Military Service

Puerto Rico –  1955 to 1957

This past Veteran’s Day I was reminded that Dad served in the U.S. Air Force right after high school.

His service was not out of some patriotic desire, but from economic need.  His teeth were rotting out and his family didn’t have any money for dental care.  So he joined up to get new teeth.  For as long I can remember, he had an upper full denture plate and a lower partial plate as well.

I’m not sure he that ever thought the service was worth the trade.  He enlisted on 4 August 1954 for a four-year hitch, but got out about three and a half months early with an honorable discharge.  I remember him telling me that the early discharge was because both he and the Air Force had had enough of each other.

He told me once that he served 30 days in the brig because he had mouthed off at an officer.  I think it was actually 26 days, because his discharge papers show “26 Days time lost under Sec 6a, Appendix 2b, MCM 1951.”  MCM is the Manual For Courts-Martial, and Sec 6a, Appendix 2b mandates that, any days lost due to confinement (and other reasons) are still owed to the service as part of your enlistment.  I guess they let him slide on that since he did get an early discharge.

I don’t recall exactly what he did while in the service.  I think he was trained as a radar technician.  He served over two years at the now closed Ramey Air Force Base in Puerto Rico.  He told me that he used to man rescue boats that were kept ready in case a plane went down in the water.  However, they apparently spent a good deal of their time taking officers out on fishing trips.

His free time was spent in the bars, riding motorcycles and spearfishing.  He had a long scar that ran down the length of his forearm from a motorcycle wreck in Puerto Rico.  His time in the bars was when he picked up his drinking habit (“there wasn’t much else to do there”).  The local prostitutes (“whores”) were not unknown to him.  His first time was with one of those ladies.  He caught gonorrhea (“the clap”) once and the base doctors gave him the standard treatment of penicillin.  He woke up the next day all swollen from an allergic reaction to the penicillin (“the treatment was worse than the clap; that penicillin liked to kill me”). He said the prostitutes could be dangerous in other ways.  According to him, they had been known to slap men with a razor blade held between their fingers.

I don’t know the exact dates that he was there. He always referred to that time as being “stuck down in Puerto Rico for two years.”  He told me that a hurricane hit the island and base while he was there, and it was “pretty damn scary.”  He was amazed at the calm when the eye of the hurricane passed over.  Thanks to the Internet I found information about Hurricane Betsy which hit the island August 11 – 13, 1956.  Sustained winds reached 73 mph in San Juan and at Ramey, wind gusts of up to 115 mph were recorded.

He lifted from the Air Force a .45 automatic handgun that he had until it was stolen in ’82 or ’83 from his bedroom in a rent house in Alief along with a box of change.  The handgun had been stolen once before from him in ’77 from our rent house in Sharpstown.  Dad figured it was his nephew Tommy who took it and sure enough found him in the parking lot of a local bar trying to sell the gun for cash.

He had his dog tags for a long time, but I could not find them with his stuff when he died.

Other mementos of his time in the service include the scar on his arm, a penicillin allergy medical alert bracelet, a decal from the Ramey AFB Spearfishing Club, and a lifelong bout of alcoholism.

Original Scan of Spearfishing Club Decal

Uncle Junior

Houston – Summer, 1977

After living in an apartment off Stella Link and the West Loop for just four months, it was time to move again.  This time Dad rented a house in Sharpstown.  A house gave him the ability to work on his car or truck and to store his house painting equipment and supplies.  But this move left me at the age of 13 with no friends, again, all summer. 

In 1977 there was no Internet and no cable TV.  Part of the summer I “worked” as Dad’s painting helper and part of the summer I spent at home.  I was a big reader of science fiction books back then as well as comic books and spent time doing that.  I think I watched “The Price Is Right” every day.

I also passed time by teaching myself to do wheelies in a wheelchair.

We ended up with the wheelchair when Uncle Junior got hit by a car trying to cross the West Loop on foot one drunken night. 

To recap, I was living with Mom in Memphis and came to live with Dad when she died in February 1977. Then in late March 1977, Dad’s father died at the age of 78.  So it was back to Memphis for the funeral.  Walter Clyde Green, Jr. was Dad’s oldest brother by almost 12 years.  As these things go in the South, Junior’s wife called him Gene, whereas Dad’s middle name was Eugene, but as a kid, all the way through high school, Dad was known as Sonny.  I only ever heard him called Sonny once by family; everybody seemed to call him Douglas and I was, of course, Dougie.

I knew my uncle as Junior.  When we lived in Memphis from 1968 to 1970, I can remember visiting Junior and his wife and my cousins in Arkansas at a cabin out in the mountains, the Ozarks maybe.  I remember driving up part of a mountain road to get to the cabin that seemed like it was vertical.  I thought surely the old station wagon was going to roll back down the hill and we would crash and die. 

When I moved to Memphis the second time, in 1976, Junior was divorced and living with his mother (Pauline) and father (Clyde).  By then, Junior was an alcoholic in a very bad way. He wouldn’t always come home and frequently had that old drunk smell.  He was the kind of drunk who would drink rubbing alcohol or Sterno cooking fuel if he couldn’t get anything else.  I remember Pauline yelling at him when he would stumble home drunk.  Pauline yelled a lot at him and Clyde Sr. both.  I remember one time that Pauline had gotten a hold of some sort of drug that she added to Junior’s food that would make him sick if he drank any alcohol. It didn’t work.  He would get sick, puke everything up and go right back to drinking.  Junior smoked hand-rolled unfiltered cigarettes. 

Where Dad was a functioning alcoholic, Junior was on-a-path-to-his-doom alcoholic.  Dad told me once  that when it came to drinking, Junior couldn’t pace himself at all and couldn’t stop once he started.

Dad told me that Junior was a medic in WWII. He said that when Junior came back he was a changed man and not for the better.  There was a darkness and sadness to him after the war.  Today, I’m sure, he would have been diagnosed PTSD. 

That March of 1977, after Clyde Sr. died, Dad agreed to take Junior to Texas with us so that Junior could get a new start.  Junior had helped dad get started in the paper-hanging and house painting business in 1969 and so I guess Dad was trying to give a helpful payback.  Junior started working with Dad as a painter.  We were living in that apartment off of Stella Link and the West Loop.  I think it was only a week and Junior’s first payday when he went out and got drunk.  He was on foot and tried to cross the 610 Interstate Loop in the middle of the night. 

He got hit by a car and remarkably did not die.  As I recall, he had a broken leg and ribs and more.  He ended up in the VA hospital for some period of time.  As soon as he got out of the hospital, Dad put him on a plane back to Memphis.  The VA gave him a wheelchair to get around and it ended up in our spare bedroom.

Junior died of cancer, throat cancer I think, in 1983 at the age of 57. 

So that boring summer in 1977 I started riding the wheelchair around the house.  The flooring was hardwood and I started doing wheelies.  I got pretty good at it.  I could ride through the entire house, around furniture, and turn through doorways -- all while on two wheels.  I even took it outside a few times going up and down the sidewalk in front of the house.  

The wheelchair highlights a difference between Dad and I.  If I ended up with wheelchair like that from the VA today, I would make sure that it got back to them – some poor soul would need it.  Dad wouldn’t waste a second of his time to get the chair back to the VA.  The wheelchair stayed with us for a few more years.  Around 1981, I ended up loaning it to a coworker at Kmart who had a relative or neighbor who needed a wheelchair for a short period of time; the wheelchair never made it back to me.

The fun video linked to below, “Learn to Wheelie” reminded me of the wheelchair.  This video is a hoot and I was laughing and cheering on the rider as he got better and better at his wheelies. 

https://youtu.be/lTYJMke4kd8

Senator John Tower

Houston – 1984

On David Letterman’s old NBC talk show, Late Night, he used to have a segment called “Brush With Greatness.”  He would invite audience members to tell tales of their encounters with celebrities.  There are clips of these segments on You Tube. 

Living with Dad, I had my own “Brush With Greatness” with Texas Senator John Tower.

When we moved into the mobile home in 1983, Dad was hiding out from the IRS. He decided to put the utilities in an assumed name.  It wasn’t a case of identity theft; it was just a fake name that he grabbed from nowhere.  The name he picked was Jack Blanton. 

I learned that Jack Blanton was a real person when I answered the home phone a couple of times and the caller was looking for Jack Blanton.  I was in college at the time; I typically had classes in the morning and worked at Kmart in the evening.

 The first phone call came in the middle of a week day. “Hello?” I answered.

A woman’s voice replied, “Senator John Tower would like to speak with Mr. Jack Blanton.  Is he available?” 

I assumed that the call would be some sort of recording where the Senator would ask for a campaign donation.  When you get a phone call for a name that you know is made up, you can be pretty sure that it is some sort of telephone solicitor. 

 “He’s not here right now.” I answered.

“Do you know when he will be back?”

“No, I really don’t.”

“Okay, thank you.”  She seemed confused by this answer.  I didn’t offer to take a message and she didn’t ask me to take one.  That confirmed to me that the phone call was some sort of effort to raise money for the Senator’s re-election campaign.  Senator Tower actually wasn’t running for re-election, but I didn’t know that at the time.

A few weeks later another call came in for Jack Blanton in the middle of a week day.

“Hello?” I answered.

A woman’s voice replied, “Senator John Tower would like to speak with Mr. Jack Blanton.  Is he available?” 

Again?  I decided to play along.  “I’m Jack Blanton,” I declared.

“Please hold,” she replied.

I waited for a moment and a male voice came on the line. “Uh, Jack?”

Oh shit! It’s a real person! I wasn’t aware of what Senator Tower’s voice sounded like, but the voice on the line had an East Texas twang to it.  “Yes sir?” I replied.

“Jack, we’re looking for someone to head up a fund raising committee to for the campaign against Lloyd Doggett.”  Crap!  This is the real deal! I’m on the phone with U.S. Senator John Tower and I’m pretending to be someone who doesn’t exist.  I later learned that Lloyd Doggett was running for John Tower’s Senate seat as the Democratic Party nominee. 

“Well, Senator, I’m pretty busy these days.  I don’t think I have the time to do anything like that.”  Get me out of this phone call!

“Jack, it’s very important that we get this committee going in Houston and we’ll need someone like you to help us out.”

“I’m sorry sir, but I’m a college student and I’m working a full-time job.  I just don’t think I’ll be able to do this.”

The conversation paused just slightly, “I think I have the wrong Jack Blanton.”

“Yes sir, I think you do to,” I replied.  With that, I was no longer on the phone with Senator John Tower.

I thought to myself, Who the hell is Jack Blanton and where did Dad come up with that name?

Dad swore that he picked the name at random.  I can only guess that Dad saw the name somewhere and it bubbled up from his memory when he picked a name to use for his phone, gas and electricity bills. 

We didn’t have the internet back then, so there was no way, other than going to the public library, to research and try find out who Jack Blanton was. I didn’t do that, but a couple of more clues came my way. 

The first clue was something I spotted in a business journal in the lobby of the Sugar Creek National Bank in Sugar Land. I was scanning the magazine while waiting and came across a full page ad for Texas Commerce Bank.  The ad had headshot line drawings of each of the bank’s directors on the Board of Directors. Oil Executive Jack Blanton was there.  The second clue about  Jack Blanton came to me at another time and place, I don’t remember where, but I learned that Jack Blanton was on the University of Texas Board of Regents.

John Tower died in a plane crash in 1991 and Jack S. Blanton died “peacefully in his Galveston vacation home” in 2013.

Lloyd Doggett is currently serving as a representative in the U.S. Congress from the Texas 35th District. 

Little Gems

Memphis – Spring and Summer, 1976

In May of 1976, when I had just four weeks left in the seventh grade, Mom decided to secretly take me and Cousin away from Dad.  He was drinking pretty heavily then, but she had recently gotten out of a half-way house after having her latest nervous breakdown.  So, of course, she was in much better shape to take care of us kids.

For the life of me, I will never understand why she didn’t wait for us to finish the school year.  That put us in the third school and our second state for the school year of 1975-76.  We were still living in Central Florida when she took us. 

The plan to take us divided my loyalties between parents.  At the time I wanted to stay with Dad because he was more emotionally balanced and functionally stable; it felt safer with him. Mom had lost it many times and would probably lose it again.  But if I was to refuse to go with her or blow the whistle on her plan, then I could become the cause of the next breakdown.  That’s a lot for a 12-year-old kid to process and make a decision on. 

As sad as it made me to leave Dad, I kept the secret and off we went to Memphis.  We packed everything we could into our 1972 Chevrolet Kingswood Estate Station Wagon. It was the three of us and our loyal German Shepherd Dog named Shama. 

The drive from Florida to Memphis had its moments.  We had little money, so a motel was out of the question.  I remember stopping a few times so that she could nap while us kids waited nervously.  There was a scary episode while driving at night; we got lost trying to change from one interstate highway to another.  I remember Mom getting angry as we drove around in circles trying to find the right ramp.  I remember feeling very scared.

I remember Mom losing it over an eye-liner pencil.  It had fallen out of her purse into the floor board of the wagon.  We were in a parking lot searching for this pencil in the front seat clutter of the car, “that pencil cost me ninety-seven cents! Do you know how long it took for me to save up for that!?”  We just stood there meekly saying, “we’re sorry” and hoping she that didn’t take it out on us.  I don’t remember if she found the pencil or not. 

Another memory of that drive was having only one eight-track tape to listen to the whole way.  It was John Denver’s Back Home Again. You would think that I would hate that album, but I still love it to this day and I can still sing most of the songs on it.

Skipping ahead a bit in the timeline, later that summer when we finally set up house in a three-room apartment we had very little to our names.  We needed almost all household items, including dinnerware.  We were receiving welfare checks and food stamps by then, and so had little money.  But what Mom did have was a stack of S&H Green Stamp Saver Books.  With these books you could go to an S&H Green Stamp store and redeem the stamps for all sorts of merchandise. Memphis in 1976 had an S&H Green Stamp store.  Mom had enough trading stamps to redeem them for a set of Mikasa Avitra dinnerware, a set of flatware, and a few other things.

Mom died about nine months after taking us to Memphis.  Those kitchen items ended up with Dad and me when I went to live with him in Houston.  Cleaning out Dad’s mobile home did not reveal any treasure, but it did reveal the Mikasa dinnerware and a few other small house hold gems.

Today I went through the two boxes of kitchen things that I saved from his mobile home, intending to clean up the items and donate them to Goodwill. Along with the Mikasa Avitra dinnerware are two turquoise Pyrex Butterprint casserole bowls, one Federal Glass batter bowl and one set of Lefton china canisters.  (I used the Internet to discover all these names). The casseroles and batter bowl I rember from my childhood.  I have no idea where the china canisters came from. 

These little gems don’t have a great value assigned to them, but through the Internet I can get them to collectors who will love them for the nostalgic pieces that they are. 

Update 1. :  The wife and I both like the cheerfulness of the Mikasa dinnerware and are going to use it for a while

Update 2.:  Dang it! Through my clumsiness and courtesy of the granite countertops, I put a big chip in the lid of the smallest Lefton china canister.

Keeping Me Alive

Greenville – December, 1963

When I was in my late 20s, I almost went to Europe on a business trip.  The company had all the reservations and I had my plane ticket in hand.  However, the day before the flight they said, “never mind . . .” Yeah, I was disappointed.

In preparation for that trip, I needed a U.S. Passport.  One of the requirements is a certified copy of your birth certificate.  I always had the pretty one from the hospital, but never had a certified copy.  South Carolina was pretty efficient and for the right fee had a copy to me overnight. 

I read the certificate in detail and found one detail that was a small surprise.

Question:

     “16. PREVIOUS DELIVERIES TO MOTHER

          c. How many fetal deaths (fetuses born dead at ANY time after conception)?”

Answer:

     “2.”

This was a only small surprise because I knew that Mom had two stillbirths after I was born, but I didn’t know of any stillbirths or miscarriages before I was born. 

I asked Dad about it.  He answered, “I finally had to make her get her tubes tied.  I got tired of burying babies. Before you came along, I came home from work and found her and your brother and sister gone.  She told me later that she was headed to visit her family in Baltimore.  She was pregnant and had a miscarriage along the way. She stopped and put D and D in a motel with enough food for a couple of days and went to the hospital.” 

Mom left my brother and sister alone in a motel and went to the hospital for a miscarriage.  D and D were  two years apart in age and were under the age of six.  Mom didn’t tell Dad she was even leaving for this road trip and didn’t call him for help.  She told him about the miscarriage after she got home. 

I have vague memories about the two stillbirths that occurred after I was born. I remember Mom going off to the hospital for several days a couple of times. During the day I stayed at a nearby daycare, probably in someone’s home.  I remember her being gone for days(?) and I remember all the neat toys to play with at that daycare.  I also remember visiting the graves of my brother and sister, Devin and Denine Green. 

 

My mother kept having miscarriages and stillbirths because of Rh sensitization.  This causes a condition called hemolytic anemia where the mother’s Rh negative blood creates antibodies that destroy the fetus’ positive red blood cells faster than they can be replaced. 

My blood type is O+ and hemolytic anemia almost killed me. 

I was born on Friday the 13^th, December 1963. I was 5 lbs. 13 oz. at birth, anemic and yellow with jaundice.  To save my life I needed blood transfusions.  Dad told me that I had an IV in my head and an IV in my foot, one taking blood out and the other putting fresh blood in. 

I remember him telling me that the doctor told him “don’t  get attached to this baby – he won’t make it past six months.”  I guess he got a little attached because he didn’t give up.  He said that he would feed me coke and crackers, that was the only thing I could keep down.  This was the 60s and so I don’t know whether they even tried to breast-feed me.

Knowing that blood transfusions are what saved my life when I was born, I am a regular blood donor.  I started when I was 17 years old and still donate three or four times a year.  

Oddly enough, Dad never understood donating blood. He sneered at the thought and said, “if they want my blood, they’ll have to pay me.”

The Note

Houston – June, 2016

Two days after Dad’s death, while cleaning out his mobile home, I found the note.  It wasn’t placed in a prominent place and it might have been overlooked but for me reading any scrap of paper with Dad’s hand writing. 

The note was on a small notepad. The artwork on the page had a cartoon family of owls at the top, staring directly at you and the logo for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital at the bottom.  The notepad was in with the clutter on the table next to his living room recliner. 

I spoke to him twice in the week before he died.  On the Friday before, I brought him some bar-b-que (pork not beef; he was raised in Memphis, not Texas) and invited him over for Father’s Day. Then on Father’s Day when he was late, I called to see what was up. He said he was not feeling well and apologized for not calling me to cancel. 

I imagine it was several days between the time he wrote the note and committed the act.  I imagine he was trying the idea out first – that he wrote the note to make the idea real. He may have even written it on Father’s Day.

“Goodbuy  Cruel World:  I’ve Been hurting 3 T 5 years That’s enuff” 

The note told me what I needed to know – that he didn’t blame me.

I wonder how many other loved ones of suicide victims do the same thing, read the note to see if they are blamed by the victim.  That seems like a selfish thought and is a bit of a turn on what it frequently said about suicide – that suicide is a selfish act of the victim.

Calling suicide a selfish act is a form of blame too, I guess. When we say that, we are blaming the suicide victim for causing our grief.

Since I don’t have any grief for the end of his life, I don’t have any blame for Dad either.

In that final moment outside his trailer, in the gravel of his parking space, what was he thinking? Was he sad? Was he angry? Was he depressed? Was he relieved?

I wish I could have provided a happier ending for him. Deciding that you’ve had a long enough life after 80 years of living is a decision that should be respected.  Like the movie Soylent Green, going “Home” should be a happy decision.  You should be able to die in a peaceful, clean place, listening to your favorite music, watching images of beauty and happiness, surrounded by loved ones. The end shouldn’t be standing all alone on a gravel driveway with Houston humidity bearing down on you. 

I’ll give him this – at least he didn’t die in a hospital with tubes and wires keeping him alive.  He was ready and he died on his own terms.  Mr. DIY to the end.  

Handsome Young Man

Dad graduated from Memphis Technical High School in 1954. His year book has pictures for 198 students in the Senior class. 

I remember him telling me that he took Print Shop classes.  I also remember him telling me that the kids would sometimes use the equipment to print pornographic stories to sell to their classmates and friends.

Before that he went to Fairview Junior High.  I went to Fairview Junior High myself some 26 years later for just the last month of seventh grade, in May of 1976.

I found a couple of great pictures of Dad on dates.  You can see this handsome young man with a couple of pretty young ladies.  One of the pictures has a handwritten note from the young lady, “To Sonny, for a very wonderful night and to a very sweet guy.”

Another set of gems are the telephone directories from Fairview Junior High.  The directory from his ninth grade (October 1950) has the name of a particular girl circled and with a handwritten note, “Aint she wonderful??????????”

He tells me that he never smiled with his teeth because they were rotting pretty bad. In fact the main reason he joined the Air Force was so that he could get some dental work.  They pulled what remained of his upper teeth and gave him an upper denture plate.  He also had partials on the bottom.

It is fun and strange to imagine Dad as a teenager, going on dates, and being called, “sweet” by a pretty young lady.  He probably was a pretty ordinary kid for his time and place, just trying to have a good time with his whole life ahead of him.