In Love and War

My Parents' Love Story

 Cast of Characters:  Dad = my father, Harry A. Hill; Grandpa = My mother's father Elmer Ryker;  Mom = my mother, Edythe Ryker; Dorothy= Mom's oldest sister, Dorothy Ryker; Ruth = the second daughter, Ruth Ryker; Lee = Mom's younger sister, Lee Ryker; Old Bob = my Dad's father (my grandfather) Robert Hill; Luzelle = my Dad's mother (my grandmother) Luzelle Hill; Ray = my Dad's brother Raymond Hill (my uncle.)

In about 1940, Grandpa met Dad at work.  As I said, Dad had to go to work fulltime when he was about 15, and worked in the woods as a gyppo faller on a crosscut saw.   Those old saws had to be operated by teams of two men.  So at about age 16, Dad was working across a saw from Grandpa.  Grandpa thought Dad was the nicest young man he’d ever met, and being a social person, invited Dad home for a Sunday dinner.  

In about 1940, Grandpa met Dad at work.  As I said, Dad had to go to work fulltime when he was about 15, and worked in the woods as a gyppo faller on a crosscut saw.   Those old saws had to be operated by teams of two men.  So at about age 16, Dad was working across a saw from Grandpa.  Grandpa thought Dad was the nicest young man he’d ever met, and being a social person, invited Dad home for a Sunday dinner.  

Through his friendship and mentor/mentee relationship with Grandpa, Dad spent some time around Grandpa’s family.   When Dad first came around, Mom was only about 13.   Probably inevitably, Dad dated Dorothy, who was his age.   He didn’t much care for her though, at least not romantically.  Dorothy was a force to be reckoned with – a very strong personality as a young woman.  She was clearly the favorite in the family (with some exception for Lee, who was the baby.)   Her parents believed that she was brilliant and talented.  She could draw some, liked to sing, and was attractive.  She had dreams of being an opera singer or a poet, and her parents believed in her dreams.   She took a kind of leadership role in the family and often acted as more of a sister to Grandma than a daughter.  

Ruth was the black sheep.   Most likely resenting her older sister, she was always in some kind of trouble and conflict.   Mom was mostly shunted aside, and Lee – in 1940 – was only 10.

When Dad saw Mom, he was immediately attracted to her, but she was far too young to date.   Dad was incredibly handsome, but his letters home during the war show that he was insecure and a little shy.   He dated Dorothy once or twice, but she was too much for him.   Ruth tried a ploy to snag him, but he managed to avoid her.   He actually liked Dorothy quite a lot, but as a good friend.   In fact, in a birthday card sent to him for his birthday just days before he died, Dorothy wrote that to her he was the brother she always wanted and never had.  He didn’t like Ruth at all.   He really liked Mom, but in secret.

The world at this time was in turmoil.  Europe erupted in another Great War in 1939, showing everyone that “The War To End All Wars” WWI, didn’t end all wars.  The US was trying to stay neutral, but President Roosevelt (FDR) knew that the Nazi movement seriously threatened the whole world.  The Japanese were trying to dominate the Eastern part of the world, and pushing hard at US interests.  Everyone was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The morning of December 7, 1941, the other shoe dropped.   The Japanese conducted a successful surprise attack on the US base at Pearl Harbor on the island of Oahu in Hawaii.  Within days, the US declared war on Japan, and because of treaties between Germany and Japan, on Germany right after that.

BATTLING BUZZARD

Young men all over the country enlisted, industries converted to war production, rationing of goods was imposed, and everything changed, almost overnight.  Dad was 17 years old when the war started, too young to serve yet, and Grandpa was 40, too old to serve.   Grandpa wanted to enlist, but there was no way.   Dad held off until after he was 18.   When he learned that he was going to be drafted, he volunteered for the draft, and entered the army in March, 1943 just after his 19^th birthday.

He was inducted March 4, 1943 at the Butte induction center and sent to Fort Douglas, Utah for basic training.  While at Fort Douglas, the newly minted soldiers were assembled in a big airplane hangar or auditorium of some kind, where an officer talked to them about the new Paratrooper units.  Dad said that he wasn’t totally convinced that jumping out of airplanes was the best thing, but two things convinced him to volunteer:   he’d make more money, and he thought he would fly into combat and not have to march.  It turns out he was disappointed on both counts. 

He volunteered for the paratroopers, along with Harry Lovering, another soldier from Kalispell.  They were sent to Camp Toccoa, Georgia on April 7.   Dad told me stories about his paratrooper training over the years, and the best way to see what he went through is to watch the first couple of episodes of “Band of Brothers”, the HBO miniseries.  When I watched that, it was like having all of Dad’s stories come alive.   That series is about the 506^th Parachute Infantry Regiment.   Dad was in the 517^th Parachute Infantry Regiment and went through training after the 506^th.  The 506^th was the first PIR to train at Toccoa, and the 517^th was the fourth.  The only difference is that Dad told me that when they were running up the mountain one day, one of the men in his regiment died, I guess of exhaustion or a heart attack or something.

Anyway, Dad graduated and eventually was shipped out to Italy, where they participated in the invasion of southern Europe that coincided with the Normandy invasion further north.  They landed in Italy the 24^th of May, 1944 and joined the invasion of northern Italy the 15^th of June.  (The Normandy Invasion began June 6, 1944.)

Dad went home on furlough in late 1943 before they shipped out.   By this time, Mom wasn’t old enough to date, being only about 16, but she was old enough to flirt with – and it’s clear from his letters that Dad had a total crush on her.    Mom left me all the letters Dad wrote her from the war.   He couldn’t keep the letters he got, so the conversation is one-sided, but reading the letters, it’s clear what happened.  Mom began to write to Dad, and from the safety of thousands of miles, Dad expressed his feelings to her, and she was completely taken with him.

Now is a good time to remind everyone to look at pictures of Dad.  He was a beautiful man.  Movie star handsome, with an incredible physique developed by years of hard work as a logger, even though he was barely out of his teens.   Mom, you'll remember, was a shy middle child with self esteem problems.  How could she not have a crush on this guy?   When he started to tell her how he felt about her, imagine how she felt.   They quickly developed a serious romance through the mail that continued to develop all through the war.

Dad didn’t talk much about his wartime experience, at least not to me.  There’s a book, “The Battling Buzzards,” that is a complete history of the 517^th. 

Dad fought in Italy, then, in August, 1944 as part of Operation Dragoon, his unit was shipped to France and later to Belgium.   On August 15, they jumped into Southern France at night behind German lines, with tens of thousands of German soldiers located in the vicinity.  In December, 1944, his regiment was right in the middle of the Battle of the Bulge, and he saw very heavy combat.  On December 24, 1944, he was slightly wounded, and received his Purple Heart.   Almost none of this is expressed in the letters he wrote home to Mom.

THE HOME FRONT

I won’t dwell on the things I know about Dad’s service, because they’re to a large extent unknown.   Mom continued to attend school in Kalispell, but when she was about a junior (the 1943-44 school year) the whole family relocated to Vancouver, Washington.  Ruth and Dorothy were both out of high school, and the whole family got jobs at the Kaiser shipbuilding yard in Vancouver.  The girls had office jobs, Grandpa was a pipefitter, and Grandma installed fiberglass insulation in the ships.   I have a photo of one of the ships Grandpa worked on, along with a newspaper clipping of its launching and a couple of Grandpa’s employee ID badges.

This was good, high paid work and a family that had just survived the Great Depression was probably really glad to get it.  On the other hand, Mom didn’t want to move away for her Senior high school year, and that’s understandable too.   I have no idea how she convinced them, but this is probably an example of how little attention Mom got as the middle child third daughter.  She got her parents to agree to let her remain in Kalispell for her senior year and live in a boarding house across from Linderman School.  The landlady’s name was Bettina, and the house was filled with student boarders.  Most of these were rural kids who had no other way to get to school than to live in town.  They didn’t run school buses then like they do now, and most people had only one vehicle.   Some people had no vehicle, and everyone had to contend with gas rationing during the war.  Two of the other boarders were George Ostrom, of radio news fame, and his brother Richie.  Mom told me that there was a lot of foolishness that went on in the house, but I never got that it was anything more than juvenile tomfoolery.

Mom and Dad continued their romance by mail all through 1944 and 1945.   The war ended first in Europe, and Dad had a choice.  He could stay with his regiment and continue into training for redeployment to the Pacific, or he could transfer to another unit and stay in Europe for postwar duty.  He chose to transfer, and ended up in Berlin for a time, attached to the 82^nd Airborne on duty as part of the Occupation Force.  At least some of the time, he was an MP, a military policeman.   Then, in August, 1945, the Japanese surrendered, and everyone started rotating home.  It took until the end of the year for Dad, but he was discharged December 27, and arrived back in Kalispell New Years Eve, 1945.

All the time Dad was in the service, he put most of his pay into an allotment that went to his mother.  She was to bank this money and Dad planned to use it to go to mechanic’s school so that he’d have enough income to get married and have a home.   He had nothing other than this.  He’d always given his pay to his parents to help support that large family before he went in the service.  But he and Mom were talking about marrying and starting a family in their letters, and that was clearly Dad’s dream.

When Dad got home, he was met with a startling discovery:  the money was all gone, and his father was driving around in a new truck.  When he confronted Old Bob, Bob just told him, “Too bad.  I needed the truck, and you can earn more money.”   Dad was devastated, and with no money and no job, saw all his plans for marriage evaporate.   He was not only disappointed, but humiliated too.  Think of how he felt.  He’d literally faced death almost every day for over a year, and gone through all the hell of combat, only to come back and find his money gone and hopes dashed.  Then he had to tell Mom about it, after all their planning for marriage.  If there was a saving grace, it was that the truck was a log hauler.   Old Bob had a portable sawmill and bought standing timber to cut and mill and earned pretty good money that way.   He put Dad to work as soon as he got home.

Mom moved out to Vancouver with her family after she graduated in the spring of 1945, and she was working in an office when he returned.  Dad wrote to her on January 3, 1946, saying that he couldn’t leave Kalispell to come see her.    His mother was pregnant with her 14^th child, and was having problems.  Dad felt responsible for her, I guess.  He wrote again to Mom on January 7.  Luzelle was in the hospital, which was his excuse for not writing.  He mentioned that he was going out with some friends, but he was tired of that.  He said that he couldn’t ask her to marry him, as the future was too uncertain.  “I don’t deserve you,” he wrote.

Mom was completely distraught.   She was terrified that, now that he was back, he was having second thoughts about all their plans.  Not knowing what to do, she consulted her sister Dorothy and said, “What should I do?”   Dorothy, bless her heart, said, “What you should do is get your butt on that train and get back to Kalispell.”

Excellent advice, it turns out.  Mom arrived in Kalispell around the 17^th of January or so and checked into the Kalispell Hotel on Main Street.  That hotel is still there (as the Kalispell Grand) and faces Main, with windows on the north and west sides.   Mom got a room with a west window. 

It didn’t take long for Dad to hear Mom was in town, and he went to see her in the afternoon, whatever day it was.  When she answered the door, she was wearing a flannel housecoat, a very modest and proper article of clothing, except that, as Dad told me, she was backlit by the sunlight in the window.   He was a goner.

Just a few days later, January 19, 1946, Mom and Dad were married at the Central Christian Church in Kalispell.  Mom’s maid of honor was her good friend Fern Walter, and Dad’s best man was his cousin Alvin Hill. 

THE NEWLYWEDS

They didn’t have a honeymoon, at least they didn’t go on a trip.  They really didn’t have anything – no savings, no real job, no place to live.  But love conquers all, doesn’t it?  Mom went back to Vancouver the day after their marriage, to give notice on her job, as well as to make a little money on what little time she continued to work there.  She also had to get her things together to move back to Kalispell. 

Dad went to Ashley Lake, to a cabin in the woods he shared with Old Bob and Ray.  Old Bob had some standing timber up there they were going to cut, but a snowstorm hit and they had to go back to town.  The day they went back it took five hours to get to town.  They had to hitch a team to the truck to get out the first mile and a half.   Old Bob found a timber sale only 8 miles from town to work on for the winter, although the storm delayed even that work.  Dad stayed in Kalispell and tried to find a place to live.   He wasn’t too successful, and his letters to Mom during that time are plaintive and quite sad.

Dad was probably the hardest working man I’ve ever known.  He was falling trees with a crosscut saw in the deep snow, yet he wrote to Mom that he was bored on a Sunday, so he went with Ray, another  “one-armed man,” and “a couple of old coots” and loaded a boxcar with 25 cords of pulp wood, earning some extra money.  He was also drawing unemployment as a returned veteran and his work for Old Bob was under the table.

Mom finally came back to Kalispell in February.  She arrived February 7, so you do the math --  I was born November 8, so almost immediately, Mom got pregnant.  The newlyweds lived in a hotel for a while, and finally found an apartment at 905 5^th Ave. W.  

I don’t know for sure when they found out Mom was pregnant, but they surely knew by Easter, which, like Mom, was late that year.