My dad was a son of a bitch, not a lovable old codger son of bitch, but a mean son of a bitch. He was mean to us as kids and he was mean to our mother. When I was growing up it felt as if he blamed us for the drudgery of his life and he was making us pay for it. He was a man of incredible talent in his own mind, superior to just about everyone, but it had never come to much and that was our fault.
From September 1944 to May 1945 my Father flew 45 missions in a B-26 Marauder light bomber. I was born in 1946. Growing up and living with my dad was hell, he was always angry and disturbing him in any way was to be avoided at all costs. . Many years later I was talking to Eric, my Ranger partner at Angel Island. Eric’s father had been an infantryman and his unit marched cross Europe and into Germany one bloody battle after another. Eric and I had similar experiences growing up with a badly damaged parent. I think it was a moment of insight for both of us. We put a name to it, PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Soldiers, Victims of Abuse, who go through terrible things and do what they have to do at the time and then pay the price for the rest of their lives with crippled souls.
My father was born in St. Louis. He grew up in Springfield probably. He never admitted it but by the end of his life his mind drifted back to Springfield. 2; His last days he lived in a dream world with his mother nearby and in Springfield. His great grandfather had immigrated to Brinktown midway between St. Louis and Springfield from Ireland. At 14, my father went to Christian Brothers College, a high school in St. Louis. I think his St. Louis origins may have been fabricated to hide that he was from the country. He was a young man of great promise, or at least that’s what we got from people who knew him, my grandmother, his brother and even my mother.
His brother, Ed, greatly admired Jack and Uncle Jack was a favorite of Ed's children. One time he came home from a family crisis in St. Louis with stories of how wonderful Ed, his wife, and particularly their children were. It sounded to us like we could never measure up. I think my father admired his brother as well, admired what he had done in life and how he was able to get sober and be there for his family.
My father was born in 1916 to Helen Cullen and John Duggan. We learned Helen was actually Ellen after she died. Apparently the name Ellen was too Irish. My eldest sister is named Ellen. My grandmother was raised by the McGlynns, her mother’s sister and her husband. My grandmother must have used their surname, because my grandfather always called her Mac.
When I first met my grandfather he was a senile old man. Before the booze destroyed him he had been a salesman and an aircraft worker. My Uncle Ed, my father’s only brother, was born in Seattle when my grandfather worked for Curtis Wright. My father told stories about organizing for the UAW, which my grandfather must have been active in in the 1930s.
My father’s grandfather, Grandpa McGlynn died in an auto accident in Springfield. My grandfather was driving and he was drunk. My father was in the car.
My father met my mother in 1939. Pictures show he was a handsome young man. She was quite a knockout herself. He had had a number of jobs, working in a foundry and on a railroad, as a gandy dancer, he claimed. Both jobs were probably from relatives. He also claimed to have been a prize fighter. From his notebooks, full of cartoons, quotes and his thoughts, I learned he was very aware of what was going on in the world, particularly in Europe. My mother got pregnant around December, 1939, and they got married February 3, 1940. The early pregnancy, of course, was a family secret. Ellen, my eldest sister, learned her real birth date when she was 18. I heard it from her years later. Ellen’s public birthday was October 31, 1940 three months after she was born. That was typical of my father to choose Halloween. He liked mean little jokes like that.
Stories in our
family were like images in a fun house. The truth was there
somewhere, but it got distorted, twisted, unrecognizable, looking
like something else. My mother would embellish, create, cover
over and make herself the hero. My father took his facts,
twisted them, turned them upside down and made them into a maze.
The real story was hard to find. In my own mind, I've tried to
strip them down to what I know and reconstruct them in a way that
makes sense. Neither of my parents were reliable sources for
anything that happened. The most important events were often
secrets and by mutual consent discussed.
My parents came
to California after they were married. I think my grandmother
was not happy about my mother and they were never friends. My
father worked at Lockheed Aircraft and then enlisted in the Army Air
Corps in 1942. He didn’t have to go. He was 25 years
old and had a year old child and one on the way. In my opinion,
he ran away from home. I don’t think my father ever dealt
with anything like a man the whole time I knew him. When his
brother was dying and his niece and nephew appealed to him to come to
San Diego, he stayed home. I think he was a spoiled kid, his
whole life.
He went to Butler University in Indianapolis as an Army Air Corps Cadet. From there he went to San Angelo, Texas, Goodfellow Field, and Lake Charles Army Airfield, Louisiana for training as a Bombardier/Navigator on a B-26, light bomber.
In September, 1944 he was assigned to to the 497th Bomb Squadron of the 344th Bomb Group at Stansted, England and was there in time for the Battle of the Bulge. He flew 45 missions and received the Air Medal for it. At discharge he was still a 2nd Lieutenant but had been the lead navigator for his squadron. He flew from England, France and then Belgium. He flew bombing missions over France, Germany and Czechoslovakia. When he was older and very drunk he would talk about George Mitchell, the pilot of their plane, whose death as he told it in fragmented references he was responsible for. I knew whatever it was it had eaten at my father his whole life. I thought my father had somehow caused Mitchell’s death by being a coward.
After he died I found a letter. The exact opposite was true. On May 1st, seven days before the end of the War, my father and his plane were flying a bombing run over Germany. Captain Mitchell was the pilot. The Luftwaffe had dropped out of the War but the anticraft fire over German cities was horrendous. The most dangerous part of a mission is the actual bombing run when the target is sighted and the plane levels out and flies straight toward the target until the bombs are dropped. In those few minutes the bombardier is flying the plane. The plane is a sitting duck for anti-aircraft fire from below. The War was won and it was the last days when the navigators on many bombing runs never found their targets or would wave off in the deadly moments before they dropped their bombs.
My father, who for all his faults was a man of absolute integrity, was the navigator/bombardier on a bombing run at the end of the War in which Captain George Mitchell from Georgia lost his life. My father had a letter from Mitchell’s parents thanking him for his loyalty to their son. When I read the letter I understood the story my father told in drunken fragments. He didn’t feel guilty because his cowardice killed his friend but because his bravery or pig headedness had killed his friend.
By the time I came along my father was a grim man who barely talked at all. He listened to the radio, he read foreign magazines, he smoked cigars and he drank beer. Most of the time he was holed up in a back bedroom, Mr. D’s room, with his radio, phonograph and books. We had to be quiet when he was there so we wouldn’t disturb him.
When I was three or younger I remember I was holding my Teddy Bear outside the car feeling the wind in my hair and I dropped it. He wouldn’t stop or go back for it. When we were together, he had to take care of me or for some reason my mother wasn't there, it was like I didn't exist. Anything I did was an imposition on him. I would walk beside him and try to engage him in conversation and he wouldn’t say anything. The one time we played catch he was so critical of my throwing and catching that we never played again. I was three years old.
He obviously had great aptitude for many things. He learned to speak French during World War II and read French magazines and books. In the 1940s and 1950s in California he learned to speak Spanish, with dictionaries, how to books, records and radio he listened to. He listened to Dodger games in Spanish. My father never spoke to anyone very much. He was a very taciturn man. When I learned to speak Spanish he wouldn't speak Spanish with me. I doubt he spoke Spanish at all. When I forced him to, it was halting and slow. He just didn’t have enough practice, but he did read it and write in Spanish very well. In French it was the same thing, whenever there was anyone around who spoke French we would proclaim my father’s fluency but he would refuse to speak French to anyone who was fluent. I don’t think he had any confidence in either French or Spanish.
At one time or another my father had been an art student, I think before and or after the War. There were a number of oil paintings around the house and they were very good. His palette was muted, dark colors, like a Dutch master palette and he did portraits. I like them better than my uncle's paintings. My uncle made a living as an artist and was good at it. He too had a dark palette for his traditional oils and portraits. His Chinese paintings were bright and colorful.
My father knew books, literature, opera, history and philosophy. Somewhere he had gotten the start to a very good education. The whole time I knew him I never saw him read a book. He had a small stack of books that included dictionaries and a foreign magazine. He didn’t say he was reading them, he “studied” them. For Christmas one year I gave him John Steinbeck’s book, “Travels with Charley.” I know he never read it.
It went on like this through high school, from the 1940s until the 1960s. And then there seemed to be a crack in my father’s wall. It began when my older sister, Joan and I began to drink beer with him. I was sixteen. We would sit and drink beer until it was gone and we would talk. He would make jokes and tell stories and after having been ignored by my father for my whole life, it felt wonderful to be his buddy while we drank.
Maybe time had diluted his bitterness and defeat from the War on. When he was 50, he started UCLA Extension and took an engineering certificate course. For years he went to night school and he completed the certificate program. My father was still bitter and mean but from the 60s on there was more life to him.
When I went in the service, when my sons were born, at a few times, he even expressed some warmth and affection.
I got sober in 1983 when I was 37 years old. My father got sober eight years later when he was 74 years old. After that things really changed between us.
In April, 1991 I got a frantic phone call from my mother that Pop was in the hospital and they thought he might have had a stroke. By this time, my parents who were getting older were leaning on me during crises. I went to the hospital and talked to the staff. They couldn’t figure what had happened to my father. He had lost consciousness while walking. It wasn't a stroke and they weren’t sure what it was.
The doctor asked me about my father’s medical history. I asked him if my father or mother had told him that my father was an alcoholic. He said, “No.”
The next thing I looked down the hallway and there was my father trying to stand on one foot. The doctor was giving him what looked like the classic Highway Patrol field sobriety test. He failed. The diagnosis was alcoholic seizure and the doctor told him he could go into addiction treatment downstairs or be discharged. The doctor would not treat him if he didn’t go to the alcohol unit. He said it would be a waste of time.
The doctor came out and talked to my mother, my sister Joan and I. He said my father had had an alcoholic seizure and that there was an alcohol treatment program in the hospital downstairs and that he would not treat him unless he went to it. It’d be a waste of time. He told us that once my father had alcohol seizures it would only get worse eventually be fatal unless he stopped drinking.
Everyone seemed to be in a panic and I asked my sister and mother if they wanted me to talk to Pop. They said, yes.
I went in and told my father, “The Doctor says you can go downstairs for alcohol treatment or you’ll die. It’s your choice, what do you want to do?”
My father said in a whisper, “I guess I’ll go downstairs.” and he did.
Not only was my father an alcoholic, but my mother was as well. The family story as she told it was my father was the designated alcoholic and my mother was doing her best to cope with it and make things good with the family. Of course, she drank as much as he did. So when my father went downstairs my mother was all in favor of it. She had wanted him to do this all along, she said. But after a day or two, the staff at St. Joseph’s Hospital wanted my mother to join the program as well.
My mother’s creature as the Irish call alcoholism, went crazy, as if it were being exorcised by a priest. She went in every direction for a day and then had nothing to do with the program. For the thirty days my father was in treatment, I was his family and attended family therapy with him. We both talked about being raised by alcoholic fathers. It was a program that was classic AA and prepared the patients to go to regular AA meetings afterwards. The AA group that met at the hospital was very active and run by alumni of the treatment program.
My father got sober and stayed that way mostly until his death 11 years later. My mother never had anything to do with it and after a few months was able to discourage my father from going to meetings. I think she got him off the wagon once but he got back on almost immediately. He stayed sober.
I treated my father as a fellow alcoholic. We openly acknowledged the bond between us and felt it strengthen and grow. I could see that he was a good and sincere man and like myself had had his difficulties growing up and coping with life and had been as devastated by his disease as I had been by mine. I think my father was very proud of my sobriety and his own.
All that tension growing up and the meanness melted away. He was a comfortable and sweet old man. Sometimes he’d have flashes of anger and cynicism but they were only flashes, not smoldering storms. He was much more tolerant of my mother than I was able to be.
It’s odd to me that two us, my eldest sister1 and I, remember our father fondly and miss him, while at the same time I have no such feelings for my mother and still haven’t forgiven her for the way she treated us.
In February, 2003 he died. He had had many bouts with various cancers and survived. In the end he succumbed to leukemia. His last five months he was very weak. He and my mother were in an assisted living in Phoenix near my Ellen and her wife Karen. They watched out for them and took care of my father at the last. We visited, we talked and it was a wonderful time for us. One of the last visits I made to him I was doing most of the talking and then he asked, "What happens if I get well?"
I said, "Don't worry about it, Pop. It won't happen."
Another time we got to talking about favorite words and he said his favorite word was "Enough." We said our good-byes a few days before he died and easily told each other, “I love you.”
***
For the genealogist: My father was John Lawrence Duggan born August 26, 1916 in St. Louis, Missouri. His father was John Harold Duggan, and his mother Ellen Cullen raised McGlynn probably of St. Louis. Grandpa McGlynn had a drayage business in St. Louis with a partner. My father's paternal grandmother was Catherine Walsh Duggan from Ireland or Liverpool. There was a story she had been a servant in Liverpool before she came to the U.S. She was called the Duchess and I got to know her a little bit. My father's paternal grandfather was John Andrew Duggan His paternal great grandfather was Michael Duggan of Brinkstown, originally from Ireland immigrated through New Orleans. The family tree I have prepared by Karen Looney, my sister-in-law, has John Andrew Duggan and his son John Harold Duggan both born in St. Louis, but says Michael, the immigrant, was married and died in Brinkstown. Springfield is in there somewhere.
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