A Company of Heroes (13 page)

Mostly, Pat lived for his family. He did whatever he needed to do to care for them. If he took a vacation, it wasn’t for him, it was for the kids, Chris noted. He was an avid bow hunter and fisherman, but never at the family’s expense. He never had an extravagant vehicle. Mostly he drove older, used cars. He lived a simple life, but he lived it to the fullest.

Pat spent lots of time creating his artwork, working on his or others’ gardens, sometimes for pay, usually for free. He built a cabin at Lake Tahoe with his sister’s husband. He loved the mountains and ocean. Chris described him as “a universal man. Some of us are good at some things, but Dad was good at many things.”

Pat was a craftsman who built birdhouses and made elaborate wood carvings that were sold in gift shops in San Francisco and Sausalito. He picked up pieces of cedar and pine in the Sierras and carved everything from figurines of American Indians to Jesus.

The family was Catholic, not necessarily devout, Chris said, but they attended church for many years. Pat had an aunt who was a nun. Pat was a highly ethical man and believed in following the Golden Rule. He was always known as a gentleman, even around his war buddies.

Pat started out in the phone company climbing poles with those old straps and spikes. He could shimmy up like a bear. They called his section in the company “craft” because it took an artisan’s and technician’s mind to do it well. He worked his way up to management but hated his new role, so he quit and went back into the field, which floored his wife because it meant a cut in pay, Chris noted. But Pat was wired as a kinetic person. He had to be able to dig into his work with his hands. He wanted to get out there and get into the wires, not shuffle papers and people. On his seventieth birthday, just for fun, he went out and climbed a telephone pole with his old rig. He retired from the phone company in 1977 at age fifty-seven.

Pat was big on ethics and doing the right thing. Later in life he told his son that he had always been true to his mother. “They were married a long time,” Chris said, “and I’m sure there were moments they felt less than thrilled with each other. But he never bailed. He never went astray on my mother.”

After Mary Jo got sick in 1997, she passed away very quickly, dying of liver cancer within three months of diagnosis. “It was a shock to everyone,” Chris said, “but it really took my father for a loop. He was absolutely destroyed.” She was just sixty-nine when she died. “After she passed, my dad got good and drunk at the end of her funeral. He said, ‘I’ve lost my wife of fifty years, I just don’t care anymore.’ Dad retreated into grief. It was reflected in his diary and in other papers. Dad lost his passion for life, for his artwork, for writing. He just stopped doing those things.”

Then Pat started to have health problems of his own. First, he had an aneurism, a ministroke. “The train just derailed from that point on,” Chris said. The stroke rewired his brain. He was slow and unresponsive, and was placed in a hospital in Salinas, near where his son, Pat, lived.

“Dad was a tough old sonuvabitch,” Chris said. “The hospital called us from time to time, saying things like, ‘Your dad has been very feisty lately.’ A few times he even needed to be restrained because he’d start slugging if he didn’t like what he was getting. He was just confused. For a short time he ended up in an Alzheimer’s facility in Freemont. He didn’t know where he was, or who he was, or what time period he was in. He had lost track of his perception of time, and said things like, ‘Well, Malarkey’s sitting over there. I just told him he had outpost duty.’ I’d say, ‘That’s not Malarkey.’ He’d say emphatically, ‘Of course it is.’ He was just rewired.”

Then, surprisingly, the unthinkable happened. One day Chris visited him in the Alzheimer’s facility and he said, clear as day, “Son, I’ve got to go home.”

“Dad, what are you saying?” Chris said.

“I’ve got to get out of here,” he said, “I’m fine.”

And he was. Pat had defied the odds. His brain had healed. The family had him assessed, and he checked out fine.

The family wasn’t eager to let him be on his own just yet. Two cousins who grew up with him in Oakland moved into his home with him, staying about ten months. Pat started exercising again. Most of his functioning returned, even to the point where he passed a DMV test and drove a car again. The physician didn’t bark a bit.

Then, he got colon cancer, which they removed, and he was okay.

Then Pat fell in his backyard, broke his arm, and jacked up his hip. “There was only so much the old war bird could take,” Chris said.

Pat’s son, Tim, had the financial means by then to take care of his father very well. Tim arranged to have a caregiver live with him in his home around the clock. She took good care of Pat, and they had a good friendship.

Toward the end, Pat developed an ulceration on his back. Family members took him to the doctor and discovered he had lung cancer. It didn’t come as a surprise. “He had been a chronic cigarette smoker since the war,” Chris said. “That was just the mindset of that era. They received cigarettes in care packages back then.”

The doctor said surgery was an option, but that Pat might end up on a ventilator.

“I don’t want to go out like that,” Pat said. “Let the cards fall where they may.”

They didn’t give him a timeline, but toward the end family members knew he was in massive pain. “You could tell by his mannerisms and expressions,” Chris said. “He never complained. He drank wine and self-medicated instead.”

He went into a coma with a high fever with short respirations. Then he was gone. He died December 15, 1999, in his own home. His three sons were with him when he passed.

Chris called Bill Guarnere to fill him in. In those days Bill kept track of everybody. Dick Winters wrote the family a letter, which says in part:

The last entry in Pat’s art journal shows a Christmas card he drew in 1944, which he sent to his fellow soldiers in Easy Company. It depicts a helmeted soldier. Underneath is one of his poems:

 

 

 

Some people are consistent. Everything about them fits a mold, no surprises. Others, like our father, don’t fit any mold. It’s all guesswork when you try to figure them out, and half the time you’ll be proved wrong. In fact, just when you think you’ve understood them, they throw you a curve-ball and do or say something that doesn’t fit your understanding. This was our father. He lived through some extraordinary times and circumstances and was always a paradoxical figure, not only to us, but to all who knew him.

This is the story of Walter Scott “Smokey” Gordon.

We know little about Dad’s upbringing. He talked quite freely about his life but never dwelled on early years much. We know that his parents didn’t marry until they were both thirty, which was unusual for their day, and they both had unusual names. Dad’s father was named Walter but was referred to as BeeBoy or just Bee, nicknames from his childhood. Dad’s mother was named for the heroine of a dime novel (the equivalent of a modern trashy paperback). Her mother had read the book and was struck by the heroine’s style, but her father was dead against such a name from such a source. He wanted to call her Deborah instead, but his wife held out, so the baby who became our grandmother was called simply “the baby” until three years later when a new sibling’s arrival forced the issue. They had to give Grandmother a real name then, and Cleta she became.

BeeBoy and Cleta grew up, met and married, and became a popular couple in Jackson, Mississippi, with many influential friends. BeeBoy became a spec builder and real estate developer and “got it when the gettin’ was good,” as they say down here. But his properties were leveraged on top of each other. When the Depression hit, the first of his properties fell and the rest came tumbling down. BeeBoy lost almost everything, and our grandparents went from being on top of the world to barely hanging on to their home.

Through good times and bad, our Gordon grandparents were sustained by their regard for one another, their friends, their wit, and something else: a cook. No matter how hard times were, BeeBoy never let go of Grandmother’s cook. It may have been self-interest on BeeBoy’s part, because Grandmother’s entire culinary repertoire consisted of grits—not a difficult dish: just boil water, add grits, add salt, stir, and wait.

Like her fictional namesake, our Grandmother Cleta was spunky in her own right. She had gone to college up north in Chicago, then later transferred down south and continued her studies at Belmont College in Nashville, Tennessee. She became a teacher in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and was fired from the school when she was spotted riding a horse astride. Everyone knew that all “ladies” had to ride sidesaddle. When students and parents learned of her dismissal, they threatened to fire the entire school board, and Grandmother was reinstated. She was an extraordinary teacher, and we know of at least three of her students who named their daughters Cleta in her honor.

Whatever else they may have been, Cleta and BeeBoy were not prepared for parenthood, especially not for two babies at the same time. The birth of our daddy and his twin sister (named Walter and Cleta) stunned them. Our daddy told us that BeeBoy would drive up to the house at the end of the day, and, if he could hear the wailing of babies, would simply put the car in reverse and drive away. He’d return only after he was certain his offspring were safely asleep.

Daddy was a bright young man, articulate, quick, and able to recall details of anything he had read. He had a wonderful vocabulary and studied Latin, yet, consistent with his paradoxical nature, did very poorly in school. Teachers always complained about his behavior. Knowing Daddy, we doubt his wit and joking manner were curtailed in the classroom.

The family was not especially religious, but Daddy, on his own, became a faithful Episcopalian, a lay reader and an altar boy. He knew the Bible like the back of his hand. In spite of the normal childhood squabbles, Daddy always adored his twin sister. He was extremely close to her and later her husband, and their three small children. Tragically, Cleta died in her early thirties of breast cancer, which was the turning point of Daddy’s religious life. Following her death, anytime he was asked about his faith, he would reply, “Any God that could take away the most beautiful creation to walk this earth, I want nothing to do with.”

He was always willing, however, to engage in discussions of religion. We have deeply religious relatives with whom Daddy could quote scripture chapter and verse. We wondered how a person who had lost his faith could know scripture so well and asked him. His reply was typical of this untypical man: “Don’t you know that the Bible is the greatest book ever written?”

Daddy enrolled at Millsaps College for a number of semesters, but his mind was on foolishness, and his transcripts reflected it. He was flailing about aimlessly, when an opportunity to make something of himself came in the most unlikely of situations: the call to arms. Here is another contradiction in this contradictory life: this lackluster student and lazy philanderer became absolutely on fire to become, of all things, a disciplined soldier.

In those days, you didn’t need to explain why you wanted to go off to a foreign land to serve your country. If you were healthy, over eighteen, and walking around town, you needed to explain why you
weren’t
serving your country. But when Daddy first tried to enlist, he was rejected. He had flat feet and was color-blind.

When he told his father he wouldn’t give up, BeeBoy offered insight. “One thing the military tries to do,” he explained, “is displace you from your home turf so your homesickness won’t tempt you to rush home at the first challenge. If you enlist down south, you will train up north and vice versa.”

Armed with this information and determined to try again, Daddy hopped a train heading north and ended up at a recruiting station in Philadelphia. He had heard about a special unit being formed called the paratroopers who would get more pay. It sounded fun, but it never occurred to him that they were paid more because most people don’t want to jump out of airplanes into enemy territory where other soldiers are on the ground, shooting at them.

So there he was, in South Philly, waiting in a line to enlist. As the men in line with him read out the eye test, Daddy memorized the letters and faked his way through the eye test. We never asked him how he faked the flat foot test, but our guess is that the Army never thought he would live long enough for flat feet to become an issue. Daddy trained initially at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, then later at Camp Toccoa in Georgia.