[This will be a long one....]
I've talked, not always respectfully, about my family here, but I've been thinking about my father.
I started because I've started reading a book by Craig Shirley called "December 1941: 31 Days that Changed America and Saved the World." I haven't decided how good it is yet. In fact I'm seeing some signs that it is not all that well written, but it does succeed in making vivid the world my parents lived in about the time I was born. And as a consequence I started thinking about my father.
So this is for you, Edgar. [I can't get to calling him "Dad."] This is your story as best I know it.
Edgar Deane was born on November 17, 1915 in Arlington, Massachusetts where his father was a family doctor. He was the last of four siblings, and a fraternal twin to his sister Cynthia. I don't know much about his childhood. The family stories didn't go back that much, but here is what I do know.
Edgar apparently always had a self-control problem. An interaction with his sister in the late seventies made it pretty clear. I was asking her to join me with a therapist to help with some family things and she demurred not wanting to have to "deal with that again." There were other signs that his own family pretty much knew he was an emotional disaster area, so it's no accident that my mother often talked about him after their separation as if she had been blindsided.
Sometime around what must have been his middle school years he was laid up with a serious leg fracture. He had had an accident trying to imitate his older brother's ability to go up and down stairs on a pogo stick. And sometime around then he had a serious bout with scarlet fever. As near as I can determine it was a little after this that the family moved to Maine from Arlington. My father told the story of being asked to go to the basement and pour out all of the bottles of homemade red wine his father had been given by the fathers of babies he had delivered. Arlington at the time had a large Italian immigrant population.
Time check here. This had to have been during Prohibition. Homemade wine would have been legal, but for a man who had an attachment to his alcohol, the memory must have had some poignancy.
Edgar was sent to boarding school for high school. The way the story got told is that older brother Frank got college and Edgar got the private school for high school. I think that was a way of papering over the real story, which must have been that the family could no longer deal with Edgar's upsets and handled it by sending him away to school. He would have been in school through 1932 or 33. The one story of his time at Proctor Academy in Andover, New Hampshire was about how during one trip home to Maine, Edgar was so drunk he fell off the train. Mind you, this is still during Prohibition.
The other story that got told of that time period was about Edgar's sailboat. He was proud of having earned it by meeting his parents' requirement that he swim the mile back and forth between the point where they lived and the island opposite. This had to have been no small feat in the frigid Maine waters. He was proud of earning the boat and he loved to sail. He crewed on some large racing sloops during his Maine years and it sounds like a time that was good for him.
He had a beautiful voice. Even wrecked by his years of drinking, it was still a good voice into his forties. I have a picture of him in choir robes that looks almost angelic. During that time he apparently went to music camps during the summer. Was that another way of getting him out of the home? Don't know, but it could have been. The only information I have of his experiences during that time was a remark by his sister. Edgar had introduced me to an old friend sometime around 1959, someone he had known from his high school years. Later I mentioned the name to his sister, Cynthia, who reacted with a sneer and a remark that implied there was something wrong about the man. Unpacking that now, I think what it was about was what must have been Edgar's emergent homosexuality during those high school years.
Edgar did not go to college. In that family only the oldest son and the youngest daughter [the Princess] were given that opportunity. I don't have much information about the years between 1933 and when he met my mother (probably sometime in 1939 or 1940). Mother worked as a lab technician at Thayer General Hospital in Waterville, Maine. She met my father when he came to the hospital lab selling microscopes. I get the date because my mother talked about attending summer parties at "the Chase Smiths" which sounded like Clyde Smith was still alive. He died in mid 1940 when his wife Margaret Chase Smith succeeded him in the House of Representatives.
Here's what I can piece together. Remember we are in the depth of the Depression. Edgar apparently did a stint with the Civilian Conservation Corps. It would have certainly met the approval of his parents not only because it got him out of the home, but also because his father had been a Maine Guide and an outdoorsman who had led canoeing expeditions on the St. John River as a young man. Sometime after that Edgar must have started selling hospital equipment which is what became his career.
While his older brother got given an Ivy League education and declined the offer to be given medical school, Edgar yearned to have been given the chance to follow in his father's footsteps. Selling medical supplies and equipment was as close as he could get.
My mother was 28 or 29 when she met Edgar, four years her junior. She would have nearly reached old maid status in that era. She had been told that she would not be likely to have children for some medical reason never specified to me. She was a career woman when women generally didn't do that, but not enough of one to not leap at the chance to marry the doctor's son. Technically, she was marrying up into what was a fairly established New England family. Her mother-in-law to be was a Daughter of the American Revolution. Her future father-in-law was a graduate of Bowdoin and Johns Hopkins. His family, it seems, was passing off a problem.
They were married in the summer of 1941 as near as I can tell. It might have been 1940, but I don't think so. I could probably find the wedding picture and it might have the date. The wedding party is in the living room of my grandparent's house in Maine. My father is attended by his older brother Frank, my mother by her sister Marian. The men are in white suits, the women in white skirts and blouses. I think the austerity that was beginning during the lend-lease years must have been a factor.
As I think I have mentioned before, my conception has to have been right around December 7, 1941. My mother used to talk about the event as quite a surprise for her. They were living in Maine and it was around this time that Edgar began working at the Bath Iron Works as a loftsman doing layouts for the superstructures of destroyers and destroyer escorts. Even before the war Bath was ramping up production. After it started, they built anti-submarine ships as fast as they could.
I knew my father was in the service in World War II. Mostly I knew because of my mother's complaints about how he didn't have to serve because he was married and had a child. What I did not know was the details of the timing until my ex-wife found Edgar's enlistment record doing genealogy.
Edgar, working in a protected wartime industry, enlisted in June of 1945! It was after V-E day and about a week before my sister was born. The information went a long way to explaining my mother's resentments about it.
Here is what I figure. He was probably out drinking and got into some argument with someone who was in the service. That happened to him years after as well, when he'd get into fights because he had not gone overseas. Any able-bodied man who was still a civilian in 1945 probably felt a lot of pressure, regardless of how important his job was to the war effort. Edgar had two brothers-in-law who were in the Pacific and Atlantic theaters. My guess is that a few drinks and some challenge from someone who had served and he marched himself to an enlistment office and signed up.
There might have also been some appeal for someone who was a closeted homosexual along with memories of his boarding school (not coed in those days) and the CCC. In any case he was off to Basic as my sister arrived. My mother went first to stay with her family, and then the winter of 45-46 was spent in an un-insulated cottage on the point in Maine, which could be had for free.
The farthest my father got during the war and the months after it was Ogden, Utah, where he made sergeant and spend his time training medics. He must have been "demobbed" sometime in 1946, and began to work for a hospital supply company in New York City, the burbs of which we lived in for the next seven or eight years until my parents' separation in 1955. For all my mother's complaints, his GI benefits put us into a house.
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