Iwo Jima veteran is story teller at heart

Like father, like son? Not in my family where history has reshaped us, generation after generation.

My father John Brewster Robinson graduated from high school in 1941. Exactly one year after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, he stepped off a train to begin Marine boot camp at Parris Island, South Carolina. He led an elite group of trained technicians as the 13^th Marine Artillery Battalion landed on Iwo Jima in 1945. As many as 80 percent of the Marines in that group were injured and another 10 percent killed. My father came out without a scratch, unless you count his emergency appendectomy aboard a battleship.

By contrast, I quivered in my college dorm, contemplating Canada, as the draft card lottery loomed during the Vietnam War. My parents married young and raised three boys. I married late and have no children. My father worked his entire life as a technician for the same corporation. I have been self-employed as a freelance writer for the past 25 years.

Nor did my father step into his father’s shoes. Grampa Jake Robinson made his living trapping fox and mink and beaver for their pelts. He ran a small farm on a tiny river in Massachusetts, raised huge nightcrawlers the size of snakes in bathtubs under the barn, sharpened saws, made custom cherry cabinets, hand-manufactured wooden toys, and walked the night shift as a security guard. One of the last times I saw Grampa Jake, he was trying to build a hovercraft out of a lawnmower engine. If I take after anyone, it’s him.

CONTINUE IWO JIMA story