For immediate filing among those factoids that never really occur to you, right up until they do, today is the centenary of my father’s birth on March 7, 1925.
That’s one hundred years, the sort of nice, round number we find ourselves drawn to.
Roger George Baylor has been gone a while now; he died in 2001, just before I turned 41. Our relationship was complicated, which is not to say troubled. I’d describe it as a state of ongoing, mutual puzzlement.
In his own way, my father was an exuberant and passionate man, with his primary issue being how to define and express his emotions, or not.
Positivity for him came through sheer physicality, first through sports, and then by blunt force hardcore work in the great outdoors: baling hay the old-school way, walking fence rows, mowing grass, building and maintaining and improving things.
It was as if he awoke each morning (very early, a former dairy employee’s lifelong habit) and confronted the world’s existential indifference by coming out swinging until he dropped from exhaustion many hours later.
I think these really were internal struggles, and absent a formula for talking them out into the open, he chose instead to try battering them into submission. We’ll never know for sure, but in my opinion much of this had to do with my father’s service during WWII.
In essence, he ran away from home to join the US Marine Corps in 1942 at 17 and returned still shy of 21, bearing the nickname “Pappy,” as earned by two and a half years aboard the battleship USS Washington in the Pacific Theater.
Following is a brief biography from the program of one of the ship reunions he attended in the 1980s and 1990s.
ROGER G. BAYLOR, Corporal, born March 7, 1925, Georgetown, IN. Joined the USMC Sept. 28, 1942. Transferred to 1Oth Replacement Bn., South Pacific; assigned to USS Washington in January 1943 with 7th Div. Served on board until July 1945 as a gun striker and shellman on the 5-inch guns.
Participated in all major action while on board, including Saipan, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Memorable experiences were the collision with USS Indiana and the encounter with the typhoon December 1944.
Honorably discharged Oct. 4, 1945, with rank of Corporal. Remained in USMCR, returned to active duty in Korean War in August 1950-August 1951,as a sergeant with D Co., 16th Inf., Camp Pendleton, CA.
Worked as a farmer, route foreman for Bowman Dairy and for Pierce Electric Co. until retirement in 1987. Married the former Bettye Sue Alien June 27, 1955, and has one son, Roger A.
That he’d have experienced post-traumatic stress disorder seems both likely and perfectly understandable. As with many of his generation, the war was an undisputed high point of his life, and surely also the source of troublesome ghosts and concealed traumas.
This said, my father’s demons may have occasionally triumphed. But by gawd, he made them work for it.
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Perhaps counterintuitively, music from the swing era soothed him just a bit, although usually only on Sunday. It genuinely was a day of (relative) restfulness, with Glenn Miller and His Orchestra substituting for church. Rog Sr.’s all-time favorite song was “Sentimental Journey,” and nothing better describes his mood when relaxed and happy than this choice of ditties.
Of course the preceding ruminations apply to me, too, only reconfigured. My chosen weapons have tended to be words and ideas. In this sense I took after my mother, who was a teacher. Growing up, my inability to mesh with my father was frustrating. We spent long periods utterly at odds.
In me, my father had sought an exact replica of himself. This wasn’t forthcoming. While in material terms, life at home was easy for me, mentally it could be challenging at times. There wasn’t so much as a hint of physical violence, but he plainly was angry about something, and while a tight lid was kept on it, a sense of percolating menace was palpable on occasion.
Maybe the black dog visited him here and there, too. There were times when the effect was tantamount to psychological warfare, and often felt like I was under a microscope. It wasn’t pleasant.
I appreciate the way that almost everyone, young or old, adored my father as a man, a coach, and a contributor to the community. I’m proud of him for that. At the same time, they didn’t have to live with him, and they didn’t see the side of him that came out at home.
Consequently, it should come as no surprise that the word “love” wasn’t ever spoken in our house, and I mean this in the most purely literal of terms. It was there, just artfully concealed.
However, as time passed, father and son both made concessions. He mellowed with age, and seems to have outpaced the demons. I accepted that he’d always tried his best, and succeeded most of the time. This was enough to achieve harmony. We came to respect each other, and to regard our differing proclivities as complementary.
I’m an imperfect human like all the rest; at the same time, insofar as anyone can be objective about themselves, I was raised “right.” As I approach my 65th birthday, I can see that the three most important lessons I learned from my father are these:
- (a) an affinity for the underdog
- (b) contempt for those who amass too much power in whatever form (and infer their own recurring privileges accordingly)
- (c) the obligation to seek in whatever way possible to make life for all into a fair fight
If my father could return to view the present degradation of Trump-dopia, he’d have none of it, and our views would coincide handily.
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World War II interrupted what might have become a promising career in baseball for my father. I spent my childhood listening to his friends and fans in Georgetown offer glowing testimonials to his ability to hit the ball “over the creek,” which was the right-field boundary of the town diamond (it actually had major league dimensions at the time).
Back home after the war, he gave it a belated shot and played briefly in 1949 for the Kingsport Cherokees of the Appalachian League. Sadly, at 24 years of age he’d have been considered over the hill for the Class D league, lowest of the low minors, and yet how many players make it even that far?
In 2011, ten years after his death, sporting immortality finally came for Roger G. Baylor when his minor league baseball statistics appeared on-line for the very first time. I suppose I should contact the web site to provide two missing pieces of information: he threw right-handed and batted left-handed, as he taught me to do, too.
Because…batting left-handed gives you an extra step toward first base.
The batting average was low, only .213, but more than half his hits went for extra bases, and that’s quite good. The cosmos is strange; had baseball worked out for him, I probably wouldn’t be here.
And this brings me to how I got here.
When Bettye Sue Allen arrived in Georgetown, Indiana to teach at the high school, she was fresh out of the University of Kentucky, and beginning her professional career in a strange new place. She made friends with the late Alda Coakley (later Cecil), who also was good friends with my father, and Alda proved to be the matchmaker who brought my parents together.
My father is seated to the left, with Alda on the right. The venue is the Wonderland in Lanesville, Indiana — later the Circle Bar. The time was the early 1950s, and the fellow dancing in the rear has just invented the photo bomb.
When I posted this photo on social media some years back, a friend summarized the ups and downs of my relationship with my father, although you must speak British to “get” it.
Figures; the old man was a Rocker, you turned out a Mod.
That’s all I have for now, a century after my father was born. He didn’t do Hallmark, and neither do I. He’d be the first to understand exactly why it is impossible for me to produce one of the glowing, feel-good written testimonials to fatherhood. He’d expect no more than the facts. It was what it was, and nothing else. It wouldn’t bother him a single bit.
It doesn’t bother me, and it shouldn’t you. Cheers to a hundred years, pop.
Previously:
ON THE AVENUES: When love and hate collide, or my father’s dalliance with the governor
