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  However, Hendrick Snyder, who could be rather volatile in temperament, appeared to be somewhat myopic in his ability to expand his own opportunities. “He had some crazy ideas,” is how Harry Jr. once described his father. “He didn’t believe anybody should be wealthy. He figured that if you made so much money the rest of it should go back to the government and they would give it to poor people. He was a die-hard socialist.” His wife, Mary, however, exhibited few if any opinions on this subject or any other for that matter. “Ma never had much to say,” Harry once explained. “She didn’t make waves. He made the waves.”

  Despite his vocal socialist leanings, Hendrick was by his son’s account something less than a visionary. Painting houses, apartments, ships—anything that needed painting—was his one undisputed talent. “I don’t think you could find a better painter,” Harry once said of his father. However, when it came to finances, Hendrick was careless to the point of recklessness. “The old man always ran out of money,” was how Harry described his father’s financial acumen—or lack thereof. “If he got paid for a job they’d have a big dinner with lots of food in the house and have a lot of people over and have a big party.” During the next several years, the Snyders enjoyed living something of an exuberant hand-to-mouth existence in boomtown Seattle. When Harry was seven years old, the circus came to Seattle. Hendrick woke him at two o’clock in the grey morning so that they could go down to watch the rail caravan arrive. “We stood and watched the animals come off,” he recalled. “It was a quite a show. We watched them put the tent up. They did the show and then they left.” But Harry never actually watched a performance inside the big tent. Apparently, Hendrick had already burned through his latest windfall and didn’t have enough money to buy his son a ticket.

  Not long after the circus left town, Hendrick left Seattle himself. Leaving his family behind for a time, he moved down to Los Angeles to find work. It was a new city for Hendrick, one in which he had a clean slate. It may have been just in time, because as the 1920s wore down, Seattle’s famous boom cycle had turned to bust. And apparently Hendrick had worn out his welcome there as well. “When he left Seattle, he owed everybody and their brother money,” Harry once said. “He was the biggest stiff there was.”

  In 1922, when Harry Snyder was nine years old, Hendrick sent for the rest of his family. The Snyders landed in a one-bedroom house on Central Avenue in the Watts section of Los Angeles followed not long after by a move to Santa Monica, a town that had benefited greatly from the expanding prosperity that was lifting most of the country during the 1920s. During this time, the Douglas Aircraft Company built a plant at Clover Field. And in 1924, the La Monica Ballroom, a fifteen thousand square foot hall capable of holding ten thousand dancers, was opened on the Santa Monica Pier. By the end of the decade, the population had more than doubled from 15,252 to 37,156.

  Hendrick took a series of painting jobs and Mary continued to clean other people’s houses. At almost any time, the sociable Snyders’ own house was filled with an assortment of friends whom they had gathered from the Dutch immigrant community. While good times were readily available, money remained in short supply. As a result, the family moved from one rental house to the next, often owing rent to the landlords they had left behind. When Harry was thirteen, his father landed in jail after he beat up a landlord who came by demanding his money.

  The Snyders moved along the Los Angeles beach circuit. In addition to living in Santa Monica, they stayed at a series of small houses in Venice. Founded in 1905 by tobacco magnate Abbot Kinney as a beach resort, Venice was considered the Coney Island of the West with its pleasure piers and amusement parks, speakeasies, dance halls, miniature railroads, bathhouses, and ocean side canals complete with gondola rides. Venice also became associated with the “Craftsman” style of architecture. At one point in 1930, the Snyder family lived in a single-family Craftsman home at 221 Market Street.

  In 1928, Hendrick Snyder quit his job painting at the three-story, sixty-bed Santa Monica Hospital on Sixteenth Street. The work paid a tidy sum of twenty-five dollars per week, but when Hendrick was refused a vacation, he simply put down his paintbrush and walked away, leaving his wife to support the family with her housekeeping jobs. The Great Depression plunged the country into an economic morass a few years later, and Hendrick never held another proper job again.

  These were tough times. During young Harry’s teenage years he was a bit of a tough himself, engaging in petty theft and sparring with his friends at the amateur boxing gym in Ocean Park. Throughout, he managed to maintain a fierce sense of responsibility. Although he was just a young man and the Depression had flattened prospects for most, Harry always found a way to earn a buck. He landed a number of odd jobs—and he always supported his family, giving them five dollars every week from whatever money he had earned.

  Among his many jobs, Harry worked as a paperboy. Delivering the Venice Vanguard on his bicycle, he boasted that he could finish his route up and down Washington Boulevard in half an hour. Among his other jobs, Harry worked for a grocer, sold sandwiches, and delivered hot dog and hamburger buns for a bakery. And for a period he worked at the concession stands on the pleasure piers of Venice. Even as the cheap entertainments offered on the piers grew increasingly shoddy, attracting a more vulgar crowd to the once upscale beaches, Harry picked up a number of odd jobs doing everything from selling red hots to picking up rental umbrellas on the beach. “It was not very much money,” he once remarked. “But money in those days was money.”

  By his own admission, Harry was not much of an academic. Despite his innate intellect, he was never more than a middling student. “I went through high school with a C-average without cracking a book at all,” he once said. “A teacher told me if I had ever studied I could’ve gotten good grades.” Rather, Harry excelled in the areas of common sense and resourcefulness. An amateur electronics enthusiast, he demonstrated the kind of mind suited to putting together and taking apart gadgets.

  During his high school days, Harry developed a keen interest in cars and a fondness for smoking Chesterfield cigarettes—a habit he picked up while playing a regular game of rummy with his buddies. Following high school, he enrolled at Santa Monica Junior College, but quit after one semester. “I couldn’t afford to go,” he later explained. “I had to work to keep myself going.” Many years later when Harry looked back at this period he claimed that the times had briefly transformed him into a radical. “I was a communist,” he declared. “I saw the capitalist system as a total failure. We needed a whole new system, and communism was the only answer. Everyone working together and sharing it all instead of some getting it all.” In all likelihood, Harry’s drive and tenacity were propelled by the uncertainty of watching his parents labor to provide for his family, chasing one opportunity after another, and by the Depression years. And despite his youthful transgressions, Harry grew into a disciplined fellow with a strong sense of responsibility. He had learned early that luck was not something that found you; if you wanted it, you had to go looking for it yourself.

  By the time the United States entered World War II in 1941, Harry had already begun to make some luck of his own. Having returned to Seattle at one point, he worked as a railway signal operator. During the war, Seattle became a center for industrial manufacturing; it also served as a major embarkation point for troops. And at age twenty-nine, Harry Snyder was drafted. On November 23, 1942, he walked into an army recruitment office in Tacoma and signed up for duty.

  Harry was quickly sent to basic training in Northern California at the Fresno County Fairgrounds that had until only recently been used as a crude temporary camp holding 5,344 ethnic Japanese residents. By the time that Harry Snyder arrived, the last of the Japanese had been transferred and the fairgrounds turned over to the Fourth Air Force. Although no less crude than when it was a Japanese internment camp (makeshift tar paper barracks, outhouses, and overhead water pipes with drilled-out holes), the Air Force converted the grounds into a non-flying tra
ining facility for signalmen, camouflage specialists, chemical warfare specialists, clerks, cooks, and truck drivers.

  A perforated eardrum disqualified Harry Snyder from the infantry and saved him from certain deployment overseas. Instead, Harry’s service was largely performed behind a desk. Following his basic training in Fresno he was stationed variously in Hastings, Nebraska; Dallas, Texas; and Salt Lake City, Utah. For a time, Harry was sent to Hamilton Field in Novato, California, northeast of San Francisco. It was the headquarters for the First Wing of the Army Air Corps, where he worked in the records department processing B-24s. For extra cash, Harry worked on the side in the Sausalito shipyards, earning an additional seventy dollars a week. Following his tour of duty at Hamilton Field, Harry was sent back to Los Angeles, where he worked as a clerk-typist for the Army Air Corps.

  When the war ended, Harry returned to Seattle. The war years had shuffled people far from their homes and thrown them together in the most unexpected ways. In 1947, Harry was thirty-four years old and working as a caterer selling boxed sandwiches to the cafeteria at Fort Lawton. And one day in 1947, while dropping off his sandwiches at Fort Lawton, Harry met the restaurant’s twenty-seven-year-old manager, a shy woman with a warm, engaging face. Her name was Esther Johnson.

  The daughter and granddaughter of coal miners, Esther Lavelle Johnson was born on January 7, 1920. She grew up in the tiny village of Sorento among the vast rural plains of coal-rich Shoal Creek Town ship in southwestern Illinois, the fourth child of Orla and Mabel (née Molloy) Johnson’s brood of eight.

  When Esther was a young girl, the family lived in a small, one-story wooden frame house with a shingled roof on State Street, across from the United Methodist Church. Sorento was so small that most houses—including the Johnsons’—didn’t have numbers. The cramped house was perhaps not more than one thousand square feet; it had a small front porch and a tiny yard that pressed up to the street. The house was unexceptional, but it was certainly a step up from the miners’ camps where many families in neighboring counties lived.

  A fifth-generation Illinoisan, Esther hailed from a long line of hardy men and women who possessed a spirit of faith and great pluck. On Esther’s paternal line, her great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Christopher Loving was born in Virginia in 1750 and fought in the Revolutionary War as a teenager. A thrifty man who kept scrupulous accounts of his money, Loving owned a hundred-acre farm in Chester County, South Carolina. James Grisham, Esther’s paternal great-great-grandfather was a farmer and a veteran of the great Black Hawk War of 1832. Originally from Dixon County, Tennessee, he was one of the first to settle Montgomery County, Illinois.

  Narrowly escaping the great Irish potato famine, Esther’s maternal grandfather, Brien Molloy, was born on March 1, 1850, in New Orleans, just six weeks after his parents, Patrick and Catherine (née Monahan), arrived from County Cavan, Ireland. Later, Molloy traveled north to Illinois where he became one of Sorento’s early businessmen. He and his wife, Anna, had eleven children including Mabel, Esther’s mother.

  The Johnson line of the family came to Sorento with the arrival of Esther’s great-grandfather Israel Johnson. A farmer and auctioneer, Israel was born around 1821 and traveled to Illinois by covered wagon from Tennessee. According to a census taker, in 1870, Israel Johnson owned a personal estate worth $1,000. Israel’s father, Jonathan Johnson, was a circuit-riding minister from Tennessee. In those days, the circuit riders traveled on horseback for weeks at a time with all of their earthly possessions packed into a saddlebag, going from provisional town to provisional town and makeshift church to makeshift church, taming both the wilderness and those lost souls that they passed along the way.

  At one time, Esther’s mother, Mabel, worked as a schoolteacher. Before his marriage, her father, Orla, worked in a retail store. However, like his father, Lawson, before him, Orla eventually became a coal miner and a farmer. It was difficult for most men of modest means not to go down into the mines. Cheap bituminous or soft coal was plentiful in Illinois, and by the mid-1800s it was in great demand. Until the onset of the Great Depression, coal output from Sorento soared.

  Orla, like many locals, ended up working at the Shoal Creek Company’s Panama Mine. First opened in 1906, the Panama was just five miles from Sorento. Orla worked alongside his brother Olis, their father, Lawson, and a man named John L. Lewis (who went on to serve as the president of the United Mine Workers of America for forty years, from 1920 to 1960).

  The Panama was a relatively small operation, used primarily to supply the Clover Leaf Railroad (built in 1881 along the south shore of the Great Lakes, connecting Buffalo, New York, and Chicago). The mine had a history of closing down for long periods, and so most of its workers supplemented their mining income with other work, mostly farming.

  By the time Esther’s father began working the mines, coal mining was already on a downward slide. The stock market crash in 1929 followed by the Great Depression ended the mining boom for good. Thousands of coal miners lost their jobs as mine after mine was shut down. In 1934, when Esther was fourteen years old, the Panama shut down permanently. Groups of miners and their families emptied out of Sorento as they went looking for livelihoods elsewhere.

  While the Johnson family remained in Sorento, they were not spared hardship. At one point, the family farmed out some of their children to live with relatives. Esther was sent for a time to live with her grandparents. Although it was meant to be a temporary measure, she ended up living with them until she finished high school.

  Although her parents were Catholics, while living with her grandparents, Esther regularly worshipped at the Free Methodist Church. A simple, whitewashed, wood plank frame structure with pine pews and a shingled bell tower, the church was located on the west side of north Main Street across from the railroad tracks. The church took its name from its break with the practice of charging for better seats in the pews closest to the pulpit (Free Methodists were also opposed to slavery). It was here that Esther’s own simple and principled beliefs were most likely formed.

  Whatever aspirations the Johnsons may have had for their eight children, the modest circumstances in which they found themselves certainly narrowed the possibilities. Yet despite the financial constraints that bore heavily on the family, they managed to place an emphasis on education. By all accounts, Esther was a gifted student; she possessed a sharp brain disguised by a shy demeanor. In her high school yearbook, the Sho-La-Hi, Esther is shown wearing a sensible, modest dress and thick eyeglasses that make her look much older than the demure teenager she was. During Esther’s three years at Sorento High School, she was an honor student as well as a member of the glee club, the school chorus, and the commercial club. She was also class president and assistant editor of the Sho-La-Hi. With characteristic modesty, Esther once described her school days by saying that “I had a good time in school.”

  Like many graduates of Sorento High School in the late 1930s who wished to attend their fourth and final year of school (Sorento only offered three years), Esther had to continue at one of the high schools in either Hillsboro or Greenville for a fee. Although it’s not clear how she managed it or who paid the bill at the time, Esther did go on to finish and graduate from Greenville High School in 1937, commuting sixteen miles every day. Esther’s Greenville yearbook inscription reads, “If it takes brains, she’ll get along.”

  Esther’s desire to attend college was stalled when her grandmother suffered a stroke and was left unable to walk. Esther remained in Sorento in order to take care of her grandmother, putting off her studies until 1939, when she enrolled in Greenville College (part of the Free Methodist Church). An aunt paid for her first two years of tuition. “She thought I deserved it,” Esther later explained. But her grandfather and uncles seemed perplexed as to why a young lady like Esther wanted to pursue a college education. “Don’t you want to get married?” they regularly asked her. To which she replied: “I like to learn.” During the mornings, Esther cared for her grandmothe
r. In the afternoons, she studied elementary school education at Greenville; upon returning home in the evenings, she took care of the household chores.

  In November 1940, Esther’s grandmother sickened; Esther quit college altogether to look after her grandmother full-time. Four months later, after the death of her grandmother, Esther spent the summer in Sorento working a few jobs, including one at the post office. She borrowed $150 and returned to Greenville College. After earning the equivalent of a teaching certificate, Esther began teaching second grade at Sorento’s primary school.

  It was while Esther was working as a schoolteacher in her hometown that the United States entered World War II. In 1943, Esther joined the war effort, signing up as one of the navy’s newly created WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service) at the recruitment office down in St. Louis. It was a bold move for a shy girl from rural Illinois. The WAVES were designated by special order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt to fill the vacancies created by the tens of thousands of men who had been sent to the battlefront. While not eligible for combat duty, WAVES performed a number of jobs previously uncharacteristic for women in the military. In explaining her reasons for joining the navy, Esther remarked, “I thought I might enjoy radio or hospital work. My parents didn’t really comment on it. But my sisters thought it was wonderful.”

  Esther—who had very little experience outside of Sorento before enlisting—was sent to New York City, where she attended boot camp at Hunter College in the Bronx. By special war decree, Hunter was transformed from a college to a naval training ground. Once there, the new recruits spent several weeks immersed in naval organization, administration, and history. In addition, the women were subjected to an intensive program of marching drills and medical exams as well as a battery of aptitude tests. Following boot camp, they were dispatched to their duty stations. Esther was sent to the San Diego Naval Hospital; the navy proved to be her ticket out of the farms and coal mines and the chronic privations of Bond County, Illinois—just as it was for the many young men across the country that had enlisted in droves.