Easy Company Soldier (3 page)

My other uncle's death from World War I was painstakingly slow. Bob was playing football at the University of Oregon when, as a sophomore, he enlisted. After struggling to survive for years after being gassed in France, he came to be known as Fighting Bob. One Portland newspaper columnist said when told he was going to die, Bob said, “Tell me another funny story. I'm just starting to fight.” In 1926, my grandfather Dan Malarkey was in Denver at the bedside of his dying son. He sent this Western Union telegram to my father:

His death made big news in both Portland and Astoria. He was buried next to his brother, Gerald, at Ocean View.

The
Evening Astorian-Budget
wrote an editorial called “Two Graves”:

Because I wasn't even alive when Gerald died and only five when Bob died, I never mourned their deaths. But in hearing and reading about them, I took a pride in my uncles that I didn't take even in my own father. In part, that's probably why I felt so close to their mother, Ida, my grandmother Malarkey. The reasons for my feeling so distant from my father were far more complex.

My father, Leo, met my mother, Helen Trask, in Portland when he was a college sports reporter for
The Oregonian
newspaper. They were married in 1918. She was a gracious
lady who worked hard, loved her family, and remained loyal to the man she married, which couldn't have been easy.

My father was a well-liked guy with a life-of-the-party personality; at the University of Oregon, he starred as a halfback on the football team, though an eye injury forced him to miss his senior year. So he became an assistant coach; in fact, he coached his brother Bob, a starting halfback, in 1916, the season the University of Oregon beat the University of Pennsylvania in the Rose Bowl.

The best thing about my father was hearing him tell stories of his being a football hero. He drank a lot; he was, after all, Irish. But, early on, I don't recall its being a big problem, other than the time he came home loaded and made some slanderous remarks in front of my mom's sister, or the time he walked into the Liberty Grill on Commercial Street, where I was busing dishes as a high school senior. He looked at me and said, loud enough for everyone to hear, “There's my no-good son.” You don't forget something like that. Ever.

Mom was a loving woman and the family disciplinarian. She gave us our chores. She took us to church every Sunday at St. Mary's Parish, where I served as an altar boy. She also took us berry picking along the Nehalem. I loved to pick blackberries and blueberries. It was much more fun than being an altar boy and, for a kid who felt most alive when he was outdoors, was maybe the place I felt closer to God, too. Those were the happiest times: me and my mom and sister and brothers out picking berries. Pick three. Eat one, throw one at a brother or sister, and save one for jam. Your hands and face would be the color of deep bruises, and it smelled good and life was safe and easy.

But the Depression changed everything. With money
short, in the summer when I was fifteen I started working at a seining ground located on a tidal island fifteen miles up the Columbia called Jim Crow Sands, on the Oregon side of the river. The salmon were so thick people joked you could walk from Oregon to Washington on their backs. Our job was to corral them in nets and get them in boats. Until I ran up and down a mountain in Georgia called Currahee, it was the hardest work I'd ever done. I was a boy among men.

The seines were laid out by two tugs. One pulled the head of the net, the other the tail. When full, the nets were towed to the sandbar, where the tail of the net was passed to a team of horses that pulled the half-moon configuration in until the net was compact enough so our crews could get at the fish. Some of the salmon were nearly the size of ironing boards—and up to fifty pounds. We'd transfer the fish into wooden boats called “slimes” that would transport the catch to the canneries. We lived in logging camp-style rooms and were paid $3 a day, plus a fifty-cents-a-day bonus if we lasted the whole season. I did. For three summers.

In 1938, my father's insurance business, like the occasional dead chinook or sockeye we'd find in our nets, went belly-up. Bankrupt. He was a good salesman but a terrible bill-collector. He trusted people too much. Didn't want to go after money that was owed him. And I admired him for that. Hell, you can't blame someone for being blown over in a storm. But you can blame them for not even trying to get back up.

Months later, we lost the house. The folks told us they were moving out to a replacement cabin in the Cow Creek Valley, not far from our old one that had burned down. John, my older brother, was already living in southern California with relatives, but Bob, then thirteen, and Molly,
three, were going with Mom and Dad. I would live with Grandmother Malarkey in Warrenton, across Young's Bay.

There went our family. There went my friends in Astoria. There went my dreams of playing basketball at Astoria High; I'd made Catholic All-State in basketball for two years at Star of the Sea, but though I'd transferred to Astoria for my senior year, it was impossible to live in Warrenton and find rides home from practice each night; instead, I played intra-murals.

It's not that I didn't like living with Grandma Malarkey. She was a wonderful human being. She was that woman who'd be visiting all the down-and-out folks who needed visiting. She had a certain holiness to her, almost as if she were a saint. She lived on Main Street in a yellow, two-story bungalow shaded by Douglas firs and fronted by a white picket fence, with a huge garden out back. But she was recently widowed. She'd already raised her children, two of whom had been taken by World War I, and now she was being asked to do it again—at age sixty-four.

Meanwhile, my father retreated deeper and deeper into the dark, like a hermit crab wedged deep in the crevice of a couple of rocks, watching but seldom coming out. Years later, after he died,
The Oregonian
newspaper would say he “retired because of ill health in 1940.” But I don't remember him being sick. I just remember him going numb as if he didn't want anything to do with any of us, partly because of the bankruptcy and partly because of the bottle he relied on to make him forget the bankruptcy. He was not exactly the guy who the
Evening Astorian-Budget
had once reported had endeared himself to the University of Oregon football coach because of his
fight.
“Malarkey literally works himself to death on the field,” a reporter had written. “When it is just
about dark, and that is the time that [Coach Hugo] Bezdek says nowadays, ‘take a lap around the track easy and then go in on the jump,' ‘Tick' has just as much pep as ever.”

He and my mother weren't separated by law, but by every other measure. Mom would stay in the cabin and he'd spend time in Warrenton or Astoria, doing who-knows-what. So with John gone, I became the one who had to help keep the family together, financially and otherwise. That's not why I was disappointed in my father. I could deal with having to take on more responsibility. What I couldn't deal with was my father giving up on himself. On life. On us.

I don't remember thinking, I'll
never be like my old man.
Looking back on it, I believe somewhere down deep I vowed I would never do what he did. No matter how bad it got, I would never quit. On myself. Or on those around me.

As a high school student, I would never have been confused with my grandmother the saint. Oh, I wasn't a big-time hell-raiser, but if some garbage cans were getting kicked around on Halloween, you could bet my buddies and I were somehow involved. We rolled a few tires down from Fourteenth and Jerome, which was a little like rolling tires off an Olympic ski jump. When Leland Wesley, at Star of the Sea School, made a rank remark about my girlfriend, Bernice Franetovich, I slammed him against the wall and threatened to kick the hell out of him. Bernice and I had pretty much fallen for each other ever since freshman initiation when we were blindfolded and I took her hand to help her up the stairs.

I suppose I had a touch of rebel spirit in me, probably more so after our family broke up and I moved to Warrenton. I began smoking, not that other guys didn't. Music was a
more serious addiction. The Big Bands. Glenn Miller. Tommy Dorsey. We'd gather at the house of someone who was a good piano player, like Bernice. Or go somewhere to listen to records. Or belt out a few songs around a beach fire some Saturday night, if the wind wasn't blowing us from here to hell's half acre as it often was.

Not to brag, but I was a pretty decent singer. Before the big split, my mother would have me sing to her. In 1939, when Dorsey came out with that “Hawaiian War Chant” song, I could nail it, tricky though it was. In the midst of the Depression, music was a release. Music was like salvation. Music made you forget that life was no longer as simple as rowing up the Nehalem to find a good place to build a fire and camp for the evening.

At Star of the Sea, a Catholic school with thirty pupils, I was a decent student. The nuns made sure of that. Math was not their strong suit, but they pounded the other subjects into you, especially English. They made you break down sentences and examine every part as if you were some sort of word detective. They had us sing until we all thought we belonged onstage, and memorize poetry, which I actually learned to enjoy.

As a senior, I was allowed to transfer to Astoria High, though an injury wiped out football for me and I couldn't play basketball because of the difficulty of getting a ride for the ten miles to and from Warrenton. Once, a teacher asked our class if we'd read the editorial in the previous day's
Evening Astoria-Budget
about the possibilities of Adolf Hitler invading the Low Countries—Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. I was the only one who had.

Bernice's father, Louie—he'd come from Croatia—ran the Liberty Grill on Commercial Street and I got a job there as a
busboy. Her dad seemed to think I was OK and I thought he was, too. In 1922, the Astoria Fire had leveled most of downtown, but in a time when a lot of people gave up, he rebuilt. I always admired that, along with the Grill's hamburger steak and mashed potatoes. The Grill also made wonderful clam chowder, heavy on the clams. Once, when President Franklin Roosevelt went salmon fishing on the Columbia, his aides would motor ashore and bring him back Liberty Grill chowder, on his request. Bernice was proud of her dad for that, and who could blame her?

One day at the Liberty Grill, this bar pilot looked up from his newspaper and asked me what I thought Germany was going to do with France. He was surprised that I actually had an answer.

“Germany,” I said, “is like the Notre Dame of Europe. Powerful. France and all of Europe is in big trouble.”

The next day, Louie, the owner, told me a guy had overheard me talking about Germany at the counter yesterday. He was with the FBI, and sure enough this guy wanted to know how I knew so much about the war in Europe, which seemed odd because I'd just been reading the papers. It was a time of great suspicion, those late thirties. The world seemed on the brink of something bad, but we just weren't sure what that something was.

I graduated from Astoria High in the spring of 1939, and with my father and mother not working, I had no money to attend the University of Oregon, my school of choice. So I decided I'd put myself through school on my own. I got a job loading ships and blending flour at the Pillsbury Flour Mill in Astoria, at the time one of the country's largest-volume export mills to the Far East. I stowed some money away for college and bought a '36 Chevrolet.

I left grandma's house and lived in an apartment that Bernice's father owned on Franklin Avenue. Bernice was still my girl; when she was selected as a princess in the Queen's Court of the Astoria Regatta, she naturally chose me as her escort. I worked at the mill during the day and bused dishes at the Liberty Grill at night. One foggy September evening—on the northern-Oregon coast, no month is safe from the stuff—I was cleaning up a table when I saw a copy of
The Evening Astoria-Budget,
its front page ringed with the circles of a few coffee cups and its main headline tinged with dread:

FIGHTING UNDERWAY

I had the same feeling I had had when the farmer had burst into the doors of that camp mess hall to tell us a forest fire was headed our way.

I entered the University of Oregon in the fall of 1941, having worked two years and sold my car to afford it. I'd almost been predestined to go to UO, given the pipeline between Eugene and my older Astoria friends, and my dad and uncle Bob having gone there. The college was about 150 miles southeast of Astoria, at the lower end of the Willamette Valley.