Finding My Father: The Lifelong Quest by an Iwo Jima Marine's Son to Know the Man Who Was His Father

By Robert Sidney Pace

This book tells the story of my lifelong search for the man who was my father. Growing up in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in the 1950s, a small boy in a large house, I knew little of my father, for little was told to me. Not a remote and
intimidating figure, as so many fathers were in that time, he was simply a mystery for which I had no solution. And the all-pervading silence in that house of my grandparents kept
the mystery alive far into my adult life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Dec 29, 2009
• ISBN: 9781440194474

Robert Sidney Pace

Robert Sidney Pace served as an American diplomat with the U.S. Foreign Service over a thirty-year career. Subsequently, he was chief staff executive for a small nonprofit organization. He and his wife live in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. Throughout a lifetime of service to his country as a diplomat and nonprofit executive, Robert Sidney Pace continued his search for the truth about his mysterious and heroic father: a young Marine Corps lieutenant of World War II who had been killed at the battle of Iwo Jima. From a brief glimpse of his father’s wartime letters in his childhood years, the author explores the contrasting worlds of his mother and father as they meet, marry and separate amid the turmoil of wartime America. His search leads him on through an exploration of the often-dramatic histories of his two American families to his final late-in-life encounter with the truth about the man who was his father.

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Copyright © 2009 by Robert Sidney Pace

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ISBN: 978-1-4401-9446-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4401-9447-4 (ebook)

iUniverse rev. date: 12/16/2009

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

DEDICATION

To my daughter, Carrie

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Joseph Garrera, Executive Director of the Lehigh County Historical Society, for his wise counsel and kind support throughout the long gestation period of this book. And especially for his advice that history is not a collection of facts and dates; it is about the lives of people who still matter to us today.

To Michelle and Jay Hartung, current owners of the house at 30 South West Street, with great appreciation for allowing my wife and me to visit a home which today looks much better than it ever did in the past.

Most of all, to my wife B., whose unstinting love, generous understanding and insistent prompting to finish it up spurred this writing project to a conclusion.

The quotations in the chapter headings of this book all stem from the same source: the novels, unjustly neglected by readers here in the United States, which were written in the last century by the distinguished Canadian author, Robertson Davies.

1

It was clear that adults did not want children to know of these mysteries, for they never mentioned them.

Tempest-Tost

This book tells the story of my lifelong search for the man who was my father. Growing up in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in the 1950s, a small boy in a large house, I knew little of my father, for little was told to me. Not a remote and intimidating figure, as so many fathers were in that time, he was simply a mystery for which I had no solution. And the all-pervading silence in that house of my grandparents kept the mystery alive far into my adult life.

That household at 30 SouthWest Steet, filled with strange silences, was owned by my grandparents, who had moved there—taking my mother and me with them like hostages to fate—in the summer of 1947. It was a strangely multi-generational house: two stern and remote elders from the Victorian Age, my young and (to me) heroic mother, and myself as the only child. The person I was eventually to become was formed in that dark, memory-haunted house at 30 South West Street. It seems to me, looking back from a great distance, that the shades were always drawn and the lamps beside my grandmother’s reading chair in the living room lit not just to keep out sunlight and fresh air but, most important of all, to keep away those aspects of the past that were too painful to bear.

And then there was the person who was missing from that household: my father. Who he was, what he had been in his brief life, and how I came to be were all mysteries to me, for no one in that large old house would ever utter his name. As all children are fascinated by puzzles, so was I. The greatest puzzle in my childhood years—and my great obsession—was this mystery-man who had come out of remote southwestern Virginia during World War II into the provincial Allentown of that time. My only glimpse of him came in a faded photograph from the early 1940s, showing an impossibly handsome, mature-looking man, standing tall in the full dress uniform of a U.S. Marine Corps officer. A young man in his prime, clearly enjoying to the full his own vitality and attractiveness. When she judged me to be old enough, my mother gave me a surreptitious look at the photograph, a quick glimpse which violated what we both knew to be the ruling code of silence that surrounded his very name. She revealed another truth to me in a whisper: my father had been killed at the epic Marine Corps battle of Iwo Jima, toward the end of World War II and just six months after my birth.

missing image file

The house at 30 South West Street

During my childhood years, Mother never revealed any other details about this remote and dashing figure of a man. But she clearly had her own ideas as to how I might follow in his footsteps. On a day in late 1955, just after my eleventh birthday, my mother and I were sitting in the darkness of a movie theater in Allentown. That long-ago downtown theater has closed its doors forever, along with much else that made 1950s Allentown a thriving regional shopping and theater district. We were watching the movie To Catch A Thief, starring Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. As Mr. Grant’s handsome, marquee face appeared on the screen one more time, my mother turned to me and said: You should try to be like that.

My 11-year-old self was painfully thin at that time and still short by the standards of my peers. Since my mother had pushed me ahead in school by one full year, I was living out my Allentown school days in the company of other children who would always be at least one year older and incomparably more knowledgeable about life. Furthermore, by then my eyesight had been found to be so poor that glasses would be required from then onward throughout the rest of my life. So I cut a rather poor figure of a boy in that mid-1950s movie house. I was ill-equipped, then, to try to mirror in some mysterious way the most sophisticated and charmingly masculine film star of the era. The handsome and dashing Mr. Grant would long remain, for me, a remote, unattainable model.

Unknown to my mother at that moment, I was beginning a quest for a different kind of hero: my own father. Although, as I began to press at the limits of my narrow and constricting world, I could not know that the search would last my whole lifetime. Nor that I would keep secret from my mother throughout that lifetime what I learned on a hot summer day in the middle of the 1950s. I knew then only that I wished to find out as much as I possibly could about this mysterious man. What was his family background? How had he and my mother met? What was their marriage like? Finally, if my father had died a hero’s death at the battle of Iwo Jima—and, in some fashion, all sons of fallen soldiers know instinctively that their father was a hero—then why did my grandparents impose such an iron law of silence about him? In the end, the journey to find my father would take me into my own family’s past, where a variety of discoveries awaited. But the main focus of my search would always be on that brief life he had lived from his birth in the early 1920s up until his death on Iwo Jima in March 1945. And most of all, of course, to know the full story of the romance between my mother and my father.

Indeed, it was the extraordinary youth of the man—both as he lived out his brief life and as he died—that was to provide a central metaphor throughout my own lifelong relationship with him. After all, when he was killed in action on that iconic Marine Corps battlefield, he was still well short of his 22nd birthday. For purposes of conventional biography, then, what was there to know of him? He had not even lived long enough to pursue a man’s career in the world, to raise a family, and to experience—even if only for a limited span of years—the joys and trials of dealing with those three essential aspects of most men’s lives: job, marriage and children. Indeed, it was precisely because he had been denied these common male experiences of life that I was to feel, in later years, that it was my duty to live out for him that life which he had been unable to live for himself. But, of course, no man can do that for another man, much less for his own father.

In those years, my own bedroom formed the center of my daily life, with after-school hours spent alone reading, playing solitaire versions of then-popular board games, and fantasizing for hours over a growing collection of toys, picture postcards, baseball cards, and even a good set of photo cards of military aircraft of various nations. But gradually my curiosity took me out of this private retreat, to which I withdrew each school day afternoon while my mother and grandfather were each away working at their respective jobs. It was during these hours that my grandmother prowled her downstairs realm and so I sought, by all means possible, to avoid her well-meant oversight of my activities.

Only when I was around twelve years of age—the year would have been 1957—did I climb the back stairs one summer day to explore among the hidden mysteries of the third floor attic. I knew full well that this type of exploration would not be welcomed by my grandmother. She was, like all housewives of the time, complete mistress of the nether regions of the house. The kitchen, dining room and living room were her preferred haunts, with forays into the ample back yard to hang newly-washed clothes to dry on the clothesline. But occasionally she would mount the stairs to the second floor to check on me, not unwisely suspecting that any child left unattended might get into mischief. What had not occurred to me, until that summer, was that there might be family secrets hidden in the attic. Items not intended for my prying eyes.

So, on that hot and close afternoon, I climbed the narrow stairs to the stuffy attic with the intention of staying in that stifling realm for only a few minutes. Time enough, perhaps, to examine a volume or two from the glass-encased bookcase at the head of the stairs. Among its tantalizing contents from an earlier time, I found H. G. Wells’ multi-volume history of the world, along with Gray’s Anatomy. But, on this never-to-be-repeated day, I looked upward and noticed a mysterious box resting atop the bookcase on the landing.

Pulling the box down with some difficulty from its high perch, I opened it and discovered my father’s letters to my mother from the years 1943 through 1945. I was stunned both by the unexpected nature of my discovery as well as by the size of this treasury of more than one hundred letters. Instinctively, I realized that I must act very quickly, if I was to take advantage of this unique opportunity. My grandmother might come upstairs at any moment. Finding me missing from the second floor, she would soon guess that I could only be up in the attic, and hence very probably up to no good.

Under this pressure, I quickly opened the first dozen or more letters, through the start of my father’s early training in the Marine Corps.

The very first letter from my father to my mother, dated October 29, 1943, came from Huntington, West Virginia, to Miss Ruth Cosgrove, 1939 Whitehall, Allentown, Penna. The full text of this typically-brief letter:

"Sugar foot,

Not a heck of a lot to say, but its been a lot of fun being home. Sure am glad I decided to come back in a few ways, but I miss the old institution. Work, studies, the old grind –well it wont be long till it starts all anew. Know you have been playing a lot since—, and am glad to think you are having a grand vacation. Shoot the works! Be good."

Your hilly billy fran, Sidney

The letter is written on the stationery of the Montgomery Hotel, J. M. Flanagan, Prop., Mt. Sterling, Kentucky. Among other self-laudatory notes, the hotel asserts that it is where you find wonderful beds, has excellent food, a spacious comfortable lobby and is both New and Modern. The accompanying sketch shows a traditional, old-fashioned brick hotel building of early 20th century rural America, with a formal, portico entrance, four stories tall, a lobby on the second floor and, of course, a flagpole with a U.S. flag flying on the roof.

The next two items were a Christmas card and letter of late December, both postmarked from Hazleton, PA, on December 27. The first was a seasonal card, with the personal message: P.S.: remind me to bring my presents before Xmas from now on—but I haint forgotten. Sidney. Oddly, there are two slips of scrap paper inside. It did not occur to my childish mind to ask, at that time, if these were enclosures to the original letter and also why my father chose to include them? In later years, the first slip of paper would remind me of a passage in The Great Gatsby, for it seems to be part of a personal fitness regimen:

"1. daily walks (at least 3 miles)

2. Exercise (strenuous)

3. Enough castor oil to get your stomach upset."

Dr. S. B. Pace II

Roanoke, Va

Huntington, W. Va.

Louisville, Ky."

The second note, odder still, read as follows:

"Pace, Sidney (USMCR)

Huntingdon, W. Va. – 3002 3rd Ave.

Huntington High

Marshall College (2 yrs.)

Plaln Geometry (high school)"

After providing my mother with this personal curriculum vitae, my father followed up with another letter of the same date from Hazleton. Here, he goes into a full page plus one sentence explanation as to why she has received no Christmas presents from him, a roundabout tale that includes travel to Philadelphia and New York, a failed shopping expedition, writing to his mother to ask her to select a present for my mother and finally an expression of his plan to steal some money and buy, pick and choose it (the present) myself. Here, also, I found an unexpected and quite frank discussion by my father of the facts that (a) my mother was then pregnant and (b) that she should consider the possibility of an abortion. As I now learned from these early letters, in the wartime V-12 Marine officer candidate program during World War II, each future officer was required to remain unmarried throughout the period of his entire enrollment in the program. Thus, from the time when my father arrived at Allentown’s Muhlenberg College in July of 1943—and met my mother working in the library there—he was legally obliged by the contractual terms he had signed with the government to remain a bachelor. Yet, to my childish mind, it was not the possibility that I might never have come to be that most affected me from these early letters. What I took away, instead, was the intense atmosphere of clandestine romance which hung over the entire passionate relationship between my father and my mother.

What also came through clearly in these early letters was a certain charm about my father’s manner, reflecting his own birth and upbringing in Roanoke, among the hills and mountains of southwestern Virginia. Playfulness, affection and already a sense of nostalgia for their brief romance permeated these early letters. There was also some sketchy information about his early school days.

Soon, however, the focus of the letters shifted to difficult early days as a Marine Corps basic trainee in the swamps of South Carolina. Constant drill, weapons instruction and marches fill the pages of these early letters. I read with rapt attention, eager to take in the tough realities of a military life that I only knew from books, especially the ones which I was already starting to read obsessively about the noble history of the United States Marine Corps.

Suddenly, I became fearful that my grandmother might at any moment materialize at the head of the stairs without warning, for she moved silent and ghost-like throughout her domestic realm at all hours of the day and night. Hurriedly, I turned over the pile of letters to reach the end of the story as quickly as possible. The very last letter, dated sometime in late March 1945, was sent by my father’s commanding officer to my mother. Here, the colonel recounted how Lt. Pace had died heroically leading his men forward to capture the airfield and apologized for the delay in sending this letter, owing to the fact that my father’s official military record contained no mention of a wife. Next to last in the contents of the box was a brief GI letter from my father to my mother, scribbled in pencil from the battlefield itself. Though necessarily lacking in detail, it did express in admirable fashion his devotion to his men serving under him in that island inferno. Finally, before I closed up the box and restored it to its place atop the dust-covered bookcase, I found one final document, curious yet reassuring to my childish mind. It was a wedding announcement by those proud parents, Mr. and Mrs. Charles A. Cosgrove, giving the hand of their daughter, Ruth Elmina, to Pvt. Sidney Bransford Pace, U.S.M.C., on the day of Tuesday, the fourteenth of December, nineteen hundred and forty-three. Enormously pleased with what I had learned, I quickly replaced the box on the top of the bookcase and returned to my bedroom, where Grandma found me shortly afterwards, engaged in a more than usual introspection.

This secret knowledge was now mine to treasure, but also to keep to myself. Observant of the code of silence that governed our secret-haunted house, I would now become myself a keeper of secrets. The fact that I had penetrated into the deepest mystery of our household could never be shared with my watchful grandparents. But it also proved to be—as years passed and the constraints of adulthood emerged between my mother and me–a secret I would keep from her as well. I could never admit to her what I had done on that summer afternoon. My silence would last for her entire remaining lifetime.

So it was that, throughout the rest of my childhood, this unique moment provided me with the raw materials of history from which I would build up my idealized image of my father. I never again dared to go back up to that hot and musty attic, to pull down the carton of letters, and to commune with the memory of my idol. During the next twenty years, the recollection of all that I had read on that hot Allentown summer afternoon would suffice for me. It seemed that I might spend my entire lifetime knowing nothing more about my father.

But the essential lesson had been learned. I had seen enough, even in this brief glimpse of the hidden past, to be reassured that my father was most certainly a good man, even a hero. Trustingly, as the child that I was, I knew and sought to learn no more.

2

Childhood. That’s the key. Not only the key, but the first key to the mystery of a human creature. Who brought him up, and what were they, and what did they believe that stamped the child so that those beliefs stuck in his mind long after he thought he had rejected them

What’s Bred in the Bone

Over the long years of her final decades, my mother spent countless Saturdays of the 1980s and 1990s in the library of our local historical society, hidden away in the upper reaches of the old Lehigh County courthouse in downtown Allentown. There, she mined the past, straining her eyes to read microfilmed copies of 19th century Allentown newspapers, from which she dutifully recorded a litany of births, marriages and deaths. Her work established a data base from which many a local family might research their own ancestry. But while serving history, she also served her own ends, adding constantly to her treasure-house of knowledge about our own family.

In her own modern 20th century way, she was an acolyte of the ancient cult of ancestor worship. Indeed, it is not too strong to say that the study of our family’s past became the ultimate ruling obsession of her later life. In these years, she accumulated more than 1000 pages of genealogical data: a treasure chest of the raw material of history that she left to me as my chief inheritance: letters, diary entries, photographs, personal papers, wills, cemetery inscriptions, memoranda, bills, newspaper articles, yearbooks and much more. It was in these years that she began to fill up those large red binders that would hold, ultimately and collectively, hundreds of biographic sketches of ancestors long-dead and distant relations long-forgotten.

In this chapter, as elsewhere in this work, I honor her memory by telling some of the stories that she never got to tell. As in books of travel adventure, the narrator often tells the story through a series of encounters with persons met along the way. Given my overall aim in this memoir, to tell of my quest for the man who was my father, these encounters also trace the path that led up to that fateful moment when my mother met the man who would become my father.

During my childhood years, my mother would tell me many tales of our family’s long history in Allentown. A common thread in these narratives was the long-lived nature of our family’s generations, so that each of us modern people of the 1950s was only a brief remove from persons who had seen the greatest figures of American history. As mother frequently told me, Your great-grandmother saw Lincoln, and her parents’ generation saw Washington. Since I was living in a household that contained both my grandmother and my mother, this placed me at only three removes from the time of Abraham Lincoln and at four generations’ distance from George Washington.

In her telling, the line of descent of which I was the ultimate product was an American matriarchy, deriving from that youthful observer of Lincoln: my great-grandmother, Elmina Emily Minie Clavill. Through her marriage to Thomas Sweitzer of Allentown, Pennsylvania, in 1875 and the five long-lived daughters produced by their union, my formidable great-grandmother exerted her influence on two generations of women, and through them on their many descendants in Allentown and beyond that city’s borders to the present day.

As my mother recounted the story to me, when 43-year-old Thomas Smith Sweitzer of Allentown married then 20-year-oldMinie Clavill at her parents’ home in Philadelphia on October 12, 1875, it was the third marriage for Thomas. And the 23-year gap in age was not the only significant difference between them, for Thomas stood 6’ 4" tall, while the diminutive and appropriately-nicknamed Minie measured only 5’ in height.

Minie had been born on Chincoteague Island, Virginia, in 1855 while her parents were visiting her Jester family relatives. It turned out that Minie’s grandmother was one Leonie Jester Clavill, an American Indian of the Delawares. Leonie’s original Indian name was Sana, though she changed it to Leonie when she married an English sea-captain and moved to Philadelphia.

Of the legendary family tale of when her father took the then-five-year-old Minie to Philadelphia’s Independence Hall to hear Abraham Lincoln speak on July 4, 1860, as with the oral history of many families, this historic moment was misremembered in later years by my mother, who would repeat the story of this alleged July 4 appearance during Lincoln’s campaign for the presidency. But Lincoln was not there on that July 4. In that era, American presidential candidates did only a limited amount of traveling about the country, preferring to use distributed copies of their own speeches to reach out to the voters. As it turns out, Lincoln’s brief remarks at Independence Hall took place in February 1861, as he was on his way to his presidential inauguration in Washington, D.C.

What is true is that her father hoisted the tiny Minie on his shoulders so that she could see Lincoln during that memorable occasion, one that she never forgot during her own long span of life across the 19th century and up to the 1940s.

missing image file

Minie Clavill Sweitzer in her garden, 1112 Linden Street, on May 23, 1914

The Thomas Sweitzer whom Minie Clavill married in 1875 came from the small but growing market center of Allentown, 55 miles north of Philadelphia and still very much in the larger city’s cultural orbit. The first two marriages of Thomas produced three children, but in one of the frequent tragedies of that time, an epidemic in 1866 carried off all three. I can well imagine, then, how this aging carpenter and furniture maker

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Thomas Sweitzer in old age

must have welcomed one final opportunity to have a family of his own when an arranged marriage with Minie was offered by her father, Thomas’s old Philadelphia friend, Lucius Alfred Clavill. That it was a marriage of love as well as of convenience may be shown by my favorite remembrance of old Thomas: a fine writing lap-desk, which he fashioned for his fiancée, Minie. Very likely, it was a birthday present to her, for Thomas has inscribed on a metal plate on the sloping front of the desk her name and the date: March 23, 1875, her twentieth birthday. On a small flat panel of wood at the top is a modest keyhole, suitable for the insertion of a delicate, ladylike key to preserve the privacy of the desk’s contents. Inside that small top section is a 7 wide flat space for pens and pencils, plus three 1 inch square holes for ink bottles and perhaps for stamps as well. The larger section of the cover opens to reveal a blue velvet interior, with the unfolded top and a similar-sized base forming a flat writing surface measuring some 12 in bottom-to-top space, and about 10 in width. A tiny blue tab in the material of the upper section enables that base section to lift up, revealing a red plush interior to the entire box, where the supply of writing paper was stored. The whole of this miniature creation measures, at its base, a modest 14 in length and some 10 in width. It is a charming example of the 19th century woodcrafter’s art.

Back in Allentown with his new bride and subsequently a rapidly-growing family that would produce in all five daughters, Thomas moved his wife and daughters frequently amongst a variety of addresses in the urban core of the city. Most likely, the moves stemmed from Thomas’s always uncertain business fortunes and his difficulties in making a living sufficient to support his large family. A skilled furniture-maker and designer of all manner of intricate, Germanic woodwork, he was less able at running a business. Without the capacity to manage his own independent store, he was frequently reduced to being the employee of others, an itinerant craftsman like so many members of Allentown’s modest middle-class of that era.

No matter how frequently Thomas and Minie moved from one apartment to another, each address where they lived from the late 1870s to the year 1913 lies within one or two blocks of the main Hamilton Street commercial heart of the city, and all are within easy walking distance of one another. It was