The Toolmaker’s Other Son

A Memoir by Galen Green


Copyright 2005, All Rights Reserved
Rough Draft; Installment #3 of 99; December 6, 2005



(Continued from Section ii. of Chpt. One: The Willows . . . . )


. . . . Waco Street near downtown Wichita, the Japanese military attacked the United States Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, so that Boeing Aircraft Company, where the toolmaker first earned his reputation as “The Toolmaker,” was suddenly transformed into a booming industrial complex, and Wichita began to flourish as never before – or since.

But as the toolmaker found his services increasingly in demand as part of the war effort, his schoolmarm wife found herself increasingly alone at night, while the glowing stithy of aircraft assembly hummed night and day in the furious race to respond to the very palpable from foreign fascism which was clearly hell-bent for the undoing of humankind’s noble post-enlightenment experiment in democratic government. And even though she may have kept her hands and heart busy throughout the daylight hours with the demands of teaching elementary school there in Wichita, those long lonesome nights of 1943 and 1944 and 1945, when the man she loved was far off in the darkness making the tools needed to build the B-17’s and the B-24’s and the B-25’s and the B-29’s needed to win that seemingly interminable set of overseas conflicts collectively known as World War II, served only to reinforce her longing for what she perceived to be the ascendancy unto the estate of motherhood.

And so it was that the toolmaker and the schoolmarm decided to adopt. The post-War Baby Boom helped. Every couple able to crank out a baby seemed to be doing so, whether inside or outside of wedlock. This included, of course, a certain young beautician and a forever-nameless farm boy up in some forever-nameless north-central Indiana hamlet, who got together one starlit night in the summer of 1948 to share their bodies with one another, thus setting our story in motion.

As of this writing, that three-block stretch of sidewalk which hugs the native stone retaining wall along the east edge Kansas City’s World War I Veterans Memorial Park and follows Main Street from Union Station up that hill to where the Willows once stood still consists of the very same cement upon which my biological mother’s feet must have trod one autumn afternoon of 1948. Suitcase in hand, her heart full of some mystified mixture of determination and resignation, her head still full of the blurred images of the Indiana, Illinois, Iowa and Missouri countryside flying past her train window, I can picture her trudging those three blocks up that hill, the autumn breeze in her pretty face, 25 years old, carrying within her that which was to gestate into your humble servant.

Meanwhile, back in Wichita, Harry the toolmaker and Margaret his schoolmarm wife would have been finishing up the ton and a half of paperwork necessary to adopt whichever Willows waif the baby shufflers deemed to be most