He was born the first of September a few years after World War II ended. He would never really get to know his father Frank B. Kyle, Sr., because John was only four when our father tore up the house and took off, never to return and never to offer child support. It was a hard time for our mother, Mildred, who had to move into a sprawling public housing complex in Long Beach called Carmelitos. It was a rough environment populated by tough kids, though not as bad as today:
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-09-19-me-245-story.html
Our mother worked double shifts as a waitress to make ends meet, which meant John and I were sent to a baby sitter each night.
About five years later our mother would remarry to George Turner, a nice man, a bartender she met at work. She did not marry for love but for her sons. He had a new house in a suburb built for the veterans of the war. It was a Lego community—new, clean, and crime free. Unfortunately, our stepfather was an alcoholic, not surprising considering his line of work, but Mother had been taking care of three of her alcoholic brothers, two who stayed in California after the war, George (who spent most the war in a Japanese prison camp) and Ben a ten year Navy veteran. Both would eventually commit suicide.
Our uncle Carl, the oldest brother, came out most likely to get out of Texas and be close to his baby sister. Once I tagged along when Mother went to his apartment. He hadn’t shown up at work, where he was a kitchen’s helper at a nondescript cafe. He got me a job there also as a kitchen helper when I was about sixteen or so. What we found were whiskey bottles all over the place and Carl passed out. Mother took him to a hospital in L.A. where he was kept overnight. So, it wasn’t surprising that Mildred and George got into fights when he came home drunk. One night he came home from work drunk and went to the neighbor’s house thinking it was ours. I was old enough to move out of the house when things were getting bad, but John had to remain during the worse years until he finished high school. Immediately after his graduation our parents divorced. They stuck it out for John, I guess. Our mother returned to Texas and George lived in a small apartment until he died at work from a heart attack.
A few times he took John and me camping. He had a lot of guns and we would take a few with us to shoot at cans and bottles. I believe those escapes into the wild were when he was happiest. Here is one of those outings:
Photo taken by our stepfather.
That's John in front.
By the way, he wasn’t a hunter. He would never shoot animals. He just loved guns for their tradition or their wood and metal craftmanship. Most of his guns were old fashion rifles and one 22 pistol. He once took me to a gun show, which was nothing like today's gun shows (describe in my novel Freddy's Freaky American Life). Most of the guns were from the wild west, World War 2, and conventional hunting rifles and shotguns. There were a few revolvers and pistols, but not the semi-automatic weapons seen at today's gun shows.
John wasn’t out of the house very long before he got pulled into the Vietnam War. Here he is in uniform next to me:
He served on the USS Ogden. Here is his ship:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Ogden_(LPD-5)#Vietnam_era
It was a ship that sent helicopters loaded with Marines into battle. John liked the Marines. They were more easygoing than his shipmates. Sometimes the helicopters would return with fewer Marines. There were two aspects of being on board the ship that John hated. First, he worked in the engine room as a boiler man, which is not what he was told he would be doing by Navy recruiter. He wanted to be trained as an electrician so he could get a good civilian job. The engine room was a noisy, dirty, oily, enclosed environment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kK5GYwV0-TQ
John said he was able to get on deck to breathe fresh air only a few times a week. And the ship might be where John got the seeds that caused the cancer that would kill him:
https://www.asbestos.com/navy/ships/
The second thing was the racial strife. Blacks and whites didn’t get along. The situation on board the ship reflected was going on in the States, a lot of conflict and hatefulness like today. It was while John was in the Navy that our stepfather died. That was a bummer because we liked the old guy, though he wasn’t that old, about 53, but a heavy smoker and drinker. He had joined the Navy during the Great Depression and when he was about to get out W.W. II started.
Once out of the Navy John ended up with me in California for a time, then we moved to Texas. We drove an old topless army jeep, top speed about 45 miles per hour. That was quite a trip. The first night we tried to sleep outside near a desert town in Arizona called Quartzsite (the town shows up in my novel Her Quest after the world has been destroyed by war). The town fills up with RV snowbirds in the winter, but we were there in the summer. We were in our sleeping bags when a carload of rowdies arrived and drove around us like Indian circling a wagon train. So we got up bone tired and went to a cafe that was still open. While we were there, a man entered all bloody saying “He’s going to kill me!” I told the guy in the cafe (owner, waiter, or cook?) that I had a gun and asked if I should get it. He said no. He had one too. We left and tried sleeping off the freeway but noticed following us was an old station wagon filled with tires that we saw at the cafe. We put down sleeping bags and I kept the 357 magnum Ruger Blackhawk near. But we really didn’t want to shoot anyone, so we got back into the jeep and continued on. Here’s Quartzsite:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1r2_n5uceJQ
We took a blue road to Wickenburg, Arizona. We didn’t want to be on the freeway at night because of the slow speed of the jeep. Driving through the desert at night in an open slow-moving jeep is an interesting experience. We didn’t meet any cars, saw a bobcat near morning. Shot off the magnum just for the hell of it.
In Dimmitt, Texas, the town of my birth, John got a job putting sheet metal on storage tanks 40 or 50 feet above ground. I don’t recall the scaffolding having guardrails. It was dangerous working on scaffolding and carrying large pieces of sheet metal especially given the Texas wind. The thing about John was that he was pretty fearless, whereas I’m Mr. Caution. I took a job on the ground working for a ditching company that laid irrigation pipe. I liked the work even though it was hard and paid half of what John made. Sometimes we had to drive for an early morning hour to get to the farm where we worked. I loved those drives. The photo below of John and me by the Colonial Inn swimming pool was taken about that time. John is on my right. You can tell we’d been working out in the sun. The colorful trim on our jeans shows we just arrived from California. Believe it or not we were on lifeguard duty because kids were not allowed in the pool without an adult watching them.
When school started, I moved to Canyon, Texas, to attend West Texas State University, about 40 miles away. John had married Sharon, a former nightmarish girlfriend of our ancient friend Ed (still alive) and started running the bar in the Colonial Inn at night.
The Three Amigos: Ed, me, and John
Three incidents occurred about that time. First, some guy verbally abused Sharon in the bar and John stepped in. A fight broke out and the guy and his brother jumped John. I was there and grabbed the brother. I had done a lot of judo and was big and strong. I probably could have broken the guy’s neck, but neither John nor I were like the rowdies we were fighting. Our mother, who ran the restraint next door, came in and yelled she had called the cops. The guys took off. You just didn’t want to mess with Dimmitt’s sheriff.
Second, Sharon had bad mouth, which is probably what got her into trouble that night, and one day said something to my Mother that angered me. The two didn’t get along at all. I lost my temper and grabbed Sharon by the neck because she was shouting shit and I really disliked the woman. A customer said I lifted her off her feet. She pressed charges, but nothing came of it. That is when being a local in a small town can pay off with the cops. Sharon was an outsider.
The third incident was when Sharon tried to shoot John with a cheap 25 caliber pistol I bought from a guy named Blacky who worked at the Colonial Inn’s motel. The gun misfired. That ended the marriage, but the two lovebirds, who never got along, never fell out of love. The relationship was totally weird to me. While John was at work, Sharon took off with his VW van loaded with all his stuff and drove to Brownsville, TX, where her crazy mother lived with her husband or boyfriend. John flew down to Brownville and took a cab to the house. No one was at home, so he called a locksmith to unlock the door, saying he had locked himself out. The van was in the garage and John loaded it up and drove it back to Dimmitt.
Charges were pressed against John and the Brownsville police wanted him returned. But one of the things Sharon took was a gun registered to me, a classic 1911 Colt 45 semi-automatic pistol that I had bought in Herford and gave to John for his birthday. Luckily, Sharon hadn’t tried to shoot John with that gun. Because the gun was registered in my name, not John’s, the Dimmitt police said I wouldn’t press charges if the charges were dropped against John. And they were. Again, that’s when being small-town local can pay off with the authorities. They look out for their own against outsiders. That’s when John took off to Albuquerque. Why there, I can’t say. Perhaps it was the nearest big town outside of Texas.
Albuquerque is where John and Lucy hooked up. The situation was similar to that of my mother and stepfather. John managed a bar at a Pizza Hut, where he met Lucy, how exactly I don’t know. Her sister Marianne was a waitress there. They considered marriage but already were having quarrels. By that time I was studying philosophy at UNM and married to Brigitte. He came over one day to talk to us about whether he and Lucy should marry. We said perhaps not if they were already having fights. He married her anyway. Another stormy love affair! The marriage went okay for a time, but life for John was still a bad-luck affair.
One night at the Pizza Hut, he stood up for a woman a biker had knocked down, his girlfriend apparently. John led the biker outside but when he turned his back to return to the restaurant the biker stabbed John. John turned around and kicked the biker but got stabbed in the heart. He walked bleeding through the restaurant out into the front parking lot where he collapsed in front of Lucy. An ex-Vietnam veteran who had been a medic and who worked next door, came to John's aid and kept the bleeding down until the medics arrived. Fortunately, a prestigious Indian heart surgeon was on duty at the hospital. However, the blood transfusions that saved his life also infected him with hepatitis that required some painful treatments later on, a big needle stuck into his liver. John was fired from Pizza Hut. No one from Pizza Hut ever visited him in the hospital. That’s called corporate compassion. The biker was caught, and charged with assault rather than attempted murder. He was given probation, probably because the New Mexico’s prisons were already full.
Once recovered, John went to work as an electrician helper. Bad luck caught up with him again when he was knocked off a twenty-foot ladder by a 440 volt jolt of electricity. He broke his shoulder and fried his nervous system. Soon after that the marriage fell apart and John moved to Colorado where he lived like a monk on disability—about $1500 a month. It was during that time that I helped him apply for benefits from the Navy. That worked out because of a sympathetic VA agent and his income improved. But those were lonely years and during that time his son Andrew got into drugs. He visited John perhaps to get away from the law in Albuquerque, and John got him a little house and a job, but he couldn’t get the drug monkey off his back. It wouldn’t be long before Andrew ended up doing time in prison in New Mexico for selling guns illegally. There were other guys involved. Andrew was never good about choosing friends. Eventually, he was allowed out of prison because he was being threatened by Mexican gangbangers to extort payments of $200 to $300 from his now single mother paid to a girlfriend or sister to keep her son from being harmed. That went on for about a year, Lucy and a lawyer finally got Andrew out of prison. However, he had to live at a halfway house for a time.
While he was in Colorado, our mother died and John drove to Albuquerque to take care of that alone because Brigitte and I were in Belgium. As I recall, Andrew helped John unload Mother’s stuff from her apartment at a HUD housing facility for the elderly. There was no funeral. My mother was a stranger in Albuquerque.
Feeling lonely, John gave San Diego a try because Brigitte and I lived there, but having lived in the very small town of Laporte, Colorado, he couldn’t adjust to the traffic and congestion of a big city. I never did either, but I loved the ocean, which helped a lot. So he took off back to Albuquerque, where he reconciled with Lucy and Andrew. But soon the cancer came and John died. John’s family life had been turbulent, yet in spite of the divorce, Lucy stood by him through his illness and Andrew did as well. By that time Brigitte and I lived in France, where John loved to visit and where he started having chest pain. A French doctor told him that he needed an X-ray. If he had stayed in France, he would have been treated, but then we didn't know that the problem was that serious.
John always stood by his family and friends. He did a great deal for Brigitte and me and for our daughter Kalleen’s family. When he was on his last legs was truly a sad time for everyone. When you lose a loved one it’s like a big part of your life drifts off—to exist only as a melancholy memory.
John and I shared a life together, one that had lots of ups and downs for each of us, but we always got along. One example of our adventures together was when we drove his 1950 one-ton panel truck to Montana, selling onions as we went. At the Dimmitt farming supplies store we bought a hundred or so sacks then went out to where excess produce was dumped. From a large mound of onions we filled sacks with giant onions (perhaps dumped because of their size) and loaded the truck up with as many sacks as it could carry. We then headed off to Montana to see our friend Bill Calhoun, another Vietnam veteran who is no longer with us, selling off sacks of onions to Texas and New Mexico Dairy Queens, Whataburgers, and other burger joints. The onions were liked especially for onion rings. Once the truck was empty we continued on to Montana taking Highway 25 through Colorado and Wyoming, and finally connecting with Highway 90 into Montana.
Much of John’s life is unknown to me. He went on long road trips alone, had a fishing buddy named Pat in Colorado who lived in a trailer in the wilderness. The two men would go on fishing trips where they would camp out by a lake. John was the only one who knew the largeness of the life he thoroughly enjoyed in spite of his encounters with bad luck.
To me the greatness of America has always been the lives of ordinary Americans, like my brother John, and I believe most Americans would agree with me. It is the greatness of hard-working, down-to-earth cowboys, factory workers, fishermen, and farmers—the lives of ordinary working men and women that are celebrated by most Americans and by writers such as Walt Whitman, Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jack Kerouac. Certainly, the rich and famous, the wealthy oligarchs, and technology’s robber barons are celebrated by no one but themselves. Such people know how to make money but are otherwise boring because they are artificial people who live apart from the the fray of ordinary life. And certainly not politicians, most of whom are as artificial as manikins seeking personal gain of one kind or another. Great politicians are rare, perhaps one appears each century: a George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, or Franklin D. Roosevelt, so far none in the the 21st-century.
Last Photo of Frank & John
Saint-Jean-de-Vaulx, France
