He never would talk about his military service, beyond cryptically saying he had a girlfriend in England and what he hated most was removing corpses from the bombers when they came back from their runs over mainland Europe. He never did any combat flights himself, I don't think.

 

His older brother, Arthur, was a drill sergeant in the last remaining horse cavalry somewhere near Midland, Texas before the war started. I remember seeing a photo of him riding a horse down a steep sand dune. Great photo, with the horse's front legs 3/4 buried in the flying sand. He was a great story teller, and in 1989, as we were driving together across Texas to Sedona, AZ, for Dad's funeral, he told some wonderful stories about how crazy life was in the cavalry in those days … getting woken up at 3 am in the dead of winter and given 20 minutes to be dressed and packed to make the horseback ride across the sagebrush desert to El Paso … that kind of thing. Uncle Arthur drove a truck in the Phillipines during WWII. Great stories about that, too. He saw a lot of combat, in terms of being strafed and bombed by “Jap zeroes.” I don't know if he ever shot at anybody, himself.

 

Anyway, my dad – Howard – and Uncle Arthur got out of the military close to the same time at the end of WWII, and went back home to Garland City, Arkansas, just a few miles east of Texarkana. Dad married my mom, Mildred, and not too long after that Arthur married mom's sister, Ruby. They bought a mule and a farm near Nacogdoches, Texas, and lived there together for a while. That didn't work out, though, and they ended up moving back to Texarkana, where I was born in St. Michael's Hospital on the Arkansas side of State Street in 1953, the third child.

 

The marriages didn't work out either. Dad was not an easy person to live with, and both Mildred (Millie) and Ruby appear to have inherited bipolar disorder from their father, Ace Booth. They liked to party and drink and have fun with men. Family legend had it that they were “wild Indians.” And to be sure, mom's mother, Dollie, was born in the Indian Territory, near Hugo, OK. But I did a DNA run a few years ago, and there's not a bit of Indigenous American in my genes, which shattered the family legend.

 

One of my earliest memories was when Ruby died in a car wreck, drunk, with two men, near Terrell, Texas. The memory is just of a dimly lit living room with the whole family there, and the women crying. Sometime shortly after, Uncle Arthur reenlisted in the military, this time in the Air Force.  He ended up being stationed at Tinker AFB in Oklahoma City, where he retired from the military and spent the next several decades working as a high-precision machinist as a civil service worker at the AFB until full retirement.  

 

By the time Ruby died, mom and dad were having problems as well. Mom was drinking a lot, and dad was working long hours at the Lone Star Munitions plant in Texarkana. I was too little to remember the ins and outs of the ordeal, but there was a period of time when they kidnapped us kids back and forth from each other. At some point, child protective services in eitiher Texarkana, AR, or Shreveport, LA – I think the latter – took us away from mom and we went into foster care.

 

I was in at least one foster home with my older brother and sister for a while. Maybe two. There were three … Mrs. Farmer, Mrs. Fisher, and Mrs. Brown. Funny that I remember that. I don't remember what order they were in. I don't know the whole story, but at some point after we were taken into care, Dad moved to Wichita Falls, Texas, to live with my Aunt Grace and grandmother. Then, sometime after that, he came and took my sister and brother, leaving me there by myself in the foster home. It was horrid. I still remember the terror of being there, and a couple of specific very frightening events that never should happen to any child.

 

After some period of time dad came back to rescue me from the foster home, and took me to Wichita Falls, too. Aunt Grace latched on to me as the neediest of the kids, and from that point she raised me until I was 13, when dad divorced my stepmother, Billie, and I went back to live with him a mile or two away. That lasted till I was 16 and a half, when I left home to go live with my 20 year-old sister in ‘The Blackburn Hotel,’ a seedy four story place in Hollywood, CA, across the street from the Lido Hotel, at Yucca and Wilcox. Life was … I guess you could say, exciting in a way that makes for interesting memories … there, while it lasted. But after a couple of months desperation and a twist of fate took us across the country to Conshocken, PA.

 

Anyway, back to my father, all the time I really ever spent with him was 3.5 years. We didn't like each other very much, I suppose. But beyond me being crazy and unmanageable, his problem child, I think he really didn't say much of anything important to anybody. The Silent Generation more than the Great Generation. Because of that, I really don't know much about his history at all. Too bad.

 

Dad had a hard childhood himself. He was born in Clam Falls, Wisconsin in 1921 … a tiny house way out in the woods, really only 1 big room, with a single loft for Dad and his 7 siblings. I'm glad I got to see the place in 1966, before it was torn down. Grampa Jacob Henry was abusive to his wife and most of the kids, but coddled my father, the baby and his favorite. Grampa owned a sawmill in Clam Falls, but sold it and the house in 1928 because he hated the cold, and thought he could make a better living in Arkansas as a carpenter. But then the Great Depression surprised everybody, and he ended up being a sharecropper who did a little carpentry on the side.

 

Dad and three of his older siblings grew up hoeing and picking cotton and working on the plantation of the family who continued to own most of the town for years afterward. Mary and I saw the plantation home there in Garland City maybe 20 years ago. Grampa died in 1948. His death, and the War, liberated the family in a very real way.

 

And that … is pretty much all I know of Dad's history, other than glitches and anecdotes from here and there. So it's kind of interesting to run across a post like this entry from the “National Museum of the Mighty Eighth Airforce.” Probably the most substantial thing I ever learned about him.