Lost children, lost years, enduring quest - Part II
To recap, in a spree of activity, the end of 2009 ran from a successful Philcon where I was again a guest panelist, through Thanksgiving, and to a visit with Lisa Scottoline and her family at the local Borders signing on Tuesday, 1 December.
What happened next required me to provide some family background. Some more is still needed to set the stage.
After my father died and we returned to the Delaware Valley where I was born, my mother's sister June Adams helped us find a house in Runnemede, a small rancher on a quiet road, in a sleepy borough.
Most of those days from the time I saw the officers in our base-quarter's living room, discomfited as they stood over my mother kicking and clawing, shrieking and sobbing, on the couch, seem to have passed as if riding on whirlwind. I recall the long plane ride -- my first -- where my brother and I were escorted by the stewardess to the pilot's cabin where he allowed us to grasp the controls in the vacated co-pilot's seat. Then he handed us Pan-Am wing lapel pins to certify that were junior pilots-in-training before we were led back to our seats.
I hope never to forget, my face pressed to the glass, the panoply of lights shining from the streets, bridges, and refinery yards that greeted me as we descended to Philadelphia International. Before I knew it we were across the river and climbing to the third floor toy-room of my maternal grandparents' home, where I eventually -- four hours behind -- slid into sleep.
We children were not permitted to attend the funeral. The only rite permitted me, one blustery November day, to stand in a review field at Ft. Dix and receive the Bronze Star on my father's behalf, my brother Jeff at my side, receiving in his turn the Purple Heart, our mother a stiff, pale presence behind us.
My mother had us baptised in the Episcopal Church in Haddonfield, even as she allowed us to regularly attend my the little RLDS church at which my father had been a deacon, so we could visit with our paternal grandparents. I became reacquainted with the aunts, uncles, cousins, which I had left behind a quarter of a world and quarter of my lifetime ago.
[L-R, JJB, Melissa, Kimberly - Easter 1967, Monmouth St, Gloucester City]
Just as we began to settle into this new life, in the spring of 1967, Sandy married a soldier buddy of her late husband and we were swept once again by changing fortune to Ft. Hood in Killeen, Texas. I recall Jim O'Brien with fondness, though e was not our father and we referred to him as Uncle Jim, never "Dad". Michael James O'Brien was born that following February, another blond-haired, blue-eyed boy.
Killeen was a boy's retreat with a creek flowing in field sloping behind the rancher-style base-quarters, with their corrugated carports that pinged vigorously in the frequent hailstorms.
We returned in late spring, staying in the apartments across the hall from my Aunt June, so I could be Stateside and watching TV when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. It echoed my memories of when my father was called to duty and there were no cartoons on the Saturday in the aftermath of JFK's assassination was held.
It was shortly before RFK's death that June's only child Susan, four years my senior, left her math book open and puzzled out the solutions to the simple algebraic equations I found there. Negative numbers had to be explained to me, so I could solve one of the harder problems.
Before the summer of 1968 was over, we had been transferred to Ft. Clayton in the Panama Canal Zone. I would bike down to the Miraflores Locks to watch the ships pass; to play hopscotch as kids passed their pet monkeys to friends as they took their turns; to hear an overthrow of the country's president on the radio, taking sanctuary in a church; to step down from my school bus to find the hills beside my building on fire ["Burning off the grass," a girl told me nonchalantly, as I froze, stupified]; to swat a shark as we swam during Christmas vacation.
[Kobbe Beach shark net]
To be a military brat -- to live one's "childhood in the Fortress" -- is a situation difficult to explain to civilians. It was not unusual to go to my fourth-grade classes and have a girl bring in for show & tell a 12' anaconda skin that her father had killed. Nor to watch anteaters and tree sloths on the bus ride to school. But the strange thing that happened most regularly, of which we never spoke, were the disappearance of classmates.
One day the desk next to one's own would be empty. Families were shipped Stateside when the fathers were wounded or killed in combat. We children living in the Fortress did not speak of this, for to speak of it was to invite the dislocation into one's own home.
Then it was my turn to be the boy who wasn't there and we returned again to New Jersey, in Bellmawr, where once more my Aunt June arranged a home for us. Jim had been wounded, losing two fingers on his left hand, and accepted medical retirement.
Bellmawr was only a short bike ride to my paternal grandparents in Haddon Heights and a slightly longer trip to June's apartment. After school on Friday's I would go there and spend the weekend with my maternal grandparents. Best of all, just a few short blocks east on Browning Road, lay the nascent tech geek's El Dorado: Edmund's Scientific.
There a child could -- and did! -- purchase a lapidary polishing kit, ultraviolet pens to be seen only under a UV lamp, an Army surplus weather balloon [which I came home to discover Jeff had inflated with the vacuum cleaner inside the house and which threatened to subsume the living room like Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner's Rover], a telescope, a slide-rule, and one's first rudimentary logic board computer.
[L-R, JJB, Kimberly & Jeffery, ca. Spring 1969]
Fifth grade was a disaster with an incompetent teacher who wasn't certified to teach above third-grade but 6th was a transformational experience in a newly-built, advanced, experimental school that assigned students by track, entering a new decade of the '70s. In that year, I learned how to operate in binary, octal, and hexadecimal; to write and resist advertising; to compose and stage a play; to test soil and advise the schoolboard on what grass to buy; and, most crucially, to confront and make a stand against injustice.
Two newly purchased microscopes vanished from the library. My friend Frank was accused of the theft. My homeroom teacher suggested we hold an investigation and trial before we passed the information on to the administration, to give Frank his day in court before a jury of his peers. My friend Hank was lead defense attorney and I was lead defense investigator.
I rigorously, mathematically, geometrically, demolished the prosecutions three witnesses. With charts of the school's halls that Hank displayed with indisputable clarity that refuted the timetable of the witnesses and with an analysis of the position of the sun that refuted the main witness's testimony that she saw Frank in the darkened library by the sunlight slanting through the narrow vertical windows.
Yet everyone **knew** that Frank came from a low-class home and so, Frank in tears, insisting his innocence, heard a verdict returned of guilty. He was led away into the hall by the teacher.
At that moment, I turned to Hank at the defense table, and whispered, "This is a set up."
The teacher returned with a calmed Frank, still wiping the tear tracks from his cheeks, and reviewed the evidence, the handling of the case, and the verdict. Then he signaled to the door and the "stolen" microscopes were brought in.
It was lesson, one that could not be repeated today in our liability-litigation-prone society, about the nature of law and justice, one that I have not forgotten. Only three people believed in Frank: Hank, Murphy [the assistant defense counsel], and myself.
Most of all, I believed in the truth of the evidence, neither rumors nor direct testimony by dubious witnesses.
That lesson would convert me to an implacable exponent of truth and justice.
JJB
What happened next required me to provide some family background. Some more is still needed to set the stage.
After my father died and we returned to the Delaware Valley where I was born, my mother's sister June Adams helped us find a house in Runnemede, a small rancher on a quiet road, in a sleepy borough.
Most of those days from the time I saw the officers in our base-quarter's living room, discomfited as they stood over my mother kicking and clawing, shrieking and sobbing, on the couch, seem to have passed as if riding on whirlwind. I recall the long plane ride -- my first -- where my brother and I were escorted by the stewardess to the pilot's cabin where he allowed us to grasp the controls in the vacated co-pilot's seat. Then he handed us Pan-Am wing lapel pins to certify that were junior pilots-in-training before we were led back to our seats.
I hope never to forget, my face pressed to the glass, the panoply of lights shining from the streets, bridges, and refinery yards that greeted me as we descended to Philadelphia International. Before I knew it we were across the river and climbing to the third floor toy-room of my maternal grandparents' home, where I eventually -- four hours behind -- slid into sleep.
We children were not permitted to attend the funeral. The only rite permitted me, one blustery November day, to stand in a review field at Ft. Dix and receive the Bronze Star on my father's behalf, my brother Jeff at my side, receiving in his turn the Purple Heart, our mother a stiff, pale presence behind us.
My mother had us baptised in the Episcopal Church in Haddonfield, even as she allowed us to regularly attend my the little RLDS church at which my father had been a deacon, so we could visit with our paternal grandparents. I became reacquainted with the aunts, uncles, cousins, which I had left behind a quarter of a world and quarter of my lifetime ago.
[L-R, JJB, Melissa, Kimberly - Easter 1967, Monmouth St, Gloucester City]
Just as we began to settle into this new life, in the spring of 1967, Sandy married a soldier buddy of her late husband and we were swept once again by changing fortune to Ft. Hood in Killeen, Texas. I recall Jim O'Brien with fondness, though e was not our father and we referred to him as Uncle Jim, never "Dad". Michael James O'Brien was born that following February, another blond-haired, blue-eyed boy.
Killeen was a boy's retreat with a creek flowing in field sloping behind the rancher-style base-quarters, with their corrugated carports that pinged vigorously in the frequent hailstorms.
We returned in late spring, staying in the apartments across the hall from my Aunt June, so I could be Stateside and watching TV when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. It echoed my memories of when my father was called to duty and there were no cartoons on the Saturday in the aftermath of JFK's assassination was held.
It was shortly before RFK's death that June's only child Susan, four years my senior, left her math book open and puzzled out the solutions to the simple algebraic equations I found there. Negative numbers had to be explained to me, so I could solve one of the harder problems.
Before the summer of 1968 was over, we had been transferred to Ft. Clayton in the Panama Canal Zone. I would bike down to the Miraflores Locks to watch the ships pass; to play hopscotch as kids passed their pet monkeys to friends as they took their turns; to hear an overthrow of the country's president on the radio, taking sanctuary in a church; to step down from my school bus to find the hills beside my building on fire ["Burning off the grass," a girl told me nonchalantly, as I froze, stupified]; to swat a shark as we swam during Christmas vacation.
[Kobbe Beach shark net]
To be a military brat -- to live one's "childhood in the Fortress" -- is a situation difficult to explain to civilians. It was not unusual to go to my fourth-grade classes and have a girl bring in for show & tell a 12' anaconda skin that her father had killed. Nor to watch anteaters and tree sloths on the bus ride to school. But the strange thing that happened most regularly, of which we never spoke, were the disappearance of classmates.
One day the desk next to one's own would be empty. Families were shipped Stateside when the fathers were wounded or killed in combat. We children living in the Fortress did not speak of this, for to speak of it was to invite the dislocation into one's own home.
Then it was my turn to be the boy who wasn't there and we returned again to New Jersey, in Bellmawr, where once more my Aunt June arranged a home for us. Jim had been wounded, losing two fingers on his left hand, and accepted medical retirement.
Bellmawr was only a short bike ride to my paternal grandparents in Haddon Heights and a slightly longer trip to June's apartment. After school on Friday's I would go there and spend the weekend with my maternal grandparents. Best of all, just a few short blocks east on Browning Road, lay the nascent tech geek's El Dorado: Edmund's Scientific.
There a child could -- and did! -- purchase a lapidary polishing kit, ultraviolet pens to be seen only under a UV lamp, an Army surplus weather balloon [which I came home to discover Jeff had inflated with the vacuum cleaner inside the house and which threatened to subsume the living room like Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner's Rover], a telescope, a slide-rule, and one's first rudimentary logic board computer.
[L-R, JJB, Kimberly & Jeffery, ca. Spring 1969]
Fifth grade was a disaster with an incompetent teacher who wasn't certified to teach above third-grade but 6th was a transformational experience in a newly-built, advanced, experimental school that assigned students by track, entering a new decade of the '70s. In that year, I learned how to operate in binary, octal, and hexadecimal; to write and resist advertising; to compose and stage a play; to test soil and advise the schoolboard on what grass to buy; and, most crucially, to confront and make a stand against injustice.
Two newly purchased microscopes vanished from the library. My friend Frank was accused of the theft. My homeroom teacher suggested we hold an investigation and trial before we passed the information on to the administration, to give Frank his day in court before a jury of his peers. My friend Hank was lead defense attorney and I was lead defense investigator.
I rigorously, mathematically, geometrically, demolished the prosecutions three witnesses. With charts of the school's halls that Hank displayed with indisputable clarity that refuted the timetable of the witnesses and with an analysis of the position of the sun that refuted the main witness's testimony that she saw Frank in the darkened library by the sunlight slanting through the narrow vertical windows.
Yet everyone **knew** that Frank came from a low-class home and so, Frank in tears, insisting his innocence, heard a verdict returned of guilty. He was led away into the hall by the teacher.
At that moment, I turned to Hank at the defense table, and whispered, "This is a set up."
The teacher returned with a calmed Frank, still wiping the tear tracks from his cheeks, and reviewed the evidence, the handling of the case, and the verdict. Then he signaled to the door and the "stolen" microscopes were brought in.
It was lesson, one that could not be repeated today in our liability-litigation-prone society, about the nature of law and justice, one that I have not forgotten. Only three people believed in Frank: Hank, Murphy [the assistant defense counsel], and myself.
Most of all, I believed in the truth of the evidence, neither rumors nor direct testimony by dubious witnesses.
That lesson would convert me to an implacable exponent of truth and justice.
JJB