By Dan Barber
The fun part of genealogy research is when searching through our ancestors roots we discover distant twigs on a family tree that spans an entire nation and maybe spreads across the oceans to foreign lands.
If the anthropologists have it right we are all related through our human DNA.
When I discover a “cousin” in some location where I have visited I think wow so close I wish I’d known then what I know now.
Perhaps our lives are planned out for us before we are born. I graduated from John A. Rowland High School in Rowland Heights, California in June 1968. Just a month later, on July 8, I obligated to join the United States Navy and met my future wife on the same day. How that happened is easily explained, I visited my cousin Dale to tell him what I’d just done at the Navy Recruiting office in La Puente, Calif.
To help out my other cousin Linda’s, new husband Lou, who she just eloped with to California from Nebraska I volunteered to drive him around so he could find a job. Lou’s old car had broken down, therefore, the need for a ride to find a job so he could get his car fixed so I offered to help out. Lou said, “Hey, why don’t we stop in the Armed Forces recruiting office to see what they have to say.”
The Navy Recruiter sold me on a career with the Navy, but Lou and Linda decided to move back to Nebraska to pursue other career opportunities, and to raise their growing, and successful family.
My future wife, Diane, was visiting her sister Cathy who was married to my cousin Dale. At the time, Dale and Cathy were living in an apartment in Baldwin Park, Calif. Diane was attending Poly Technical High in Van Nuys, California and lived in the San Fernando Valley and I lived in the San Gabriel Valley. Geographically we were separated by about 50 miles with the huge city of Los Angeles in between. Diane was born in Santa Monica, California and I was born in Nebraska. The odds of us meeting were astronomical. On top of all that, in six months I was going to enter Navy Boot Camp on January 15, 1969. But in the interim everything worked out and we were married on December 13, 1969, in Norwalk, California.
At the time, I was stationed at Barber’s Point Hawaii. No, I couldn’t find any family connection, in my genealogy search, with old Captain Barber who sometime in the 1700s got lost and crashed his sailing ship into the point on Oahu that carried his name.
Because Diane was born in Santa Monica and grew up at the beach surfing she was thrilled to join me in Hawaii! We enjoyed a year-long honeymoon where we lived on a small farm, owned by an ancient old Japanese couple. We stayed in a cottage eaten up by termites and was only held together by the surplus paint I would drag home that Diane kept slathering on the place to make it look presentable.
The color was whatever was available from the dumpsters behind the hangar where I worked. It was the 60s so psychedelic was the "in motif" with alternating blue and yellow ceiling tiles and green trim around the windows and doors. Once, when I came home from work I sat down on the “throne” only to find myself stuck…Diane failed to warn me that she had just that afternoon decided to paint the toilet seat! She thought it was funny… however, I got a laugh once when I came home from work and found Diane stuck between two refrigerators we had in the corner of our living room. She fell there while painting the ceiling…again. Note: we had two refrigerators where we stored our food to keep the bugs and termite wings out of our food.
One time our Granddaughter overheard me tell Diane that if our heaven is where we spent our happiest time on earth then maybe we could spend our eternity in our Hawaiian cottage. Our Granddaughter asked if she could come too.
Our Hawaiian home was a real paradise… we had a 10” black and white TV that we could squint at to watch the original “Hawaii Five-O” and wonder where those scenes were filmed. We had a large pillow we sat on in front of the TV. We also owned four wooden boxes that served as moving boxes when not being used as a bookshelf. We could carry all of our earthly possessions in those boxes and they fit neatly in the back seat of our Volkswagen bug. Mr. and Mrs. Onahara supplied the two refrigerators and an ancient double brass bed with a lumpy mattress that made a huge racket “when we turned over in our sleep.”
I think that Mr. and Mrs. Onahara adopted Diane because she actually loved helping them take care of the farm animals. In the mornings, I would head off to work at NAS Barber’s Point and she would help slop the pigs, milk the goats and feed the chickens and a bull named “Fred.” After her farm chores were done, Diane would head off to the beach with her surfboard and her neighbor friend Laura. The beach was just across the Farragut Highway from where we lived in Waianae.
Being in the Navy, we couldn’t expect to stay in any one place for very long. I received orders to report to a squadron at Whidbey Island, Washington. Shortly after our arrival there Diane found out we were pregnant! We were assigned Navy housing in a small cottage on a hill with a postcard view of the small town of Oak Harbor. I was promoted to Second Class Petty Officer so the Navy decided that we had to move to “better housing” which turned out to be “lousy housing” because we lost our postcard view and moved very close to the noisy runway at NAS Whidbey Island.
In December 1971, we celebrated our second anniversary and a month later our son Brian was born. Shortly after that, I deployed with my Squadron to Vietnam.
After about four months on deployment, a career counselor in my squadron informed me that I could reenlist in the Navy while in the war zone to get a “tax-free” bonus and orders to someplace else…done deal! I got my tax-free bonus and orders to NAS Sigonella Sicily.
Diane and I used most of the bonus to buy a new car (Ford Pinto) and a bunch of baby furniture to include a new washer and dryer…Diane only used disposable diapers on long trips, around the house Brian wore cloth diapers with rubber pants. Diane has always been very conscious of environmental hazards facing humans, except for sharks while surfing…she never thought about them back then. She left that worry up to me.
While in route to New York to ship our new car and catch a flight to Italy we stopped off in Arkansas for a visit with my paternal grandparents who had yet to meet their new Great-grandson and granddaughter-in-law. Of course, my grandparents were interested in Diane’s family. She mentioned that her father Thomas Politz was from Greece and her maternal Grandparents names were Donald and Bernice Deeds, all now dead. My grandfather said that he had a buddy in Nebraska when he was a child by the name of Don Deeds…we thought what a coincidence.
Years later while working on our family history, I discovered in the 1910 Census that my wife’s maternal grandfather and my paternal grandfather, were in fact, neighbors when they were children living in Nebraska.
While in Sicily we celebrated our third wedding anniversary a month earlier on November 15th we were blessed with a second son, Christopher…perhaps we were influenced in naming him after another famous Italian, who got lost searching for a shorter sea route to India but instead “discovered” America.
Christopher was born at the Naval Hospital in Naples, Italy because, at the time, Naples was the only place in Italy where military people could have babies delivered. Diane’s doctor sent her there two weeks before the due date of our new baby to make sure she was at the hospital. The nickname for all of the pregnant women waiting for the birth of their children was "The Belly Brigade"… Christopher decided to show up two weeks late!
Diane expected me to keep Brian’s diapers laundered in her new American made washing machine that ran normally on American 60 cycle power… but ran real slow on Italy’s 50 cycle power…when the power was on.
Diane instructed me to keep Brian clean and to keep a supply of clean diapers ready for frequent changing while she was off to Naples Italy to give birth to our second son. I had to hang the laundered diapers off our balcony like all the other Italian ladies in our Italian neighborhood did to dry. I didn’t see any husbands out hanging laundry.
On the weekends, Brian and I would take a road trip from Sicily to Naples to visit Mommy. I would drive our Ford Pinto as fast as it could possibly go up the auto strata while really fast German and Italian sports cars zipped past us.
I still catch hell from Diane today, over 40 years later, for allowing our near naked two-year-old son wearing a droopy diaper and his ever present Army hat to become stinky and sticky on our road trips where I had to allow him to try to pluck out my arm hair. If I told him to stop, he would just start crying brokenheartedly. She even accused me of allowing Brian to become un-potty trained while she was gone… I swear I didn’t know he pooped in his Lincoln Log container while I wasn’t watching! Those memories are still precious to me.
While in Sicily, I decided to try to teach myself how to write. It was an uphill battle to change myself from being borderline illiterate to literate. One of my shipmates in Sicily can attest to the fact that I was not a literate person. Once, while on a Temporary Additional Duty assignment to Crete, with my shipmate and hotel roommate, Joe, grew increasingly irritated with me while I was reading my English textbook out loud and had trouble pronouncing the word Adjective. Actually, it was Joe’s fault that I became a writer. I once overheard him tell someone that I was intelligent! I wanted to prove to him and myself that I was.
Diane spent hours, days and weeks trying to help me master grammar. Thank goodness there were some really good editors who helped me out in my eventual career as a Navy Journalist, Publisher and finally as a civilian Navy Public Affairs Officer.
After a couple of years living in a wonderful and beautiful place, we had to say goodbye and head back to our “civilization” in California. Shortly after returning home we found out that we were going to have yet another baby. Our daughter Kimberly was born in Escondido, California on Friday the 13 of August… a blessed day for our family and four months before our sixth wedding anniversary.
I could go on about the experiences we had of being assigned to some great and some horrendous duty stations, but year after year 20 years flew by like nothing. Diane became a pretty good handyperson able to fix broken appliances as needed. She would haul kids to school, practices and to doctors appointments while she was not feeling well… it was the job of a Navy wife to take care of the family while I was off doing something else. I didn’t mean to take Diane and our family for granted because they gave me everything and they made my life have a purpose.
We had our ups and downs, but mostly ups because we had our family.
I thought that after I retired and settled down in the dusty little military town where I now live, my children would find their own adventures far from Mom and Dad. I was wrong, they also choose to live near Mom and Dad in a dusty little military town...I like to think of that as a tribute to the closeness of our family growing up in the Navy.
My children grew up strong and successful and despite moving as Navy Brats every couple of years they made lasting friendships with other Navy Brats and still talk and visit them when possible.
Just a couple of years ago I asked my daughter Kimberly what she remembered growing up as a Navy brat. I expected her to tell me about all of her adventures, but instead she said that she remembered me being gone all the time.
I’m home now.
Happy Birthday, Punkin 12/12/XX and Happy 46th Anniversary 12/13/69! Congratulations on making such a wonderful family as ours!
Love you!
