For Posterity's Sake: Legacy of an American Couple

By Terri L. McKenzie

When they met, Raymond Jay Wright and Margie Moselle Brooks had at least one thing in common: humble beginnings. He was the son of an early twentieth-century Texas sharecropper. Her father owned a farm just outside of Midland. With the advent of World War II, they embarked on what would become a military career, he the brave but understated soldier and she the strong but demure Army wife. Together, they found the kind of success that many long for but few attain, one produced by the combined forces of faith, patriotism, and love for family. For Posteritys Sake is a simple, heartwarming, and inspirational story contextually rich in American history and reminiscent of A Land Remembered. For decades, society has unknowingly asked for this true account to be told. Upon these pages lies its answer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 8, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524605087

Terri L. McKenzie

Terri McKenzie and her husband, David, have five children. She holds a bachelor of science in dietetics and food administration from California Polytechnic State University and in 1988 completed a dietetic internship at the James A. Haley Veterans Hospital in Tampa, Florida. The latter experience helped her better understand and appreciate the stalwart nature of veterans and their wives. This only deepened the admiration that she, along with many others, held for her father and mother. So when a casual conversation with her siblings led to the suggestion that she put their parents’ story on paper, she readily grabbed a pen. While McKenzie has authored articles, product copy, plays, and skits, For Posterity’s Sake is her first book. It is a tribute to the couple who taught her by example how to serve, persevere, and, most importantly, love.

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FOR POSTERITY’S SAKE

LEGACY OF AN AMERICAN COUPLE

TERRI L. MCKENZIE

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AuthorHouse™

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Bloomington, IN 47403

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© 2016 terri mckenzie. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 07/29/2016

ISBN: 978-1-5246-0509-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5246-0507-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5246-0508-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016907638

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

Jay: The Formative Years

Moselle: The Insouciant Days

The Making of an Officer

Moselle: Generous Young Lady

Of Pearl and Diamonds

Domestic Casualty

Close Calls on Foreign Ground

Enlisted By Marriage

Almost Paradise

Familiar Territory

Reunion

The Pentagon and Beyond

Presidio

Back to Bluebonnets: Fort Sam Houston

Retirement

Prank Calls and Pizza

When Winter Comes

Finding Spring

To David

PREFACE

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The advent of parenthood brings with it a hypersensitivity to potential tragedy. In response to the birth of our firstborn child, we new parents launch a prevention plan that consists of two major components: protective devices and prophylactic warnings. We purchase safety latches, outlet covers, baby gates, and anti-bacterial soap. A few years later, we spring for training wheels, a bicycle helmet, and kneepads. We teach our children to cling to us in the parking lot but run from overly friendly strangers at the park, to eat their vegetables, to take their vitamins, to bathe, to brush, to floss.

Then one day, as we climb into the passenger seat of the van, we realize that the child sitting behind the wheel for the first time is not exactly a child anymore. He is a teen — on the brink of adulthood — and, aside from the fact that we are his ticket to a driver’s license, feels he needs us less and less.

Just as he decides he can do just fine without our advice, we begin to dish it out with more urgency because time’s quickening passage makes his inadequacies glare with more intensity than ever before. We’ve spent 15 years telling him to look out, to look both ways before crossing the street, to look at the time, and to look at us when we’re talking to him. Now, as he turns over the ignition, we remind him to look over his shoulder before backing. Look, look, look, look, look.

But we seldom try to sell our children on the virtues of looking back generationally. Oh sure, we want them to understand that we walked uphill six miles both ways and that time and experience have left us far wiser than they, but we are hard pressed to find the time, between soccer practice and fundraising, to sit and reminisce over the moral successes and — as the case may be — failures of those who have come before us.

This is where we do our children a great disservice. For it is in this kind of looking back that we may best safeguard them from losing sight of all that defines, whether by comparison or contrast, what is honorable, noble, and virtuous. If our culture is adrift, preceding generations form the shoreline to which it must glance in order to avoid completely losing its bearings.

It is in the interest of taking that all-important look back that this book has been written. It holds within it the story of two people who were at the same time ordinary and exceptional. You may have known the couple as Jay and Moselle, Colonel and Mrs. Wright, or Grandpa and Grandma. But to my four siblings and me, they have always been just Mom and Dad, simple titles with daunting job descriptions.

Shortly before her death, Mom typed on her computer:

Margie Moselle Wright was born in 1925, the sixth child in a West Texas farm family. At age 18 she married Raymond Jay Wright, a farm boy from the same area who was now an army lieutenant…

That’s where it stops. She may have been interrupted by a phone call or the buzzer on the dryer. Certainly she intended to return to her story, but time escaped her and she never had the chance to finish. She had, however, recorded her memoirs and was apparently putting them into the third person for posterity’s sake.

Some 50 years prior, then 1st Lieutenant Wright sat down at a desk somewhere in Germany and recorded his World War II experiences.

Both possessed a natural gift for writing and a keen awareness of the truth that their present would one day be our past. They knew that someone, one day, would need to look back. This book, like each of our lives, is simply an attempt to add to the works they have already begun.

The fact that a book has been written about our parents makes a sadly ironic statement about society. Stories like this one — two young adults fall in love and marry, rise above tragedy and hardship, find contentment in having and loving a family, and remain married until death separates them — would, in an ideal world, be too commonplace for print. Instead, they are becoming increasingly scarce and consequently, in my estimation at least, increasingly newsworthy.

There seems to be a shortage of true happiness these days and the world aches to get hold of a ration or two. This book was written to satisfy that longing and at the same time preserve the memories of our beloved parents and those loved by them. Whether you hold this story by the good fortune of posterity or are just one of the many who hunger for a heartwarming tale, dig in…

JAY: THE FORMATIVE YEARS

Frustrations and denials which seem to youth cruel and unfair often are important equipment for life. — Bruce Barton

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The Wright Family (top to bottom, left to right): Audra, Mary, Donnie Mae, Jay, Monroe, circa 1922

Your dad’s honesty…came from observing (our parents’ example) and maybe that was just the way he was. Maybe God had a special hand on him…We always knew that he was intelligent and ambitious, but we saw few who did as well as he did. He was always kind and knew right from wrong. — Lorene Wright Lowe, Dad’s younger sister

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Audra and Mary Wright, circa 1919

It was Valentine’s Day in the year 1919, and the weather in Lamesa, Texas was characteristically cool but dry. From behind a closed door, the cries of a healthy newborn filled the Wright household as Raymond Jay Wright made his entrance into the world. Just outside the door, Monroe Wright breathed a guarded sigh of relief while his wife, Donnie Mae, took the swaddled infant into her arms, looked at his plump, pink face, and smiled weakly, almost certainly afraid to fall too in love with her baby.

Almost four years earlier, she and Monroe had buried their six-month-old son, C.W. Wright. Five years before that, Monroe Sligh Jr., their firstborn, had died 21 days after his birth; and now the memories of having loved and lost children were more vivid than they had been in a long time.

Since the Wrights were a farming family, the birth of a son was a good thing both sentimentally and practically. In addition to being another child to love, he would be another son to work the farm in an effort to feed the already struggling family. Nevertheless, the Wrights embraced him with cautious optimism, knowing from painful experience that Raymond Jay could be taken from them just as quickly as he had come. My siblings and I are grateful that he wasn’t. He eventually became our father.

There to help welcome the baby into the family were his older brother, James Audra Wright, close to seven years his senior, and his sister, Mary, a little over five at the time. These two would one day become like father and mother to the boy most people came to call by his middle name, Jay.

Our father was not the last child to enter his immediate family. The Wrights would announce the births of four more babies within the next ten years. And in that same time period, mourn the deaths of three.

When Dad was almost three years old, a little sister replaced him as the baby of the family. Margaret Lorene, named after her Aunt Maggie on her mother’s side but called by her middle name, was born on December 9, 1921. Another little sister, Bonnie Mae Wright, followed two and a half years later, giving Lorene both a little sister and a future playmate.

On September 14, 1927, Audra took the younger children to a neighbor’s house while their mother labored with twins. No one knows whether Donnie Mae knew she was expecting two babies, but they arrived prematurely, as twins often do. Audra ran to the neighbor’s to announce their birth. Both were boys. But if excitement surrounded their arrival, it lasted only briefly, as they both died within a week.

They were never given names due to poor health at birth. The Wright family Bible lists them as Twins Wright and has their dates of death a week apart. Lorene, however, distinctly remembered the undertaker coming to get them both on the day they were born. They were buried in graves marked by unetched stones.

It’s an understatement to say that this group of Wrights knew tragedy well. But their faith and devotion to one another helped compensate for what they lacked in both wealth and health. Although Monroe Wright — like his own father — was a stern man who expected no argument from his children, he had a tender but solid belief in God. After the twins died, he sat the other children together and explained to them that Jesus loved them and had died on a cross for them. He then assured them that God would take care of their baby brothers in Heaven.

There was always God’s care or we would have been less than we were and are. I was always aware of God’s creation, His power, and a need to reverence His name. We never heard His name used in any way that was unbecoming to Him. My dad used the word ‘fear’ instead of ‘reverence’… — Lorene Wright Lowe

Monroe’s faith had been shaped, no doubt, by his own mother’s faith, as referenced in the following transcript of her obituary, clipped from an unidentified newspaper:

"On the eve of the 21st of April, 1905, Mrs. Susan Carolyn Wright went to her reward. She was born May 19, 1845. Married Sept. 21, 1865. Joined the Baptist Church when 16 years of age. The beloved mother of nine children, five of whom have preceded her to the great beyond.

"She was afflicted for many years with that dreaded disease, consumption. She bore her affliction with Christian fortitude and often remarked that she had turned it all over to Jesus. Surely God showed her infinite mercy when He sent the death angel for her, but ’tis O! so hard for loved ones and friends to say, ‘Thy will be done.’ The wife and mother are gone, and truly a home without mother is indeed sad to look upon, and there is a vacancy that can never be filled on earth, but now she lives with Jesus, where her family can join her and dwell forever more. What a blessed thought. Were it not for the hope beyond the grave, life would be bitter to the most of us, but when dark days hover over us, and our griefs, almost harder than we can bear, there is ever a bright light shining ahead, showing, showing us a gleam of hope and pointing to one who bereaves, yet heals all heartaches.

"While we sorrow for our dear sister and friend, and miss her so sadly, yet we would not call her back to earth if we could.

"Weep not for thy dear mother, but follow the shining light and may it lead you to the bright home above.

"May God comfort and bless the bereaved family. — Committee

"Dear mother, thou hast left us,

and thy loss we deeply feel,

But the Lord that hast bereft us,

Can all our sorrows heal.

We are leaving it all with Jesus,

For we think He knows best,

And He’ll send into our aching hearts,

A sweet and peaceful rest. — Her Children"

Monroe’s parents were both Baptist, as were his paternal grandparents. His mother, whose ancestral line contains a lengthy Quaker heritage, had joined the Baptist church four years before her wedding, and it was most likely at the church that she met James J.K.P. Wright, the man she eventually married.

As a side note, J.K.P. Wright’s name has been incorrectly written as James K. Polk Wright on some family Bible transcriptions. While this was a reasonable assumption, given the fact that James K. Polk was running for election at the time of J.K.P.’s birth, his initials actually stand for James Knox Pettus.

The use of the Knox Pettus combination is found sprinkled throughout Monroe’s paternal ancestry and probably began when a William Pettus married Mary Knox, making her legal name Mary Knox Pettus. The couple named one of their children Samuel Knox Pettus. Our J.K.P. Wright was Samuel’s grandson. The Pettus line can be traced back to a Sir John Pettus, knight, of Norwich, England and a Colonel Thomas Pettus, the immigrant. More on these in a later chapter.

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At the time of the twins’ death, Dad was eight years old. This was his first personal experience with a loss of this magnitude. Unfortunately, it would not be his last. But he lived his childhood in a time when death was a more familiar and possibly less perplexing entity than it is today.

Today we search for the reason behind death and, if it makes us feel better, demand compensation from anyone remotely responsible for our loss. Back then, people were more likely to accept death and sorrow and disappointment as part of life. That’s not to say that anger was not involved in their grief; but the common acknowledgement that life was God’s to both give and take away provided a paradigm that relieved an otherwise unrelenting tension.

The experience of death was a commonality that brought people together and the sense of community that resulted lightened a mourner’s burden somewhat, at least until the next sunrise hit him with heartache all over again. I don’t know whether Dad’s kiss ever graced his little brothers’ foreheads. But I have to believe that their very brief lives contributed indirectly and possibly imperceptibly to the gratitude Dad later felt each time he welcomed a child or grandchild into the world.

At any rate, the Wright family refrained from speaking much about hardships like these. Emotions, out of necessity, took a back seat to immediate physical needs. Practically speaking, to dwell on losses by discussing them would neither bring someone back nor chase away the sadness, and a farm in the early 20th century didn’t allow its farmhands many personal days for mourning. If anyone chose to mull over his sorrow, he needed to be doing something productive at the same time, an unspoken rule that, when observed, proved therapeutic.

Indeed, the silence surrounding the Wright children was what most loudly echoed the family’s grief. In the days following the twins’ burial, a numbing quiet hung over the dinner table, punctuated only by the occasional clink of a fork against a plate. The Wrights were, both by blood and by choice, a stoic bunch. Even so, there were times when, in the stillness of night and the sanctity of darkness, all the tears withheld during the day secretly found their freedom.

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Although not a demonstrative group, the Wrights never had any doubt about their loyalty to one another. For siblings, however, the temptation to pester at times overrode familial devotion. In later years, Lorene idolized Dad and trailed after the gangling preteen and his friends who visited the farm. Possibly in retaliation, but more likely because of his penchant for teasing, Dad followed her home from school on more than one occasion, placing his feet precisely and deliberately into her footprints until the desired effect was achieved and Lorene burst into tears.

Monroe Sligh Wright, described on his World War I draft registration card as being medium in height and slender in build, was of English and Scotch-Irish descent. Dark hair with flecks of silver framed his weathered face, which, though softened by pensive gray eyes, reflected years of cotton farming in the Texas sunshine. Monroe was literate and had held a position as a grocery store salesman in his early thirties. He also worked for the Fuller Gin Company and a later census lists him as a clerk for McAdams Lumber. But his children remember him in the same occupation his father had pursued: that of farming.

As a sharecropper, Monroe held no ownership in the land he tilled. Sharecropping was an agricultural agreement between a landowner and a farmer wherein the farmer supplied the cultivation tools and supplies, worked the land, and, at the end of the year, presented the landowner with a predetermined percentage of the profit.

People had no time to waste hoping their lottery tickets bore winning numbers. Although the latter half of the 1920’s brought many Americans unparalleled prosperity, West Texas farmers were not among the financially fortunate. Life was not going to hand them anything easily and denying that for very long would only lead to gnawing hunger pangs. Work at the Wright homestead was expected of those enjoying the farm’s benefits. There was no time for negotiation or complaint; and there was certainly no room for outright laziness.

The success or failure of a year’s crop was best manifested by a look inside either the wardrobe or the pantry. If each girl owned two dresses and a nice pair of shoes, it had been a relatively good year. On the other hand, a poor harvest meant biscuits and gravy eaten two to three times daily or, according to Dad’s account of his childhood, the sacrifice of a little boy’s pet bantam rooster for the family supper.

Obviously, neither holiday celebrations nor everyday activities involved the trumpery that they do today. During the wintertime, the children were delighted to find their Christmas stockings filled with fruit, nuts, and a sprinkling of candy. When they were older, they walked home from school hoping for a cold, leftover biscuit to top with blackstrap molasses.

Nighttime trips to the bathroom meant visiting the outhouse by starlight. As he began his midnight trip to the privy, Dad always tiptoed tentatively across the family’s front porch, but his footsteps were never quiet enough to avoid the inevitable chorus of rattlesnake rattles that arose from beneath the creaky wooden slats.

Without the luxury of air conditioning, the family used creativity to combat the Texas climate’s oppressiveness. During the summer, Dad settled down for the night under bed sheets presoaked in cold water in an attempt to achieve comfort in the still, dry heat. The occasional production of homemade ice cream helped to alleviate the heat, as well. This required somehow procuring the ingredients, borrowing a hand-crank ice cream freezer from a neighbor, and taking turns sweating at the crank until the frozen treat was finished, but it was a rarity considered well worth the effort.

One thing Monroe and Donnie Mae provided for their children regardless of their financial state was a daily example of honesty, the impact of which manifested itself in Dad’s own adult life. When once asked why Dad placed such a high value on honesty, his sister responded without hesitation, That was the only way we lived. In their parents’ expectations and possibly in the children’s own minds, no viable alternative existed. Through arduous work and scrupulous business practices, Monroe and Donnie Mae clothed and fed their family during troubled times. They accepted no less in the areas of work ethic and integrity from their children.

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The tall, thin nine-year-old squinted in the Texas sun and tightened his grip as his father’s hog tried to wiggle free from his chokehold. Although still a child, Dad was just strong enough to contain one of the smaller hogs, as long as he straddled its back and wrapped his left arm tightly underneath its neck. In his right hand, he held a hatchet, a tool not exactly foreign to him.

Aside from helping with the farming, milking the cow, and caring for the family dog, Dad had cut wood regularly in order to maintain a constant supply for the heater and the cook stove. He had also helped his father dig and build a storm cellar.

But today, Dad had added to his chore list without first consulting Monroe. He had an idea, one that would surely meet with his father’s approval. The elder Wright’s young hogs had a very bad habit of rooting out of their confines, sending every able-bodied farm dweller running to fetch them. Dad decided to save the family all this wasted energy by moving the hatchet from the woodpile to the pigpen. By making slits between the hogs’ nostrils, he reasoned, he would disable their rooting devices, freeing family members to spend hog-chasing time on more pressing activities.

He carried out his plan carefully, tongue protruding from mouth in youthful concentration, imagining the prideful pat on the back his father would give him after discovering his ingenious solution. As it turned out, Monroe was far from impressed and, in lieu of the pat on the back, administered a sound whipping elsewhere.

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Naturally, finances and distance from town meant that the family relied much more heavily on home remedies than on doctors’ visits. Dad often walked about barefoot, probably out of a combination of material want and personal preference. One day, he stepped near a twig that sank deep into the skin just above and behind his ankle. The wound was treated like an overgrown splinter — washed, maybe bandaged, but otherwise left alone.

Unlike a splinter, however, the twig never worked its way out. The wound healed over and throughout Dad’s adult life, the small, calcified stick could be felt in his leg. Later, his children and grandchildren found touching the embedded twig and hearing the story behind it fascinating. When asked, Dad would obligingly roll up his pants leg, push down his sock, and tell once more the story of the poverty-stricken boy whose family, during poor crop years at least, could afford neither shoes nor a doctor.

Similarly, when Dad let his thumb venture too close to the grindstone while sharpening an axe, his father therapeutically drenched the wound in coal oil and let it heal over time at home. But when a wasp flew into Dad’s ear, his parents decided medical intervention was necessary and Audra took his brother to the doctor, who successfully retrieved the insect.

There were times when Dad seemed almost to invite his casualties. Like many young boys, he dreamed of flying, so much so that he pursued his dream by jumping off of the roof clutching only an umbrella to slow his fall, an experience that may explain his ultimate choice of Army over Air Force.

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It was late afternoon and the sun threatened to set as Monroe Wright navigated the dirt road to his home, driving more carefully than usual. He had hauled his cotton to the gin that day and, although his family expected him home, they would be shocked when he showed up. Today, the slight smile that graced his otherwise solemn face revealed a quiet satisfaction in having kept the secret and secured the surprise. His cargo demanded that he drive slowly and avoid as many ruts in the country road as possible, which made him even more eager to reach the farm. As he neared home, the familiar sound of gravel spraying from beneath his tires and the smell of stirred dust announced his arrival.

He drove an unusually nice truck that day, indicative of an exceptionally good year’s crop, which had made it possible for him to purchase the pipe organ he brought home for Donnie Mae. No one knows what kind of deal he’d struck with the organ peddler in town, but the instrument would add joy to his wife’s life, which was becoming increasingly riddled with illness. Maybe the organ was a birthday or Christmas gift. Maybe it was Monroe’s way of celebrating a temporary increase in income. Whatever the occasion, the organ made his wife happy and, at least for a while, there was music in the Wright household.

Donnie Mae Wright’s features were sharply cut and her fair skin, framed with brunette hair and punctuated by thoughtful, piercing eyes, gave her a simple beauty even farm life could not imbue. Her appearance corroborated later reports made by her children concerning her partial Native American ancestry. She was a quiet woman. Perhaps part of that was her personality, but certainly her chronic illness contributed to the silence. As long as the Wright children could remember, she had suffered from nephritis, a form of kidney disease then termed Bright’s Disease.

Every pregnancy causes even a healthy woman’s kidneys to work overtime. Today, despite medical advances, a woman with kidney disease who bears children does so to the detriment of her own health. By the age of 38, Donnie Mae had endured eight pregnancies, the last of which had presented the family only briefly with twins. After the twins’ deaths, her illness worsened significantly, surely largely due to the exaggerated burden a multiple pregnancy places on the kidneys.

Consequently, on August 2, 1928, not even 11 months after losing their twin brothers, the Wright children met with an even greater loss. This time they grieved not over the death of siblings they had never known, but over the death of their 39-year-old mother.

Lorene recalled an inordinate number of visitors coming to the house one day. Her father stayed very close to both her and Bonnie Mae, perhaps because the flow of community support had begun before the youngest children had learned of their mother’s death and he didn’t want them to hear the news from a neighbor. Finally, as she remembers, he took the two youngest aside and told them the sad truth. Five children, ages four through fifteen, had lost their mother; their father had lost his wife.

Lorene had but one recollection of her mother holding her, possibly because it is a memory she clung to during the years following her mother’s death. She tearfully called to mind the family having spent a day visiting at a neighbor’s house, where they played with other children. The Wrights didn’t leave until after the youngsters’ bedtimes and, for all the fun they had enjoyed, the little ones were exhausted. All the way home, Donnie Mae held both Lorene and Bonnie Mae,