John Frank Lathrop

John Frank Lathrop

What a pity to have had a father who was pretty much a nice guy and to have known him so very little.  John, or "Jiggs", as he was commonly called, tried to work with my mother's dad for the Pet Milk Company located in Sparta.  He was the son of another good Sparta family, of which I will write more later and it happens that my maternal and paternal grandmothers were both teachers in the areas surrounding Sparta.

(Picture of John Frank Lathrop courtesy of Clara Lathrop)

I am sorry that I do not have childhood memories of my father, and so I will have to rely upon hearsay which I will give much credence to primarily because none of the things that have been told me about him are particularly bad.

The U.S. Navy destroyer, USS Smith (DD378) was attached to a squadron of ships serving as screens for the aircraft carrier Hornet.  On 24 October 1942 they joined with another group protecting the carrier Enterprise in the South Pacific after a large Japanese carrier force was spotted converging on the island of Guadalcanal.  My uncle John tells me that my father was aboard the Smith, although I have no other confirmation that the story is true.  The timing seems appropriate, as my mother would have been in high school at the time, probably beginning her junior year, but possibly her senior year. 

Two days later the Hornet was hit by bombs and the Smith was attacked by 20 Japanese torpedo planes.  One plane crashed into the forecastle of the destroyer but the torpedo did not detonate upon impact, but a short time later, causing even more fire and casualties.  The forward part of the ship was enveloped in a sheet of smoke and flame.  The bridge had to be abandoned.

The gunners downed six of the torpedo planes and the crew extinguished all the fires by afternoon, thanks to a decision by the captain to steer the ship into the wake of the USS South Dakota, helping to douse the fires.  Smith maintained her position in the screen with all serviceable guns firing although many of the powder magazines were flooded.  When fighting broke off she limped to Noumen for temporary repairs and then to Pearl Harbor.

Since my parents were married for such a short time, I have no idea of whether my father was a seaman or a fireman (whether he worked above or below decks) nor did I have opportunity to talk to him about whether he was aboard during this skirmish.  If he was aboard the Smith, I can only imagine the horror, because in the South Pacific naval encounters, I don't believe anyone survived if they went into the water.

The timing works out, because when Smith went to Pearl Harbor for more extensive repairs, sailors would have been transferred to pare down to a skeleton crew, and John Frank Lathrop might have been discharged from the Navy and returned home to marry Elsie Patricia Hanson and father me.

My mother tells me that he was basically a good man with a great sense of humor and adventure and that he wouldn't take "guff" from anyone.  The times being what they were, I am of the opinion that partying and a goodly amount of drinking were the norm.  Everyone who had survived the Great Depression and World War II had a lot to be thankful for and lived it up.

She related a story to me of a trip to San Francisco to see my dad while he was in the Navy during which they had drinks in a park and someone stole her purse and shoes.  My dad apparently asked around and they wound up in an upstairs apartment having a couple of beers with one fellow's girlfriend while he plied his acquaintances for information.  Amazingly, the purse was returned, minus a little money but with the important things (like travel tickets) intact.  The shoes were not found and the girlfriend loaned my mother a pair which were three sizes too big. 

Others arrived and the little beer party was interrupted by an argument where knives were produced and my dad quickly ushered her out onto the street.  She had to continue her visit clomping around in the oversize shoes. 

My grandfather purchased a small cottage on the La Crosse River which cuts through Sparta.  I remember my first birthday taking place there.  It might be that "Jiggs" and my grandfather were away working, probably in Madison, but I remember some gifts.  One was a rubber airplane with Mickey Mouse in the cockpit.  I promptly chewed Mickey's head off and had to play with the plane from then on with only his severed neck protruding from the toy. 

I was also given a candle which was about a foot tall and had gradations embossed on its surface about a quarter of an inch apart.  They were numbered and the idea was to burn the candle to the next mark each birthday, which my mother and the others present promptly did, with great seriousness.  I never saw the candle again.  It may even have been a baptismal candle--I am not sure.

The other toy was a large plastic egg, two-toned, the halves welded together.  There were holes in it.  One was tiny and a small crank protruded through it.  When the crank was turned a tune was plunked out and could be heard through the somewhat larger hole.  When the crank was turned backward, the tune played backward.  If you looked into the larger hole you could see that a wide rubber belt moved around when the crank was turned.  The belt had bumps on it which plucked the various tines of a little sound board.

I truly believe that my interest in how mechanical things work dates back to this little toy and its inner workings which could be observed by the fascinated eye of the one-year-old peering in through the hole.  What was truly amazing about this toy was that the little belt inside was made of a material that had a peculiar smell.

After my grandmother's death, this little egg surfaced in a trunk of her belongings and I was astounded to discover the memory of it in my mind as well as a memory of the little tune, a memory of how the tune sounded backwards, and a memory of how the little belt with the bumps on it smelled, which it still did.

My grandparents and my uncle and aunts seem to have an affection for "Jiggs" and my mother tells me that his main fault was that he just couldn't settle down and be responsible.  Around the time I was a year old, the number one song for a number of weeks was "Manana" by Peggy Lee.  Jiggs may have been a "manana man", a procrastinator.  I sure am.  I have tried to live my life by the lyrics of this song so it might have been the case that I underwent some subliminal personality molding from exposure to it at age one.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ou5vsdpsoAE

Some of the guys at work even used to call me "Johnny Manana".

Because the Lathrops were Catholic, my mother had to turn Catholic, in those days, to be married in the church and I was baptized Catholic at some point in my infancy, before the marriage went bad.  My mother and father divorced when I was around the age of two.  She did not remain a practicing Catholic.  I am told there was an effort at reconciliation and indeed I have a snatch of a memory of moving away to Council Bluffs, an extension of Omaha.  This was a very short move and I can remember only exploring the yard a little bit.  I can't even remember my dad in the event.

There is also a story about "Jiggs" apparently learning to fly a small airplane.  The crux of the matter is that he was forbidden to take me up in the airplane but that on occasion I would return from an outing crowing "cows!"  "cows!".  Then they knew that I had been up in the airplane. 

Ultimately the divorce took place and my mother and I lived with her parents in Sparta in a little house on Cottage Street adjacent to a city park.  In those days a divorce was a real black mark and the families involved often did not continue to associate with one another out of the shame of it all.  The mother almost universally kept custody of the children and I am not sure alimony or child support was a sure thing at all.  In many cases the father moved away from town which is what I believe happened in our case.  "Jiggs" went out to seek his fortune and my mother and her parents undertook to raise me. 

It is a sad consequence of the way things were that I did not meet my father again until I was in high school.  Because there had been a dearth of involvement and because of my own immaturity, I was not overly excited when I did meet him.  I developed a fondness for John Frank Lathrop and we exchanged visits, but it was not until a bit later in my life.  We will return to him, but after the divorce he apparently had moved to Council Bluffs, and ultimately lived in Nevada, Iowa and worked for a large company there that managed the mailing out of samples of consumer products.  He met and lived with a very nice woman named Dorothy who also worked there.  I don't know if they officially ever married, but they conducted the rest of their lives as though they were. 

My grandparents on both sides liked one another, however, and I am thankful that I often had contact with his side of the family.  As I write on, my experiences are largely skewed to my mother's side of the family, but we visited the Lathrops freely and I am lucky to have some fond memories there as well.

Elsie Patricia (Hanson) Lathrop

                                                              Over The Rainbow

My earliest memory is of being held in my mother's arms while she sang "Over The Rainbow" and rocked me gently.  Although I haven't encountered anyone who claims to have memories of infancy and have heard it said that the mind does not retain them, I nonetheless do indeed have this snatch of memory and cherish it.  This song and George Gerschwin's "Summertime" stick in my mind from her singing them to me so much.  I didn't sing "Over The Rainbow" to my children when they were little, but I did fumble around sufficiently with a guitar to find four chords that augmented "Summertime" and I would sing it to them at bedtime.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSZxmZmBfnU

A few years ago, I had the occasion to recreate this moment with two of my grandchildren and when I started to sing the words, my scant infantile memories and those of my own beautiful children snuggled safely in their beds flooded my mind and I was so overcome that I had to croak out some of the words in the dark.  Afterward, my little granddaughter, Annabelle, commented from her top bunk, "Grandpa, that was so beautiful that I almost broke out crying!"

"Over The Rainbow" was sung by Judy Garland in the movie "The Wizard of Oz" in the 1930's and "Summertime" was from the play Porgy and Bess in the same era.  My mother would have been a fourteen year old girl when these gems came out.  They were already 'oldies' by the time I was born but Garland continued to sing her song for thirty years, never changing the way she sang it. 

The first hit song that I would have been likely to hear from my dresser drawer, which doubled as a bed, was Perry Como's hit titled, with considerable irony, "Chi-Baba, Chi-Baba (My Bambino Go to Sleep)".

I was born in May of 1947 to Elsie Patricia (Hanson) Lathrop, a beautiful young mother of 21-years who had married her high school sweetheart after he returned from serving in the Navy toward the end of World War II.  The marriage was not destined to last very long and, things being as they were in the middle of the 20th Century, I subsequently did not know my own father, also named John Lathrop, very well at all and I don't have memories of him at all from my infancy.

My mother always went by Patricia, using the E or the total Elsie for a middle name.  She did not like her first name, presumably because she was called "Elsie the Cow" by other children when very young.  "Elsie the Cow" was the mascot for Borden dairy products and was prominently featured in advertisements and embossed upon the glass bottles that milk and cream came in. 

In those days, there was a milkman, much like a postman, who once or twice a week made his rounds and left full bottles on the porch, taking away the empties for refilling.  However many empty bottles one left on the porch was the number of bottles the milkman would leave and it was likely that "Elsie the Cow" decorated each one, to my mother's chagrin.

The first person in a child's  life is his or her mother.  I believe awareness of one's mother to even preclude awareness of one's self.  Once the self is perceived, the journey has begun and I was immensely fortunate to have my journey begin, not in one of any number of inhospitable places, but in Sparta, Wisconsin where the glaciers carved huge valleys out of thirty-million year old limestone and sandstone, their melted remains digging tracks like the Beaver Creek, which runs through Sparta and into the La Crosse River and ultimately into the Mississippi at La Crosse, twenty six miles distant.

My mother and father grew up and went to high school in Sparta.  Camp McCoy, an Army base, was located about eight miles to the east.  Japanese Americans who had been unjustly sequestered by the government, were housed there at times, as were German prisoners-of-war.  But mostly, Camp McCoy was a training base for infantry and artillery. 

The constant presence of rotating military staff and trainees ensured that Sparta was an active party town in those days and ever since and I can only imagine the competition my father and his classmates endured from the steady influx of handsome and exotic young men for the attention of the girls, as well as the consternation of the parents of the local girls when the night spots and dance bars were overrun with these intriguing fellows.

This situation, added to the fact that the war had ended, led to an aura of general festivity and celebration, which resulted in what is referred to as the "baby boom", of which I was at the front end.  The soldiers and sailors who survived the war and made it home were regarded as heroes and either married sweethearts who waited for them or found sweethearts to marry.

My grandmother wrote a journal about her life and, to give one shocking example of the changes in her time, she recounted that she was courted in a horse-and-buggy in Westby, Wisconsin yet lived to fly in a jetliner to Germany to visit her own daughter and to watch a man walk on the surface of the moon.

My own series of stories is intended to continue in that vein, with the hope that my own grandchildren and great-grandchildren might one day be amused to read what life was like for a boy growing up before such things as arcades, shopping malls, computers, cell-phones, and the internet and by my memories of those wonderful, wistful, and hard-working giants, their ancestors!

As for my mother's story, it would be impossible for me to condense it into one brief, smarmy essay.  She will appear many times throughout, her history being a long braid consisting of strands of exuberance, delight, success, failure, triumph, but always with a string of sadness entwined within, because she was a beautiful person, not superficial in her ability to think and experience, but who was burdened, like us all, with some tragic flaws.

My memory of her love for her infant child is fleeting but intense, and it is the earliest thing that I can claim to be a witness of, but based upon experiences of my life with her I can make some speculations.  I believe that the milieu in which my mother found herself being an adolescent was one of great relief that the great depression was over, but also one of great trepidation about world events.  After all, the boys of her generation were dying in Europe and in the islands of the South Pacific.

I know that my grandmother rented, from time to time, a room in her house to various wives of servicemen overseas, and that sometimes the husbands of these women would return and there was a happy ending to their stories.  In other cases the women got tragic news.  In both cases, I cannot imagine any of these poor ladies thinking of my grandmother as anything other than a surrogate parent.

It was the proximity of Camp McCoy that fostered all of this and my mother and her siblings would have shared in the drama surrounding it all.

Elsie Patricia Hanson, or "Patty" as everyone including myself called her, didn't get high grades in home economics and cooking.  She got high grades in reading literature.  She was lousy in mathematics but wrote nice poetry.  She was very pretty, so she got a lot of attention from the boys. 

She was the oldest of four siblings and, from what I've been told, they all were party animals while in high school and after, but only when their mother was preoccupied elsewhere and my mother was left in charge.  The music and dancing of the day were wonderful, almost any town in Wisconsin had at least one brewery, and in the case of Sparta, there was an army base next door which supplied a plethora of dancing and drinking partners.

I think that Patty Hanson was quite a rebel.  I think she likely tried to defy most of the rules and constraints placed on her, even if it meant going underground to do so.  The 1940's were not times when women were particularly liberated.  I never heard of my mother or her two sisters considering attending college.  They went to secretarial school and learned to type and take shorthand.  I believe she learned quite early to view other women as competitors for the attentions of men. 

Like myself, she was quite capable of being alone and finding ways to entertain herself.  She read voraciously and loved to collect books.  She never developed much of an adeptness for technical or mechanical matters and remained so all her life.  She never learned to drive a car, although she once tried.

My mother, probably at age 19 or 20.

I have this notion, although it is pure speculation, that as a 20-year old she was having a great time but, like many young girls of her day, wanted to marry and live happily ever after and felt that time was wasting and that perhaps even within only a few months she would be an old spinster and realize that life had passed her by.

I have this notion, although it is also pure speculation, that my father bounced around the Pacific Ocean wondering how he had gotten into that mess, dreaming of the day that (if he survived) he would be discharged, go home, and find the girl of his dreams and live it up, because it was all going on without him.

They both likely were too young to be married and should have lived life a few more years before trying.  Lucky for me that they were impatient.

Margie Dolezal Linzmeier

                                                       The Beatles Sing Margie

Margie Dolezal loved the Beatles and so, to get in the proper mood to write about her, I directed Alexa to stream Beatle music and am sitting quietly for a while, alone and gazing out the window across a sun dappled yard that is slowly collecting birch, red maple, and walnut leaves.  I nearly weep, wondering where all the years have gone.  I stumbled across this yard as a first grader when it was a cow pasture.

The Beatles were never received very well by the two generations before me.  My grandparents thought they were satanic.  My mother thought a little better of them, primarily because she couldn't simply agree with her own parents, but probably more because my immersion into music had proved a less nerve-wracking pastime than committing delinquent acts.  As I listen to them now, fifty years later, I am struck by how sweet and clean their music was, particularly in comparison to some of the things that were yet to come.  I can see why Margie loved the Beatles. 

My mind slips back to La Crosse, Wisconsin.  The year is 1970 and I am living on Badger Street, practically on campus.  Cathy and I have struck up a romance which looks like it is going to last, and she has moved into a house about a mile away on Madison Street.  She has a roommate. 

I have four of them, of course, to make expenses less.  Lined up in the little 25-foot long upstairs bedroom is an assortment of five cots and beds.  Cathy's brother Steve and her cousin Vern are in two of them at night.  The other two belong to the Stogis brothers, Ken and Jim, from Illinois.  We are living in a predicament of squalor which has been repeated by endless streams of college boys all over the world and throughout modern times.

I was back attending classes, and more seriously than I had leading up to my "flunking out" for a semester, which extended my proposed graduation date to January of 1971, in direct conflict with my class ring, which had 1970 inscribed on it.  With my one point eight grade-point average, I am fairly certain that the officials at UW-La Crosse had no expectation that I could attain straight A's in order to meet the standard.

I had a lot invested in the timeline, however, since I had joined the U. S. Navy Reserve because my college deferments had run out and I had drawn number 15 in the very first draft lottery.  I had gone to boot camp and had six months of reserve meetings before I would have to go on active duty. 

Every Wednesday night I attended my required meetings at the Naval Reserve Center on the south side of the city.  In addition I had to spend one weekend per month there, drilling, standing at attention, and attending various classes designed to prepare me for life in the Navy.  Cathy, intent on impressing me with her cooking skills, offered to make dinner for us after my meetings in her new apartment.

The first dinner she made was chicken Kiev and it was my first visit to her place.  I rang the doorbell and the door was opened by a tall, beautiful girl with long black hair and a shy, impish smile. 

"I'm Margie," she said.  "I'll get Cathy."

Cathy and I ate our dinner at a tiny kitchen table.  Margie conveniently disappeared to give us privacy.

That is the way it went on Wednesday nights for many weeks.  Somewhere along the way I proposed marriage to Cathy and she accepted, with some provisions regarding the Navy. 

Cathy's younger brother, Chris, was also attending classes at the university by now and, as all women are matchmakers at heart, Cathy thought to introduce him to her roommate.  I can't remember exactly when and how this introduction took place, but Chris has an elaborate personal legend about it. 

Apparently he was awestruck by her immediately, but owing to a combination of cowardice and discretion, he felt he probably didn't have a chance of interesting such a beautiful girl.  He asked to see her and she responded something like, "I'm very busy but I'm always at church at the Neuman Center.  Why don't you come there?"

I'm thinking he went and she didn't happen to be there that time, frustrating him greatly and sinking his hopes.  Chewing at his fists and occasionally slapping himself, he temporarily gave up.

Now we have to fast forward to July 24, 1971.  I had miraculously graduated college and attended Naval Radio School in San Diego.  I was on two weeks leave before going to my first duty station, Washington D.C.  Cathy and I were married in Blenker, Wisconsin, and the reception was held in the front yard of the family home.  I think that Margie and Chris were both in the wedding, but their various duties kept them occupied.  Chris remembers that his dad sent him to the house to set up beer or perform some errand and that he missed the dinner altogether. 

There was a record player set up in an upstairs bedroom with the speakers jammed into an open window.  I remember seeing Chris and Margie up changing records in that window briefly, but the evening ended and everyone went wherever they went.  Cathy and I drove away to our honeymoon in northern Wisconsin.

A week later we were on our way to Washington D.C. and a year and a half later we were finished with my active duty and back in Wisconsin.  We had rented an apartment in Madison from my old college roommate Duane and I was trying to use my G.I. bill to get into graduate school.  I went to the University of Wisconsin for a semester as a special student, taking courses in psychology.  We decided to throw a party in our new apartment.  Chris arrived with a girl he was interested in but who was breaking up with him.  There was a knock on the door and when it opened, there was Margie with Cathy's brother Steve!   I think Steve had agreed to pick her up and bring her to the party, but the logistics of the whole thing didn't promote their being together.  I am of the opinion that Chris was probably as surprised as I was to see his brother bringing a girl who, in retrospect, was a person of high interest to him.  I don't have any brothers but I can readily appreciate the irony.  It almost qualifies as a corollary to Murphy's Law which states that if something disastrous can happen, it will happen.

I had enrolled for the spring semester and it didn't look promising for me to get accepted as a graduate student at Madison with my 2.01 undergraduate grade point.  Someone made me aware of a program in school psychology that was looking for applicants.  It was offered at a place none other than my alma mater, UW-La Crosse.  I drove up there and got admitted to the program provided that I attend summer classes and prove myself.  I enrolled and was eventually accepted.  Cathy and I rented the downstairs of a house out on Jackson Street, not far from the Heilmann Brewery.  I loved the program.  While we lived there, Cathy gave birth to our first daughter, Sara.

Over the next two years, we had several parties and all our friends would visit from time to time.  Chris even moved in with us for a few weeks while he worked at a cooler plant.  Cathy tried to continue her role as matchmaker, setting Margie up on a date with my colleague Jim French, but it didn't bloom into a romance.

I think that Cathy could read that Chris was infatuated with the elusive Margie.  One weekend we were staying in my grandparents' spare bedroom in Sparta.  Margie's parents lived in Hillsboro a few miles away and we picked her up to go out.  Cathy invited Chris to join us and we went to a few bars and probably got dinner somewhere.  A blizzard was occurring and the roads were deteriorating rapidly.  Citing some bogus excuse, we asked Chris to take Margie back home.  The poor guy drove up over the Norwalk Ridge and up and over Wildcat Mountain in the raging snow and ice to take her home.  He slept on the family's couch with Margie's sisters and brother peering at him.

Eventually I graduated and took a job as school psychologist for the Green Bay Public Schools.  We bought a little house in the suburb of Preble.  We invited people to visit and somehow Margie and Chris both visited us at the same time.  Margie was home from a teaching assignment in Houston, Texas, and after a couple days, she returned there.  Chris returned to central Wisconsin. 

Chris had finally had enough of Murphy's Law and decided to take action..  We got a phone call from him that he had gotten in his Volkswagen and was halfway to Texas to visit Margie in Houston.  The car didn't make it but Chris did.  About three days later we got a giddy call from them both that they were engaged.  To this day, he laments that he was in love with her at first sight and that due to perverse timing and chains of events, all that time was wasted that they could have been happily together.

Chris and Margie did get married.  They had three children, Ben, Dan, and Jon.  Our lives have intertwined for fifty years.  For a time they lived in Green Bay.  When we moved to Portage, Wisconsin, they moved to an apartment there, later buying a house in nearby Rio.  Ultimately they moved to Wisconsin Rapids and then built a house in his hometown of Auburndale, where they lived for many years before selling it and moving to an empty nest apartment in Elk Mound, Wisconsin where their youngest son and wife teach school.

This photo is of Chris and Margie with their oldest son, Ben.

We have gone on vacations, weekend road trips, and cruises together and Cathy and Margie have travelled together overseas.  Some of these adventures I have chronicled elsewhere, but generally speaking we have probably been closer to them than anyone else over the course of our lives. 

Now, as I sit here writing and reminiscing, Alexa is playing "Blackbird" by the Beatles, and indeed the blackbirds are swooping about in the little valley outside my patio window.  All of the lovely early Beatles songs are reminding me of Margie.

Margie, smiling and giggling as she answered that door in her and Cathy's apartment.  Margie, giggling as she thanked me for swatting out the flames when her fur collar caught fire from being too close to a candle at a supper club.  Margie, smiling as she triangulated all of Chris's foibles and saw past them to the essence of the man she was in love with. 

Margie, laughing as she attended game after game after game of her three boys, from grade school through high school and college and beyond.  Margie faithfully never missing church and unflinchingly clinging to her faith in God in the face of two successful fights against cancer and a third against a form of leukemia.

Margie, getting up and going to work early and staying late despite recovering from radiation, chemotherapy, and surgeries.  Margie, putting up with the stresses of teaching and going the extra mile, always, because she had standards which she would not let slip.

Margie, smiling lovingly as she spent her first year of retirement babysitting her grandbabies while their parents went to work.  Margie, delighted, when Chris agreed to obtain a passport so that they could make a trip to Ireland, then pensively accepting when a series of seizures and a fourth cancer diagnosis put an end to their foreign travel plans.

Margie, giggling and enjoying life even as cancer progressively limited her universe.  Margie projecting forth the strength to fly to California for a wedding and to Florida to visit us.  Margie, enjoying going to church and to breakfast out, when it was difficult but all she could physically manage.  Margie, smiling lovingly at Chris, her caretaker, when she could no longer leave the bed without help, and smiling and laughing with her sisters when they visited.  Margie, using all her strength to reach for and gently kiss the hand of a newborn grandbaby that no one could be sure she would ever see.

A year and a half ago, I agreed to go with Cathy on a trip to New Zealand.  The flight was long and I spent most of it with my head resting on my hands with my elbows on the little swing-down tray.  After an eternity we landed in Sydney, Australia, where we were to catch our final flight.  As the plane taxied to the gate, Cathy's phone rang.  It was her brother, Steve, calling to tell us that Margie had passed.

We lit a candle in a New Zealand cathedral for Margie and less than a day later we encountered, on a hike, a young woman with long black hair, a willowy look, and a giggling smile, traveling alone.  Blackbirds were swooping around the trees.  We have lit votive candles in other places in Margie's memory, not because of our own devoutness, but in respect of hers.  A few weeks ago we lit one in the final home, in Epheses, Turkey, of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  Margie would like that.

Now I'm sitting and reminiscing on one of the last warm, sunny mornings before autumn closes in and Alexa is playing the Beatles.

The Beatles are singing of Margie.