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| ISBN-13: | 9780996274067 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | GoodKnight Books |
| Publication date: | 10/24/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 390 |
| Sales rank: | 190,740 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
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Mission
Jimmy Stewart and the Fight for Europe
By Robert Matzen
Paladin Communications
Copyright © 2016 Robert MatzenAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-9962740-6-7
CHAPTER 1
HIGH-STRUNG
James Maitland Stewart had to fly. His earliest memories of flight involved colorful covers of Literary Digest depicting the Great War, then in progress, and the incredible use of air power by both sides. Jim tacked up each magazine cover on the wall in his bedroom. "Airplanes were the last thing I thought of every night and the first thing I thought of every morning," he would say as an adult.
Jim had entered the world on May 20, 1908, in the quiet, hilly western Pennsylvania town of Indiana, the county seat with a population of 7,000. He was the first child of Spanish-American War veteran Alexander Mead Stewart and his wife of less than two years, Elizabeth Ruth Jackson Stewart. There was nothing special about Indiana, since America was full of towns roughly that size and that population. King coal ruled the area, with mines boring into the hard earth, undercutting the landscape, which also featured lush and rolling farm fields. An educational facility for teachers, the Indiana Normal School, sat a few blocks south of the Stewart home on Philadelphia Street.
Normal was the word for Indiana, and Jim experienced a normal childhood rooted in faith. "Religion was an important part of our lives," said Jim. "We used to go to church a lot. The Presbyterian Church. My mother played the organ and my father sang in the choir." Jim's friends visiting to dinner would watch the family hold hands as Mr. Stewart said grace.
Jim's father was a favorite son in Indiana, and among his community involvements was service on the volunteer fire department. Some described Alex Stewart as "the town character," a tall, loud, extroverted, opinionated, often flighty man who required a fair amount of attention and pampering, which made it handy that the family hardware store served as the crossroads of the town of Indiana. He greeted his customers loudly, remembered their names, and always had a story to tell. Earlier in life, he drank to excess and drinking made him grow wild. Later, he would cut down on the booze but not by much.
"Alex should have been an actor. He was a born actor. He made it a business to be a character," said D. Hall Blair, one of Jim's childhood friends. Only one human could wrangle Alex Stewart and that was his wife, Bessie, a stable, strong, commonsense, salt-of-the-earth woman whom her son Jim would describe as "cultured, elegant, and refined."
Young Jim — known as Jimbo to his father and Jimsey to his mother — grew up seeing Dad as his role model every day, and walking in his father's long shadow made it necessary that Jim become something of a performer as well. It was expected. At the same time, Jim possessed none of his father's high volume or blunt extroversion; quite the contrary, Jim grew up quiet like his mother and high-strung, with a nervous stomach that made it difficult to eat a full meal. His whole life, nobody would know what Jim was thinking.
The Stewart boy played ball and caught tadpoles in Two Lick Creek. When a customer offered an accordion as payment in lieu of cash at the hardware store, Jim picked it up and started playing, and liked it well enough to take lessons from the Italian barber up the street. Jim lived a normal childhood with friends Hall Blair and Bill Neff until war in Europe broke out for the United States in 1917 when Jim was nine. At that point, life changed because his father went back into military service as a captain of artillery.
A profound memory in Jim's life involved traveling to New York City, where the Stewarts had trudged up the steps of the Statue of Liberty and Jim had attempted to climb out on her nose, despite his fear of the great height, because he had wanted to prove to his father how brave he was. Alex had always set such high standards and demanded such perfection that Jim felt motivated to take extreme measures to prove himself.
The trip also was memorable because Jim and his parents had watched President Woodrow Wilson deliver a speech at Carnegie Hall. Days later, on October 17, 1917, Capt. Alexander Stewart shipped out for Europe and the Great War.
Jim had grown up on war, beginning when Fergus Moorhead, his great-great-great grandfather on his father's side, served in the Cumberland County Militia in the American Revolution. A counterpart on his mother's side also fought in the Revolution.
Jim's grandfather, James Maitland Stewart, youngest of ten children, followed older brother Archibald into the Union Army; J.M. enlisted in the U.S. Army Signal Corps in 1864 at the advanced age of twenty-four, whereas Archie had joined up at the beginning of the war in 1861. Why J.M. waited until the South was on the ropes is anybody's guess, but he saw a great deal of action in the Shenandoah Valley of western Virginia under Union Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan and Brig. Gen. George Armstrong Custer, among others. At about the time J.M. Stewart was participating in the battle of New Market, older brother Archie was cut down by mortal wounds at the battle of Spotsylvania Court House. J.M. would continue to see action in engagements at Berryville, Winchester, and Fisher's Hill, which began the scorched-earth march by Sheridan down through the valley, torching farms, factories, and railroads. Virginians called it "The Burning," and Sgt. James Maitland Stewart was there to see it all. Gen. William T. Sherman would soon emulate Sheridan's practice in Georgia on his march to the sea.
Sergeant Stewart kept a colorful diary that detailed much of the fighting in Virginia in the last year of the war, like this entry about the battle of Cedar Creek, fought October 19, 1864, when the army of Confederate Lt. Gen. Jubal Early launched a pre-dawn attack on General Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley:
"We then went out on station on the banks of Cedar Creek where we remained until Oct. the 19th, when the Johnnies charged our works about an hour before daylight. They carried the works on our left and came in on our left flank and in less then [sic] an hour they had the 8th and 19th Corps on a skedaddle. The 6th Corps was then drawn up in line of battle & held them there till they were ordered to fall back. They fell back in good order till they got a good position then drew up in line of battle & held their position. A heavy fire was kept up all day till about four o'clock PM when the 6th were ordered to charge. The Johnnies broke and skedaddled like [a] flock of sheep without a Sheppard. We encamped for the night near our old camping ground on the Cooly Farm. We took about 4,000 prisoners, 50 pieces of artillery, and about 60 ambulances. Our loss in killed and wounded was pretty heavy. The next morning Thurs. the 20th I rode all out over the battle field, saw some hard sights. That evening went out on station at the breast works. Came off station to reserve camp the next morning."
J.M. would go on to see more action at Dinwiddie Court House, Five Forks, and, finally, Sailor's Creek. He served under Custer when Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House in April 1865. In fact, Sgt. Stewart witnessed the ceremony, and fifty years later when he owned J.M. Stewart & Company, the family hardware business, he told young Jim about the time the dignified Lee met the sober Grant, about seeing President Lincoln, and about the flamboyant "boy general" Custer. This wasn't history in a book; this was eyewitness history from a man who had been there to see the hard sights, brother of the late Lt. Archibald Stewart, who became another hero to young Jim. J.M. had lived American history and served as a direct link between Jim and the American Civil War, between Jim and a family's military heritage and a strongly held belief that each generation of Stewart men had a mission, and that mission was to serve their country.
There was a third heavy military shadow hanging over Jim. In addition to Archie and J.M. Stewart, there was Jim's mother's father, Samuel McCartney Jackson, colonel of the Eleventh Pennsylvania Reserves. Whereas Sergeant Stewart was a tough-as-nails workingman remnant of the Civil War, Colonel Jackson — who would become General Jackson by war's end — was J.M.'s officer corps counterpart. Jackson had seen the butchering of Union troops at the stone wall at Fredericksburg and seven months later participated in a successful charge across the hotly contested Wheatfield at Gettysburg as part of Col. Joseph Fisher's brigade. That charge proved just as important to holding the federal left flank and preserving victory for the Union as Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain's stand at Little Round Top the same day, at about the same time. Young Jim would never lay eyes on Sam Jackson, who died May 8, 1906, two years before Jim's birth, but General Jackson remained heavy in the air as a guiding influence in Jim's youth.
The rambunctious Alex Stewart was known throughout his lifetime to Princeton University classmates as "Eck," probably because he insisted on his name being pronounced Alec instead of Alex, causing bemused Princetonians to grant half his request. Eck had run off to fight in the Spanish-American War at age twenty-six, two weeks shy of his college graduation, but he spent only thirty-six days in Puerto Rico, grew ill, and saw no action; it was all over too soon. J.M. must have been displeased with his son's performance in round one of his service, because at age forty-five, by then a father of three and yet under the close scrutiny of J.M., Alex went off to serve again in 1917, this time in the Ordnance Repair Department, which was close enough to frontline combat in the Great War that Alex had been forced to look into the eye of the beast, just as his father, uncle, and father-in-law had half a century earlier. At one point Alex, referring to the combat death of an Indiana man, wrote home that "the Germans must be exterminated; that is what is coming to them."
With his father away at war, Jim turned ten, and passion for military life burned within him in all its preadolescent glory. He expressed his enthrallment with war by staging plays in his basement and the basements of his friends, plays that depicted the war in progress in Europe as imagined in the minds of schoolchildren. The young troupe of players used as props German trench helmets and other mementos sent home from the European lowlands by Captain Stewart.
The world war ended with the capitulation of the German empire and harsh terms by the victors, who divided up German territory, demanded war reparations, and dictated severe restrictions on Kaiser Wilhelm's military to make sure Germany would never again pose a problem for the world.
J.M. had imparted to Alex, and Alex would now impart to his son: "This is your destiny; this is what the Stewart men do. We serve our country without hesitation whenever there is a need." Jim responded by asking his mother to fashion a uniform for him, so he would be ready when the bugle sounded.
J.M. had hardly been a perfect parent to Alex and his younger brother, Ernest, who had been born with a deformed leg. At one point J.M., frustrated with his unruly eldest child, remarked, "I have one son with a crippled leg and another [Alex] with a crippled head." This remark may have been in response to a questionable incident at Princeton when Alex accidentally (or on purpose) left a Bunsen burner running in the science lab, with a fire resulting. Or was it the incident when Alex and his pals griped to the Chinese laundryman about the quality of his ironing and then, according to Jim, ganged up and "ironed the laundryman." There was a cruel streak in the Stewart men. J.M. had it and Alex had it, and Jim never did, although perhaps some of his introversion resulted from being too close to hurtful times at home.
Alex's father was a hard-liner, with a view of women that was typical of the times — a view that would prove unhelpful to Jim down the road. J.M. was on his third wife by the time Jim knew him; the two earlier women had up and died on the old man — Alex's mother had died when he was just nine — and J.M. every so often needed to recruit a replacement caregiver. Alex learned from his father just what the role of a good woman was, and this was how Jim grew up, with the notion that a man found a lucky little lady to quietly pamper him and always be there with a kind word or a firm hand, depending on whether he was sober or drunk. Since the Stewart men were quite successful at business, they always found willing candidates to be the next Mrs. Stewart.
Still ten, Jim began helping out at the hardware store and earning wages; just about then the family moved from the house on Philadelphia Street to a larger home on a cliff known as Vinegar Hill, overlooking the center of town. This larger home made Alex a focal point of Indiana since anyone passing by on the streets below could look up and see the Stewarts' front porch and potentially the big man himself. The new place accommodated a growing family that included Jim's two little sisters, Mary, known to all as Doddie, born in 1912, and Virginia, or Ginny, in 1914. Jim's new address meant a change in schools; he began sixth grade at the Model School, a laboratory school for new teaching techniques within the Indiana Normal School. There he earned average grades because he possessed a short attention span and was easily bored — traits he would retain all his life. He perked up some when appearing in school plays, and around that time he joined the Boy Scouts.
Soon after the conclusion of the Great War, a pilot named Jack Law advertised that he would be barnstorming through Pennsylvania, including a stop in Indiana. "I knew a long time in advance that he was coming," said Jim, "and I saved every cent I could. I made up my mind I was going to have an airplane ride. My folks said I wasn't. They said flying wasn't safe."
Jim had convinced his parents to at least go and watch, and he stuffed all the money he had saved, fifteen dollars, in his pocket. "The Bennetts had a farm right south of town," said Stewart, "and a nice big [flat] field where they could land." Down came the Curtiss Jenny onto the field, and the pilot began taking townspeople up for rides, many of them friends of Alex Stewart. "They came back intact, raving about the thrill," said Jim. "They helped me break him down, and he finally said I could go up. So I went up on my ride and from then on, I was stuck on flying."
Like many boys who went on to become pilots, Jim was bowled over by his first taste of being airborne. "It was more than liberation. It was the ultimate experience of being in control ... and being alone. I've always been a loner. I don't enjoy being lonely, but I enjoy being on my own."
He went up on at least four barnstorming rides growing up and built model airplanes "by the gross," many of them decorating odd flat surfaces in the hardware store. By now, he was growing into a gangling and shy teenager who had once been to New York City and that's about it. He was a nervous kid on the inside, high-strung and unsure of himself, still a musician who delighted in playing the accordion and an adolescent male interested in girls, although no one knew it because he kept quiet and spoke and moved at a leisurely pace.
In 1921 J.M. Stewart, Civil War veteran and hardware store owner, retired, giving ownership to Alex. But J.M. remained a daily visitor to the enterprise and was there for Jim as a comforting companion and font of wisdom. Questions the self-critical Jim couldn't ask Dad could be directed to Granddad, about life in general and girls in particular. "It's not a crime to be human," said the elder J.M. at one point. "Make allowances for yourself." This was not advice that demanding perfectionist Alex — and hard-on-himself Jim — would ever allow.
Jim got a job as weekend projectionist at the Ritz Theater in Indiana. Between the plays he produced in basements and participated in at the Model School and the celluloid flickers he un-spooled night after night, Jim got an inkling that acting might be an interesting vocation.
In 1923 Jim's stable small-town life saw interruption; Alex had engineered his average-student son into Mercersburg Academy in lieu of Indiana High School so that Jim might boost his grades and follow in his father's footsteps to the hallowed halls of Princeton University in New Jersey.
Mercersburg Academy was a private school located in south-central Pennsylvania that had been founded in 1893 "to prepare young men for college," and not just any colleges, but Ivy League schools. The course of study was five years, not the traditional three of high school. Off went Jim to Mercersburg, 121 twisting, hard miles from Indiana. Jim had never been an A student and barely gained acceptance to the academy, then worked like hell his first year to remain there. His second year was marred by an attack of scarlet fever and then a kidney infection that kept him bedridden for months. When finally on his feet again but too weak to hold a regular job for the summer, Jim teamed up with his Indiana friend Bill Neff on Neff's Magic Show. Neff had found puberty a dark experience; he had become obsessed with magic and the occult, making him an unlikely companion for Jim, who kept Neff's darker stuff from his parents so he could continue to hang out with his friend. Neff's skill at magic and drive to perform earned him local and regional play dates, all precursors to a soaring national career in magic. Jim was in on the ground floor, serving as Neff's onstage assistant and playing audiences in and out with the accordion. In one summer Jim Stewart became a seasoned performer used to public scrutiny and the spotlight. But he remained quiet and aloof with a mystery about him that attracted the opposite sex.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Mission by Robert Matzen. Copyright © 2016 Robert Matzen. Excerpted by permission of Paladin Communications.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword,Prologue: Unreality,
1. High-Strung,
2. Soaring,
3. Factory Work,
4. Silver Birds,
5. Reliable Girls,
6. A Storybook Life,
7. Mr. Smith Goes Hollywood,
8. Seeing History,
9. Restless Spirit,
10. The Eagle,
11. Alias James Smith,
12. Overachiever,
13. Static Personnel,
14. A Game of Chess,
15. Destination: Meat Grinder,
16. Boy Scout,
17. Daft,
18. Shakedown,
19. Pushed by Angels,
20. Mission Today,
21. A Late Breakfast,
22. Topaz Blue,
23. Bailout,
24. Roman Candle,
25. January on the Rhine,
26. The Dungeon of Eppstein,
27. Iceman,
28. Baptism,
29. Boys Will Be Boys,
30. Mother Nature's a Bitch,
31. Fat Dogs,
32. Argument, Part One,
33. Argument, Part Two,
34. Bloodbath,
35. Physics Lesson,
36. The Big B,
37. No-Nonsense Men,
38. The Sumatran,
39. Invasionitis,
40. They Are Coming!,
41. Germany Burning,
42. The Great Aviation,
43. Grounded,
44. Marching to Death,
45. Aged in East Anglia,
46. Gold Light,
Epilogue: Reaching Beyond,
Mission: The Story in Photos,
Acknowledgments,
Chapter Notes,
Glossary,
Selected Bibliography,
About the Author,
Related Subjects
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