History Lessons: A Memoir of Growing up in an American Communist Family

By Dan Lynn Watt

History Lessons traces Dan Lynn Watts journey through childhood in New York during the McCarthy era. He marched on May Day with his war hero father and activist mother, chanting We dont want another war! and Jim Crow must go! At camp, he sang about world peace, freedom, and workers rights. At school, he attempted to hide his familys politics. He takes you inside family struggles against racism and political repression. Disillusioned with communism by the 1960s, he became a civil rights and antiwar activist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 17, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543429855

Dan Lynn Watt

Dan Lynn Watt and poet Molly Lynn Watt, lifelong social activists, are among the founders of Cambridge Cohousing, an intentional urban community of forty-one family units. Since 1998 they have lived collaboratively to reduce their carbon footprint. They coauthored, performed, and produced a CD, George and Ruth: Songs and Letters of the Spanish Civil War, based on his parents’ letters. Dan’s work focused on promoting project-based learning in science, mathematics, and technology. He helped develop and promote the Logo programming language. He and Molly worked with teachers worldwide to support the use of Logo in classrooms. His Learning with Logo (McGraw-Hill 1983) was used by tens of thousands of teachers and students and translated into Spanish, Italian, and Chinese. Teaching With Logo, (Addison Wesley, 1986), coauthored with Molly, continues in use. In summer the Watts lead a ukulele camp in the White Mountains.

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Copyright © 2017 by Dan Lynn Watt.

Library of Congress Control Number:     2017909454

ISBN:     Hardcover     978-1-5434-2987-9

Softcover     978-1-5434-2986-2

eBook     978-1-5434-2985-5

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.

Rev. date: 07/14/2017

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Contents

Introduction: Making History

Prologue: George Looks Back

Chapter 1 The Home Front

Chapter 2 War Stories

Chapter 3 Ballad for Americans

Chapter 4 Class Consciousness for Breakfast

Chapter 5 Marching on May Day 1948

Chapter 6 Mexican Winter 1949

Chapter 7 Secret Mother

Chapter 8 Lost Mother Found

Chapter 9 Camp Wochica

Chapter 10 Over the Park with Curtis

Chapter 11 Grandpa and Grandma’s American Dream

Chapter 12 Unavailable

Chapter 13 The Dream of the Lost Cause

Chapter 14 I Led Three Lives

Chapter 15 Man of The Times

Chapter 16 I Saw Your Daddy in Chains

Chapter 17 Sedition

Chapter 18 An Afternoon in May 1956

Chapter 19 Out in the Rain

Chapter 20 Levittown 1957: American Dream Turned Nightmare

Chapter 21 The Locomotive of History

Chapter 22 Tales of the Zanies

Chapter 23 Freedom Summer 1964: Deep South

Chapter 24 Freedom Summer 1964: Getting Religion

Chapter 25 Center of Gravity

Appendix: Chapter Notes—Sources and Resources

Acknowledgments

For

George Watt (1913–1994),

Margie Wechsler Watt (1916–1999),

and Ruth Rosenthal Watt (1915–1940),

who believed they were going to make a better world

and

Molly Lynn Watt,

who makes the world better every day

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May Day Parade, New York City, 1947

New York Daily Worker Photo

Introduction

Making History

At dawn on April 4, 1938, George Watt, fighting as part of the International Brigades for the glorious but doomed cause of the Spanish Republic, reached the west bank of the Ebro River. The river was wide, freezing cold, flowing swiftly at the height of the spring flood. Six men, fleeing from Franco’s fascist army, knew they’d be imminently discovered. They had to get across the river. They could not find a boat, and the bridges were all blown up.

Three men made a makeshift raft from a barn door. My father and two others said they’d swim. The raft vanished downstream around a bend in the river. The swimmers stripped off their clothes and plunged into the river, letting the current carry them while they swam across. My father and his friend Johnny Gates reached the other side shivering and walked until they came to a road. A jeep came along, carrying two American journalists. The men in the jeep tossed George and Johnny a couple of blankets and asked to hear their story. The journalists were Herbert Matthews of the New York Times and Ernest Hemingway, reporting from Spain for the North American News Agency.

The next day the story appeared on the front page of the Times. All through my childhood, I met people who told me, "George Watt is my hero! When he swam the Ebro River, he made the front page of the New York Times."

After escaping across the Ebro, George was appointed political commissar of the Lincoln Battalion. At twenty-four, he was one of the leading American communists in Spain. He remained a dedicated communist for the next twenty years, including the worst years of anti-communist repression in this country.

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My father joined the Young Communist League (YCL) in high school when it led a successful campaign to roll back a two-cent increase in the price of milk in the school cafeteria. My future stepmother, Margie, hitchhiked to West Virginia during a high school vacation to assist striking coal miners. Later she was suspended from Hunter College for leading a one-day peace strike—a boycott of classes. My birth mother, Ruth, was arrested at age seventeen for leading a raucous street protest against a speech by Nazi Germany’s ambassador at Columbia University.

My parents became communists in the 1930s when the Great Depression exposed the limitations of capitalism. The efforts of political and business elites to provide for the basic needs of the most Americans seemed too little—and too late. Communism offered action to change the status quo. Communist theories cited the Depression as evidence that capitalism was in crisis, perhaps its final crisis, and that the triumph of the working class was inevitable.

In the 1930s communists were part of a progressive coalition, a united front alliance of socialists and liberal New Dealers, labor unions, and civil rights groups, anti-fascist groups—all groups working for social and economic justice, racial equality, a world without exploitation. Not everyone in the united front believed that class struggle was inevitable or that revolution was desirable. But as long as they were working together for common objectives, communists were respected by their collaborators as tough, militant, and effective organizers.

Communists were among the first Americans to oppose the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy. In 1936 a fascist uprising in Spain threatened the democratically elected leftist government of the Spanish republic. The Spanish fascists were massively supported with troops and weapons by Hitler and Mussolini. The leading democracies—Britain, France and the United States—declared neutrality and established an embargo against arms to Spain, which hurt the republic but not the fascists. My father was one of thousands of communists and socialists from many countries who volunteered to fight with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. They had the support of a large proportion of public opinion across the United States.

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I am a red diaper baby, a child of communist parents. I was born in March 1940, nine months after my father returned from fighting for the Spanish republic. I grew up knowing that my father was a hero who had risked his life for the cause. My grandparents on both sides, my aunts, and my uncle were communists as well.

I was less than two years old when my father left home to serve in the US Army Air Corps during World War II.

When my father returned home in 1945, my parents expected a bright future for the communist movement. Their movement had hundreds of thousands of supporters across the country, greatly outnumbering the official membership of the party itself, which ran to tens of thousands. Communists and their sympathizers were leaders in some of our country’s largest Labor unions. Communists were influential in the arts as writers, composers, performers, and filmmakers.

I grew up in an optimistic, idealistic family. During my childhood and adolescence, my parents believed they were part of a great historical epoch—the epoch of the triumph of the working class. They consciously devoted their lives to making that history come to pass. My parents and most people around them believed that a better society was on the horizon, if only they stayed true to their beliefs and ideals and continued to organize.

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History Lessons is almost entirely made up of stories about incidents in my life and my family’s life. Through stories about me, my parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles, I seek to illuminate a part of the history 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, as seen through my eyes as a child, adolescent, and young adult.

I grew up trying to straddle two cultures: the rich subculture of idealistic communism and the mainstream culture of midtwentieth-century New York City. I have some of both in this book, as well as some family history that has little to do with politics. I try to capture as best I can the mind-set of the young person I once was.

Sometimes I step back from my own experiences to say a bit more about what was going on in the larger world, as I now perceive it. Occasionally, I reflect on my youthful thinking from the vantage point of my midseventies.

I am not a historian. My version of history is subjective, in my own voice. My knowledge of history is incomplete, told from a personal point of view. My memories of events and conversations are also incomplete. I make use of other materials—books, family letters, scrapbooks, interviews, photographs, and news articles—to fill out my stories. A notes section at the end of the book describes all the sources I have used in writing each chapter.

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There is another voice that appears throughout the book: the voice of my father. George Watt was my hero, my role model as a child. He played a large part in my political education as I was growing up.

My father liked to talk about his adventures behind enemy lines in Spain and World War II and I loved to listen. Over and over I heard him tell stories about fighting in Spain, swimming the Ebro River, and meeting Ernest Hemingway. Even more satisfying was hearing how he escaped from behind enemy lines when his B-17 was shot down over occupied Belgium during World War II.

Other things my father would not talk about. One day, when I was eleven years old, my father took me aside to tell me he was going to leave home for a few months to work for the party. He could not tell me where he was going or when he would return. He was gone for almost three years.

We had a saying in those days: The walls have ears. For our family, this was literally true. The FBI bugged my childhood home and tapped our telephone. While I was growing up, we never spoke about where George was during the three years he was underground, attempting to evade the FBI. In the end, they caught up with him.

For decades, I knew nothing about his experiences underground. We finally had an extended conversation about this when I was about fifty and he was in his midseventies. A transcript of a recording made at that time allows me to give him presence in his own voice, deeply enriching the stories I tell from my memories.

I begin this book with the start of that conversation.

Prologue

George Looks Back

You have no idea. I had been so anxious, so lonely, all those months. It was such a relief, such a joy, to spend a few days with you and Stevie and Margie. Just a normal, sweet, happy family time. What a bath for my soul. And you and Stevie were so great. We had so much fun together. Without that, I could never have gone on to do my work.

This was in June 1990. We were sitting in my parents’ dining room in Northport, Long Island. George was framed by Margie’s climbing plants and backlit by afternoon light from the yard. We each had a glass of beer. A bowl of pretzels sat on the table between us.

My father was recalling a surprise vacation our family had in the Catskills almost forty years earlier. In 1952 the communist party was under siege; and George, along with many of its leaders, left home and went underground, hoping to avoid the FBI. Afterwards, George and I never spoke about where he had been and what he did between 1951 and 1953.

I was fifty years old. George was seventy-six. I leaned forward slightly and opened the conversation, In all these years we’ve never talked about what you did and where you were when you were away from home. You’ve talked about Spain, about World War II. You’ve written a book about the Comet Line and your escape from Belgium. Why don’t we ever talk about the years you were underground?

George leaned back a little, offered a tight little smile. Well, first off, you never asked me. Do you realize that you’ve never asked me anything about this in all these years?

I’ve been curious of course. I paused and took a sip of my beer. George reached for a pretzel. But I was so well trained by you and Margie that some things have to be kept secret. I figured you must have your reasons. Remember we used to say, ‘The walls have ears’? Do the walls still have ears?

George laughed. Something seemed to loosen in his face. It’s been a long time since I heard anybody say that. Well, you know that our home was bugged by the FBI when we lived at 478 Central Park West. I never found any direct evidence, but I know how the FBI worked. They would have had someone come in to repair the telephone or an electric circuit. There are dozens of ways they could have gotten in and bugged us.

He took a sip of beer, and his face darkened slightly. "But it’s true. I haven’t wanted to talk about those years. Now, I want you to know that I never had any secrets from Margie. Even when our home was bugged, we found ways to talk outside the house or in written notes we passed back and forth. But with you and Steve, there were things I never felt comfortable talking about.

The party made a lot of mistakes in those days. You know some of them. Believing in Stalin and the Soviet Union was probably the biggest. All the other mistakes followed from that. And there are mistakes that I made personally that I never wanted to talk about. And some things I did that could have gotten me into trouble, even after I left the party, even after my Smith Act conviction was overturned.

Another sip of beer. He smiled again. These days I can’t imagine that the walls have ears. Even if they do, I’ll answer anything you ask. FBI, if you are listening, here’s your chance. Make the most of it.

Let’s start with this. Why did you leave home in 1951? I was so angry at you for leaving. I felt my jaw tighten.

George launched into a little history lesson. "To answer that, I really need to go back to 1948. The Cold War was heating up, and the party was under siege. The Justice Department had just brought indictments against eleven members of the party’s National Committee, including Gene Dennis, Gus Hall, Winnie [Henry Winston], Gil Green, lots of our friends. We were expecting a major government repression. We thought that at any moment there might be mass arrests. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of party leaders as well as rank-and-file members might be rounded up.

There was talk of raids. Hoover said he had a list of Commies to be rounded up in an emergency. Hubert Humphrey was elected to the Senate. He’d been very progressive, but he was one of the people working to set up concentration camps for communists.

So far none of this surprised me, except the part about Hubert Humphrey, but then I had been so disappointed in Humphrey during the Vietnam War. George continued, Gene Dennis [executive secretary of the party at the time] called me into his office. Talk about ‘the walls have ears’! We couldn’t talk out loud in his office. He wrote on a pad, ‘Get ready to leave. I want you and your wife to go away for a while.’ He wanted me to start setting up an underground organization for the party so people could still function in hiding if the party was made illegal.

I sat up. I almost choked on my pretzel. What? He wanted Margie to leave home too? I never knew that!

George put his glass down with a clunk. Well, we never agreed to it. ‘Leave the children,’ he wrote. ‘Let them stay with your parents or your in-laws.’ I wrote on my pad that we couldn’t leave our children. Later Margie and I agreed. I would go underground but never both of us.

I sat straight up. Memories of those years came flooding back to me. I was so angry at you for missing my sixth-grade graduation in 1951. I still remember that. You said you’d come, and I was waiting for you. I was sure you’d come. And I never knew why you didn’t. George’s response stunned me.

I was in hiding in Mexico after a botched operation. I was down there for six months, afraid to cross the border because I was sure the FBI would be watching for me. There was no way I could even let Margie know where I was. I hope you’ve forgiven me.

Well, I’m fifty years old, I said. So I guess I can forgive you now.

Well, that’s a relief. Seriously, I didn’t have time to think about what was going on at home. I’m sure you can understand that.

"Well, obviously you made it back because we had that surprise vacation in the Catskills. I was twelve years old by then. You’d been away for over a year. I had no idea where you were before or after that vacation. Even now I have no idea.

And you’ve really got me curious. What the heck were you doing in Mexico? And why were you stuck there so long?

George stopped and thought for a minute. He went to the kitchen and came back with some more beer and refilled our glasses. Do you remember our family trip to Mexico in 1949?

Of course I remember it. We spent two months driving there and back in our 1938 Chevy. It was our greatest vacation ever as a family.

Well, he continued, that’s when my Mexican fiasco really started.

Chapter 1

The Home Front

The first sounds, the first voice, the first words I remember hearing were my mother’s, singing an old lullaby.

Low, low, sweet and low, Wind of the Western Sea

Blow, blow, breathe and blow, Blow him again to me

While my little one, While my pretty one sleeps

I was about two, lying in my crib, listening to her croon this sweet, lonesome song. Margie’s voice was husky, not especially musical. We were both aching for my father, far away in the Army Air Corps, training to be a flight engineer.

Margie, actually my stepmother, was doubly bereft. Married less than a year, she was raising me by herself. Whenever she looked at me, she was reminded of my mother Ruth, George’s first wife, who died suddenly five weeks after I was born. Ruth had been Margie’s best friend since their YCL days at Hunter College.

When Ruth died, Margie was there to console George, ready to help him cope with his baby boy. World War II was brewing. George knew he’d be going. It was natural for George and Margie to get together. George was sure Ruth would have approved. As for me, Margie was the only mother I knew. George and Margie never spoke about Ruth.

My first memory of my father is of his absence.

I came to know and love him through letters I received during the war. We were living in Far Rockaway, Long Island, when the first letter arrived from basic training in Miami Beach, complete with hand-drawn sketches of palm trees. Margie read me the letter.

Miami Beach is a beach just like Rockaway Beach. … There are palm trees all over, even on the beach. … I am a soldier now. You know what a soldier does? He marches up and down, up and down, up and down the street all day long. I also will work on and help fix airplanes. As soon as I get a chance I’ll send you one—a little one.

Your loving daddy,

George

I went around telling anyone I saw, I got a letter from Daddy. He’s in Margie’s Ami Beach. This was greeted with gales of laughter. I asked Margie to read the letter again. When she read, Miami Beach, I interrupted, See, it says your ami beach.

"It’s not my ami."

Well then, is it George’s ami?

No, it’s not anybody’s ami.

"So why did you say my ami beach?"

Because that’s its name. Miami Beach.

I gave up. My two-year-old logic was not up to solving the puzzle.

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I received a dozen letters during my father’s three and a half years in the Army Air Corps. Each was full of wit, affection, and humor. Margie assembled them into a scrapbook of brown embossed leather. On its cover a silver B-17 bomber was topped by an eagle and bordered by flags and symbols of the army, navy, and air corps. The title page said From George in the Army to Danny.

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Margie pasted each letter in the scrapbook as it arrived and read them all to me at my insistence. I would pore over them for hours, delighting in the hand drawings, photos, postcards, and clippings.

My second letter arrived on stationery headed Army Air Forces Technical School, Amarillo, Texas, where George was undergoing flight engineer’s training. In the upper-left corner was a photo of men working on airplane engines.

I’m now in a place called Texas. Texas is very big. You want to know how big it is? Well, it’s bigger than Far Rockaway. It’s even bigger than Central Park. … There are no trees here so I can’t draw a picture of a tree. All there is, is grass and sky. There’s a lot of sky. And that’s very good. Because there are a lot of airplanes. Airplanes fly in the sky. The more sky there is the more room the airplanes have to fly in.

That business of airplanes in the sky worried me. I asked Margie to explain it for the umpteenth time. She pointed to the full moon outside my bedroom window. Daddy’s flying up there with the moon. Frightened, I made her pull down the shade. Afterward, I blanched whenever I saw the full moon. If I read a book with a picture of the moon or a story about the man in the moon, I’d get a sinking feeling in my stomach and turn the page.

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I don’t know how soon Margie and George began living together; but by the time they married on July 7, 1941, I was sixteen months old and I already knew Margie was my mother. George was drafted seven months later.

Margie raised me as her own son. How she kept up her cheerfulness during the war years I can’t imagine. But except for those lullabies, she was always upbeat around me. She was determined that I would have a happy childhood: toys, tricycles, playmates, grandparents, nursery school, and a loving mother.

While George was training to become a flight engineer in Texas, Margie took up housekeeping with Peggy Wellman, mother of two toddlers. Davy was my age, three; Vicky, one and a half. We now lived at 401 Pine Street in Freeport, Long Island. Our ramshackle two-story home with a large yard on the edge of town was perfect for an active family.

Peggy’s husband, Saully, was a paratrooper with the 101st Airborne. Saully and George became close friends in Spain, where both had been officers. They remained loyal communists during the difficult years of the Moscow purge trials and the Hitler-Stalin pact, when many of their former comrades left the party, unable to accept the gyrations of the party line.

Margie, a New York Jewish intellectual with an advanced degree in social work, came to the party from the student movement. Peggy, a working class spitfire who arrived in New York from Seattle on the back of a motorcycle, hadn’t graduated from high school. Margie was a soft-spoken mom, let me have my way, would never raise a finger to discipline me. Peggy let her kids know loudly when she disapproved and spanked them if they got too far out of line.

Margie and Peggy were both devoted communists. Their husbands were in great danger, fighting fascism overseas. They bonded while caring for each other, raising three small children, and worrying about an uncertain future. They remained friends for life.

I remember the Watt-Wellman household as a joyous, lively, raucous home with two working moms, no dads, and three toddlers. Davy and I ranged all over the house. Outside we raced round and round through back and front yards, inventing our own games.

The bench of our picnic table, made from a plank of wood resting on crisscrossed legs connected by a long wooden dowel, was a favorite plaything. Davy and I turned the bench on its side, then climbed in with our feet under the dowel, our chests against the plank. We leaned forward ever so slowly, pressing against the seat. Suddenly the bench fell over, turned upside down. Two giggling boys crawled out, turned the bench back up on its side, and climbed in again.

For indoor days, our huge console 78 rpm record player stood like a sentinel in the living room near the stairs. Davy and I could climb on a stool and wind it up to play our favorite record: a folk song from the American Revolution. We’d wait for each verse to end, then march around—one shoe off and one shoe on—chanting the refrain:

For the rifle, (BOOM boom),

For the rifle, (BOOM boom),

In our hands will prove no trifle, (BOOM boom)

Our offbeat stomp echoed the sounds made by the banjo. We had no idea what the song meant, but it captured the martial enthusiasm of two little boys whose dads were away fighting a war.

Margie and Peggy taught us other songs to remind us of our dads. For George, we sang the Army Air Corps song that began, Off we go into the wild blue yonder, climbing high into the sun; … and ended, Nothing can stop the Army Air Corps!

For Saully, Davy’s father, we sang the infantry song, Over hill, over dale, we will hit the dusty trail as the caissons go rolling along …

We sang these songs with gusto, although caissons meant nothing to us. Many of the words were strange, and we knew nothing about war. But we memorized both songs before we were four.

It was during these years, Margie told me, that Davy, Vicky and I developed a habit of calling our parents by their first names. Davy called my mother Margie; so did I. I called his mother Peggy; so did he. The habit persisted for the rest of my life. My parents were always ‘Margie’ and ‘George,’ never ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad.’

George’s next letter from Amarillo came complete with photos, a glossy picture of a cowboy on a rearing horse and several drawings.

This is the story of my trip to Palo Duro Canyon. … Here we are waiting for our horses. Can you see me? [Photo of six men in uniform sitting on a fence.] … Here are some buffaloes. [Photo.] If mommy gives you a nickel, you’ll find another buffalo.

This picture deserves the center of the page. [Photo of George on horse.] That’s me on top. The horse’s name is Colonel. Colonel is a smart horse. He didn’t want to go down the trail. We tied him to another horse named Pinto and pulled him down. Finally we stopped to rest. [Photo of men standing near horses.] We are not sitting down. We rode for five hours in the valley. At last we rode home. Colonel was not so stubborn now. He galloped very fast and almost threw Daddy off. … I didn’t sit down for a week! – The end – Love, George.

I don’t think George had ever ridden a horse before.

Thus began my fascination with cowboys, horses, and everything Texas that lasted through my childhood, well into my teens. I listened to Tom Mix, The Lone Ranger, and the Gene Autry Show on the radio; later I watched the Lone Ranger on TV. I devoured Roy Rogers and Red Ryder comics. And I dreamed of riding a horse someday.

From Amarillo, George’s next stop was Seattle for additional training by aircraft mechanics at the Boeing factory. Margie flew out to spend a weekend furlough with him just before he was to be deployed overseas. In the scrapbook is a photo of my parents in Seattle.

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George was promoted to tech sergeant, fully qualified as a B-17 flight engineer. The rest of his cohort went overseas immediately without him. Instead, he was sent to a base in Utah while the army decided what to do with him.

He was itching to go into action against Hitler. But Americans who had volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War were designated premature anti-fascists by the army and were considered security risks because of suspected pro-Soviet sympathies. At first, many of these men were assigned to menial or clerical duties. Eventually, the Department of War decided that their prior combat experience and commitment to defeating Hitler made them more valuable in battle than out of it.

After three months cooling his heels in Utah, my father was assigned as a waist gunner and flight engineer to a B-17 crew based in England as part of the Eighth Air Force. From England, huge flotillas of B-17s, Flying Fortresses, accompanied by escorts of fighter planes, took off for bombing runs over the industrial heartland of Germany. Dangerous work. Although the cruising altitude of a B-17 was thirty thousand feet, when it came in over a target to deliver its payload, it was vulnerable to German antiaircraft fire.

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In Freeport, Margie and Peggy split the housekeeping, child care, and breadwinning. Margie got up early to work as a riveter, building Hellcat fighter planes for the navy at Grumman Aviation in Farmingdale, New York. Afternoons and evenings Peggy waited on tables at Byers, a local restaurant down the street from our nursery school. Many afternoons when Margie picked us up, we’d walk over to Byers for a dish of vanilla ice cream.

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Margie woke me early while it was still dark. We ate oatmeal together in the small kitchen at a table covered in checked oilcloth. She made sandwiches for both of us, wrapping them in wax paper. Holding the overlapping edges together, she made three narrow folds so that a strip of paper rested tightly on top of the sandwich. Then she formed the ends into triangles folded under the sandwich. They made such crisp neat packages that the wrapping never came apart.

Margie took a rounded tin lunchbox to work. I had a smaller one for nursery school. Into each lunchbox would go an orange or apple along with the sandwich, maybe cookies for me. A thermos of coffee fit neatly in the rounded top of Margie’s lunchbox. A smaller thermos of apple juice fit into mine. They were clamped shut. Margie would kiss me good-bye, say, Give Davy and Vicky a kiss for me. And off she went, chugging into the dark morning in her 1933 Plymouth.

Alone in her car driving east as the dawn was breaking, I imagine that Margie had plenty of time to agonize about our situation. If George did not return from the war, I would be an orphan. It was unthinkable that anyone would want to take me from her, but still she worried. Would George’s parents or Ruth’s sisters think that I would