Harold Edwin Marsh was a victim of the Korean War. I don’t use that term lightly. He clearly suffered from PTSD his whole life and spent huge amounts of energy trying to disguise that fact from anyone who suspected. Those of us closest to him didn’t suspect because to do so would have been a kind of betrayal. And you didn’t admit a thing like that in those days because it went directly to the core of manliness.
My mother probably could see it better than any of us. She, of course, knew him before he headed to Korea and when he got home. But the unspoken rule of not mentioning it, ever, was followed by all of us. By today’s standards of mental health, that was an absurd behavior. But it was how it was done at the time. There was too much shame associated with it. It has a lot to do with why the 50s were so idealized. It was never real.
I could see the cracks later. I was two weeks old and living with both parents in Kansas City, Missouri where Dad was going to watchmaker’s school in preparation for working in his parents’ jewelry store in Flushing, Michigan. He had joined the Marine Corps as soon as he was old enough, in 1947, but missed WWII. So, in Kansas City he joined a Reserve unit (he said often it was for the fellowship and camaraderie) to earn a few extra bucks a month and when the Korean War (Police Action) broke out, his unit was activated. Poof! Dad was gone and my mother and I found ourselves living with her parents on Hall Street, in Charlotte, Michigan. I didn’t know then it was an ironic homecoming, as one of the greatest motivating factors for my mother to marry my father less than a week after high school graduation was to get away from her abusive father.
In Korea, Dad was injured by a piece of shrapnel from an explosion while he was trying to repair a communications line 60 feet up a pole. Only once he described how, when the explosion went off he was suddenly stone deaf. He leaped down to the branches of a nearby tree, swung to ground and found cover from the Korean artillery assault. He carried that shrapnel the rest of his life. He never viewed his injury as worthy of the purple heart he earned because he didn’t have to stay in a hospital. A half a day in the battalion first aid station was enough to patch him up and send him back to his unit. He told me once, years later when I had joined the Marines, that he changed his mind about the medal when a young Lieutenant received one for slicing his thumb on a beer can. Hey, blood is blood.
He finished his tour and came home to his young, beautiful wife with his two-year-old son and tried to resume a normal 1952 existence. He tried to enroll in some courses at Michigan State University but it took only several days for the Korean War vet to learn that the aesthetics of an academic life was too effete for the man who had lived in the mud and ice and snow of Korea and who had out-marched the Chinese army one night to survive a trap. That is probably where his disdain for higher education blossomed.
I think my father sincerely tried to become the stereotypical 1950s father, head of the stereotypical 1950s family. But he was star-crossed often.
With higher education out of the picture and trade school hopes gone, he settled down in Charlotte trying to get on with the business of raising a family. He took a job as a “puller” in an aluminum extrusion plant. It was a mindless job. Later he got a promotion to “sawman.” Between the artillery in Korea and the high, constant whine in the metal saw shop, his hearing was shot before he was 30. But the American Dream persisted.
We lived, for a while, in a second story apartment on Cochran. I have no particular memories or images from inside that apartment, but I do have a recollection of the long porch-like structure on the second floor. It makes no sense to me now, why the building was built that way, but there it was. It is torn down now, like so much of my childhood. My mother, my father and I were walking down that porch one day, headed somewhere important because we were dressed up. Maybe it is because I was told this story by my mother enough (never by my father) but I think I recall a moment when Dad was there and suddenly he was not. A car backfired or some other loud sharp noise reached Dad and he just leaped over the pony wall that ran along the side of the porch. He jumped into the tree that grew there and disappeared. Mom and I hurried down the stairs and found him below, just fine, acting like nothing happened. Again, we didn’t talk about that much over the years.
We moved into our first house (a rental) sometime in 1953. My sister Crystal was born while we lived there. I think Mom was convinced that would be her life: lower middle class, two kids, stay-at-home mom (like all moms were). When Karla came along in 1954, my mother was not pleased. She blamed my father in front of others for that pregnancy. I think he took some kind of pride in having “tricked” her into a larger family.
I remember many things from our time on Munson Street (it was literally on the wrong side of town exactly next to the railroad tracks). Some memories are very sweet. Some are traumatic.
I remember a fishing trip to Duck Lake when I was five. We left before dawn. We found a giant bullfrog that morning and Dad dispatched it with the butt of a cane pole. We put it in the trunk of the car while we fished (and caught nothing). When we came home, we discovered the frog had regained consciousness and Dad had to kill it again. Then we ate frog legs. They really do jump in the skillet!
I remember Dad teaching me how to use a hammer. He often bought a half pound of roofing nails and I was permitted to pound them into an old stump we had in our triangular shaped back yard (the railroad tracks cut the corner off). By the time we moved from there in 1957, I had pretty much galvanized that stump. Mostly I did this without him nearby. Work became a solitary endeavor for 5-year-old me. And decidedly blue-collar.
In 1957 (the year the Mackinac Bridge opened), we moved to a small house outside of town on Lansing Road. (It may have been US 27 at that time, but I’m unclear.) Dad bought it privately on a land contract from a local entrepreneur named Sam Combs at 4% interest. (Here’s a little joke: Sam Combs was bald.)
It was bit of a dump, but it fit my dad’s idea of working class, bootstraps philosophy. It was a two bedroom, one bath with a Michigan basement under some of it and a crawlspace under most of it. An old fuel oil-fired furnace labored in the attic of the one story structure to blow heat through ceiling vents, a system that insured perpetually cold feet. An outdoor fuel oil tank was troublesome when temps fell below about 25°. But there was a tiny 4 room rental on the property which sometimes had tenants. (Not always since there was no bathroom, the renters had to use the privy (look it up). A big old barn, unused for years and a couple of dilapidated out-building sheds full of rusty everything. It didn’t take long to find out what a tetanus shot was.
Dad was the master of this vast empire. And provided a ton of sweat equity. And about six tons of extra sweat. Remember, this was the house we had no television in for about 2 years (maybe 3), no air conditioning ever, no heat when the fuel oil froze in the fuel tank, and no water all one summer when the pump went out. But we still believed we were middle class. Mom took a job in Lansing with the Mental Health Department to prove it. She had taken a course in Speed Writing which apparently was a version of shorthand but the course was cheaper and the textbook was free. So in addition to “taking memos” she also got an education typing and transcribing case records. I promise more on that story later. It was a typical inside/outside division of labor at home. Everything outside was Dad’s responsibility. Everything inside was Mom’s responsibility except the things she told Dad to do.
I hope there are chances to tell the stories of each of these elements of this house in the future. There seems to be a lot to say about them, but the question here is: “What was my father like?” He felt responsible for this home, this family. He did what he could to ensure our safety and our success within the (often self-imposed) limits he was facing. He made as many good decisions as he could and my mother sometimes let him take credit for good decisions she made. He also made some bad decisions and Mom never took much responsibility for those. In those days I believe they conferred on questions of family policy often and sometimes they got it right and sometimes they got it wrong…just like most of us.
One event that has always stuck in my mind happened at a time that Dad was under more stress than he let any of us understand. This was at the end of his first and longest employment with Aluminum Extrusions. He had (with a little reluctant help by me) planted a too-large garden. I think he was pretending he was a farmer and I was the eldest (only) son. We were to tame this land together. He also was planning on this food to help with the inevitable layoffs in his job. Except I thought a garden was a lot of work for a little reward. (And I still believe that if the only thing you are after is vegetables. You work your ass off all summer to be able to pick a few tomatoes at exactly the moment the market bottoms out because of a glut in supply.)
But here was Dad, busting his ass tending the cucumbers, knowing that the rest of his life looked pretty dismal at this point. Always laboring for the man in his non-union shop, subject to annual layoffs, and beginning to feel the effects of a life-long addiction to alcohol. His kids were growing up with interests in things outside of Dad’s experience, his wife was working outside the house (the humiliation was real back then). And his oldest son was a horrible gardener.
So, anyway, I was bitching about being out in the hot sun and not inside reading a book. And then I bitched about how my sisters were going to eat these onions too but I didn’t see them out in the garden weeding and cultivating and watering. Pretty typical for a smart-ass 14 year old, but I stopped when I looked up and saw a look on his face I had never seen before. It was a little bit scary.
He started yelling. Dad wasn’t much for shouting, but he let it fly on this day. Some internal restraint had given way.
“When you grow up, you better get a job with your head…” He screamed this at me while pounding the vegetables with the garden rake in his hands. “Because you sure as shit aren’t worth a damn with your hands!” And each time he swung the rake down, his feet came up off the ground and his long, skinny legs bent at the knees. He looked for all the world like a cartoon of himself. “I ask you to offer something toward living here…” The rake banged down again. “the least you could do is give an hour of your time,” Bang the rake. The scene lasted about 90 seconds and then it stopped, very suddenly. He went silent, I turned away (weirdly embarrassed) and tended to a different part of the garden and we never spoke about it with each other after. Never speaking about it was typical in our family.
My father was many things, but he was not given to screaming very often. I cannot recall him doing that to me again (although we had a huge falling out early in my senior year in high school). But something changed in my father that day. I think he stopped trying as hard.
I also mark that day as the change in our relationship, the end of my childhood with my father, if you will. Our interaction after that was less friendly, more distant. That never changed until the day I came home and told him I had enlisted in the Marine Corps. That began a new relationship with him, adult-to-adult, sort of.
I want to make it clear that I loved my father, but often it was in spite of himself.
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