From Darkness to Light: The Strange Life of Marty Wilkins

By Marvin D. Pipher

Traumatized as a child, Marty Wilkens struggles to come to grips with himself and to understand the dark forces driving his life.

He may have been seen as living a normal childhood. But inwardly, Marty lived in a world of his own creation. It was a dark and dangerous world which influenced everything he thought and did and which ultimately framed his perception of himself—small, weak, not very bright, and always a failure. Fortified by one misadventure after another, that perception was firmly implanted in his mind.

All that changed, however, when Marty joined the US Navy where, removed from his childhood environment, he was able to gauge himself against other boys his own age. And he found that he wasn’t what he thought he was. Instead, he was a strong, confident, popular, successful, and typical young sailor— that is, until his childhood trauma came back to haunt him, this time with a vengeance that all but destroyed his life.

Returning home after his service, he found that nothing had changed and soon was again the boy he once was but now driven to succeed, if for no other reason than to prove to himself that he could do it. Faced with a choice of majors, he chose electronic engineering because it was thought to be the most difficult course of study.

Later, sensing that something was wrong with him emotionally, and deeming it psychological, he embarked on a private journey, hoping to unearth the root cause of his problems. After reading several books on psychology, he attempted self-analysis. The effects were devastating. He became paranoid and began having thoughts of suicide. Ultimately, an unexpected event forced him to confront the truth, and his childhood trauma was finally brought into the light of day.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jul 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9781639616565

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From Darkness to Light

The Strange Life of Marty Wilkins

Marvin D. Pipher

Copyright © 2022 by Marvin D. Pipher

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

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20

21

22

To God and to Dr. Karen Horney,

the brilliant German psychoanalyst and author without

whose brilliant insights and published works

this story could never have been told

1

In his mind’s eye, Marty could still see them clustered around their workstations in the communications building at Skaggs Island. It must have been the midnight shift, with no traffic, for they were huddled there playing poker while listening on their headphones. They all looked so young. Frank Hartman, who, word had it, couldn’t send if you stepped on his toe, was there. Glenn Bradley, the elder statesman of the team who served in World War II and then was recalled five years later for the Korean conflict, was there leaning back in his chair with his gangly legs sticking out. So was Ron Welden, tall and slim with a wry smile and a slight Southern accent. And so was Martin Marty Wilkens straight from boot camp and radio school. Four young sailors thrown together by happenstance to form team 3 of the communications section who got to know each other and became lifelong, though widely separated, friends.

Hartman was shuffling his coins around, as he always did when he had an ace in the hole. Then, as they all expected, he lifted the edge of his hole card and peeked in to make sure his eyes hadn’t deceived him. Everyone knew that the more he peeked, the better his hand.

Then, thoughtfully rubbing his chin, he tilted his head back and announced emphatically, I’ll see that raise and up you another fifteen cents, most likely wondering if he was going to scare everyone off as he’d done so many times before when he had a good hand. He never could keep a straight poker face when he needed one.

This all seemed strange to Marty, almost dreamlike; hadn’t he seen this hand played out at least a thousand times over the years? Yet this time seemed different, almost as if he were watching himself in some other life. Everything was different yet the same. And he seemed to be seeing it through a dull and lifeless haze. He couldn’t help but wonder if he might have had a few too many beers or was having a stroke or something. But then it occurred to him that the whole day had been pretty much like that, almost surreal, as if he were a spectator in his own life looking over his own shoulder. But wasn’t it like that every day?

That’s too rich for me, Bradley said, tossing in his hand, as he always did.

Well, announced Welden, once again flicking more ashes in his already overflowing ashtray, I’ll see your raise and up you a nickel. You can’t scare me out that easy. He tossed twenty cents into the pot.

Marty tried to make sense of all this, but he couldn’t quite grasp it. He paused pensively as time seemed to stand still. But the sound of Ron’s voice sent his mind reeling back to a much earlier time. Once again, it was 1942, and he had just arrived at St. James Elementary for his first day in fourth grade at his new school. He didn’t want to go there, but his mother made him go. In the end, she promised him a brand-new bicycle if he went, and he finally gave in.

St. James faced the east side of Pacific Coast Highway and was across a narrow side street from Redondo Union High School, which Marty would later attend. It was different in every way from Pier Avenue School in Hermosa which he had been attending. It was much smaller and highly regimented. The school was overseen by the priests who served at St. James Catholic Church, which stood diagonally across the highway. Nuns ran the school and taught the classes. They were dressed in the traditional nun uniforms of the day: full-length black habits with black woolen belts circling their waists from which black crosses were hung. All that was visible of their shapes and forms were their faces which were circled by pure white coifs and stiff white circular bibs. Since you couldn’t see their feet at times, they sometimes appeared to simply be floating along like black-and-white angels. But from a child’s point of view, they were not always angelic.

Marty was frightened when he got there and alert to everything he saw and heard. For it was the first time he had gone there alone, and St. James was a long way from his home in Hermosa Beach. To get there, he had to walk down to Pier Avenue School where he had been attending school for the past three years, catch the local puddle jumper bus to Redondo, get off at Emerald, and walk the rest of the way to the school; and he didn’t know anyone there or anything about it. And to make matters worse, he certainly wasn’t much of a Catholic and knew almost nothing about that either. All he knew about religion was that he and his sister, Jennifer, used to play on the railroad tracks where they crossed Pier Avenue while their friends went to church on Sunday. He wished he could have just kept the five cents bus fare and stayed home.

Marty walked up the hill to the steep concrete steps that led into the schoolyard. When he reached the top, he couldn’t help but notice the difference between Pier Avenue School and St. James. The playground at Pier Avenue was unpaved and much larger, suitable for almost any sport or any activities which boys and girls might engage in at recess and the children played together.

At St. James, things were quite different, and Marty thought foreign and a little unsettling. The small schoolyard doubled as the playground. It was paved in black asphalt, wasn’t quite level, and was divided down the middle by a white line. On one side was a wire fence about ten feet high along the alley which backed the school; on the other was the small parochial school itself. At recess, the girls played on one side of the line, and the boys on the other. A concrete structure straddled the line. It enclosed two separate lavatories, one accessible from the girls’ side of the playground, the other from the boys’ side. There were no windows. So never the twain should meet, except in class.

All in all, it wasn’t very friendly. There weren’t any swings or slides or anything like that, but the children didn’t seem to notice. The boys played their rough-and-tumble games on the far side, sniffed airplane glue occasionally, sometimes striking the backs of their hands with their combs, just behind the knuckles, then swung their arms around to watch the blood eke out from the pinpricks. The girls, who never seemed to get dirty or ruffled in their pristine dresses, just bounced balls back and forth, talked in small clusters, or sat on the benches along the fence on their side. The boys never could figure out what they were doing.

What about you, Wilkens? Bradley said, at last, You in? Wilkens, are you in?

Marty watched as Wilkens glanced at his cards one more time, moving his index finger back and forth across his lips, a habit he’d always had when he was thinking.

Then Wilkens said, That’s too rich for my blood, as he tossed in his hand as he always did.

I’ll just call, said Hartman and then raked in the pot with a smug grin on his face when his two pair, aces, and threes beat Welden’s kings and tens. You’re up, Wilkens. It’s your deal?

Marty watched as Wilkens gathered up the cards, shuffled and cut, and began to deal. Seven-card stud, jokers wild, he murmured half-heartedly in his soft-spoken manner. Ante’s a dime to play.

Everyone tossed a dime into the pot, and Wilkens dealt the cards. Hartman’s king of clubs was high, and he bet a nickel. Everyone kicked in.

The next round, Bradley’s ace of spades was tops. He passed, and Hartman tossed in another nickel.

For a moment, Marty, peering through the dreary mist, lost track of the game. His mind was elsewhere. But try as he might, he couldn’t remember much of anything about that first year in the fourth grade; maybe he didn’t want to remember. He couldn’t remember the names of any of his classmates or the name of his teacher. But the one thing he did remember clearly was the last day of school, for that day was to have a marked impact on the rest of his life.

He was called to meet with mother superior, Sister Agnes, in her office on the second floor facing Pacific Coast Highway, along with his mother. Mother superior was an older nun, no longer attractive, stern, and strict in all things moral and academic. She no longer taught any classes herself, but she patrolled the halls and visited the classrooms regularly all through the school year. The last thing any kid wanted to do was to be called to mother superior’s office, especially when their parents were also called. But there he stood, apprehensively wondering what was about to happen to him, wondering what he might have done wrong.

Sister Agnes began by saying that Marty hadn’t failed but went on to say that he was falling behind in his studies, and the decision had been made to hold him back a year.

Marty was devastated but was forced to accept the fact when his mother, Molly Wilkens, made no complaint or protest. Molly, it would seem, had married outside the Catholic faith, and therefore, her marriage wasn’t blessed and wasn’t recognized by the church. She was simply happy to be having her children raised in the faith no matter what it took, even promising a bicycle that she could never talk her husband into buying or having one of her children set back a year.

Perhaps it was then that Marty began to form the worldview that he carried in his mind for much of his life. For in his mind’s eye, he came to see girls as pristine creatures that could do no wrong, and he placed them on pedestals where they stood apart from him on their side of the line for many years to come. This was an image of the world with which Marty became all too familiar, but one which he never mentioned to anyone or tried to explain. It was just there, and it drove his life. It was impossible to describe, other than to say that it was like a view of the St. James playground as seen from on high, with its line running right down the middle, the girls on one side, the boys on the other. And in Marty’s distorted view, it was dangerous to cross the line. For Marty began to sense that every bad thing that had ever happened to him had been caused by a woman.

If Marty had been older and wiser, he might have expected it. After all, he was the youngest child in his class, had just been introduced to a new school, a new religion, and a new religious environment, and had come from a public school which had much lower academic standards and was far behind in the learning process. But as Marty saw it, Mother Superior had just pronounced judgment on him: he had failed. It was bad enough being small for his age, leaving his friends behind, going to a new school that he didn’t want to go to and not getting his promised bicycle, but now he was a failure.

Looking back on it years later, Marty had to sympathize with his mother, however, for he came to realize that her life must have been a living hell at that point in her life, and she must have been desperate. For, although his mother was a devout Catholic, she had married outside her faith without satisfying one of the principal tenets of the church. For her marriage to have been blessed and recognized by the Catholic Church, Marty’s father would have had to agree to be instructed in the Catholic faith, and that any children issuing from the marriage would be raised as Catholics, which he refused to do.

Disregarding that doctrine, Marty’s Catholic mother and his inactive-Episcopalian father had simply eloped to Hot Springs, South Dakota, and been married by a justice of the peace. In the eyes of the church, then, Marty’s mother was living in sin and was forbidden participation in the sacraments of her faith. Surely, she must have hoped and prayed that their attending St. James would satisfy the requirement allowing her once again to actively practice the faith she so cherished.

2

When Marty woke to the game again, three rounds had been dealt. Bradley now had a possible straight, headed by the ace of spades; so did Hartman, but his was only headed by the king of clubs. Welden had nothing showing but a possible straight flush in hearts. Looking over Wilkens’s shoulder, however, he could see that he had dealt himself a joker, which gave him two jacks as a minimum and a multitude of possibilities.

Wilkens pondered for a moment running his index finger across his lips, as he glanced around the table not wanting to scare everyone away, then tossed in a dime, as he always did. Everyone did likewise, and Wilkens began dealing the fourth round. Gazing through the dreary mist which wouldn’t seem to lift, Marty looked around the table trying to assess the odds as he once did, but his thoughts were too fragmented and soon drifted away.

That first day in fourth grade the next year was the worst. The year before, those kids had been behind him, the little kids, and now they had caught up, and once again, he didn’t know anyone in his class. Worse yet, the kids he had known last year must surely know by now that he had failed. Marty, who felt that he was walking around with a dark cloud hovering over him, was humiliated, and he began to shrink within himself. It seemed to him that nothing in his life ever went right. But as the days passed and no one mentioned it, these memories faded, and he gradually got over it, at least outwardly, although he was now a little quieter and a bit more subdued.

Before long, the new faces became familiar faces, and soon Marty knew a few names and a couple of classmates. And to his surprise, he discovered that he really liked his new teacher, Sister Mary Bernadette. She was the youngest of the nuns and by far the prettiest, and he loved to listen to her soft Irish brogue. But he hated it when she called on him to provide an answer, since he was almost always unprepared and never stuck up his hand, not even to go to the bathroom.

But what he hated most of all was when the class was divided in two by rows and lined up along opposite walls for the weekly spelling bee. He wasn’t a good speller, never lasted long, and seemed always to be the first to return to his desk. He was embarrassed every time it happened, but somehow, it never occurred to him to study.

For with his parents being gone all day every day but Sunday, he and his sister Jennifer Jenny were left to their own devices, which didn’t include studying. And when their parents did get home, which was usually around seven, they were too tired to care whether the children studied or not. His father simply sat down in the front room, read the Daily Breeze, and listened to the radio, while his exhausted mother set about cooking supper, which usually consisted of something like thinly sliced potatoes fried in bacon fat or lard, sunny-side-up eggs splashed with bacon grease, potato pancakes made from yesterday’s mashed potatoes, shells and tomato sauce, wieners and sauerkraut, or homemade noodles and mashed potatoes.

This rather meagre and not too healthy diet, short on meat and protein, may have contributed to Marty’s physical and psychological development. For he was always small for his age, underweight, and skinny; and thought of himself in those terms for much of his adult life. Consequently, he lacked confidence, was introverted, had low self-esteem, and didn’t relish his personal appearance which his best friend telling him that every time he tried to smile, he looked like he was going to puke didn’t help much.

Still, as best Marty could recall, his was a happy childhood. Who wouldn’t be happy living in a virtual child’s paradise, without guidance, direction, or restraint, with beautiful weather all year-round and some of the best beaches in the world and Clark Stadium beckoning all summer long?

But that was from a child’s perspective. The fact is that Marty’s parents were so busy trying to make a living and so concerned with living their own young lives that Marty and his sister were most often left on their own. They were what later would be termed latchkey kids. Only it was worse than that.

Since their parents were never home, except in the evening hours and at night, Marty and his sister were essentially free to come and go as they pleased, and they did. There was no control or guidance and no one to encourage or force them to study or to do their homework. They could come home from school or not come home or just stay out and play all day as long as they were home when the streetlights came on. Years later, in looking back on those years, Marty’s mother told him that they never got into any trouble, so they never worried about them. Life was good.

It is true that Marty and Jenny never got into any serious trouble with the police or anyone else. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t try or couldn’t have or, more likely, should have. Marty still recalled how he accompanied his older sister to the 5&10 Cent Store in Redondo Beach and watched as she shoplifted nail polish and dresses for her dolls. He didn’t remember ever doing it himself, but he certainly was an accessory. Maybe he was just too small at the time to participate.

But he did remember taking small change from his father’s cash register, especially the bright new Jefferson Nichols when they first came out. He didn’t know that someone else would take the blame for the shortage when the tally didn’t come out right at the end of the day. He didn’t even know there was a tally or that small change was big money back in 1938.

It wasn’t until years later, when Marty looked back on his life, that he realized that the worst thing about going to St. James wasn’t really about his being set back a year, his poor study habits, or his lack of initiative. It was that he never really got to know any of his classmates. Few of them lived in Hermosa Beach, most living in the neighborhoods around the school. So when school let out, they all walked home together, played together, got to know each other, got in trouble together, went to each other’s birthday parties and became true friends; while Marty was, for all intents and purposes, an outsider, a commuter who caught the bus to school in the morning and found his way home when the bell rang.

In Marty’s world, birthdays were celebrated around the kitchen table with a cake and perhaps a present or two, as at Christmas time. But fortunately, Marty and his sister didn’t think they were poor or even feel poor. Life was good, and fun, and you couldn’t find a better place to be a child than the South Bay Area of Southern California in the 1930s and 40s: Redondo and Hermosa were the best of all possible worlds.

The most birthday fun of all, at least as Marty remembered it, was those times when their parents took them to the amusement parks in Venice and Ocean Park. When this occurred, it happened about midway between Marty’s and Jenny’s birthdays, which were about two weeks apart.

As Marty remembered it, there were two amusement parks about two miles apart, connected by a shuttle that ran back and forth between them on the Strand. Each was on a pier, and neither of them was surrounded by a wall, as became the custom in later years where you had to pay a steep price of admittance, which enabled you to ride any ride you chose until your tickets run out. You simply walked up and paid at whatever ride you chose. As a result, there were seldom any long lines or any lines at all. Marty still recalled the excitement he felt when his father gave them some money to spend and set them free to do whatever they wanted to do and ride whatever rides they chose to. For Marty and Jenny, these excursions were the highlight of the year.

Most of the attractions, of course, were commonplace—Ferris wheels, carousels, roller coasters, and the like—but in Marty’s memory, one always stood out above the rest, the Fun House in Venice.

Cartoons were posted at its entrance, one of which Marty always remembered. It showed the inside of a barbershop with a man leaning halfway through the door asking, Bob Peters in here? and the barber replying, Nope, just shaves and haircuts. For some reason, Marty found that to be particularly funny, and it always stuck with him.

The entrance to the fun house led to a large rotating barrel, through which you had to pass to enter. This led to a shaky wooden and rope bridge, over which you had to pass to get to the top of a steep highly polished wooden slide. The slide, after several ups and downs, dropped its riders about forty feet below onto another highly polished wooden surface, a flat, slowly rotating circular dish about ten feet in diameter. The centrifugal force of the dish wasn’t sufficient to cast its riders off, but it eventually slid them to the edge where they could extricate themselves.

From the bottom of the slide, a haphazard passageway led to the fun house’s exit. Marty could still sense the disappointment he and Jenny always felt when the excitement was over far too soon. But the exit wasn’t that far away from the entrance, and they often went through more than once.

The fun house was always the first place Marty and Jenny went when they got to the park. But in later years, attractions such as that were banned as being too dangerous for children, and they probably were. But Marty sometimes wondered if America might be turning its children into wimps by not letting them take such risks.

Whenever Marty recalled those happy days at Venice and Ocean Park, one strangely curious happening almost always came to mind. It involved the night they were on their way home when his father stopped at a rustic roadside hot dog stand to get a round of hot dogs for the family. As they were driving away with their prizes, someone discovered that the hot dog vendor had cut out the middle of the hot dogs such that only an end stuck out at each end of the bun. Marty’s father got angry, quickly turned the car around, and went back. And while everyone watched from the car, he confronted the miscreant seller of the deceptive hot dogs and demanded that he either give him what he had paid for or give him back his money. After some loud discussion, the culprit finally complied. Marty always thought that was the best hot dog he ever had. Later in life, he still enjoyed just thinking about it.

Marty knew that his mother was born on the family homestead, an isolated cattle ranch in the middle of nowhere on the great plains of Nebraska in 1911, about halfway between the small towns of Crawford, Nebraska, and Hot Springs, South Dakota. She was the third in a family of five boys and five girls. Marty didn’t know much about it, only what his mother had told him over the years.

But from what she had said, it wasn’t an easy life for a child, especially an older girl who of necessity had to help raise her younger brothers and sisters as they came along one after another, as she and her older sister Nancy did. With all the chores to do, there was little time to play, only a few handmade toys to play with and few books to read. With no electricity, no telephone, no radio, and no water, except that drawn from the well, there was always something which had to be done. And everybody had to pitch in. About the only fun thing his mother ever told Marty about was that she liked to go out to the wood pile, between the house and the outhouse, and kick the pile to make the snakes rattle.

Somehow, that didn’t sound much like fun, but Marty did have a vague recollection of jumping over a snake himself once when he was on his way to the outhouse, but he was never quite sure that it was a real memory, since he only visited there a few times in the 1930s when he was only four or five years old; but every time he thought about it, it brought back another sadder memory which he’d rather have forgotten.

In 1935, Marty’s father heard of a business opportunity in South Dakota; and since, with the Depression in full sway, there weren’t many opportunities in the South Bay area, they began thinking of moving back to the Midwest. So they loaded the kids in their old jalopy and drove back east to see if they could find something better. As it turned out, the business in South Dakota didn’t pan out, but Russell did find what he thought to be a good one, a cleaning establishment in Harrison, a small village about twenty-three miles west of where he had been raised, which according to census records, had a population of about 280 inhabitants in the mid-1930s.

While in Nebraska, Marty’s mother and the kids often stayed on the ranch