Conversations with Marco Polo: The Remarkable Life of Eugene C. Haderlie

By Mark Denny and Joanna Lee Nelson

Conversations with Marco Polo is a biography of Eugene Haderlie, whose extraordinary life is deeply intertwined with the 20th century: a rough-and-tumble childhood in Wyoming during the Depression; an undergraduate expedition to Baja Mexico, where he crossed paths with John Steinbeck and had his inflamed appendix taken out by a veterinarian; two years as hard-hat diver in World War II, defusing mines in the English Channel and enduring the trauma of D-Day. The conversations recorded here are akin to reading about Marco Polo: tales of every-day life and adventure from a world we can never experience firsthand

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 29, 2006
• ISBN: 9781465316226

Mark Denny

Mark Denny is the John and Jean DeNault Professor of Marine Sciences at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station. A specialist in the application of physical principles to the study of biology, he bridges the interface between engineering and ecology. He and his family live in Pacific Grove. Joanna Nelson is a doctoral student in ecology at the University of California. She met Gene while working at Hopkins Marine Station and is honored to be part of this oral history and biography project with Mark. She and her husband Yair live in Santa Cruz

Book preview

Conversations with

Marco Polo

The Remarkable Life of Eugene C. Haderlie

32643-DENN-layout.pdf

MARK DENNY & JOANNA LEE NELSON

Copyright © 2006 by Mark Denny & Joanna Lee Nelson.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in

any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,

recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission

in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.\

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

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32643

Contents

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 2

MORMONS: LIFE AMONG THE LATTER-DAY SAINTS

CHAPTER 3

STAR VALLEY

CHAPTER 4

GROWING UP IN WYOMING

CHAPTER 5

BAJA, DOC, AND THE LONG WAY HOME

CHAPTER 6

THE ORIGINS OF WORLD WAR II

CHAPTER 7

SEA MINES

CHAPTER 8

RENDERING MINES SAFE

CHAPTER 9

THE PHYSICS AND PHYSIOLOGY OF DIVING

CHAPTER 10

TRAINING DIVERS

CHAPTER 11

A DAY’S DIVE

CHAPTER 12

D-DAY

CHAPTER 13

FOLLOWING THE BIG RED ONE

CHAPTER 14

A CAST OF CHARACTERS

CHAPTER 15

SHIPWORMS AND THE SPANISH ARMADA

CHAPTER 16

LIFE IN THE MIDST OF WAR

CHAPTER 17

THE SCIENTIST

CHAPTER 18

POSTLUDE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For Aileen

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Gene’s office at Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station is inconspicuous, tucked away next to an overflowing bulletin board just inside the entrance to the Station’s main building, and when he isn’t around, the door is shut. Few people stop to contemplate the plain wooden door, identified only by a small nameplate which discretely announces that this is the office of Eugene C. Haderlie.

In the afternoons, though, when Gene comes in to pay his daily visit to the library, the door is open and the office is inviting. It is a vertical room, with windows on one side and bookshelves on the other, both extending up to a tall ceiling. Once it was a passage to an adjacent classroom, but now it is a compact office with the utilitarian feel of a well-used ship’s cabin. Instead of charts and flags, however, the office is filled with relics of a remarkable life. For instance, on a desk under the windows, next to a few flasks and a dissecting microscope, is a meter-long grayish tube that resembles a misshapen unicorn’s horn. Ask, and you are told that it is the calcified lining of a shipworm’s burrow, taken from the root of an Australian mangrove. It lies next to the carefully dried spiral valve from a shark’s intestine, a memento of a cruise through the South Pacific. Standing in a corner is a single baleen plate from a bowhead whale, and propped next to it is a rolled-up map. Ask, and you find that the map is of Utah Beach in Normandy, issued on June 5, 1944.

If Gene is in his office and notices you walking by, he will inquire as to whether you have a moment. If you do, there is something he would like to show you. Perhaps it is the shell of a tropical clam that has evolved transparent windows allowing algae in the clam’s gills to process light into sugar. Perhaps it is a serious scientific article on the manner in which tornadoes can suck toads out of a lake and rain them down elsewhere. But even as you listen, you can’t resist looking around the office. There’s a hunk of English oak stacked on a shelf and a periscope prism used as a paperweight. And when you have learned about photosynthetic clams or raining toads, you just have to ask: What’s special about that oak? Why a periscope prism? And with his gentle voice and sparkling eyes, Gene will tell you their stories.

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Over the course of several years, we found ourselves being drawn into Gene’s office more often, and we noticed that his stories began to meld into an oral patchwork. Piece by piece we were hearing the story of his life. But this was more than the biography of an 80-year-old scientist. Through these stories, we were offered a glimpse into an extraordinary history. The more we listened, the more enthralled we became, and we developed a compulsion to record the stories we had been told.

There is a precedent here, and the similarities are striking. If you thumb through the pages of a text on world history, you will find reference to a man named Rustichello, a prisoner in Genoa, Italy, late in the 13th century. It seems that Rustichello’s story started innocently in 1288 with a simple business trip from his native Pisa. Unfortunately, it was his fate to sail unwittingly into the Battle of Meloria, a skirmish in the rivalry between Venice and Genoa. Genoa won that battle, and in the process Rustichello became a political prisoner. Prior to his capture, Rustichello had been a writer of romances, a specialist in chivalry and its lore. But confined to a prison cell, his only contact with the greater world was a narrow view of the city beyond the prison walls

In late September of 1298, after ten years of confinement, Rustichello’s world changed when he acquired a new cellmate. Once again, a skirmish at sea was to blame. Marco, a merchant by trade, had on a whim enlisted as a gentleman commander with the Venetian fleet just in time to lose the battle of Curzola. One of seven thousand prisoners, he ended up in Rustichello’s Genoese cell purely by chance.

It took considerable work on Rustichello’s part to figure out even this much. Language was a problem. In 13th century Italy, each city had it own dialect, and Marco’s speech was accented and unfamiliar. He knew no Latin and his Venetian was rustic. But a halting conversation with an outsider, even if it was in coarse Franco-Italian, must have been preferable to Rustichello’s all-too-familiar view of the city. So he and Marco talked. And Rustichello gradually forgot about his confinement and concentrated entirely on the stories being told by his cellmate, Marco Polo.

missing image file

Marco Polo, from the title page of the first typeset edition of

The Travels of Marco Polo, published in 1477.

How else to describe it? Dropped by serendipity into a prison cell, Marco Polo must have seemed so far removed from the experience of a 13th century courtier that he might as well have been from another planet. Here was a man who claimed to have spent 17 years at the right-hand of Kublai Khan. A man who in his youth had traveled the Silk Road across the high Hindu Kush, acted as a military adviser to the Mongols during the siege of Saianfu, and served as a court diplomat in Yunnan. For all his lack of Latin, he was fluent in Persian, Mongol, and Uigur Turkish. He had returned from the East as the escort for a Princess betrothed to a Persian King. To hear him tell it, they had sailed in a fleet of fourteen ships, accompanied by 600 courtiers and sailors, and had been paid in jewels. Presented with the opportunity to explore this new world, Rustichello listened and wrote down every word.

Eventually, the winds of politics changed. In 1299 Marco and Rustichello were released, and Rustichello published his notes as Il Milione, known in English as the Travels of Marco Polo. It was an instant success. Here was a vision of a distant, unobtainable world, and European society was fascinated.

Our circumstances aren’t as exotic as those of Rustichello and Marco – no battles at sea, no prison cell – but the analogy is compelling. As with Rustichello, we have long felt a sense of confinement. Although we are scientists by trade, we are historians by avocation, and we had often wondered what it was really like to live in times before our own. For us, history presented by books is akin to the view of Genoa that Rustichello had from his prison window: distant and unobtainable, a mere glimpse of a world that we cannot enter. And then in 1982 we met Gene Haderlie: a unique portal to an extraordinary time, our Marco Polo. Through Gene, we have gained entrance to events so far beyond our imagination that we marvel at them much as 13th century Italians marveled at tales of Mongol China.

It first became apparent what we were dealing with when one day, quite by chance, we found Gene in his office and were invited in. We had been there before, and thought we knew what to expect. However, that day instead of learning about the optical properties of clam shells or some other biological oddity, the conversation turned to the subject of history, and Gene mentioned that he had been a diver in the U.S. Navy during World War II. In fact, while diving in one of the classic hard-hat rigs, his job had been to defuse mines on the bottom of the English Channel. From there the stories flowed, eventually to include D-Day, Jacques Cousteau, the Spanish Armada, Buchenwald concentration camp, the trans-Siberian railroad, John Steinbeck, and federally sanctioned bigamy in Wyoming. In this book, we offer these stories to you.

In presenting Gene’s tales we are faced with a classic problem in the description of history – events that, at first glance, appear separate are in fact deeply intertwined. Like Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five or the logic in James Burke’s Connections, we find ourselves skipping backwards and forwards in time as the story unfolds. But where to start? How best to give a taste of intertwinings to come? Perhaps it is fitting to take a clue from Gene’s office and start with an explanation of how he came to have a prism once destined for the periscope of a German submarine.

The thread of our story begins in April 1945, in the small industrial town of Wetzlar in the center of war-torn Germany. American and British armies were pressing eastward toward the Elbe River where they would soon meet up with the westward rolling Russian Army, a meeting that would effectively end World War II in Europe. As the American 1st Army flowed into Germany, small groups of specialists followed closely in its wake. Composed of engineers, scientists, and experts on explosives and ordnance, these technical groups were the vanguard of the Allied effort to evaluate and utilize the spoils from the Nazi war machine. Atomic physicists and rocket scientists? The Tech Force was to locate them and find out what they knew. A factory that once produced jet engines? If there is anything useful left, the Army had orders to pack it up and send it home for investigation.

The technical group was in Wetzlar to visit the Leitz factory, manufacturers of optical instruments, and Gene Haderlie, Lt. (jg), was along to represent the United States Navy (although he was wearing the uniform of a First Lieutenant in the Army’s Signal Corps). Thus begins the first of the Haderlie stories:

"On the afternoon of April 9, we drove to the Leitz factory in Wetzlar. We were looking at any factory that might potentially have been involved with naval mine development. And it was there in Wetzlar that I met Ernst Leitz; he surrendered the factory to the American Army. Leitz was standing right at the front door of the factory and he introduced himself. I went up to him, and I said, ‘Professor Leitz, I want to give you greetings from a former colleague.’ When I was a student, I had had a course at Berkeley in microtechnique from Professor John Gullberg, who had spent a sabbatical year at Wetzlar; he was an optical specialist. I told Professor Leitz that, ‘Professor Gullberg from Berkeley wants to be remembered to you.’ Gullberg had actually told me that, if I ever got to Germany during the war, I should give his best to the people of the factory. He knew I was in the Navy, but for some reason he thought I might somehow get to Germany. Well, I got there.

"Leitz’s whole face lit up. He must have been in his late sixties; he may have been even a little bit older. He spoke fairly good English, and he asked, ‘What are you going to do with me?’ I said, ‘I don’t know – I am simply with the Army, and I would like to know what kind of things you’ve been doing for the German Navy. We want to look at your factory and see what’s been going on, and I don’t think any harm is going to come to you and the group here.’ He was very thankful, and he said, ‘Let me show you around.’

"As we were walking around the factory, he explained that the only work they were doing for the German military was building binoculars, aerial cameras, and periscope windows and prisms for submarines. We had about seven Army officers with the tech group, and they were interested in a variety of things, but because I was representing the Navy I wanted to see where they were making the periscope windows. Professor Leitz explained that they had their own glass factory, and had worked out a process of molding glass that had no bubbles in it. Then they would grind it into parts for periscopes. I don’t know why they still acted like they were assembling these things, but here was the American Army and they still had people working! There they were, people sitting at benches putting things together.

"We walked by, and a periscope prism was sitting on a bench. I picked it up to look at it, and Leitz said ‘Oh, that’s broken; it’s got a chip off one corner. This young man dropped it,’ and he pointed at a boy working at the bench. The kid looked up at me, and he looked absolutely terrified. Leitz was speaking to me in English and the young man clearly didn’t understand a word of what we were saying. But he was really scared. Here was his boss showing his mistake to a foreign soldier! It’s hard to imagine what was going through his mind.

"I admired the prism, and Leitz asked, ‘Would you like to have it? It’s no use to us.’ I said yes, and took it with me. I hauled that prism all over Germany and France during the war and then back home. It ended up as a paperweight on the desk in my office, and I more or less forgot it was there.

"Thirty years later, when I was over at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, I had an Olympus microscope, and I was having some trouble with it. I called the Olympus company in San Francisco, asking them to send a service man down. A few days later, a knock came at my office door, and the man there introduced himself as Helmut Will: he worked for Olympus and wanted to look at my microscope. I sat him down at the bench, and he began to examine the instrument.

"But while he was sitting there, he looked over at my desk and he saw the periscope prism. And he turned absolutely white! ‘Where did you get . . . ? Where did you get that?’

"I told him the story about the technical group and the Leitz factory, and he just sat there for a minute, trying to gather his wits together. Finally, he said, ‘I’m the one who dropped it. I was sitting right by you when Dr. Leitz gave it to you. I had nightmares for months afterwards because I knew he had told you what I had done. You took the prism away and I thought that you’d come back and shoot me!’

missing image file

"Wetzlar was in the American zone, and there were American troops stationed there after the war. He told me that for years whenever he walked down the streets of Wetzlar he would cross the street so he didn’t have to go near an American soldier. He was only 17 years old at the time, and he was absolutely terrified. It was years before he learned that the Americans couldn’t be less interested in him. When he finally found out he said, ‘Oh, had I only known, had I only known.’

"By the time he came to my office, he spoke good English. He had represented Leitz in this country for a long time, and then when the Japanese firms started taking over the optical microscope business, he went to work for Olympus.

Isn’t that a wonderful coincidence though, meeting him again? I sent a Christmas card to him for years. I’ve lost touch with him, though, since he moved from San Francisco back to Germany.

Perhaps everyone’s life has a moment such as this, a vignette worthy of O’Henry. In Gene’s life, however, this is just a sample of many such strange tales.

CHAPTER 2

MORMONS: LIFE AMONG THE LATTER-DAY SAINTS

One day, after class, we happened by Gene’s office. He had his door open, and after the usual pleasantries, we were invited in. Gene had been rummaging around in his archives and had unearthed something he wanted to show us. From the glint in his eye, we expected some new scientific tidbit, but instead, the treasure du jour was a dusty scrapbook of family photographs. Black-and-white photos glued to black pages: kids and their pets, women and babies on the front porch, snowy winters, groups of stern frontier folks. Gene pointed out his grandfather, Charles Henry, and his grandmother Bertha, in a family portrait with their children. On the next page was Charles Henry with his other family. We settled in to listen.

What began that afternoon turned into the story-telling equivalent of a progressive dinner. We moved from Gene’s office to his house, where he had more photographs and family records. Eventually, the conversation expanded to include Gene’s sister Hazel and his brother Lamar. Hazel’s perspective and turn of phrase yielded a wealth of details that had slipped Gene’s mind, and Lamar, a life-long cowboy, provided yet another perspective on the path a young Gene took to his adventures in World War II. Here we weave together the complete story, a result of several separate interviews.

My ancestors on my mother’s side came from England during colonial times and settled in Connecticut. They were not Mormons, but my grandparents on my father’s side came from Switzerland, and they were converted to Mormonism in the 1860s. My great-grandfather is the one who was converted to Mormonism, and he emigrated to this country, to Salt Lake City, with his family.

They came to the United States in 1866 when my grandfather was a boy. My grandfather’s name was Karl Heinrich Häderli; the name was Anglicized when they arrived in America to Charles Henry Haderlie.

Your great grandfather converted in Switzerland?!

Yes, my great-grandfather was converted in Switzerland. When I was in Switzerland for the very first time, in 1959, I visited the old family home near Zürich. I had kept records and talked to my grandfather a great deal, and he had told me exactly where he had been born, and my grandmother too, on my father’s side. I visited both the Haderlie farm and the Schiess farm, which was my grandmother’s, nearby in Herisau. My grandmother described her home in Herisau as a big house with a barn down below, for the cows, set in the middle of a cherry orchard. Well, when we were there in April of 1959 the house was still sitting on the hillside with cows coming and going out of the barn, and the cherry blossoms were in bloom all around, and I thought: in that beautiful setting no one in their right mind could be converted to a strange religion by some hayseeds from Salt Lake. But they were, and they sold the farms. The Haderlies left Switzerland in 1866, and the Schiess’ left 10 years later.

They went through an ordeal to get to Salt Lake City. First, they had to go to Rotterdam to get on a ship. I don’t know what kind of a ship it was; it may have been a sailing ship for all I know. But probably not, probably a steamer. They arrived in New York, and then they got on a train that took them to Omaha, Nebraska. In those days, the railroad ended at Omaha, and that was when they joined the procession that Brigham Young had started in the late 1840s to go by covered wagon all the way to Salt Lake.

Well, my grandfather’s family, he was the only boy, and he had two sisters. One of his sisters died en route, somewhere near Evanston, Wyoming, and they simply buried her along the side of the trail. When they reached Salt Lake City they were assigned a farm. The church apparently, in those days, assigned the immigrants to farms, and the Haderlies and the Schiesses were sent to Logan, Utah, which is north of Salt Lake. Actually, it was to a little town near Logan called Providence. My great-grandfather, John Ulrich Haderlie, the one who had been converted in Switzerland, used to travel to Salt Lake all the time, because he assisted in building the Mormon Temple there.

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The Mormon Trail

The family lived under what must have been absolutely primitive conditions, especially in comparison to the civilized country and comfortable home they had left behind. My wife, Aileen, very often asked my grandmother, ‘Did you ever wish you had stayed in Switzerland?’ And my grandmother answered, ‘Well, I was too young to know any different. I was only seven years old when we came. But I think my parents very often wondered if they’d made the right decision.’ Because here they came to this horrendous frontier, living in log houses, Indians around wanting to scalp them.

So, these two families came at different times, but they all settled in Providence, Utah. They didn’t know one another in Switzerland, but the children grew up together in Utah and went to school and learned English. When my grandfather was 22 years old – he was born in 1859 – he married the older of the two Schiess girls. That was 1881. And then in 1885 he married the younger sister. The older one was named Anna Barbara; they called her Babette. She was born in 1860. Bertha Schiess, the younger sister, was my grandmother, and she was born in 1868. Babette already had three children when Charles married her younger sister. My grandmother was only seventeen when he married her.

No one has ever been able to explain to me why polygamy was started among the Mormons. Joseph Smith, the founder of the church in New York State in the 1830s, secretly had multiple wives. Polygamy became more common about the time of Brigham Young, in the 1840s. Because Mormonism was such a heretical sect, the Mormons were persecuted in New York, and they kept moving around. They first went to Illinois, and finally to Independence, Missouri, where the group settled for a time. It was kind of an evangelical sect in those days, and it was probably inevitable that anti-Mormonism was directed against their religious beliefs. Finally, Brigham Young, when he became president of the church in the early 1840s, decided: well, we have got to move our people to someplace where we won’t suffer such persecution. So we’re going to move to the Mexican territory in the West. But he had a hard time getting people organized, and when he did get them all organized to make the big move, he found that there were about four women for every man that was a member of the church.

How did that happen?

It just appealed to women more than it did to men, apparently. I have no idea why that was true. But 80% of the church in Brigham Young’s day were women. And he thought: we’ve got to increase our flock. There probably was a lot of the lecherous old man in him, too, but nonetheless, he’s the one who finally encouraged the men to have multiple wives. He took, oh, I don’t know, fifteen wives or something like that. There were very few people in the Mormon church that ever practiced polygamy. But Brigham Young was one of them, and others, including my grandfather.

When they encouraged polygamy, the persecution really became intense, and this is when Brigham Young decided: we’ve got to move again. At the time, they were in Nauvoo, Illinois, on the banks of the Missouri River. That’s when he took the group to Salt Lake. At that time, Utah was part of the Oregon Territory.

He then sent all these missionaries to Europe to proselytize more people to come, and that’s when my ancestors got involved. Why the Mormons continued to practice polygamy is one of the great mysteries. No one has given me a good answer. But this was the source of all the problems that the Mormons had from then on. People forgot about their strange theology; all they knew was that these were a bunch of old men who had multiple wives (although few of them actually did). Why, in the 1880s when the persecution was at its highest, my grandfather chose to take