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By Root 1020 0

by the navy blue uniform, and with his mother’s thick black hair and his father’s soft eyes, he was a model of a robust young American. He stayed that way even when he started losing enough hair that his classmates called him Baldie. When I was in seventh grade and living at the Naval Academy, I went to the library and looked up my father’s placement in his graduating class. I was disappointed that it wasn’t high. But that was just his academic placement; he was made a commander in his company when he was a first-classman, which is a senior; he was a more than reliable football player and an All-American lacrosse player in a world where athletic success was valued at least as much as academic success; and he was—and remains to this day—beloved by those men who graduated above and those few who graduated below him in the Class of 1945, which because of World War II graduated in three years, in 1944.

When he graduated from the Naval Academy, his orders came to report immediately to the USS Quincy, a heavy cruiser, “the biggest ship you could ever imagine seeing,” as he wrote home. On January 23, 1945, when the Quincy and my father set sail from Newport News, Virginia, President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself was aboard, destined for the Black Sea in the Soviet Crimea, where Roosevelt met with Churchill and Stalin at what became known as the Yalta Conference.

In early March 1945, after the President had been returned home, the Quincy and my father sailed for the Pacific theater, to fight the war with Japan. The Quincy took part in the first bombardments of the Japanese mainland at Kamaishi, north of Tokyo, and survived a severe typhoon that flooded my father’s bunkroom and swept, he complained, his gray worsted trousers out to sea. His letters home were censored, of course, so after the Quincy bombed a factory in Hamamatsu, he wrote about how thrilled he was to hear that his older sister had finally become serious with a boy. “Hope she will be leaving home soon,” he wrote. “At last, more room for me. Besides, she always stayed in the bathroom too long.” After the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, he wrote his mother that “life out here is still wonderful. Thanks for the brownies. They were very good, though a little hard by the time they reached us. One boy asked if they were left over from my high school graduation party.” World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, he was in those places, but he always talked as he did in his censored letters home, keeping everything cheery. He lived through a terrible great war, and two more to follow, but you would never know it from talking to him.

In October 1945, after Germany was defeated and Japan had surrendered, my father returned home. He went to Navy flight school, where he spent his nights in a classroom and his days in a cockpit. My father loved flying and swore he’d never get out of a plane. He never minded the danger, but he did mind the unrelenting heat of Corpus Christi and the intense schedule. “I still have a lot to learn,” he told his mother as his training program came to a close. “We have to know everything about this plane except how to make it talk.” That left little time, he complained, for the more important things, like football and girls. But all that was about to change.

In a letter home to his mother, my father slipped in the name of my mother—and his plan to marry her—between the notice that he had taken $135 from his bank account and a reminder that his Plymouth was due for a free checkup. “Believe me,” he wrote, “this is it. She is tall, shapely, light brown hair—fairly attractive. Hope you will like her.”

My mother was born Mary Elizabeth Thweatt, the daughter of a Navy pilot and a Mississippi farm girl. Her father, Troy, had courted my grandmother Mary in letters from the front as part of the first Navy Air Corps during World War I. While in France, he wrote her a sweet letter about how much he adored and missed her. He always started his letters “Dearest Girl,” and that is how this one started. On the outside of the letter he wrote that if the