Mom grew up as the daughter of a university professor, a very attractive debutante indeed (think Bettie Page), and with a posse of admirers. Then World War II broke out. She lost several beaus to combat.
Mom, Donna Yvonne Hayes by name, was almost done with college at the time, a double major in psychology and chemistry. She was a competitive swimmer and for the rest of her life swam a mile a day in warm weather. She kept her trim figure to the bitter end.
Every house we ever lived in had a pool. (I can imagine the discussions she and Pop had. . . Two stubborn, headstrong people – but always in private. “The little boy has ears.”) Mom had ambitions (and the intelligence) to become a medical doctor. I suspect the war changed all that. She got a job as a chemist at the Enjay refinery in Baton Rouge to help in the war effort.
Mom’s favorite story was how she got dashed with acid in a laboratory incident. They rushed her to a chemical shower which, as designed, washed every last bit of clothing off her. And there she was. Stark naked in front of a laboratory full of young men.
Having zero idea of anatomy at the time, I laughed with everybody else, not quite knowing why. This is me, the most courteous camper. (It’s okay, everybody else ignored me. Gramm was nice, though. I brought dinner on a tray to her every evening. She lived a short walk across Dogwood Avenue. Stuffy house. Gramm all dressed up. Always kind. Bilbo. That’s what she called me.)
Pop got a tennis scholarship to Georgia Tech. He was a very handsome dude, decked out in his tennis whites (think Humphry Bogart). He belonged to a fraternity and, in fact, lived at the frat house for a while after he got a job at the Humble refinery in Baton Rouge.
Pop was drafted into the U.S. Navy as an Ensign, but got a deferment because his chemical engineering expertise – creating derivatives of hydrocarbons – was more important than his service. It’s my understanding he was the industry expert on resins, the really thick gooey stuff left over after all the lighter oils were fracked away.
Mom was a sorority girl. I suppose they met at a social function on the LSU campus across town. (I wonder if Pop took all the overseas assignments because all the other men his age in America were combat veterans and made him feel bad. I’m sure this sentiment was prevalent, just not sure how much it affected the old man.)
Mom told the story about how her father was a very gruff man. Whenever she brought a date home, Dadee never talked. Just wrote his question down on paper and handed it over. Apparently, Pop passed muster. He probably wrote his answers down and handed them back.
I found several documents online about the late Professor Ralph Hayes. He was extremely well-liked by his students. He trained an entire generation of foresters and trained them well, go the accolades.
After the war, Pop got a Master’s Degree at LSU (the most useless piece of paper he ever owned, he used to say). About this time they got married. Mom would bring him lunch at the refinery every day. Until their firstborn, that is. Then two more in quick succession. Adios goes that medical career, Ma’. (Honestly, she never complained and in fact was very happy with her life, which was quite the adventure as you will soon see.)
After Mom died circa 2002, I inherited The Family Bible, a giant gold-edge 1860 King James Edition. Inside is a genealogy of Pop’s side of the family. William Brown Jr. married Ida Erb just before the Civil War broke out. He was the commanding officer of the 15th Mississippi Cavalry for the Confederacy. Col. Brown survived the war, settling down near Vicksburg. (Which isn’t that far from Baton Rouge, and is quite close to our old camp on Lake Rosemound, just over the Louisiana border.)
A year after Mom passed away, I moved to Port Gibson, a small town just south of Vicksburg. A year later, wandering around town waiting for them to close on the sale of my house at 206 China Street (I was moving to Vicksburg), I chanced upon Wintergreen Cemetery a few blocks away. And, lo and behold – there was the last resting place of William Brown Junior, my ancestor.
Yeah. Surprised the dickens out of me, too.
I later wrote a novella about Col. Brown’s Civil War exploits, which eventually morphed into a screenplay called SHILOH. “The ghost of an avenging Confederate general terrorizes a small southern town.”
William Brown’s father-in-law was William Erb, a famous Swiss psychophysiologist, after whom that reflex when you hit your knee just right was named. Dr. Erb had four sons who emigrated to America, starting the Mennonite community in Pennsylvania. When the Civil War broke out, two brothers joined the Confederacy and two brothers fought for the Union.
Gramm used to say that Dadee was a direct descendant of U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes. President Hayes was evidently a very gruff and ornery individual, so maybe she was right. (Great-Grandpa Rutherford was the only president not directly elected by the people, by the way. Something about everybody haggling after the Civil War; he was the compromise president.)
Another ancestor Gramm claims for us is Cotton Mather, the preacher involved in the Salem Witch Trials back then. Again, knowing her and my family history, this fits very much with our family character. (And is excellent fodder for a horror drama set in the Deep South in the middle of a Civil War battle zone.)
In any event, our roots in America go back to the Revolutionary War and beyond.
My father’s father, Joseph Howard O’Cleary, emigrated directly from Cork County Ireland. They Americanized his last name at Ellis Island to Clark. The Clan O’Cleary was one of the four ruling classes of the Druids, the antiquarians or keepers-of-history. The storytellers. So perhaps I have this curse of the written word in my blood. If only I could be rid of it, once and for blessed all.
Grandpa Howard was a railroad engineer. My pride and joy as a boy was a fancy Lionel railroad train (which I still have) he gave me for Christmas one year. It’s a beauty. Still works to perfection. Made in America par excellence.
I found a letter in Pop’s papers from President John F. Kennedy, thanking Grandpa Howard for some unnamed but important “service to the country.” It was mailed a week before JFK was shot. Grandpa Howard was deceased at the time. My father received it almost on the very day of the assassination!
What a shock THAT must have been.
Grandpa Howard was never in the military. He never did anything noteworthy that I know of other than get rich on the stock market, only to go bankrupt in quick order. I understand this financial fracas happened several times. I did find newspaper clippings, saying he was a big wheel in Memphis. Moved out to Hollywood later on.
My speculations on this “important service” to America (Grandpa Howard was an Irish Catholic, just like JFK) are laid out in another screenplay, CRASHDOWN. “An elderly recluse in the Appalachians helps a young human-looking female extraterrestrial find a new host.” The old codger’s story is mine. The young lady is, well – the girl I never had.
The drama is set in my house in the Appalachians of western North Carolina, where the schizophrenic dude regales the young lady with a rambling tale of his family’s dark past involving the Roswell UFO crash in 1945.
(Dadee was a forester in New Mexico at the time and Grandpa Howard, the railroad engineer – White Sands Proving Ground where the UFO landed is where all the Nazi rocket scientists were brought after WWII – whole trainloads, the train and all – in Operation Paperclip.”)
Basically, a dark conspiracy theme (Mr. Bill versus the Deep State) runs throughout this tale, in all its gory glory. An alternate title was “The Secret State,” tying JFK’s assassination to the military-space-industrial complex at the time. (Remember President Kennedy’s dream of landing on the moon?)
To prelude a little bit more, by the time I swore an oath and was commissioned on my first day at the U.S. Naval Academy in 1974, my family had lived in a total of eighteen different places overseas. I was, to whit, an “Exxon Brat.” Consequently, the timeline gets a little crazy from now on.
2424 Cottonwood was always our home base. We moved back there between overseas postings, although basically we were gone for good after 1st grade, only returning to my last year in high school.
All the moves would be difficult to follow and a very confused jumble of places, schools, vacations, and dates, except for one fortuitous document that I prepared when I was hospitalized against my will on a psychiatric ward (straightjacket, padded pink room, and all) at Brooke Army Medical Center.
This is, the original, rambling, HAUNTED 1940s BAMC on Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. They diagnosed me with “severe chronic paranoid schizophrenia.” In the words of my doctor, I was “the sickest of the sick.” So testified at my tribunal my boss at the time, Chief of Chaplains Colonel Robert Sanders, United States Army.
Then, well – being stuck on a psych ward for weeks on end for “observation” – baby blue pajamas – surrounded by crazies (who seemed quite all right to me), what else was I to do but try and understand their diagnosis?
Picture this: an E4 writing a formal research paper on psychology. On an army psych ward. No underwear. Just baby blue PJs. No sharp surfaces. Butterscotch pudding. Saturday afternoon Children of the Corn movies (no kidding).
Like – grandiose delusion. DIAGNOSIS CONFIRMED.
So. I created a document pinpointing exactly the cause of my schizophrenia: extreme nuclear radiation exposure when I was a Midshipman at Annapolis while on a summer tour of a nuclear-powered submarine. My proof was in my past, which I showed repeated a VERY specific (nuclear particles have a specific half-life) pattern over my major life events heretofore. That document listed every place I lived and the dates. I wrote a small research paper explaining the diagram. Gave it to my doctor. He, in turn, presented it to the hospital staff.
Wow! I’m famous!
Except, in a really bad sort of way.
Later on, in my Army medical tribunal, the two doctors on the panel voted against me – the line officer said I should remain in the service – presumably because the two doctors had prior knowledge of my case, presented to them by the Chief of Psychiatry, Gabriel Durand-Hollis – a Mexican national who spoke broken English at best. Justice served.
The inciting incident for this misfortune (getting locked up on a psych ward) was a horrific situation I had only just got out of at the U.S. Army White Sands Missile Range in southern New Mexico, where I worked as an E-4 Specialist 93E Weather Tech.
(Remember? White Sands is exactly where the Roswell UFO crash landed back then.)
An entire fracas at WSMR – a motorcycle wreck, my car blowing up, fistfights, threats from generals and Congressmen – began right after I presented a tech paper to the commanding general and a couple of scientists at the “High Energy Laser Project” on post, HELSTAF for short, what President Reagan called the trillion-dollar “Star Wars Laser” project.
Well, my paper, it was a very dry subject, and – being creative to a fault – my final poster was an application of my proposed theory, a faster-than-light spacecraft.
FYI. The beauty of a letter that got me that opportunity to chat with the Big Brains at HELSTAF was a certain letter from NASA dated a few years earlier on a little manuscript I wrote. NASA said, in part, “Your concepts about the Unified Field Theory appear to be so profound as to be years ahead of the scientific thinking in which you delved.”
Nice words, but say hey – you can’t give me a JOB?!
But, wait. Rewind.
Say what? You jabbered on about a fu*king UFO to goddamn senior brass at White Sands Missile effing Range??? (I swear, hand on Bible, at that time I was the only person in America who didn’t know squat about UFOs.)
Well, you can fill in between the dotted lines. The splats of blood. The headaches. The heartaches.
Mom always told me, “You’re never happy unless you’re in trouble.” Well, going by that, I should have been absolutely ecstatic. So not. I was on an effing psych ward. Fighting for my life. For my sanity. For my science.
Perspective: Psychology expert Mom? Any other mom would move heaven and earth to extricate me from this and all the other troubles I got into. Not my Mom. She wanted me to be happy. Ergo, let him enjoy his trouble.
Another way to put it, and this in retrospect seems to be my life’s motto: If you’re going to get into trouble, you might as well. Go. All. The. Way. That’s me. The real-life Saturday Night Live Mr. Bill.
“Oh, no. It’s Mr. Bill.” SPLAT.
Sorry to tell you all things ahead of the official timeline.
Like, maybe now you want to stick around for another chapter or three? Please? If for no other reason than to figure out why God has given little old me this wonderful opportunity to thumb my nose at the entirety of modern science.
If this doesn’t turn out to be the Greatest Show on Earth, well – ask for your $$ back.