A Tale of Two Parents IV

There's some mystery about what my Mother did before she married my Father. After working as a clerk in a department store in Washington DC, she eventually ended up doing civil service clerical work, but I don't know what agency hired her. Between the department store and the civil service work there could have been any number of adventures. There could be as much as five years unaccounted for. There is even the possibility that my Mother was a WAC. The cemetery that has her ashes lists her as having been a PFC. I don't know who gave them that idea.

[Right: Did Mother have a
Star-Spangled Heart?]

What I do know about my Mother is what she looked like in those days, and I have a good deal of information about her later hopes and dreams, and a sense of the times tells me that her later dreams were entirely formed from the glamor fantasies that characterized 30s and 40s film and art.


Therefore, Mother's idea of the Good Life:



She trained herself to be sultry and innocent in turns, as necessary. She considered herself too smart to have to learn anything, that's what idiots do. Really clever people just trick the idiots into getting things done.

[Silky sultry Mother / Cottony innocent Mother:]


Her highest goal was to marry a rich man. When a rich man didn't come along, and the clock was showing age 34, the new goal was to marry a man with a promising career. Why not a budding Lieutenant with dreams of his own of being a General?

A Tale of Two Parents III

Odd numbers are blue for boys, even numbers are pink for girls, so we return to where we left my Father. That would be Washington, D.C., where he is a printer's apprentice at the Government Printing Office, because that will get him in to the newspaper business, and he will get to be a journalist, and maybe do professional freelance news photography on the side.


There's the occasional family reunion back in Seattle. Here he is on our far right looking tall up against immediate family. Actually he was 5' 6" and felt inadequate about it. But his mother to his right was 4' 11" so next to her he was a giant. The guy to our far left looks shorter only on account of the perspective. Dad's Mother was Scots, but because she was so short and tinted her hair blue I call her my Pictish grandmother.

Notice that he doesn't have a military cut in that shot or in this next one, which is prime evidence concerning my parents.


What we have here is proof that my parents not only met before my Father entered the army, but were an item. That's Mom sitting in front of him, at least 3 years before they were married. Probably more like 6 years before.

I've lost the records I once had of the GPO days. There was an album which was priceless, in which another apprentice drew caricatures of my Dad and razzed him for being so stiff. It also had a picture of him with a description written by classmates. It recalled fondly that he came from the Pacific Northwest with a trumpet and a never-ending supply of tall tales. Those weren't tall tales people, those were just his stories of Seattle. They sounded like tall tales, because in those days Seattle was still an exotic destination. All in all it looks like he had friends among his fellow apprentices.

Then Pearl Harbor was attacked. It seemed like everybody was enlisting. My Father began to tell people of his plan to join the Navy. But he procrastinated about it. He never joined the Navy, instead he got an army draft notice for a John W. Browning. He found out that the notice was for a John Walter rather than a John Wesley, and could have gotten out of it, but decided what the heck and went through with the draft process. Maybe he thought it would look like he was trying to dodge the draft if he made an issue of it.

I wasn't there, but I'm convinced from everything my Father ever said about it that the Army swallowed him up emotionally. He was, as I've said, a very simple animal when it came to feelings. When he found something to be loyal to, he locked onto it. He locked onto his own Mother. He locked onto Seattle, which was always the greatest city in the world to him. And when the Army took over his life it became his new fraternity, replacing the GPO.

It didn't matter that he was never sent to the war. Even though he sat the war out in a camp in Florida, he still imprinted on army life and his unit, and years later would talk about having served in two wars, WWII and Korea, not just one.

When the war was over and Dad's service was up, he could have resumed his dream of becoming a journalist. There was nothing stopping him. He had managed to finish his apprenticeship before joining the army. But he had a girlfriend he wanted to marry and have a family with, and he had the idea that the US Army was his new best friend. So he entered Officers Candidate School. He scored high on his tests and got placed in the Army Security Agency.

So, in early 1948 Lieutenant John Wesley and Jemmie became married in a civil ceremony by a Washington D.C. Justice of the Peace. They were married on my Mother's birthday because for all his intelligence she didn't think he could be counted on to remember both a birthday and a wedding anniversary every year.