Pomegranate Jelly: A Cold War Family Preserved

By Wendy Wallin

Not everybody has a father who took part in creating the most destructive weapon known to humankind and also developed the prototypical lens system for making wide-screen movies. Quite a few people have mothers who pared down their youthful aspirations as they turned their attention to raising a family. Most people have parents who lived a fair portion of their early lives unfettered by preoccupation with childrens needs, unaware of the limitations imposed by exigency, and full of the intoxicating sense that their whole lives lay ahead of them. We usually dont really know these people who became our parents, and often dont care to know them until its too late. So many of us are too focused on creating our own lives, trying to ensure that they are something other than our parents lives. So we fail to pay attention to who our parents were before they became the parents with whom we are familiar. By the time we wonder who they were their stories are often inaccessible to us.

Pomegranate Jelly, A Cold War Family Preserved, is the story of these parents and their involvement with each other and with their world. The narrative reveals individual and family evolution in a historical context, explores motivating factors that led a pacifist couple into careers supporting defense technology for the military-industrial complex, and ponders human attributes of idealism, incongruence, denial, resignation and resilience. This is a story of true love--love for each other, for children, and for humanity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9781514438190

Wendy Wallin

Wendy Wallin has worked professionally as a Marriage, Family, and Child Therapist, and most recently on short-term assignments at various military installations counseling service members and their families. Her educational background includes an undergraduate degree in English, a master's degree in Clinical Art Therapy, and a paralegal certificate. For two years as a young woman, after graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, she served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Niger, West Africa. She then spent much of her adult life zig-zagging from place to place and job to job: Editor of a Newsletter in the United Nations' Department of Economic and Social Affairs in New York, legal secretary and paralegal in Santa Monica and San Francisco, psychotherapist in Napa, adjunct professor at Solano Community College in Northern California, and Military and Family Life Consultant in Germany, Kansas, Tennessee, Okinawa, and Southern California. She now enjoys country living and retirement with her husband and cats on their property in Napa County. Writing has always been an integral part of her varied life. She attributes this in part to her parents instilling in her, during her formative years, a belief in the power of the written word to foster enlightened thought as well as to entertain.

Book preview

Contents

Preface

I.     Snapshots in Time

II.     War and/or Peace

III.     When We Were Very Young

IV.     Killing Birds

V.     Halfway Down the Stairs

VI.     A Schoolboy’s Holiday

VII.     Peter Pan, Wendy and Signe

VIII.     Songs of Friendship

IX.     Rise and Fall

X.     A Long Day’s Journey

XI.     The Tree of Knowledge

XII.     See No Evil

XIII.     The Life of Wally

XIV.     Legacies

XV.     Home Again

Postscript

Acknowledgments

Appendix

We will defend our people and uphold our values through strength of arms and rule of law. We will show the courage to try and resolve our differences with other nations peacefully – not because we are naïve about the dangers we face, but because engagement can more durably lift suspicion and fear.

—President Barack Obama, Inaugural Speech, January 21, 2013

This book is dedicated to my parents, Sara (Sallie) Wallin (nee Short) and Walter (Wally) Wallin, neither of whom lived to see an inaugural speech given by a non-white U.S. President. Both would have been thrilled to see the manifestation of their wildest political dreams and to hear their national policy sentiments so eloquently echoed.

PREFACE

Not long ago, thanks to an unanticipated work assignment, I found myself spending the heat of summer at a Navy base in the high desert of Southern California. Located on the western edge of the Mojave Desert between the Sierra Nevada Mountains and Death Valley, the Naval Air Weapons Station (NAWS) China Lake stretches out over three counties on the largest piece of land owned by the United States Navy. The land and the facilities situated on it support the Navy’s research, development, acquisition, testing and evaluation of weapons systems. This Naval station has been a crucial player, since World War II, in ensuring that cutting edge munitions are available to America’s war fighters.

It is also the only place that remotely qualifies as my hometown.

For five years, in my role as a psychotherapist, I took on short-term assignments providing brief, problem-solving assistance to military personnel and their families. The assignments involved relocating to a military installation for anywhere from one to six months. As I’m fairly selective about the length of time I’m willing to stay away from home, I tend to jump at assignments of two months or less. I’m generally less selective about destination, preferring to go where I think I’m most needed. When the scheduler called me about various options working with child summer programs in California, I took only a day to decide. I called her back to say I would take China Lake.

"You’ll take what?"

She had also offered San Luis Obispo and San Diego, which she hinted I might prefer. I wanted China Lake. She was delighted, because a summer assignment in the Mojave Desert was proving to be as hard to fill as were positions for scientists and engineers when my father was recruited to work there many years ago. I, too, was delighted because I was at a place in my life where I longed to wade down the refreshing runnel of nostalgia. Never mind that the temperature would average over 100 degrees; I would be able to stand at the edge of civilization as I had known it as a child and gaze out over the grayish mounds of desert brush framing Mirror Lake, which waited dormant and dry for flash floods from rare winter rains to awaken the brine shrimp. I could walk down China Lake Boulevard in Ridgecrest, the Miracle Mile that consisted of only a couple of food markets, a shoe store, a small medical clinic, a bar or two, and a smattering of other businesses when I was young. I might even be able to dip my feet in the pool at the Officers’ Club, where I had first learned to swim, or do a drawing of B Mountain, which had dominated the view from my bedroom window when I was a child. This would be an opportunity to catch a glimpse of myself as a little girl from an adult perspective.

What I hadn’t anticipated was that I would also be looking for my parents, and would find them everywhere: walking to the theater at Bennington Plaza or entering what used to be the Officer’s Club—a structure still saturated with the smell of old cigarette smoke—which is now the U.S. Naval Museum of Armament and Technology. Little did I know that I would spend my lunch hours wandering from the Officer’s Club past the old Bank of America building to what used to be the Commissary, then to the sprawling school where my second grade class had walked—lined up in orderly fashion—from rustic temporary buildings to our new, fully-equipped classroom. I didn’t know that each structure I would re-encounter, each turn taken on the familiar streets of my childhood, each towering cottonwood tree I might have known as a sapling, would have me summoning psychic clues to my mother’s and father’s subjective experience as young parents.

Both my parents have been selective in telling stories about their lives, their struggles, and their emotions. I have always felt there were huge gaps in my knowledge about family. Any real understanding of my father’s defense work was always a bit elusive to me. I never fully grasped, for instance, until after his death, his participation in the Manhattan Project. But I eventually came of age in terms of having a healthy curiosity about my parents’ aspirations, achievements, and setbacks. I interviewed my mother when she was in her late 70s and early 80s, and have listened to the cassette tapes I made of those interviews. And as if tacitly welcoming a snoopy daughter prying into their personal affairs and philosophical musings, my parents left behind many pages of sporadic notes, stories, and poems, as well as a hefty stack of letters. Supplementing all these are my own memories. A few are sharp and detailed; others are snapshots of events and circumstances, or mental silent movies, or a deeply ingrained awareness—much of which has never been put into words.

We tend to remember best those incidents and circumstances which stimulate a strong emotional response or a keen interest. Those indelible experiences are easily recounted, with virtually intact dialogue, although the details can mutate over time. In some cases, the emotional response and its memory are vague, elusive, and often a condensation of many similar events. Where distinct, detailed memories are lacking, I have chosen to interject quasi-fictional accounts—which nevertheless portray real-life events—in order to capture those experiences and dialogues which have blurred through the passage of time.

My return to China Lake ignited an impulse to revisit my family’s history leading up to, during, and immediately following the period of time we lived there. In doing so, I hoped to reacquaint myself with my parents and get to know them as a young couple who had their whole lives ahead of them. What inspired them? What worried them? What satisfied them? I was curious about how they had adapted to living conditions in our desert home. I wanted to understand more about my father’s work, what he had hoped to accomplish, and the rationale behind his professional choices. I wondered how my mother felt about devoting her life to his work and the family, relinquishing her dream of teaching and writing stories. I wondered if they were happy.

Most of all, I wanted to know who they were and what they were thinking.

I.

Snapshots in Time

We must react affirmatively to the perception of potential virtue. It is ours to will benevolent change, and ours to peel away rancor and pessimism as we would the leathery skin of a pomegranate in order to access its delicious bounty.

—Sara (Sallie) and Walter (Wally) Wallin, as channeled through their daughter

My whole family was afflicted with smile deficit disorder. That isn’t to say we lacked positive emotions, but we often neglected to show our feelings of pleasure, contentment, or mirth. My father had an upside-down smile. We knew when something amused him by the way the corners of his mouth pulled downward in an expression of suppressed elation. My mother’s smile was warm and pleasant but, as she pointed out once, only appeared on the front of her face; the corners of her mouth didn’t stretch back toward her ears. Lacking a wraparound smile is a defect I shared with my mother, and it was exacerbated by my avoidance of toothy grins because of a defect I shared with my father: a gap between my front teeth which persisted until I reached my fifties.

But even the old Stereo Realist slides taken by my father when I was a preschooler, before I knew enough to be self-conscious about the gap, revealed what a boyfriend once called the Wallin dour expression. In each picture—sitting next to a neighborhood boy, on a rock at Whitney Portal, with my mother at the salt water swimming pool in Trona, or at the rodeo in Ridgecrest—I could pass for an evil Stephen King toddler contemplating homicide, suicide, or a sadistic combination of both. In only one photo, taken in our living room one evening when our parents were entertaining friends, did I reveal an effort to smile. In this three-dimensional image—scratched and warped from years of inserting the cardboard frame into the Stereo Realist viewer and pressing a large, red button to illuminate the paired slides—I’m perched on the lap of one of the guests, who sits on the floor glancing down at me jovially. My brother stands beside us resting one hand on the guest’s shoulder, the corner of his mouth drawn back in the sort of one-sided leer that usually accompanies a wink. My mother is seated on the couch, a cocktail in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and a languid smile resting quietly on the front of her face. I’m looking point blank at the camera, biting my lower lip in a rough approximation of a grin which I awkwardly hold in place by the sheer force of ten splayed fingers pushed against my cheeks.

My sister had a beautiful smile, but she was usually so irritated she preferred to scowl much of the time, at least while I was growing up. My brother felt he had better things to do than smile, I suppose, but his sense of humor has always been intact; his chuckle and restrained expression of amusement in the face of irony are unmistakable.

I’m sure we’ve all heard the adage, It takes more muscles to frown than it does to smile. That may be true for some, but when my face is absolutely relaxed my mouth becomes a thin, upside-down smiley face. My father’s sister wore that expression pretty much all the time, and we always thought she was grumpy. I only fully realized what I was presenting to the world one afternoon when I was shopping at a Safeway in Oakland, California. I had just finished seeing a client and was rushing to get a few provisions before driving the 50 miles or so to the home my husband and I had just bought in Napa County. As I was moving my cart forward in the checkout line, a woman hurried through the door. Lagging behind her was a school-age boy. I found myself lifting my cart to move it out of their way, and looked at her with what I assumed was a perfectly neutral expression. Brushing past, she glanced at me and spat out the word, Sourpuss. I wasn’t sure if the insult was meant for me or for her son, but I found it easy to take it personally. That evening as I was getting ready for bed, I checked to see what my perfectly neutral expression—neither friendly nor judgmental, compassionate nor annoyed, tolerant nor inconvenienced—might have looked like to her. I re-created that absolutely expressionless, totally relaxed mien in front of the mirror, hoping to see a replica of, I don’t know, Mona Lisa maybe. What I saw was a scowl. Not just a scowl, but a thin-lipped frown exactly like my aunt’s. I looked like a sourpuss.

I started thinking back from that moment to mysterious reactions people have sometimes had to me: my husband believing I’m angry when I think I’m feeling contentment, a child client telling me he thought I was mean at first until he got to know me, my brother thinking I was merely complaining when I tried to match his poker-faced jests, a roommate thinking I had a judgment about her buying a bag of candy and proceeding to eat the whole thing. Well, maybe I did, but it was really only a minor judgment. It dawned on me, much too late in life, that I was hard-wired with body language that sabotaged my intended message. I finally appreciated the utility of a refrain I once learned in a personal empowerment seminar: If you’re happy, notify your face!

Some research indicates smiling can affect a person’s mood, and I don’t doubt that can be true. Therapies recommend smiling and laughing as antidotes to depression. When I was using biofeedback as an adjunct to psychotherapy and pain management, I demonstrated to many clients that although facial muscles are tensed in order to smile, when they smiled the biofeedback indicated the clients were actually more relaxed overall. And there is research demonstrating that a facial expression can elicit the mood it portrays. Smiling makes us feel better; frowning brings us down. Could my family’s muted expressions of mirth actually have impaired our experience of delight? What effect might it have had on our ability to show affection or appreciation for each other? How did it influence the feedback loop involved in exchanging information, interpreting social cues, and responding appropriately? Did it contribute to impairments in my ability to express myself verbally throughout the first half of my life?

Am I reading too much into this? Whether I am or not, that Safeway experience had a profound effect on my facial expression from that moment onward, and possibly on the effectiveness of my work and my comfort with interpersonal interactions. I resolved, that night, to go ahead and use the extra muscles it takes me to smile. Since I’m all into exercising anyway, why not exercise my face as well? I made a pact with myself to never, if I could possibly avoid it, allow my face to totally relax in public, and preferably not in private either. I set about to wear a smile on my face—or at least a determined grimace—when undertaking tasks that required focus, like reading, horseback riding, or clipping my fingernails. I was determined to smile at everyone I passed, whether they cared or not. I even started practicing different types of smiles, noticing which side of my face had more potential for wraparound status, and taking the time to stretch and exercise the stunted side. I looked in the side view mirror of the car whenever I was the passenger, to ensure my face and mouth were sufficiently toned and adequately uplifted. In short, I wallowed in vanity.

The results, I have to say, have made it all worthwhile. At least that’s my subjective experience of it. Although I have always resented the expectation that girls need to smile in order to be considered acceptable, and recoiled at the sound of a 4-H judge reminding a young contestant posing a hefty bull she had raised and trained to smile big, now, let’s see those teeth (something that would never be said to the boys), it does seem that practicing the discipline of smiling has rendered me more approachable. For one thing, people smile back at me. Even strangers. For another, clients are more likely to lean in, as if they might really be interested in sharing their lives with me, and children bound into the therapy room looking eager to play and talk. Friendships are more fun and last longer, and my husband is somewhat less likely to think I’m criticizing him when I’m not. I hate to admit it, because I spent so much of my life resisting it, but when you smile the whole world smiles with you. Or maybe it’s just that when you smile, the whole world looks better to you. And it wouldn’t have taken me so long to figure out if I had only listened to the advice my mother gave me when I was a surly pre-teen: If you smiled more, you’d have more friends.

* * *

Our family moved to California in 1946, thanks to a job opportunity that arose for my father following his work on the Manhattan Project during World War II. He was recruited as a civilian scientist by the Navy for work at the Naval Ordnance Test Station at Inyokern, California, now NAWS China Lake. As an optical physicist, he contributed his small part, mainly through development of prisms and lenses, to the sophisticated weaponry which propelled us as a nation into our future role as indomitable warriors. He considered himself a pacifist. This is an irony that has oft been repeated by family members, usually accompanied by a wry, knowing smile. We seemed to share an unspoken acceptance that any character flaws which might have sullied my father could be attributed to the discrepancy between his pacifism and his profession. There was also a tacit agreement to forgive those few flaws we collectively acknowledged, based on our assumptions about how the conflict might have weighed on my father. I don’t think any of us tried to fully understand his dilemma, or how my father may or may not have reconciled his choices between ideals and imperatives.

Workers’ reactions to their first view of the Mojave Desert in the early days of the China Lake Naval Station have been well documented.¹ Built during World War II to accommodate research and development of 20th century weapons for use in the war—including atomic bombs—the Naval Ordnance Test Station (also called China Lake, NOTS, or just the base) was a mirage come to life within two frenetic years of building. Situated about 150 miles from Los Angeles in the Indian Wells Valley, just east of the southern Sierra Nevada Mountains and south of the Coso Range, the base is distinguished by dry lake beds, vast expanses of sand dotted with creosote and hardy desert brush, and outcroppings of stark, arid mountains studded with boulders and streaked with lava flows. The summer heat, winter cold, and sandstorms sprinkled in between throughout the year mandated a sense of adventure, a hardy spirit, personal sacrifice, and an all-consuming work ethic to willingly meet the challenges posed by desert living. It also required a belief in the war effort and, after the war, in the imperative of modern military weaponry in the service of global stability.

Our family’s oral history consisted of a smattering of abbreviated anecdotes. There were the children’s language-learning stories (my brother using the word twindlyne for sewing machine and my sister greeting my father when he came home from a business trip with an excited, Darwick!—which was what, at the time, she called all men). There were the tortured-but-forgivable-syntax stories (me as a four-year-old on the train to Boston exclaiming, Mommy! I saw a horse go standing by!) There were the trials-of-parenting stories (my mother, following a Dr. Spock suggestion to splash water in a child’s face to calm her during a tantrum, receiving a glass of water thrown by my calmed and avenging sister back in her own face). These narratives served, along with the Stereo Realist slides, a few black and white photos, and some portraits taken by my father, as our snapshot history. They were repeated over and over, to the exclusion of information about our parents’ more challenging trials and tribulations, relatives’ peculiarities, or detailed accounts of our early lives.

I can only guess what my mother might have thought about moving to the Mojave Desert or about my father’s decision to dedicate his scientific expertise to the development of munitions. I have no memory of her reactions on first seeing our single story, stucco, duplex home, lined up in single file with identical houses on a broad swath of sand, facing another line of identical houses across the newly paved road. My earliest memories there are of being in a crib facing a framed, glow in the dark picture of lambs on the opposite wall, of having an earache that