A Family of Steves
I was born into a family of Steves. There was Stephen A., my grandfather, Stephen B., my father, and my brother could have been Stephen C. since Chaires has a venerable history on our mother's side, but he is Stephen R. I am not a Steve at all, but as Michael D. I am in alphabetical order as far as middle names are concerned.
The D. is for David, Stephen A.'s father, who was brought to New York in 1859 at the age of 12 with his parents, Michael and Mary née Hartigan, who according to records I found at the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston were neighbors on the Russell estate in Ballyneety, County Limerick. Nothing more is known about Michael and Mary, but thanks to a short memoir Stephen A. wrote in 1963 at the age of 82 at the behest of his two daughters, we know that David joined the New York State Volunteers of the Union Army at the age of 17 and served for a year and a half, until June 1865. Then he went into the ice business and later owned two taverns in New York City.
Thus I like to think of my name, Michael David, even if my parents didn't have this in mind, as recapitulating my Irish ancestry, somewhat as they say that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.
When I first discovered Irish traditional music, at the age of about 40, I realized why I had been fond of calliopes as a kid. It was not the association with organ grinders and circuses but something about the sound itself, which I would hesitate to call musical but had somehow resonated with me and which I recognized again in the uilleann pipes. Not to put too fine a point on it, the pipes were calling -- had been calling all along!
Stephen A. was a quiet man, long on cigars and short on words, but when he spoke they were well chosen. One night when he was visiting us in our quarters at Ft. Meade, he 83 and I 17, as we edged by each other in the narrow hallway, he said in his quiet way: "Two ships that pass in the night." I didn't know he was quoting Longfellow at the time. It wouldn't have mattered. For me he will always be that ship in the night.
Stephen B., my father, had a literary bent and we all (Mother and I at least) expected a major opus from him, but it was not to be. He did produce a fine account of his rifle company’s raid on Maknassy, Tunisia on Dec. 17, 1942, for his Advanced Officers Training Course at Ft. Benning after the war. This was based on a diary he kept in North Africa from Sept. 19, 1942 to June 10, 1943, but the diary itself didn't come to light until many years later. He had given it to his sister Kathleen after the war with the admonition: "I never want to see this again." She followed his instruction, and no one saw it, except for her and her son David, until many years later. After Aunt Kay died, David kept his mother's promise and only gave the diary to my brother after both our parents died in 2012. Steve passed it on to me, and I had it typed up. It came to 50 single-spaced pages, beginning in Tidworth, England, on Sept. 19, 1942, before he knew where his company would be deployed:
If you were an American officer who had come to England in the AEF [American Expeditionary Force] in 1942, what would obsess you and fill your days aside from the Second Front?
It ends on June 10, 1943. I suspect he stopped writing because he knew, at that point, what was coming. L Company landed at Gela on July 10 along with the rest of the 26 Infantry Regiment to begin the Allied invasion of Sicily, meeting immediate and fierce resistance from German and Italian tanks and aircraft. They suffered heavy casualties. Capt. Morrissey was evacuated on July 12 for what was then called "battle fatigue." He returned to the States in February 1944 to a job in the Pentagon.
He never talked about the time in Sicily, much less wrote about it. Once when I broached the subject Mother shut me up like a steel trap. “We don’t talk about these things in this house!” she said. Later, when Dad and I were alone, I told him that whatever happened I was glad he made it, since otherwise I wouldn’t be here. I could not discern his reaction.
Great-great-grandfather Michael and I are the only members of the family that I know of to have put an ocean between ourselves and our respective birthplaces, albeit in opposite directions. You have to go back more than 500 years to find a similar migration on my mother's side. That would be Jan de La Chaire, a French Hugenot who left France in 1662 for New Amsterdam, now New York City, in 1662 to escape religious persecution. Thence derives the name of the town of Chaires, Florida, actually an "unincorporated community," just outside of Tallahassee. This is the remnant of the plantations of four Chaires brothers, one of whom passed the name on to my great-grandmother, Anna Elizabeth Parkhill Chaires, known in the family as "Mama."
"Mama" was preceded by "Big Mama," whose maiden name was William Amanda Hall. "The William because her father had wanted a boy," Mother says in her memoir, which she wrote in 1993 at the age of 79, on my request. Big Mama's great-great uncle Lyman Hall signed the Declaration of Independence. She married Capt. John Parkhill, whose valor in fighting the Seminoles unfortunately killed him but also earned him a memorial that still stands on the grounds of the state capitol building in Tallahassee.
"Because of her rather illustrious ancestry," writes my mother of her mother, Anna May, "she belonged to (and all are documented) seven historic organizations: DAR [Daughters of the American Revolution], UDC [United Daughters of the Confederacy], Huguenots, Colonial Dames of the 17th Century, Patriots and Founders, and two others that I can't remember."
That would qualify me for the SAR, Sons of the American Revolution, if I were so inclined and if they would have me, which I doubt.
My own humble self first saw the light of day in a Year of the Dog, Fire Dog to be exact, in what Noam Chomsky calls the terrorist capital of the world, Washington, D.C. This was the same year when George Bush, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump were born, and like all three of them, I lucked out on the draft lottery of 1969. My number was 347, and theirs were 311, 327 and 356, respectively, which means none of us would have been drafted.
I had been prepared to flee to Canada. The alternative was jail, and I had no desire to become a martyr. My application for Conscientious Objector status was rejected because I did not have a documented history of churchgoing and I answered truthfully that I would fight if necessary to protect my family. The war had nothing to do with protecting anybody's family. But of course the draft board thought otherwise.
My parents were not pleased by my attitude. Stephen B. was a West Pointer and a veteran of two wars, his brothers-in-law were graduates of the Naval Academy and the Coast Guard Academy, and Stephen R., also a West Pointer, did two tours in Vietnam. I grew up on Army posts, standing at attention and facing the flag every day at 5 pm (if outside) when Retreat was played. I was a Cub Scout and a Boy Scout. They were not gung-ho types, though. Maybe my father taught me more than he knew when, for example, he refused to let me go for a Boy Scout Marksmanship Merit Badge. "I don't want anything more to do with guns," he said.
Still, inevitably, we clashed, though not as badly as in many families. One night during one of my visits home, after watching the TV war news, a nightly ordeal, in response to some bleat of patriotism from the tube I blurted out: “The Vietnamese are people too!” That was too much for my mother, who was washing dishes at the time. She walked over to me and threw the wet sponge in my face. “How can you say that when your own brother is over there!” she exploded. She was as angry as I had ever seen her. So much for the joke about getting beaten with a wet noodle. That sponge hurt!
When I called my parents to tell them I would be going to Canada if I got drafted, my mother was speechless, and handed the phone to my father. He advised me to enlist, since with my French (I had spent a year in France, my "junior year abroad") and typing ability I would end up in a Quonset hut somewhere, safe enough. I should have just said I would think about it, but again I blurted out, "It's a matter of principle, too!"
"In that case," he responded, "I'll act on principle, too," and hung up.
They no doubt suffered greatly during those years, with one son in Vietnam and another protesting and dodging the draft, but we managed to avoid talking about it most of the time, and over the years the emotions died down, especially since my brother came back unscathed from Vietnam, and his younger son, another West Pointer, survived Afghanistan with no visible physical or mental scars. And I was gone, as of January 1, 1977, having taken a job at the University of Kassel that I kept until retirement.
I'm not sure how my parents would have reacted to my renouncing my US citizenship, had they lived to know about it. I didn't do it for political reasons, though I am sometimes tempted to claim that I did, just to emphasize my disagreement with many things the US government has done. I have maintained good relations with my brother, who resigned from the Army soon after Vietnam and became a successful businessman. We agree on a lot of things, even politically, which I think shows how far US politicos have estranged themselves from the will of the people, both "right" and "left."