Читать книгу Pot Shards: Fragments of a Life Lived in CIA, the White House, and the Two Koreas - Donald P. Gregg - Страница 5

What triggers memories of the past? I was born in December 1927, and perhaps because I grew up in the pre-television age, many of the strongest links to my childhood are aural, not visual. The voices of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill are as thrilling and familiar to me as Peggy Lee singing “Why Don’t You Do Right?” with Benny Goodman in 1942. The sound of a steam engine’s whistle instantly takes me back to long train rides to my grandfather’s house in Colorado, having dreams of wild Indians in my upper berth in the Pullman car. And the cry of a loon is as hauntingly evocative today as when I first heard one in Canada’s Algonquin Park when I was five.

My childhood, in a hilltop house in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, was unusual. I was taught to read at a very early age by an aunt, who was a brilliant teacher of pre-school children. Before I could start formal schooling, I picked up tuberculosis at a 1934 YMCA conference in South Carolina that I attended with my father, whose life work was with the YMCA. He was Abel Jones Gregg, and he became head of boys’ work at the National Council of the YMCA, and started the Indian Guides program.

Because I had TB, I was not permitted to start school until I was eleven, and so for the first decade of my life, as an only child, I was essentially with adults, who went out of their way to include me in their conversations, and to introduce me to their thoughts about the world.

The first foreign issue I became aware of was Japan’s invasion of China, which began in Manchuria in 1931. When I did not clean my plate at dinner, my father would tell me not to leave “a Chinese meal” to be thrown away. As he explained what that term meant, I had my first inklings that the rest of the world was not as well off as we were.

Through his participation in international YMCA conferences held in the 1930s, my father became aware of Adolf Hitler’s rise in Germany, and was deeply apprehensive about what it would mean. On one occasion, an American radio network played a recording of Hitler delivering a speech in Germany. My father had me listen to the broadcast. Hitler’s voice had a high yapping tone to it, and I did not like it.

I knew both my grandfathers, both of whom lived into their nineties, and through them was introduced to our long and colorful family history.

My paternal grandfather, Harry Renick Gregg, was born in 1852 in Circleville, Ohio. He was full of clear recollections, some funny, some violent and some tragic. He was proud to tell me, when I was a very small boy, that we were a Scottish family, descended from the war-like MacGregors, who were outlawed by the English king in the early 17th century, for generally ferocious bad behavior. Our ancestors then changed their name, if not their behavior, to Gregg.

I last saw Grandfather Gregg in June 1950, when he was 98. We talked of the Civil War, which he remembered clearly. Most vivid was his memory of President Lincoln’s funeral train, which passed through his hometown in 1865. He said that “the silence and the sadness” were unforgettable.

My maternal grandfather, Charles Atherton Phinney, was born in 1853 in Maine. He was a conservative, church-going man but had some wild and woolly ancestors, including “Narragansett John” Phinney, who took part in the “great swamp fight” in 1675 that was the culmination of “King Philip’s War” against the Narragansett tribe.

And there was Mary Corliss Neff, carried off from Haverhill, Massachusetts with Hannah Dustin and her baby by Abenaki raiders from Canada in 1697. Mary has been acting as a nurse to Hannah, who had very recently given birth. The Indians quickly killed the Dustin baby, and the women plotted revenge.

Their chance came one night after several grueling days on the way back to Canada, when, on a small island where they thought their captives had no chance of escape, the Indian captors grew careless, and all fell asleep. Mary and Hannah took three tomahawks from the sleeping Indians, and armed a young boy who had also been captured. Acting swiftly, they killed ten Indians, scalped them for the bounty then being given for killing Abenaki raiders, and escaped downstream by canoe.

Mary lived until 1722, Hannah until 1736. In 1874, a large monument honoring the courage of Mary and Hannah was erected on the small river island in New Hampshire, where they killed their captors. My mother’s middle name was Corliss, and she was one of Mary’s direct descendants.

The family anecdote to which I feel most closely connected concerns my great-grandfather, John Gregg. I heard the anecdote from my grandfather on three or four occasions; once or twice in the 1930s, in the summer of 1944, and in June 1950 for the last time.

John Gregg was a huge man for his time, the mid-19th century. When he was buried, he weighed 240 pounds. He was well over six feet tall, and was immensely strong. He helped run a family dry goods store in Circleville, and people would gather to watch him unload wagonloads of produce. He was noted for lifting heavy barrels of sorghum over his head and carrying them into his store.

One day a large, tough-looking man came into the family store, sized up my great-grandfather and said “I’ve come to fight you. If I can lick you, I can beat any man in this part of Ohio.” The stranger, an itinerant prize fighter, was told to leave, which he did, but as he departed he said: “You’ll fight me before I leave town.”

The stranger set himself up in Circleville’s bar district, acted with great belligerence toward those he encountered, and “beat the daylights” (my grandfather’s words) out of anyone who challenged him. Word of these doings quickly got back to John Gregg, along with the stranger’s claim that there was a certain storekeeper in town who was afraid of him.

My great-grandfather had his lunch at a hotel near the family store, normally sitting alone at a table reserved for him. One hot summer day, the stranger with his fearsome reputation fully established, barged into the hotel dining room, and, uninvited, sat down with John Gregg.

The two men stared at each other, and the stranger sneeringly said “You’re a lily-livered son of a bitch.” (Each time my grandfather told me this story, the high moment for him was the repetition of that powerful epithet. Otherwise, swearing was strictly discouraged in the Gregg family home.)

John Gregg leapt to his feet, flipped the heavy dining table over on the stranger, pulled him out from under it, threw him through a window onto the street, jumped out the window, and beat him unconscious. He then picked up the stranger and carried him over his shoulder to a nearby doctor’s office. He told the doctor that he would pay all medical bills, and asked that he be notified when the stranger planned to leave town.

When word came of the stranger’s departure, John Gregg went to see him off. The stranger held out his hand, and said “Well, I came looking for it, and I got it.” He then climbed into the waiting stagecoach, and departed. Such was life in Ohio in the 1850s.

My mother, Lucy Corliss Phinney, had a beautiful contralto voice and was offered a chance to study for an operatic career. Her conservative father was against this, and so she went to Radcliffe, graduating in 1913, and going into a life infinitely more dangerous than she or her father would ever have imagined.

My mother had studied “social work” at Radcliffe and began work at the Boston Society of the Care of Girls (referring largely to unwed mothers). Mother’s work attracted the attention of a group in Montreal called the Women’s Directory, which had been formed to fight what was then often referred to as “white slavery,” the entrapment of poor, uneducated young women into prostitution.

In 1916, she moved to Montreal to begin this new phase of her work. Within three years she had become head of the Directory, and had been successful in focusing press attention on what she referred to as “commercialized vice interests,” which could be more accurately described as vicious criminal gangs. Two attempts were made to kidnap and kill her, and she was urged to leave Montreal to protect her life. So she went to Colorado College, as dean of women, where she met my father when he returned home from France after World War I.

Dad graduated from Colorado College in 1913, and joined the YMCA. In 1916, as a member of the Colorado National Guard, he was sent to the Mexican border to pursue the Mexican border bandit Pancho Villa. In 1918, he joined the Army, and as a 28-year-old college-educated buck private, was sent to France.

In his last letter before shipping out, he wrote these words: “I am looking forward to my trip with a mighty anticipation. A Western boy sailing overseas to have a hand in the biggest event the world has ever seen. I am quite happy to go so that I can hold my head up during the years ahead.”

I worshipped my father. When I was a sickly child, feeling deeply inferior to both my youthful, healthy contemporaries and my powerful forebears, Dad always encouraged me to feel that one day I “would make a difference” in the world. The unhappiest period of my life started in the fall of 1942, when Dad became ill, suffering internal infection from an abscess on his duodenum. Just as my health improved, Dad’s worsened. Radical surgery was attempted, but failed. Dad died in April 1944, when I was 16.

World War II was raging, my lungs had cleared from any evidence of TB, and I had been given clearance to play all high school sports. I decided to enlist in the Army as soon as I was 17, to “have a hand” in World War II, thus emulating my father. My mother wisely insisted that I graduate from high school before entering the Army, and so I doubled up on enough courses to graduate in 1945, at 17. I “toughened up” that summer at a canoe trip camp in Canada, and was on a remote lake in Ontario when travelers from another camp shouted the news of war’s end. I enlisted in the Army in September 1945.