As we all round into a Fourth of July weekend in which the entire structure of the American democratic republic seems to have been revealed to have rotted away from within, I’ve thought this weekend about how we got here. Over the years, I have had friends tell me that when I say the words “My country,” there is a “pride of ownership” in the tone. That’s true. It is My Country because my ancestors first came here a century before the United States of America was a country, and all after them made contributions at risk of their lives to insure this this country lives up to the words “All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.”
Magnificent, Thomas McKelvey Cleaver. What a powerful personal history to draw from. Although I have heroes in my family, including Cousin Willy (Wm. Ewen Shipp), who was killed leading his Troop F in the charge on San Juan Hill (we have a handwritten letter from Theodore Roosevelt attesting to his bravery), I wish I had more details of earlier family history. My father ( Ewen Cameron Shipp) said we Shipps are direct descendants of Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochiel (1629-1719), the Scottish Highland chieftain. A man of enormous bulk, he was known for his feats of strength and ferocity in combat. My family members are above average in height, but the only relative I know who might have matched the chief in girth is Great Aunt Kate (Catherine Cameron Shipp) founder of Fassifern School for Girls in Lincolnton and later Hendersonville, NC. She was 6 feet tall and weighed 300 lbs. Often called "the Shipp of State."
Thanks for your invocation of all those forebearers to mark a place in your passage, and, by your gesture, in our passage. I know only the story of my father, who served in the OSS in the Second World War, although he rarely talked about it. I learned at his memorial service that he won a bronze star for saving some of the Doolittle fliers from the jungle, those who had bailed out after their bombing run, only making it to Indochina. He did tell me once that at a particularly dicey moment when their hiding location came under control of both the Chinese and/or maybe the French, their radio went dead… running out of ideas of how to reach HQ, he walked up to the telegraph counter and sent a telegram. It got through and their escape was secured. He was a true conservative all his life, a back-room king-maker for the Republican party, but in his final years, he led a campaign to end “The War on Drugs” The law that reformed many aspects of the state’s drug policies was passed the year after he died but it has his name in the title.
Just yesterday I was thinking of him as I fell into deep mourning over the death of our democracy, happening gradually and then all at once. I wondered if Dad would have come out against the Kleptocrats, since he was born into their tribe, and spent a good part of his life as a lawyer defending their corporate interests. I think we could now have one of our first truly constructive debates on the politics of our country. The dismantling of the EPA; I’m not so sure where he’d go with that… I think he was a probably a founding member of the Federalist Society, but I will never know.
In this summer of the death of our democracy, and the dismantling of our fight against the climate crisis (thus the impending end of our civilization as we know it), I have searched for solace in the thoughts of writers, and, one by one, skipped on to the next, until I finally came to the credo of the original Native Americans.
All of us Americans who have lived in the golden age of the last half of the 20th century have become powerless to defend ourselves from our usurpers, to even understand the true danger of their strategy operating in the guise of conservative Republicans, just as, 200 years ago, the Native Americans living in harmony with their lands, and their spirits, couldn’t understand the usurpers who took their lives, who sundered their civilization… who couldn’t understand how they could so cleverly hide their intentions in treaties and arrangements based on good will.
Nothing can stop our usurpers now, nothing short of a general nationwide strike, and the liberals can’t even agree on the legislation they’re going to pass if they win an election that’s already been lost, rigged by the usurpers' voter-suppression laws.
Those of us who have not understood the power of the kleptocrats’ strategy, BOTH the liberals with our ideals, and the conservatives who were hornswoggled by ТЯцм₽ and his puppet-masters… we are all in a camouflaged PTSD, like those North Plains Indians in Edward Curtis’s sepia photographs, unbelieving.
TC, I have a Thomas relative from Wales who settled in Pennsylvania. I'll need to look further for his name and the dates that go with it. What an amazing family history you have! I really enjoyed reading this, especially today, when it's hard to muster much hope.
The low estate of our noble experiment in self-government saddens me, and I fear the current Democratic leadership is not up to the task, given their usual practice of bringing a butter knife to a gunfight..... There are plenty of feisty leaders in the party, but they are not in positions of power and the ancient ones who are will not exit stage left - they are hanging on to the bitter end, which more and more looks as though it will be more bitter for anyone not to the right of Attila the Hun.....
Dear Tom, you brought America closer to me on this Independence Day. Learning the origins of your great, great, great... grandfathers; following their steps through the American Revolution; reading the words of Tom Paine; being acquainted with their practice as Quakers and Abolitionists and residents of the state of Pennsylvania …changed the day. I unintentionally missed seeing Nadel play at Wimbledon because I sat with WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT. It is also the story of ‘My Country’. A story of flight, change, adaptation, danger, sacrifice, service, and fortitude. Alive, personal, and serious. I was sitting with America. There was a moment of dread toward the end of your story when I thought you might bury patient America. I have haltingly reached for the shovel and stopped. You cannot let her go and neither can I.
My family’s story on both sides is one of Jews escaping the fascists, antisemitism and murder in Hungary, Austria, and Poland. They came to America in the early 1900’s and settled NYC’s lower east side among other Jews who fled. You know how they lived if you’ve seen pictures of the tenements, pushcart vendors on Orchard and Grand Streets, and Yiddish theaters along Second Avenue.
My grandmother died when my mother, Ruth, was eight years old. She was one of 10 children. My grandfather, Saul, worked as a butcher. The family was poor and so was everyone else around them. Ruth was an alert child and eager to learn. You had to be able to read before taking out a book from the library, so she went there and memorized what a couple of people read to the librarian. In no time, little Ruthie was taking books out of the library. Mother rose in life to be a court stenographer in the Supreme Court of New York.
Both of my grandmother’s died before I was born. Grandfather on my father’s side, Davis, was a patternmaker in the garment center. I had the best winter coats in the world. Father, Harry, was a curly haired redhead with freckles. He was a runner, a tennis player and real-estate lawyer for mostly regular folks. A great achievement on my mother's part was convincing my father to buy a modest house In Bayside, Queens, so our family of four, brother Robert was four years younger than I, could move out of our 3-room apartment in the Bronx.
Beautifully written, Tom, as always. I applaud your extensive knowledge of your family's history - many of us do not know the details as you have described here..... I actually know little of my father's line at all, other than the lineage is now preserved by Ancestry.com. His mother was the family geneologist but much of her work was lost after she died. She painted heraldry coats of arms, and my mother had the one from a line of our ancestors, the Stewarts from Scotland. One of my ancestors was James Stewart, who married Joan Beaufort, the widow of James I of Scotland, and thus became the stepfather to James II of Scotland.
On my mother's side, my grandmother was a Preble from Boston, who knew Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. Her ancestors included Jedidiah Preble, who fought in military campaigns in the 18th century, and in the American Revolution, rising to the rank of General. His son, Commodore Edward Preble, later commanded the US naval squadron that campaigned against the Barbary pirates in 1804-5. He sent Stephen Decatur ashore to burn the frigate "Philadelphia" to keep it from the Tripoli pirates. He is also considered one of the fathers of the American Navy for his attention to discipline and tactics (all his commands were to be ready to fight on short notice). The young officers under his command in the Tripoli campaign became known as "Preble's Boys" and included Stephen Decatur, William Bainbridge, Charles Stewart, Isaac Hull, Thomas Macdonough, James Lawrence, and David Porter. I am told that several drill fields at US Navy installations are called Preble Field.
My mother's father was a descendant of Huguenots from France, whose family arrived in the early 19th century. He was a major in the US Army medical corps and served with Dr. Walter Reed in the Panama Canal Zone, fighting yellow fever. He contracted miliary tuberculosis in the early 1920s and was medically retired - told he had six months, he lived another 35 years. A polyglot and varied background, much of which I learned from the Ancestry chart my brother gave me.
WOW. you've been coming out with fantastic posts these last weeks, but this one was your most beautiful. my own ancestral history is (as is common with NYC Ashkenazi Jews) a little murky although, oddly enough, I only recently discovered a LOT of family history from the old country (I might have told this story elsewhere) on my father's side. some family members on my mother's paternal side have that part of the family going back to the revolution, fighting under Lafayette. it actually disturbed me to find actual relatives going back that far because I enjoyed the sense I had that we were all relative newcomers and, therefore, LESS invested in this country's history. it might not be okay to say something like that on a "patriotic day," but, slightly amending Dr. Johnson, I've always felt that patriotism is the refuge of a scoundrel, first, middle and last. but that's just me. if anyone in my family fought in the Civil War, it would have had to have been on the wrong side, but I have no idea. my mom's paternal side had deep roots in Kentucky. on her maternal side, her grandfather showed up in Little Rock peddling matches after a few years on the Lower East Side, fell in love with the daughter of the rooming house he was staying in, married her and invited his several brothers to join him down south. one of those brothers turned one department store into a chain and, essentially, owned Dermot, Arkansas. my father's parents arrived in NYC in 1904 for the usual reasons. my father's father had sixteen male siblings, all of whom ended up living within a square half-mile of each other in the Bronx. none of them was religious and most of them called themselves "Socialists," although a few of them became pretty hard right, agreeing with the editorial pages of the Daily News and Daily Mirror. all of their male children enlisted after either the Hitler-Stalin pact or Pearl Harbor. my father tried the Navy, but scented some active Jew-hating in the questionnaire, so he and the rest of the gang he was with got up and left for an Army recruiting station. as I've told you elsewhere, he volunteered for the AAC, washed out of pilot school and became a navigator. in Navigation school in Monroe, LA, he attended a party for Jewish AAF guys to meet nice Jewish girls and one of them was my mother, who was 15 (he was 20). a few of my uncles were medics. I have very strong memories of going around the city with my father and hearing the conversations he'd have with other vets. the one specific thing I do remember is that if someone said that he'd been at "The Bulge," nobody said anything for ten or twenty seconds, but they were very LONG seconds. but throughout the fifties, "The War" was talked about very, very frequently. I'd like to know about that shadowy part of my mother's side, but it's much too late for that--any actual source is gone.
the rest of your post is one I go along with in just about every detail, which is not exactly a secret on this particular site. I remain pessimistic about our shared future, even though I actually tend to be a pretty optimistic person.
I DO feel a lot of rage, which this particular holiday tends to stoke up, although this year it's a lot more focused and specific than I remember it being on previous Fourths. I have no idea if this is better or worse.
That is a fascinating family history, Tom. Thanks for sharing it. I loved the canteen anecdote.
Sad to admit, but all I know of my family history is that my mother’s parents came to the U.S. in 1905 from Odessa (then Russia, now Ukraine), and I am proud that the descendants of those who stayed there are now valiantly fighting for their freedom in the face of what I hope won’t be overwhelming odds, and I am proud to have Ukrainian blood in my veins. My grandfather, Mendel, worked in the Philadelphia Navy Yard and died of diphtheria, leaving my grandmother, Jenny, to raise her seven children all by herself at age 38.
My dad’s parents came to New York from Poland (or The Pale). My grandfather, Max, was a tailor who worked for Howard Clothes. With his meager wages, he always managed to buy books and records. That love of music and literature, and of doing good in the world, was in my father’s genes, and is in mine. His wife, Sara, died in her 50s of cancer. She was a sweet, petite woman, who gave me my frame.
Great story, TC. Greater meaning. I know I should be heartened, but the Wollbergs are a morose bunch by nature, so I still see our future with great trepidation.
My family history is rather obscured by the years. On my mothers side we can trace ourselves to the two brothers Cummings traveling by raft down the Mississippi a couple decades before the Civil War. We do not know from where they came. One got off in Arkansas territory, from whence my mother’s family derived. The other decided to float down to New Orleans, and was never heard from again. Supposedly my mother’s ancestor got rich in the timber business. His first wife died, and his second wife came with two daughters. When he died the second wife and stepdaughters squandered all the money, leaving his progeny destitute, which is how they stayed well into the 20th century. Ultimately his great grandson, my grandfather, was a mule skinner working in the log woods of central Arkansas, living in itinerant tent camps, moving from grove to grove. My mother had no shoes until she was 5 years old. Prosperity did not arrive until WWII, when relatives wrote to tell them of jobs aplenty in the aircraft factories in San Diego, California. And so they packed up and headed west.
My father’s family were from Germany originally. I have no idea how his mother’s side, the Naumbergs, ended up in America. I just know my grandmother was first generation American born in New York in the 1890s. My fathers’ grandfather came from sausage makers in Berlin. When he got married, his family gave he and his bride, as a wedding gift, one way tickets to America. I’m not sure when. The family Bible which recorded all the doings with the family was stolen from the trunk in which it was kept, stored in the garage of the small apartment in which Grandma and Grandpa lived (probably by the landlord). Grandpa Wollberg was also first generation American. He and Grandma made their way to Nebraska, became farmers, went bust during the Dustbowl, scraped up enough funds to buy the garbage truck in the nearest town, and made a decent (if unglamorous) living.
We have no tales of marshal glory in my family. On my mother’s side there was one relative who fought in the Civil War. On both sides. From time to time. He was lucky enough to be in an Union outfit when the war ended. On my father’s side only my father served, during WWII. He wanted to enlist in the Navy when he was 17. That would require his mother’s consent and, because he couldn’t swim, she would only consent to enlistment in the Army. (He held that against her the rest of his life). He served in the Pacific in a unit deployed only for battlefield cleanup, generally arriving two or three days after an engagement. (Yes, the scene was horrific; don’t think about it.) He was shot one time, through the buttocks while sitting on a coconut cleaning his rifle. His unit had been sent out on a make-work reconnaissance patrol. The lieutenant called for a rest and sent one fellow out front to scout. That fellow got turned around out in the jungle and came up behind what he thought was a platoon of Japanese soldiers. He panicked and started shooting. In addition to my father, one fellow was shot through the spine and paralyzed, and another was killed. The guy that did the shooting went nuts after he realized what he did; my father was told the guy never recovered his sanity.
My father came home after the war, with his medals, including the Purple Heart, in his pocket. He never talked much about the war. After he passed I learned he’d been awarded a Bronze Star, too.
Both sides of my grandparents came from immigrants, two from a country that did not exist at that time, being a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire or of Imperial Russia, and the other pair from a country that bankrupted itself fighting a war against the Russian Empire. I doubt either set of ancestors would be welcome in today’s ‘Murikkka the way things are going. But then I live in a state where almost everyone is from some mixed cultural and ethnic potpourri, so I pretty much blend in, but I can relate to being picked on for being different, being a “haole” boy in Paradise. Perhaps the rest of the country can learn something from Hawaii…it’s not perfect by any means, but it can work if people try.
OMG! Brilliant! Thank you so very much for this wonderful piece of writing and of history that is as alive today as it was long ago! I think President Zelensky would appreciate Thomas Paine's writing today given the tyranny the Ukrainians are fighting and by extension all those nations striving for democracy despite the power of money to turn everything on its head. What a GREAT piece!
Thanks for a beautiful bit of family history. Some thoughts about my family (I wish I had more details):
My mother Dorothy was born in Los Angeles in 1920; her parents had recently relocated from the Midwest to California. Her mother was from an Indiana pioneer family, who came to that county from western Pennsylvania in the early 1800’s. Her grandfather had served in the US Indiana Volunteers and was wounded in the Civil War. Dorothy’s father was from a German emigrant family that settled in Nebraska in the 1870’s.
My father Victor was the first US born of his family, who emigrated to the US from Britain about 1910. Using musical and athletic talent he managed an Annapolis appointment and graduated in Feb. 1941. He was assigned to the aircraft carrier Enterprise CV-6 on the west coast, and while the ship visited San Diego, he met my mother. He invited her to visit him at the ship’s new home port, Pearl Harbor, Oahu. She came in late November on the SS Lurline with a girlfriend. Vic invited Dorothy to dinner at the Royal Hawaiian, proposed, and she accepted. The following day Vic’s ship went to sea for a supposedly routine day cruise to allow carrier qualifications. After a Marine squadron landed aboard, however, the pilots and ship's crew were in for a shock. Admiral Halsey commanding the task force gave the crew a now famous document, Battle Order Number One. Secret orders were issued to proceed to Wake Island 2000 miles west, which Naval Intelligence guessed would soon be a target of attack by Japan. The Marine squadron was ordered to stay at Wake to provide its air defense. Aircraft and ship's guns were armed and ordered to fire on any unidentified ships, planes, or subs. Armed air patrols were ordered every day.
Back on Oahu on Nov. 29th, Dorothy's fiancé failed to show for another date in Honolulu. She called and visited Pearl Harbor trying to find Victor. Nobody would tell her anything. Needless to say, she was not happy with the Navy. She spent the remaining days in Oahu with her girlfriend, hanging out on the beach and learning to surf. The Lurline sailed on Dec. 3 for California. On Dec. 7 the Lurline, while several hundred miles west of California, received an SOS from a freighter a few hundred miles north that was being shelled by a submarine. An hour later a confirmation was received that Oahu was under attack. The Lurline went to maximum speed and zigzagged the remainder of the voyage, fortunately avoiding attack.
What happened to Vic and the Enterprise next is history (see TC’s book ‘I Will Run Wild’). He and the ship survived 1942 just barely, with many casualties, and Vic made it back to San Diego in Feb. 1943 to marry Dorothy. He returned to the war in 1945 as a Corsair pilot with VBF-88 aboard the Yorktown CV-10. He was awarded a DFC, 3 Air Medals, and downed two enemy aircraft in operations over Japan in July – August 1945. On the last morning of the war he flew a mission to protect search seaplanes looking for survivors of perhaps the last dogfight of the war.
Honestly, TC, this is such an achingly beautiful accounting of both your family and the birth of a nation. "What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value." I, too, feel that this is part of the rot at our core as a nation. It's also why I feel so strongly that this nation of immigrants needs to continue to be a nation of immigrants. The focus on hope of a better life elevates all. Your ancestors would be so proud of your continuing push for this country to live up to her ideals.
Fascinating, TC! What an amazing family history. Thank you for telling it with such zest and well-deserved pride! By the way, I wouldn’t give up either!
Magnificent, Thomas McKelvey Cleaver. What a powerful personal history to draw from. Although I have heroes in my family, including Cousin Willy (Wm. Ewen Shipp), who was killed leading his Troop F in the charge on San Juan Hill (we have a handwritten letter from Theodore Roosevelt attesting to his bravery), I wish I had more details of earlier family history. My father ( Ewen Cameron Shipp) said we Shipps are direct descendants of Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochiel (1629-1719), the Scottish Highland chieftain. A man of enormous bulk, he was known for his feats of strength and ferocity in combat. My family members are above average in height, but the only relative I know who might have matched the chief in girth is Great Aunt Kate (Catherine Cameron Shipp) founder of Fassifern School for Girls in Lincolnton and later Hendersonville, NC. She was 6 feet tall and weighed 300 lbs. Often called "the Shipp of State."
Thanks for your invocation of all those forebearers to mark a place in your passage, and, by your gesture, in our passage. I know only the story of my father, who served in the OSS in the Second World War, although he rarely talked about it. I learned at his memorial service that he won a bronze star for saving some of the Doolittle fliers from the jungle, those who had bailed out after their bombing run, only making it to Indochina. He did tell me once that at a particularly dicey moment when their hiding location came under control of both the Chinese and/or maybe the French, their radio went dead… running out of ideas of how to reach HQ, he walked up to the telegraph counter and sent a telegram. It got through and their escape was secured. He was a true conservative all his life, a back-room king-maker for the Republican party, but in his final years, he led a campaign to end “The War on Drugs” The law that reformed many aspects of the state’s drug policies was passed the year after he died but it has his name in the title.
Just yesterday I was thinking of him as I fell into deep mourning over the death of our democracy, happening gradually and then all at once. I wondered if Dad would have come out against the Kleptocrats, since he was born into their tribe, and spent a good part of his life as a lawyer defending their corporate interests. I think we could now have one of our first truly constructive debates on the politics of our country. The dismantling of the EPA; I’m not so sure where he’d go with that… I think he was a probably a founding member of the Federalist Society, but I will never know.
In this summer of the death of our democracy, and the dismantling of our fight against the climate crisis (thus the impending end of our civilization as we know it), I have searched for solace in the thoughts of writers, and, one by one, skipped on to the next, until I finally came to the credo of the original Native Americans.
All of us Americans who have lived in the golden age of the last half of the 20th century have become powerless to defend ourselves from our usurpers, to even understand the true danger of their strategy operating in the guise of conservative Republicans, just as, 200 years ago, the Native Americans living in harmony with their lands, and their spirits, couldn’t understand the usurpers who took their lives, who sundered their civilization… who couldn’t understand how they could so cleverly hide their intentions in treaties and arrangements based on good will.
Nothing can stop our usurpers now, nothing short of a general nationwide strike, and the liberals can’t even agree on the legislation they’re going to pass if they win an election that’s already been lost, rigged by the usurpers' voter-suppression laws.
Those of us who have not understood the power of the kleptocrats’ strategy, BOTH the liberals with our ideals, and the conservatives who were hornswoggled by ТЯцм₽ and his puppet-masters… we are all in a camouflaged PTSD, like those North Plains Indians in Edward Curtis’s sepia photographs, unbelieving.
TC, I have a Thomas relative from Wales who settled in Pennsylvania. I'll need to look further for his name and the dates that go with it. What an amazing family history you have! I really enjoyed reading this, especially today, when it's hard to muster much hope.
The low estate of our noble experiment in self-government saddens me, and I fear the current Democratic leadership is not up to the task, given their usual practice of bringing a butter knife to a gunfight..... There are plenty of feisty leaders in the party, but they are not in positions of power and the ancient ones who are will not exit stage left - they are hanging on to the bitter end, which more and more looks as though it will be more bitter for anyone not to the right of Attila the Hun.....
Dear Tom, you brought America closer to me on this Independence Day. Learning the origins of your great, great, great... grandfathers; following their steps through the American Revolution; reading the words of Tom Paine; being acquainted with their practice as Quakers and Abolitionists and residents of the state of Pennsylvania …changed the day. I unintentionally missed seeing Nadel play at Wimbledon because I sat with WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT. It is also the story of ‘My Country’. A story of flight, change, adaptation, danger, sacrifice, service, and fortitude. Alive, personal, and serious. I was sitting with America. There was a moment of dread toward the end of your story when I thought you might bury patient America. I have haltingly reached for the shovel and stopped. You cannot let her go and neither can I.
My family’s story on both sides is one of Jews escaping the fascists, antisemitism and murder in Hungary, Austria, and Poland. They came to America in the early 1900’s and settled NYC’s lower east side among other Jews who fled. You know how they lived if you’ve seen pictures of the tenements, pushcart vendors on Orchard and Grand Streets, and Yiddish theaters along Second Avenue.
My grandmother died when my mother, Ruth, was eight years old. She was one of 10 children. My grandfather, Saul, worked as a butcher. The family was poor and so was everyone else around them. Ruth was an alert child and eager to learn. You had to be able to read before taking out a book from the library, so she went there and memorized what a couple of people read to the librarian. In no time, little Ruthie was taking books out of the library. Mother rose in life to be a court stenographer in the Supreme Court of New York.
Both of my grandmother’s died before I was born. Grandfather on my father’s side, Davis, was a patternmaker in the garment center. I had the best winter coats in the world. Father, Harry, was a curly haired redhead with freckles. He was a runner, a tennis player and real-estate lawyer for mostly regular folks. A great achievement on my mother's part was convincing my father to buy a modest house In Bayside, Queens, so our family of four, brother Robert was four years younger than I, could move out of our 3-room apartment in the Bronx.
Beautifully written, Tom, as always. I applaud your extensive knowledge of your family's history - many of us do not know the details as you have described here..... I actually know little of my father's line at all, other than the lineage is now preserved by Ancestry.com. His mother was the family geneologist but much of her work was lost after she died. She painted heraldry coats of arms, and my mother had the one from a line of our ancestors, the Stewarts from Scotland. One of my ancestors was James Stewart, who married Joan Beaufort, the widow of James I of Scotland, and thus became the stepfather to James II of Scotland.
On my mother's side, my grandmother was a Preble from Boston, who knew Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. Her ancestors included Jedidiah Preble, who fought in military campaigns in the 18th century, and in the American Revolution, rising to the rank of General. His son, Commodore Edward Preble, later commanded the US naval squadron that campaigned against the Barbary pirates in 1804-5. He sent Stephen Decatur ashore to burn the frigate "Philadelphia" to keep it from the Tripoli pirates. He is also considered one of the fathers of the American Navy for his attention to discipline and tactics (all his commands were to be ready to fight on short notice). The young officers under his command in the Tripoli campaign became known as "Preble's Boys" and included Stephen Decatur, William Bainbridge, Charles Stewart, Isaac Hull, Thomas Macdonough, James Lawrence, and David Porter. I am told that several drill fields at US Navy installations are called Preble Field.
My mother's father was a descendant of Huguenots from France, whose family arrived in the early 19th century. He was a major in the US Army medical corps and served with Dr. Walter Reed in the Panama Canal Zone, fighting yellow fever. He contracted miliary tuberculosis in the early 1920s and was medically retired - told he had six months, he lived another 35 years. A polyglot and varied background, much of which I learned from the Ancestry chart my brother gave me.
WOW. you've been coming out with fantastic posts these last weeks, but this one was your most beautiful. my own ancestral history is (as is common with NYC Ashkenazi Jews) a little murky although, oddly enough, I only recently discovered a LOT of family history from the old country (I might have told this story elsewhere) on my father's side. some family members on my mother's paternal side have that part of the family going back to the revolution, fighting under Lafayette. it actually disturbed me to find actual relatives going back that far because I enjoyed the sense I had that we were all relative newcomers and, therefore, LESS invested in this country's history. it might not be okay to say something like that on a "patriotic day," but, slightly amending Dr. Johnson, I've always felt that patriotism is the refuge of a scoundrel, first, middle and last. but that's just me. if anyone in my family fought in the Civil War, it would have had to have been on the wrong side, but I have no idea. my mom's paternal side had deep roots in Kentucky. on her maternal side, her grandfather showed up in Little Rock peddling matches after a few years on the Lower East Side, fell in love with the daughter of the rooming house he was staying in, married her and invited his several brothers to join him down south. one of those brothers turned one department store into a chain and, essentially, owned Dermot, Arkansas. my father's parents arrived in NYC in 1904 for the usual reasons. my father's father had sixteen male siblings, all of whom ended up living within a square half-mile of each other in the Bronx. none of them was religious and most of them called themselves "Socialists," although a few of them became pretty hard right, agreeing with the editorial pages of the Daily News and Daily Mirror. all of their male children enlisted after either the Hitler-Stalin pact or Pearl Harbor. my father tried the Navy, but scented some active Jew-hating in the questionnaire, so he and the rest of the gang he was with got up and left for an Army recruiting station. as I've told you elsewhere, he volunteered for the AAC, washed out of pilot school and became a navigator. in Navigation school in Monroe, LA, he attended a party for Jewish AAF guys to meet nice Jewish girls and one of them was my mother, who was 15 (he was 20). a few of my uncles were medics. I have very strong memories of going around the city with my father and hearing the conversations he'd have with other vets. the one specific thing I do remember is that if someone said that he'd been at "The Bulge," nobody said anything for ten or twenty seconds, but they were very LONG seconds. but throughout the fifties, "The War" was talked about very, very frequently. I'd like to know about that shadowy part of my mother's side, but it's much too late for that--any actual source is gone.
the rest of your post is one I go along with in just about every detail, which is not exactly a secret on this particular site. I remain pessimistic about our shared future, even though I actually tend to be a pretty optimistic person.
I DO feel a lot of rage, which this particular holiday tends to stoke up, although this year it's a lot more focused and specific than I remember it being on previous Fourths. I have no idea if this is better or worse.
That is a fascinating family history, Tom. Thanks for sharing it. I loved the canteen anecdote.
Sad to admit, but all I know of my family history is that my mother’s parents came to the U.S. in 1905 from Odessa (then Russia, now Ukraine), and I am proud that the descendants of those who stayed there are now valiantly fighting for their freedom in the face of what I hope won’t be overwhelming odds, and I am proud to have Ukrainian blood in my veins. My grandfather, Mendel, worked in the Philadelphia Navy Yard and died of diphtheria, leaving my grandmother, Jenny, to raise her seven children all by herself at age 38.
My dad’s parents came to New York from Poland (or The Pale). My grandfather, Max, was a tailor who worked for Howard Clothes. With his meager wages, he always managed to buy books and records. That love of music and literature, and of doing good in the world, was in my father’s genes, and is in mine. His wife, Sara, died in her 50s of cancer. She was a sweet, petite woman, who gave me my frame.
Great story, TC. Greater meaning. I know I should be heartened, but the Wollbergs are a morose bunch by nature, so I still see our future with great trepidation.
My family history is rather obscured by the years. On my mothers side we can trace ourselves to the two brothers Cummings traveling by raft down the Mississippi a couple decades before the Civil War. We do not know from where they came. One got off in Arkansas territory, from whence my mother’s family derived. The other decided to float down to New Orleans, and was never heard from again. Supposedly my mother’s ancestor got rich in the timber business. His first wife died, and his second wife came with two daughters. When he died the second wife and stepdaughters squandered all the money, leaving his progeny destitute, which is how they stayed well into the 20th century. Ultimately his great grandson, my grandfather, was a mule skinner working in the log woods of central Arkansas, living in itinerant tent camps, moving from grove to grove. My mother had no shoes until she was 5 years old. Prosperity did not arrive until WWII, when relatives wrote to tell them of jobs aplenty in the aircraft factories in San Diego, California. And so they packed up and headed west.
My father’s family were from Germany originally. I have no idea how his mother’s side, the Naumbergs, ended up in America. I just know my grandmother was first generation American born in New York in the 1890s. My fathers’ grandfather came from sausage makers in Berlin. When he got married, his family gave he and his bride, as a wedding gift, one way tickets to America. I’m not sure when. The family Bible which recorded all the doings with the family was stolen from the trunk in which it was kept, stored in the garage of the small apartment in which Grandma and Grandpa lived (probably by the landlord). Grandpa Wollberg was also first generation American. He and Grandma made their way to Nebraska, became farmers, went bust during the Dustbowl, scraped up enough funds to buy the garbage truck in the nearest town, and made a decent (if unglamorous) living.
We have no tales of marshal glory in my family. On my mother’s side there was one relative who fought in the Civil War. On both sides. From time to time. He was lucky enough to be in an Union outfit when the war ended. On my father’s side only my father served, during WWII. He wanted to enlist in the Navy when he was 17. That would require his mother’s consent and, because he couldn’t swim, she would only consent to enlistment in the Army. (He held that against her the rest of his life). He served in the Pacific in a unit deployed only for battlefield cleanup, generally arriving two or three days after an engagement. (Yes, the scene was horrific; don’t think about it.) He was shot one time, through the buttocks while sitting on a coconut cleaning his rifle. His unit had been sent out on a make-work reconnaissance patrol. The lieutenant called for a rest and sent one fellow out front to scout. That fellow got turned around out in the jungle and came up behind what he thought was a platoon of Japanese soldiers. He panicked and started shooting. In addition to my father, one fellow was shot through the spine and paralyzed, and another was killed. The guy that did the shooting went nuts after he realized what he did; my father was told the guy never recovered his sanity.
My father came home after the war, with his medals, including the Purple Heart, in his pocket. He never talked much about the war. After he passed I learned he’d been awarded a Bronze Star, too.
Happy Independence Day, everyone.
I agree - magnificent TC! Thank you
Both sides of my grandparents came from immigrants, two from a country that did not exist at that time, being a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire or of Imperial Russia, and the other pair from a country that bankrupted itself fighting a war against the Russian Empire. I doubt either set of ancestors would be welcome in today’s ‘Murikkka the way things are going. But then I live in a state where almost everyone is from some mixed cultural and ethnic potpourri, so I pretty much blend in, but I can relate to being picked on for being different, being a “haole” boy in Paradise. Perhaps the rest of the country can learn something from Hawaii…it’s not perfect by any means, but it can work if people try.
Thank you Tom, for sharing and furthering my education. I too hope your ancestors' efforts shall not have been in vain.
OMG! Brilliant! Thank you so very much for this wonderful piece of writing and of history that is as alive today as it was long ago! I think President Zelensky would appreciate Thomas Paine's writing today given the tyranny the Ukrainians are fighting and by extension all those nations striving for democracy despite the power of money to turn everything on its head. What a GREAT piece!
Thanks for a beautiful bit of family history. Some thoughts about my family (I wish I had more details):
My mother Dorothy was born in Los Angeles in 1920; her parents had recently relocated from the Midwest to California. Her mother was from an Indiana pioneer family, who came to that county from western Pennsylvania in the early 1800’s. Her grandfather had served in the US Indiana Volunteers and was wounded in the Civil War. Dorothy’s father was from a German emigrant family that settled in Nebraska in the 1870’s.
My father Victor was the first US born of his family, who emigrated to the US from Britain about 1910. Using musical and athletic talent he managed an Annapolis appointment and graduated in Feb. 1941. He was assigned to the aircraft carrier Enterprise CV-6 on the west coast, and while the ship visited San Diego, he met my mother. He invited her to visit him at the ship’s new home port, Pearl Harbor, Oahu. She came in late November on the SS Lurline with a girlfriend. Vic invited Dorothy to dinner at the Royal Hawaiian, proposed, and she accepted. The following day Vic’s ship went to sea for a supposedly routine day cruise to allow carrier qualifications. After a Marine squadron landed aboard, however, the pilots and ship's crew were in for a shock. Admiral Halsey commanding the task force gave the crew a now famous document, Battle Order Number One. Secret orders were issued to proceed to Wake Island 2000 miles west, which Naval Intelligence guessed would soon be a target of attack by Japan. The Marine squadron was ordered to stay at Wake to provide its air defense. Aircraft and ship's guns were armed and ordered to fire on any unidentified ships, planes, or subs. Armed air patrols were ordered every day.
Back on Oahu on Nov. 29th, Dorothy's fiancé failed to show for another date in Honolulu. She called and visited Pearl Harbor trying to find Victor. Nobody would tell her anything. Needless to say, she was not happy with the Navy. She spent the remaining days in Oahu with her girlfriend, hanging out on the beach and learning to surf. The Lurline sailed on Dec. 3 for California. On Dec. 7 the Lurline, while several hundred miles west of California, received an SOS from a freighter a few hundred miles north that was being shelled by a submarine. An hour later a confirmation was received that Oahu was under attack. The Lurline went to maximum speed and zigzagged the remainder of the voyage, fortunately avoiding attack.
What happened to Vic and the Enterprise next is history (see TC’s book ‘I Will Run Wild’). He and the ship survived 1942 just barely, with many casualties, and Vic made it back to San Diego in Feb. 1943 to marry Dorothy. He returned to the war in 1945 as a Corsair pilot with VBF-88 aboard the Yorktown CV-10. He was awarded a DFC, 3 Air Medals, and downed two enemy aircraft in operations over Japan in July – August 1945. On the last morning of the war he flew a mission to protect search seaplanes looking for survivors of perhaps the last dogfight of the war.
Honestly, TC, this is such an achingly beautiful accounting of both your family and the birth of a nation. "What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value." I, too, feel that this is part of the rot at our core as a nation. It's also why I feel so strongly that this nation of immigrants needs to continue to be a nation of immigrants. The focus on hope of a better life elevates all. Your ancestors would be so proud of your continuing push for this country to live up to her ideals.
Fascinating, TC! What an amazing family history. Thank you for telling it with such zest and well-deserved pride! By the way, I wouldn’t give up either!