Father's Day

Richard Snow, Jr. has an op-ed piece in The New York Times about his father (seated in the right foreground of the photo above):

My father, Richard B. Snow, was happily running his own Manhattan architecture practice when Pearl Harbor was attacked, and he was quickly taken into a service that needed people who knew about structures.
The Navy gave him a good job: he put on a nice, new uniform and, every couple of days, went to Brooklyn or Staten Island to inspect new shipyards and barracks and all the other buildings being conjured up by the war, making sure that the support beams were in the right places, and that there were enough fire hydrants. On the way home to sleep in his own bed, he’d be saluted by sailors back from fighting the German U-boats in the Atlantic.
He hated it. Years later, he said: “I began to feel that I’m riding up and down in the subway in a uniform. What kind of a way is this for a man my age to spend his life, when we’re really engaged in a war?” Born in 1905, he was over-age for combat service, but eventually he told my mother that, if she let him put in for sea duty, he would write her every day. She reluctantly agreed. He came very close to keeping his promise.
Recently, I started reading his letters for the first time, and it was both comforting and startling to see his familiar handwriting, spiky and vigorous, which changed not a bit from when he wrote this correspondence until he died, aged 95, in 2000. They were terrific letters, I thought, and the more of them I read, the more I appreciated how his military career echoed that of the millions of Americans who, during those years, had left familiar jobs for an unknown and likely perilous one.
Like every other sailor since the days of the Ark, he did his share of grousing. But he slowly learned his place in the Navy, first at the submarine-chasing school in Miami, then a shipyard in Orange, Texas, and took increasing satisfaction in it. “I feel there is no comparison between what I was doing in New York and what I am doing here, both in the work itself and as a preparation for my job at sea, when I get to it,” he wrote.
He got to it in September of 1943, when he became a first lieutenant on a new destroyer escort, and went on to spend nearly two years in the North Atlantic hunting submarines.
Atlantic duty was hard and dangerous. One rainy April morning, Lieutenant R. B. Snow saw his sister ship, the Frederick C. Davis, hit by a torpedo and take 115 men to their deaths, and was part of the daylong action that finally destroyed the German sub. But he came through it all without a scratch. After the war, he returned to his office delighted he still had a job— indeed, owned the job— and eager to resume architecture.
But it is good to remember that war can vex the spirit in subtle and unexpected ways. He sat at his drafting table and did nothing. Not for days, not for weeks. There were plenty of commissions, and he had no pressure on him: his partner, who had run the business during the war, urged him not to worry. Of course it will take a while, Dick, he said. It did. My father soon left the firm he had founded. A couple of months later, my mother got a phone call from him, in the middle of the day. He was standing on a subway platform, calling to say goodbye. Don’t! she said. Come home now. You need to rest. Just come and talk it over with me... He hung up. She sat in a chair and waited. Hours after my father made his farewell call, my mother, still rigid in her chair, heard his key in the lock. I don’t believe he ever spoke of how he spent that afternoon and evening, but he had come home for good.
From his ship, he had once written her: “I like the morning watch best, in spite of having to get up at 3:15 a.m. to start it, for there is something very pleasant about starting the watch in total darkness— often with no visibility whatever, and gradually, imperceptibly, have a little light steal over the ship, coming from no apparent source. Later it is intensified on the eastern horizon and finally, if it is not too cloudy, you see the sun rise.”
And that’s the way he healed, coming imperceptibly from total darkness into the everyday light. Eventually, he joined another firm, and went on to design buildings for four more decades. During that retrieved life, he had me. He was an uncommonly lively and interesting father, I think now, but I really had little idea of that at the time. I was just glad, in the self-conscious way of children, that he didn’t seem too different from anybody else’s father. I knew he’d been in the war, but so had most of my friends’ fathers, and it made no particular impression on me; if I thought of his military service at all, it was as just one more civic thing that happened to grown-ups, like voting, or going to PTA meetings, or spending a morning at the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Then, a decade after the war ended, his old skipper, Captain John Greenbacker, brought a destroyer into New York Harbor, and invited my mother, my father, and my seven-year-old self out for a ride. It was a fine, bright day and I was thrilled to enter a sharp-edged gray world full of enticing machinery.
We went up on the bridge when it came time to cast off and back away from the pier, a feat that Captain Greenbacker achieved with no fuss whatever, just a few quiet words to the helmsman. When he’d got his ship’s nose pointing downstream, the captain turned to my father and asked: “Want to take her out, Dick?” Suddenly my father, in his drab-brown, standard-issue father suit, was saying things like “Steady up on oh-eight-oh” to blue-clad demigods who jumped to do his bidding. I couldn’t have been more surprised if he’d taken wing, and my comfortable present swung like a door giving onto the past, as I realized that this man had not been put here solely to buy me Good Humors and make sure that I got to bed on time. This is a lesson, however administered, that no son ever gets over.

Richard Snow, the former editor of American Heritage magazine, is the author of A Measureless Peril: America in the Fight for the Atlantic, the Longest Battle of World War Two.