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

Like so many members of the Greatest Generation, my father, former Staff Sergeant John Robinson, rarely spoke about the War. He was on Iwo Jima during the famous flag raising, but the topic never came up at the dinner table. It was only recently, when he wrote a brief memoir, that we learned of his role in a secret "Beach Jumper" operation. His mission was to trick the enemy by broadcasting the pre-recorded sounds of a mock landing force on giant speakers. He then worked with a team of scientists and engineers at Duke University, perfecting a system for triangulating the position of enemy artillery using the sound from strategically placed microphones. He tested the equipment in Hawaii and deployed it successfully during the counter attack on Japan. You didn’t see that in Clint Eastwood’s Iwo Jima movie.

My father and I were both sickly kids. He suffered from severe asthma, pneumonia, scarlet fever, and persistent allergies so bad that he left the family farm at age four, and never went back. His grandparents nursed him through his teens. I too spent much of my childhood gasping for air, then was laid out with rheumatic fever. And like my father, I passed the isolated months in bed, building models from kits. I made mostly plastic cars and monsters. My father made airplanes out of wood.

One of the photos in my father’s hand-made memoir shows a sleek 1930s era airplane model made of balsa floating on pontoons. The picture hung over his workshop for decades. The "Comet Zipper" was special. It was his first motorized model. Before that, isolated and often bedridden, he made only airplanes powered by rubber bands.

It took almost a year, but I finally found a duplicate Comet Zipper model on eBay. It arrived in cherry condition, still in its original cardboard box with fold-out paper instructions to assemble the plane with its 54-inch wingspan. The kit originally sold for $4.50, not including the large bore gas engine. My father built his first Comet Zipper at age 16. He built the second one in his early 80s. I wondered if duplicating the experience might conjure up more memories of the past – of a time before war, before family, before career.

"Everything about the model was the same," my father told me recently. "Making it was very nostalgic."

There is an evolving marketplace, he says, for hobbyists who want to build "antique" models. You can even get reproduction kits these days, but this one was real, almost as old as the man who assembled it. No plastic. No twist-off pre-made parts. Constructing the body and wings and gluing on the paper skin took a month. Teenagers in the 1930s had to carve the airplane wheels out of a solid block of balsa. They had to be skilled and resourceful. You didn’t just assemble the parts, you crafted them.

My father explained how, as a teenager, he bartered with the shopkeeper for the $20 gas engine by building a dozen smaller demonstration models for the store. He got the rest of his money manning a stand selling fresh corn at Cape Cod during summers. He and his grandparents lived by the water in a bare wooden cottage from April to October every year. The salt air soothed his allergies and "recharged the batteries" of his ailing grandfather.

That connection to the sea, passed on from generation to generation, is deeply embedded in me. For the last four decades I’ve rarely been more than a few miles from the ocean.

CONTINUE Comet Zipperstory

My father got a dollar a day to run that roadside stand at Cape Cod, good money for a kid during the Depression. He squirreled away his income and they lived almost entirely off the bounty of the sea.

In his memoir my father writes: "We had clams, quahogs, oysters, scup, bay scallops, flounder and, of course eels, at all times,trapped in pots just 30 feet from the cottage. Grandpa would clean and skin the eels, cut them into six inch pieces and put them on ice in the refrigerator. Fresh pan fried eel is delicious, but grandmother found it took at least 24 hours on ice before the eel’s nervous system calmed down enough to prevent them from flipping themselves out of the frying pan when heated."

I inherited the family frugality and can live on fumes, a critical skill for any full-time writer. I carry no credit card debt, don’t drive a car, and have an aversion for "stuff" with the exception of my books and my computer. I did not, however, inherit a taste for eel.

When my father wasn’t building model planes, he read everything he could get his hands on. He read magazines and manuals. He read the classics and comics, science fiction and science fact. His unpublished memoir, a rich and detailed 20 chapters, reads like fine literature. Although he spent his life repairing telephones, my father is a born storyteller. So was my Grampa Jake whose yarns, true or false, were never dull. Stories flow between the generations like blood.

The bare-ribbed skeleton of the second Comet Zipper still hangs above my father’s cellar workbench, its paper skin still missing. His model-making days are fading – hands a bit too shaky for the pinpoint detail work, he says. But at 85 he is still building cellar shelves, digging out the artesian well, fiddling with electronics and reading science fiction.

And what of the first Comet Zipper built by the teen soon to become a Marine? I’ll let my father finish the story, as he told it to me the other day:

"Most people were into free flight models in those days, not gasoline engines that were noisy and dangerous. To fly the Comet Zipper, you set it to go in a circle and never on a windy day. You only put in 20 seconds worth of fuel. That was important because there was no radio control to guide it back. It would climb 150 feet, circle around, and land right back at your feet. I flew that a hundred times on its wheels, on skis in the winter, and on pontoons in the water."

"Well, your Uncle Henry had a really good camera that I wanted, and I had the Zipper, so one day we traded. He filled the engine with fuel, forgot to cock the tail, and let her go. The plane took off, flew over the tops of the trees, and disappeared. We never saw it again. Henry had that plane for a very short time. It’s been another 70 years or so since he let that airplane go. I used that camera all through the war and when you kids were growing up. Now Henry’s gone too -- but I still have his camera."

This story is for you, dad. Thanks for showing me how to dig clams, build models, spin yarns, save dollars, and always barter to win.

Copyright © 2008 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved. Robinson is the owner of the popular wed site SeacoastNH.com. His latest book is Strawbery Banke: A Seacoast Museum 400 Years in the Making.