CHAPTER TWO

LIFE BEFORE MS

I’ve always been a sports nut. My stepson, Christopher, says that I will go anywhere and pay any price to watch in rapt attention anyone who wears a number and sweats. Football, baseball, soccer, jai alai, anything except basketball. In the late 1940’s when I was in school in Portland, Oregon I wasn’t a watcher. I was a player. Well, maybe not a player exactly, but at least I was on the team.

I wore a number and always worked up a good sweat at practice, but then I spent most of the actual game on the bench as a substitute. Even though I practiced hard and made the team, my coordination was always poor enough to keep me from really being of first team quality.

In baseball I was the second-string catcher and last-hope pitcher. My batting average was always terrible because I struck out so much: No hand-eye coordination. But when I did get around on one and met it squarely, either the third baseman would get knocked down or it would go over the fence.

Basketball was my downfall, literally. In high school I was already almost six-four as a freshman. The basketball coach drooled. I rally had no choice. If I didn’t play basketball, I was a traitor to the good old blue-and-gray. (What can I tell you? I went to U.S. Grant High School and what would you expect the school colors to be?)

After the first week of practice, they moved a six-one guard in to be starting center. When I did get in the game, I was told to play the post and pass off, never to shoot. So I ran up and down the floor a lot, stumbled and fell a lot and ended up breaking first a finger and then my nose on that hardwood basketball floor. When I told the coach that I was going out for the swimming team the next year instead of basketball, there wasn’t even a hint of my being a traitor. Basketball is one game I can’t even watch on TV. I usually get a nosebleed.

But football – that was my sport. Instead of all the attention only on me alone, or only me with four other guys, in football I was just part of a mob way out on the field. In the fall it always rains in the Willimatte Valley of Oregon, so all of us were so muddy that our numbers were covered and except for my size, no one could even tell which one was me.

Out there on the football field, I could play with total abandon. And if I tripped over my own feet and fell down, what the hell? The field was muddy and slippery wasn’t it? Surprisingly, I turned out to be a pretty good pass-catcher and an even better blocker. When I fell down, I was so long that I was usually able to take out two or three of the other team’s rushing linemen with one belly flop.

Life was full in those teenage days. The girls liked guys who were on the athletic teams. Studies were easy for me, even if my grades sometimes didn’t show it because I spent too much time with sports and the activities of the social clubs and societies I joined. Even my poor coordination didn’t bother me overly much because everyone said that I’d grow out of my clumsiness in time.

I really wanted to go to college and play football. I graduated from high school just after I turned seventeen and went down to the University of Oregon to see about enrolling. The assistant football coach I talked to suggested that I go in the military service and see if I couldn’t, in fact, grow out of my awkwardness problem and add a little weight before trying big time football. He didn’t even give me a real tryout; he didn’t seem interested in anything past my six foot five inch height, which was only wrapped in a 162-pound frame. My nickname at the time was spider and I think he was afraid I’d get stepped on and squashed out there on the field by one of those really big guys.

So I joined the service and six months later fell down a ladder aboard a ship and broke an arm and a leg. Both had to be operated on (the leg three times before it was over). Darned if they didn’t give me a medal. Seems we were off the coast of Korea at the time. The surgery kind of dashed my hopes of a football career so at age 19, I got married. We had a son, John Jr., and I decided to make a career out of the military instead of football.

We had a second son, Mike, and service life was good to me. Without a college education I could not become a commissioned officer, but I rose quickly in the enlisted ranks. With my specialty of electronics in the early 1950’s I was on the leading edge of what has now become pretty commonplace stuff. I learned about radios, radars and even got to cut my teeth on the new computers. In those days it took a whole room full of equipment to do what your average desktop home computer does today.

After I got married, most of my early assignments were in small northern towns at radar sites or taking care of radio relay stations in places like Othello, Moses Lake and Hanford, Washington. Finally I was assigned to an intelligence unit in Germany for a few years and from there, traveled throughout Europe, the Middle East, the Mediterranean and even Asia.

I was responsible along with six other senior non-commissioned officers for the electronic layouts at various US Air Force Stations. There were seven mobile radio groups under our headquarters and each one of us had overall electronic installation and maintenance responsibility for one radio group. My group had squadrons in Libya, Greece and Italy.

We drew up plans, or modified already existing plans, made sure the necessary parts and equipment were on site to do the job and then led the teams that went out of the office and did the actual work of making the equipment installations. For me, this was a good life – an interesting job and the excitement of traveling to places that most Americans only read about.

I even got my shot at some pretty big time football. Every fall there were military service teams in Europe that were really like semi=pro teams. I turned out for an Army team because the Air Force didn’t have a team right in the city of Frankfurt where I was stationed. The level of competition was pretty high. There were only a couple guys without college experience on our team. I loved it! Of course, I banged up my bad leg again right away, but I thought it was worth it at the time. Twenty-three year olds are like that, I guess.

TROUBLE STARTS

However, for my wife the service life was not so good. She had shown some signs that she was troubled early on in our marriage, but in Europe, with me traveling all the time, things got very bad. She was put in a psychiatric ward in Germany for a while. Finally the Air Force had to ship us home and my wife began what turned out to be a long hard battle. She was hospitalized, went through shock therapy, long years of counseling and more hospitalizations.

During this same period of time, my Korean War injured right ankle was acting up, probably as a result of the football and needed the second operation. The combination of my natural lack of coordination and the orthopedic surgery, made me so physically unstable that I was put on something called he Temporary Disability Retired List. That’s a fancy way of saying you are on an indefinite vacation from the service at half pay.

I have always believed that the doctors also wanted us to have enough uninterrupted time to try and solve my wife’s problems because, naturally, it affected my Air force work performance. Her problems didn’t get much better and I, of course, blamed myself. If this perfectly normal girl I had married was unstable then I must be the cause. It’s no the most memorable part of my life.

A few years later while I was in Pakistan, I saw the Pathan tribesmen beating themselves bloody by swinging chains with knife blades soldered into them over their shoulders so that they slammed down into their backs. This happens every year during a religious celebration as they walk on their pilgrimage. They do it because they feel that their ancestors were responsible for the death of the Prophet Mohammed and that the sons must atone for the sins of the fathers. What I did to myself mentally during this period, because I thought my wife’s problems had to be my fault, must have been akin to the chains on the back.

My leg finally healed well enough for the service to recall me to active duty. Back in harness, things improved for both of us, but two years later while I was stationed over in Pakistan, the leg gave out again. By then though, I had other problems as well; splitting migraine headaches, dizzy spells and numbness of the arms and feet that came and went. In an effort to keep me from losing my balance all the time and twisting my ankles, the doctors fitted me with something called free ankle leg races and gave me a cane to use after they operated on my leg for the third time.

A few months after I got out of the hospital and went back to an active duty post, Air Force headquarters in its wisdom, sent orders fro me to go to parachute jump school so that I could become a forward controller in Viet Nam. When my Air Force doctor informed the brass that there was no way I could jump out of airplanes with my leg, they decided to give me a permanent medical disability retirement.

LIFE AS A CIVILIAN

Electronics was my specialty. Way back in high school I had played around with radio announcing and later, while at various military stations, I had enjoyed helping out on Armed Forces Radio and Television Service radio stations in my spare time. So now, I embarked on a career in commercial broadcasting. I ended up working in Reno, Nevada. I held jobs doing everything from being an all-night disc jockey, to working as a TV transmitter engineer on a mountaintop to holding the position of chief engineer at a radio station. Finally I became the operations manager of a TV station after I’d been retired from the service for about two years.

Between my wife’s problems, for which I still blamed myself, and my problems, which I didn’t understand, our marriage came to the breaking point and we got a divorce. Shortly afterward she left to go back to Oregon with our two boys.

About three months later, I had the first attack that I can now actually pinpoint in retrospect as MS, although many of my previous problems are also suspect. It was not diagnosed as MS at the time, but the entire left side of my body went numb and stayed that way for several weeks. The Air Force doctor at Stead Air Base, just outside Reno, thought I might have had a heart attack even though an EKG didn’t show anything. I had a residually numbness in the two small fingers of my left hand and that numbness ran up the inside of my arm clear to the armpit. It stayed that way for several years.

The divorce really didn’t solve anything. I worried about the boys, who were now eleven and twelve and whether my ex-wife would be able to care for them. A few months after she left, she sent my older son, John Jr., back to live with me in a house I was sharing in Reno with two other bachelors. Probably not the greatest environment for a twelve year old. I think something called adult education started for him at about that time.

Then I heard that she had moved into a motel and left our younger son, Mike, with her parents. Obviously the divorce and separation, though it solved my day-to-day problem of trying to cope with her situation, wasn’t helping my sons. I moved to Oregon, got work at the ABC affiliate TV station and about six months later, after what seemed like endless conferences with all the grandparents, we both felt the only thing we could do that would be in the best interest of all concerned was to go back together and get remarried.

The new marriage was entered into with the understanding that we would both try hard, but that once the boys were out on their own, either of us could end it again without recrimination. Even with all the understandings, and no matter what all the grandparents had to say about duty, honor and the manly thing to do, somehow I felt as if I had be sacrificed on the altar of family and motherhood. In less than four months, while driving to work, I had the attack that functionally blinded me and this time it was diagnosed as Multiple Sclerosis.