No Ordinary Joes (7 page)

Because so many farmers and ranchers had moved into town looking for work in the mine, Wayne had become a boomtown, its population swelling to 3,000. Located in the heart of the Alberta Badlands, an area known to hold one of the richest dinosaur fossil beds in the world, it was a forbidding landscape. Summers were scorching hot, winter temperatures were way below zero. The gathering place in town was the Rosedeer Hotel, home of the Last Chance Saloon, where miners went after work to drink and play poker. But not Gordy’s father. He wasn’t much of a drinker, and he’d learned long ago that he was a lousy poker player. He continued to hope that he and the family would return to the farm.

But any hope he’d had of returning was lost when the cows he’d left on the farm with a caretaker were stolen. Adding to his frustration, work at the mine slowed down and Julian was laid off. Now there was no money, no work, no cows, and no crops. Not even a garden. About to lose the farm, he sold the property, took what little profit he made, packed up the family’s meager belongings, including the farm equipment and Weasel, and moved the family two hundred miles north to Colinton. Located ninety miles north of Edmonton, it is a picturesque area known as the gateway to the Great North Country. The family found a small farm to rent, with a run-down old house topped by a leaky roof. Now instead of sweeping up dirt and dust, they mopped up the puddles from the rain and battled the frigid winter, when the temperature dropped to thirty below and stayed
there for months. On one occasion, it plummeted all the way to seventy-two below.

For entertainment, Gordy sometimes tried playing his violin, but being tone-deaf didn’t help. Mostly he played with his brothers. The neighbors had children, but the days were short, with little time for anything besides school and chores. Gordy’s main responsibility was helping his brother Larry gather and cut wood. He continued to flounder in school.

After years of struggling to make a go of farming in northern Alberta, and tired of the cold and isolation, Julian decided to move the family again, this time to Yakima, Washington. He’d heard there was work there. Before moving, he held an auction to sell off all of the farm equipment and animals, including Weasel. Gordy pleaded to keep him. His dad said no.

As Weasel was led away, Gordy ran after him, tears streaming down his face, giving him one last hug around the neck.

The next day the family boarded a train south, stopping in Calgary to visit relatives. Gordy was in the seventh grade, but it was his first time in a big city. He’d never experienced a house with a flush toilet, or bread that wasn’t home-baked. Larry coaxed him to go downtown with him. A prostitute approached, beckoning them down an alley.

Gordy turned and ran home. He wondered if America would be so perplexing.

In early June 1937, Gordy Cox crossed the border into the United States in the backseat of the 1928 Pontiac his dad had bought for the trip. It was Gordy’s first time in a car.

Yakima, named after the Indian tribe and located in a verdant valley in south-central Washington 145 miles southeast of Seattle, was a leading agricultural center, known for its fruit. With a population of almost 10,000, it seemed huge to Gordy. It even had an electric streetcar. But it didn’t have any jobs. Soon after arriving, the whole family went to work outside the city limits picking fruit. The Depression was still on, and hundreds of families had come to the Yakima Valley, many of them farm owners and businessmen displaced by the Dust Bowl in the Midwest. Most of them lived in a
large transient-labor camp south of town and were treated as lower class by the Yakima townsfolk, who referred to them as Okies, including the Coxes.

Working alongside his parents and brothers, Gordy spent his first months in America picking apples, pears, strawberries, cherries, apricots, and peaches. The only fruits he’d seen in Canada were the sweet purplish black saskatoons and chokecherries that grew wild on the prairie, and it didn’t take long for him to develop a dislike for the fruit he picked. At night he slept in a tent with his parents, or outside under the stars with his brothers, enduring wind, rain, and noise from the other migrant workers. Working together, the family made less than $100 a month.

In September, just as school was starting, Gordy’s dad got hired as an irrigator for a farmer living in Naches Heights, twenty miles north of Yakima. The job paid $100 a month and came with an old house that had more conveniences than any place they’d lived—cold running water and electricity, a single bulb hanging in each room. To Gordy, now enrolled in the eighth grade at Marcus Whitman School, it felt like the Ritz. But at school, he felt isolated from the other students, who were better off. Sometimes they called him “Okie.” He ignored them, choosing to stay mainly to himself. In time, his dad lost his job and the family moved again, this time into a house in Yakima, and Julian went back to work picking fruit with the migrant workers.

Entering high school, Gordy wore the same clothes he’d worn in the sixth grade.

Gordy looked smooth in his new skates, gliding across the ice at Yakima Ice Rink, the only person left in the arena. This was his favorite time of the evening. He loved the quiet. It was his job to lock up the rink, and most nights he would skate for a few minutes before heading home, gliding effortlessly from end to end of the rink.

He was dreading tomorrow at school. As captain of the school’s hockey team, he was supposed to say a few words about the team at the school’s sports assembly, but the thought of standing up and speaking before the whole student body terrified him.

Now a junior, he’d done his best to pass unnoticed through Yakima High. He still had trouble reading and was barely passing his classes. He’d taken violin lessons, but without much success, and the violin was now stored away in a closet. Mostly he kept to himself, and as for girls, he’d never had a date; even the thought of talking to the opposite sex made him nervous. His high-school calling card, if he had one, was as the right-winger for the hockey team. At 5 feet 5 inches, 130 pounds, he wasn’t the best or toughest player on the squad—he did his best to avoid the contact and hitting—but he was the best skater, helped by his job at the rink. Skating gave him confidence, whereas in other sports he felt awkward and intimidated.

He finished locking up the rink, then rode his new Schwinn home. His old bicycle had been stolen, and he had had to buy a new one to make his deliveries on his morning paper route. For a year now he’d been delivering
The Oregonian
on the hilly west side of town, struggling out of bed at 5:00 a.m., an especially hard task on the mornings after he’d worked late at the skating rink. On the positive side, his two jobs provided him with the money to buy his bike, new skates, and movie tickets. A week earlier he’d splurged on a black cowboy hat, just like the one Hopalong Cassidy wore. He was able to indulge himself because his dad was now working as a road builder for the WPA, and his brother Larry, who’d dropped out of school after the move from Canada, was now sending half his paycheck home each month from his job with the CCC.

Arriving home at midnight, Gordy went to his room and pulled out his schoolbooks. As he tried to read his history assignment, his eyes grew heavy. Some days it was all he could do to keep his eyes open in class. He finished the first page, then realized he didn’t remember anything he’d just read. It was this way almost every night, a struggle not only to stay awake but to make sense of the words. It bothered him that other kids came to class every morning with their homework neatly done and an understanding of the material. He knew he was trying, but he was just slow. His mom still blamed it on being kicked in the head by the horse.

He awoke the next morning, still terrified at the thought of going before the whole student body. He thought of calling in sick, but that would
mean not getting to play in the game. He rolled out of bed, delivered the newspapers, then rode to school. By the time the assembly finally began, he felt the sweat rolling down his back, and his mouth had turned dry. He had not written out what he was going to say because he thought it would be even more embarrassing if he got up there and couldn’t read his own words.

As the student body cheered the concluding remarks from the captain of the football team, Gordy turned to a teammate. “I can’t do it,” he blurted, then stood up and bolted out of the gym, leaving his surprised teammate to talk to the student body.

Later at practice, his teammates and coach didn’t mention the episode. They didn’t need to. Gordy had dealt himself another blow to his self-esteem, which was already in the basement.

It was late 1940, and the idea of dropping out of school and joining the Navy seemed like a good plan to Gordy. His brother Larry had joined the Army right out of the CCC, and his letters home talked about all the new friends he’d made and places he’d visited.

But there were a couple of big obstacles. One was passing the physical. Gordy had recently started wearing glasses, and that worried him. The other problem was that he was only seventeen and would need his parents’ approval. He doubted he’d get it, especially from his mom, but it was worth a shot.

During the previous year, he’d gleaned a vague understanding of the growing threat of war from reading the headlines every morning as he folded the newspapers, but that all seemed remote and unconnected to his world. Besides, he’d heard his father talking about how FDR was promising that America wouldn’t get involved. What was real to him was that he was flunking English class. He had a book report due on
Silas Marner
, but he hadn’t been able to get past the first few pages of the book. He’d all but given up on school.

He presented his case to his parents. As he’d expected, his dad approved but his mother insisted he finish high school. Over the next couple
of weeks, he continued to plead with her. Finally, convinced that he wasn’t going to finish school anyway, she relented. Now all that stood in his way was passing the physical and proving his U.S. citizenship. He needed to get ahold of his birth certificate, which showed that even though he had been born in Canada, his parents were American citizens, which made him one, too. It took several weeks, but he finally got the proof. And to his surprise, he passed the Navy physical, including the eye exam.

In January 1941, Gordy Cox boarded a train in Seattle on his way to boot camp in San Diego, California. The thought of serving on a submarine had not crossed his mind.

S
tanding with his sailor buddies outside the whorehouse on Hotel Street in Honolulu, Chuck was having second thoughts. Sure, he wanted to lose his cherry—he was nineteen, and if his buddies were to be believed, he was the last of the virgins. But this didn’t feel like the way to go.

It was March 1941, and Chuck was stationed on the USS
Maryland
, a battleship that had recently, along with the rest of the Pacific Fleet, shifted its base from a West Coast port to Pearl Harbor as a deterrent to Japanese expansion. Chuck hadn’t really given much thought to why the fleet moved; he was just happy to be in the Navy and traveling to new and exciting places.

His three months in boot camp at Newport, Rhode Island, had been easy for him, thanks in large part to his experience in the CCC. He was used to discipline and regimentation. He loved the food and, not surprisingly, scored well on the rifle range, getting assigned as an antiaircraft machine gunner. After boot camp, his whole company was assigned to the
Maryland
, including his new best friend, Wesley Strevous, whom he’d met on the train to boot camp from Buffalo. Strevous had attended Cornell for a year, and to Chuck he seemed so much smarter than his friends back home. After boot camp, they’d traveled together to Long Beach, California, and when they arrived there, Chuck was wide-eyed at the fragrant orange groves around every other corner, the hundred-foot-high palm trees, and the abundance of long-legged southern California blondes.

It was shortly after arriving in Pearl Harbor aboard the
Maryland
that Chuck applied for submarine service. Part of the appeal was money. Submariners made $20 more a month than the sailors of the regular fleet, and would double their pay in war. He’d seen submariners on the deck of their ships, and they seemed more relaxed. Whenever the crew of the
Maryland
was topside, they had to wear dress blues and have boots, belt buckles, and buttons polished perfectly. Not so with the submariners; they wore dungarees and T-shirts. Plus, they had a reputation as elite crews. Chuck didn’t think of himself as elite, but still, it was worth a shot.

The line of sailors waiting to get inside the whorehouse on Hotel Street snaked halfway down the block. Many of the men had been drinking beer and cheap rum. The bars such as Two Jacks and the Trade Wind maintained a four-drinks-per-person limit, usually serving all four drinks at once to encourage the men to guzzle and move on, a policy that made for a lot of quick drunks.

Chuck didn’t stop in any of the bars. Other than a few sips of hard cider in high school and a couple of swigs of rotgut wine back in Buffalo, he didn’t imbibe. And as for girls, he’d never come close to going all the way. There’d been a few kisses with Irene, the girl back home, but she’d moved out of town. She’d written several times, and even promised to wait for him, but he wasn’t counting on it.

Edging closer to the front of the line, he wished now he’d never confessed that he was a virgin. His buddies had made it their mission to get him initiated, and there was no shortage of brothels on Hotel Street to provide the opportunity. Located on the edge of Honolulu’s Chinatown, it was the city’s vice district, where men came to get drunk, tattooed, and laid. There were fifteen brothels, run-down places with names like the Senator Hotel or Bronx Room. Chuck was headed to the Rainbow Hotel.

Prostitution in Honolulu in 1941 was big business. As it was stateside, it was illegal, but police and government officials looked the other way. Honolulu officials reasoned that with so many young servicemen full of raging testosterone, they couldn’t fight nature and figured it was better that these men sought release from prostitutes than from the respectable
young women of Hawaii. It was also a way to keep venereal diseases somewhat under control. The 250 registered prostitutes were required to have weekly checkups; they also had to pay taxes and a $1 yearly license fee as “entertainers.” Many of the prostitutes had followed the fleet from San Diego and Long Beach and San Francisco. Some serviced as many as one hundred men a day, and because they got to keep $2 of the $3 fee, they could make up to $50,000 a year.