Spring 1948 - a cameo

            Recently Lora, Maya and I took a trip to Lisbon.  It was a three day stop on route to a conference in Marrakech.  We’d first landed in Casablanca and then taken a plane to Portugal.  As we walked out onto the tarmac in the Lisbon airport to board the plane for our return trip to Casablanca, we were surprised to see that we were walking towards not a jet, but a propeller plane.  Knowing that we were going to be flying over a stretch of the Mediterranean Sea and possibly even the Atlantic to reach Casablanca, this was a cause for dismay among some of the passengers. 

Yesterday as I was working on family history, I came across a document I had never seen before, and it surprised me as much as walking up to that propeller plane in Lisbon.  It was called “Clearance Declaration of Aircraft Commander.” The document was issued on April 20, 1948 in Honolulu, Hawaii.  It was a list of non-Navy passengers who were being transported back to the United States; aboard it were my mother, me and my brother Steve. I was two and my brother Steve, who had born on March 21 of that year, was less than a month old.  As a family, our places of birth made a strange grouping on the  list since Mom’s was as Aberdeen, South Dakota, mine was San Diego, and Steve’s was Honolulu, TH – the TH meaning Territory of Hawaii since Hawaii was not yet a state.  As the document notes, we were “Bound for” Alameda, California. The ultimate destination for the three of us was listed as  838 N. Van Ness St., Santa Ana, California – my grandparents’ house.

As I look at that piece of paper that appeared like something out of a time warp, I wonder how my mother felt on this trip, sixty-four years ago.  It must have been extremely difficult for her.  She was traveling with two young children, having given birth less than a month before, over a distance of 2400 miles, and I can imagine, being a military plane, it was no luxury travel.  It was certainly a propeller plane – one that probably makes my recent plane from Lisbon look like luxury transport. .  Once she landed, she had to make her way down to southern California.  The distance between the two cities, Alameda and Santa Ana, is about 370 miles.  My guess is that she took  a bus. It would have added another day to the journey.  Even for someone who was used to a tough life, this could not have been an easy trip, and I seriously doubt they had massive plates of lamb and Moroccan tangines waiting for them at the other end as I recently did.

Tomorrow is Steve’s birthday, the first full day of spring.  He would have been 65 years old – retirement age.  I always knew that he had been born in Hawaii, but I never imagined that he had been uprooted at only a month old and transported down to begin life in his grandparents’ house.  Of course, one can always see signs and causes in events, if they look long enough, but I wonder if such a beginning had any bearing on the short, often troubled, life that he led.  What might his life have been like given the stability and advantages that my grandchildren have.