There was a clear path to Leon Conner’s story, and it seemed as if it would open up for her. She Googled Eufaula, Alabama, and found that they held an annual pilgrimage, that is, a re-creation of the antebellum South, where the classic, columned homes are opened and guests are welcomed and treated with lavish hospitality. One of those old columned Southern mansions was called the Conner-Taylor home. And now she felt the jolt of discovery.
Andrea was a child of the South, and she knew that these small towns were close-knit. The name Conner had to have a long trail of connections. With a sense of excitement, she Googled “Conner” and “Eufaula, AL” and found a Conner-Lawrence Real Estate.
Now she turned to the full white pages Web site, focusing on Eufaula, where she discovered a total of five Conners and started cold-calling. There is a common charm that people of a certain cultural background recognize. They know and react to it. Andrea’s soft, sympathetic spiel was invariably met with polite, helpful attention:
“Hi! My name is Andrea Leininger, and my husband and I are working on a book about an escort carrier in World War Two called Natoma Bay. One of the men killed in service on the ship was Leon Conner from Eufaula, and I was trying to find someone who was a relative of Leon’s. Would you happen to be related to Leon Conner?”
“No, I’m not a relative, but his cousin Gwen is. Would you like her number?”
The first call!
Gwen Conner was as excited as Andrea when she got the phone call. She had grown up with Leon and married one of his cousins. He was a family legend, the golden child who had gone off to war and died in battle for his country. Gwen had photos—movie star good looks—and poignant letters and poetic details about Leon, the son of a successful businessman who pitched in and helped the poor families of Eufaula when times got tough.
Gwen couldn’t stop talking about him—his church work, his tennis game, his parts in the school plays, and his voice in the town operettas. He was a wonderful dancer, and during the town cotillions he danced so long that his shirt would be soaked in perspiration. He’d run home and change into a fresh shirt and come back and dance some more. An enthusiast. A wonderful spirit.
Gwen stayed on the phone for an hour, talking about her dead cousin, the long memories flooding back from sixty years ago.
He was an ideal boy: six feet tall, blond, blue-eyed, a football star who also played the violin. Bright and ambitious, he graduated from Alabama Polytechnic Institute (which later became Auburn) in 1942 and joined the Naval Reserve in April.
Blond! Just like James’s namesake GI Joe.
When he was killed in October 1944, one month before his twenty-fourth birthday, he had already won Air Medals for leading attacks against enemy airfields on the Solomon Islands. He was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross, the nation’s second highest medal, for making repeated attacks against an enemy cruiser. It was almost legendary, his exploits on that fatal day during the Battle of Leyte Gulf off Samar Island in the Philippines.
Leon’s TBM had made repeated runs against the enemy ship, and when he was out of bombs he spotted another TBM from another carrier going in for an attack. The other pilot asked Leon if he could make a strafing run ahead of him to draw fire, and Leon went in first, despite the fact that his plane was fat and slow and the strafing runs were usually reserved for the more elusive little fighters. The TBM he had escorted in made a direct hit on the cruiser, then fell into the ocean in flames. When Conner returned to Natoma Bay, his gunner, Louis Hill, confronted him on the flight deck. “If you ever pull a stunt like that again, I’ll beat the shit out of you.” Conner volunteered for a second mission later that day, attacking the same enemy formation. It was on the second attack on heavy warships that Conner was killed, along with crew members Donald Bullis and Louis Hill.
He was awarded a total of six medals for bravery.
Oh, yes, said Gwen, he was a brave pilot and a beloved member of the community. And he left behind some broken hearts. While he was in pilot training in Jacksonville, Florida, on May 28, 1943, he married Mary Frances “Fay” Widenburg.
His parents, Lynn and Lalla, had borne their share of grief. They had six children, two of whom died during a flu epidemic in the winter of 1917–18. With Leon’s death, half their children were gone.
It was a long and moving conversation—many conversations—and Gwen tried to make Andrea understand the importance, the stellar qualities, of the dead cousin.
“You know, his wife, Faye, married again,” she told Andrea. “But she never got over Leon. She kept his picture on her nightstand for the rest of her life. Her second husband didn’t mind.”
But all along, Andrea had been having mixed feelings about this whole research process—she didn’t know if she wanted to see what lay under the rocks. She knew that she didn’t want to find out anything bad about James Huston Jr. But the panel had ruled against her. Their argument was simple: Huston was bound to be okay. The Navy didn’t allow hoboes or escapees from Alcatraz to fly its planes.
Okay, but what if she didn’t like him? Simple as that. What if he turned out to be a real jerk? Andrea might quit the whole project. But, of course, she wouldn’t. She was far too nosy for that.
If there were any lingering misgivings, Leon Conner’s story put her mind to rest.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
THE ACCUMULATING FLUKES and strokes of accurate details connected to the GI Joe action figures were dumbfounding. How could James name them for dead pilots? How could he know the ones who died before James M. Huston Jr.? He couldn’t read the list of names of the casualties—he had no way of knowing who would be there to “meet him in heaven.” He was a four-year-old child, and he was saying things that made his parents’ skin crawl.
Leon Conner had blond hair, just like his namesake GI Joe. Bruce and Andrea knew that when they found Billie Peeler and Walter Devlin they, too, would have hair matching the action figures.
They were being pulled hard in a blind but compelling way. Bruce and Andrea moved forward in a fog of confusion. They didn’t quite understand exactly what they were looking for, but they knew that their research would uncover the answer to their sons’ shocking declarations. It was as if all the dead crewmen were waiting to be discovered, and their job was to fulfill that role.
And so, in their own erratic yet systematic fashion, they forged ahead. They would find some answers by tracking down the families of all the Natoma Bay dead. Andrea, attempting to keep one foot ahead of the other, stayed alphabetical. Eddie Barron was not one of the GI Joes, but one thing would lead to another….
Ed was Jewish and had married a beautiful Jewish girl in Los Angeles a week before we left San Diego.
It was a passage in a clear loose-leaf binder. The pages carefully typed, the way people used to keep memoirs before computers. It had come from Cliff Hodge, a gunner in VC-63. His name was on the Natoma Bay roster of veterans, but he had been too sick to attend the 2002 reunion. When Bruce got home from the San Diego reunion, he called Cliff Hodge in St. Louis, introduced himself, and asked if Cliff had ever served with any of the men killed in action.
“As a matter of fact, yes…”
The digging paid off. There were these amazing surprises that kept popping up as a result of Bruce’s diligence and persistence. Cliff Hodge told him that he had served with Eddie Barron and Eldon Bailey, knew them personally; they were shipmates and combat veterans out of the same squadron.
Bruce and Cliff had a long telephone conversation. The old veterans were usually eager to talk, especially to someone who had been to the reunions, someone who was familiar with the territory. At the end of their phone call, Hodge said he had something to send Bruce. It was his unpublished memoir, a book he titled World War II: A Scrapbook & Journal—The Human Side. It was filled with pictures and notes and stories about the men and life aboard Natoma Bay. It was another example of finding a treasure trove of material—a thick packet of clues in the nameless mystery. Pieces of the memoir had been in Cliff
Hodge’s closets and albums for sixty years. He had been putting it together for his grandchildren, but he said that Bruce could have a copy.
The stories that Cliff Hodge delivered showed the human side of the war. On February 12, 1944, Natoma Bay was anchored at a secure bay in the Marshall Islands. Cliff, an aviation machinist’s mate, was responsible for squadron equipment, and the ship was running low on a certain type of valve for the TBMs. The ship’s motor whaleboat took him over to USS Intrepid, where they had the missing valve. “Don’t forget to come back and get me!” he yelled at the coxswain.
Cliff picked up the valves, but the whaleboat never returned. The coxswain didn’t forget; he just got lost among all the ships in the lagoon.
A call went out: “All hands man your stations to weigh anchor!”
Intrepid had been ordered to join a task force for a surprise attack on the island of Truk. Cliff was stuck. The officers of Intrepid found him an old cot and some light duties, and Cliff tried to stay out of the way. Four days later, he was in the middle of the attack on the island. On the second evening, he was flung out of his cot. His neck really hurt, and he didn’t know what it was that had jarred such a big aircraft carrier. The ship had been torpedoed—not enough to sink her, but badly enough to take her out of action.
Cliff would discover later that he had hairline fractures of two vertebrae in his neck.
Intrepid was sent back to Pearl Harbor for repairs. Living on a flimsy cot with scavenged clothing, Cliff worried about being court-martialed for being AWOL for so long. There was something else pressing on his mind. His wife, Elsie, was pregnant, in her last trimester, and he hadn’t heard from her for weeks. One evening a man in officer’s tans asked if he could do anything for him. He was from the Red Cross. “Yeah, I want to know if I’m a mother or a father.” Cliff forgot about the visit and went back to sleep.
On March 1, Cliff was rolled out of his cot at two a.m. and told to report to the small boat dock on the double. He boarded a large seaplane and was flown to Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides Islands, where, almost two weeks later, Natoma Bay dropped anchor. He rejoined the ship, not knowing if he would be sent to the brig or back to duty.
Everyone loved the story—going away for an hour to fetch some spare parts, then getting caught up in a battle, being torpedoed, sailing eight thousand miles, and coming back a month later without the parts. It was a great story.
Waiting for Cliff were fresh uniforms, his old bunk, and his mail. The news was good. His daughter, Nancy Lee Ann, was born on February 5, 1944. There was one little hitch. Elsie was coming home from the hospital with the baby when she saw a car parked in front of the house. When Elsie got out of her own car, holding Nancy Lee Ann, a woman in uniform approached her holding out the familiar yellow telegram. Elsie started to shake. Everyone knew what was in those yellow envelopes. Either her husband or her brother…
“It’s not bad news,” said the woman in uniform quickly, seeing Elsie’s face turn pale.
No one was killed. It was simply Cliff’s telegram asking about the baby.
It was a very warm sidelight to a very grim war.
The memoir was added to the piles and files of material that were beginning to choke off certain rooms in the house in Lafayette. The office was overflowing, the dining room was unusable except as storage, and the shelves were cluttered with books about World War II. Andrea would have complained, but she, too, had fallen under the spell of Natoma Bay. She, too, was rapt and wanted to get all the stories. She, too, wanted to know about the men of Natoma Bay. But above all, of course, she still wanted to find out about James M. Huston Jr. and her son’s eerie utterances. And she knew that the way to James Huston was through the crew. But the stories were like a song, and she was a faithful listener.
At first, it was not apparent which elements were important and which were not. The memoir came and was quickly read and then slipped into another pile of material, the significance skipped over by the avalanche of all the rest.
It is possible to have too many documents, too much data—too much raw information. And Bruce, being the child of the modern researchers’ electronic and paper-trail deluge, collected everything. He printed every file. He copied every record. The house was becoming a fire trap of Natoma Bay documents.
“It’s all there,” he would tell Andrea, rushing off to work, leaving her adrift in the ocean of records. And he was right—it probably was all there, but where? You just had to know where to look.
Fortunately, Andrea had a bloodhound’s instinct for finding the lost families. At the height of her frustration, when she was lost in the web of all the Web sites, she remembered Cliff Hodge’s memoir. And she remembered that inside the memoir she had read another reference to Eddie Barron. It was something said by another shipmate, James Gleason:
Eddie liked to call himself “Jewboy.” And he was ready to get back home as soon as he could. He was so excited about having gotten married to what he described as “the most beautiful girl in the world.” He was madly in love with his wife. Eddie changed the stereotype I had of what a Jew was like. Eddie was a warm and friendly person who genuinely made people feel good about being around him. He made people comfortable.
A Jew who called himself “Jewboy” as a kind of preemptive inoculation against being called the name first, the shipmate who is surprised that a Jew can be warm and friendly—such condescending slights were common in the 1940s. Andrea looked past the small insults couched as compliments. Now she had a bundle of clues. She knew that Eddie Barron was Jewish and had enlisted in the Navy from Minneapolis. She had already struck out in Minnesota, but now she had Cliff Hodge’s reference to California. Maybe Eddie Barron was listed among the dead for California. She tried the nara.gov (National Archives and Records Administration) Web site, which lists ancestry, and—voila!—there it was: Edward Brennan Barron. His next of kin was listed as his wife, Miriam Koval Barron of Los Angeles.
Andrea was still not home free. She still couldn’t find Miriam Barron or Miriam Koval in the white pages search, so she tried the Los Angeles marriage records for 1943. They were unavailable. She then went to the 1930 census records and found that Miriam Koval had three sisters: Zelda, Elaine, and Pearl. She did a marriage record search under the name Koval and saw that a Pearl Koval from Los Angeles had married a Hyman J. Davis.
Davis was a pretty common name, but she tried the California directories and found a Hyman J. and Pearl Davis in Bakersfield. She called the number and told her story, and the woman on the other end listened with that mixture of suspicion and wonder that characterized these conversations. Finally, convinced that Andrea was not someone with a new investment scheme, the woman said that Miriam was her older sister.
Sometimes the breakthroughs came easily—or seemed to fall in place quickly after the long, arduous approach. Finding the right phone number—finding the sister—broke it open. Miriam’s name was no longer Barron. Like so many war widows, she had remarried. She was Miriam Sherman, and she was willing and eager to talk about Eddie.
Yes, she met Eddie on a blind date while he was in training in San Diego. She was bowled over by the uniform and his dark good looks and a little nervous about being a few months older than he. She held that back for a while, afraid that he might lose interest. Men were funny about such things in those days.
It was love at first sight. He called her “Mickey” and didn’t tell her about his fearful premonitions. He told everyone else that he didn’t think he was going to make it back to the mainland after the war.
Did she know about his civilian background?
Yes—courtships always began with an exchange of pedigrees. He was born Edward Brennan Barron in Minneapolis on February 24, 1924, the son of Joseph and Pearl Barron. They were immigrants—Joseph came from Russia in 1908, and Pearl came from Romania in 1910. Joseph ran a clothing store. Eddie had a younger brother, Norman, and a younger sister, Marguerite. They called her “Dolly.”
Miriam told all
the little details that fascinated Andrea. Eddie had been in the drama club in high school, then joined the Navy and was based in San Diego.
They didn’t have much time together. That’s what those wartime marriages were like—a few months, and then he shipped out. They hardly knew each other at all, beyond the fact that for a little while in the mid-1940s, he was her husband. She married twice again after the war, but Eddie, she said, was “the love of my life.” She was pregnant when he shipped out. After she learned of Eddie’s death, she gave birth prematurely to twins, who died after a few days. Eddie never knew.
He was a radioman on a TBM Avenger. His pilot was Ruben Goranson. His other crewmate was Eldon Bailey, the gunner. He probably knew them better than he knew his wife—at least, he spent more time with them.
The military part of the story—some insights into Eddie’s character—was fleshed out in Cliff Hodge’s memoir:
… An interesting sidelight; the type of everyday heroism that never made the news… It was a couple of days before the fatal flight… During the catapult, the radio gunner grasps two handles in front of him to brace his body for the (G force) of takeoff. The catapult was like being shot out of a cannon. Just in front of the two handles was a shelf that held all of the heavy electronic equipment—radio, radar, etc. Ed was holding on to the handles when the cat shot hit, but something didn’t hold. The heavy equipment on the shelf slammed backward, pinning Ed’s hands. Both hands were injured and he was caught between the handles and the shelf.
Looking down between his feet from the gun turret, Eldon Bailey could see what had happened; he climbed down to try to help Barron. Without tools, Eldon couldn’t budge the shelf. Bailey called the pilot, Goranson, and held the mike so that Barron could talk. Goranson asked Eddie if he should abort the mission and go back to the ship, but Ed said negative, keep going. They flew the mission, searching for subs, while Ed Barron’s hands were pinned beneath the heavy shelf. The carrier landing was excruciating, and both of Eddie’s hands were cut and bruised.
Soul Survivor: The Reincarnation of a World War II Fighter Pilot Page 16
