The LST

The LST

She stood bent over at the door of the long hallway, holding her Daddy’s hand as tight as she could. She was 4, and just barely aware that a big War was going on, and her town was part of it. Not in the fighting, no, but in the training. The Navy men in their dark blue uniforms and white sailor hats were everywhere downtown. No one could drive to the beach to swim anymore because that’s where the Navy was. They had buildings and boats and a hospital and a photo lab building, and lots of other things. They had painted the bottoms of all the palm trees white, she didn’t know why.

But here she was on one of the Navy boats. The Navy had decided to give the people in her town a little treat, right here in the middle of the War, maybe as part payment for taking over their harbor for the Navy. So her Daddy had brought her down to the docks where the LST was tied up, and they had crossed over the bridge to the boat, a bridge that shook when you walked on it. And her Daddy said there would be cookies at the end of the tour.

Part of the tour, the part just before the cookies, was a special long room, a hallway really, that the Navy men had decorated to look like a jungle in the Pacific, where the LST had been. The room was totally dark, except for some green lights that shone up into the palm trees that lined each wall, and some yellow lights that shone on the men, dummies really, that were propped up against some of the palm trees, holding their guns in their laps, but pointed toward the path of sand that ran down the middle of the room. She could see, far on the other end of the path, a doorway with bright light behind it. That’s where the cookies were, her Daddy said.

“Come on, honey, it’s OK, “ her father said.

“I’m scared, “ she whispered.

“It’s not real, honey, it’s just pretend.”

“I don’t like it. I don’t want to go.”

“We have to go, honey, that’s the only way out.”

“I’m not going.”

“I tell you what. I’ll go and show you there’s nothing to be afraid of. You can follow me.”

She watched him walk the 20 or 30 feet down the sand path, looking back over his shoulder a couple of times. She hid behind the edge of the door and just peeked at his back moving away from her.

Her Daddy stood in the doorway now at the other end of the jungle. “Come on, “ he called. “Run to Daddy.”

Suddenly she shot forward through the jungle, sobbing, never looking left or right at the soldiers and the palm trees, running as fast as she could toward her Daddy’s shape silhouetted in the doorway.

Her Daddy swooped her up in his arms and she, embarrassed for the other visitors to see her cry, buried her face in his neck.

“I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t know you were so scared. Daddy should have carried you through. But I thought you were a big enough girl to go by yourself.”


Years later she remembered this event, not all the details maybe, but certainly the fear, the embarrassment, the clinging to the safety of her father. Today’s War wasn’t nearly as scary, seen only through the TV. You don’t have to walk by yourself through the jungle at night with soldiers pointing their guns at you. Much easier now.

Uncle Arthur

Uncle Arthur

When my uncle Arthur went off to war, his sister, my aunt Martha took a whole roll of film with her Brownie camera. Most of the shots were of Uncle Arthur standing still and erect in his Navy uniform, like one of Grandmother’s Christmas nutcracker soldiers. But the picture I like best is the one of him seated in a green wicker chair from the porch, brought into the yard to make a more informal or maybe more familiar picture. Even so, Uncle Arthur maintained as much of his military persona as he could—squared-off shoulders, crossed hands on crossed legs, like a pipe cleaner man arranged just so. In the photo his glasses and mustache make him look years beyond the barely 19 he had accumulated, and I think the glasses were just for effect. He probably thought looking like a grown man instead of a boy would get him more dances with girls at the USO.

My uncle Arthur was the crown jewel of the Hunter family. I don’t know that he was any brighter than the rest, or more polished, but he was clearly cherished by his brother and sisters and my Grandmother and Granddaddy. He was the baby, not yet set on a specific course through life. That was still to come after this War was over.

I wonder sometimes why Uncle Arthur volunteered for the Navy. Maybe to avoid being drafted by the Army. Maybe to “see the world” as the Navy recruitment posters promised. Maybe to please Uncle Sam who told everyone that “Uncle Sam Wants You.” It couldn’t have been to please his family. Although none of them were actual pacifists, there was no military tradition in the family either. Perhaps Uncle Arthur though he needed to serve in order to hold his head high in his future life. And he needed that, as he was expected to be the one who rose beyond the farmer’s life and made something of himself. He’d already had one year of college, something none of his older siblings had been awarded.

So I like to look at Uncle Arthur’s picture taken in the side yard of Grandmothers house, just before he shipped out on the USS Indianapolis, bound for the island of Guam from San Francisco. I like to imagine what he would have been—a teacher, a banker, a salesman, a father, a husband, but most of all, my Uncle Arthur.

And he would have been, too, if the telegram had not arrived just a few weeks later.

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Hunter,
I regret to inform you that Arthur Ryals Hunter, Jr. is missing in action and presumed dead. STOP USS Indianapolis torpedoed by enemy forces and presumed lost as of this day. STOP Deepest condolences. STOP Signed, Secretary of the Navy

I feel as if Uncle Arthur is an unfinished and never-to-be finished story in my life. And I’m sure that every mother, father, brother, sister, cousin, aunt, uncle and friend of a military person killed in action (isn’t that a quaint euphemistic term) feels the same way. The picture now is all the legacy we have from Uncle Arthur, that and his dusty Purple Heart, awarded posthumously. But what a cherished picture it is.

SERVICE IN TIME OF WAR

SERVICE IN TIME OF WAR

My Dad didn’t officially serve in the Armed Forces during WWII (except for the brief sojourn in the Navy Auxiliary, but that’s another story) but his fishing boat did serve.

Daddy was exempt from the draft on two counts; he had a child (me) and he was a food producer. Farmers and fishermen (and Daddy was a commercial fisherman) were exempt. The irony was that the Port of Fort Pierce and its inlet and offshore ocean waters were closed to civilian uses because the Navy had taken it over for a training and coastline security facility. Plus, the Germans were present in their submarines all along the Florida coast, torpedoing ships almost at will. So fishing was pretty iffy anyway.

One of my earliest memories is of standing on our front porch at night looking out over the Atlantic Ocean and seeing, in the black sky just above the horizon, three orange lights. “Ships on fire,” Daddy said. “The Germans got ‘em.”

In addition to patrolling the beaches looking for German saboteurs to come ashore, the Navy had the first training facility for “frogmen” (later called SEALS) on our North Beach. And somehow, Daddy’s 30 ft. fishing boat was pressed into service as a patrol boat. Two Coast Guardsmen, both new recruits from Iowa (I-OWE-WAY was how Daddy pronounced it) who had never seen the ocean until they arrived in Fort Pierce were put in charge. Of course, they didn’t know anything about running a boat and they knew nothing about the coastal waters they were to patrol from Vero Beach to Stuart. So, my Dad went along every time they went out to patrol (I don’t know whether the government knew about this or not)

One moonlit night, a little offshore from “The Pines”, a local landmark of a grove of trees that stood very near the training base for the frogmen, Daddy and the two Coast Guardsmen were surprised to see, just a few hundred yards away, a German submarine break to the surface of the water and put up a periscope. The Guardsmen, armed only with rifles and with no ship-to-shore radio, were terrified. They were sure that the Germans would torpedo their fishing boat. Daddy laughed telling this part of the story, saying the Germans would never waste a torpedo on a 30-foot fishing boat!

Daddy and the Coast Guardsmen turned their little boat around and headed back for port, all the while looking back over their shoulders at the hulking submarine, just breaking the water line and dead in the water, with that periscope still up.

At the Coast Guard station on Fort Pierce Inlet, they radioed the closest Navy airfield in Tampa, on the other side of the state. Tampa sent out a spotter plane, but in the several hours that elapsed dawn had broken. The German submarine had slipped back down beneath the surface and headed for deeper water, not to be seen again that day.

My Father’s Suit

My Father’s Suit

So far as I know, my father only ever owned one suit. Some of my earliest memories are of Daddy getting cleaned up, showered and shaved, and putting on his dark blue suit that Mama had pressed, along with a long-sleeved white shirt and a tie. Plus the black lace-up dress shoes that Mama had polished.

Most of the time when Daddy wore his suit instead of his khaki work pants and worn work shirt, he was on the way to a funeral to be a pallbearer. Daddy was young and big and strong and the funerals were for the parents of his friends—the old-timers. He also wore the suit to jury duty, and to weddings, and on New Year’s Eve when he and Mama went out to paint the town. Mama used to try to get him to buy a new suit, especially when he gained about twenty-five pounds and had to squeeze into the pants.

“Hell, no, I don’t need a new suit,” he’d say. “This one isn’t even broke in good.”

So Mama tried to keep the suit presentable. Once a year or so it went to the cleaners, and every couple of years there’d be a new long-sleeved white shirt, and when the styles changed radically, Daddy’d wear a new tie he got for Christmas.

When he died, my sister Mary and I gave the undertaker the only suit we found in his closet. It can’t have been the original one. But I’ll bet it was only number two or three.

SIMON LE DOG

SIMON LE DOG


As long as I can remember, Jonathan has wanted a dog. We always had cats before and after Jonathan was born. I don’t know how young he was when he started campaigning for a dog, but I know his Dad told him he had to wait until he was 6 years old—I guess thinking that Jonathan would forget about it in the intervening years. The year Jonathan was 6, we had a nice birthday party, tons of presents and at the end Jonathan said “Where’s the dog?”

Shortly after that, the dog owned by one of his carpool buddies delivered a litter of mongrel puppies. We were apparently put on the waiting list for a puppy by you-know-who. Several weeks later, Simon came home with us. (It was later determined that Simon was a girl, but the name stuck.) Simon was an outside dog and she loved it that way. Jonathan was an outside-type kid and they (Simon and Jonathan) got lots of exercise chasing each other around the pasture in the front of our house. This was also where I found Simon several months later when I drove in the long driveway after working all day. She was surrounded by male dogs of all description—large, small, purebred, mutts, collared, uncollared. Simon was in heat!!

I must have arrived during a lull in the action because everyone was lying on the ground in a circle around Simon when I arrived home. But this was just the calm before the storm, or perhaps I’d missed the first and second act, and this was intermission. At any rate, it didn’t last long. There arose from the front yard an upswelling of sounds such as I’d never heard before. Yowling and growling, moaning and barking, yipping and yelping, high squeals and low growls—it was a madhouse. I ran out to retrieve Simon from the front yard, carrying one of Jonathan’s plastic baseball bats in case I had to fight my way in. Simon was still lying on the ground in the middle of the yard, with her admirers still circled around, but now jostling for “position.” With trepidation I marched up to Simon and grabbed her by her collar and we escaped to our screened-in back porch, leaving her retinue behind to sort out who was “top dog” for themselves.

Well, silly me. Within 10 nanoseconds the whole company, including the chorus, had moved the mainstage to our back porch. Now they were up close with the yowling, except real hostility was about to break out, as their frustration mounted with Simon now unattainable.

Many miserable hours later, Jonathan’s Dad arrived home (it was all his fault; he’s the one who said “when you’re six”) so he was given the task of getting Simon in the car, past all the love-struck males, and delivered to the emergency vet clinic where, a few days later, we went to pick her up, all ”fixed.” Imagine my embarrassment, though, when I took her back to the vet to have her stitches out, and met one of my neighbors in the waiting room. He was there to get stitches taken out of his male dog who had been bitten in a dog fight which happened, according to the neighbor, when “some jerks left their bitch in heat outside.” I just sympathized and prayed we’d be called soon for our turn with the vet.

Mr. Lawrence

MR. LAWRENCE

Mr. Lawrence, my first cat, was not all that loving. If truth be known, he was pretty stand-offish. He would let me, and only me hold him for perhaps 10 seconds. So I was always looking for ways to get him to stay close to me.

I discovered, I don’t remember how, that Mr. Lawrence loved salt. He especially liked to lick off the salt from a saltine cracker if I’d hold it up for him so it wouldn’t slide away when he licked it. For a while, I had gotten into the habit of arriving home in late afternoon from my position as an Instructor of Science Education at the University of Iowa, sitting at the dining room table with a box of saltines for a snack and reading the daily Iowa City newspaper, which I didn’t have time to do in the mornings. I’d first hold up a saltine for Mr. Lawrence to have his salty treat, and then put his licked and de-salted cracker down and pick up a couple of saltines for myself.

Once, as I was putting up the paper and the saltines when we were both done with our snacks, I couldn’t find Mr. Lawrence’s licked-up saltine. It wasn’t on the table. It wasn’t on the floor. Finally it hit me. It was in my tummy.

That ended the daily saltine cracker snack routine.

Summer in Manteo

SUMMER IN MANTEO

The summer after second grade, my Aunty Libby and Uncle Maynard invited me to go with them for a couple of weeks to Manteo, NC, where Maynard’s mother lived and where he grew up. I don’t know why they took me with them—whether they just wanted to give me a treat or to provide a playmate for their two boys, Joe and Brazelle, who were already at their Grandmother’s house, having gone a few weeks earlier.

Anyhow, off we went from Fort Pierce, Florida in their ’47 or ’48 Chevy two-door coupe with whitewall tires, much nicer than our ’40 Ford. I don’t remember a whole lot about the trip up to Manteo, except that at some point Maynard bought us all hot dogs for lunch to eat in the car. I asked for mayonnaise on mine, but that’s not the way it came. It came with catsup and mayonnaise. I don’t think Libby and Maynard spoiled their boys as much as my mother spoiled her girls. They made it pretty clear that I could just eat it as it was, catsup and all. I managed to get through about three-fourths of it. As long as there was still hot dog in the bun, I could convince myself that the spicy flavor of the hot dog covered up the taste of the catsup. But then I got down to the last few bites, and there was no hot dog left in the bun. I could not possibly eat this! So I carefully and quietly rolled down my back window, just far enough for me to poke that catsup and mayonnaise-covered hot dog bun through and let the wind carry it away.

Everything was fine until Maynard had to stop for gas. He went back to unscrew the gas cap and I herd him say to Libby, “There’s red stuff smeared all over the side of the car.” I suddenly had a vision of that hot dog bun dropping down from the top of the window, splatting open on the side of the car, and then the wind slowly moving it back from where it landed to the fender, where a gust caught it and it fell off into the road, where it was supposed to have gone in the first place. Maynard got the station’s water can, usually used for filling radiators, and washed down the side of the car. I played totally deaf and dumb and stupid, and bless their hearts, they never said a word to me about it.

That wasn’t the end of their troubles with me, though. After about a week at Mrs. Duvall’s house, where for the first time I saw hydrangea bushes with blue and pink flowers that I have loved every since, and pecan trees with bagworm webs, and giant sand dunes at Kill Devil Hills that we slid down on waxed paper sleds, and the outdoor drama “The Lost Colony”, and the Wright Brothers memorial, and most special of all, a dime store in Manteo where you could buy souvenirs with shells pasted on them and that had Manteo, North Carolina written on the side---I got powerfully homesick.

I waited a day or two without saying anything about it to anyone, but meanwhile developing my plan. I reconstructed in my mind the roads that we took and the towns we went through and I figured that by a combination of Greyhound buses and walking, I could be home in about a week. I had $13 in my wallet and I knew I was going to need to ride a bus at least as far as US 1, maybe I could even get as far as Jacksonville, where I could then just follow US 1 all the way back to Fort Pierce. And you could see our house on 6th street from US 1 in Fort Pierce.

So the next afternoon, while everyone else was gathered in the side yard under the pecan trees, trying to keep cool in the drowsy Carolina summer, I said I didn’t feel good, and went in the house to lie down. What I really did was pack up my stuff, including my souvenirs, in the little brown suitcase that Mama let me use, the one her boss, Mr. Brown, had given her when she left her job as a bookkeeper for a citrus fruit packing house when she was pregnant with me. Unfortunately, I wasn’t as good a packer as Mama was, and not everything fit back in the little brown suitcase. So I got a brown paper grocery bag and put the overage in that.

Then I eased out the front door with my suitcase in my left hand, holding my paper bag in front of my chest with my right hand. To get to the street that led to the highway, I had to walk down the sidewalk, visible to the side yard. As I got to the edge of the property, I sneaked a look at the side yard, where everyone was staring at me. I turned my head and quickly headed east toward the highway. Just as I passed the house with all the lightning rods on the roof, I could see coming towards me that ’48 Chevy coupe. When it got closer I saw that my Aunt Libby was driving. When she got even with me, she stopped the car and I stopped walking. “Where you going?” she called through the open window. “I was planning to go home,” I said. “Don’t you like it here?” she asked gently. “No”, I said. “What don’t you like? I need to tell something to Mrs. Duvall.” That gave me my only idea, since I couldn’t admit I was homesick. “I don’t really like her cooking,” I said. “Well, get in, “ Libby said, “and we’ll see what she can do about that.”

I opened the passenger door and put my suitcase and paper bag on the floor of the front seat and climbed up onto the seat. We drove back the 100 yards to Mrs. Duvall’s house in silence. When we got there, I took my suitcase and paper bag back in the house and unpacked them. Then I waited in the bedroom until someone called out that it was suppertime.

Nothing was ever mentioned during the rest of the trip about my attempt to walk home, although I suspect the grown-ups kept a pretty sharp eye on me. My Aunt Libby was so good. She never told my mother what I had done.

Years and years later, at a Roberts family get-together, my mother overheard Libby and Lorena laughing about the time Gwendie was so homesick she tried to walk home to Fort Pierce from Manteo. By that time, there was no need to be embarrassed or worried. She just laughed with them.