I had two Uncle Jimmys growing up. One was my Mom's brother, I am named after him but never knew him. Well, that isn't exactly true; I remember when he died that everyone in the house was so upset. When they told me my Uncle Jimmy had died I got upset too, because I had just seen him drinking coffee in the kitchen. They convinced me it wasn't my coffee drinking uncle who had died, but the other Uncle Jimmy.
I remembered that I knew who the other Uncle Jimmy was...then...but I have no active memory of him now. He was in Oregon working on a construction site and was seriously injured in a blasting accident. I don't know if he was the blaster or the blastee, I only know that after the accident they kept him alive for a little while using the first artificial lung. But he needed more than fresh air to survive, I guess.
My other Uncle Jimmy, the one I do remember, was kind of a funny guy (not funny ha ha, funny peculiar). I don't know why he and my Aunt Essie ever got married. All I ever remember about them as a couple was the constant bickering; they picked at each other every waking moment. Sometimes their arguments reached the point where one or the other would storm out and go drinking... Uncle Jimmy would go somewhere, but I never knew if he had a single friend anywhere. Aunt Essie's boozin' buddy of choice was my Mom, Betty Lou. I can't count how many times Essie would storm into our house, half a load already on, yelling about Jimmy and drinking beer out of the can while Betty Lou rushed into her going-to-the-bar outfit, and then out the door they would fly.
Essie and Jimmy owned a very successful kennel of toy Chihuahuas and toy French Poodles. One of their toy Chihuahuas was in a nationally circulated photo; his name was Ollie and he was perched in a standard-sized martini glass. Some of their dogs were from champion lines and their puppies were in pretty fair demand. I am pretty sure that a few of their pups went on to be successful show dogs.
Uncle Jimmy was a country boy from some podunk town in Kentucky. Mom and Essie would tease him about his accent all the time. "I hear a sireeen...mus' be a fahr..." He enjoyed a brew or two, country music, and going to the Bostonia Ballroom. He also ran a diner made out of an old railway dining car, right next to the stadium in Mission Valley (not Qual-com, the old Padres stadium). The diner, and an outfit called Hazard Block were all owned by the same folks and they liked Uncle Jimmy. The diner was put in place mainly to serve the workers at the brick yard but became a popular place for lots of people who worked in the Valley.
Uncle Jimmy was rumored to have a vicious temper. In a famous incident (famous in our family), while unloading boxes from a U-Haul during an argument, he got fed up with the carping, threw down the box he was carrying, charged off to his old Studebaker, and roared away (to the bar, I guess). Unfortunately the box he was carrying was full of some of my Grandma's glass and crystal treasures and many of them were broken. According to Betty Lou, he never apologized for that. When I was in Vietnam, Essie and Jimmy got divorced. Family Fable has it that Jimmy tried to kill Essie. That didn't sound like a true story to me.
I never saw anything like that from him. As far back as I remember, he always treated my sister and me like royalty. Several times I lived with Aunt Essie and Uncle Jimmy for months at a time. Uncle Jimmy is the only member of my family that ever took me to the circus. He took us to the diner and made us dinner, made a whole bag of French Fries to take with us, and bought us goodies during the show. Ringling Bros and Barnum and Bailey...right there at the old Westgate Stadium.
The subject was PTSD the other day. That is what made me think of Uncle Jimmy this morning. Jimmy was in the Army, an infantry private who was in the first wave on D-Day. I am not sure which beach he landed on, but it was a horrible day in his life. I don't remember how the conversation got started; I was getting ready to graduate from high school and was considering the Army. He started telling me a little about his time in the Army. It started off being a light-hearted recounting of his sergeants in boot camp and going to England on a troop ship and things like that.
His voice and demeanor shifted a little when he started talking about the overnight journey across the English Channel. He explained how they were supposed to climb down the cargo nets, how to hold onto the upright ropes and not the cross-ropes where soldiers above you could step on your hands...if that happened you could loose your grip and plummet to the deck of the landing craft and break you legs or back...and that was the good result; you could fall into the sea and either get crushed between the ship's hull and the landing craft or get pulled to the bottom by the nearly 100 lbs of gear and ammo. He said he was scared to death that one of those things would happen before the Germans even had a chance to kill him. He was seasick the whole ride from the transport to the beach; soldiers all around him were crying, praying, hurling their breakfast, and cussing loudly. He struggled to keep from throwing up as he was tossed to and fro and was splashed upon by those around him.
When the landing craft ran up on the beach, a lot of things happened at once: the sergeants started yelling to move out, soldiers lurched and stumbled to get down the ramp, and enemy machine gunners started pouring fire into the newly opened boat. He could see that they were still a long way from the beach; Uncle Jimmy said he was about three or four guys back from the front. Bullets started zinging and bouncing around inside the landing craft, men in front of him were being shot up or were trying to get out or were trying to get back in. Jimmy said he knew if he stayed where he was he would soon be dead so he stepped up on the man in front of him; he wasn't sure if the guy was wounded, dead, or just scared and hunched over, but he stepped up on him anyway. He stepped forward on another soldier's back and reached up, grabbing the edge of the boat's rail about two feet over his head, and swung out over the rest of the soldiers in front of him, letting go of the boat intending to sail off to the side and into the water. But that didn't happen. His wedding ring was hung up on the edge of the boat. And now his whole weight was suspended by his ring finger. He couldn't pull himself up to lift the ring off the rail; all he could do was hang there. He told me that he was hoping his finger would pull off so he could get down. He felt like a banner...or more like a target. It seemed like hours to him but couldn't have been more than a few seconds before he felt someone put his hands up under his butt and then he was launched up and away from the boat, landing rather unceremoniously asprawl in water that was just barely over his head. His gear held him down so he started walking toward the beach. He was soon able to get his head above the water and breathe again. He said that when he got on the beach and was able to gather his senses, he found himself next to his squard sergeant who told him, "I told you to take all jewelry off!" It had been his squad leader who had boosted him off the rail. Jimmy told me that he was proud that he had gotten ashore without losing any of the gear he was supposed to carry; he even still had his rifle. And when his unit got ashore and organized, he was able to shed all that soggy, heavy gear and help set up the mess hall and start doing what he had come to France to do...Uncle Jimmy was a cook.
I saw the changes he went through as he told me his story and I could tell that there was probably more to it, especially watching so many of his friends slaughtered right in front of him and being held underwater hoping he could get to air before he drowned. Comparing notes with others later, I found out that Jimmy had never told anyone in the family, including Essie, anything about his war experiences. No one would ever know he had gone through what he had, to look at him. He was a smiling, drawling, slightly goofy country boy who always treated the kids like royalty. Like I said in that other post, there is no way of knowing how some folks will internalize their experiences, or what demons they live with. Just thought I would share my Uncle Jimmy's experience with you.
