Three Children Ascending the Steps Alone

George A. Morrison, left, writes the news for WAVE-TV in Louisville circa the late '40s. His son, Brian Arbenz (nee George Morrison), at a book signing in 2011. 

 

“What do you know about war?”

This question from my father in 2003 was contained in an e-mail, so I don’t know precisely in what tone he meant it, scornful or mildly skeptical.
It was the crescendo of an on-line discussion about the issues peace crusaders such as myself, a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, are always absorbed with, and it forced me to pause from my usual fervency and acknowledge that as a veteran of four years of submarine warfare going toe to toe with German u-boats under the Atlantic, his qualification to comment exceeded mine.
I searched my memory for what scant experience I had with war, including stumbling upon tanks training for Vietnam at Ft. Knox while on a hike at adjacent Otter Creek Park as a startled 10-year-old at school camp in 1969.
Very quickly, however, I became stuck in the vulnerable spot some peace activists find themselves in when confronted with the question of whether we must know of what we speak; whether Dwight Eisenhower‘s statement: “I hate war as only a soldier can” is the ultimate logic.
Of course, consider the life of former FOR national secretary Doug Hostetter, a conscientious objector who spent three years in rural Vietnam during the war teaching literacy and Gandhian-style small scale economics, then “saw enough pain to last a lifetime” while trying to mediate the conflict in Bosnia in the 1990s. Add to this, the daring peace stands of those who have voluntarily stepped into grave danger to serve in base communities in Colombia or accompany refugees in Guatemala, and Ike is compelled to amend his observation to “as only a witness can.”
Still, on that point, my then 78-year-old father was right to question what I really know about the subject I spoke and wrote about regularly. And yet, the answer was wrapped inexorably in the fact that e-mails, letters and phone calls were nearly the only way I had communicated with George A. Morrison.
So irregular and confused were my contacts with my biological father (I first saw him in my conscious life when I was five) that I did not find out about his passing at age 82 until four months after he died in Albuquerque, the place he had spent most of his adult life.
Whereas I never in my memory sat on my father’s lap, I’ve placed on my own lap two of the three books he wrote, including “College Street,” his memoirs centering on growing up in a Louisville orphanage on that thoroughfare just off downtown next to what is today an ecumenical center called Unity Temple.
The book vividly details Dad’s riveting recollection of the incident that led to his being placed there in 1928 -- the fatal shooting of his new stepfather, a German POW from World War I who had moved to Russell, Ky. after receiving asylum. This was offered as part of a policy the U.S. has maintained regarding enemy prisoners since the Revolutionary War.
The bulk of the Russell police force shot this man one afternoon while – according to the memory of my then three-year-old father – he was in the process of surrendering to them. The former warrior for the fatherland had, in a fit of rage, taken the family hostage in the boarding house he and Dad’s mother operated in the small town near Huntington, W. Va. after discovering her in bed with one of the guests.
Dad remembered to his dying days exactly the position his stepfather’s hand was in while he was beginning to drop his gun, then exactly what the barrage of gunfire sounded like that slaughtered him in full view of his three-year-old stepson. This was just months after Dad’s heavy-drinking though economically prosperous birth father died of pneumonia.
My father, who went on to become a prosecuting attorney after a career as a broadcast journalist, was certain that the Russell police force’s excessive, hair-trigger response was due to the fact that virtually every one of the town’s officers and reservists also had fought in the Great War.
If before, his stepfather had been not well liked in the little Ohio River community for his cold ways, in this irreversibly agitated moment, he became once again the enemy. Ten years after the armistice, the guns didn’t really fall silent until the Battle of Russell, Ky.
And what’s militarism without sexism – the courts blamed my grandmother for unilaterally causing the carnage by failing to be the humble and selfless ideal woman of the era’s close-to-the-hearth imagery.
Immediately taking her three children away was the judge’s idea of punishing her, but it imposed a life of regimentation in a cavernous orphanage on three innocent and emotionally battered children who needed warm and caring intervention, not institutionalization.
Dad’s book said the driver ended the 200-mile trip to the Louisville orphanage by releasing the three onto the building’s steps, instructing them to go inside, then driving off as the trio, all age seven or younger, ascended the steps alone. After registering, Dad learned the Kentucky Christian Children’s Home was gender segregated; he would see his sisters on only Thanksgiving and Christmas each year. He didn’t even discover the existence of a grown half-sister until decades after she had died at age 32 in 1932.
After World War II, which the U.S. entered months after my father joined the Navy at age 16 on a forged birth record he created to enable him to quickly escape the orphanage, the same excuse for a family services system that had warehoused the three Morrison children, turned them loose.
Dad, of course, had the GI Bill in hand, and soon put it toward earning a degree from the University of Louisville, then put his love of the language and personal charisma to work in the newsrooms of the nation’s new dominant medium. He started by writing the news for Livingston Gilbert and the other anchormen of WAVE-TV at the station’s inception in 1948, then anchored news himself in Albuquerque and Indianapolis.
Viewers knew my father’s debonair appearance and polished voice. Off the air, that charm combined with his emotional neediness made for a toxin deadly to our family, which was portrayed as happy and stable in a brief Albuquerque newspaper feature while in real life it was being torn asunder by my father’s footloose ways.
The marriage ended in Indianapolis when I was not yet three. I never again lived in the same city as George A. Morrison. The anchorman seen nightly by the public was to be seen by me about every ten years.
The carnage in Russell may have had little to do with the events that set my fatherless life in motion. Or, perhaps, I am a third-generation emotional casualty of – would you believe it – World War I, an historical calamity that commenced with the firing of a gun at an obscure archduke 44 years before I was born.
So, to answer your inquiry, Dad: that is what I know about war.

Brian Arbenz lives in Louisville, Ky. USA