by Larry Colton
Eventually, the injury healed. But in the months and years to come, Gordy struggled with his vision, especially close up. Reading was difficult, and he was always behind in school. He flunked the first grade.
“Gordy’s a little slow,” his mom would explain. “He got kicked by a horse.”
* * *
Things always came tough for Gordy. Born at his grandparents’ remote farmhouse on the Canadian prairie on June 23, 1923, Gordy was two months old before his parents hitched up the horse and buggy and drove into town to register his birth. They put down the wrong date.
He was still an infant when they scraped together $100 for a down payment on a plot of farmland ten miles south of Wayne. The land seemed like a good buy—there was a spring and two lakes, a barn, and an old log structure to shelter the family’s dozen pigs, workhorses, cows, turkeys, and chickens during the frigid winters. The house was another matter: it had no electricity, refrigerator, or indoor plumbing. Nor were there any tractors or combines to do the farming; all the work was done with horses. And there was no market nearby. Everything was homegrown—bread, vegetables, meat. Milk came from their cows.
Gordy always tagged along behind Larry, the most daring of the four Cox brothers, the one who always rode his horse at a full gallop. His two younger brothers, Willie and Don, were talkative and adventuresome. Gordy was the only one who wasn’t a daredevil. He was shy and afraid of just about everything. When visitors came to the house, he hid under the dining room table. At school, he wouldn’t meet the teachers’ eyes, and on the playground he walked away from confrontations.
To get to school, three miles away, Gordy rode with Larry on a family horse, holding on for dear life as Larry did his best to scare him, flying through fields at full speed. Sometimes on the way home, Larry detoured by the Two Bar Ranch, daring Gordy to try riding one of the owner’s sheep. He told him that was how all the great rodeo cowboys at the Calgary Stampede had gotten started.
Eventually, Gordy asked for a horse of his own. “There’s a Depression on, son,” his father told him. “There’s no money.”
A few weeks later, a man stopped by the farm trying to sell a little white pony that was half Shetland. Gordy’s father offered the man ten bushels of oats in trade, and he accepted. Gordy named the horse Weasel because he liked watching weasels on the farm sneak up behind jackrabbits and kill them. Weasel had previously been a workhorse, pulling coal cars in the mines; he had an ornery streak that made it tough on Gordy at first. Short-winded from his work in the mines, he had a bad habit of ducking sideways and sending Gordy flying whenever he got tired. After a while, Gordy figured out Weasel’s tricks and they got along fine. He rode him to school almost every day, stabling him in the barn the school kept for the kids’ horses. At lunch he came out and fed him half his sandwich. During the winter, he hitched him to a sleigh and rode across the snow-covered fields. In the spring, he rode him to the south slope of the hill behind the house. Weasel would graze on the grass, and Gordy would stretch out on his back in a field of crocuses and daydream, the clouds billowing across the sky.
At the age of ten, Gordy decided he had to have a violin. Never mind that he’d never played one, or that his parents had no money. As luck would have it, his mother spotted a contest in a magazine—anybody selling $10 worth of Gold Medal garden seed could win a new violin.
The odds were against him. First, he’d have to write away to get the seeds—no easy task for Gordy—and then he’d have to sell them. It was 1933, smack-dab in the middle of the Depression, and the neighbors who might be his customers were also struggling to get by. Not to mention that some of them lived twenty miles away, and the Coxes had no car. Still, his mother encouraged him to try.
Nellie Cox was the spiritual backbone of the family. Not that she was religious. Occasionally she read the Bible, but going to church was never part of the family routine. Besides, the nearest church was a dusty ten-mile ride away. Nellie preferred spending what little spare time she had reading to her four boys, often from the classics. She’d only completed the eighth grade, but everyone knew how smart she was. Whenever the teacher at the children’s school was sick, she stepped in to substitute. At home, she never stopped working—she baked bread three times a week, boiled water collected in rain barrels behind the house on the wood-fired stove for washing and baths, cleaned the family’s clothes on a scrub board, sewed clothes, darned socks, canned vegetables, made butter, nursed wounds. And she did it all with no electricity, refrigeration, or running water. She loved to ride her horse, Dexter, and once every six months she hitched him up to the buggy to make a trip into Wayne to buy supplies.
With his mother’s help, Gordy sent away for a full order of seeds, and then he set out on Weasel to sell them. He was gone all day, traveling round-trip fifty miles. Not many people had the cash on hand to pay him. “I can come back,” he offered. Two weeks later, he rode back to collect. Some had the money, others didn’t. Steadily, he neared his goal.
If and when he earned his violin, he didn’t aspire to play in a symphony, or even a school orchestra. He just wanted to be able to accompany his mother, who loved to sing at family gatherings. Those were always special times—aunts, uncles, and cousins singing, playing the fiddle, reading poetry, dancing. It didn’t matter that Gordy had two left feet on the dance floor.
He was, however, good at getting his chores done around the farm. He and his brothers were not yet teenagers, but they were expected to shoulder their share of the workload. Gordy milked the cows morning and night, shoveled hay, carried water from the well to the house, and hauled wood.
It took three months, but he finally sold his full order of seeds and collected the money from the neighbors. He sent it all in, and a month later his shiny new violin arrived in the mail. Now all he had to do was learn to play it.
Gordy’s dad, Julian, nicknamed Shorty, was a slender 5 feet 7 inches. He was a man of few words but a hardworking farmer, out in the fields from dawn to dusk, fighting a losing battle against the Depression and falling wheat prices. A drought added to the struggle, wiping out his entire crop. He replanted it, but a wicked wind lifted the soil off the seed grains and they blew away. The wind blew the dust so hard that Nellie had to light lamps in the house in the middle of the day. Dirt blew in under the doors and through the window frames. She stuffed rags in the cracks, but still the dust swirled inside. In winter snow blew into the house. Outside, snowdrifts piled so high around the barn and corral that Gordy rode Weasel right over the tops of the fences.
To provide food for his family, Julian took a job working in the Red Deer Coal Mine in Wayne, ten miles from the farm. He hoped it would be temporary, but in the meantime he moved the family into town. All six of them lived in a one-room shack with no electricity, running water, heat, or even an outhouse. Nellie hung a sheet across the room to divide the space and cooked atop a coal-fueled heating stove. It was Gordy’s job to walk the railroad tracks with a bucket every day and pick up lumps of coal that had fallen off the trains.
Because so many farmers and ranchers had moved into town looking for work in the mine, Wayne had become a boomtown, its population swelling to 3,000. Located in the heart of the Alberta Badlands, an area known to hold one of the richest dinosaur fossil beds in the world, it was a forbidding landscape. Summers were scorching hot, winter temperatures were way below zero. The gathering place in town was the Rosedeer Hotel, home of the Last Chance Saloon, where miners went after work to drink and play poker. But not Gordy’s father. He wasn’t much of a drinker, and he’d learned long ago that he was a lousy poker player. He continued to hope that he and the family would return to the farm.
But any hope he’d had of returning was lost when the cows he’d left on the farm with a caretaker were stolen. Adding to his frustration, work at the mine slowed down and Julian was laid off. Now there was no money, no work, no cows, and no crops. Not even a garden. About to lose the farm, he sold the property, took what little profit he made, pa
cked up the family’s meager belongings, including the farm equipment and Weasel, and moved the family two hundred miles north to Colinton. Located ninety miles north of Edmonton, it is a picturesque area known as the gateway to the Great North Country. The family found a small farm to rent, with a run-down old house topped by a leaky roof. Now instead of sweeping up dirt and dust, they mopped up the puddles from the rain and battled the frigid winter, when the temperature dropped to thirty below and stayed there for months. On one occasion, it plummeted all the way to seventy-two below.
For entertainment, Gordy sometimes tried playing his violin, but being tone-deaf didn’t help. Mostly he played with his brothers. The neighbors had children, but the days were short, with little time for anything besides school and chores. Gordy’s main responsibility was helping his brother Larry gather and cut wood. He continued to flounder in school.
After years of struggling to make a go of farming in northern Alberta, and tired of the cold and isolation, Julian decided to move the family again, this time to Yakima, Washington. He’d heard there was work there. Before moving, he held an auction to sell off all of the farm equipment and animals, including Weasel. Gordy pleaded to keep him. His dad said no.
As Weasel was led away, Gordy ran after him, tears streaming down his face, giving him one last hug around the neck.
The next day the family boarded a train south, stopping in Calgary to visit relatives. Gordy was in the seventh grade, but it was his first time in a big city. He’d never experienced a house with a flush toilet, or bread that wasn’t home-baked. Larry coaxed him to go downtown with him. A prostitute approached, beckoning them down an alley.
Gordy turned and ran home. He wondered if America would be so perplexing.
In early June 1937, Gordy Cox crossed the border into the United States in the backseat of the 1928 Pontiac his dad had bought for the trip. It was Gordy’s first time in a car.
Yakima, named after the Indian tribe and located in a verdant valley in south-central Washington 145 miles southeast of Seattle, was a leading agricultural center, known for its fruit. With a population of almost 10,000, it seemed huge to Gordy. It even had an electric streetcar. But it didn’t have any jobs. Soon after arriving, the whole family went to work outside the city limits picking fruit. The Depression was still on, and hundreds of families had come to the Yakima Valley, many of them farm owners and businessmen displaced by the Dust Bowl in the Midwest. Most of them lived in a large transient-labor camp south of town and were treated as lower class by the Yakima townsfolk, who referred to them as Okies, including the Coxes.
Working alongside his parents and brothers, Gordy spent his first months in America picking apples, pears, strawberries, cherries, apricots, and peaches. The only fruits he’d seen in Canada were the sweet purplish black saskatoons and chokecherries that grew wild on the prairie, and it didn’t take long for him to develop a dislike for the fruit he picked. At night he slept in a tent with his parents, or outside under the stars with his brothers, enduring wind, rain, and noise from the other migrant workers. Working together, the family made less than $100 a month.
In September, just as school was starting, Gordy’s dad got hired as an irrigator for a farmer living in Naches Heights, twenty miles north of Yakima. The job paid $100 a month and came with an old house that had more conveniences than any place they’d lived—cold running water and electricity, a single bulb hanging in each room. To Gordy, now enrolled in the eighth grade at Marcus Whitman School, it felt like the Ritz. But at school, he felt isolated from the other students, who were better off. Sometimes they called him “Okie.” He ignored them, choosing to stay mainly to himself. In time, his dad lost his job and the family moved again, this time into a house in Yakima, and Julian went back to work picking fruit with the migrant workers.
Entering high school, Gordy wore the same clothes he’d worn in the sixth grade.
Gordy looked smooth in his new skates, gliding across the ice at Yakima Ice Rink, the only person left in the arena. This was his favorite time of the evening. He loved the quiet. It was his job to lock up the rink, and most nights he would skate for a few minutes before heading home, gliding effortlessly from end to end of the rink.
He was dreading tomorrow at school. As captain of the school’s hockey team, he was supposed to say a few words about the team at the school’s sports assembly, but the thought of standing up and speaking before the whole student body terrified him.
Now a junior, he’d done his best to pass unnoticed through Yakima High. He still had trouble reading and was barely passing his classes. He’d taken violin lessons, but without much success, and the violin was now stored away in a closet. Mostly he kept to himself, and as for girls, he’d never had a date; even the thought of talking to the opposite sex made him nervous. His high-school calling card, if he had one, was as the right-winger for the hockey team. At 5 feet 5 inches, 130 pounds, he wasn’t the best or toughest player on the squad—he did his best to avoid the contact and hitting—but he was the best skater, helped by his job at the rink. Skating gave him confidence, whereas in other sports he felt awkward and intimidated.
He finished locking up the rink, then rode his new Schwinn home. His old bicycle had been stolen, and he had had to buy a new one to make his deliveries on his morning paper route. For a year now he’d been delivering The Oregonian on the hilly west side of town, struggling out of bed at 5:00 a.m., an especially hard task on the mornings after he’d worked late at the skating rink. On the positive side, his two jobs provided him with the money to buy his bike, new skates, and movie tickets. A week earlier he’d splurged on a black cowboy hat, just like the one Hopalong Cassidy wore. He was able to indulge himself because his dad was now working as a road builder for the WPA, and his brother Larry, who’d dropped out of school after the move from Canada, was now sending half his paycheck home each month from his job with the CCC.
Arriving home at midnight, Gordy went to his room and pulled out his schoolbooks. As he tried to read his history assignment, his eyes grew heavy. Some days it was all he could do to keep his eyes open in class. He finished the first page, then realized he didn’t remember anything he’d just read. It was this way almost every night, a struggle not only to stay awake but to make sense of the words. It bothered him that other kids came to class every morning with their homework neatly done and an understanding of the material. He knew he was trying, but he was just slow. His mom still blamed it on being kicked in the head by the horse.
He awoke the next morning, still terrified at the thought of going before the whole student body. He thought of calling in sick, but that would mean not getting to play in the game. He rolled out of bed, delivered the newspapers, then rode to school. By the time the assembly finally began, he felt the sweat rolling down his back, and his mouth had turned dry. He had not written out what he was going to say because he thought it would be even more embarrassing if he got up there and couldn’t read his own words.
As the student body cheered the concluding remarks from the captain of the football team, Gordy turned to a teammate. “I can’t do it,” he blurted, then stood up and bolted out of the gym, leaving his surprised teammate to talk to the student body.
Later at practice, his teammates and coach didn’t mention the episode. They didn’t need to. Gordy had dealt himself another blow to his self-esteem, which was already in the basement.
It was late 1940, and the idea of dropping out of school and joining the Navy seemed like a good plan to Gordy. His brother Larry had joined the Army right out of the CCC, and his letters home talked about all the new friends he’d made and places he’d visited.
But there were a couple of big obstacles. One was passing the physical. Gordy had recently started wearing glasses, and that worried him. The other problem was that he was only seventeen and would need his parents’ approval. He doubted he’d get it, especially from his mom, but it was worth a shot.
During the previous year, he’d gleaned a vague
understanding of the growing threat of war from reading the headlines every morning as he folded the newspapers, but that all seemed remote and unconnected to his world. Besides, he’d heard his father talking about how FDR was promising that America wouldn’t get involved. What was real to him was that he was flunking English class. He had a book report due on Silas Marner, but he hadn’t been able to get past the first few pages of the book. He’d all but given up on school.
He presented his case to his parents. As he’d expected, his dad approved but his mother insisted he finish high school. Over the next couple of weeks, he continued to plead with her. Finally, convinced that he wasn’t going to finish school anyway, she relented. Now all that stood in his way was passing the physical and proving his U.S. citizenship. He needed to get ahold of his birth certificate, which showed that even though he had been born in Canada, his parents were American citizens, which made him one, too. It took several weeks, but he finally got the proof. And to his surprise, he passed the Navy physical, including the eye exam.
In January 1941, Gordy Cox boarded a train in Seattle on his way to boot camp in San Diego, California. The thought of serving on a submarine had not crossed his mind.
Part Two
SUBMARINERS
5
Chuck Vervalin
USS Gudgeon
Standing with his sailor buddies outside the whorehouse on Hotel Street in Honolulu, Chuck was having second thoughts. Sure, he wanted to lose his cherry—he was nineteen, and if his buddies were to be believed, he was the last of the virgins. But this didn’t feel like the way to go.
