“LOST MUSKET DIARY” March 15, 2015
Sunny 89°F/32°C in Rancho Santa Margarita
Buongiorno,
My new Epson photo
scanner arrived a couple of days ago, and after a day of folding the new
device into my home office operation, I am proceeding with my memoirs. There’s
nothing like wading through cartons of baby pictures and family snapshots
dating back through the last hundred years to help me as I while away the otherwise
idle hours of my retirement.
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| Mom in the 1920s |
I promised my
brother back in 1965 when we were closing up the house after our father’s
sudden death, that I would someday devote the time to writing our family story.
Our mother had died in 1961 from breast cancer and the sudden stroke that
killed dad four years later totally shattered the generational continuity that
most families take for granted. My own children were not born until years later
and Packy and his wife didn’t have any children. We had already moved away from
our home town and on with our lives. I was living in Arizona, newly married and
my brother was going to college in upstate New York. Before he died, dad had drawn
up his will which directed that our family home be sold to pay any debts that remained
after the long illness of our mother. A family therapist counseled me years
later that the event was of the same magnitude as losing our home and parents
in wartime. I couldn't help but agree.
“One day your life will flash before your
eyes. Make sure it's worth watching,” sings Gerard Way-musician, comic book
writer. My family photo project is like that. But, in my case, my life is not
flashing before my eyes. It’s moving in very slow motion - from my arrival in
New York City in 1941 until now. As someone who
spent a substantial part of his working career as a journalist and student of
history, I feel that I have been in training for this project all of my life.
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| Me and "Bucky" 1944 |
Lift the lid. Put the photo face down on the
glass. Lid down. Hit the “scan” button. Repeat process. It’s an excruciating
revisiting of countless “Kodak moments.” Hell! That’s almost three quarters of a
century. What’s more, my doctors who have gone over me with a whole host of
high tech diagnostic tools have pronounced me in good health and tell me that
there’s a lot of mileage left on this old carcass. That tells me that I at
least have some more time to review my life and sort out the family photos and
put them into some cohesive form that can be passed along to the next
generation of family and future historians looking at life in the mid to late 20
th century and the early years of the 21
st.
A
thumbnail version of our family history can be told in pretty short order. Both
sets of grandparents migrated to the U.S. around 1900. Mike Percy and his
Margaret from England – he’s my mother’s dad. Karel and Johana Botula came here
from what is now the Czech Republic. Both started from the ground up, as
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| Charlie and Mary - Wedding Day 1937 |
coal
miners. Both raised 9 children. My mother and father met around 1930 in
Pennsylvania. Their home towns were just a few miles apart. Mary Percy studied nursing. Charlie Botula
majored in Business Administration at the University of Pittsburgh, and became
the first one in his family to graduate from college. During the Depression and
after nursing school and college, both headed for New York City, where they
married in 1937 and set up housekeeping in Sunnyside, just across the East
River from Manhattan in Queens. Charlie, who had been working as a loan officer
was promoted to manager and transferred to the far distant hamlet of Riverhead,
about 75 miles east of New York on Long Island. I joined them in January 1941,
just as the Depression was grinding to a close and just before the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor brought us into World War Two.
So, in
terms of my family photo scanning project, I have spent several weeks like an
archaeologist sifting through pre-historic times, for me, in my family. Like an
archaeologist, I’m sorting through “ancient” artifacts in a quest to understand
what life was like before I came into the world. It’s an odd feeling that
arises when you are conscious of the fact that the ancient society you are
studying is your own family. But, the longer I delve into this history, the
more I come to know about my family. What’s even more important to me is that I
better understand the elements that have shaped my own life, and have made what
I have become as a human being. I’m beginning to solve some of my own life’s
mysteries.
The “War
Years” have shaped our family in so many ways, that I can’t even begin to count
them, much less explain to you how. The Depression shaped the families that
Karel and Johana and Mike and Margaret raised to a cohesive and productive
adulthood. ”Steel is made in the heat of the furnace,” my grandfather used to
say. The Depression forged two strong families in my grandparents’ generation. World
War II shaped my generation. Having been to Europe a number of times myself and
listening to my father recount his round trip by wartime convoy across the
Atlantic, I think I have a better appreciation than most, just what my
grandparents’ journey from the “Old Country” to America entailed from the
standpoint of a life-changing experience. They left the friends and families
and even the language that they had known their entire lives for the promise of
a new and better life in a strange land. For a lot of people like them, it
became a promise unrewarded, but overall, they were lucky.
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| Dad's Job in 1944 - Normandy |
My
father was commissioned in the U.S. Naval Reserve in 1943 with the rank of
Lieutenant and assigned as Executive Officer on the LST 920, a 328 foot,
flat-bottomed Tank Landing Ship specifically designed to carry Allied troops
and their equipment onto the beaches of Europe, North Africa and the South
Pacific as America’s two-ocean Navy waged a global war. Unlike World War I,
which was fought primarily in Europe, World War 2 was a global conflict. Two
“world wars,” one fought across Europe, and the other fought across the Pacific
Ocean. Having grown up in the coal and steel country of western Pennsylvania
where the nearest substantial body of water was Lake Erie, one hundred miles
from his home in Cokeburg, Pennsylvania, my father was packed off along with
thousands of other landlubbers, given a 90 day cram course in how to become an
officer and a gentleman, and sent to sea with a lot of other young men who had
never seen the ocean. When that happened, Charles and Mary had to give up their
home in Riverhead. He sailed off to see a huge part of a world at war. She took
her little boy back upstate to live near her parents.
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1920s-Aunt Hannah, Uncle Ted,
My Grandmother and Dad |
As I've
combed through these cartons of old family photographs, I’m impressed by just
how much of my parents’ lives has been documented. In my grandparents’ day, the
family would troop down regularly to the town’s photography studio for an
annual family portrait. Many of which survive in my archive. As I grew up, I can’t ever remember a family
event that didn’t include somebody showing up with an old Brownie or Argus box
camera. The Navy pictures were amazing, but I didn’t know until I started talking
to dad’s wartime shipmates that photography was supposedly forbidden aboard a
Navy ship. But the crew of the LST 920 not only carried personal cameras to the
beaches of Normandy and Okinawa, but they had their own clandestine dark room
on board the ship, and the tacit approval of the ship’s skipper, Harry Schultz.
I've come across a lot of
snapshots taken during the war and in the immediate period after World War II when
dad had come back from the Pacific. He and my mother regrouped and went on with
their lives. When he returned in December 1945, he met his new son,
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| Mike, Charlie, Packy, Mary Botula 1946 |
Charles
III, who I nicknamed “Packy,” and he had a new term of endearment for his wife.
Henceforth, to my dad, she would be “Skip” Botula, short for “Skipper,” Navy
slang for the captain of the ship. To his dying day, she was his “Skipper,” the
helmsman who kept the good ship Botula Family heading on a straight course.
So! This
is my retirement project. And, if I live to be a hundred, I doubt that I will
complete it to my own satisfaction, but I’ve gotten under way, and, there will
be at least something that my daughter can show her children about the family
history, and they in turn can pass along to their grandkids.
Ciao,
MikeBo
©Mike Botula 2015
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