New Me, New War - Part Two

by Jacqueline Sewall Golden

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The radio was the family meeting place in the evening, when we would get caught up on war news.  Newspapers were scanned for news of prisoners and every so often the photographers from those papers would come by for updates on Mom.  She had been a minor film star in the early Hollywood days, was extremely photogenic and seemed to the media, in those days, to be an excellent example of the working mother with an absent war hero husband. 
    On Saturdays, I would take the bus to downtown Glendale, with 50 cents knotted away in the corner of my handkerchief.  Costs: bus round-trip, 20 cents; movie matinee, nine cents; box of popcorn, ten cents.  I splurged after the show on a lime coke, a nickel.  Any leftover change went into a real piggy bank.  The News of the World, which ran between the main movie and second feature, was fascinating and horrifying.  Many shots of diving planes, ships being blown up, men rushing up denuded , bombs exploding and smoking hills, were riveting to a child of six or seven.  And a wonderful surprise one Saturday:  a very short scene of some six or seven emaciated men in a line, captioned “American Prisoners of War” was shown and one of them was Daddy!  The next day there was a photograph of him in the newspapers which Mom promptly cut out and inserted into our now bulging album.
     Grandmother Putty, so named because her last name was Putnam, (her husband was descended from the infamous General Putnam whose most acclaimed feat was to ride up to the White House, dead drunk on his white horse, and promptly fall off) was our rock.  I learned my stoicism from her.  Full of love, this small, gentlewoman was father, mother and friend.  She had been a prima ballerina with the Sadler Wells Ballet group in England, had remembered seeing Queen Victoria during a parade to celebrate her 50th year of reign, and told us of her father leaving the house on a cold bitter morning with hot baked potatoes in his pockets to keep his hands warm.  She and my mother left the American Midwest just before the 1920s to come to Hollywood and find their fame and fortune as dancers.  They opened a dance studio; Mom haunted the movie studios, and was eventually paired with Conrad Nagle as his sometimes-leading lady. 
    Then, late one evening, came that feared knock on the door.  I was upstairs in Mom’s big bed, suffering from something or other, heard her running up the stairs and,  for the first time in my life, saw her cry.  The telegram was from the War Department, stating that my father was missing in action.
     In December 1945,  Lt. Colonel John Wright Sewall and some other five thousand other prisoners were sent through Subic Bay on a Japanese freighter  to Japan to work as slave laborers.  An American airplane squadron attacked the ship and it was sunk with all hands. 
     Shortly thereafter, we moved to another home.  We continued our lives as before but Mom was really never the same after that and some time passed before we got the official notice of his death in that battle.  She had always kept to herself, and was never overly emotional but became even more devoted to her church.  She never remarried, and her social life consisted mostly of travel, which she did frequently.  In 1973,  she went to the Philippines on invitation from the Air Force and made a pilgrimage to the camp where Daddy had been imprisoned so long before.  A large plinth with all the names of the prisoners had been erected.  She never spoke much about that trip and did not take any pictures.  I believe she had finally buried him and put him away in her own special place. 
     Mom passed away in 1990, quietly, and with great dignity.  She had lived those forty-five years since that telegram on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Carmel, California.  Putty had passed away in 1968.  I miss them both to this day.  I could never say that mom was a “friend” and we were never emotionally close.  But she was a wonderful, beautiful, quietly courageous woman whom I’ve tried to emulate, mixing it with the gentleness and warm love as provided by Putty. 
     In 1984,  I invited Mom to lunch with the express purpose of determining our family’s history, as I couldn’t quite put all the bits and pieces together that I’d learned over the years.  I wanted to know just when Putty had come over from England, had she gone through Ellis Island, the name of her ship, what happened to my grandfather, and so forth.  Mom totally stunned me by saying, “Dear, when you were born, that is when your history began and that’s all you need to know.”  Well, what can you say to that?  My niece and I are trying to piece things together, as best we can, by going through the family bible for birthplaces and dates.  My paternal grandparents’ history is also piecemeal and sparse but at least I’ve begun the search for the past.  I hope my daughter will continue.

 

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