Letter to My Grandson, Great Lakes Naval Base

By: Bob Boyer

 

This is a copy of the letter I just completed to my grandson who recently joined the US Navy and is currently in training. I think it makes a fitting article for this column. I have made no changes whatsoever from the original.

Dear Kyle,

I am looking at a framed photograph of your Great Grandfather Phil Effenberger, with his wife Elaine (Noel) Effenberger and his four-yearold daughter Barbara Effenberger (Boyer). In the lower right-hand corner is the inscription, “Visiting at Great Lakes, 1944.” Barbara is well-known to you as Grandma Boyer, my wife, and mother to Annette Noel Boyer, your mother.

Grandma Boyer (Barbara) is standing, smiling at the camera, between her parents. She is fairly tall, Barbara, for four, and she comes up to her Dad’s belt, or rather to the waistline of his dark blue Navy uniform. Her Dad and Mom are leaning into each other’s shoulders, tilted that way, above Babara’s almost blond hair—it must have been early in the fall since Barbara’s hair is so light from months in the sun. She’s wearing a sweater, but her Mom has a full-length coat on. Her Dad is in full uniform, not a dress uniform and without any insignias or mark of rank. He is wearing those ankle-to-knee leggings (I can never remember the correct term), his sober blues, a bit of a T-shirt visible just below his chin and above his sailor’s tie. He wears his Navy hat the way I remember seeing sailors wear them, slightly indented on the sides, and tilted just a touchy downward toward his right eye. Her Mom is wearing a hat, something like a beret. It enables her to lean her head to her Dad’s just touching above his left eye.

I go into all this detail because it is one of my all-time favorite family pictures, and now it has even greater meaning since you are training at Great Lakes just as your Great Grandfather did. Grandma Boyer and I are very proud of this, and we wish you well and look forward to hearing from you when you can let us know how you are doing.

I should add a few further details that might interest you. You are a member of a Navy family. Great Grandpa Phil was one of five brothers who served in the US Navy in World War II. I met his younger brother, Louie. Louie was a bit of a character. He told me he chose to become a Navy medic, thinking it was a relatively safe duty. He chuckled as he related how he was assigned to the Marines and was in the landing on Iwo Jima. He hadn’t known that the Navy provided medics for the Marines.

Great Grandpa Phil, on the other hand, was assigned to the Quartermaster Corps, San Diego, CA. He felt pretty secure about that until he started being assigned to night flights bringing much-needed supplies somewhere in the Pacific. He never told me that he had been outside of San Diego except for one trip to Hawaii. Only later did I hear about the night flights. They were never told where they were going. They arrived in the dark, quickly unloaded supplies, and took off for the return immediately. This would have been in the early days of 1945 at a time when Louie was landing on Iwo Jima, and when Okinawa was yet to come, and when the Battle of the Philippines was raging. This last mentioned battle was one whose results were still visible when I taught at the University of the Philippines Diliman (Manila) in 1998 for a semester (June-October). I like to think of Great Grandpa Phil somehow helping to bring relief supplies to Louie and to the people who were so devastated in the War at this time.

OK, Kyle, it’s probably taken a couple of days for you to get through this epistle, with all of your training going on. I don’t imagine you have much time. Grandma and I think and talk about you all the time, so we are with you.

With all our love and happy thoughts, Grandpa and Grandma Boyer

Bob Boyer welcomes comments at Robert.boyer@snc.edu or <anamericaninmanila.com>.