have made Grace or Marian wary of “Okies”—the uncountable desperadoes who were fleeing the dust storms in the Midwest in the early 1930’s. They lived the life of the Joad family (Grapes of Wrath) in car camps and creek beds outside Fresno, trying to get a grip on the bottom rung of the social and economic ladder, upon which the Craycrofts were perched far above—too far to be bothered. It was clear that Lt. Rude wasn’t cut from the same cloth as those pitiful outsiders. But... Oklahoma! “Be cautious” I can almost hear Grace saying to her daughter.

If Grace was prejudiced (and who among her social set was not?) she always managed to be subtle. After Red and Marian were married, Grace brought up the Dust Bowl in the nicest way in several letters to her daughter and son-in-law.

What does Red’s mother write? The dust storms in their part of the country must have been terrible. Every day the paper mentions Oklahoma.

The Midwest seemed like the far side of the world to Californians, who basked in the bounty of fig gardens and grape arbors. Whatever assurances or romantic exchanges that occurred during Red’s weekend visits to Fresno, it soon became obvious to Fresno and the whole world that Marian was no longer listening to advice that had anything to do with caution.

Scrapbook Memories: 1912-1933

2008-07-26T09:59:00.000-07:00

The alchemy of the Rude-Craycroft union was, like all family mergers, tinged with hopes, disappointments and mysteries. However the merger happened, whatever the reasons behind it, the marriage produced my DNA—both biology and temperament.

And yet as I write this, all Rudes and Craycrofts from my parents’ generation are dead. I have only scraps—tapes, photos, letters and scrapbooks—to make the divergent worlds my parents came from seem comprehensible. My memory of my father telling me his stories is relatively clear, yet my mother’s voice is muted, except for a box of yellowed clippings and the fading ink on letters from her mother, brother, boyfriends and future husband. It is possible, however, to re-construct my mother’s life from this trail of scrap-books. In some ways the scrapbooks are more eloquent than the oft-repeated (and embellished) stories of my father. In any case, they are the only physical evidence I have that she existed.

Newspaper clippings reveal Marian’s young life spinning with the social velocity a Diaghilev dancer. As the granddaughter of a pioneer family, she had an image to cultivate and protect.

Age 11 - A photo of Marian in an elaborate dancing chorus costume for “Windmills of Holland’ an operetta at Alexander Hamilton Jr. High School.

Age 13 - Large” tea given by Marian Craycroft and Eleanor Hinch. Dining room table covered with Venetian lace over pink satin. Baskets of Scotch Broom and Matilija poppies were placed over the fireplace and other tables. In the center was a silver bowl filled with long sprays of Dorothy Perkins roses; at each side were silver candlesticks holding long pink tapers.

Age 14 - Group of homes erected this summer at Rock Haven [Shaver Lake] for Dr. Harry J. Craycroft, W.C. Miles and Dr. Arthur E. Anderson.

Age 14 - Marian Craycroft elected VP of student body at Fresno High School.

Age 14 - Miss Dorothy Hinch and Miss Marian Craycroft will leave tomorrow evening for Catalina Island, where they will spend two weeks as the houseguests of Miss Eleanor Mattei.

Age 15 - Two girls narrowly escape injury when a eucalyptus tree limb falls on motorcar at the corner of 7th and Huntington. The girls, Marian Craycroft and Eleanor Hinch, had just gotten out of the car to join a party of friends.

Age 17 - Photo of Marian as a member of the cast in the Fresno high school senior class production of a four-act play, “Disraeli” by Louis N. Parker.

Marian’s photographs in the newspaper and her personal albums reveal a Flapper staring into the camera with etched eyebrows and a knowing smile. As I’ve shown these photos to strangers over the years, many have stared admiringly at her more-than-pretty face.

My mother was a natural beauty. Her friends, in the fashion-conscious Twenties, were forced to put in greater effort to look like silent movie star Clara Bow, or to behave like a moody Fitzgerald character. I’ve puzzled whether my mother was self-conscious about her beauty, but I’ve never doubted that she had it—or IT, as this mysterious quality was known in the Jazz age. Neither did Max Hayden have any doubts. Max was one of Marian’s more articulate boyfriends (eventually becoming her fiancée).

She has dark, bobbed hair that I feel like mussing when I get the chance, but haven’t done so...yet. She might think it fresh of me. Her face is the setting for a most disconcerting pair of blue eyes. They are so expressive in one way, yet always seem to keep a secret—something that sometime might be said, but never really under-stood.

From her mouth come the most amusing thoughts. One longs to stop them with a kiss. The curve of her cheek, the color of her hair simply cannot be forgotten.

In other letters, Max lapsed into pseudo-poetry, followed by reasonably good verse to plumb the depth of his feelings for my mother. Some samples:

And I thought I liked her in blue, but she’s adorable in pink, but what I liked best was the way she called on me when she had the blues. She said nobody loved her, silly girl.

What could make her blue? She had a date with me recently—no, that couldn’t be it. Maybe I did something. If I did, I’d be sorry, but I would secretly be a little glad that I could make her blue.

* * *

There passed before me a vision —
all in blue
with trailing scent.

Pretty hands in graceful gesture
dainty hands in measured rhythm

For some small reason she laughed
the sweetest little laugh
Flicked back her hair with graceful shake
and started upon her way.

Other boyfriends clearly lacked Max’s debonair charms, but she saw fit to preserve their bumbling attempts at wooing her. First a boy named Dick, followed by George:

Dick: I am very ashamed of the way I acted last night. I wouldn’t have embarrassed you for anything. I have enjoyed very much having a sensible girl for company, not because of any personal favors that you could give me.

George: What I said about you will never be known, I’m afraid. Alas and a woe. But really, Marian, it was said in a complimentary way, and it was very true for you, don’t you know? (Signed) Your timid knife-wielder.

Marian’s brother Burr, only two years her junior, was a faithful letter-writer. His letters are mostly limited to the comings and goings of family friends. However, a few snippets from his letters from Stanford suggest that he was paying attention to Marian’s social standing:

How are your studies coming along? I hear you’re the apple-polisher supreme...

The annual Military Ball is coming off here and I’d like to have you go with me. If you do, I can get you some dances with an All-American or the president of some-thing-or-other....

Thanks a lot for the date; I surely had a good time. I think you’re the best sister a fellow could have...

Well, I went to “The Drunkard” again and thought of you all the time, especially when they sang the songs at the end. At the Alpha Phi “jolly-up” the other night everyone seemed to want to know what you were doing....

The Dekes are having a tremendous drunken brawl across the street, and I can hardly hear anything...

There is little to suggest that Marian’s ambitious social whirl was meant to achieve any specific goal. It is more likely that she lived largely according to expectations, as the scion of a prominent family. Her beauty could have raised the stakes somewhat: it is not unusual for women with attractive appearances and money to fall into a miasma of vanity. But my memory of my mother is of a mature woman who was camera-shy, and far more ready to laugh at herself than others. To be sure, she hadn’t, as a young girl, acquired the doubts or physical and psychic wounds that became so evident in her later years. It’s possible that she flirted with the power of her image, and indulged in a bit of manipulation. But I have the clear impression that her friends—and eventually my father—admired her for her authenticity, rather than for her artifice.

Another psychological trait makes an appearance in one of the letters that her mother’s friend, Vivian Curtain, sent to Grace.

Well, your daughter got away yesterday on the Santa Fe Streamliner. You probably know by now whether or not she went on from L.A. In spite of the disappointments, excitement and nervous tension, I think she was not too tired to relax when she boarded the train, and she knew that she was really going. And she kept her head through it all and planned everything out in a remarkably cool manner. I would have been too jittery to speak under the same strain. She looked adorable in her new suit, and there is some comfort in knowing one looks well.

It requires only a little between-the-lines reading to see that Marian had a streak of anxiety that ran through many aspects of her life. I can remember the “jittery” feeling that she emanated on many other occasions, which she concealed on the Santa Fe train. Whenever a thunderstorm passed, for example, she would draw Sally or me into the closet for the duration of the storm. She always made sure there was a light in there for reading or drawing. Most of the time, my mother’s anxiety was masked by a drink or cigarette, never far from her grasp. Alcohol eased her trip to L.A. to attend college. The last line of Vivian Curtain’s letter to Grace speaks volumes:

We had a hilarious time (for us) Monday night on just one highball, and wished you were with us.

My mother’s album of clippings reveals a reasonable, yet somewhat sinister, basis for her anxiety as she boarded the train for Los Angeles. One of her fondest ambitions had just been crushed.

Some background: Marian’s Fresno education was aimed not so much at a prestigious university education as a prestigious sorority. As early as age thirteen, she and her mother sponsored teas for Entre Nous, Fresno’s counterpart for the Cotillion Societies found in larger cities. Most of her album consisted of clippings of Entre Nous girls who gave their own teas, and eventually were pledged to the best sororities at the University of California in Berkeley. There was no reason, academically or socially, that Marian would not follow the same well-worn channel—clear water from a pioneer stream flowing toward the larger ocean of sophisticates in the Bay Area.

But a 1930 article in the Fresno Bee reveals that her expectations were dashed in the cruelest possible way:

Anonymous letters written by some girl in Fresno to the six leading sororities at the University of California urging them to deny admission to Fresno girls have caused a furor among the parents of the girls and started an investigation to determine the identity of the writer. Who was the writer of the letters, which were meant to blast the hopes of the girls? A handwriting expert, it is understood, has been put on the case by several of the parents and if the identity of the scribbler is revealed by this investigation further action may be taken. The letters were sent to the “Big Six” (Kappa Kappa Gamma, Pi Beta Phi, Delta Gamma, Alpha Phi Theta and Alpha) and have caused no end of gossip throughout sorority row. The letters were sent just before the rushing season and their evident purpose was to keep Fresno girls out of these houses.

Details of this incident were never explained to me, other than my mother’s vague references to her disappointment at not pledging the Kappa house at Berkeley. We can only guess at the identity of the girl who wrote the notes, what she said, or who might have been affected by her poison pen. All we know as family history is that Marian attended Berkeley for one year, didn’t pledge any sorority, then transferred to UCLA in Los Angeles for her final two years of college.

Today I think of UCLA as a giant institution, which it most certainly is. But in 1931, when my mother transferred there, the university had only in the previous year moved its campus from Vermont Avenue in North Hollywood (today the site of Los Angeles Community College) to the 419-acre ravine in Westwood that it now dominates. There were only four buildings at the center of the campus. The “university” did not offer a Master’s Degree until 1933, or a Ph.D. until 1938, long after my mother had graduated.

My mother pledged Alpha Phi sorority and settled into life as a young member of a far more conformist, homogeneous Los Angeles than today’s metropolis. Nearby Westwood theaters were showing films such as Murders in the Rue Morgue with Bela Lugosi, or Pack Up Your Troubles with Stanley Laurel and Oliver Hardy. Gene Autrey was beginning to popularize “honky tonk” music, and Duke Ellington was giving jazz a new face with “swing.” The Los Angeles Theater, built at a cost of $1 million in 1931, was the last major theater built on Broadway in downtown L.A. This French Baroque palace, with central staircase and gold brocade drapes opened with the premiere of Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights.

Marian arrived each semester by train at Union Station, which is still preserved as an art-deco architectural jewel. Unless her friends picked her up in their motorcars, she had easy access from downtown to the west side by Red Cars—a sensible mode of electric transport that auto makers were then in the process of undermining, through buy-outs and bribes to make space for freeways. On many occasions Marian might have hired a taxi; there is little to suggest that the Craycrofts lost much of their fortune in the Wall Street Crash two years previously.

The Alpha Phi house on the UCLA campus was built shortly before Marian moved in, and still stands on Hildegard Avenue—“fraternity row.” Other fraternities and sororities pledged African-Americans students (Delta Sigma Theta) and Asian-Americans (Chi Alpha Delta). In light of this racial diversity in her own time it is surprising to read the following L.A. Times description of an Alpha Phi “triumph”:

Alpha Phi places Second in Hi-Jinks with its artistic production, “The Sacrifice,” which portrayed a ceremonial rite of Africans dancing to the musical sounds of a monotonous tom-tom, the “black men” fiendishly gloating over their sacrifice of a beautiful white girl.

Some sorority high jinks were more benign, as another Times article attests:

Hildegard Avenue [sorority] houses have been the scenes of many holiday parties, but members have not forgotten those less fortunate, and nearly every house along the row has adopted one or more poor families in Los Angeles. Where there were children in the family, these young Fairy Godmothers provided generously of toys and clothing.

Marian Craycroft is listed among the sorority sisters who were “particularly active” in such charitable activities. No record survives of her dramatic role (if any) in “The Sacrifice.”

In 1932 a shattering event hit my mother that was never recorded in Marian’s scrapbook or letters: her father, Dr. Harry Judge Craycroft, died of pneumonia. With such a glaring blank appearing in the otherwise detailed record of her life, I pleaded for more family stories from my cousins, Peter and John Craycroft. Their e-mail responses put this sad event into perspective. First, Peter’s reply:

Harry was extremely generous. He was gregarious and liked to make bets in the context of daily life. One example: he was always betting double or nothing for a pair of new shoes with the storeowner, a long-time friend. He seemed to enjoy losing as much as winning.

Harry studied surgery in Germany after the war. He had discovered in the midst of combat casualties from both sides that the Germans were far ahead in their surgical techniques. He taught what he had learned to surgeons in the U.S. upon his return, free of charge.

Harry took great pride in his Pierce Arrow. Imagine Harry, with family in tow, grinning at the wheel, flying up the intense grade to Shaver, over-heated cars strewn in his wake.

Obedient to Lena (it was not easy!), he was deeply in love with Grace, giving to his children (to a fault) but distracted by his clients needs and still tormented by the war.

Keep in mind that Harry and Burr need to be seen in the context of their outstanding contributions as Family General Practitioners. My father was one also. As children we were taught to always be prepared to defer to the larger family, our father’s patients. Being a GP was not a job; it was a calling. Doctors carried huge burdens. They worked very, very hard. Bone-crushingly hard.

I, for one, completely forgive Harry for what distracting pleasures he may have taken.

A yellow newspaper clipping from 1919 or 1920, saved by Aunt Franke, was among John Craycroft’s collection of family memorabilia.

Major Harry J. Craycroft, tall, sinuous and sunburned, is back from overseas, full of interest in his experience of two years of service in Uncle Sam’s uniform. He generalizes his impressions with a hearty, “the Army treated me right.”

Dr. Craycroft was operating surgeon at Camp Fremont. He received several promotions that caused him to go overseas in October, 1918 with the rank of captain. He was stationed at Periguem with base hospital unit No. 95. His responsibilities increased with his appointment to chief of the surgical staff and later to the commanding officer of the hospital, whereupon he received a major’s commission. Five thousand patients were treated at this hospital, including a number of German prisoners.

Major Craycroft spoke highly of the treatment given to American prisoners who, after the Armistice, were transferred from German hospitals to Periguem. Their surgical treatment had been fine, he said, but from lack of proper food they were all thin.

The lengthy article went on the describe the first Armistice Day exercises, as French and American survivors planted flags on graves in their respective cemeteries. Offered the chance to fly over the grim, silent battlefields by air, Harry turned down the offer down in order to tour through Brest and Chateau Thierry (how else?) by motorcar.

John Craycroft elaborated on how Harry purchased a car after the war.

Dad told me that Harry was driving in Fresno in his old Lincoln when the engine started to miss and knock as it threw a rod. He pulled to the curb and walked a few blocks to the Pierce Arrow dealer, bought a new touring car and drove home.

Marian was in her junior year in college when her father died. I’m sure that she went to Fresno for his funeral and grieved with the family at Pine Ridge during the summer be-fore returning to UCLA for her senior year. My cousins duly noted Harry’s intellectual curiosity, impulsiveness and gregarious nature. These can be traits that endear a person to strangers, but sometimes alienate family members who long for a more intimate relationship. I suspect that Harry’s “giving to a fault” to his children and his penchant for “distracting pleasures” might offer clues to a less sunny side to his temperament. In any case, Harry’s hard work came to an abrupt, premature end in 1934. Surviving members of his family moved on with their lives, leaving few mentions of him in their numerous letters, either before or after his death.

Hardware and Shakespeare: 1876-1932

2008-07-25T09:22:00.000-07:00

My patriarchal legacy begins at Council Grove, Kansas, circa 1876—the year my paternal grandfather Walter H. Rude was born. The Kaw Indians had been forcibly removed to Oklahoma only three years earlier. Established in 1823 as a rendezvous site between French trappers and Indians, the Neosho River village of Council Grove became the busiest trading post on the Santa Fe Trail between Independence and Santa Fe. In this rich prairie soil, Parley Lathrop Rude had established a prosperous farm with his young wife. The couple had two young children when Parley choked to death on a piece of meat in 1881. He was only 40 years old.

The young widow soon married John Stephens, who welcomed his four-year-old stepson Walter and younger sister Cordelia into the established Stephens brood of two sons and a daughter. The Stephens clan meandered through some of the West’s roughest mining towns in the same decades that C.B. Shaver was establishing his fortune in California. Instead of working with lumber, young Walter grew up learning how to collect, tan and sell animal hides—a smelly, disreputable occupation. His mentor in business, and in life generally, was his stepfather, “Uncle John” Stephens. Moving from Council Grove to Gunnison and Cripple Creek, Colorado, then for several years to California, Walter received an itinerant’s education. He learned the art of grafting fruit trees while living near Chula Vista, California. While his family worked the orange groves, Walter attended a year or two of college.

When he returned to Cripple Creek, Colorado in 1898, Walter barely escaped death when drunken cowboys shot up the cabin in which he was staying. After years of peddling hides and pencils, Uncle John and his stepson bought a covered wagon. They determined that the only way to support the Stephens clan was to carry hides and freight to the richest town in the West—Fort Worth, Texas. Walter and Uncle John set out in the Spring of 1905, traveling 20 miles a day from farm to farm.

Knowing that their supplies and money wouldn’t take them all the way to Fort Worth, they stopped frequently to provide music for ranchers. They exchanged their rambunctious guitar and fiddle tunes for board, room and oats for the mules. Out of desperation, young Walter honed his musical gift. The same gift would delight (and occasionally feed) his progeny over several generations.

When they entered the Oklahoma panhandle, the weary travelers were entering territory that had recently been transformed by one of the wildest experiments ever attempted by the U.S. government. Known as the “Cherokee Strip,” this portion of northern Oklahoma had been formally ceded to Indians by treaty in 1828. During the Indian wars that ensued throughout the West, defeated tribes were “removed” to this region, beginning with the infamous Cherokee “Trail of Tears” in 1838-39.

After the Civil War, an over-supply of beef in Texas led to massive incursions through Indian treaty lands by cattlemen, who were intent on driving their herds North to rail markets in Kansas and Missouri. Valuing the lush pasturelands in Oklahoma, cattlemen leased six million acres from Indians, becoming the area’s first white settlers. Government agents in Oklahoma territory knew it would only be a matter of time before homesteaders would follow in the footsteps of cattle ranchers. Range wars were usually the result of this volatile economic mix.

Trying to avoid the violence of earlier homesteading stampedes, the U.S. Cavalry and Department of Interior set up land offices and established a date—September 19, 1889. At the noontime firing of pistols by troopers, 100,000 determined settlers would “run” to stake over 50,000 40-acre claims on former Indian and ranch land. Those who jumped the gun were called “sooners”—a nickname which Oklahomans later adopted wholesale as their nickname.

Only a few days after the Run, the town of Enid, Oklahoma was fully populated and in-. Twelve years later, Walter and Uncle John entered Enid in a relentless downpour. Their wagon was too full of hides to pull through the mud. After waiting for three weeks for the rain to stop, they decided to settle in the prosperous little Garfield County seat.

Uncle John traveled back to Colorado to fetch the family, and Walter stayed in Enid to establish a hide-trading business. He later opened a pencil factory, and finally Rude Hardware Store, which specialized in farm and ranching implements.

The doors of Rude & Co. Hardware remained open for business for the next 60 years. Walter’s resolute character and intelligence is evident in the fact that the store bore his name. It could have been known as Stephens and Sons, because Uncle John and his sons all worked at the store over the years. But success in business was Walter’s gift alone, and all acknowledged that as the family’s chief provider, he was entitled to name the store for himself.

Soon after the Stephens family settled in Enid, Walter Rude met Sara Ann Buckley, a recent graduate of “normal school” (the name given to teachers’ colleges in those days). Although she was the refined daughter of English immigrants, Sara Ann must have been an adventurer in her youth. Her spirit can be inferred from the adventurous careers of her children and grandchildren. Whatever impelled Sara to leave her prosperous home in Kalamazoo, Michigan to travel to wild and wooly Oklahoma, she instantly fell in love with the practical hardwareman. The prim Presbyterian couple never discussed details of their courtship, but it seems likely that the well-educated teacher, whose thoughts were fixed on poetry, flowers and Shakespeare, impressed the handsome, earthy merchant, who was already gaining a reputation for honesty. They were married in 1906.

The couple had two children in fairly rapid sequence, beginning with Buckley in 1907. My father “Allen” (as he was known in the family, although his given name was Walter) was born 18 months later. After a break of four years, Evelyn was born, then five years later, Gladys. Buckley (my uncle) and Allen (my father) enjoyed a healthy rivalry that sometimes was transformed into mischievous teamwork. They were fascinated by Enid’s streetcar tracks, and enjoyed playing “chicken” by sitting on the rails, to the conductor’s great annoyance. After several forced removals from the tracks, the boys’ parents resorted to tying their overalls to a tree, so they couldn’t wander beyond their yard. When they were older (and free from restraints) the two redheads “graduated” to games of chicken on the Santa Fe railroad tracks behind the Rude & Co. hardware store.

Despite such risky behavior, the Rude-Stephens clan grew larger through the years. Thanksgiving and Christmas meals were times for intellectual display, with children and grown-ups alike sitting around the big round table, required to recite from memory a poem, Bible verse or bit of Shakespeare before they could eat. After dinner, everyone took out a musical instruments—Buckley played violin, Evelyn piano, Gladys cello and Allen several instruments—guitar, saxophone, clarinet and trumpet. Lessons improved the musical ability of each child. Gladys won first place in the state cello competition, and Allen was playing in dance orchestras by the age of fourteen.

Eventually Allen became known as a virtuoso on the clarinet. His gift (and laborious effort to teach himself to read music) landed him jobs in military bands and jazz combos. His ability to improvise was especially well matched to then-popular Dixieland and Swing, which emphasized solos by the likes of Benny Goodman and Bix Beiderbecke. Made miserable by hazing of upper-classmen during his first year at West Point, “Red” Rude formed and became leader of West Point’s popular dance orchestra. He was rewarded with meals at the athletes’ training table, where food was generous and rules were less strict. He also made frequent Saturday night sojourns to New York City, where he witnessed the “wild side” of the Jazz Age.

Allen joined the Army with considerable reluctance, and his ambivalent feelings toward authority were difficult to conceal during his 33-year military career. He entered the National Guard at age 15, only because he wanted to learn to play the clarinet. He also graduated from high school at 15. Viewed by his teachers a prodigy in mathematics, he had learned to read before kindergarten, and was promoted to third grade when he was only six. He attended Wentworth military school in Leavenworth, Kansas—but hated the marching and discipline. During the next two years while he attended Oklahoma A. & M. and University of Oklahoma, Allen steadfastly avoided ROTC.

Allen’s appointment to West Point was arranged without his knowledge by his uncle; he accepted it only out of a sense of family obligation. At the Academy Allen “majored” in making music, although his official major was engineering. It was the Jazz Age, after all, and he was doing more than listening to lively rhythms—he was literally marching to their tunes.

Tragically, the world of music (and all sound) disappeared from the life of Allen’s father, Walter. The gentle man lost nearly all his hearing while in his thirties, decades before electronic hearing aids became available. The Rude children and Sara Ann learned to shout simple sentences repeatedly so Walter could catch their meaning. There was no escaping the family sense of annoyance growing up with “Dad.” Even after he started wearing a hearing aid, family members had to carry on conversations with him at top volume.

Yet in his silent way, Walter Rude became for his children a paragon of honesty and perseverance. His stepfather Uncle John and stepbrothers Robert and “B” Stephens were worse than useless as business partners. Rude & Co. (Walter and his few employees) kept the Stephens family alive after several of their schemes for financial independence failed during and after the Depression. By Oklahoma standards, my grandfather became relatively well-to-do. Even during the grimmest Dust Bowl years in the 1930s, Walter and Sara Ann sent small stipends to their four children, who were at various stages in reaching their ambitious educational goals. Support flowed in both directions: Allen managed to save $1,400 in the early 1930s, and Buckley $700. What they could save, they sent back gratefully to their parents.

The only Rude family value more important than financial independence was learning. If there has ever been a medical malady known as “educational fever,” the Rudes of Enid would have been suitable poster children. After graduating from Enid’s Phillips University (B.A.), Buckley attended Chicago’s McCormick Seminary (M.Th.), Princeton Seminary (Th.D.), University of Edinburgh (Ph.D.) with additional coursework at University of Berlin and Paris’ Sorbonne. Allen graduated from two years of college at Wentworth Military Academy, attended Oklahoma A. & M. and University of Oklahoma (one semester short of a B.A. degree) and West Point (four more years and a B.S. in engineering) Many years later, he received a M.A. in Education from the University of Washington. Evelyn Rude Winter attended Oklahoma College for Women (B.S.). University of Oklahoma (M.D.) and San Francisco Women’s and Children’s Hospital (Residency in Pediatrics). Gladys Rude White also attended Oklahoma College for Women (B.S.). and received her R.N. at College of Emporia, in Kansas.

At a family reunion in 1994, Buckley, Evelyn, Gladys, my sister Sally and I drove together in a car for four hours, on our way to attend the Ashland, Oregon Shakespeare Festival. We discovered that each one of us could quote extensive passages of Shakespeare and the Bible from memory. Instinctively, we knew that the source of our college degrees and passion for learning was Sara Ann, our grandmother, matriarch, schoolmarm, President of Enid’s Shakespeare and Garden club—an accomplished poet in her own right. It seemed natural (yet wondrous) that two generations of Rudes (including my sister and cousins) had become so highly educated, and spent their lives kindling a passion for learning in others.

In November, 1932, Sara Ann gave a speech to the Enid Shakespeare Club on the subject of Coriolanus—including a prideful digression about her two sons.

It has been said that the success of any project depends on the atmosphere, the attitude of mind, and the ideals. Most of all I value the marvelous training in reading they have had in Enid schools which enabled them to turn out large quantities of college work in one third the time others need for it ... the training in music and appreciation which brings rich returns wherever they go. I am reminded of Shakespeare’s words: ‘All along the path of life other luminaries may seek to turn them from their cherished hope. May no moons that shine with borrowed light, no meteors that dazzle but do not guide them turn the needle of their purpose from the North Star of their hope.’

Pioneers and Sugar Pines: 1891-1932

2008-07-19T17:39:00.000-07:00

My daughter Amy, a well-read feminist, insisted that I include my maternal ancestry in this account. This I can do with pride equal to my recounting of the male Rude lineage, because the families of my father and mother had an abundance of strong women.

And yet, the two families were so very different. Even the names—Rude and Craycroft—have the slightest hint of opposing polarity, like the magnetic toys I played with as a child. How did these two families, one pioneer-plain, the other seemingly aristocratic, come to merge, and what (besides the inevitable children) were the consequences?

I choose to begin with the Craycroft-Shaver branch, in part because it includes figures of minor historical importance—yet also because these ancestors had a tendency to explode brilliantly like Roman candles, then fade prematurely (and permanently) into the dark sky.

Harry Craycroft (a name with unintended irony, since he was undoubtedly the carrier of my baldness gene) was my maternal grandfather. He died at age 55 of heart trouble, complicated by pneumonia—and possibly, alcoholism.

His father, John Wesley Craycroft, was born in Missouri and died in Modesto, California at the ripe age of 88, just two years before his son Harry died in 1932. Photos of old John Wesley Craycroft show a distinguished 19th Century patriarch with a black three-piece suit, white beard and cane—an anachronistic throwback even in the late 1890s, when the pictures were taken.
Harry’s grandfather was Benjamin Craycroft Jr., who died in Decatur, Illinois in 1853. His father, Benjamin, Sr. was born in Baltimore, Maryland, July 14, 1780.

Craycroft may sound like an aristocratic name, but its literal meaning is “crow farm,” indicating that our English Craycroft ancestors were yeomen, rather than gentry. I confirmed our humble origins during a visit to Westminster Abbey in London, where the chronicles of nobility contained not a single reference to Craycrofts.

An extensive (and mostly fanciful) Craycroft history was written by John Henry Craycroft (my grandfather’s second cousin) in the 1940s. Another cousin, Robert Craycroft corrected much of this account in 2000. Both make for interesting reading.

Despite our obscure beginnings, the name Craycroft has long been on public display in two localities: Fresno, California and Tucson, Arizona. In Fresno, a brick company founded by Kenneth Craycroft (second cousin to Harry) stamped the family name on bricks used for over a century throughout the San Joaquin Valley. In Tucson an arterial road named Craycroft stretches for miles across the eastern part of the city, spawning eponymous signs that advertise schools and businesses. The latter Craycroft is sure to be a relative, but the link is probably too tenuous to be significant.

A brief detour into another branch of the family is significant, however, because it may be our only known departure from the Anglo-Saxon tribe. John Wesley Craycroft was a college-educated itinerant evangelist and sheepherder. He married Alice Valpey, a woman of Italian descent. The story (passed on by her daughter Franke) links Alice Valpey to the House of Volpi of sunny Tuscany.

The link is said to go back to the 11th Century, however, (possibly to a Jersey knight returning from the Crusades)—so the story was probably intended to be a reminder that the Craycrofts and their next of kin have been very, very British for a long, long while. My cousin Peter Craycroft and I suspect that the darker features and wilder temperaments of some relatives might have more recent Mediterranean (or other) origins. Once again, additional research is needed—possibly DNA sampling.

Aunt Franke, dedicated archivist that she was, focused on her grandfather Captain Calvin Valpey, who was born in Nova Scotia, apprenticed to the sea at age 12, rounded the Horn in his own schooner (The Eagle) in 1850 and a year later landed in San Francisco to seek gold in California. Valpey finally settled down to manage a general store in Warm Springs (Fremont), California. He left behind a place-name visible to all who travel by the Diablo coast range near San Jose—Valpey Ridge, a popular spot for hikers and campers.

The most illustrious place name in all branches of the family, however, must be Shaver Lake, named for my maternal great-grandfather Charles Burr Shaver. Called C. B. (or “Cannonball”) by his many admirers, Shaver was born in Steuben County, New York August 7, 1855. His family, of modest means, moved to a small town near Detroit, Michigan. There, after a bit of schooling, he started working in a lumber mill, where he was quickly promoted to foreman.
Shaver moved from laborer to the business side of lumber in 1889 when he became general manager of White and Friant Lumber Co., Grand Rapids, Michigan. He distinguished himself by running a mill that cut 100 million board feet in a two-year period. In 1891 C.B. and his friend Lewis Swift toured the forests of California, and fell in love with what they saw.

On the steep slopes of Tollhouse cliff near Fresno, C.B. and Lewis Swift had an epiphany. The only thing that separated millions of dollars of timber in the mountains from eager lumber buyers in Clovis was the lack of an efficient means to transport the timber. Shaver and his partner visualized a flume, a man-made river suspended in the air, with planks shaped in a V, mounted over a roller-coaster-like framework of timbers. With the clear creeks of the Sierras providing the water to float the timber, there would be nothing to keep the rough-sawn planks from shooting down the incline, from virgin forests to insatiable markets.

C.B. and his partners began construction of his ambitious flume in 1891. By 1894, with an investment of $30,000 (and another $170,000 borrowed from others), he was floating thousands of kiln-dried planks 41 miles from his Pine Ridge mill to Clovis. “Cannonball” was well on his way to earning his first million dollars.

As business manager, C. B. Shaver had to deal with the effects of a depression in 1893 that almost bankrupted the company. Robbers frequently held up the stage lines that carried payrolls up to the sawmill workers. Shaver faced the problem by issuing script payrolls to the workers, and dodging creditors in Fresno. The company was plagued with lawsuits, accusing Shaver of trying to sell flume water for irrigation that legally belonged to others. In Vintage Fresno historian Edwin Eaton (a distant relative of Shaver) describes the operation of the flume:

The customary procedure was to load the lumber into the flume at Shaver at night, so that it would begin arriving at the Clovis planing mill and box factory at about six in the morning. At intervals along the flume were cabins of the “flume herders” whose duty it was to keep the flow of lumber orderly and to straighten out the jams that sometimes occurred... Because of its slightly steeper pitch and the sheer drop to the canyon beneath, the [Tollhouse] portion was one of the most thrilling and dangerous places for company officials who occasionally rode a “flume boat” for quick passage from Shaver to Clovis.

A contemporary description in the Fresno Bee depicted Shaver as “portly of figure, genial of countenance and passionately fond of a good cigar.” As he became one of Fresno’s most prosperous citizens, my great grandfather relished his status as a local celebrity. Citizens cheerfully jumped aside as “Cannonball” Shaver, with stogie planted in his mouth, raced the city’s first Stanley Steamer through the streets of Fresno.

Dozens of photographs show him at the center of the action, sledding down Tollhouse on a cart poised atop the flume, riding horses, or posturing with his loyal friends and employees beside the massive sugar pines destined for his mills and flume. Yet Shaver’s life was not free of complications. In 1901 his partner Lewis Swift died suddenly of a heart attack. C.B. persuaded Lewis’ brother Harvey (whose wife happened to be the sister of C.B.’s wife Lena) to come from Michigan and take over the mill, so Shaver could concentrate on the operation of the Fresno Flume and Irrigation Company.

Shaver bought 2,300 acres of timberland, dammed streams and created millponds to ensure a plentiful supply of logs and water. Over the 20 years of its operation, the flume transported 450 million board feet of lumber. Nine million board feet were used to build the flume itself, a section at a time, over three years.

At the height of his affluence and influence, on Christmas Day, 1907 C.B. Shaver died in his Stanislaus Street mansion from complications of goiter and diabetes. He was only 52. Shaver was undeniably a patriarch who enjoyed life to the hilt, and had little regard—except as a source of wealth—for the old-growth timber that his company’s 200 fellers and sawyers and steam-driven donkey engines brought crashing to earth. Perhaps it is unfair to judge “Cannonball” Shaver by our current perspective, as today we are left with a legacy of only 5% of the Sierra’s original timber. One thing is certain: Shaver’s extravagant schemes and fortune might have evaporated into the mountain mist—like the tiny Mono Indian encampment at Pine Ridge that was neglected or worked to death by Shaver’s company—had it not been for the shrewd business acumen of Shaver’s widow Lena, the matriarch of the family.

Seeing that the big trees were nearly gone and roads and trucks would soon make the flume impractical, Lena Shaver sold her share of the Pine Ridge mill in 1912. She also sold acres of clear cuts at higher elevations to Southern California Edison. The Edison company dammed Stevenson Creek in 1926 to create Shaver Lake as part of a string of hydroelectric power stations in the high Sierras. Using the $2 million she gained from these sales, Lena developed and subdivided an exclusive vacation enclave called Rock Haven (still a favorite getaway for Fresno’s elite). Next, she purchased the store, barn and hotel that had been built by Gus Beringhoff near the Pine Ridge sawmill.

Lena and her sister Minnie (Harvey Swift’s widow) deeply loved their 400-acre mountain paradise. Auntie Minn (as we came to know her, although she was long dead when we visited her mountain home) had a distinctive cabin built behind the hotel, graced with gorgeous Baroque revival cabinets and furniture. We loved to visit Auntie Minn’s Edwardian retreat, even when the knick-knacks were falling apart and covered with dust.

After C.B. died in 1907, Lena sold the Fresno Shaver mansion and bought herself and each of her three daughters—Grace, Ethel and Doris—comfortable houses on “L” Street in Fresno. Lena’s health declined in the 1930s, so she leased the mountain hotel to the Armstrong family for several years to keep her fortune intact. Heartbroken to be confined to the flatlands, Lena died on May 10, 1939 in Fresno, away from Pine Ridge, her heart’s home in the mountains.

Lena’s daughter Grace (my maternal grandmother) was born in Blanchard, Michigan in 1887, but grew up in Fresno. Grace Mabel Shaver married Harry Judge Craycroft on October 6, 1909. Harry was a physician employed by Grace’s father to treat injuries (primarily broken bones and amputations) in the hazardous Shaver sawmill operation.

After their wedding, the couple moved to Fresno—to “L” street, next-door to Lena. Harry thrived in surgical practice while Grace produced babies (Marian in August, 1912 and Charles Burr, known by his middle name, in 1914); she also maintained a busy social life. Before Marian’s birth, the couple spent a year in London and Vienna, where Dr. Harry Craycroft studied advanced surgical techniques.

Seven years later (1917-18) U.S. Army Major Harry Craycroft applied his skills treating countless wounded soldiers in hospital tents near the front lines in France. By all accounts the 23-year marriage between Grace and Harry was happy. In 1923 the couple moved to Pine Street in Fresno. Photographs of Marian and Burr in those years, along with their parents, provide convincing evidence that the Craycroft family enjoyed material comforts and social prominence.
Despite the surface sheen of affluence, a few stories have passed through the filters of family pride to be picked up by the sensitive antennae of later generations. Harry earned a good deal of money as a doctor, and he had access to Grace’s fortune. He also loved to fish, bet on horses and play poker (a habit acquired during his saw-mill days). A cartoon in the Fresno Bee shows Harry as one of the champion “liars” of the Shaver Lake Fishing Club. His companions loved to hear his stories. One, Emil Gundelfinger, told me years ago that Harry’s friends made sure a bottle was always at his elbow.

Whether Harry became alcoholic—or was just a lovable guy who drank a bit—may be impossible to sort out at this distance. If alcohol didn’t kill Harry (he died of pneumonia at age 55 in 1932), the addiction certainly became his daughter Marian’s nemesis, and was a factor in the relatively youthful death of his granddaughter Carolyn Craycroft Thomas at age 61 in 2003.

Given our current understanding of genetics, it seems proper and wise to issue a warning to all who carry the Craycroft DNA: there is a chance that you carry an inherited tendency toward alcoholism. Like one of Harry’s numerous bets, it is a risk not worth the suffering that would surely follow you if you carry the gene.

Sometimes tragedies arrive in pairs, separated by a single generation. Grace lost her father soon after her 20th birthday; coincidentally, Marian’s father died just as she had reached the same impressionable age. The psychological impact of these deaths may have been profound, or they may have been slight, but one thing is certain: both women lived their adult lives depending on their widowed mothers for support and affection.

As a relatively young widow of 45, Grace began a new and satisfying career as a “house mother” for college sororities. Soon after her son and daughter had married and left Fresno, Grace moved to Berkeley to “mother” Pi Phi sisters, then moved on to UCLA (Alpha Phi) and Stanford (Kappa Kappa Gamma).

With her intellect, warmth and social ease, Grace was a comforting mentor for hundreds of California’s privileged women during the Depression years. She loved her charges deeply, but her most unwavering loyalty was given to her daughter Marian, to whom she wrote letters weekly over the next decade.

Loved to Pieces

2008-07-17T08:28:00.000-07:00

Introduction

As I begin this account of my life, I am sixty-four — a milestone made famous by a Beatles song written decades before any member of the band had to confront the reality of aging. The song is full of questions:

Will you still be sending me a Valentine, a bottle of wine … will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m sixty-four?I approach the task of writing my life with the same whimsical curiosity as Sergeant Pepper’s "Lonely Hearts Club Band." Questions abound; answers are precious, but scarce. Perhaps the most whimsical fact of all is that I have outlived half the Beatles. John Lennon merely imagined; I am living the reality of growing older.

The catalyst for writing my story came from the reading of two biographies among the many I’ve read over the years. The first is the memoir of my Uncle Buckley Rude, set down in longhand in the late 1980s, then typed, edited and distributed with my enthusiastic assistance.

Although his story never quite rose to the level of publication (as my own story will not) Buckley’s biography produced a rich collection of memories, ranging from Hitler’s Germany to racial integration of Southern churches. All who read Buckley’s story were grateful for his vivid details, and for his conclusions laced with deep moral wisdom. It was in every sense a distillation of a life lived well, right up to two weeks before his ninety-sixth birthday.

The second inspiration for writing my own story was my reading of a published (but fictional) biography of the 2nd Century Roman Emperor Hadrian. This remarkable work by French author Margaret Yourcenar depicted an imagined Rome that we think we know (at least in broad outline) from our study of history in school. But Hadrian’s biography, as interpreted by Yourcenar, proved to be as mysterious as life itself.

More than a half century after it was published, “Memoirs of Hadrian” (recommended to me by my sister Sally) is widely understood to be a unique work of biography — a blend of research and imagination. I have no illusions about transforming my life story into a masterpiece, but I aspire to make this account of my life readable, accurate and insightful. If I’m fortunate, the act of writing will also be therapeutic — as I believe it must have been for Buckley Rude and Margaret Yourcenar.

Any biography is an excavation of memory, and my recollections are both selective and faulty. Some “facts” will fall somewhere on the continuum from verifiable to fanciful. Where they fall won’t always be a result of my calculated purpose, and as always, some facts will be debatable.

This work has been assembled in much the same way as the Roman mosaics I viewed in Libya in 2005 and in Bath, England in 2006. Some of the shards will fit perfectly; others will have jagged edges and jarring inconsistencies. The human mind (mine included) craves stories to sort out the chaos of daily living. Without story (to continue the mosaic analogy) our lives would be a pile of stones without intelligence or beauty to give them meaning.

I will try to make connections and draw fresh conclusions. In the end, however, this will only be the STORY of my life. It is no more a complete depiction of my actual life than a mosaic is of Roman life. For memories of older contemporaries who influenced my life, I have relied on the recollections of my sister, cousins and others who responded to early drafts. I also consulted letters, photos and the Internet for details that were beyond recall.

The rest is memory — faulty or otherwise.

For me this has been a work of imagination and spirit, rather than a dry, dusty slog through my familial and personal history. I am no celebrity or Emperor, nor even a minister with Buckley’s excellent adventures to tell. Nevertheless, I expect that you begin to read this account in the same frame of mind I had as I began to write it: with curiosity about me as a person; who am I, really? The years that I’ve lived are a mere statistic, but they must count for something. What, exactly? Let us see….

Roots: 1520-1908

Our family’s male succession of Rudes on the North American continent stretches back thirteen generations. This is a trivial fact — except for those of us who bear the name and are curious about the legacy we carry.

Some family heritages are better forgotten or distorted into myth, because the truth is too shameful to recount. The forgotten history of Rudes has been more prosaic, I believe. Most is speculation, however, because few in our family engaged in genealogical research during the pre-Internet era.

I gave genealogical research my first serious attempt in 1994 while visiting a Latter Day Saints stake (church) in Salem, Oregon. The hours I spent cranking the wheels of micro-film readers were mostly fruitless. Then, by chance I encountered an Illinois record of Alpheus Rude in the 1850 enumeration of United States census. Listed among the land-owner’s children I found Parley Lathrop Rude, my paternal great-grandfather.

A newspaper account of Parley’s death in Council Grove, Kansas in 1879 had been passed down to me through my father. His age was right, and the name had to be unique. Parley Rude, as an Illinois eleven year-old in the census book, must have grown up to become the substantial farm-owner who had died suddenly at age 40, leaving his 4-year old son (my grandfather Walter H. Rude) and his mother to fend for themselves.

Thanks to Mormon records, I now had a link back through four generations of Rudes: from my father Walter A., to his father Walter H., to Parley, and finally to Alpheus, born in 1807 in Massachusetts. But where, exactly? Without a precise birth date or the name of a village in Massachusetts, the trail grew cold. Seven years passed while this mystery simmered on the back burner of my mind. As luck would have it, these were years when the Internet grew exponentially, placing records of arcane bloodlines like casket-aged wine into the hands of eager genealogical researchers.

I started to use a pay-by-the-month service called Ancestry.com in November, 2001. The next several weeks were a feast of discovery as I bored through generation after generation to identify the first Rudes in America — and beyond.

Thus, like the Bible, I begin this narrative with a list of “begats.” This may seem strange, but is may be the best way to demonstrate the deep and rare attachment we Rudes have to our native land. Whatever their accomplishments or politics, Rudes can justifiably call themselves Americans by birthright. To wit:

Ethan Thomas Rude - b. 2005 (Utah)
Peter Stuart Rude - b. 1972 (Oregon), m. Lara Peirce
John Craycroft Rude - b. 1941 (Panama), m. Mildred Emily Sweet
Walter A. Rude - b. 1908 (Oklahoma), d. 1991 (Arizona), m. Marian Craycroft (1934) and Louise Heinlein (1957)
Walter H. Rude - b. 1876 (Kansas), d. 1963 (Oklahoma), m. Sara Buckley
Lathrop Parley Rude - b. 1839? (Ill.), d. 1881 (Kansas), m. -------
Alphus Rude III - b. 1807 (Mass.), d. 1877 (Kansas), m. Delana Bosworth
Alpheus Rude, Jr. - b. 1775? (Mass), d. 1832 (WVa), m. Hannah Taylor
Alpheus Rude, Sr. - b. 1750? (Mass), d. 1832, m. Sarah Lathrop
Josiah Standish Rude - b. 1726 (Mass), d. 1808, m. Mary Foster
Jabez Rood - b. 1693 (Conn.), d. 1760 (Mass), m. Mehitabel Standish
Samuel Rood - b. 1666 (Conn.), d. 1742, m. Mary Mariner
*Thomas Rude - b. 1626 (Glastonbury, England), d. 1672, m. Sarah White (1646) and Sara Field (1658)
Thomas Rudde - b. 1603, d. ? (Stevenage, Hertford, England), m. Elizabeth Greene
Johannes Rudde - b. 1566, d. ?, m. Johanna Carter
Edmundi Rudde - b. 1549, d. ?, m. Elisabetta Norwoode
Randolphi Rudde - b. 1520, d. ?, m. ?The asterisk by the most recent Thomas Rude denotes the first generation of English Rudes to cross the Atlantic – thirteen generations ago. In total, we can trace the male lineage back seventeen generations — nearly 600 years.

Not much is known yet about our English forebears, except that they were probably descendents of Vikings (Rude being a name much more common among Norwegian invaders than Anglo-Saxon Britons).

The first Rude recorded in the misty annals of the Eleventh Century is said to have founded the village of Rudston, which still lies in Yorkshire’s East Riding, about 25 miles south of the town of Scarborough and six miles inland from the seaside town of Bridling-ton. The baptistery in All Saints church has been the site of Rudston christenings for over 900 years.

Little is known about the Rude family legacy over these centuries, because our ancestors were restless spirits, leaving no vast estates or physical reminders in their wakes. Even the spelling of the Rude name has been ephemeral, with many of our ancestors jettisoning all associations with bad behavior, choosing the more benign spellings of Rood or Rudd.

Countless stale jokes have scratched a perverse pride into those of us who gracefully bear the Rude name. “Go ahead: try to say something original,” we murmur silently as store clerks smirk at the signatures on our driver’s licenses. We’ve had to store up a quiet resistance to provocation over the years -- possibly, over many generations.

It requires confidence, courage and courtesy to bear the name Rude.

Since it is a biological truism that 300 years can produce over 1,000 human ancestors from a single individual, there is no telling where further genealogical research might lead. Ancestors who become notorious leave records that can be traced with pride; those who commit incest or murder are quietly forgotten.

We can only guess what role Rudes might have played in history. We do know that Jabez Rude married the daughter of Captain Miles Standish, defender of the pilgrim colony at Plymouth. Hannah Taylor, wife of Alpheus Rude, Jr. is said to have been the sister of U.S. President Zachary Taylor. (Later research into President Taylor's genealogy put an end to this speculation.) Through Sara Ann (Walter H. Rude’s wife) we have a link to legendary Scottish poet Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832). The writer’s son James had a daughter (Emma) who married Thomas Buckley, Sara Ann’s English father — making Sir Walter Scott my great-great-great grandfather.

Our ancestors’ military connections were documented in brief contemporary pay records. Alpheus Rude fought briefly in the Revolutionary War as a captain in the Woodbridge regiment (under the command of Colonel Benjamin Ruggles). The record also shows that he marched for six days from New Ashford, Massachusetts to Bennington, Vermont in August, 1777.

There is no record of Alpheus Rude in the Civil War, but Alpheus Jr.’s son David (brother of Alpheus III) fought for Illinois Company I, 40th Infantry. David Rude did not give his life for the Union, but died instead as an old man in 1877.

No Rudes fought in the Spanish-American or First World War, but my father, Col. Walter Allen Rude, was on active duty during World War II, as well as the Korean and Vietnam conflicts.
The day before he died, I heard my father say: “I thank God I never had to kill a man or order one of my men into combat.” This statement reflects an essential pacifism at the core of every Rude I’ve known. Duty, honor, country may have been my father’s West Point slogan — but over time, it seems that Rudes preferred to keep their powder dry, and avoid meaningless sacrifices.

Soldiers, farmers, merchants, preachers — whatever professions Thomas, Samuel, Jabez, Josiah and Alpheus Sr., Jr. or III might have chosen, we can infer that they lived the drama of exile in the wilderness, and witnessed (or in small ways, participated in) the birth of a new nation. They must have cleared a lot of land, and probably lived and fought with a significant number of Indians. For six generations — nearly 200 years — they clung tenaciously to New England soil, embracing the dark fervor of Calvinism. When the nation expanded westward, they joined restless throngs moving to Virginia, West Virginia, Indiana, Illinois, Kansas, Oklahoma, and ultimately the Pacific coast states.

Whatever formed the American colonies and new nation also formed my ancestors. By some mysterious unfolding, it is still forming me.