The Way They Were-With World War II Marriages In Mind  

By George Logan

One night Allan Jackson was talking to an acquaintance about the unusual way that his parents had met. Talking to a recently met lady friend acquaintance, Ellen Johnson, met through an on-line dating service, Seniors Please to give you an idea of the approximate ages of the conversationalists, and why they were comparing notes about how their parents met. Parents who had met, married and eventually stayed together in the throes of World War II, against the closing of the European and Pacific wars with a little hope of a breathing space to pursue their romances for future reference. The subject had come up as Allan and Ellen were collectively trying to outline, broad outline, their family histories, and how they grew up, survived the vicissitudes of childhood, teen-hood and the baggage of adulthood to arrive in free-fall at the same table via cyberspace, something that would have seemed impossible as a way to meet for their parents (or even their younger selves which both had commented on in an e-mail response as indeed a bizarre way to meet companions against the old-fashioned face to face meeting and go from there way).            

Such basic personal history talk is no way unusual for people who have barely known each other except in cyberspace as a way to “break the ice,” get a feel for whether the person sitting opposite you is worthy of further consideration (or are you secretly thinking that he or she has the look of an ax-murderer, a goof, or a crazy and how the hell did you ever get mixed up in such an experiment at your age). The whole thing depending on a certain amount “trust” that what was on their profiles, scanty details at best, and on your instinct after a few phone calls. So family history it was in this case, as in others to get a feel for the situation, for any false notes. The amazing thing about this particular combination was that despite the arbitrariness of on-line dating via the beauties of cyberspace Allan and Ellen had actually grown up not five miles away from each other in North Adamsville a few miles from Boston although it might as well have been five thousand miles but that as will be explained as the family histories unfold.            

Here is the way the Jackson family saga unfolded. Prescott Jackson had been born down in Appalachia, down in coal country, down in Hazard, Kentucky known far and wide in story and song as a bedrock town where you dug coal or didn’t work. In such a situation it was not surprising that Prescott once he attained his coming of age, that being fourteen in coal country, he was yanked out of school to work in the mines. That yanking based on the “principle” that one did not need an education to shovel coal just a strong back and good lungs (book-learning his father would always call education when he wanted to upbraid Allan or his brothers about their knowledge from books against the realities of this wicked old world). And so Prescott shoveled coal when there was work during the Great Depression of the 1930s, times that certainly were rough all over.

Then came December 7, 1941, a day that for Prescott’s generation would be permanently etched in their psyches as the day the Japanese dropped their bomb loads on Pearl Harbor (as for Allan and Ellen’s generation the JFK assassination in 1963 and today’s 9/11 are permanently etched in their psyches). Prescott the next day put down his shovel and took the bus to Louisville to sign up for the Marines (an act, the signing up the next day whatever branch of the service, many other young men did that next day as well). And he never looked back, looked back on his growing up Hazard hometown. Prescott, a beaten down man not noted for a sense of irony, later made Allan take a double take when he had asked his father about why he had left the coalfields. Prescott’s reply was that he would rather have taken his chances against the Nips (the common and probably the least offensive name for the Japanese foe) than to chance his life on the black lung that would have grabbed him if he had stayed at home. Whether that had been a wise decision with all the sorrows of his later life that were pressing down on him was a question left unanswered and with which he went to the grave.

Prescott, although he never talked about the details which Allan had only gleaned from his maternal uncle after his father’s passing, fought in all the big name island wars in the Pacific with the Marines. With the end of the war in sight (after the horrific atom bombings of two major Japanese cities) he was assigned to the Naval Depot at Riverdale about twenty miles from North Adamsville to await demobilization. [The Marines are the soldiers for the Navy for the confused about Prescott’s assignment.] That is where he met Delores Riley, Allan’s mother, who had been then just out of high school and had been working in one of the offices in the complex. They would meet at a USO dance one Friday night and the rest was history.           

Well not so fast history, maybe not schoolboy history or Mister Wells’ history but history nevertheless as Allan had once read as a line in an old time detective novel so family history of the mortally tragic kind. A history against the flow of the times. Whatever romance, or the bite of romance, hit Prescott and Delores over the head there were some hard-scrabble facts that confronted them from day one of their marriage (although not conclusive of what would happen in the future that marriage had because Prescott was a Protestant and Delores a Catholic been performed by a Roman priest in the rectory not the church of her growing up parish without the benefit of parents who were violently opposed the coupling). The hard fact was that one hard-boiled Marine soldier boy Prescott Jackson, high school drop-out and not well-spoken or a very good writer had no skills that measured up to anything in the Boston economy, an economy markedly not in need of an unskilled son of a coal-miner.

That hard fact would plague him his whole checkered working career as the last hired, first fired in the various downturns that bogged down the American capitalist economy. In what is now considered something of a golden age of working class America during the hegemonic 1950s the Jackson family (parents and three boys, three boys carried to term close together another hard fact) were left out, left out with a hard thump.             

It had not been pretty down at the bottom of society where everybody is prey to the bottom-feeders, where “the projects” cultural gradient stamped everything with its scarcity face. Small apartment, too small for three growing boys, many times no car in the golden age of the American car to get about in that isolated projects location, a weekly struggle to pay rent and food, cheap-jack clothing and a million other hard knock things that come in the poverty train of the working poor. Worse, one hundred times worse, though was the social and psychological scarring due to that sense that one was left behind, was made to feel less human, less worthy. Of anything. Allan would spent his whole life looking over his shoulder at what others had which in his youth he never had. And of course he was the “lucky,” one, he survived although that was a close thing. His brothers, the older a career criminal, the younger beset by massive mental problems which required long periods of enforced institution did not survive the whole experience. As Allan related that last information a tear formed in his eyes for what might have been but never was in the benighted Jackson family.

Ellen had been visibly shaken by Allan’s story since she had grown up not four or five miles from “the projects” in North Adamsville that Allan had grown up in but it might as well have indeed been that five thousand miles because the twain would never meet. Although she was slightly younger than Allen Ellen had parents who also met during World War II and this hard fact forms the backdrop of what happened to two families from the same town. Ellen’s father, Paul, had come from a large, too large Irish Catholic family of twelve children (three from a previous marriage on his father’s side and nine with Paul’s mother), the O’Brians, due to family economic circumstances had been “shipped out,” given up to another family, the Johnsons, who could afford to take care of him. They lived in the Adams Shore section of town. That, given the less than glorious fate of the scad of children left behind was probably the decisive factor in driving her father toward success in that golden age of the American dream mentioned before. Ellen mother, Gloria, nee Crawford, had come from a very prosperous family from Maine. Ellen’s maternal grandfather had been a doctor in the bargain. Although Paul was smart he, and the Johnsons, did not have enough money to send him to college during the height of the Great Depression and so he did odd jobs here and there before the war. During World War II her father had joined the Navy and would eventually be stationed at the Portsmouth Naval Base where he meet Gloria who was working doing her civic duty as a civilian secretary to one of the high naval officers on the base. They had met in the office of that officer when Paul had to take some paperwork for approval there. They were married not too shortly after. The rest is history.                                        

We will dispense with what kind of history it might have been except to say that it was very different from what Allan had experienced. Paul used his G.I Bill benefits to advantage and went to college in Boston at Boston University to study business. [Allan’s father could have qualified to use the G.I. Bill as well except there was nothing available that he could have used it for without a high school diploma and besides he had had to struggle hard to just keep food on the table for three close in age growing boys.] After he finished his studies he and Gloria started a family which would grow to three before they were finished. Now Paul had struggled just like Prescott to put food on the table at first (and made Gloria angry on more than one occasion when her family offered to help and he turned them down flat).But Paul was able to roll with the golden age of the American economy. See he had an idea, an idea based on the quicksilver rise of television in the home. Since his own children, including Ellen, would clamor for watching television during lunch and dinner he thought of the idea of creating those folding television tables that one can put food on and watch television undisturbed. He didn’t design the damn thing but his idea was to get somebody to design the table and he would merchandise it. Bingo, the American dream come true.

Immediately that meant, much to Gloria’s delight, moving from Adams Shore to posh Adams Heights (and later to a WASP haven in Alden down by the sea). Meant that Ellen (and her two siblings) would go to private schools and attend prestigious colleges. Ellen was one of the few women molecular biologists at MIT when that discipline was gaining traction. Mostly and she admitted this she led a straight forward very upper middle class life with a minimum of problems (and baggage). One sister had been in some trouble over drugs and radical politics but the family had the wherewithal to squash all of that. The only thing Ellen expressed sorrow over which had not happened was that she had never been married (Allan had three failed marriages under his belt) and had given up that idea a while back for the easier road of companionship. That idea is where the saga of the two very different family histories might join together. Who knows stranger things have happened in the age of cyberspace.