by Jon Stafford
When Papa returned, he added his voice to the songs. And then Grandmother! No one in the family had ever heard either sing outside of church. Papa had a deep voice, almost a bass, and had grown up singing in the choir at Ebenezer Lutheran Church in town, our church now for almost one hundred years. And my little petite grandmother, who we had no idea could sing, actually had a lovely voice. Hers was the best voice of any of us, an operatic soprano voice that reminded us of Jeannette McDonald, the 1930s movie star who starred so often with Nelson Eddy.
Occasionally, Papa would sing solo. His choices were usually love songs that he invariably sang to Mama. A few stand out even after all these years. He particularly loved the middle ’50s’ tune “Let Me Go Lover,” the one sung by Johnny Ray rather than the much more popular version done by Teresa Brewer with her booming voice. Ray wasn’t nearly as popular, but we loved him because you could just feel, even over the radio, that he was putting everything he had into his singing. I think he only had one top one hundred song, “The Little Cloud that Cried,” in the early ’50s. Papa had the same skinny figure as Ray, but did not do the gyrations. He would smile, but mostly just stand in the yard and sing a few stanzas, which are easy to remember even now.
I remember one other song he loved and sang many times, which was always such a treat. It was the Dean Martin song of the late ’50s, “Return to Me,” which was just perfect for his voice. Mostly, I recall the two men singing duets, Mr. Riser reaching for the higher notes and Papa the lower. They were at their very best with the Patti Page song of the early ’50s, “The Tennessee Waltz,” which was just wonderful.
To me, the singing on the porch represented the postwar years as much as anything else. They were wonderful years for our family, all of us healthy, all of us together again with no war to separate us. Papa and Mr. Riser farmed, and these were golden years for farming on the Great Plains.
In 1952, our family was finally completed with the arrival of my little sister, Karen Finney. I was sixteen then, a junior in high school. It was fall, after the harvest. Papa was over on the forty acres Great-Grandfather Fallon had purchased in 1891, near the crossroads of Iowa state Highway 6 and a county road. This was the same intersection Papa hiked from when he came home from the service. Papa heard a terrible crashing sound above the sound of the tractor. He looked and could see that two cars had collided at the junction. He jumped from the tractor and ran there.
There were the car of State Senator Milton “Ted” Bywinger, a Cadillac, and a late model Dodge sedan. He could see no movement in either vehicle as he came closer. Upon getting there, his worst fears were realized.
It was obvious that the senator, driving on the county road, had been going at a tremendous clip and had not heeded the stop sign at Highway 6. Before anyone else arrived, Papa examined the Cadillac and found two bloodied and dead people inside: the politician and his secretary, whose name now escapes me. As he looked into the broadsided Dodge, he saw a young couple, also dead, bloodied and slumped over. He almost did not notice the little bundle on the floor of the backseat. But in the next instant the little girl, no older than three, began crying. He yanked open the back door and pulled the child out, holding her to his chest.
In a few minutes, Mama arrived in our Chevrolet, her apron still on. She had heard the crash at the house. She could see that something was wrong with the child. Luckily, she had called the police, and in only about twenty minutes old Dr. Karnes arrived. He was concerned enough to ride in the ambulance with the child to the hospital in Waterloo, where he set her broken left arm.
The young couple’s driver’s licenses said that they were Tim and Louise Finney of 1218 Roark Street, which turned out to be an apartment in Dubuque. Obviously, they were traveling west from their home. But where they were going has never been solved. Nothing more has ever been learned of them. Neighbors said that they had just moved to town. Their landlord had recorded no previous address and had taken cash for their deposit and two rent payments. No employer came forward, despite a massive effort in Dubuque. In fact, despite a national effort by local and national newspapers, no relative was ever located. An unfortunate series of events took their lives and gave no clue as to whom to inform.
Of course, Mama was ready. She insisted that the child be brought to our house. Perhaps the old doctor cut a corner or two to make it happen. He knew that Mama had taken in four children, and that one more would be as welcome as the first. She was one of us from the first moment we saw her. She was as blonde a child as I ever saw, small-boned, unlike me, and petite in every way.
She was in considerable pain for a few days. But she mended quickly, and in a few weeks, the splint was gone. We all doted on her. It must have been obvious to her that she was in a new home. The boys would bring her little presents: a hard candy that one of them was saving in a secret place, or a little metal car with worn-off paint. After school, I would come into the bedroom we shared with one of my favorite books from when I was her age, and she would smile and listen intently. We knew exactly how to make someone feel safe, and we knew how important it was to do so.
At first, we feared that our new little sister would be taken from us by a relative who might knock on the door at any moment. But first a week went by, and then months, and finally years, and no one has knocked on the door yet.
This was an incredible joy for Grandmother. This was the child she had hoped for all of her life! Finally, a dainty girl to dress up in frilly clothes! (She had long since given up on me.) The two spent vast amounts of time together. Mimmi made her dress after dress. Grandmother had always made practical clothing for us. Now, she delighted in going to town, carefully choosing a pattern, buying the material, and making something pretty for Karen. She labored with joy as she ironed every ruffle with care. It’s not that she abandoned Rudd; after all, he had his brothers. This was a special “girl” relationship, and the two of them were very close until Grandmother died.
From the beginning, Karen was so positive and nice. She had good manners, which we weren’t used to. “Thank you,” she would say, in her squeaky little voice. Soon, there were lots of “I wove yous,” and later, “I love you. You are my best friend!” which she managed to say to everyone with equal sincerity. No one ever complained! She would set the table so that everything was perfect, all the flatware just so, making sure everyone had a proper napkin.
When she was the one who folded our clothes, we could always tell. She was always so fastidious, even as a small child. While I was up long before her to help Mama with breakfast, when I looked in on her, she would be making her bed, the only one of us to do so. Before she would come down to eat, she would assemble the things she might wear by placing them perfectly on her bed. I would sometimes watch as she carefully considered each choice, while the rest of us would just slap on our clothes. Then she would carefully put away the things away she had rejected, and the ones that remained on the bed, she would wear.
We had money for things by that time. For the next twenty-five years, almost until the passing of my folks, small farms like ours just boomed on the Great Plains. It was a golden age, as wonderful as the Dust Bowl years had been terrible for my grandparents. About the time Karen came, Papa purchased the first of a seemingly endless line of brand new Chevrolet cars and trucks from Mr. Kay Jenson’s dealership in nearby Waterloo. I know the same expression passed Papa’s lips a thousand times: “If Chevrolet doesn’t
make it, I don’t want it.”
There was money for clothes too. Mama delighted in buying clothes for us. Of course, that didn’t change us much. We still assembled in order, with me as the leader, and then Danny, Toby, and Rudd. Off we went, looking for sailing ships, pirates, monsters, and the like. At the time I had a dog that I just loved, a German shepherd named Kim. She was a great dog and a pal to all of us. We would be running on one of our expeditions, and she would have to be in the lead. When we suddenly decided to change direction and she was last, it wasn’t long before she made up the distance and was first again.
But our daily excursions were never really of much interest to Karen. She was never too sure, like the rest of us, that dirt was good. When all of us went into the barn to climb up to the loft and jump down on the hay piled on the floor, Karen would climb up a few rungs, watch us jump, sharing the fun of the moment, but not jump herself. I don’t think she ever jumped. Mostly, she stayed near the house and helped Mama. She wore dresses when I was in jeans, and generally shunned everything that even hinted of being a “tomboy.” Unlike the rest of us, she was a little sweetheart all of the time. She never threw things, only occasionally pouted (usually for good reasons), and was just plain nice. We soon learned that to put rocks in her bed or bugs in her shoes was too low, even for us.
And she did things for us. Coming back from building a fort or at the end of some other adventure, we might find sandwiches and drinks carefully laid out for us on the porch in such a way that we knew Karen had been the preparer.
Papa was absolutely wound around her finger. The two played a sweet game that all of us loved and heard time and time again during her elementary school years. She would be on his knee reading a book and he would ask her: “Sweetie, was anyone mean to you today?”
She would nod her head without speaking, that innocent expression on her face. Papa knew no one had actually been mean to her. It was a time for validation and intimacy.
“Was a boy mean to you?” he would continue.
Again she would nod, perhaps playing with her hair. He would hold her a little tighter then. “Well, you don’t have to worry about that. You are safe from all of the mean boys here.”
She would nod, and they would go back to reading the book. Of course, he had missed a certain part of the early childhoods of the rest of us, so he had his catching up to do.
My parents so loved this farm and the life it provided, which is now mostly gone. It was the same for me. Mama spoke to me many times about it. “Baby, look out on to the fields. This is God’s face that we see here. His hand is in everything that happens here. He saves the land for us by giving us the winter, lets it rest and renew itself. Then He makes it bloom and flourish with little work from us, so we can feed the people in the cities so busy with their own work.”
My parents’ reverence for this life touches me very deeply. Theirs was a life of contradictions. While our acres and crops remained the same, with the birth and death of animals, and the growth of us kids, it was a different place each year. The renewal of life here is so awesome. An observer seeing the farm in January or February, when everything is so dormant, dead, would think it impossible that anything could ever grow here again. But within a matter of weeks, the same land has a bounty beyond comprehension! My parents felt great satisfaction in growing food that nourished so many people. Lastly, we’ve all felt a sense of the power of the land, due to the sheer vastness of the Plains and its closeness to nature. Sometimes there is so little here that speaks of any human influence.
I think of my parents now and the world in which they lived. It was a world of turbulence, a time when life was cheap. But they did their best to value life, and helped make a world better than the one they found. They were involved in difficult battles that would be too much for most people today. Yet they wound up as the same people that they were at the onset. I think that’s a great accomplishment. I can’t say which of them had the harder struggle. Different people would answer differently. Yes, my father was almost killed, and he served far away and against a pitiless enemy. But my mother took care of the thing they both valued the most, our family. In many ways, she had a more complicated and stressful time of it.
I can see us now so clearly in those old days: Papa on the tractor toting little Karen in his arms, gently patting her on the bottom; Mama mixing something for supper and me steadying the bowl; all of us kids running someplace, just playing. How I miss those times! But they are gone, gone as far away as the crops we harvested.
Now Joe and I are long retired, I from teaching in the same grade school I attended, Joe from the telephone company. My beautiful little brothers, Danny and Toby, run the Perdue farm implements store my great-grandfather began four generations ago in 1899. Little did we know, looking at shy little Rudd, that he would make a career of our little games of running around the farm. He has just retired at age sixty-five from forty years of being the head track and baseball coach at a high school not far away. And Karen, the little sweetheart of our tribe, now has three grown girls who were just as pretty and frilly as she and two grandchildren. Her husband has the largest law firm in Cedar Rapids, in which two of her sons-in-law are now partners.
I think I’ll just go up to the Five Brothers and think about those old times.
Theodore Rodgers Stories
Mackson
South Pacific, October 9, 1942
Seventy-two hours. That was as long as his first command had lasted. He had savored the idea of having a command for his entire adult life, and it had lasted only a matter of hours. As he lay in the captain’s cabin with a broken leg, Commander Theodore R. Rodgers, Jr., thought back on those three days.
He had been speedily driven from the dock as soon as the PBY amphibian plane landed and came ashore. It was 6 October, and they were at the big US base at Noumeo, New Caledonia, some eight hundred miles south of Guadalcanal. He was immediately ushered in to see Rear Admiral Lakeland W. Wells, a staff member of Admiral Thomas Ghormley, Commander South Pacific.
“Kip,” Wells said, using Rodgers’ old Academy nickname, “this is a real emergency. I’m going to give you verbal orders. There’s no time. You probably saw the destroyer and tanker in the harbor as you were coming in. Those are Mackson and Mineola. We were bringing you here to take command of the destroyer Garnet, but that’ll have to wait. She’s been delayed getting here.”
The old man looked Rodgers squarely in the eye. “I am hereby ordering you to take command of Mackson as of this moment. You are to run Mineola up to Guadalcanal. We wish we had ten destroyers to send with you, but Mackson’s all we can scrape up. Next week, we could send you with more. But that’d be too late.” Wells leaned across the table. “You are to protect that tanker with everything you have. If they send a battleship against you, you attack. You understand me?”
“Yes, sir!”
“If you fail, come back on your shield. I doubt we can give you any air support. We’ll try. But there are ninety thousand gallons of aviation fuel on Mineola and they must reach Archie Vandegrift on Guadalcanal as soon as possible. His Marines are holding on by their toenails. We could lose this whole show if we don’t take some big chances. It’s that close. We must take the chance that you can sneak in.
“Admiral Ghormley just relieved Mackson’s skipper two hours ago, for reason
s that need not concern you. This job should only take you seventy-two hours. We’ll have a skipper for her by that time, and we’ll have a seaplane bring him up and get you out.”
The two men stood. Wells shook Rodgers’ hand firmly, grasping his right forearm with his left hand as well. “Go, my launch is at the pier waiting for you!”
“Yes, sir!”
Whatever ordeal Mackson’s crew had been through that necessitated the relief of her commanding officer, Rodgers only discovered later. As the ship left the harbor at Noumeo, her crew seemed to be in some shock. But it did not last long. As soon as he was on the little destroyer, the new skipper, but an experienced sailor, he initiated the command style that was to make him a household name in the United States.
He saw that every man on board was a vital cog in her welfare, each more capable than he could ever be. He was confident that they would perform heroically with even minor encouragement, giving their lives if that was what was needed. A captain did not need to micromanage them, or even to really run the ship. The executive officer could do that. Rodgers saw a captain’s role as being apart from the crew. He had no intention of picking up binoculars if someone could see for him, or disciplining or second-guessing anyone. He would not curse, worry, lament, or show any weakness in front of the men, ever. He was there merely to provide leadership.
He toured the engine room first. He met, shook hands with, and spoke with every man, visiting and taking his time as the ship sailed on. Though a shy person at the social gatherings his wife lived for, Rodgers was a born leader. The leadership he projected, the affability and basic goodness, were completely natural and had remained sincere as he had ascended the ladder to high rank. In five hours, the handsome and smiling thirty-nine-year-old had met about half of the crew, and they had forgotten the past troubles.
