I didn’t grow up celebrating Memorial Day.
Other than as the unofficial start of summer. Which always seemed like a tease.
Tempting us with an amuse bouche of beaches and barbecues. Making it that much harder to concentrate those last couple of weeks of school.
Beyond making us skip ahead to summer, what else is Memorial Day about?
“Stores have a lot of big sales,” my eight-year-old daughter says.
She’s not wrong.
Celebrating Memorial Day
I don’t know any fallen soldiers in my family.
The three I knew all lived well beyond their service.
I’m pretty sure I have ancestors who fought on both sides of the Civil War. But without that genealogy handy, I’ll stick with what I know myself.
My Grandad Jack Amasa Myrick was a sailor.
More precisely, he was an early expert in radar and computers who worked aboard Navy ships in the South Pacific. Who lied about his age so he could leave dirt-poor Kentucky behind sooner and put his hungry mind to use.
A 15-year-old high school dropout who went on to earn high school diplomas in both Washington State and California. When my mom was three. And before long was supervising engineering computer services for aeronautics giant Rohr Corporation.
The Navy made it possible.
Because my Granddad Jack signed up to go to war.
And made it home alive.
1944
My historian father traced where Granddad Jack, his father-in-law, spent his time during the Pacific War. Working from a small typed list of dates and places where my grandfather was in 1944.
“It looks a lot like a tourist cruise itinerary,” my dad wrote.
My father contextualized that small typed list within world history to try to help us understand.
“It turns out, however, that the list logs a number of the major battles of the Pacific War,” he wrote.
In other words, not a cruise anyone wanted to be on.
History was my dad’s thing. So I usually took his word for it. When I wasn’t tuning out everything he had to say.
“This helps make it clear why of all his 22 Navy years (1931-53), 1944 was the one that stood out for him.”
My dad, saying it again today from a yellow sheet of paper in a binder of my mother’s family history he compiled.
My mother was born in 1943.
using JAM’s typed list, his official military service records,
and Richard B. Morris’ Encyclopedia of American History
Remembering Uncle Peck
My Great Uncle Peck on my dad’s side served in the Army. An infantryman in Europe who saw lots of battle.
I’m writing this on the way down a mountain and don’t have ready access to the facts. I hope you’ll forgive me for being vague.
Peck died too young, but it wasn’t in the war. I flew home early from a trip to Chile in the 11th grade to attend his memorial service. He was 68.
Peck came home from the war intact, at least in body. He married my incomparable Great Aunt Liz.
Together they raised three incredibly brilliant daughters. Some years later, Liz absolutely helped raise me, too.
Liz was a woman who understood great loss. Her father committed suicide when she was five, and her mother never really recovered. Liz was parentless in the world before she turned 30. Which she shared with me at my mom’s memorial service. I was 25.
Peck must have carried great pain within him, too. A fact I appreciated even more yesterday.
Often it is those who have suffered deeply who see most clearly the deep suffering in others.
Memoir Writing on Memorial Day
I hiked up Lookout early yesterday evening. It’s a favorite hike here in Montreat for just about everyone in our family. Starting by about age three. My dad made his last trip up at 76.
Montreat is the tiny hamlet in the western North Carolina mountains where generations of my father’s family have spent summers.
In fact, five generations of my family have lived inside the 100-year-old house I’m writing from right now.
Been here all alone for a week and a half now, and I’m not usually one to get spooked. But I confess to wondering more than once last night if this house has things it’s trying to tell me.
Part of why I hardly slept. Likely a sign I need to get out more.
As I walked back down toward Lake Susan from Lookout, I realized my cell phone could tell me more about Peck’s military service.
Especially if I used it to call Sara Hill.
Sara Hill, my father’s first cousin, is 85. The family elder. Our greatest connection to the past.
A phone call away.
Unearthing Memory You Don’t Have
Sara was still quite young when Peck went off to war, 11 years younger than her uncle.
Sara’s dad, Tom, was one of my Grandmother’s big brothers. First came William and then Tom. Followed by my Grandmother, Haywood, and finally Peck. The baby. Another sister, Zaida, died at age three. Maybe from diphtheria, though we don’t know for sure.
Peck’s first playmate, suddenly gone.
He was two.
Sara answered the phone on the second ring and wished me a happy holiday. I explained I’d just hiked Lookout and had some questions about Peck’s military service.
“He went in quite early and was in there a long time,” Sara remembers. “He went in toward the start of the war.”
Maybe he had a semester or so of college before he went? She doesn’t know if he enlisted or was drafted.
“I remember feeling very sorry for Peck when I would hear the news on the radio,” she says.
“He was an infantryman in Europe. I knew he was in the middle of all the terrible stuff I heard about.”
Haywood, Peck’s next older brother, was in the Philippines, Sara tells me.
“Haywood saw an awful lot of broken-up bodies, too,” she remembers. “Not only by the war but also by drinking whatever they could get their hands on.” Improvised alcohol that tore through their bodies, killing some of them then and others later.
Haywood had already finished college and some or all of med school, Sara remembers. He served as a medic.
“Dad always felt a little bad about the fact that he didn’t go,” Sara remembers of Uncle Tom. “He was excused—either for being a preacher or a college professor, I don’t remember which.” He was both.
“He felt it was partly his duty,” Sara remembers.
Her mother felt differently.
“He couldn’t quite call himself a pacifist but couldn’t quite make himself go,” Sara said.
Many years later he would carefully counsel a nephew, my Uncle William, facing the same question. Uncle William, with Uncle Tom’s help, decided he was a conscientious objector.
In 1944, Sara and her family were living in Massachusetts. Tom was at Harvard on a fellowship studying philosophy. Sara and her younger brother and sister would sometimes go play at a nearby pond, one where Henry Thoreau once liked to write.
“There was a tower at Walden Pond, and T would throw his little G.I. Joe figure from it,” Sara remembers.
“Peck was the one I always thought about watching the little parachute float down.”
Peck came back disillusioned and adrift.
“Dad had a really hard time talking him into going back to school after the war,” Sara remembers.
He ultimately succeeded. Peck graduated from Davidson College in 1947 and the University of Virginia School of Law after that.
The Army paid his way.
By 1950, he was working as a government lawyer for the Atomic Energy Commission. Then the Defense Department, the Justice Department, and as counsel of the House Foreign Affairs Committee from 1956 to 1959.
By the time I knew my Great Uncle Peck, he was a partner at Kirkpatrick & Lockhart. The 12th largest law firm in the country in 2018, according to Wikipedia.
I ate gingersnaps in Peck and Liz’s kitchen after school in junior and senior high school. On my way to my after-school job. Assembling cardboard boxes and shipping out literary books published by the small press Liz and her business partner started and ran. From the basement of Peck and Liz’s house.
At Peck’s request, there was a big party at the house when he died. I drove my mom home from that party with my still new driver’s license.
She may have been too tipsy to drive, but on this she was very clear: She wanted exactly the same kind of party when she died.
Nine years later, we gave her just what she wanted. A party just like Peck’s.
At the big pink house with black shutters at Newark and 35th where I worked after school.
Peck and Liz’s house.
My Ways of Celebrating Memorial Day
I think right now holidays and rituals can serve us even more than ever.
A way to be united in our thoughts, our practices, what we choose to focus on and consider important. For some small stretch of time.
Together. Even when we have to be apart.
I celebrated Memorial Day by remembering.
Wrote down a bunch of memories as they came to me.
Dove deeper into memories of my maternal grandfather. Carefully chronicled and compiled by my dad.
Hiked a trail I’ve hiked countless times. A bit more focused than usual on the footprints I was retracing.
A hundred years’ and five generations of footsteps. Including Uncle Peck’s and Uncle Haywood’s.
Now you tell me. How did you celebrate Memorial Day?
Corrections: A photo that originally appeared in this piece depicting my Great Uncle Haywood—or so I thought— has been removed. It was a photograph of the prior generation! My apologies and my thanks to family members who brought it to my attention.
Likewise, I have corrected the line beginning “In 1994, Sarah and her family were living in Massachusetts.” What confusion that must have caused! It should have read, as it does now, “In 1944, Sara (no h) and her family were living in Massachusetts.”
Finally, at least one family member thinks that my grandmother’s younger sister, Zaida, died at the age of five, not three. But other family members have told me three. The answer is surely in the Archives in my basement at my home in Pennsylvania. I am not there now but will get to the bottom of this as soon as I return and make any additional updates.
I am very much in pursuit of the truth. And also very much human and capable of making mistakes. Please always feel invited and encouraged to reach out if you think I’ve gotten anything wrong. If I have, I want nothing more than to correct it.
