The World Turns, Bites

Years after the fact my Mother told me that I missed almost half of Kindergarten due to childhood diseases. I remember being sick frequently but have no independent sense of how often. What I clearly remember is that none of it bothered me until the time I got mumps.

I remember having the measles. No problem. The doctor came with his black bag. The worst part of it was the stick in my mouth. I'd spend some time being nauseous, some time counting bumps, some time drawing, some time being delirious with fever, and then it was over. At no time would I feel like I was suffering. The disease wasn't an alien force invading my body. I didn't feel under attack. There was no sense of injustice.

It was still like that when I got the mumps on one side. I coasted through that. I also coasted through the chickenpox that I came down with the same day the mumps ended.

Then, I came down with mumps on the other side, the same day the chickenpox ended. That did it. Now, it was personal. The germs hated me. I broke down. Forever after, diseases were an assault. I've never been able to take them easy since.

I think it was soon after that triple whammy finally ended, in the late Spring of 1955, that there was a big ASA party out at a lake on base.

Mirror Lake was about fifty acres. An access road led to a bathing beach with restrooms, picnic tables, and BBQ grills. For the party a PA system was set up. Actually, anytime the ASA held an official party there was a PA system. The ASA did electronic surveillance. They were into it. They had the wires, they had the microphones, they could buy cheap speakers.

Boy, were they cheap. It was a little like listening to arrivals announced in a New York subway hub.

Nevertheless a lot of attention was paid to the speakers because when there weren't announcements pertinent to the party ("Three-legged races are about to start! Choose your partners!") they patched in a radio broadcast of a Boston Red Sox game.

I was intrigued by all the interest people had in it. My Father had watched some games on TV with interest, but I didn't know baseball was so popular. I hadn't assumed that my Father's interests matched those of the general public.

My Father noticed how intrigued I was. So he tried to make points with me by promising to take me to a game. The way he said it, "We'll go and watch the Red Sox win a game!"

The party started in the morning and lasted until dusk. My parents let me run and play in the shallow water for several hours without sun protection. Around 4 in the afternoon I started to burn. Within an hour I was in agony. My entire body from the waist up was on fire. It was a new way for nature to attack me.

The next two days half my skin peeled off. At one point a sheet of about a square foot of burnt skin came off my back all at once.

At least, through it all, I could look forward to that Red Sox game I was going to with my Dad. I didn't blame either him or my Mother for the burning, I blamed the sun and the Universe apart from us. That was the injustice. What had I done to hurt the Universe?

In retrospect it's surprising that the trip to Fenway Park ever happened. My Father tried to make points with me by promising to do other things later, and then never followed through. This, the baseball game promise, was an exception.

My Father and I went alone. Mother stayed home. That was awkward. I was no longer accustomed to speaking directly with him.


The tickets turned out to be so far up in the stands the diamond looked like the size of a postage stamp held a foot from my face. To see it at all I had to crane my neck from one side to the other, because a pillar blocked my view. I had to stand in my seat to look over people in front of me, a trick that didn't work any time they also stood, like whenever something was happening. I never saw a ball or a bat. The players looked like ants running around for no evident reason. The proof that anything ever happened was in the cheers of the crowd that was nearer who could see something, and announcements over the PA system. The announcements meant little, since no one, least of all my Father, had seen a need to explain the rules or the terminology to me. I was supposed to have been born with it wired into my neurons, or to have learned it in a Kindergarten that had no yard.

The high point of the game was getting a hot dog.

The Red Sox lost. Two weeks of being told, "We're going to see the Red Sox win a game" ended with, "Oh well. Next time will be better! I promise!"

There never was a next time. I refused to go again. To this day, I've never seen another baseball game. I can't bear the thought of spending three hours being reminded that all my Father's best efforts to bond with me could be summed up by his pointless BS, "We're going to go watch the Red Sox win a game!"

New Home

Sometime in the Fall of 1954 it was our turn to get on base housing. We were assigned a unit in a quadruplex, the fifth of five on Chancellorsville street, which faced out onto a beautiful green marching field having an area of about 8 football fields. We weren't on an overgrown abandoned farm anymore we were on a well-maintained clean military campus.

The officers' quarters and the administration and ASA training buildings were built in the same Colonial Revival style that's found on most US military bases built in the period between world wars.

Our quadruplex had two units on the first floor and two on the second floor. Our unit was the westernmost unit on the second floor. The living room and my parents bedroom looked out over the main street, Chancellorsville, and the marching field. That side was officially the front of the house. The kitchen, and the main bathroom, looked out the back at a service alley and across it, a wooded area, with mostly birch trees. My bedroom would also have looked out on the service alley, but attached to my room was an airy covered porch, screened on three sides. It became a deluxe play room, where I could be indoors but feel outdoors. My parents completely left it to me.

They had their own play room: another covered porch had been attached to the far end of the house with three entrances. You could get there from my room, from the main hall down the middle of the unit, or from a small bathroom that was connected to my parents' bedroom. This porch may have originally been open on three sides like my play area, but someone had decided to build windows, so it became a sunny second living room. My parents treated it as a party room and family retreat. It was the place they invited their best friends, keeping the mere acquaintances to the formal living room.

The Sun Porch, as we called it (as opposed to the Play Porch) got all the Hawaiian furniture which now came out of storage, so it took on a tropical look.

Fort Devens covered more than two square miles. It was decommissioned in the 90s. The old wooden structures like the Kindergarten building were all torn down, but most of the brick buildings were kept to form the Devens Community Center. The map below is based on a current satellite image, and only shows about a third of the total area of the base.


Some of the street names have changed. Chancellorsville became Elm. What is called Walnut Street on the map was called Detrobian Street in 1954. On the other hand Sherman and MacArthur Avenues were called the same back then, so not all the names have changed, maybe not the majority of them. Between MacArthur and El Caney, almost none of the structures were wooden, so nearly all the buildings in that part of the map are as they were then. One notable exception is the nursery which was a wooden structure on the west side of Sherman Avenue.

Another change, not having to do with the structures, is that the golf course appears to have shrunk. Formerly the golf course had fairways on either side of the marching field. Once I caddied for my Father and a golfing partner, and remember how, as we finished the holes to the west of Sherman Avenue, we had to walk across the marching field with the clubs to get to the final holes.

I've marked a building at the top as "Devens grade school." It actually only had first and second grades. I believe it had a total of 160 to 170 children in four classrooms, two to a grade. South and a little west of that, and up a slight hill you can't see in this view, I've marked a complex as the ASA School where my Father taught. I'm guessing slightly. It may have had other functions. Somewhere on the end of the base was the enlisted men's barracks, either in that complex or further east. Or the school may have been further east. I'm more sure about base headquarters which was a much smaller building on the other side of Sherman Ave.

Next door to the alleged ASA School, across a parking lot, was the main Fort Devens theater. It was one of the first new places I visited on base once we settled in, as my parents dumped me off for an all-day cartoon marathon. I got to know it very well, and would never confuse it with a school or barracks. Saturday matinee double features for kids were a dime!

Calm Before the Storm

Here's my Father, now Captain Browning, in Korea outside a tent, being a Sentinel of Security (Vigile Salutis!) for the Army Security Agency. This probably was taken before the war broke out in June 1950. I guessing it was too hectic for this kind of thing during the two weeks between the North Korean invasion and my Father's departure.

While Dad was getting the light bulb shot out over his head, I was back in Schofield Barracks with my Mother in a little two bedroom shack in the officers' housing. The officers' housing area looks like a low-income suburban housing project. Here's a shot of the base of one of the neighbor's house that was taken a couple of years later. I'm showing it now because it's the only shot I have that illustrates the ample crawl spaces under the houses. There are no basements. I think it's because of the monsoons.


The weeks before my father came home there were no heavy rains. It was very hot. My Mother drank a lot and ignored me, allowing me to crawl around outside in a shirt with no diapers so she wouldn't have to ever change me. Just hose me off at the end of the day. To escape the heat I learned to crawl around in the space under the house. It was dusty but cool. I remember it being a huge relief whenever I could get in there, and I didn't mind that I wasn't near my Mother, except when I was hungry.

I don't remember it but the story is that I couldn't handle my Mother's milk and a doctor advised filling bottles with warm papaya juice, which I loved. What I do remember are solid food feeding sessions in a high chair filled with cursing and yelling.

Back before the heat wave when my Mother kept me in diapers in the house there were attempts to toilet train me. One feature of this early toilet training that stands out in my mind was that whenever I completed a bowel movement my Mother would say, "Look, you made a present for Daddy!" At the time I didn't know what the words meant.

With the heat wave the tension was reduced, thanks to neglect. My world almost collapsed into the shady world of the crawl space. It was like a return to the womb. Maybe I didn't miss my Mother because I'd rediscovered her in the earth. There were grubs and cobwebs growing in her, but I didn't know I was supposed to mind.

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.