Ruminations or A la Recherche du Temps Perdu

It was the very best time of year—spring—April –daffodils awakening, the most brazen of that delightful ilk, rising up through patches of snow that lingered in spite of April’s warming sun. It was 1958; I was in tranquil, Vermont, the land of prim, white-painted churches; towns neat as those of Holland and western Massachusetts. I love New England.
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I came to California late in life, and though I have been a resident for twenty-five years, I still find it strange. That said, I am most appreciative of San Francisco’s mild climate. However, I selected my Erewhon long ago but the merest thought of living in New England in winter chills my blood and makes me shiver on the warmest day of summer. I just admire Vermont from a safe distance. Actually, what I know of New England is what I learned from Earl Fanjoy, a Bangor Maineac with a broader “A” even than the Kennedys. Earl lived in a chicken house converted by his father in the grimmest days of the depression. The roof of Earl’s not-very-regal abode was so flimsy that, in winter, he had to climb up several times to clear the snow off his roof lest it collapse and fall on his head. Earl and I were the same age—I, of course the wiser because I was an entire month older.

Earl died almost ten years ago, but I cannot forget him; one of the few from my sea-going days I cannot erase from memory. When the war came I had already been in that life for six years, but Earl was drafted from his job as a man-of-all-work for Maine’s Senator Owen Brewster. An innocent idealist, Earl, was so valuable, the powerful senator wanted to rescue him from his draft board but Earl was sick of cynical Washington and wanted to go to war. In the Navy he became a yeoman, his battle station the bridge, his task the conveyance of orders in the thick of battle. Somebody had recognized this Maineac as stalwart and unflappable. He served in the South Pacific where the greatest of our sea battles were fought.

I loved the stories Earl told of the pettiness of Washington life. So Senator Brewster could continue to reap the benefit of Earl’s services without the obligation to pay his salary, he had Earl put on the Senate payroll as elevator man. Once Earl had Senator Alan Bible of Nevada as a passenger. It was the habit of long serving senators not to call out their floor, and in this case, Bible, a pompous authoritarian, did not. When Earl passed up the senator’s floor, Bible blew up in a childish tantrum, threatening to have him fired. Of course, there, he would have come up against Senator Brewster’s power, an influence equal to his own. Earl did not get fired.

Like many senators, Brewster exerted his power and just as constantly had his hand out for favors. While receiving big-time from Pan American Airways, he inaugurated an investigation of Howard Hughes who owned competing TWA. Hughes retaliated with a private investigation of Brewster—exposing the senator’s shameless acceptance of favors big and small. Brewster was forced out of the Senate in disgrace.

Howard Hughes went on to let his fingernails grow as he dined exclusively on ice cream, gradually becoming a living ghost. The moral lesson of this vignette is never cross a crazy billionaire!

By comparison to Earl’s, my war experiences were tepid—a collision—inches shy of perilous, and the goggle-eyed observation of the torpedoing of a bomb-laden ship, as mine, the Liberty ship “Tyson,” slid safely and peacefully by the doomed vessel—so close it was as though we were one for a few moments. In astounded passivity, I watched the panic of the “John Bell’s” crew. In August 1943, for more than two weeks we had been companions in the Atlantic and Mediterranean; she, just ahead of us in a convoy of more than a hundred ships. Fifty years later I learned the details of her sinking: only one man of the sixty-nine in her crew was lost. We glided around the doomed “Bell” and watched her explode a dozen times before she sank far behind us.

The namesakes of the mass-produced Liberty ships “John Bell” and my ship, the “Lawrence D. Tyson,” were Tennessee politicians. Constitutional Union Party candidate John Bell, ran for president in 1860, an opponent of Breckinridge, Douglas and…er Abraham Lincoln. Bell received the fewest votes of the four: 590,901.

My reward for that frightening experience was to have what amounted to a ten-day vacation in Malta while my ship underwent repair of the hole in her side. Malta was then a part of the British Empire on which the sun never set. Each afternoon just before sunset, a steel net was drawn across the narrow entrance of the Valetta harbor, protecting its many ships from night-marauding u-boats.

Fenski, the U-Boat 410 whose torpedo sank the “John Bell”, was itself bombed and sunk at Toulon, just seven months later.