My AA Story

From the 12 Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous:

Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio, and films.

This is my personal story.  I can’t write my own biography without talking about my alcoholism, how I stopped drinking and what it means to me.  I am not a spokesman for AA.  There is nothing official about this, it is just my story.  The AA members I mention in the story are deceased and their anonymity is no longer an issue. 

I had my last drink December 13, 1983.  I haven’t had a drink since.  I went to my first AA meeting a week later, December 22^nd, 1983.  

I grew up in alcoholic family.  My grandfather, my mother, and my father were all alcoholics.  I started drinking at around age 14.  My father drank red wine with his meals.  Our family’s self image was that we were sophisticated drinking red wine like Europeans.  My mother bought the wine by the case, Pride of Cucamonga, four large gallon bottles in a cardboard box from the Monte Carlo Italian Deli.  It was a Zinfandel that left a red stain on my teeth.  I started having a glass of wine with my mother in the afternoon.  

After that I could pour myself a glass of wine whenever I liked and I drank a little wine with my meals.  At first a half glass, we used water glasses, of the Zinfandel was enough.  By the time I was senior in high school I would have a full glass or maybe two if I felt like it and I began to go places with a bit of buzz on.  At 16 I started drinking beer with my dad and by the time I was 17 I was going with my sister who was 21 to the liquor store to buy a six pack of beer.  My father, my sister and I would drink it until it was gone and sometimes go for another.  One time in a liquor store in Glendale the clerk stopped us.  He wasn’t going to sell me a six pack of beer.  I deferred to my 21 year old sister.  He wasn’t going to sell her the six pack either.  Other than that one time it was never a problem.

By the time I got to college, I could drink pretty well.  I still drank beer as much as was available, but I eventually learned to stop sometimes when there was still beer left.  I remember one wedding I attended I got so drunk I tried putting the make on the groom’s sister.  She was married and much older than I was, and I think she may have thought it was funny.  I don’t remember ever seeing the groom again.   

At college there wasn’t much opportunity to drink beer.  By this time I drank mostly at home.  Sometimes there was a jug of Red Mountain wine at a party and I always drank my share.    

I went in the service at 20.  On the base servicemen could drink 3.2 beer on base at 18 and in Mississippi we could drink 3.2 beer off base.  I turned 21 a few months later and I could drink hard liquor but mostly I stayed with beer.  After Mississippi I was stationed in England and I became a regular at the local pub, the Gordon Arms.  My new wife and I drank red wine, Volipacella from Italy in half gallon bottles in baskets.  We bought it at the Class VI store on base.  We had quite a collection of empties hanging on the kitchen door.  We used them as candle holders and gave them to friends. 

There were a few parties or events where I drank too much, but most of the time it was just fun.  I loved the pub.  For less than a pound, I could drink all night and most nights that was 3 or 4 English pints, 20 ounces each.   In the service we didn’t think anyone drank too much.  I remember being a little shocked at Sergeant Welch drinking bottles of Ripple as he drove me home one Sunday morning after our shift.  And Sergeant Irving, an older man in Personnel, had an alcohol problem. 

I came home from the service and went to college.  We lived on the GI Bill, $240 a month and my wife and I could barely afford the Safeway Chablis gallon bottles we bought weekly.  On weekends I drank my fill of beer at my in-laws house or at my parents.  When I went to work at Bank of America drinking was a regular part of the job.  My first boss got a DUI, driving under the influence, and quit LA and went back to San Francisco. 

In the PR Department we often went downstairs to a bar after work.  As the newest and youngest member of the department I would freeload the best I could from my better paid co-workers.  At one time, one coworker and I made regular visits to a Carl’s Junior in the Broadway Department Store basement mall where they sold pitchers of beer for $4.  It wasn’t very dignified drinking pitchers of beer in Carl’s Junior, but it was cheap.   

By the time I got sober my drinking had progressed to a quart of wine every night starting with a glass at dinner.  I drank martinis when someone else was buying and sometimes I had a bottle of gin at home.  Every so often we’d discover something new like putting cheap scotch in coffees or using tequila to make margaritas.  Scotch and tequila never lasted very long in our house.  So while I didn’t think of myself as a hard drinker, just a little beer wine, I was drinking hard liquor frequently and beer and wine all the time. 

One of our favorite things to do was to make fondue with white wine.  We dipped our bread in the cheese and drank Chablis while we did it.  Afterwards I’d make margaritas in the blender and we’d get really blasted.  Like the red wine when I was a kid, the fondue pot made us feel sophisticated. 

I had friends I drank with and friends I didn’t drink with but most of my friends were people who enjoyed a few drinks and what I thought of as convivial company.   I drank a lot of what I didn’t think of as drinking.   Beer and wine didn’t really count.  When I worked in the bank branches my regular lunch was to go to a mini-mart, buy some cheese and an apple and a can of beer.  I gave the beer a lot of thought.  Sometimes it was a 16 oz can but sometimes a 12 oz can because I had to do something at work or needed to be more alert or maybe it was a couple of 12 oz cans because I deserved them.  These decisions included a lot of factors and subtly balancing them out.  I didn’t get much work done in the afternoon, but I don’t remember anyone complaining.   

Occasionally I found myself drinking too much in the wrong company.  I seemed to have offended my wife’s co-workers at a party at someone’s house I can’t remember.  I thought of myself as just flirting with pretty women, but I may have been just boorish.   I tried to avoid those situations that would get me in trouble, but sometimes I just couldn’t.  One time I invited my friend Burton Katz to join me and my drinking buddy Bill Kline at the Sportsman’s Lodge.  Bill and I could down a few and it was with Bill, who always bought, that I indulged my taste for martinis.  The next morning Burt called me at work and told me how shocked he was at my behavior and he didn’t want to ever see me drink that much again and how I shouldn’t hang out with people like Bill.  I never invited Burt to drink again.

I was embarrassed by Burt’s call.  It was like a pebble in my shoe, something I couldn’t forget.    

After that I was working at our Century City branch.  It was not a good situation.  One morning I came in to work smelling of wine. I can’t remember who pointed that out to me.  After that I was more careful about when I stopped drinking.  I made a new rule to stop at midnight on weeknights.  I had a lot of rules around drinking.  One day the Regional Vice President came to the branch and announced to the staff that I was transferred from Century City to Loan Administration Department.  In the Loan Administration Department I was a replacement officer for loan officers in the branches who were on vacation or sick.  My friend Bill had just barely saved my job for me. 

Shortly before I got sober I was invited to a party at a customer’s house.  By that time I had figured out it was better sometimes if I didn’t drink.  I did OK that night, but after the party I bought a six pack of beer and drank it in the car as I drove home.  I had learned to put my beer in a large coffee mug and drink it that way in the car.  I took an accounting class at UCLA Extension and before the class I would have a beer in the parking lot.  When my wife drove me to a football game at the high school she taught at I put a healthy serving of gin and a little vermouth in a travelling mug and arrived at the football game blasted with my face numb from the gin.  

I drank and I drove.  I drove to the places I drank and I drove back from the places I drank.  Sometimes when I had too much to drink, driving was a struggle.  There were things I could do, close one eye, hug the line, things that always got me home.  I was never stopped by the police.  I think those were different days.  I don’t remember any checkpoints.  Even among my drinking friends drunk driving arrests didn’t happen or no one knew about them.  My first boss was the only one I knew personally.   

A week before I got sober, I called a priest my wife and I were seeing for marriage counseling.  I don’t know what I said to him, but at some point he said, “You’re nothing but an alcoholic” and that I was nothing but a self-pitying drunk.  I didn’t think he was much help, but he was the first person who ever called me an alcoholic to my face. 

It was preying on my mind.  The 13^th of December I went to my estranged wife’s house and dropped some boards off I thought she could use.  She gave me a beer, I had a second and then I went home to my parents’ house.  For some reason I decided not to have any more to drink that night.  I never drank in the morning before going to work and I didn’t drink at lunch the next day.  That night as usual I stayed at work late after everyone left.  I found myself at work alone, writing in my journal.  After my wife and I separated I lived at home with my parents and most nights I stayed late.  I made tea in the bank lunchroom.  My parents were alcoholics and were bad company in the evenings.  Dinner with them was a dismal affair, so I normally waited until I was sure they had gone to bed before I went home.  They went to bed early, thank god.   

Writing in my journal I admitted I was an alcoholic.  Writing makes me honest.  It was almost a joke.  I was Irish and Scotch Irish.  Both my parents were alcoholics and I drank every day.  Of course, I was an alcoholic.  Years before I had attended training for supervisors in which an Employee Assistance person told us how to recognize and deal with the alcoholic among us.  I remembered the class.  That’s where I had first heard alcoholism is a progressive disease.  For the first time looking at myself I finally admitted, I was an alcoholic.   

That summer I had decided my Saturdays were lost in a beer haze and I decided to stop drinking for awhile to see how that was.  It was OK for a couple of days and then I went to a party and was doing just fine until they brought out champagne left over from a wedding.  Well just a glass of champagne and my short days of sobriety vanished.  For the first time I realized I needed to drink.  I didn’t think about it after that, but it was always there.  I was drinking hard liquor now.  I was drinking and driving and drinking had caused a number of problems.  My boss made pointed remarks about my drinking.

The next morning I called EAP, the Employee Assistance Program, and talked to a counselor.  He agreed to come out and see me.  “How was next Wednesday?” he asked. 

I told myself I wouldn’t drink before I saw him.  My last drink had been a beer at my estranged wife’s.  I didn’t drink that week.  I didn’t drink that weekend.  I went out to lunch with a friend and when I normally would have had a beer I didn‘t.  It was easy. 

The counselor came the following Wednesday and gave me a schedule for Alcoholic Anonymous meetings in Los Angeles.  It was a thick little book.  He told me I sounded like an alcoholic to him and there were different programs I could go to but the only one that worked in his experience was AA and he said that’s where I should go. 

I spent a lot of time poring over that little directory looking for just the right meeting.  Finally I decided on a meeting at St. Francis of Assisi Church on Brunswick Avenue in Atwater.  Eleven years before I lived on Brunswick down the street from St. Francis.  The little Episcopal chapel always seemed to be a place of peace and tranquility.  I had been to St. Francis High School and afterwards a Franciscan monastery.  The image of St. Francis was familiar to me.   

I waited at work until it was time to go.   I arrived in Atwater early and went to the Brown Keg Liquor Store across the street and bought a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes.  I usually didn’t smoke cigarettes but it seemed like a cigarette night.  I was wearing my banker’s blue pinstripe suit.  I went in and found a seat in the chapel and waited to see what would happen. 

My marriage had fallen apart.  We had been separated a month.  I was living at home with my parents.  My job was about as bad as it got.  I worked for Joe Bent who was later fired because he was out of control and a petty tyrant.  He seemed to take satisfaction in torturing the people who worked for him.  I was an Assistant Vice President.  The Assistant Manager, another AVP had recently been fired.  Joe told me I was never going to be the Assistant Manager and it was true. 

I think I had been placed at Joe’s branch because Joe and I were both problems.   I was known to give supervisors a hard time and they didn’t really care which one of us crashed and burned.  The smart money was on Joe but if they were lucky they’d get rid of both of us.

My life was a disaster.  I needed to start doing something about it.  I thought Alcoholics Anonymous was like going to yoga, a self improvement class.  I figured I had a lot of problems and it wouldn’t hurt to stop drinking.  

The format of the meeting was three speakers who shared.  The first two speakers were probably newcomers and gave short 10 minute pitches and then a regular speaker with a little sobriety telling his AA story.  One of the speakers went through a list of woes in his life.  It was a laundry list of things gone wrong, mostly good intentions failed and he ended each failure with the refrain, “And if I don’t drink, it will get better.” 

I heard that.  If I don’t drink, it will get better, no matter what and I believed it.  At the break, everyone was friendly and they gave me the two books I would need to get started, Alcoholics Anonymous and 12 Steps and 12 Traditions.  The books were for sale.  I only had a couple of dollars and some change on me.  They said that would be OK, I could pay the rest later.  They also pointed out that the meeting I was at was a gay meeting and that I might be more comfortable at other meetings.  They told me about a place in Glendale where there were meetings every night.  

That was Thursday, December the 22^nd.  I went to my next meeting Saturday, December the 24^th.  Later people asked me how it was to get sober at Christmas time.  Christmas time?  Hell, I didn't care what time of year it was.  I had more important things to worry about than Christmas that year.   

On Christmas Day I did go to my ex-house and see my sons.  I told them I had stopped drinking.  My middle son, Ted, who was 12 at the time, said, “That’s a very brave thing to do, Pop.”  I didn’t think it was brave but when he said that I thought this is something I’d better stick with.

My sons were 14, 12, and 8 when I got sober.  I tried to be as good a father as I could be.  I never thought about it before I got sober, a few beers was who I was, but alcohol did not contribute to my being a parent.  I wasn’t there a lot of the time for them.  It takes a lot of time to drink.  I came home late.  I spent time on the couch barely conscious.  My moods were unpredictable.  Even when I wasn’t drunk I could be volatile and angry without provocation.  As a person I was unreliable.  I drank and I drove with my children in the car.

It’s hard to admit, but drinking was probably more important to me than parenthood. 

A Start in AA

The first few days were easy.  I just didn’t drink.  I read the books they gave me.  I drove down to San Diego on the day after Christmas and visited with my Uncle Ed.  My uncle had been sober since 1946, though there was a short time in the 1960s when it seems he might have gone out again.  It was either the booze or a manic episode or probably both.  My Dad got involved, no one explained it, and he was found in San Francisco.    

My cousin was there for the holidays and I learned she had gotten sober a couple of years earlier.  She and I were only a few months apart in age and she always made sure I knew she was way ahead of me in just about everything.  She sneered I was still in the pink cloud phase of sobriety and that it would go away.  Out of spite to my cousin I kept my pink cloud through good times and hard times.  I claim it never went away. 

I drove back to LA and went to a meeting in Atwater on my way home.  I remember in that meeting people tried to warn me about slippery places.  I thought I didn’t need to worry, I had this program and it was easy.  I started going to meetings once a week or so at the Windsor Club in Glendale.  Club Houses and there are thousands of them are separate from AA; run and funded by their own boards, usually AA members.  They provide a place for people to hang out and rooms for AA meetings.  The Windsor Club is a two story brick building with a lounge and café in the first story and meeting rooms upstairs.  It even had a parking lot and when there were meetings the parking lot and the streets around the club house filled with cars.  It was a popular place.   

The Monday night meeting at the Windsor Club was called the Gong Show.  It was a large raucous meeting with 150 people or more.  The room was packed, every seat taken and people standing up along the walls and in the back.   It was the standard LA format, a reading from the Big Book and the 12 Traditions, cakes for anniversaries and chips for newcomers at their first meeting, and chips for 30 days, 60 days, 90 days and six months.  There was a 10 minute speaker, usually someone new, and then a circuit speaker, one of the AAs well known for their pitch and invited specially to give it.  

Most AA meetings are pretty informal but the Gong Show took informality to an extreme.  The meetings were rowdy with bikers, punks, suits and street people, mostly on the younger side.  I attended regularly and it seemed like everybody knew each other.  After a few weeks I still felt isolated and out of place.  I didn’t know anyone and no one talked to me.  It just wasn’t working.  I realized I couldn’t even make it in AA.   

I went home devastated.   I opened up the Big Book and read the Fifth Chapter, “How It Works.”  I just wasn’t getting it.  I read the chapter; I read the 3^rd Step prayer.  I did everything I could think of.  I don’t believe in God, but I’ve always believed in the power of prayer.  I don’t know who I was praying to and I didn’t care.  If it worked it worked.  The 5^th Chapter didn’t tell me who was in charge.  It didn’t tell me how to become part of it.  It didn’t tell me what makes it work or how to get started?  It didn’t answer any of my questions.  It just gave me the Steps and recommended I work them.  Exhausted I finally went to bed. 

The next day everything seemed to change.  It seemed like a weight had been lifted.  One of my friends, a customer, called to see how I was doing.  That day I had this feeling that people cared about me.  It wasn’t anything major, just small things.   

At the Gong Show there was one gentleman, who like me wore gray slacks, a blue blazer and a tie.  Church, as he was called, seemed to always be around and he seemed to get the program.  He seemed comfortable with himself.   

When I got him aside I asked him to be my sponsor.  He told me he was gay. 

I asked if that made any difference.

He said, “I don’t think so.”

I said, “That’s fine with me.”

I think he said, “If it doesn’t work out, I’ll help you find a new sponsor.” 

Church was my sponsor until he died 9 years later.  At that time he had about 5 years of sobriety.  He worked for a commercial insurance brokerage downtown.  He was comfortable with himself and he worked a wonderful program.  Under Church’s guidance I began working the 12 steps.  He also recommended I find another meeting.  He recommended a meeting in Pasadena known as the Women’s Club.  The Wednesday Night Speakers Meeting met in the South Pasadena Women’s Club for fifty years or more. 

I went to the meeting and came back and told Church it seemed like everyone there was blue eyed, well dressed, and they were all lawyers and bankers.  He said, “Yes.” and looked at me.  I realized maybe instead of the bikers and down and outs at the Gong Show; I should start hanging out with people like myself.  Of course, there were more than just white people and professionals at the Women’s Club but overall it was a more gentle and sophisticated meeting. 

I started attending meetings regularly at the Women’s Club. 

I still went to the Gong Show but not as often.  One night I came in late and was standing in the back of the room.  There was a young man there dressed in white jeans and a white turtleneck.  He looked pretty cool, but he didn’t seem to be able to stand still and nervously he backed up to the counter in the back of the room.  There was a coffee urn there and as he backed up he hit the spigot and hot coffee poured down his white jeans.  I felt sorry for him, he was trying to be cool and it wasn’t working.  It reminded me of myself.  By this time I knew the Gong Show was mostly newcomers like I had been.  The court card people, people ordered to attend AA by the Judge, hung out in the back and that's where I had been trying to make friends.

The place to find AA is not in the back of the rooms, but up front where people are getting it and not in meetings where everyone is a newcomer but in meetings where people keep coming back.  It doesn’t happen overnight.  In South Pasadena I got a job pouring coffee and I didn’t just stand around anymore.  I became one of the regulars who stuck my hand out when I saw someone uncomfortable.  Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.   

In Pasadena I got to know people.  I worked the steps, gradually I became very comfortable with this meeting and sometimes even comfortable with myself.  After awhile I began to sponsor people.  Eight years later I was the secretary of the South Pasadena Wednesday Night Speaker’s Meeting known as the Women’s Club.  At work where I was just another bank Vice President I wondered what people would think if they knew I was the head drunk for the Pasadena area including San Marino.  Of course, the secretary of an AA meeting is not that important, as the book says “Our leaders are but trusted servants.”  Most importantly I belonged and AA worked for me. 

It’s been 28 years since then.  I don’t attend AA meetings much.  I’ve never connected in the Bay Area with AA the way I did in Pasadena.  My job and weird schedule made meetings hard to do and I don’t have much in common anymore with newcomers.  Even some sober AAs aren’t comfortable with cops.  I’ve been sober so long I look like the middle aged white guy that doesn’t have a clue. There are enough new people who are cool and who are getting it to take care of the newcomers. 

I’ve taken the concept of service as I learned it in AA and done it elsewhere.  I worked as a counselor at San Francisco Juvenile Hall.  As a Park Ranger and cop I was always open to helping people in need, especially people mired in addiction with no way out.  Sometimes the best way to help is to arrest them.

When I got sober it took a long time to recover the trust I had squandered with my sons.  I tried to be there for them.  I tried to control my own anger, fears, and rage.  I tried to listen and I tried to support them.  Most importantly I tried to insure that nothing came between me and them.

Years later I have a very satisfying relationship with my adult sons.  I appreciate them.  We are friends and they are part of my life.  With Paloma I have another chance to be a parent and I think I’m better at it than I was the first time.  I have my sons as good examples for being a parent and they give good advice.

My life has been good and the first principle of my life today is I don’t drink.  The speaker 28 years ago was right.  If I don’t drink, everything gets better and better.  

Pop

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 1^st, 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.   

FRIDAY, MAY 4, 2012

Pop - an addendum

I call this biography, The Stories I Tell Myself.  I believe the stories we tell ourselves, the family myths, the misinformation, the fanciful, and the made up are as important as the facts.  So this biography, the essays that make it up, are the stories I tell myself.  I’m not worried about having all the facts.  We fill things in, we tell stories, we imagine the way it might have been, we smooth over the gaps.  I try to be as honest as I can be, but it doesn’t surprise me that sometimes my own stories aren’t as factual as they should be.   

When I was drinking I didn’t tell myself I was a drunk.  I told myself I was a good person doing the best I could.  I enjoyed a few beers, convivial company, and it wasn’t my fault some people weren’t as Irish as I was.  When I got sober that story failed me.  Sometimes growth is admitting the facts to be true.    

I have stories about my family and they’re a pastiche of what I’ve been told, what I’ve learned about my family and the history of the time.   

Since my father’s death I’ve always thought there was a good chance that he was born in Springfield, Missouri.  My father was a dissembler.  He never told the truth straight out.  Either did my mother, but my father would twist things and embellish them so that  I’ve always questioned his facts.  Well the facts are that my father was born in St. Louis.  He never told us about growing up in Springfield and now I know he did but he wasn’t born in Springfield.    

I knew Michael Duggan my great great grandfather had been a farmer in Missouri and I thought it was Springfield.  I’ve since learned it was Brinktown, Missouri. 

Facts are a good thing.  The world is full of fact checkers and I expect somewhere in my descendants there will be someone capable of correcting all of my errors.  If they do I hope they will add them to these stories.  Between the facts and the stories are the myths that make us who we are.  I always appreciate knowing the facts, but I’m Irish enough to never let the facts stand  in the way of a good story.

Don't Worry About It

Paloma is two and half years old.  If you have children this age or remember those days, the answer is yes, we are in the midst of potty training. 

I don’t think it’s hard but it is fraught with high hopes and frequent disappointments.  Right now in our household Paloma, Suzette and I devote a lot of time and attention to body waste.  We talk about poop, we read about poop and we think about it.  Poop in our house is a remarkable thing.  If Paloma is around she likes to participate in any visits to the bathroom.  She has appointed herself the Official Family Flusher.  If Suzette or I should inadvertently flush our own toilet, it causes a family crisis and requires a retake and apologies. When she flushes the toilet, she checks it and comments on our product.   “Daddy made big poop.” 

Paloma has her own pink potty which she likes to sit on bare bottomed and watch television or set it up at the sliding glass doors to the veranda and watch the world outside, her legs spread and her feet up on the window.    Even though we’re on the sixth floor of an apartment building, we’ve told her this is something she may want to stop doing in a few years.  It’s OK for now. 

Paloma has pooped in the potty now and again.  She often pees in the potty, in fact more often in the last few days.  We’re still celebrating each event.  At her daycare we’re told she does use the toilet and pees and poops in it, though not all the time. 

All of this effort is with the understanding that when she is ready to use the toilet on a regular basis, she will.  What we do before is just practice and shouldn’t be rushed or pushed, encouraged but not to make too big a deal of it.  Everything positive, no trauma.

Paloma is good about telling us when she has pooped but she doesn’t like to be interrupted while she’s doing it and she particularly doesn’t like to have her diaper changed.  A year or so ago she had problems with constipation.  It took us awhile to get past it.  A small daily dose of stool softener recommended by the pediatrician has taken care of it.  But there for awhile she was having considerable trouble around bowel movements and her little bottom was sore.  The whole process of pooping, cleaning her up and changing her was difficult and she would cry through it. 

These troubles left their mark.  She’s better now but for awhile she would tense up when cleaning her after a poop.  It was hard, accompanied with tears and required overcoming her resistance to opening her legs.  So even today she doesn’t like having her poopy diapers changed.

This last Sunday I smelled a familiar and pungent odor as she passed by me.  “Did you poop your pants?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. 

“Should Daddy change your pants?”  I asked.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, in an excellent Tony Soprano impersonation. 

Suzette and I are sure by the time Paloma starts junior high, she will be potty trained.  It will happen.  Maybe even soon, but in the meantime,    “Don’t worry about it.”    

Another Son, an Honorable Discharge and Home

Shortly after I got home from Lakenheath hospital Cathy decided we needed to have another child.  We needed to take advantage of the healthcare we had in the Air Force or as it turned out, what we had in England.   So we did.  

The idea was that she was going to have her baby at home with a midwife.  She did all of the pre-natal with an English doctor and midwife and the pregnancy went well.  Our home was visited and her pregnancy and health were evaluated and we were approved for a home birth.  The night of May the 9^th I called the health service and Mrs. Roselli, the midwife we had already met, a Polish woman, arrived at the house and took over.  She had a nurse with her from Kenya.  Our friend Anna came over to help out.  Later a doctor arrived.  Mrs. Roselli said he wasn’t needed but came because there was nothing else to do. He knew to stay out of Mrs. Roselli's way.  

In the middle of the night, the wee hours of May 10^th, the Kenyan nurse delivered the baby under Mrs. Roselli’s careful eye.  During the birth the doctor sat in the corner and made comments.  Most of the night before that I sat in the dining room with Anna and drank Vodka and lime juice.  Mrs. Roselli made a pointed remark about her own teetotaler status, but I don’t remember being drunk, just excited.  I went into the bedroom and stood by the side of the bed and watched the birth. 

I remember when the baby was born they laid him down on the bed beside Cathy and he was all blue and didn’t move.  For a terrible moment I thought he was stillborn but then he screamed and his little body bloomed in color.  For me it was an instant of death and resurrection in less than a minute.  They attended to him and we had a new son.  Ted, Edward Charles Duggan, screamed for the rest of the morning.  When he was awake he screamed.  He definitely let the world know he had come.  He had a good voice. 

We were exhausted.  The nurse and midwife cleaned up and left.  We were at home, we had a new baby in the bed and it was done.  After the sun rose I brought Sean in, Sean was 2 years old, to see his new brother.  Later that day another nurse came to visit.  I left and went to register the birth at the registry office downtown. 

I think it was that summer that I was finally accepted by the Airman Education Commissioning Program, something I had applied for years before.  If I wanted to stay in the Air Force they would send me to college and then I would be an officer and serve another six years.  I was ready to get out.  It had seemed attractive half way through my enlistment but with only months to go it was no longer attractive.  I was accepted at UCLA and San Francisco State.  We decided it was better to return home to LA and so I made plans to attend UCLA. 

The last few months in the service were very comfortable.  We loved England and we had learned to live with the Air Force.  Being a staff sergeant was much easier than being an airman. 

We left England in August and arrived in Los Angeles in time for one of the hottest periods ever in LA.  I remember one day the temperature reached 127° in the San Fernando Valley.  We bathed Ted our new baby in a cool bath and after one visit to my parents in Burbank stayed in El Segundo with Cathy’s parents where the temperature was only in the high 100s. 

We found an apartment in North Hollywood in a subsidized housing complex and I started UCLA in October.    

Living with Mania

What I had was a manic episode.  I was and probably am a manic-depressive or at least have that type of personality.  Now it’s called bipolar disorder. I prefer manic depression. 

My manic episode was bad, probably unloosed by the Valium I took.  By the time I got to the hospital I had been going so hard and so long I was at the virtual end of my physical endurance.  I hadn’t slept, I hadn’t stopped and everything kept going faster and faster.  The doctors worried that I would crash and they wouldn’t be able to stop me, that I might run myself to death.    

I surprised everyone by how quickly the Lithium seemed to work.  I took Lithium for a few months after that and then stopped because it made everything taste bad.  I was a little depressed for a few months afterwards, but then life resumed.  Working at Personnel was enjoyable.  Being promoted to Staff Sergeant was wonderful. 

After the service I waited for it to happen again.  And it didn’t.  Like a lot of manic depressives or bipolar people I treated my highs and lows with alcohol, beer and wine, and then later martinis and Irish coffees. I was comfortable with depression.  Highs scared me.  Bipolar and alcoholism are related somehow.  One doesn’t cause the other but they seem to go hand in hand together.  When I got sober I worried that I wouldn’t be able to  handle the highs anymore, but it wasn’t a problem.

One time after I was sober I really got out there.  During the Los Angeles Civil Disturbance I began working in City Hall and for the first few days, everything was hectic and intense.  I didn’t get any sleep and the little sleep I got was disturbed.  I began to get crazy and grandiose.  I got some sleep and life seemed to become more normal.  It seemed that way to me.  There were some bad signs that I was still functioning in a different way.  I broke up with my girlfriend and fiancé.  We had lived together for over a year.  I borrowed money from retirement plan because I needed things.  Looking back on it, it was more serious than I thought at the time, but it ended with enough sleep and normal work.    

When I took the psych test to become a peace officer at San Francisco Juvenile Hall, it showed up on the test and I explained my service experience to the psychologist and I was cleared to work in Juvenile Hall.  When I took the psych test to become a Ranger, it came up again.  This time I thought it was the end of my application.  They asked for my service records and I got them.  They looked at my service medical file and set up an appointment to talk to a psychologist.  He cleared me to become a police officer.

I am surprised it never happened again with the exception of 1992.  I spent many years waiting for the other shoe to fall.  I think it was closely related to my alcoholism.  When I got sober I worried about it, but life seemed easier and I became more confident. 

The mania I experienced in 1992 during the LA Civil Disturbance scared me.  I had really gotten out there and made a fool of myself with people I worked with.  It seemed OK while it was going on.  It was only in retrospect I began to realize it had been full blown mania and how serious it had been.  When I became a Ranger and was doing call outs, searches and other crises at all hours I was even more careful to make sure I got enough sleep.  Proper sleep for me has been the cure for the mania of manic depression. 

The depression is easier.  I’ve handled it with physical exercise and just showing up.  I lower my expectations for work and just wait it out.  I have had thoughts of suicide but never taken it very far.  Depression has always felt to me like a gathering in, something like a renewal, whereas mania is an expenditure, a letting loose, a draining.  It feels good while it’s happening but it has a hell of a hangover.  I think I may have had a manic episode in college.  Part of college felt like one long manic episode and it is hard to tell the difference between insanity and late adolescence. 

I’m glad I had the experience.  I think it made me more empathetic, made me aware how vulnerable I am and how vulnerable we all can be, how tenuous our hold on reality actually is.  I think it’s what makes me treat people in extreme circumstances like human beings, whether it be insanity or incarceration.  I know even in the insanity there was an I there.  I got to come back.  Like sobriety, sanity, being able to function, is something I’ve always been grateful for. 

A little bipolar or manic depressive is just who I am. 

Insanity

For the first few days I was locked up in a room with just a bed in the psychiatric unit at Lakenheath AFB in England.  I heard voices.  I saw things that probably didn’t happen.  I tried to speak French.  I would have told the doctors about the voices but they were in Russian and the doctors didn’t have security clearances high enough to to know what language I was hearing.  There was even a guard outside my door until my own clearance was pulled.    

A week or so after that I had a dream.  I could tell it was a dream, a very bad dream, but I knew it was a dream.  I was getting better. 

It all  started after my family, Cathy, Sean and I, got back from 30 days leave driving to France and Italy.  It was a fabulous vacation.  When we returned it was springtime in England.  I went back to work and everything seemed to be good, very good.  I was having a little back pain and I went to see the doctor.  He prescribed a muscle relaxant, a new wonder drug called Valium. 

I took the Valium and I was off.  Gradually I slept less and less.  During that time Cathy had a miscarriage but I was so busy marveling at the wonder of my life that I missed it.  I didn’t even know it happened.  Friends of ours, Tom and Anna, had a crisis in their life and Tom and I stayed up the whole night looking for Anna.  The next day I was like a high voltage wire talking nonstop and going faster and faster. 

I went to work at midnight and sat down at my rack.  The first thing to do at work was to type in my name at the top of a blank page.  I couldn’t remember my name.  It seemed a simple thing and I tried a little harder and it got harder.  I stared at the page and tried desperately to remember my name.  I couldn’t.  I didn't know who I was.  I pulled the earphones off and I think I shouted in panic.  Whatever I did it caused quite a stir on Dog Flight in the Manual Morse Section at about 10 minutes after midnight.  Sergeant Hornbecker took me down to the Base Medical Clinic and the corpsman there tried to figure out what to do. 

Later I learned the corpsman with Horny was trying to figure out  how to undo and use a strait jacket.  While they left me alone I was sinking into a terrifying well of nothingness and I couldn’t stop myself.  I was as frightened as I had ever been in my life.  Thank God, the corpsman didn’t figure the stait jacket out before the doctor arrived and gave me a shot of Thorazine and maybe another. 

I woke up the next day and life was still wonderful, I was talking to anyone who would listen and talking if no one was listening.  The doctor explained I was going to go to the hospital up at Lakenheath for observation.  I had a reasonably calm ride up there but at the hospital everything seemed to fall apart. 

I was locked in a room and a guard was posted outside my door.  Apparently the doctor with a security clearance high enough to treat Chicksands patients was on leave and the other doctors were being careful.   After a day or two the guard was gone, but I was insane. 

I was tortured by poundings on the wall, the sound of steel beds being dragged across a hard floor in the room on the other side of the wall, there was no room, and voices I heard in English and Russian.  I didn’t know what was going on but it was terrible and I couldn’t get away.  After two or three days of this, the doctor told me he was going to give me Lithium.  He explained that it was a new drug that hadn’t yet been approved but was being used very successfully in Australia.  After a couple of days he got permission to administer it to me.  Apparently the doses I was taking were so high that there was some danger involved and a corpsman arrived twice a day and drew blood from me. 

Within a day or two I had calmed down enough to join the rest of the patients.  I think this must have been when I had my bad dream. 

There was an anorexic teenager and a couple of other airmen who seemed nice enough.  We were a little group of crazies.  We attended group sessions with a psychologist and there were nurses and doctors.  The voices continued but not as bad.  I always had to be doing something, playing ping pong or talking, or drawing or playing pool.  One time I saw an airman in a wheel chair being taken down the hall and I knew he was being taken for electroshock treatments.  There were events and amazing connections going in flashes of heightened awareness all day long.    

I know there were no electroshock treatments being done at Lakenheath but I believed it at the time and it was hard to convince myself months later that everything I saw and heard was not real.  Even a few years later when I read about the military doing LSD experiments, I thought maybe that’s what happened.  It was hard to believe it was all in my head and not something being done to me. 

There were meetings with the doctors and nurses.  One day I decided not to tell the truth about the voices to the doctor .  When he asked me if I was hearing voices, I told him, “No.”  A day or two later I got to go home. 

I have no sense of time in all of that.  The best I can do is a day or two here or there.  I think I was at Lakenheath less than two weeks, but more than a week.  I made a leather wallet in occupational therapy which Cathy carried for years after that.  

I went home with a prescription for Lithium salts.  For a few days, a few weeks, a few months, I don’t know, I was very quiet and contained.  I sat in our flat and tried to feel sane, tried to have control.  After a while it didn’t seem so hard.  Sometime on my own I stopped taking the Lithium.  It made everything taste bad.  I think the doctor went along with that

I went back to the base.  My security clearance had been revoked.  That’s when the guard left.  In the military, apparently if I didn’t have a security clearance, I wasn’t a risk.  Dog Flight’s first sergeant, Senior Master Sergeant Scarborough, tried to get me a temporary position on the base newspaper until a determination could be made about where I was going.  The Personnel Section stepped in and I was assigned to them. 

I could type and for a few days I helped out at Personnel.  They were nice enough.  I had the shift worker’s dream of a day job, five days a week, with weekends off.  By this time I was a three striper like Airman 1^st Class Steinberg, but in 1970 we were called sergeants, but we still cleaned latrines.  The assignments clerk, another sergeant left for one reason or another and I stepped into his place. 

I became the assignments clerk for RAF Chicksands.  It was during the Vietnam War and I spent my days working on itineraries and orders for Airmen and Sergeants being shipped all over the world though mostly through Travis AFB near Sacramento to South Vietnam or Thailand.  I enjoyed it.  I had a good time.  Sergeant Graham was my boss and our boss was Master Sergeant Erwin.  There was a captain as well, but Sergeant Erwin addressed the Captain in his Alabama drawl as “Son.”  I don’t ever remember the Captain as having much to do with the operation of the section.   

Sergeant Erwin brought his coffee and a sandwich to work in a net bag like the English used to go shopping and one time I saw a copy of the New Republic showing through it.  He was a World War II New Deal Democrat from Alabama and as fine a man as I’ve ever met.  He had a serious problem with the bottle and it seemed to be destroying him slowly.  

I must have done a pretty good job because at the end of six months, Sergeant Erwin and Sergeant Graham asked me what I wanted to do, where I wanted to go, as something they could do to return the favor.  They thought they could keep me in personnel if I wanted to stay or let me go back to the States or whatever I wanted.  I knew that once having had a security clearance that it was never going to look good  if I lost it.  I said I wanted to go back to Dog Flight.  My base medical file was written showing a drug reaction as what had had happened.  It seems everybody was watching out for me.    

The whole time I had been in personnel, Captain Sinclair of the Air Police and in charge of security clearances for the base had been trying to get me ordered off the base, sent to Torrejon, Spain or somewhere other than RAF Chicksands and Security Service.  I was told he was writing memos that had to go through personnel and that Sergeant Erwin was attaching explanations to the memos that negated them and that there had been a running war between Captain Sinclair and the Personnel Department.  Personnel won. 

At the same time the Air Force began giving a test for promotion to Staff Sergeant.  The first one was that February.  Ron Graham, my boss and Sergeant Erwin recommended I take it.  I said I didn’t have a clearance.  They let me know it didn’t require a clearance and I took the test.  Before I left personnel they informed me I had been put on the Staff Sergeants list and I would be promoted shortly.  That day they gave me my new stripes, four of them, to take home. 

I went back to work on Dog Flight.  I sewed those stripes on a couple of months later.  I spent the rest of my six months in the service as the assistant to the First Sergeant.  I typed reports, supervised clean up details and did whatever Master Sergeant Lewis required.  It was a good time.  I enjoyed it.  I never had to listen to Morse Code again. 

This is a good place to talk about Sergeants.  Until I had my breakdown I didn’t realize how well we were cared for by our sergeants.  It was a Staff Sergeant I worked with who took me down to the Medical Clinic.  Hornbeck or Horny was a good friend and somebody who took gentle care of me that night.  Chief Madigan, Chief Master Sergeant Madigan, the senior enlisted man at Chicksands made sure my wife was able to come see me in the hospital when she needed to.  One time he drove her to Lakenheath himself to see me, three hours away from Chicksands.

When I returned from the hospital our first sergeant at the time, Senior Master Sergeant Dick Scarborough was watching out for me and working to get me a good situation and to protect me from people who didn’t care.  Pretty quickly Technical Sergeant Ron Graham and his boss Master Sergeant Erwin were watching out for me.  Chief Madigan was always there somewhere in the background. 

The military could be pretty impersonal place but the sergeants were like mother ducks, they watched out for us.  They protected their own.  Like parents they cared about us and made the system work like a family.

For the first ten years and more after that I seemed on the edge of going back there.  I think it wasn't until I got sober 13 years later that I lost my fear that it was something that could happen again.   

   

Our First Son

Cathy announced that she was pregnant in August, our first summer in England.  We were ecstatic.  Neither Cathy nor I were practicing Catholics but we certainly came from that background and during our courtship, the idea of having children was exciting to both of us.  We felt like adults.  

In August, 1968 I was 21 years old and she was 20.  We were living on our own in England. 

For the first few months Cathy used birth control but she went off the pill as soon as we had settled in.  We were the first of our set to have a child among the airmen and their wives who came to Chicksands in 1968.  The whole experience was exciting to us.  I think one day she went to the medical clinic on base and we met in the Airman’s Club for lunch.  She told me we were going to have a child together.  I remember the table we were sitting at when she told me. 

Sean was born April 25^th, 1969.  I used to always mix up his birthday with  our anniversary on April 20^th.  Then I made the mnemonic, first we were married and then he was born.  Cathy told me the gossips in El Segundo where she grew up were disappointed it was a year after we got married. 

We lived in Bedford, about 10 miles from the base.  Toward the end of the nine months Cathy had labor pains frequently and two or three times we went to the base and got prepared to go to the Air Froce hospital in London and they called it off, Braxton Hicks contractions or false labor.  The last time an ambulance came out to get her and took her to East Ruslip near London.  I was told by the doctors,one more time it was Braxton Hicks and normally they would send her home, but since we lived so far away they would keep her and induce labor the next day.  I should go home and return in the morning.  There was plenty of time. 

After a long train trip home and back, I arrived back at the base hospital  about 10 o’clock the next morning.  I got to see my son Sean for the first time.  He had been born two hours before. 

From the start, he was an incredible youngster, so beautiful and lovely to look at.  He was a delight to be around.  Early on he developed a love for cars and we began buying him matchbox cars.  He had dozens of them and would spend his time lining them up to play with them.  He slept in a crib in the front room.  At some point before he was two years old, he learned to climb out of it and play with his cars until we got up.  Usually by the time, we joined him he already had them all lined up and running with motor sounds he made. 

We bought a used Volkswagen shortly after he was born.  He could spot any Volkswagen product from long distances.  VW was beginning to manufacture squarebacks and notchbacks and it seemed there were odd VWs wherever Sean looked.  We had no clue they were Volkswagens and Sean would announce “Volkswagen!” with great delight.       

It was a wonderful time having a baby and Sean was a wonderful baby.  We took him around town in a large perambulator, pram (baby buggy) that we bought used.  We dressed him warmly and went to parks and took pictures whenever we could.  His grandparents from El Segundo came to visit him.  His grandmother was worried that if he came to harm unbaptized his soul would go to limbo.  My seminary training told me we didn’t a priest to administer the sacrament of baptism, so we baptized him at home to satisfy Minnie.  Later Monsignor (Major) O’Donnell made it official at the base chapel. 

My sister came to see him and stayed with us for a couple of weeks.  Cathy’s brother Alan, a 16 year old, came and stayed part of the summer with us.  Alan learned to drink beer at the pubs.  I came home from work and he looked dreamy eyed and punchy.  Somehow an American 16 year old looks 18 to the British.  I guess he was tall enough and well fed. My parents from Burbank came to see their first grandchild.  It was the middle of winter and we had to have a doctor to see my mother for a terrible respiratory infection.  

Sean began talking in England and by the time we came home, his grandparents and everyone else wanted him to talk to them, because he had an English accent.  I think it lasted less than two months.  When he was 20 he went back to England from Paris where he was living and got his British passport.