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Today's memory comes to us from reader T.A. in San Francisco, CA:
I'm a long-time reader of your excellent site and all the recent stories about fathers has moved me to write you and tell some of the story of my father.
John was born in 1910 in the Iron Range in northern Minnesota and while he grew up during the Great Depression, he was lucky enough to get to go to the University of Minnesota. When he graduated in 1933, he put his new wife June—a fellow U of M student—in the front seat of his old car, along with everything else he owned, and drove west to California, where he'd heard there were jobs. He wasn't technically an "Okie" because he didn't come from that state, but many of the old pictures he and Mom took on that trip looked like a lot of Dorothea Lange photographs. They stayed in camps in the Central Valley of California. To the day they died, they hated the term "Okie."
My brother, John Jr., was born in 1940 and when World War II began, Dad went into the Merchant Marine. He made a number of the "run to Murmansk" trips, where Navy destroyers would escort large convoys of various goods from the U.S. east coast, up around Scandinavia, to the only ice-free port in Russia. As you know, the U.S. was a lifeline to Russia during that time. The 2020 Tom Hanks movie Greyhound was about those convoys. I've got a picture of dad on his ship, where he is manning a gun crew on the bow, on the lookout both for ice floes and U-boats. Behind him in the picture are icicles hanging from the gun barrel and the chains on the edges of the deck. It must have been very, very cold.
In 1945, he, like thousands of other men in uniform, was sailing around the western Pacific Ocean, waiting for the invasion of Japan to begin. He passed away in 1979 and Mom passed in 1981, and after she died, we found a batch of letters from him, tied with a red ribbon and tucked away in the back of a dresser drawer. Dad wrote about how everyone on the ship listened to the Armed Forces Radio news every day, and his letter from Aug. 6 talked about the news report of a "new type of bomb" that had been dropped on Japan. No more information was given, but rumors on the ship began that the war with Japan might end. And 3 days later, there was another "new type of bomb" dropped and all their prayers were answered.
While Dad was at war, Mom did her job on the home front. She moved to Los Angeles, where she got a job in the Douglas aircraft plant, and since she was only 5'1", short even by the female standards of the day, she became a literal Rosie the Riveter. It was her job to crawl up in the planes' tail section with a rivet gun and make sure everything was buttoned down and ready to go.
After the war, Dad went to work for the California prison system. He didn't particularly like it, but—as a child of the Depression—he used to say it was a safe job, that we'd always need prisons, which is true, of course.
Dad worked most of his career at Folsom State Prison outside Sacramento; It was the state's only maximum security prison for most of his 20+ years there. He became a senior figure at the prison and traveled to a lot of other prisons, where he met, and interacted with, a number of California's most notorious criminals—Charles Manson, Juan Corona, Sirhan Sirhan, and Caryl Chessman, among others. He also dealt with Robert Stroud, the famous "Birdman of Alcatraz," a number of times. He thought the 1962 movie with Burt Lancaster portrayed Stroud way too kindly. I remember him telling me, "Prison is full a lot of the most awful people but of them all, Bob Stroud was the worst by far. He was the most awful, cruel, utterly mean human being I ever meant."
A couple of other movie notes. Folsom was a popular spot for movie shots, at least on the outside, because it looks like what it is—a hulking, dark prison. Dad was an extra in a number of movies, including the 1954 movie Riot in Cell Block 11.
And while he had long since passed away when the 2005 Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line came out, he did "play" a small role in it. As the movie opens, Joaquin Phoenix (Cash) is getting ready for his famous 1968 concert at the prison and inmates can be heard in the background. The opening shows Phoenix talking with a couple of prison officials and signing some legal documents, including a "hold harmless" agreement for the prison and the state, because he's in a potentially dangerous situation and could be injured or taken hostage. One of those officials was my dad.
P.S.: My brother, John Jr., was an early graduate of the Air Force Academy and became a fighter pilot who flew many missions in Vietnam during the war. He came home, only to be killed in 1976 during a training flight at Nellis AFB in Nevada. What an utter waste—surviving a year in combat only to die in a training accident.
Thanks, T.A. (Z)