It’s not a stretch to think a man of my grandfather’s irreverent tendencies might pull such a stunt, and the story is certainly in keeping with his fearless, swashbuckling side. But it’s probably apocryphal, an exaggeration, at best. Exhibit A: Sandy was honorably discharged, “By reason of flying deficiency,” and his character was listed as “excellent.”5 That’s the kind of assessment you’d expect for a solid candidate who just didn’t have the skills to make a good pilot, not for an insubordinate cadet who put lives and valuable US Army property at risk. Besides, any pilot who could demonstrate the kind of control required to buzz the control tower probably wouldn’t have been bounced out as “deficient.”6
But Sandy had found much to like in Texas, including Josephine Virginia Bell, a local girl he’d met at a debutante party. He was so smitten with Jo that he stuck around and took a job washing dishes at the famous Frenchy’s Black Cat Restaurant in San Antonio just so he could court her.7
Jo was born in San Antonio on July 13, 1912, to Blanche Browne Bell, an amateur artist whose roots reached all the way back to John Rutledge, second chief justice of the US Supreme Court, and Andrew Jackson Bell, a circuit judge who had traveled by horse to conduct trials in rural west Texas. Jo had one sister, Blanche, six years her elder. Though not especially wealthy, the family was socially prominent and spent summers at a second home in Boerne, thirty miles northwest of San Antonio in the Texas hill country.
It’s no wonder that my grandfather was drawn to Jo. She was elegantly attractive, with wavy dark hair, high cheekbones, and a small, angular nose, and partial to padded shoulders, white gloves, and two-tone high-heel shoes. Something about her smoldered.
Yet Jo was also something of a tomboy, a crack shot with a rifle who shared Sandy’s love of bird hunting. She was an excellent rider—as a girl, she showed off by doing her morning calisthenics on the back of a pony—and was locally competitive in the sport of equestrian cart driving. Like Sandy, she played a mean game of tennis, and both enjoyed a good party.
Jo also had the advantage of being related to her sister Blanche, who had married Henry Sanford, whose father owned a ranch in Coahuila, Mexico. Sandy and Henry became friends and made many three-hundred-mile trips in a Model T to go bird hunting at Rosita Coahuila.
Sandy was a catch for Jo. But Alex Bonnyman wasn’t a fan of the match, going so far as hiring a detective to sniff around San Antonio for dirt on her (but who found no hint of scandal). No family members were present when Sandy and Jo were married by a judge on February 15, 1933.8
After the wedding, Sandy swallowed his pride and returned to Knoxville to work for his father at Blue Diamond. This time, putting his son’s natural charisma to work, Alex put him on the sales team—not what Sandy wanted, but a savvy business move.
“We always heard he could sell coal to people in Appalachia,” said his nephew Robert McKeon.9
On May 4, 1934, Jo gave birth to their first child—my mother—Frances Berry Bonnyman. Though Sandy was immediately smitten, Jo had little passion for motherhood. She would come to think of her children as a “life long problem,”10 and child rearing was mostly delegated to paid staff or relatives.
Now responsible for an infant daughter, Sandy did his best to please his father. But he wasn’t cut out for working inside while wearing a suit and tie, and they clashed. Recalling bitter memories of retrieving his alcoholic father from the seedy taverns of Louisville, Alex fretted that Sandy and Jo’s drinking and socializing would reflect poorly on the family’s good name.
Ironically, it was to Louisville that my great-grandfather sent his son shortly after the birth of his first daughter. Somewhat to their surprise, Sandy and Jo loved it. They lived in tiny Harrodsburg, the oldest permanent American settlement west of the Appalachians, where they rode horses while dressed in matching jodhpurs and boots, played tennis, and quickly developed a circle of friends who loved a party as much as they did. After the birth of their second child, Josephine, or Tina, on June 3, 1936, Sandy began talking to his mother about buying a horse farm and really settling down.
He also gave an early demonstration of the kind of selfless courage that would later earn him the Medal of Honor when he commandeered a skiff to rescue several stranded people when the Ohio River flooded.11
Those brief days in Louisville would turn out to be the happiest of my grandparents’ lives together.
In 1937, Alex appointed his son assistant superintendent for Blue Diamond for the Lake District of Minnesota and the northwest, which meant relocating to Minneapolis. Sandy and Jo hated it from the start. There was no riding in the great white north for most of the year, no tennis, no garden parties. They missed their friends in Kentucky and Jo was repelled by the dowdy midwestern homebodies who, she complained, so desperately wanted “to get her in the basement to do canning.”12
Unsurprisingly, drinking became an even greater focal point in the couple’s lives during their winter of discontent. The parties were wilder than ever, but somehow less fun, more desperate. Sandy broke a man’s jaw in one drunken brawl and young Fran recalled seeing one inebriated guest tumble down the stairs and smash through a plate-glass window.
My grandfather had managed five years of obedience to his father, but Minnesota proved too much. In 1938, Sandy quite Blue Diamond for the last time, packed up his family and headed for the untamed promise of Mexico, Texas, and the Southwest.
“I am certain it was a mistake to exile him out here to the west after he left his father’s company,” my grandmother later complained. “Sandy was very restless, the years he was out here. I’m sure that’s why he decided to join the Marines.”13
Sandy first made for the ranch in Mexico where the Sanford clan raised cattle and horses while playing the role of benevolent patrons to the local community. Jo was no fan of this rustic life, but like her father, young Fran was immediately at home in the wide-open desert landscape where she and her cousin Ann rode ponies, chased chickens, and skinned many knees.
Sandy had come to Mexico to seek advice from Henry Sanford, who managed a nearby plant for El Paso-based American Smelting, about buying his own mine. Henry made some inquiries and told his brother-in-law he might want to take a look at a small copper mine he’d heard about near Santa Rosa, New Mexico, nine hundred miles north.
The eighty-acre mine site near the tiny village of Pastura was located just a mile from the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad’s Guadalupe station. Bought in 1925 by I.J. Stauber, the mine—which featured several shafts and pits, as well as houses, outbuildings, and its own small rail line to move tons of ore—produced some five million pounds of copper worth nearly $800,000 (about $12 million in 2018 dollars) before Stauber ceased operations due to low market prices in 1930.14
But Sandy, convinced that war was on the horizon, was sure demand for copper would soar. In 1939, he secured a lease on the property with a $5,000 loan (about $89,000 in 2018) from the Blue Diamond Investment Co., whose directors graciously overlooked his lack of collateral on the good word of the company’s founder: Alexander Bonnyman Sr.15 Incorporating as the Guadalupe Mining Co., he contracted with Jose and Joaquin Campos, brothers from Santa Rosa, to haul copper ore to the railroad station, began hiring local laborers, and commenced operations.
My grandmother, put off by a reported lack of indoor plumbing, refused to relocate to Santa Rosa. Instead, she took the girls to stay in the graceful Alvarado Hotel in Albuquerque to look for a place to set up house. But she found the state’s largest city dusty, sprawling, and lacking in charm, hardly better than Santa Rosa.
Then she saw Santa Fe, perched below the southern reaches of the snowcapped Sangre de Cristo Range, sixty miles to the north. Settled by the Spanish empire twenty-two years before the pilgrims scratched 1620 on Plymouth Rock, New Mexico’s small capitol city has long exuded exotic culture, history, charm, beauty, and ineffable magic. Jo knew immediately that’s where she wanted to live.
Sandy soon rented a small adobe house at 570 Eas
t Garcia Street for Jo and the girls. Because Santa Fe had a reputation as a “wild and woolly town,” he insisted that Jo sleep with a pistol in her bedside table.16
Sandy spent five or six days a week working the mine. He lived in a small rented cabin on the outskirts of Santa Rosa and commuted three hours over rough, unpaved roads every weekend to spend time at home. His hard work began to pay off quickly. By 1940, the mine was turning an annual profit of $40,000 and he was earning the equivalent of $600,000 a year in inflation-adjusted dollars. It wasn’t the Kentucky horse farm he’d been dreaming about, but it beat the hell out of wearing a tie and peddling coal in grim, wintry Minnesota.
Sudden prosperity made life hospitable, even for Jo. Perched at seven thousand feet above sea level, Santa Fe’s winter nights were bone-cracking cold, and there were occasional desert snowstorms, but its piercing blue skies were clear more than 320 days a year. She once more took up tennis and riding, and in spring and summer, Sandy sometimes took time off to drive his family into Pecos hills for trout fishing and picnics.
As always, Sandy and Jo were quick to form new friendships, and it wasn’t long before they met James Hobart “Jimmie” Russell, a tall, silver-haired charmer with a perpetual tan who could pass for a poor man’s Cary Grant. Jimmie’s past was obscure, though he was rumored to have Cherokee Indian ancestry. Born in Oklahoma, he’d left home at age fourteen and never lived anywhere but New Mexico for the rest of his life. He worked for years as the chief bookkeeper for the American Metals Company in the tiny community of Terrero northeast of Santa Fe. When the mine closed in 1939 he joined my grandfather’s Guadalupe Mining Co., managing finances from Santa Fe. Restless, adventurous Sandy and calm, coolly competent Jimmie may have seemed an odd couple, fire and ice, but by all accounts made excellent business partners. Sandy was soon calling Jimmie his best friend.
On November 28, 1940, Jo gave birth to a third golden-haired daughter, Alexandra. All three girls were usually left in the care of nuns, teachers, nursemaids, or a local woman of Spanish descent, Cassamira, hired to do the shopping, cooking, and cleaning. Every summer, Jo and the girls boarded the Super Chief to Chicago on their way to Knoxville, where the girls would spend the next three months with their Bonnyman grandparents.
But over time, and despite all their good fortune, cracks were developing in Sandy and Jo’s marriage. Now, when he came home, Sandy spent more time in his own pursuits, training bird dogs, haunting the city’s taverns rather than hosting parties for friends, even taking up the seedy pastime of cockfighting; fueled by alcohol, he and Jo began arguing and fighting more often.
Meanwhile, down in Santa Rosa, Sandy quickly earned a reputation for drinking and troublemaking alongside his employee, Jose Campos.
“They were good friends,” said Joseph Campos, mayor of Santa Rosa and owner of Joseph’s Café, opened by his father in 1956. “And they were hell-raisers.”17
While my grandfather had not, as family lore claimed, been “shot in a bar fight in Santa Fe,” I learned that he had been shot in a gas-station parking lot in Santa Rosa. At 5:30 a.m. on Saturday, March 8, 1941, a mysterious, simmering feud with a local rancher, A.A. Mack “Eck” Walker, exploded into violence outside the Squeeze Inn on the banks of the Pecos River.
“The two men engaged in an argument . . . and shortly thereafter Walker left and got in his car,” reported the Santa Rosa News. After Walker was “again accosted by Bonnyman,” the rancher fired a single round from rifle at point-blank range, dropping my grandfather instantly to the ground.
My mother always believed he’d been shot in the leg, but in fact the slug tore through his “left upper thorax” less than half an inch from his heart and pierced his lung.18 He was “rushed” to the nearest hospital—three hours away in Santa Fe—accompanied by a local doctor named Von Pohle.
“Bonnyman has survived this long and reports today are that he will probably recover,” the paper reported, “though no hope was held at first for his life.”19
Walker turned himself in to the sheriff. He was charged with assault with a deadly weapon, and released on $10,000 bond. Sandy sued the rancher for $13,918 and on March 16, 1942, a jury awarded him $5,000 ($87,000 today).20 Yet just a month later, a jury found Walker not guilty, “at which the courtroom was filled with whistles, indrawn breaths, sighs of relief, and handclapping.”21
“Details of the fracas were vague,” according to initial reports, and the origins of the feud are now lost. It’s not clear why locals would cheer Walker’s acquittal, even Sandy’s family members described him as a “mean drunk.”22
Whatever happened, three-quarters of a century later Guadalupe County proudly claims Sandy Bonnyman as one of its greatest heroes.
“What really matters,” said former county superintendent and historian Daniel Flores, “is that he survived. He could have used that injury or the fact that he had a copper mine as an excuse not to go to war, but he wanted to serve his country.”23
Three decades earlier, I had angrily doubted the cousin who had first related his garbled version of the shooting incident. But now, the impossible myth I’d known as a boy continued to unravel and I felt kinship. I was no hero, but it was somehow comforting to know that my grandfather also had fought with his father, dropped out of college, upended family expectations, impulsively sought adventure, chosen the wrong women, and drunk too much.
Alarmed by the news of his son’s brush with death, Alex Bonnyman dispatched a deputy from Blue Diamond, Fred E. Gore, to Santa Fe that spring in an effort to put Sandy on the straight and narrow. Gore lectured my grandfather that he could lose it all—his wife, children, and business—if he didn’t stop his carousing, fighting, and other unsavory pursuits. He also presented an offer from the elder Bonnyman to take Sandy back at Blue Diamond for a third chance.
But this time, Sandy didn’t need to go home again. He wouldn’t live life to please his father—and he knew he’d always have his mother’s unconditional affection and support. He had broken free.
For all his wild ways, my grandfather dearly loved his daughters. Whatever went down on Saturday night, he was always to be found in the pews of Santa Fe’s majestic Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi on Sunday morning, young Fran perched beside him, feet swinging (Jo was an Episcopalian). Afterward, he would take her over to the Capitol Pharmacy for a treat.
Though she was just seven years old at the time, three-quarters of a century later, Fran Evans vividly remembered one particular Sunday—December 7, 1941. An Associated Press bulletin first broadcast the news at 12:22 p.m., Santa Fe time.
“We were in the Capitol Pharmacy when we heard it,” she said. Once home, her father “was very agitated, he was pacing, very upset about the whole thing.”24
Sandy and Jo spent the rest of the day listening to crackling radio updates and calling friends and relatives.
A married father of three young children and owner of a business critical to the coming war effort, Sandy Bonnyman was thrice exempt from military service. But he’d never been one to shy from a fight. As the scion of a wealthy, well-connected Southern industrialist, he surely could have had his choice of plum roles in any branch of the service. But Sandy he didn’t want a cushy stateside job, and on February 8, 1942, flush with pride and patriotism, he signed papers to join the US Marine Corps. At thirty-one, the recruiter warned, he was too old to go straight to officers’ training school. He didn’t care. He wanted to be a marine, to fight on the front lines, and if he had to start at the bottom alongside teenaged recruits, so be it.
My grandfather’s patriotic decision to become an enlisted marine has always been foundational to his legend. But as with all legends, there’s more to it than that. Despite his outward success, Sandy had grown restless for adventure after years of hard work at the mine and “troubles at home.”25
“One of the many great appeals of war for men,” wrote the late Christopher Hitchens, “is that it legitimizes flight from domestic entrapment.”26
; NINE
DIGGING DEEPER
2010–2012
Despite my disillusionment over the prospects—perhaps even the wisdom—of finding my grandfather’s remains, walking in his footsteps on Tarawa had inspired me to begin a long-overdue excavation of his life.
I began by reading (or rereading) every history of the battle I could find: Alexander’s Utmost Savagery, Eric Hammel and John E. Lane’s Bloody Tarawa, Michael Graham’s Mantle of Heroism, Robert Sherrod’s Tarawa: The Story of a Battle, One Square Mile of Hell by John Wukovits, Line of Departure: Tarawa by Michael Russ, the Marine Corps Historical Section’s detailed official 1947 account, The Battle for Tarawa, and a gung-ho 1944 retelling by combat correspondent SSgt. Dick Hannah, Tarawa: Toughest Battle in Marine Corps History. I also obtained the Second Marine Division’s official 1943 after-action report.
I also embarked on what I thought would be a simple process to get copies of my grandfather’s official military records from the National Personnel Records Center (NPRC) in St. Louis, Missouri. A month later I received a letter explaining there were no records on anyone named Alexander Bonnyman, Jr.
I knew that a 1973 fire at the center had destroyed an estimated sixteen to eighteen million military personnel files, but also that no marine files had been destroyed. So I wrote the NPRC again, noting that Lt. Bonnyman was a Medal of Honor recipient and well known in Marine Corps history. Four weeks later, I received the exact same form letter: “We have been unsuccessful in identifying a military service record for the above-named individual.”
When I called the people who signed the letters, they kicked me upstairs to other staff members, who all gave me the same maddening answer. At their suggestion, I contacted the Marine Corps in Quantico, Virginia, which bounced me back to St. Louis.
Bones of My Grandfather Page 10
