What a tangled web we weave

He was born in 1906 in a place called Tomah, Wisconsin, and moved twice with his parents and four older brothers, first to LaCrosse, Wisconsin, and then to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He left school after the tenth grade. He worked at Quaker Oats there as a young man but later found his life's calling working with metals at the Dearborn Brass Works. He drifted around the midwest some in the early years of the Great Depression, living the hobo life and hitching rides on freight trains. Eventually he married a woman named Hildred Putman from Leavenworth, Kansas, and returned to Cedar Rapids with her. He was 35 and working at Dearborn Brass Works when Pearl Harbor was attacked. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1942 at the age of 36 when he realized he probably was not going to to be drafted. He wanted to be in the submarine service but was told that he was too old. After completing training at Great Lakes Naval Station in Chicago, the farthesr east he had ever been up to that point in his life, he was assigned to the PCE-869, a Patrol Craft Escort vessel of the "submarine chaser" class, as a Machinist's Mate. He was twice the age of many of his young shipmates, and they called him "Pop". He was even older than the ship's captain, who was 32.

During the war his ship sailed through the Panama Canal in both directions, going up the Pacific coast as far as Portland, Oregon, and up the Atlantic coast as far as Greenland. He never served in either the European or Pacific theaters of operation, but his ship escorted many ships containing people who did. He remembered in his later years that his ship would drop depth charges when German submarines were in the vicinity; he had nightmares of seeing dead bodies rise to the surface of the ocean and woke up screaming a few times. At some point during the war he received notice that his wife Hildred back in Iowa had divorced him. He remembered various shore leaves in San Diego, California; Fort Lauderdale, Florida; and New York City with fondness. His ship's last home port before his honorable discharge from the Navy after the war ended was Quonset Point Naval Station in Rhode Island.

He met my mother in Rhode Island sometime in 1945. I was about four. I thought he was my father returning fron the war. He wore a sailor's white uniform and I called him "Ted" like my mother did until I was encouraged to call him "Daddy." They were married in Seekonk, Massachusetts, on September 2, 1946, but this bit of information was not known to me for many years. I thought he was my biological father and that they had married on September 2, 1939, probably because it meshed nicely with my being born in March 1941. That is what they told me and everybody else, but it was not true. My mother died when I was 16 without ever having told me the truth. I pieced it together after many years and through much research and remembering fragments of conversations that were not meant to be overheard. I remember hearing my mother say to my dad during an argument, "He never asked to be born." I remember hearing my dad say to my mother during another, "I gave him a name." I remember hearing my mother tell someone that she had fallen in love with a sailor suit and found out only later that she didn't care too much for the sailor.

After I completed first grade, our family moved away from Rhode Island for two reasons. First of all, I had developed a pre-asthmatic condition -- I remember my mother using an atomizer to spray something medicinal up my nose each night at bedtime -- and the doctor said a drier climate would be beneficial. Second, the new man of the house thought job prospects would be better for his particular set of skills in the new aerospace industry. After he had considered both Ohio and southern California, we moved by train in August 1947 to Fort Worth, Texas, where he found work at Consolidated Vultee Aircraft (later called Convair and then General Dynamics) as a turret lathe and milling machine operator. He stayed there for nearly 20 years, dying of pancreatic cancer in March 1967 at age 60, just six months before he would have been eligible to retire with a pension. My mother, Ruth Silberman Brague, had died in 1957 of metastatic breast cancer at the age of 47. He had been married for nearly nine years to Mildred Louise Williams Houston Brague, his third wife and my stepmother, at the time of his death. With no visible means of support, neither pension mor Social Security payment, she married again to a man naned John Fuller in 1969 and stayed married to him for 33 years. He died in 2003 and she died in 2004 at the age of 89.

I was born at home. My first bed, I've been told, was a pillow placed in a drawer that had been removed from a chest of drawers and set on a table. I believe that. What I don't believe, what I know in fact cannot be true, is that the only birth certificate I have ever had, which was not issued until I was about to enter public school, indicates that the man in the sailor suit fathered me. And as far as I know, I was not adopted by him. It is simply false information, whatever good intentions they may have had.

Just because a document that is considered official says something doesn't make it so.