Told by Tommy Carden,
Written by Roy Peter Clark

© St. Petersburg Times, published January 18, 2001

The story so far:

If you missed the first part of Tommy's story go to Day One: Her Picture in My Wallet

In 1943 Tommy Carden, an Irish kid from Youngstown, Ohio, quits high school to go to war. He leaves behind a tough father, a loving mother and a sweetheart named Jean. He carries Jean's photo in his wallet through the great campaigns of Europe: the Invasion of Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge, the liberation of Buchenwald.

The saddest moment of the war is when he gets a telegram from back home telling him that his father has died. He returns to Youngstown, ready to take on the world, only to be crushed when the love of his life runs off and marries another man.

Second of two parts: Apple Blossom Time

Jean Hoffman at 18

I couldn't breathe. I needed to do something, to get the heck out of Youngstown, to get away from things that reminded me of Jean, who had left me when I come back from the war and married another man. So I did the only fool thing I could think of. I joined the Navy.

They shipped me to the Fort Lauderdale Naval Air Station, and for the last six months of 1946 I used my Army artillery know-how working on fighter planes, loading guns, bomb racks and rocket rails. Given the mood I was in, losing my girl and all, this was the perfect job for me.

Then they sent me to Cecil Field in Jacksonville. On the weekends we'd go into town and raise hell.

One time, me and three buddies pooled our money, stopped at the liquor store for supplies and went to a Friday night dance at the Carpenter's Union Hall.

When that eight-piece band started cooking, my legs started moving. My feet could just fly: cha cha, rumba, tango, polka, fox trot, waltz, jitterbug. I could do it all. Of course, I needed someone to dance with.

She was sitting on a table. She had dark eyes, almost black, and black hair down to her shoulders. She wore a party dress that clung to her body. Then she crossed her legs.

Her name was Dorothy Bastion, and she was 36, about 13 years older than me. It only took me a few dances to fall in love. With moonlight thoughts of a little ooh-la-la, I walked Dotty home. I was in heaven.

Two weeks later -- yeah, that's what I said -- two weeks later me and Dotty took a Greyhound bus across the Georgia border to the little town of Folkston where, in a single day, we could get a blood test, a marriage license and a justice of the peace.

Those next 25 years flew by, and Dotty made them wonderful. That woman settled me down. She kept an immaculate house, filled with antiques, on West 67th Street in Jacksonville. She took care of all the finances and cooked fantastic meals. She never smoked, drank or cursed. That was the example I needed.

I don't want you to think she was a prude. When she danced with those legs and that body of an angel, she had the same effect on me as Marlene Dietrich. Man, the two of us just tore up that dance floor. I was true to my vows and never stepped inside a sporting house.

I left the Navy in 1950 and bought myself a Roadmaster Buick Dynaflow. I loved that car, and I've been a General Motors man ever since.

I worked as a sales rep for a beer distributor, delivering Miller High Life, Pabst Blue Ribbon and Heineken. I was making a buck drinking beer with my clients, engaging in some friendly football wagering and spreading around Jacksonville -- and I do mean spreading -- some of my best Irish blarney. As my buddy says, I had a license to exaggerate.

I've always loved to sing. The nuns would let me sing in the school plays, and I'd sing in the car on the way to Steubenville, and I'd sing with my Army buddy DiNooch in the English pubs, and even today I sing on my answering machine. I've got an Irish tenor voice, like the guy on the old Lawrence Welk show. I'm not bragging now, just telling the truth.

One St. Patrick's Day I'm at a tavern in Jacksonville, trying to land the draft beer account. The owner had hired an Irish singer, but the guy never showed.

So I told him how I could belt out When Irish Eyes Are Smiling, and My Wild Irish Rose, and Old Shanty Town, and Peg O' My Heart. But I wouldn't bail him out unless he signed the beer contract. The night was so successful the owner paid me a hundred bucks and had me come back every year to sing on St. Paddy's Day.

In 1962 -- we had been married for 15 years -- Dotty and I decided to adopt. The doctor and lawyer who found our baby asked if we wanted to know his family history. I said no. I figured if we didn't know anything, there would never be any interference from the child's natural family. Me and Dotty would raise him and love him as our own.

We went to the hospital and saw our son for the first time, and took him home three days later. I didn't dance in the street or play the drum. But I paid a tribute to my own father in the only way I knew how. We named our new son Tommy.

It was the life that I had dreamed of when I was freezing my ass off in the forest of Ardennes. To be honest, I could never get the war out of my head. It was part of me, a good part because I had survived.

One day in 1969 I'm driving my beer truck through Jacksonville. My dispatcher comes on the radio. "Tommy, you had a call from a Dr. Lovejoy. She wants you to call her."

I found a pay phone. The lady doctor warned me that she had something important to say. "Your wife has leukemia."

Dotty's brother and sister had already died of leukemia, and now my dear wife had it, too. Over the next three years, the harder she fought the worse it got. She lost weight, down to less than 90 pounds. Her thick black hair fell out.

She was in a hospital in Jacksonville in April 1973. When I bent over and kissed her, she told me, "Take care of young Tommy" and handed me the family checkbook. Tommy kissed his mother, and the orderlies took her up to intensive care. Three hours later, a Catholic priest came down to where we were waiting. He had given her last rites.

Me and my son held each other and cried. What the hell were we going to do now?

When I look back, I can see all the times in my life I failed at something. In school, all I got is what I call my D.A. degree -- for Dumb Ass. I guess you could say I was a failure as a son, especially when it came to dealing with my own dad. I know one thing for sure, I was a failure as a father.

A lot of it had to do with my drinking. I drank my way across Europe, through the Navy, and now I had a job with a beer distributor.

Dotty had helped keep my wildness under control. But she was in heaven. And I was responsible for raising a hurting 10-year-old boy. I'll be the first to admit it: I wasn't up to the job.

I worked long hours, which meant I had little time for my son. It wasn't neglect, but pretty damn close. I'm ashamed of it to this day.

I started dating again, mostly with the women I met through church. One lady had the leg and could dance to beat the band. And she loved drinking Scotch.

I had always been a beer man, but I started drinking the hard stuff just to keep up with her. Before long I was a full-blown alcoholic. I drank at home. I drank on the job. I drank at the wheel and got two DUIs. I drank in front of my son. I got to where I was drinking two fifths of Scotch a day.

I'd get smashed and miss the morning meetings at work. Eventually they canned me.

One night I stumbled home drunk. I must have been holding a peanut butter sandwich. I opened the door down into the basement and took a step. Next thing I know, I tumbled down the whole flight, 13 steps, like a drunk in a Western movie. I hit my head on the wall and snapped my neck.

I don't know how long I was down there, just laying and not being able to move. My son Tommy was out of town. When he finally got home, there I was, sprawled at the bottom of the basement steps, peanut butter smashed all over the side of my face. What a sad thing for a son to see.

Well, he carried my sorry ass up to bed, where I stayed all that night and the next day. Then he drove me to the VA hospital in Jacksonville. The doctor looked at the X-rays. "You've got a broken neck," he said. "You should be dead."

They put me in an ambulance and drove me to the veteran's hospital in Gainesville. They drilled holes in my head, two above the outside corners of my eyes, two next to my ears. Man, I didn't care if I lived or died. All I could think of was how I had disappointed everyone who cared for me: my mother, my son, my wife Dotty in heaven. She was wearing a real halo, I know. And all I got was this damn halo brace.

It was a contraption with a harness supporting my neck and four metal rods that connected with a circle around my head. Four screws in my skull kept the halo secure, and each day a technician would tighten it with a screwdriver. I don't think it's the kind of halo my Aunt Aggie had in mind for me.

It was hell on earth. "Almighty God, please take me." I prayed as hard as I had prayed as a little boy to save my mother and when I was a soldier trying to survive the war. "Please God, I want to die."

I spent more than four months in that hospital, getting my halo tightened each day. As I got stronger, so did my prayers. "Almighty God, I'm telling you. I need help. Please, God, I make this pledge to you. If you help me through this, if you give me another chance, I'll never touch another drop of alcohol as long as I live."

They moved me to a ward with about a dozen other patients. They brought in a new guy who got fed up with the way I was saying God had helped me through. "There ain't no Almighty God," he said, laughing. You know, I never had met a real atheist before, not that I knew of. You couldn't find many of them at St. Brendan's or at St.-Lo.

Well, when they wheeled Mr. Loudmouth Atheist back from surgery, the men in the ward could hear him moaning in his sleep: "Oh my God, please help me." That's all I had to hear. I told my buddies to let me handle it.

When the guy recovered, I kind of yelled across the ward: "Hey, phony. Yeah, you. Yeah, you, you four-flushin' son of a bitch. The first words out of your goddam mouth when they wheeled you back here was 'God help me.' You lousy phony. Never let me hear you say there's no Almighty God ever again."

Maybe that was my way of paying God back for everything he did for me. I was feeling a whole lot better.

When I finally returned to Jacksonville, I landed a job with Central Security, a company that provided guards for businesses. They put me at St. Regis Paper, working the front desk.

It was like I was in the Army again, except no one was shooting at me. I wore a uniform. I stood guard. I inspected the trucks. Yeah, I know, the trucks were lugging paper and not cannons. But this was a job I was good at.

My son now towered over me, 6 foot 2 inches of muscle and character. Thank God he got his mother's values. We lived in the same house together, and I swore I'd try to make it up to him for years of neglect.

One day in 1985 my sister Theresa calls from Ohio. Her daughter was getting married. She asks me and young Tommy to come up for the wedding, so we drive up to Youngstown in my old Pontiac.

I hooked up with two old friends from Chaney High, Joe Pacak and Inga Neeley. Man, that Inga was a beautiful girl in her day. Out of the blue, Inga says to me: "Have you been in touch with Jean?"

"Why would I want to do that?" I said, seeing as how Jean had dumped me and all.

"Well, she's living in St. Petersburg. I thought maybe you'd been in touch with her. You had such a crush on her."

Inga told me that Jean was divorced. She slipped me a piece of paper with Jean's phone number on it. Man, that piece of paper was just burning in my pocket.

The next morning, I got my sister's permission to use the phone.

"Hello."

"Hello, Jean?"

"You want Jean? Just a minute please."

"Hello?"

"Hello, Jean. It's been 40 years."

"Tommy?"

A while ago I told you about how Jean just suddenly disappeared, and how I got so depressed I joined the Navy. It was only after we talked that I found out what had happened.

A lot of it had to do with Father Prokop, my parish priest back in Youngstown. Somebody had snitched to him -- it was either my mom or my aunt -- that I was getting serious about Jean, who was a non-Catholic.

It turns out that Father Prokop couldn't mind his p's and q's, so one night he shows up on the Hoffmans' front porch. Now Mr. Hoffman doesn't like Catholics to begin with, so this priest comes knocking on the door, and right away Old Man Hoffman doesn't like the looks of him.

"I understand your daughter is getting serious with Tommy Carden. Now what are we going to do about that?"

"Well, I don't know," says Mr. Hoffman, "but I can tell you one thing. You can get your ass off of my porch."

"I guess I've been thrown off better porches than this one," says the priest.

That was all she wrote. Next thing you know, the family got Jean into this family conference, and reminded her she had a rheumatic heart as a baby, and that marrying an Irish Catholic would mean having tons of kids. They didn't tell her anything about Father Prokop, only that her system wouldn't be able to bear the strain of marrying me.

Jean's twin sister Joan was already pregnant and living in Jacksonville. Why don't you go down there to help your sister, they told Jean. But it was all a big smokescreen. They just wanted to get her away from me. She felt her family "shanghaied" her -- that's her word -- but she did what she was told.

When I look back on my life, I guess one of the strangest things is the way Jean and I both wound up in Jacksonville, married to other people. Jean married Bill Hale, a Navy pilot. In 12 years, they had three kids: Lois, Vera and Bradley. But by 1959, the marriage was over.

To use an old-fashioned phrase, Jean sort of carried a torch for me. When she came back to Youngstown for her mother's funeral, she heard I was in the Navy. She worked as a telephone operator for the Seventh Naval Reserve, and one day she heard the name Carden and asked around and learned I was in Jacksonville, a married man. She was pregnant at the time and thought about contacting me. "Women are dreamers," she would always say. Her husband looked at her like she was crazy, so she let go of me again.

Cupid finally arrived in 1985, in the form of our old high school friends Joe Pacak and Inga Neeley. Inga called Jean from Youngstown and told her that she was about to see me at a wedding. "Since Tommy and you both live in Florida now, since you're divorced and he's a widower, do you want me to give him your phone number?"

Before long, Jean's oldest sister, Mary Lou, called from Ohio. She, too, had heard about old Tommy Carden coming back to town.

"You'd better think before you try to get back with him," Mary Lou told her sister.

"Think about what?"

"You'd just better confront him about something."

"About what?"

Mary Lou, almost 40 years after the event, told Jean the story of Father Prokop, finally letting go of the family secret.

"Why was I never told?" asked Jean, her voice rising.

"You would have to ask Mom and Dad, and they're not here."

But then Inga and Joe played Cupid. And I did dial the phone. And Jean picked up.

"Hello, Jean, it's been 40 years."

"Tommy?"

"How did you know it was me?" I asked, not knowing there had been a little plan.

"Well, you said 40 years."

It was like time had just melted away, as if all the heartaches, all the hurt, had been erased, just like that. Jean says that when she heard my voice, she knew that everything was going to be all right, that we'd be together forever.

Over the next days and weeks, I wrote her these long, romantic letters, and we talked on the phone for hours. I was trying my best to woo her back and didn't realize that she was already plenty wooed.

I got some time off and drove from Jacksonville to St. Pete. I got off at the 38th Avenue North exit and followed the street numbers until they led me to a little house across the street from a church and a school. Jean came out the side door to greet me. Even after all those years, she still had the leg.

I looked all spiffy in my best slacks, a nice shirt and a sweater. We embraced right there on the driveway.

I couldn't help it, but I just broke down and cried, holding Jean in my arms after all those years. She looked up at me, and there were tears in her eyes too, and we just stood there hugging and crying, and then crying and hugging some more. The neighbors next door, they were Lithuanians, saw me with Jean and sang us a Lithuanian love song. It felt like we were in some corny old movie.

I stayed the week, not at Jean's but in a spare room at her twin sister's house. That seemed proper. But the distance between us didn't last long. On a return trip, at the ages of 62 and 63, Jean and I spent the night together for the first time. Some things, it turns out, are worth waiting for. I thought right then, Almighty God's been good to me.

I went back to Jacksonville feeling young and in love. Back in St. Pete, Jean was helping her daughter move, fell off a trailer and shattered the bones in her left hand. Before long I was back in St. Pete attending to Jean's every need.

Then I popped the question.

"Jean, will you marry me?"

Jean was ready with her answer: "No."

She had a better idea. Why bother getting married? Why not just live together? That may surprise some of you younger folks, but lots of older people live together without the benefit of marriage. They do it to save money, they do it to protect their kids, and they do it to keep things simple. In other words, we shacked up.

Coming home

[Times photo: Lisa DeJong] “It took more than 40 years, but me and Jean finally got our act together. To me she’s still as beautiful as when she was in high school.”

In 1988 we traveled to Youngstown together to attend the 45th reunion of Chaney High School, Class of 1943. People were thrilled when we walked in together, like everybody knew it was meant to be.

On the dance floor things were pretty boring until a certain silver-haired Irishman stepped up onto that bandstand and grabbed a mike. "You guys know the Chaney Fight Song?" I asked. "Don't worry, just follow me."

Well, Chaney didn't have a fight song. Or if it did, no one could remember it. What the heck, I sang the University of Florida fight song and just stuck in the name of old Chaney High.

Then I sang all the Irish songs I knew, and all the songs from the 1940s, and when I didn't know the words, I made them up. I was Frank Sinatra, Perry Como and Bing Crosby, all rolled into one. The dance floor was packed.

For 15 years now, I've lived in bliss with Jean.

I just celebrated my 77th birthday. Jean is 76. We've both had health problems that come with our age. She's recovered from a minor stroke. I thought I was having a heart attack, but it turned out to be ulcers. We lead a simple life. Jean keeps house, enjoys eating out and spends time with her children and grandchildren. She doesn't seem to mind that I'm always showing off and even laughs when I talk about my wild times in Steubenville. Now she finally understands why I was so eager to mow all those lawns.

One day we were sitting around the kitchen table with a friend thinking back on all those years apart. Jean was chattering away, free as a bird, until she began to talk about the moment I called her up after 40 years. There was a little catch in her throat. Then tears started rolling from her eyes, and my eyes got misty, too, and I reached across the table to hold her hand.

"This was Tommy," she said. "This was my life. My life was starting all over and that was it. And he never said anything. I just took it for granted. That he's here. And to hell with all those years in between. They were gone. I really believed that."

After I moved to St. Petersburg, I got on with a security company, and for the last 12 years I've been a night watchman at the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists that owns the St. Petersburg Times. I work the 5 to midnight shift, but I like to get there at least an hour early. I've met students and visitors from all over the world.

One of the best things about the job is they let me sing a lot. I sing for birthdays and anniversaries and special occasions. I always keep song sheets with me so people can join in. I love music. It's one of the things that make life worth living. I still like betting on football, Jack Russell terriers, Marlene Dietrich and my Saturn. I'm still a leg man and a GM man.

I guess you can say that World War II shaped me forever. I can't think about FDR dying without choking up, God love that man. I still wear a uniform: a white shirt and black pants, an American flag on one sleeve, an eagle patch on the other, a shiny badge over the pocket, and sergeant major insignias on my collar. I even won a big award for distinguished service as an older worker and sang When Irish Eyes Are Smiling at the ceremony.

Hear Tommy Carden sing. Irish Eyes are Smiling: It's a Sin to Tell a Lie: To play the audio you will need the free QuickTime player for Windows or Macintosh.

I've shaved off what's left of my hair. You can see the four spots where the halo brace was bolted into my skull. They just look like dimples now. My right leg acts up, the one I hurt in football and in the war. When it hurts bad, which is most of the time, I use a cane or walk my rounds behind a cart.

But sometimes the old magic returns. At a wedding, I was headed out the door with my cane when the band started playing a swing number. I threw down the cane and hit the dance floor -- like I was healed at a revival service.

At the age of 96, Sister Mary Jane, my old Catholic school teacher, still writes to her little altar boy from a retirement convent in Pennsylvania. After all these years, her prediction has come true. I'm still showing off. Still trying to attract attention. She recently asked a friend about me: "Did that boy turn out great?" God bless her.

I survived the Depression and the War, and I'm proud that I'm one of the guys who helped defeat the Nazis. I'm also proud that I've never taken a drop of alcohol in the 18 years since I made my pledge to Almighty God.

I've tried to do right by my son, making up for my earlier neglect. My son, his wife and their three children live in my house in Jacksonville. I visit them when I can and try to make up for lost time. I'm proud of him, even if I didn't give him a reason to be proud of me.

If there is one war that never ends for me, it's the one that has to do with my own father. How I idolized that man. When I was a kid, I played in the woods, wearing his World War I helmet and gas mask. But I couldn't take how tough he was, so I ran away to fight my own war.

With all I have seen, the saddest day of my life was that day in Luxembourg when Capt. Brown told me my father had died. I'll always regret that I never got to hold him or tell him that I love him. So if you love somebody, you better tell them every day.

[Times photo: Lisa DeJong] Told by Tommy Carden Written by Roy Peter Clark To leave a message for Tommy or Roy: rclark@poynter.org [Times photo: Amber Tenille Woolfolk]

My mother, who almost died in childbirth, lived long enough to have two husbands and six children. God finally took her to heaven when she was 82.

At night, when the building I guard is empty, and the lights get dim, I sometimes sit and replay my life like a great old movie. When I get home, I watch the History Channel and relive moments at Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge. I still sleep with "one eye open," the habit I got keeping watch during the war.

Once in awhile, I'll go into my wallet and dig out that old black-and-white photo, protected in plastic. It's the picture of Jean, from our high school yearbook, back when she was 17.

It's the photo I carried with me across the battlefields of Europe, the photo I carried even after Jean was shanghaied. I carried it through 25 wonderful years of marriage to Dorothy. I carried it when I was arrested for drunk driving and when God rescued me from being a drunk. I carried it on the day I called Jean, on the day we embraced again and on the night of our high school reunion.

That picture was taken 60 years ago. We're both old now. But when I look in Jean's eyes, I can still see the girl in that picture.

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