Part 5 (of 6) of the narrative "What happened to Ace on that day?" Back to the beginning of the narrative Back up to earlier in the narrative

There were scores of pictures of Ace available for me to look at when I was a child. Pictures of him with my mother. Pictures of him in uniform with his brother, John, also a Navy officer in uniform. Pictures of him with his squadron, one of them with him sitting on the plane cowling. Several pictures of him with people not identified. Quite a few of the pictures undated. Some of the pictures are tiny.

Here is an undated picture of him on the beach with several guys. Ace, taller than most of the others, is fourth from the right (click the picture to enlarge). I can't tell what they've been doing--a shovel, some kind of long oar or mast, one guy has a ball. Ace, holding a mug, stands nonchalantly with legs crossed. These guys were having fun.

There were pictures of him and me together, too. Here's one with me as a trike driver, dated October 1944, when I was two years and four months old and he was thirty-three (click to enlarge). He seems to like his son in this picture. When I saw pictures like this, I would scrinch my brain tightly, trying to separate what I had been told from what I actually remembered, trying to ferret out a real memory of him. No luck.

In almost every picture Ace is smiling. Studying his features rigorously, I was sad that I didn't resemble him much. Christine didn't look much like him, either. Janna resembles him a lot.

Everyone who knew him told me he had a great sense of humor. I was told he could wiggle his ears. He could make people roar with laughter by bobbing his hairline up and down on his forehead with just the muscles on his face.

When my mother would be storming in one of her dark moods, Ace would just laugh, I was told--by my mother herself. Her mood, unstoked by her spouse's indulgence, would dissipate. It's too bad my Pop (my stepfather) didn't know this technique.

I so wish that I could have gotten to know this man Ace, but all I have are little tidbits of him--small anecdotes, pictures, and such artifacts as his engineering kit, calling cards with his (and my) name, gold leafs from his uniform. Not a single memory of my own. He was my real father and an utter stranger.

Once I left home for college and beyond, I stopped thinking about my father.

In 1975, my Mom and Pop, traveling full time with their trailer and calling themselves "Geritol Gypsies," visited me in my home in New York State. Now I was thirty-three years old, as my father had been when he posed with me driving my trike. I now had a wife and a child whom Mom and Pop had never seen. It had been more than a decade since they had seen me, or even received a reply to any of the letters my mother had sent me. With this unannounced visit, they had bridged the continent between us--and the gulf of estrangement between us, too.

Pop pulled a box out of the trailer and handed it to me. "Here's some stuff of your Dad's," he said.

I looked him in the eye and said: "You're my Dad."

In the box were Ace's flight helmet, several medals including the Purple Heart, various certificates, photos, the tidbits I mentioned earlier, odds and ends in a disarray. I felt somewhat repelled by this box of treasures. It represented a painful family emotional chasm from my teenage years: the split between the hero ghost "real father" and the hardworking flesh-and-blood stepfather. I accepted the box, but I stored it on a high closet shelf and didn't think about it again for another decade.

In the mid-1980s, after a divorce and a remarriage, I began to focus on my extended family again. In my late forties, I became interested in genealogy. The items in that box really were treasures now. I assembled photo albums.

I acquired a copy of The Ship That Wouldn't Die, a video documentary of the Franklin disaster produced by Robert Garthwaite, a colleague of my former mother-in-law. I watched it several times.

We started visiting Aunt Jean, Ace's older sister, in Connecticut; it was the first time I had seen her since 1950. She gave me Ace's sea chest, his tuxedo, lots more photos, his high school yearbook, letters he had written his mother (Grandmother Edmands), copies of the dire telegrams from the Navy Department. She gave me my grandmother's diaries, diligently kept from 1936 until her death in 1970; most of the entries were such humdrum items as "Had a perm today," but quite a few were fascinating--and many of them were about her son, my father.

Aunt Jean told me anecdotes from Ace's childhood, how he used to take pledges from his schoolmates, how he and his brother lived for a couple of years in Vermont, how he almost enlisted in the Army rather than the Navy (the Army recruiting office was closed that day).

In 1995, during our short annual home leave back to the States from my five-year overseas assignment in Japan, a little more than three years after my mother had passed away, we attended a large family reunion in eastern Washington State. My Aunt Jane (my mother's older sister) told me how Ace had handed her the tiny portion of potatoes and gravy. Aunt Jane's old eyes crinkled merrily as she talked about her brother-in-law Ace. Later, on my sister Janna's Web site, Fossil Freak's home page, I found the anecdote about Ace suggesting everyone brush their teeth or not caring about the neighbors. (These anecdotes are on the biography page about Ace.)

While residing in Japan, I gained some insight into the culture and people that had been a formidable enemy, my father's enemy, in World War II. My mother had never forgiven the Japanese, but I felt not the slightest rancor toward these people, not even toward those who were old enough to have participated. I enjoy several fine friendships with native Japanese people.

Residing in a country where barely more than 1% of the population are Christians, we took our Christianity seriously and regularly attended services at the Yokohama Union Church.

On the morning of Sunday, March 19, 1995, Reverend Girling delivered a sermon on two of the seven deadly sins: avarice and sloth. Avarice, he said, made us brittle and hard, less human: What do we cling to at the expense of decency? What can we let go of for the sake of the Kingdom? Sloth, he told us, is not mere laziness, it is a living death. Sloth is when we know we are set on a deadly course yet do nothing to change. It is sloth, he said, that is usually behind depression.

I was always inspired by Reverend Girling's sermons; I regularly took notes, and I pondered deeply his words. On that particular day, the fiftieth anniversary of the Franklin disaster, I wanted to soften the brittle hardness within me about the single event that had made such an impact on my life. I resolved to make sure I had the best possible relationship with my 82-year-old stepfather while he was still alive.

When Reverend Girling finished the sermon, I couldn't hold all this inside. I stood up and announced to the congregation that that very day was the fiftieth anniversary of my father's death, just off the eastern coast of Japan. I wanted to honor his memory in a prayer that we might find a course other than war to express our human avarice and sloth, as well as the other five deadly sins.

I hadn't prepared this short speech, and it wasn't terribly logical what I said. But I did say that I wanted to treasure my relationship with my stepfather during his final years. After the service several people came up to me to discuss the terrible war that had raged between the U.S. and Japan. A couple of people hugged me. When we got home, I called up my Pop in Centralia, Washington, just to chat. I made these calls a weekly event.

We visited my Pop in Centralia whenever we got the chance, choosing the West Coast for our home leaves instead of our East Coast home. During his last week of life in 2000, I was by his side, and I organized a memorial "celebration" of his life. I was grateful that I had been able to repair our difficult relationship somewhat.

After his death, I realized that I now basically belonged to the older generation. Oh, I have a couple of aunts left--but otherwise, my sisters and I are in the vanguard of the march through life. Compiling everything I can of the family history has become an urgent obsession with me.

I gathered together all the facts about my father Ace that I could find, but the events of March 19, 1945, the last day he was seen alive, were still mysterious. Here's an example of the mysteriousness:

One of the letters I have a copy of, which had been in the box of treasures I had stored away in 1975, was from Lt. Carr, Ace's executive officer, explaining that the Ace's Naval Academy ring and his dog tags had been found even though Ace himself was still missing. My sister Christine helped me understand that Lt. Carr was fibbing, shielding our mother from some gruesome details about the condition of Ace's remains, which must have indeed been discovered: Ace had not been able to get that ring off his finger, and no serviceman is ever without his dog tags, especially in a combat zone, especially when strapped into the cockpit of a plane warming up for takeoff on a bombing raid.

The fact that Lt. Carr's words can be doubted makes all of the official version of events--what Captain Gehres, who received his information second or third hand, said in his letter, what was in the hastily edited Lucky Bag 20-year reunion book--seem possibly suspect.

I read what I could about the Franklin disaster, and began to understand the scope of it. I looked at the video The Ship That Wouldn't Die again. As of summer 2002, however, I was resigned to never knowing much more about what happened to Ace on that day.

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