by Larry Colton
His naval career had not gone the way he’d hoped. After rising to the rank of commander, he was passed over for promotion to captain and the admiralship he’d wanted. He alternately blamed it on being discriminated against because he was short or because he’d married an enlisted man’s wife. He’d always been a big drinker, but after being passed over, he began drinking even more heavily. Barbara usually kept pace.
He was a strict and controlling parent, rarely showing affection to his two children. He hand-selected the classes Lynn took in high school so that she could qualify for Annapolis. He repeatedly told his son, Bobby, that he was worthless and a loser and beat him with a belt.
Kunhardt’s drinking had gotten so bad that one of his friends advised Barbara that if she was to have any chance of saving the marriage, she needed to lock the liquor cabinet. There was a part of her that was afraid of him and wanted to leave, but over the years she’d grown comfortable in their material world. She liked her big diamond ring. She remained faithful in the marriage.
Lynn heard Kunhardt’s tirade ordering Barbara to return from Oregon. “It would serve you right if she never came home,” she said.
At the market the next day, Bob had a six-pack of beer in his shopping basket when he came around the aisle and spotted Barbara. As he approached, tears filled his eyes. “Oh, my God, you’re as beautiful as ever,” he said.
“You look pretty darn good yourself,” she replied.
Their old chemistry was instantly ignited. They got into Bob’s pickup and started south on I-5, past Medford and Ashland, and up into the Siskiyous toward Mount Ashland. It was the same route they’d taken the day they first saw each other after Bob’s return from the war. To Barbara, on that day Bob had been a shadow of the man she’d married. Now he was robust and full of life, barely able to stop talking or casting lustful sidelong glances in her direction.
They turned around and headed back north. In his bed in his single-wide, they made love for five hours.
The next three days were a whirlwind of sex, reminiscing, and feelings of guilt. Every evening Robert Kunhardt called and demanded that Barbara come home, and every time she told him she couldn’t leave until her mother was better. She even took Bob to visit her mom in the hospital. When her father learned that she’d seen Bob, he was disapproving, just as he’d been back when they dated in high school.
“See where you’d be if you’d ended up with him?” he demanded. “You’d be living in a trailer. What kind of life would that be?”
As the time neared for Barbara to head back home to Virginia, she and Bob agonized over what to do next. As intense as the sparks had been, she wasn’t ready to leave her marriage. “Maybe we can just have a long-distance love affair,” she suggested.
“I want more,” Bob insisted.
He remembered when they went to Reno in 1945 to get a divorce and ended up making love all night long, only to have Barbara dash his hopes of getting back together. But this time it felt as if renewing their relationship might be possible. She’d told Bob how unhappy she was in her marriage, and that she’d never loved her husband with the same passion and intensity that she’d loved him.
For Bob, being with Barbara again had been the best thing that had happened to him since their wedding day back in 1941. All the years that had intervened had done nothing to diminish his passion or desire to be with her. It was as if he’d just been treading water while she was away, treading water for twenty-five years.
“I’ll do whatever it takes to get you back,” he vowed.
On their last night together, they bid each other a tearful farewell. “I don’t think we should contact each other,” she proposed. “It would just be too painful.”
“I don’t know if I can promise that,” he responded.
After he watched her walk back into her parents’ house, he drove away, but instead of heading home, he headed south toward California. He drove all night, and the next morning when her plane landed at San Francisco Airport, he was waiting to greet her when she headed for her connecting flight.
“You got away from me once,” he said. “I can’t let it happen again.”
Her heart told her to get in his pickup and head back to Oregon with him. “All I thought about on the flight down here was being with you,” she admitted. “But I can’t do it. At least not now. I have to go home and see if there’s anything to be saved in my marriage.”
Once again they said a tearful good-bye. Bob headed back to Oregon and Barbara flew east to her husband.
“Bobby, I want you to meet me at the Holiday Inn in Georgetown tomorrow at six o’clock,” said Barbara. She sat nervously across the family room from her twenty-two-year-old son. A senior at the University of South Carolina, he was home on vacation.
“Why?” he asked.
Barbara cleared her throat. “Because I’m going to introduce you to the man I’m going to leave your father for,” she replied.
Bobby stared in disbelief. Had he heard her right? She’d always been high-spirited, a bit of a kidder. “Say that again,” he said.
Barbara took a deep breath and repeated the words. “This is for real,” she added.
Bobby studied her face. Clearly, she was serious. But she’d always been the dutiful wife and good mother, living in her husband’s world and by his rules. “Who is this guy?” he asked.
Barbara paused. Bobby vaguely knew that his mother had been married before, but how could she possibly explain to her son the history she shared with Bob Palmer and the passion that had been reignited? “I want you to meet him and see for yourself who he is,” she answered.
When she’d first returned from Oregon, she initially tried to brush her rekindled feelings for Bob into a back corner of her mind and heart. She had lived her whole life doing what others expected of her and she saw too many barriers in the way—they lived on opposite sides of the country; she couldn’t imagine giving up her life to go live in a single-wide trailer; she didn’t think she could ever get up the courage to confess to her husband.
But the pull to be with Bob was relentless. Barbara had decided to enlist her daughter’s support. She invited Lynn upstairs to her bedroom, where she went into a closet and pulled out a shoe box. Inside the box was another box, and inside that box was still another locked box. Barbara opened it to reveal pictures of her and Bob, as well as other little mementos. Lynn had never seen her mother look so happy or excited. It had always been a mystery to her why she’d stayed with her father. Lynn was no longer living at home, and she volunteered her address as a place where Bob could write to Barbara. In the months ahead there was a steady stream of letters back and forth, as well as phone calls. Once, when Barbara’s husband was out of town on business, Bob got in his car and drove forty-six hours straight through across the country to see her. They spent five days in a motel room. When he went for a physical shortly after returning home, he still had rug burns on his knees and elbows. The doctor inquired how he got them, and when Bob confessed, the doctor shook his hand.
Sitting across from his mother in the family room, Bobby had never seen her look so resolved, so self-assured.
“Does Dad know about all this?” he asked.
Her smile disappeared. Yes, she had told him. At first, she’d just told him how unhappy she was and she was considering leaving. He responded by telling her he wanted to save their marriage, and asked for a month and promised to make changes. He took her out to dinner, bought her gifts, and treated her nicer than he had in years. But it was too little, too late. She called Bob and asked him if he’d marry her if she left Kunhardt. “Yesterday,” he responded.
“I told your dad last night while we were out on the boat that I was leaving him to go back to Bob Palmer,” she said.
“What did he say?”
“The first thing he said was, ‘Who’s going to help me with the boat?’ ”
Bobby rolled his eyes. “What about the house and boat and all of that?” he asked.
“I
’m giving everything to your dad,” she replied. “I just want out.”
“Wow, this guy must have money,” Bobby ventured.
“Not at all.”
“You guys must be really in love.”
Barbara smiled. “I can’t wait for you to meet him tomorrow. He’s special. You’ll see.”
“I’m staying at the house tonight,” said Bobby. “I don’t trust Dad with all those guns.”
In July 1971, Bob flew across the country to bring Barbara back to the West Coast. Despite his nerves, the meetings with Bobby and Lynn went well, both of them giving their blessings to the relationship.
Some of Barbara’s friends thought she was nuts to run off with a man who couldn’t afford an engagement ring. “I can’t imagine leaving someone who won a national sailing championship,” said one friend. They also thought she was being naive; she had not hired a lawyer and she had signed everything over to Kunhardt. “I admitted to him that I’d slept with Bob and he was going to charge me with adultery if I tried going after property,” she explained.
For Barbara, physically leaving had not gone as badly as she’d feared. All she was taking were a couple of suitcases packed with clothes and an old sewing machine, which she put in the backseat of a five-year-old Chevy Nova. The morning she left, Kunhardt rode with her to the Holiday Inn, stopping a block from the motel. As he got out of the car, he threw two $100 bills at her and then walked away. She and Bob didn’t even get out of the state before they stopped at a motel and made love the rest of the day.
They stopped at a drugstore in Ohio, where Barbara bought two imitation gold wedding rings until they got something more permanent. Instead of returning to Oregon, they rented a small one-bedroom apartment in San Mateo, south of San Francisco. Bob took a job working three and a half days a week for a drywall company that installed movable partitions in buildings. Barbara stayed home and clipped coupons and decorated the apartment. For her, the romance and affection Bob gave her more than made up for the material things she’d left behind. She felt that for the first time in her life, she had a say in decisions. She had money, though not much, to spend however she wanted. When Bob wasn’t at work, they spent almost every possible moment together.
They held hands everywhere they went; Bob opened doors for her and wrote her love notes and cards. His manners were almost Victorian. He regularly told friends that his main purpose in life was to make Barbara happy. Because she’d been an officer’s wife and lived in a big house, he worried that he wouldn’t be able to measure up financially, so he took a part-time job selling lawn mowers for Sears. Barbara constantly reassured him how happy she was. It wasn’t unusual for them to make love in the morning before he went to work, then when he came home, and then again before they went to sleep. They remarried on August 12, 1972.
One of the things that impressed Barbara the most was how handy and practical Bob was. He could fix anything. If he was driving down the street and heard the engine ping, he’d pull over and fix it on the spot. If a door squeaked, he’d take off the door and replace the hinge. For Christmas, he bought her son a screw gun.
The only gray cloud in their life came from Marty, who had married his high-school sweetheart and was now living in the Bay Area too. It wasn’t that Marty didn’t like Barbara, it was just that she was stealing such a big part of his father’s heart and time. Marty’s long hair and his being stoned a lot didn’t help his relationship with his father.
Bob was constantly amazed at Barbara’s positive attitude. He marveled at the way she started singing as soon as her feet hit the floor every morning and the fact that she kept separate envelopes of money for furniture, dishes, bedding, clothes, and other expenses, just as she’d done when they were first married in 1941. When he got home from work she’d excitedly show him her purchases for the day. It might be a salt-and-pepper set or a TV tray. She told him that when she was married to Kunhardt, she’d go shopping with no intent to buy because she already had everything she needed. They traveled frequently to Oregon on long weekends to visit old friends.
In 1977, Bob and Barbara moved back to Medford. He wanted to be closer to the mountains and rivers he’d loved so much as a kid. With his Navy pension and the disability pay he was now collecting, he figured they’d have enough money to live comfortably, especially after he started receiving Social Security in a few years. Plus, every time he drove through the Hunter’s Point neighborhood in San Francisco and saw all the blacks, he’d usually say the same thing: “I hate those people.” Medford was a lily-white community.
Soon after moving back to Oregon, Bob suffered his second heart attack. The cardiologist told him he needed to slow down, so he and Barbara started to play golf regularly and bought a camper to take trips. Barbara was a faithful follower of All My Children; so that she wouldn’t miss any episodes while they were on the road, Bob hooked up an antenna on the camper and always made sure they stopped in a place with good reception.
It wasn’t too long after the heart attack that Bob received a jolt of another kind—Barbara’s father apologized to him. For almost forty years Mr. Koehler had held firm to his belief that Bob wasn’t good enough for his daughter, but after seeing how happy Barbara was now, and the adoration, love, and respect that Bob lavished on her, he pulled Bob aside.
“I was wrong,” he admitted.
Because the war was responsible for his long separation from Barbara, he wanted to be able to show her a part of that experience, so in 1988 he took her to Penang to the place where he’d spent the first four months of his imprisonment—the Convent on Light Street. After the war, it became a highly respected school for girls again. For several months he’d been exchanging letters with Sister Francis de Sales, the director of the school. He’d even made a charitable contribution to the convent. It was an emotional return as he visited the classroom where he had been held and saw all the names of the crew memorialized on a plaque. He cried as he listened to Sister de Sales introduce him to the students, teachers, alumni, and local dignitaries:
This is no ordinary day for us here in Light Street Convent. We have as our guest someone who came here, metaphorically in chains, forty-five years ago. He was a prisoner of war then; today he has freely come of his own accord to visit what he often calls “the old school.”
Some of you once studied in the classroom near the laundry, generally known in school as the “Grenadier Sanctuary.” I regard it as a sacred place, a monument to the love and loyalty to one’s country and fellow men that inspired, strengthened, and goaded on the Grenadier men to a superhuman endurance that could take the beatings, the clubbings, the bayonet pricks, and the physical weakness caused by near starvation and intense hunger. We here have long sensed the mystery that surrounded these gallant men.
Mr. Palmer edits and circulates the Grenadier Newsletter. I have been receiving a copy of it monthly for almost six years. I wish to pay tribute not only to Mr. Palmer’s outstanding writing ability but also to the splendid work he’s doing in keeping the men together. He was the ship’s writer before that fateful day in April 1943. He is still that today in fact, but he is more than that because of the part he plays in strengthening the bond between the men. They are a unique bunch of men, sharing one another’s interests, plans, joys, and sorrows, all the nitty-gritty of daily life.
Someone has said that of all the fighting men of World War II, the submariners lived in the closest confinement and therefore forged the closest companionship of all. That seems particularly true of the Grenadier men, and that such close and constant companionship has not only weathered the passing of time but has been strengthened in an unbreakable bond is due in no small measure to Mr. Palmer’s efforts.
That brings me to the Grenadier’s bond with us, a strange one in a way, since our school was the crucible of their sufferings. Mr. Palmer tries to explain it this way in a newsletter dated September 1983: “For some there are definite ties with the old school, it seems. I cannot really understand that except that
young men are impressed by everything that happens, and it must be remembered that the first blows struck by the Japanese with bayonet, or fist, or club were the first real physical hurts some of us had ever received. Little wonder we remember and attach significance to the school of 1943 and the lovely school of today.”
Elsewhere in a personal letter to me, Mr. Palmer wrote: “Why we hover over the painful or the unusual is a mystery to me, but what is clear is that a small group of very young boys encountered their first real and genuine confrontation with life within the walls of your school. It would seem that they have profited much by that experience.”
In 1990, Bob and Barbara moved to Ocean Pines, Maryland. Bob wasn’t all that keen on moving to the East Coast, but he went along with it because he knew that Barbara wanted to be closer to her two children and four grandkids. Making her happy continued to be the most important thing in his life. He often expressed this love in writing, as he did in a letter to friends in 1998:
Twenty-six years have passed since Barbie and I reconnected. She is 77 and I am 78. To put into words seems beyond me. We have traveled, both in the United States and overseas, and have felt the touch of the other’s hand all this time. Our hearts quicken at each other’s return home from an errand. To watch her walk across the room arouses those urges present in a much younger man. She excites me and I am so proud of her. She line dances and started to tap dance at the tender age of 75. She plays bridge, gardens and maintains a household environment of cleanliness along with three square meals each day. Our bills are paid on time, no birthdays are forgotten and I have been privileged to count her children and theirs as “very close.” I heard that a man has only six chances in this world of finding a completely suitable mate. Considering the billions of women in the world, I count myself as lucky beyond belief in not only getting her in the first place but in being able to recover her a second time. My cup runneth over.
