Soul Survivor (26 page)

The memoir was added to the piles and files of material that were beginning to choke off certain rooms in the house in Lafayette.
The office was overflowing, the dining room was unusable except as storage, and the shelves were cluttered with books about
World War II. Andrea would have complained, but she, too, had fallen under the spell of
Natoma Bay
. She, too, was rapt and wanted to get all the stories. She, too, wanted to know about the men of
Natoma Bay
. But above all, of course, she still wanted to find out about James M. Huston Jr. and her son’s eerie utterances. And she
knew that the way to James Huston was through the crew. But the stories were like a song, and she was a faithful listener.

At first, it was not apparent which elements were important and which were not. The memoir came and was quickly read and then
slipped into another pile of material, the significance skipped over by the avalanche of all the rest.

It is possible to have too many documents, too much data—too much raw information. And Bruce, being the child of the modern
researchers’ electronic and paper-trail deluge, collected everything. He printed every file. He copied every record. The house
was becoming a fire trap of
Natoma Bay
documents.

“It’s all there,” he would tell Andrea, rushing off to work, leaving her adrift in the ocean of records. And he was right—it
probably was all there, but where? You just had to know where to look.

Fortunately, Andrea had a bloodhound’s instinct for finding the lost families. At the height of her frustration, when she
was lost in the web of all the Web sites, she remembered Cliff Hodge’s memoir. And she remembered that inside the memoir she
had read another reference to Eddie Barron. It was something said by another shipmate, James Gleason:

Eddie liked to call himself “Jewboy.” And he was ready to get back home as soon as he could. He was so excited about having
gotten married to what he described as “the most beautiful girl in the world.” He was madly in love with his wife. Eddie changed
the stereotype I had of what a Jew was like. Eddie was a warm and friendly person who genuinely made people feel good about
being around him. He made people comfortable.

A Jew who called himself “Jewboy” as a kind of preemptive inoculation against being called the name first, the shipmate who
is surprised that a Jew can be warm and friendly—such condescending slights were common in the 1940s. Andrea looked past the
small insults couched as compliments. Now she had a bundle of clues. She knew that Eddie Barron was Jewish and had enlisted
in the Navy from Minneapolis. She had already struck out in Minnesota, but now she had Cliff Hodge’s reference to California.
Maybe Eddie Barron was listed among the dead for California. She tried the nara.gov (National Archives and Records Administration)
Web site, which lists ancestry, and—
voila!
—there it was: Edward Brennan Barron. His next of kin was listed as his wife, Miriam Koval Barron of Los Angeles.

Andrea was still not home free. She still couldn’t find Miriam Barron or Miriam Koval in the white pages search, so she tried
the Los Angeles marriage records for 1943. They were unavailable. She then went to the 1930 census records and found that
Miriam Koval had three sisters: Zelda, Elaine, and Pearl. She did a marriage record search under the name Koval and saw that
a Pearl Koval from Los Angeles had married a Hyman J. Davis.

Davis was a pretty common name, but she tried the California directories and found a Hyman J. and Pearl Davis in Bakersfield.
She called the number and told her story, and the woman on the other end listened with that mixture of suspicion and wonder
that characterized these conversations. Finally, convinced that Andrea was not someone with a new investment scheme, the woman
said that Miriam was her older sister.

Sometimes the breakthroughs came easily—or seemed to fall in place quickly after the long, arduous approach. Finding the right
phone number—finding the sister—broke it open. Miriam’s name was no longer Barron. Like so many war widows, she had remarried.
She was Miriam Sherman, and she was willing and eager to talk about Eddie.

Yes, she met Eddie on a blind date while he was in training in San Diego. She was bowled over by the uniform and his dark
good looks and a little nervous about being a few months older than he. She held that back for a while, afraid that he might
lose interest. Men were funny about such things in those days.

It was love at first sight. He called her “Mickey” and didn’t tell her about his fearful premonitions. He told everyone else
that he didn’t think he was going to make it back to the mainland after the war.

Did she know about his civilian background?

Yes
—
courtships always began with an exchange of pedigrees. He was born Edward Brennan Barron in Minneapolis on February 24, 1924,
the son of Joseph and Pearl Barron. They were immigrants—Joseph came from Russia in 1908, and Pearl came from Romania in 1910.
Joseph ran a clothing store. Eddie had a younger brother, Norman, and a younger sister, Marguerite. They called her “Dolly.”

Miriam told all the little details that fascinated Andrea. Eddie had been in the drama club in high school, then joined the
Navy and was based in San Diego.

They didn’t have much time together. That’s what those wartime marriages were like—a few months, and then he shipped out.
They hardly knew each other at all, beyond the fact that for a little while in the mid-1940s, he was her husband. She married
twice again after the war, but Eddie, she said, was “the love of my life.” She was pregnant when he shipped out. After she
learned of Eddie’s death, she gave birth prematurely to twins, who died after a few days. Eddie never knew.

He was a radioman on a TBM Avenger. His pilot was Ruben Goranson. His other crewmate was Eldon Bailey, the gunner. He probably
knew them better than he knew his wife—at least, he spent more time with them.

The military part of the story—some insights into Eddie’s character—was fleshed out in Cliff Hodge’s memoir:

… An interesting sidelight; the type of everyday heroism that never made the news… It was a couple of days before the fatal
flight… During the catapult, the radio gunner grasps two handles in front of him to brace his body for the (G force) of takeoff.
The catapult was like being shot out of a cannon. Just in front of the two handles was a shelf that held all of the heavy
electronic equipment—radio, radar, etc. Ed was holding on to the handles when the cat shot hit, but something didn’t hold.
The heavy equipment on the shelf slammed backward, pinning Ed’s hands. Both hands were injured and he was caught between the
handles and the shelf.

Looking down between his feet from the gun turret, Eldon Bailey could see what had happened; he climbed down to try to help
Barron. Without tools, Eldon couldn’t budge the shelf. Bailey called the pilot, Goranson, and held the mike so that Barron
could talk. Goranson asked Eddie if he should abort the mission and go back to the ship, but Ed said negative, keep going.
They flew the mission, searching for subs, while Ed Barron’s hands were pinned beneath the heavy shelf. The carrier landing
was excruciating, and both of Eddie’s hands were cut and bruised.

But there were no broken bones. It was painful, but not disabling. A few days later, they were to go out on anti-submarine
patrol again and Eddie was excused from the flight. But he refused to let anyone take his place. He insisted that he could
manage.

At 10:07 a.m. on February 7, 1945, seventeen days before his twentieth birthday, while on patrol 12 miles from Majuro Atoll
near the Philippines, Eddie Barron sent a Mayday back to the ship. The plane had engine trouble and radio problems and was
going to ditch in the ocean. That was the last signal from the stricken plane.

A destroyer, USS
Kidd
, along with two other aircraft from the anti-sub patrol were diverted to search for the lost TBM. Other planes joined in
the search, but no trace of the plane was found. No wreckage. No survivors. They were all lost. Goranson, Bailey, and Barron.

The names were all familiar to Andrea. When a TBM was lost, all the members of the crew died together
—
a small family. Goranson, Bailey, and Barron were on the list of twenty-one
Natoma Bay
dead.

She learned a little about the others from Hodge’s memoir and some records from the ship. Ensign Ruben Goranson also came
from Minnesota. His father, Adolph, was a crystal cutter and glassblower. His mother, Alma, was a housewife. They were also
immigrants, from Sweden. There were two older brothers, Henry and Harold. All three would serve in World War II.

Ruben, the youngest, was a premed student when the war came along. He took a lot of interest in flying and joined the Navy’s
officer candidate program in college. His father’s crystal factory was at the end of a local golf course, and Ruben would
often “flat-hat” the factory, making low passes in his trainer. His father, who usually held his temper, would sometimes come
running out of the factory yelling Swedish epithets at the sky.

It didn’t bother Ruben, who kept making the low passes over the factory. Ruben was short and took a lot of ribbing over it.
But he was athletic; he worked as a lifeguard in high school. He was single when he died. He was twenty-one years old.

After hearing that her son was missing in action, Alma cut evergreen branches and placed them under his bed; it was a Swedish
custom. The belief was that the evergreen boughs would provide a safe passage home.

These things Andrea learned from Roger, a nephew who was born in 1948—he never met his uncle.

Eldon Ray “Bill” Bailey was from Kentucky. His parents, Hubert and Elgie Bailey, were farmers. The family moved to Kansas
in the thirties and ran into the Dust Bowl. They lived a hardscrabble life.

They were tough people—they had to be tough to come through the Depression. Eldon was also twenty-one when he died.

There was one younger brother, Floyd, who worshipped Eldon, who supported Floyd’s education. After the death of his brother,
Floyd joined the Navy.

Andrea and Bruce got the information from a cousin, J. D. Bailey, who had lived with Hubert and Elgie after J. D.’s parents
died in the great flu pandemic in 1919.

The stories were unnerving but in some way reassuring. The men who died were boys. Just boys—not too much older than Andrea’s
own little boy.

B
RUCE HAD UNCOVERED all of the military details about the twenty-one men who were killed while serving on
Natoma Bay.
He had the action reports, the war diaries, the air-crew accounts, official citations of all types. He knew how and why they
died. He just didn’t know anything about them. There was that eternal reason—that the sailors aboard the carrier kept an emotional
distance from the combat crews. Experience had taught them that there was a price to pay for getting close to doomed men.

And so if he and Andrea wanted to complete the picture—to find out the whole story—they would have to go back to the families
of the dead servicemen. They would have to conduct the research back over time, awaken the families to a grief more than half
a century old.