Freedom-Fighters Forum

By Jim Baldwin – October 1996

The year is 1989. The man I didn’t know is gone but his body lays there on the mortuary table with a bandage, like a turban, covering his head and a sheet draped over the body like a toga. Only his face can be seen and it is quiet and serene with the little wound in the right temple standing as testament to the turbulent soul that defeated the daunting intelligence that once lived there. That image seems so inconsistent with the smiling, self-assured youth in the photo adorning the wall of my den. There he is, kneeling in the front row, fourth from the right, with the other heroes of his Navy fighter squadron, each one proudly wearing aviator goggles, flight suit and helmet. Over them looms the World War II fighter-bomber that will soon terminate his military career in an oily, black fireball spread across one of Jacksonville’s long abandon runways. The photo album of my mind recalls a patriot, a dedicated husband, a loving father, and a brilliant scientist who never fully recovered from that awful crash.

Here he is in the cockpit of his plane, beaming as he points to my mother’s photograph carefully applied to the fuselage just above the wing. Is this a gesture to show that she was with him always, or, was it a supplication to God to bring him home safely to her? In any case, forty-five years later they were still together. The moustache accents the charm exuded by the gap-toothed grin which is among the earliest memories stored in the box marked DAD up in my mental attic.

Here are my sisters, my brother and me standing in front of the first house he ever bought; the one he worked twelve hours a day to afford. Did he know how excited we were then and what a wonderful home he and my mother made for us there? In summer we played on the screened-in porch and listen to the mosquitoes, like Ali Baba, hum their incantations to open the door and let us in.

The most wondrous room of all was the one on the east side, in the back, next to the stairs. In an age of black and white TV, thirty cent a gallon gas, and propeller driven Pan American airplanes, we sat quietly there watching him retrieve from thin air the voice of someone who cast their words adrift into the ether on the other side of the world. A sense of the fantastic permeated the room as the spectral glow from the illuminated dials transformed Dad into “Eugene the Magnificent, Master of the Carrier Wave.” In the radio room Dad was king.

Here is the treasured newspaper article that reported that told of his patented invention. Sailors were being burned in front of high powered radars, like chickens in a microwave oven, until Dad figured how to measure the energy fields the radars created. None of the school kids believed it until they saw the article themselves. They didn’t believe the story about the laser he built in the basement either. Who could blame them? Even those of us closest to him found it intimidating to live with a certifiable genius.

Born during the Great Depression to parents so poor they had to send him to live with his grandparents, he eventually joined the Navy only to be “smoked out” on a medical discharge after surviving that terrible crash. Armed only with his electronics correspondence course certificate and his Navy training, he advanced himself by reading to become a brilliant electronics scientist. He father truly was the American self-made man.

Now we see the aging, overweight, ailing retiree standing with his family on the patio of my California home on that last Christmas. Visible is the rose tattoo on his left forearm that was, for decades, a reminder of the untold exotic side of his life. Unlike my eyes that only saw what it wanted to see, the camera saw the worries and troubles that wrote themselves onto his face like stones thrown into the placid waters of what was once a smiling and charismatic youth.

If I could talk to him again I’d tell him that he is no longer the man I didn’t know. I’d tell him that by his example I learned the values of patriotism, family and education. As we say goodbye, I’d thank him for the privilege of knowing and understanding him. His awards and Silver Flight Crew wings occupy a place of honor in my home just beneath the faded photo of aviators from a time long past.

Even in death he was teaching. I learned that people, like photographs, are never fully appreciated until we know what came before and after the brief moment that is frozen in the single frame. Each day we are sent out on a new mission. We fly through reality in our personal fighter-bombers never realizing, until the last moment, that it only takes one small part, worn by time or stressed beyond tolerance, to send us spiraling out of control toward our unexpected destinies.