John Turner – In My Time

Father’s Story

My father, Frederick Arthur Turner was born on December 10, 1906 at home at 77 Brunswick Street in Reading England. At a house built by his grandfather Arthur Richard Turner.

He was the second oldest of eight surviving children. His mother Alice James Turner and his father; Arthur Richard Turner had married in September 1902. His father ran a successful plumbing business.

My father did not speak much about his childhood or growing up in England. Much of what I have learned came from my mother but particularly from my step uncle David Turner, who has done considerable research into the Turner family tree.

I was born when my father was 39 and he was in the middle years of his ministry career. He was pretty distant in my childhood, my memories of him were of him passing through my days to attend meetings or church functions. He seemed either preoccupied with what he was doing or retreating into his study in silence and darkness.

I think men of his generation and cultural background did not think about their “relationship” with their children. They were focused outward towards their work. Raising children were the focus and responsibility of the mother and it was true in our home.

His own account of his childhood.

“Rev. Frederick Arthur Turner was born on December 10, 1906 in Reading Berkshire ,England, the second child of family of nine children of his father and mother Arthur and Alice Turner. His father was a registered plumber and had graduated from Christ Hospital school for boys a famous boys school in England from which Charles Lamb and other well-known men have been train. His brother Ernest had also attended and later became a teacher in the London school system Christ Hospital where the Bluecoat school as it was better-known allow the eldest son of each generation of the founders to be admitted to the school on scholarship When Fred reach the age of 12 ,he became eligible person attended at that time was a branch of the bluecoat school in Reading and since it was located across the road from where Fred was living he attended that branch 

He remembers that his initiation consisted of his being thrown by classmate high over a Hollytree in the schoolyard and that he came home with lots of scratches on his leg for at 12 ,he was still wearing short pants his mother bathed  his bleeding legs and soothed  his trouble soul . While he was at the school , he learned to type and master Pittman’s shorthand, which looking back he says enabled him to come to America as a secretary of the leader of the church of our on the job.

He was raised in a loving home during the First World War 1914 to 1918. He remembers a German zeppelin hovering over Reading where they live one morning he came downstairs and saw all the shoes in the living room for all in a row mother said that she was up all night and had made preparation rest to be evacuated in case of a bombing raid what I’m wonderful mother she was. Dad had enlisted in the Air Force and was stationed in Scotland Yoel flying Corps they called it during those warriors the family had a lot more of ground on which you could raise your own vegetables Fred remembers that were his brother Dick 18 months younger than Fred help mother with a garden he was assigned as a babysitter for his younger brothers and sisters as he loves little children ever since they smiled at him whenever he has been Fred was a choir boy and all Saints Reading with a Vicar ; a Rev. H Wardleigh he loved the relationship and the church is a typical choirboy after one choir practice he was on his way home and was snowing and he saw a woman with an umbrella in the snow falling and began throwing snowballs at her she ran after him but he outran her to his home. Sometimes when Fred was 16 on a summer afternoon after school is out he applied for job at Huntley &

I am a circle 

Circling around myself

Enclosed in a larger circle

Called my family

My family circle is enclosed

In a larger circle called a national circle.

My national circle is inside a larger circle

Called a humanity circle that includes hundreds of other national circles .

That humanity circle is yet but one circle inside something we call the Earth.

The Earth circle contains so many more circles than just the human circle but we constantly forgetting that. 

I am a circle

Circling around and inside myself

Circling though time, friends, family 

Circling through changes of seasons

Sometimes attempting to circle around 

Problems, people and dangers.

Sometimes attempting to circle into

people, possibilities and love.

I wasn’t aware of the centrality of circles

Before the American Indian taught me.

Thought everything was a straight line

From me to the future

And a straight line back through me to the past.

Nope, it was about circles not straight lines

Circles that have expanded and contracted through my long life.

Circles have come and gone… school circles, work circles, community circles, love circles. Some have come full circle, arriving back at the start again.

Those have been the best, cause everything lies “ahead”again..

At some point you will ask yourself, “what came before me?”  “Who else is in my family Tree?”

You may have already asked it or maybe you will ask it when you have your own kids and fully realize that your life wasn’t a self contained, self absorbed existence but fit into an on going family story that lived before you and will live beyond you.

Now at 75 I wanted to share my story and my life experiences for you, for your children and maybe one day for their children. Though my life isn’t over, I anticipate in the next five to eight years it will be increasingly difficult for me to both remember and write my life story for you.

I start with two quotes that have always been close to me and my thinking through the adult years of my life. Here is the first:

Stories we tell ourselves to explained to be who we are,

What is happening to us and where we are going,

Are incredibly important and powerful………….

So choose your stories carefully.

Everything that has happened to me, that will happen to you in your life, leads  to some form of reflection and insight. Some desire to understand and explain to yourself and to others, what has happened in your life in the past, in the present and your desires and or fears about the future . .

You can learn a lot from listening to other peoples stories about their lives and how they chose to try and live them. Are their stories full of pain, suffering and regret? Are their stories too good to believe? 

The stories I am to tell you about my life will be generally much more positive, up beat and positive. That doesn’t mean that haven’t been moments in my life when I was depressed, discouraged or unhappy. But over the sweep of the 75 years I have been alive, my sense of reality, my experience have been overwhelmingly happy, enriching and wonderful.

The second quote is from a song by Bob Dylan:

Those not busy being born are busy dying.

What I did this morning, yesterday or last week is gone now. I may have screwed up, made mistakes, offended someone or even hurt them. What happened to me this morning, yesterday or last week is gone now. Maybe someone had screwed me up, made mistakes, offended or even hurt me…. But it is gone now. If you choose to leave it there.

As best you can, try and leave it there so you can be ready to experience the world as new , unknown and full of unexpected outcomes.

The silence of my ancestors has left a void which I will fill for my children and their children and their children.

We got cut off  by desires to have an adventure in a new land, avoid a predictable and unwanted life where they came from or out of sadness .

When I was young it would take two weeks to exchange correspondences between England and United States via the mail. Today I can talk to and see my English uncle instantaneously, if I wanted to.

It was August of 1963 I had just graduated from high school and in a month would be getting on a train heading west to go to college in Iowa. Both were some form of a miracle in my mind then,..how after failing so many times in high school had I passed enough classes to graduate? And how given that performance had anyone given  me a shot at a college  education?

But the real miracle of that summer was that I had found my first true love….Lenore . We had worked together for the past year at the town library. She was two years younger than I and would head back to high school in the Fall, while I went West.

After school got out in June I spent as much time with Lenore as I could, usually walking the mile between her house and mine. On this warm August night I had gotten tickets to a Joan Baez concert at the old Forest Hills Tennis Court. I could only afford the cheapest tickets and when we found our seats we were at the very top row, as far as you could get from the stage and still have paid an entrance fee.

Joan Baez sang for about forty five minutes and then stopped, stood up and said “There is a young folk singer I would like you to listen to named Bob Dylan. In the next hour, listening to his music and words I had what some folks would classify as a “Coming to Jesus” moment.

I was totally captivated. I had never been so deeply affected by a set of songs. 

“How many roads must a man walk down, before you call him a man?” “You’re the reason I am traveling on,Don’t Think Twice it’s all right.” “Oxford Town, around the bend, Two men died neath the Mississippi moon. Somebody better investigate soon”

As soon as I could find it, I brought his album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. There on the cover was Bob Dylan  walking down a snowy street in New York City with a beautiful young woman her arms wrapped through his. It could have been Lenore and I, no it was Lenore and I at that moment.

Less than a month later, I pulled a steamer trunk onto a Chicago bound train and headed off to college with the The Freewheelin Bobby packed safely inside.

During those early weeks in Iowa, my life was full of new people, new sights, new challenges. I was in college, I was on my own and I had never felt more alive.

In the evenings, I either sat down and wrote Lenore a letter or called her on the public telephone that stood in the hall near my dorm room. I told her how much I missed her, which was both true and not true, I told her how much I loved her, which was true.

Always nearby, playing in the background was Bob Dylan’s Freewheelin album….. in the evening, thinking of her, I would listen to “ Girl of the North Country”….

 “Please see for me if her hair hangs long, If it rolls and flows down her breast. Please see for me if her hair hangs long,That’s the way I remember her best”.

During the day I was more likely to listen to those songs that stirred my sense of justice or injustice like A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.

“ I’m going back out ‘fore the rain starts a falling”

I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest dark black forest 

Where the people are many and their hands are all empty

Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters

Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden

Where hunger is ugly, where the souls are forgotten

Where black is the color, where none is the number.”

It was hard to match the boy who sang along with the words of Dylan that Fall with the same boy who a year earlier had love to sing along with a favorite album of “Al Jolson’s Greatest Hits” and who two months before graduation, donned blackface and sang “Mammy” at his high school talent show!

By the middle of October, the letters from Lenore became more infrequent and when I got her on the phone we did not have much to say to each other , other than increasing feeble and inauthentic statements of “I miss you.”

It was ending, she knew it way before I did and again I turned to the playing of “The Freewillin Bob Dylan” for comfort.

“I’m a-thinin and a-wondrin all the way down the road,

I once loved a woman , a child I’m told

I give her my heart but she wanted my soul

But don’t think twice’s its alright”

I played that album over and over and over that Freshman year of college, It got so badly scratch and damage, I had to buy another copy over Christmas vacation.

In the years ahead it stayed locked up in my parents house while I went to the Philippines , when I came back it came with me to South Carolina and then Vermont.

That vinyl record has long disappeared into some trip to the junk and I have moved on to having owned it as a cassette, a disk and now downloaded onto my computer.

But I will always cherish that first album as a “guide” “comforter” and in moments of doubt or loneliness… a very good friend!

He had had three primary care physicians over the course of his life.

Three relationships: One doctor was much older, one was his age and one was younger. Now in his mid seventies he was probably on his last and youngest.

As a young boy, his mother had taken him to a Doctor Tobin. She seemed to take him there often, he recalled, as much for her own anxiety as any thing he was suffering from. The waiting room was small and dark with a well worn black plastic couch that made noise when you sat down on it. There always seemed to be other children waiting, sitting next to their mothers or in their laps; father’s never present.

The nurse would come out in a stiff starched white uniform (it was the 1950s) and take him into a small examination room. He would hop up on the exam table and the doctor would come in.

The doctor and his mother did all of the talking, he sometimes felt that he was only a delivery boy, delivering a small body to be poked, measured and examined. The doctor would write a prescription and send my mother out of the exam room reassured that her boy would live to see another day.

There would be a some twenty year gap before he would enter a doctor’s office again for a regular check-up. He would stay with this doctor for the next thirty years…,through the early years of his marriage the arrival of children and ultimately his retirement from work.

He always called him Paul, rather than Doctor. Paul was a man of small statute and quiet demeanor, much like the patient himself.

He always liked Paul, he was not one of those doctors that made you feel like thank god you came to him because now he can save your life , make you well. He was modest, always assumed you were always teetering on the edge of excellent heath. He was always pleasant always conversational and most of all had a great sense of humor.

Over the years that he was with Paul It became apparent that he was a candidate for diabetes since his mother had been a diabetic. When Paul diagnosed him with type two diabetes he prescribed as series of medication which he still takes to this day. Paul would encourage him to have more exercise and less sugar in his diet. Generally he try to comply but as he got older it was harder and harder to do .

During the years with Paul he would come in for quarterly check ups and they would spend much of the time in those checkups…. Laughing and talking about women ,wives ,children, politics. Any anxiety he might’ve had walking into those doctor visits with, were all gone when he left. The laughter , shared with Paul was the best medicine he could get.

He used to say to Paul you know someday “if I stay with you long enough you gonna have to give me bad news. I want you to know I plan on quitting the week before that meeting.”

Well what happened was Paul beat him out the door before he could really give him any bad news. He retired leaving him with a need to find a new doctor. It felt like the death of a soul mate.

The third doctor he had was just a couple of years older than his son. He had the choice of two doctors who inherited Paul’s patients, one was just graduating from medical school and one was John who had more years of experience. He chose John.

He never felt comfortable with meeting new people until they had had their first shared laugh. He soon discovered that even though there was a 40 year age gap between him and John they shared a common ground of humor and concerns. He liked the kid, he liked his energy his willingness to share what was going in this young doctor’s life. He had heard similar concerns from his own son and felt like John was a son too. 

He kept track of the progression of his diabetes , made wise suggestions for changes and modifications in therapies and through it all found many shared things to laugh together.

Given his experience with these three doctors over the span of his life his counseled his own children to find doctors who they could laugh with and who they could call by their first name.

He did know though that unlike with Paul, he would be unable to quit this doctor before he got bad news!

“What’s an Elephant doing in our living room” He had just come down stairs and there it was, standing in the middle of the room!

“Chester “ in here”! “Did you bring this elephant home with you?”

His gangly teen age son came out from the kitchen where he had been gazing the shelves in the refrigerator for the last ten minutes, trying to decide whether he would eat the remains of a chocolate cake or freshly baked apple pie.

The boy look first at his father than the elephant ? “Whoa, what’s that doing here?” “I was hoping you can tell me!”
“I thought you brought it in!”

“No way!”

“Go get your mother and sister and bring them in here.”
His wife and daughter come in to the room and his daughter, Carmela sees the elephant and screams!! “What is that doing in here???”

Everyone is equally shocked and simultaneously amazed that somehow this huge elephant had gotten into their house without anyone knowing how.

“ What does this means!” The mother asked . “Chester “google” what an elephant in the living room means. Their eyes all turned to Chester now, including the elephant…

“ It is a metaphorical idiom in English for an important or enormous topic, question, or controversial issue that is obvious or that everyone knows about but no one mentions or wants to discuss because it makes at least some of them uncomfortable and is personally, socially, or politically embarrassing, controversial, inflammatory, or dangerous. “

“Well maybe there is something we need to talk about as a family that we are not” pipes up Carmela.

“What could that possibly be ?”, the mother asks.

“Is it that nobody wants to visit grandma we don’t want to admit it?” “No, I always love visiting grandma,” says Chester

“Is it that Carmela has bad choices in boyfriends but nobody wants to say it? “ I liked that boy Josh says Mom. He was a creep responds Carmela.

“Is it that Dad is unhappy in his job but nobody wants to talk about it?” No response

Is it that Chester plays too many video games, will never graduate from high school and end up living with us for the rest of his life?” “ I don’t play that many” Chester meekly responds

Is it that we are all bored with each other and would like to have different family members? Silence….No response

Is it that Dad & Mom move around each other in silence and nobody says anything? The silence continues….

Is it that Dad voted for Trump and Mom didn’t? “I still think the election was stolen from him” says dad. Mom rolls her eyes

After due consideration to those possibilities and others and with a number of defensive reactions to some of the suggestions… the family could not come up with an explanation

“Well this elephant isn’t a metaphorical idiom, it is standing right in front of us in our living room” The father finally said.

Sometimes an elephant in a living room is just….an elephant in the living room.

Chester call the zoo and tell them to come and pick this elephant up!

View From Five Feet was a column in The Que written during John’s years attending University of Dubuque in Iowa.

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It’s about the size of a credit card encased in plastic so it would survive the trip with him. And survived it has for 59 years. For six years between his 18th and 24th birthdays the document represented to him, an obligation. An obligation, he did not want to pay.

The obligation was to register with the Selective Service System and the document was his registration certificate made official on October 1, 1963.

When he graduated from high school in the summer of 1963 and headed to college that Fall. He did not think much about the form or the obligation. He registered as required with local Board #4 in Freeport, New York. This made him eligible to be called up for military duty if required. That status was called 1A.

But exemptions could be made by the local board. Deferments were made for physical or mental issues or as in his case because of enrollment in college. Every year the local board reviewed his status and every year made a decision on whether he would be granted an extension. Because he stayed enrolled in college he was granted the deferments.

In November 1963, the president of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem was assassinated by his own generals and there were 16,000 US soldiers there. In August 1964 the Gulf of Tonkin resolution was passed in Congress giving President Johnson the power to,“take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States.”

By 1965 the number of soldiers in Vietnam had risen to 184,300, by 1966 to 385,300.and by November 1967, the number of American troops in Vietnam was approaching 500,000, and U.S. casualties had reached 15,058 killed and 109,527 wounded.

It became clear to thousands of boys of that generation , that the issue of going to war, would have to be confronted. To go or not to go and if not, what?

By 1966 he knew that he would not fight in this war. The war made no,sense to him and seeing farmers and peasants in black pajamas and sandals as a real threat to democracy in the United States, seemed absurd.

Long before he had ever heard of South Vietnam, he had been moved and inspired by John Kennedy’s presidency. HeI was moved and inspired by the line in his inaugural address about,

“Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”

When the Peace Corps was created he was immediately drawn to it and in his junior year of college applied and was accepted. In June of 1967 after graduation he flew off to the Philippines to teach school in a very rural farming village, very similar to those in South Vietnam some 500 miles away. Again, because of the nature of the work, local board #4 granted him a deferment to serve as a Peace Corps volunteer.

When he returned to the US in the summer of 1969 Local Board # 4 informed him that his status was changed to 1A, eligible for immediate call up. 

Unemployed for much of that summer he jumped at an opportunity for a teaching job in South Carolina in the Fall.

On December 1, 1969, the first draft lottery  was held since 1942, during World War II. This drawing determined the order of induction for men born between January 1, 1944 and December 31, 1950. A large glass container held 366 blue plastic balls containing every possible birth date that affected men between 18 and 26 years old.He remembered that night watching on TV the slow pulling of the numbers with birth dates on them.He ended up being number 244. And because it was a high number and the war was winding down.He was never called up.

But the Selective Service Registration card stayed with him for the next 53 years. 

Why?

Maybe because it was a reminder of a time when his life depended on getting deferments that were not always automatic. Maybe because the card reminded him of all the boys of his generation who did not get deferments, went to Vietnam, and were killed, wounded or badly scared.  And maybe in a way it served as a reference point for the state of his well-being.

On the card on October 1, 1963 it said he was 5’3” and 150 lbs and today at 76 he is 5’3’ and 148 lbs.

 Two pounds lighter and a lot wiser.