by Larry Colton
Tim Jr. has had a good relationship with his father. “For a long time I felt like I lived in his shadow, especially here at work,” he explained. “But he’s let me come into my own. Now I feel like I stand in his light. He’s been one hell of a mentor.
“I think one of the things that helped me through some of the tough times is that I have hobbies. I play golf and I’ve played guitar in rock ’n’ roll bands around town. Dad’s even come to see me play. But he doesn’t have any hobbies of his own. It’s work and being with my mom. Well, I guess you could count the church as a hobby. And he’s been a Mason for over fifty years.”
Perhaps it was the lack of a physical outlet that contributed to Tim’s health issues after his son’s death. He suffered a case of vertigo, and on a business trip to Chicago he had an anxiety attack and had to get off an airplane just before it took off. But with each setback, he fell back on his faith to help him through.
“There are quite a few sides to his personality,” Tim Jr. continued. “He can be gruff, giving to a fault, or deeply religious. And he’s definitely a big teaser, especially with his grandkids. He’s a fantastic grandparent, very involved in those kids’ lives. He likes to take them on trips with him—it could be to the zoo in San Antonio or snorkeling in Hawaii. He’s a big hugger. But maybe the thing I notice most about my dad is that he’s really mellowed out. Maybe it was my brother’s death, or maybe it’s just age, but he is definitely a lot calmer.”
Maureen Bright, or Mo as she’s known to friends, has an office down the hall from Tim Sr. She has worked for him for over twenty years, starting as a secretary and working her way up to senior VP. Outside of his family, probably nobody knows him better, although in some ways they are very different. She speaks with a British accent; he has a thick Texas drawl. She’s divorced; he’s been married for over sixty years. He was a vigorous George W. Bush supporter; she thought Bush was “a fool.” But over the years, they have forged a deep mutual respect.
“He’s an up-front kind of guy,” she said. “Honest. Full of integrity. Big heart. Levelheaded. Great family man, completely devoted to his wife. Just an all-around nice guy. As a boss, he was demanding. Very no-nonsense, very forceful. He ran the business like a ship. Everything had to be tidy and shipshape. He’d walk around picking up staples off desks. He couldn’t tolerate clutter. And he wanted it done yesterday. He also can’t tolerate people being late. He fired his own grandson because the kid thought he could keep getting away with showing up late. Yes, he was tough, but he always treated his employees really well, although he kept a professional distance.
“He’s as generous as anyone I know. I’ve watched him loan employees money. He bought one man a set of dentures. And I can’t even begin to estimate how much he’s given to the church. He bought new Dell computers for the office and gave all the old ones to the church. He set up a foundation. And it’s not just money he gives. It’s also his time and energy.”
For all the success and money Tim earned in business, he also suffered setbacks. In the late 1980s, his company encountered significant financial problems. He lost his office, agents, just about everything. But he converted the bottom half of the split-level house in which he was living at the time into office space. He didn’t draw a salary for over a year, getting by on his Navy pension. He and Mo diligently worked the phones and sent out mailers, and in time they rescued the business and built it back up bigger than ever.
“I think his attitude during that difficult time and with the loss of his son was that if he could survive being a POW, he could get through anything,” Mo concluded.
Tim steered his customized van into the driveway of his million-dollar home in an Austin suburb and flipped a switch under the dash, activating a lift for the side rear door. He hurried around the car and waited for the lift to fall into place, then stepped into the van to lend a hand to Jean. Since being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in the mid-1990s, she has been confined to a wheelchair. During that time, Tim has dedicated his life to providing her care—shopping, running errands, making sure she gets to lead as full a life as possible. It’s payback, he said, for all the years she took care of him. On this evening, they had just returned from dining out at a local steakhouse, Tim working the room like he was the newly elected mayor—a wave, a slap on the back, a quick visit to a table of suits, with Jean smiling all the while, well accustomed to her husband’s big-as-Texas style.
He followed her motorized wheelchair into the house and pushed the button to the elevator he’d had installed to make it easier for her to navigate the large house. As she headed upstairs, he walked to his office, a room with an expansive view of the rolling mesquite hills to the south. If this office was a testimonial to the life he had led, with plaques and pictures of his careers in the Navy and insurance, one memento stood out—a framed, handwritten letter to him from Chuck, written a couple of months before he died. Its last sentences read: “You’ve always been there for me, Dad, even through the hard times. Thanks. I love you.”
50
Bob Palmer
Ocean Pines, Maryland
Eighty-one-year-old Bob Palmer sat in an easy chair in the living room of his modest home in Ocean Pines, Maryland. Slowly, arduously, he got up to get himself a drink of water, his breathing labored. His body might have been a little wobbly, but his mental acuity was still sharp.
“When Barbara and I drove up to Reno after I got back from the war,” he said, sitting back down, “I thought we would get back together, especially after we spent that night dancing to ‘The Anniversary Waltz’ and making love. Didn’t work out that way.”
He stared wistfully off into space, thinking of what might have been if the love of his life hadn’t deserted him. Dressed in slacks and a white golf shirt, he was still a handsome man despite his failing health, with clear blue eyes and a thick shock of silver white hair. Peeking out just beneath the right sleeve of his shirt was a tattoo of a sailing ship riding the waves of a red reef. He got it back when tattoos were the province only of military men and convicted crooks.
“I was a little drunk when I got it,” he admitted. “Okay, I was real drunk.”
Bob regained his physical health after the war and decided to make a career of the Navy. His mental health slowly rebounded, too, although rarely an hour went by that he didn’t think about Barbara, who married Robert Kunhardt on March 2, 1946. His primary coping mechanism was alcohol.
In late 1947, while stationed at Treasure Island in the Bay Area, he met Jean Towne, a divorcée who worked as a secretary in the same naval office he did. She did little to hide the fact that she was looking for a husband. She wore her reddish-brown hair in pigtails and had a personality 180 degrees away from Barbara’s. Spirited and independent, she loved sports, especially baseball; she had worked as an usherette at Seals Stadium in San Francisco for the city’s Pacific Coast League team and liked to boast of seeing Joe DiMaggio before he got famous. Her quick temper and sassy mouth often got her in trouble. On a previous job when she was told to take her hair out of pigtails, she responded by telling her boss to “kiss my ass” and walked off the job.
She brought this impertinence to her relationship with Bob. From the very beginning, they argued, often over his flirty ways with other women. She shared his fondness for alcohol, and she wasn’t afraid to start an argument. Bob’s usual way of coping was to head off to the nearest bar. Nevertheless, they married in 1948, and a year later, while stationed in Saipan, they had a son, Marty.
Like many POWs after the war, Bob filled out an affidavit detailing his imprisonment—prison conditions, torture, medical care, food, exercise, and Red Cross supplies—taking great care to provide an accurate account of his time in the four camps—Penang, Singapore, Ofuna, and Ashio—where he had been held. He made little effort to hide his hatred for his captors, and whenever possible he provided names or descriptions of the guards at each of the sites.
Bob’s affidavit would become part of the mountain of evid
ence compiled by the U.S. Investigative Group to assist in the prosecution of Japanese war criminals in what would become known as the Tokyo War Crimes Trials, which stretched from 1946 through 1948. He did not testify in person, although Captain Fitzgerald did, specifically regarding the brutality at Ofuna. Other POWs, among them Gordy Cox, had no desire to participate. The past was the past, and all they wanted to do was get on with their lives and not dredge up those painful memories.
In the end, 920 Japanese military personnel were executed, including officers responsible for ordering waterboarding and other excessive torture. Another 475 received life sentences, and another 2,944 drew prison time, with 1,018 being acquitted. Tojo, the prime minister and war minister, was executed, but General MacArthur ordered that Emperor Hirohito be exonerated. It was a decision second-guessed by many who believed it distorted the Japanese understanding of what it was to lose a war in which the country’s supreme commander went unpunished.
Bob was particularly interested in the sentences handed down to the thirty-three officers and enlisted men from Ofuna who were put on trial. Three officers received death sentences, one committed suicide; the rest were given prison sentences of various lengths.
In some small measure the war crimes trials and punishments they meted out helped Bob feel like his treatment had been avenged, but it did not erase the memory of all those horrible days and nights when he was convinced he was going to die. For that, alcohol was a better eraser. But even more than a case of beer, what helped him move forward with his life the most was his son, Marty.
The same wasn’t so true with his feelings about Jean. The first year of their marriage went well enough, but after that their relationship rapidly deteriorated. Bob was drinking and running around with other women, Jean was constantly yelling and screaming about his miscreant ways, each blaming the other for their behavior. They not only slept in separate beds, they moved into separate rooms. But they both felt a sense of obligation to stay married because of Marty.
As bad a husband as Bob was, he was as good a father, wrapping his life around Marty. He took him everywhere with him; he even welded a special seat for him into the backseat of his Navy-issued jeep.
Marty looked up to his dad, admiring the way he looked in his Navy uniform and the way he could fix just about anything. How many times did he hear Bob repeat his little mantra for getting things done: “Do it now while you’re thinking about it.” In the Philippines, Bob bought and rebuilt an old sailing junk and took Marty sailing with him. He also bought and tinkered with motorcycles, and with Marty riding behind him, he loved to go for rides in the countryside. When Marty was old enough to drive a motorcycle, Bob always encouraged him to let out the throttle. To Marty, it seemed that everyone loved to be around his dad except his mother. Once, while Bob was stationed at Pearl Harbor, Jean woke Marty up in the middle of the night and brought him out on the front porch and pointed to his father passed out on the front lawn. “I want you to see what a drunk your father is,” she said. On Marty’s eighteenth birthday, Bob took him to a bar in the Philippines. After a few beers, Bob confessed that he hadn’t always been faithful to Jean, an admission that didn’t surprise Marty but one he still wished he hadn’t heard.
But the one thing Bob rarely talked about with his son was his experience in the war. Marty knew very little about what had happened to his father and didn’t ask. Bob made it clear that he believed that it had been his patriotic duty and honor to serve his country, no matter how badly it turned out for him.
Nor did Bob talk to Marty about Barbara.
Bob eventually became a chief warrant officer 4 (CWO-4), the highest rank below the commissioned officers. Primarily, he served on the office staffs of commanding officers throughout the Pacific; his duties included overseeing motor and boat pools, controlling correspondence throughout the staff, coordinating VIP tours, and maintaining personnel records. He consistently received high grades from his commanding officers.
With each new transfer or assignment, he checked the duty rosters and phone books looking for Barbara’s name. He knew that her husband was a Navy officer on track to become an admiral, and that she’d had two children, a boy and a girl. They both ended up stationed in Hawaii, where Bob was careful to avoid situations where they might run into each other. But once, after a night of heavy drinking, he drove to their house at 3:00 a.m. and parked across the street. He just sat behind the wheel, staring at the house, tears rolling down his cheeks. After an hour, he drove away.
Most of the time, he felt like he was just going through the motions, with no purpose to his life. Barbara was always a ghostly presence in his marriage. In the heat of an argument, he told Jean he would do anything to get back with Barbara and would never be happy without her. “I’d crawl back to her on my hands and knees if she’d take me,” he blurted out, effectively ending what little affection Jean had left for him. Still, they stayed together for Marty.
In 1967, Bob suffered a heart attack. He was convinced that it was related to the stress and physical toll his years as a POW had taken on him, but the Navy didn’t see the connection and refused to give him disability compensation. He soon retired and settled in San Mateo, south of San Francisco. Bob wasn’t bitter; he was immensely proud of his nearly thirty years of service and the stack of letters of commendation. Although he hadn’t gone to college or become a commissioned officer, he felt that the education and travel he’d experienced during his career had served him well.
With the war in Vietnam escalating rapidly, Marty enrolled at Sonoma State College and received a college deferment, but he flunked out after his first year and was immediately reclassified 1-A. To avoid getting drafted into the Army, he followed his dad’s advice and enlisted in the Navy, eventually volunteering for the Riverine Forces, a joint U.S. Army and U.S. Navy force that helped transport troops and saw combat in the Mekong Delta. The boats often came under heavy fire from Vietcong units dug in behind trees and foliage along the riverbanks that ran through the delta. For Marty, being part of such a dangerous assignment was a way to show his dad that he was every bit as brave and tough.
Marty survived his tour of duty, but like many returning Vietnam vets, he struggled with reentry into civilian society, falling into the grips of dope, including heroin, and a deep depression. Bob struggled to understand, and he and his son began to drift apart, the closeness they shared during Marty’s childhood giving way to an uneasy tension. Bob suspected Marty of stealing from him; Marty believed that Bob was not sympathetic to the difficulties he was experiencing in readjusting after Vietnam. In one heated argument, he blamed Bob for his problems.
In 1970, Bob’s marriage to Jean finally disintegrated. He packed his few belongings, took their two small dogs, and moved back to southern Oregon where he’d grown up, renting a single-wide mobile home in the hills west of Jacksonville near Medford. He got by on his Navy pension and small savings. He dabbled with the idea of writing a book about his POW experience, but whenever he sat down to work on the project, he was overwhelmed with the enormity of the task and soon abandoned the idea. Mostly, he drank beer and did nothing. He rarely talked to Marty. Even the task of taking care of the two dogs seemed too much to handle, and he returned them to Jean in California.
It was January 1971 and Bob was sitting in the living room of his mobile home, trying to get a fix on how to spend the day, when the phone rang.
“This is Barbara,” the voice on the other end said.
“Who?” he responded.
“Barbara Kunhardt. You know, Barbara Koehler. Barbara Palmer. Your ex-wife.”
Bob hesitated, trying to match the voice with the memories. “Is this somebody playing a joke?” he asked.
“No, it’s really me,” she said.
She had come home to visit her mom, who was recuperating in the hospital following surgery, and her father had told her where Bob was living.
“God, it’s great to hear your voice,” he said. “How’ya doing?”
&
nbsp; Barbara told him that she was still married to Kunhardt, who had retired from the Navy in 1966 and now worked as a consultant for the government. She had two children in their early twenties and lived in a large house in McLean, Virginia, an upscale suburb near Washington, D.C. She and Kunhardt liked to entertain and go sailing on his yacht.
Bob and Barbara talked nonstop for two hours, both admitting that they had regularly checked the duty rosters in search of the other’s name at each new assignment. “It’d sure be nice to see you,” Bob finally offered.
They agreed to “accidentally” bump into each other the next day at a market in Central Point.
What Barbara didn’t mention in their conversation was that she’d made the decision to call Bob (her courage bolstered by a couple of stiff drinks) after her husband had called to demand that she cut short her visit with her parents and come back home “where you belong.” He ended the conversation by hanging up on her.
The reality was that Barbara’s marriage had not been a happy one for years. Robert Kunhardt, as Barbara had learned soon after they were married, was not an easy man to live with. He had a notoriously short fuse and kept a tight rein on her and the children. A gun collector, he kept five loaded pistols and eight shotguns in the house. He demanded his dinner be served every night precisely at 1800 sharp (6:00 p.m.) and often graded Barbara on the quality of the meal, or their sex. They took family vacations every year at the same time and to the same place—to visit his parents in Connecticut. He kept her on a tight budget and had to approve of every expense. At one point, their daughter, Lynn, told him to “stop trying to run the family as if you’re commanding a ship.”
