Stories about my Father 51
Baguio is a hill station built by the Americans after they occupied the Philippines. High up in the mountains, the site was chosen so that the occupiers could escape the relentless summer heat of the rest of Luzon. There were already some local people who were farming the area, but with the permission of the local Philippine government, the Americans pushed them all out.
The then Philippines Governor General, William Howard Taft, hired the architect Daniel Burnham to design the layout of the city in 1904. He also tasked Burnham with designing Manila but only some of the resulting vision for the capital was realized. Baguio, on the other hand, still follows many aspects of Burnham’s original plan. To give you an idea of who this guy was, Burnham designed the Flatiron building in New York, Selfridges in London, as well as the downtowns of both Washington D.C. and Chicago. There is a popular book called The White City about the 1892-93 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago for which Daniel Burnham was the Director of Works. Talk about leaving your mark.
When my father started writing about our family, he didn’t have many of the resources that I have at my disposal today. He wrote down what he’d heard and what he thought he knew but didn’t really do any further research on much of anything. Not that I’m complaining, far from it. I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere I have without the groundwork he laid.
In one of his chapters, he briefly mentions that my great-uncle Scott had been sent to boarding school in Baguio for a time. He said that Scott told him that hated being there because it was run, according to my father’s account, by an Englishman who believed in corporal punishment. I am guessing that up until then, Scott, as his mother’s favorite, had been rather coddled.
That was the sole piece of information in anything he left me that referred to Baguio. The day before I got to Baguio, I googled “boarding schools in Baguio” and what came up was the Brent School.
The Brent School was founded in 1909 by a Canadian Bishop named Charles Henry Brent. He followed the principles of education outlined by the Reverend Endicott Peabody from Groton, Massachusetts, and Dr. Thomas Arnold of Rugby in England. The Brent School wasn’t run by an Englishman per se, but maybe the nuance of its founding had gotten lost over the years or altered in the telling?
I emailed several people whose contact information was on the school’s website, but I heard nothing back. It was hardly surprising as I sent the email on Sunday night and the following day, Monday, June 12, was Philippines Independence Day, a national holiday.
While I was in Baguio I stayed in a Lodge at Camp John Hay. Camp Hay had been the original American military base during the Occupation. Now, the whole area is a resort set amid groves of pine trees up in the hills above the city proper. The Brent School, which I could see on my map app, was about an hour’s walk from the hotel, so I decided to go the next day and see what I could find.
Five hours after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, they made another run over Camp John Hay in Baguio. Several US and Philippines soldiers were killed. During the war, much of Baguio was bombed and destroyed. I had no idea if any of the original buildings at the Brent School would still be there. I had no idea if anyone would be willing to talk to me. Most importantly, I had no idea if my great-uncle Scott had even gone to school there.
Camp John Hay was designed as a rest and recreation area for the army. Unlike the other cities I’ve visited in the Philippines, there’s a lot of green. The next day, after breakfast, I headed into town, walking through the shady trees. Baguio is a full fifteen degrees cooler than either Cebu, Vigan, or Manila but just as humid if not even more so.
By the time I got to the school, I was soaked through. The last couple of hundred yards of road were almost straight up with no cover from the sun whatsoever. There was a gate and a guardhouse set into the wall surrounding the campus. The second I even got close to the entrance, the guard was up and out. It took me a minute to explain to him why I was there. We didn’t really share a language. Great-uncle was a tough translation. Finally, he agreed to call up to the offices, but it turned out that, indeed as I feared, everyone was off for the holiday. I told him I’d try back tomorrow. He seemed less than thrilled at the prospect.
The next day I showed up at about ten. He looked just as miserable to see me as he had the day before. He reluctantly called up to the offices and a long discussion in Tagalog followed. A second guard came out whose English was marginally better than his. I told her why I was there. She smiled. I think she was happy I was the other guard’s problem and not hers.
Finally, the first guard told me that everyone was in a meeting, but I could go up and wait outside the administrative building until they were done. Really, that was all I was hoping for. If nothing else, it was a chance to look around.
The Brent School campus sits on a beautiful, shaded, tree-filled hill. The buildings at the top looked old, but everything does in a tropical climate. They were all wooden and painted white with green trim. I didn’t want to seem nosy, but I was dying to explore. I stayed put. Eventually, somebody came out and invited me inside. I was greeted by someone who I think was the Associate Dean. I wish I could have understood her name. She could not have been kinder.
I told her my story. She was immediately interested and started asking me questions. I relayed what I knew, and we tried to sort out when he might have been there. In 1909, when the school first began, Scott would only have been six. It seems unlikely he would have been there at such a young age. It was more likely he wouldn’t have been sent there until he was in his early teens.
In 1915 or so, my grandmother Eunice, who was then seventeen, left the Philippines for Kentucky to finish high school. My great-grandmother and great-uncle Scott followed her to the United States soon after. Then in 1917 my great-grandfather left government service and began managing the Kolambugen Lumber Company in Mindanao. He traveled all the way up to Kentucky and brought my great-grandmother and Scott back to the islands.
The Associate Dean told me that all the records that they had before the 1930s had been lost during the war. The building we were in, as well as the one next door, however, were the original structures. If Scott had gone there, he would have studied in the same house where we were now talking.
She found a book on the history of the school that had a lot of pictures from the early years. It had been written in the 1980s on the 75th anniversary of its founding. As I leafed through it, it didn’t seem as if Scott was in any of the photographs. Then, I came across the following paragraph:
“Even at special events like the February 28, 1917 performance of “The Merchant of Venice,” where the girls (from Cathedral School), dressed as Red Cross nurses, sold candy between acts, the cast was all male. Arthur Quinn was Shylock; Bernard Caldwell, Launcelot Gobbo; Chief of Police J.J. Keith, the Goaler; Scott Wilson, Portia, and Stanton Pitt, Jessica.”
There he was. He did attend the Brent School after all. Of course, Scott would have played Portia. In a few years, he’d be at Harvard and a member of the Hasty Pudding Club playing all the women’s parts in their variety shows.
In 1917, Scott was fourteen. To get a higher level of education than he would have been able to get in the wilds of Mindanao where the mill was, my great-grandfather must have packed him off to Baguio.
What must that have been like for him? Going home to see his parents for the holidays would have been challenging. Even these days it’s a four-hour bus ride from Baguio to Manila and then a 38-hour ferry ride from Manila to Ozamis which is just across the water from the Lumber Mill. All of that probably took much longer in 1917.
The Brent School escaped destruction during the war because the Japanese used it as a prison for American and Filipino POWs. There’s a tree right outside the window of the office where we were talking that is reputed to be the oldest in Baguio. It also survived the war. I wonder if Scott ever sat underneath it.
In 1942, General Douglas MacArthur was leading troops on the island of Corregidor just off the coast of Luzon. As the Japanese were moved in, MacArthur and his family snuck off in the middle of the night and fled south to Mindanao dodging enemy ships along the way. Left behind were about 90,000 American and Filipino troops. Two-thirds of them would die at the hands of the Japanese on what became known as the Bataan Death March. To give MacArthur his due, it was President Roosevelt who ordered him to go. MacArthur was too important to the war effort to lose. Whatever the cost.
After vowing to return, in 1945 MacArthur made good his promise. Following the famous shot of him wading through the surf of Leyte, a whole platoon landed on the shores of the Lingayan Gulf on Luzon. Within the enormous force was a corps of Red Cross doctors, nurses, and administrators. One of the members of that corps was my great-uncle, Scott.
I’ve told this story before, but it bears repeating. In the years since he’d graduated from Harvard, Scott had moved to New York and become a designer and illustrator. He had a whole line of linens and dress-making fabric.
While nobody has ever said that he was gay, I have never been so sure of anything in my life. He married a woman much later in his life, but that always seemed to me to be a marriage of convenience rather than a love match. I leave open the possibility that I am wrong, but I honestly don’t think I am.
When the United States entered World War II, Scott was thirty-five. Homosexuality was not tolerated in the armed forces but for patriotic gay men who wanted to contribute, they could join the Red Cross. Scott was never an out gay man. At that time in history, that sort of revelation could destroy somebody’s career and life. I’m sure his circle of friends who were probably gay, themselves, knew, but he would have kept it under wraps at all costs. At any rate, the Red Cross is where he ended up, managing a large group of nurses.
In an account he wrote that I found at the library archives in Harvard, he said that when they reached the shore of Luzon, they all found themselves under fire and hid as best they could behind palm trees on the beach. Scott was terrified, but when he looked across at the next tree, he saw that a Filipino woman was hiding behind it. As frightened as he was with bullets flying all around him, all he wanted to do was laugh because the woman was wearing a skirt made of material that he had designed!
The place where all this happened is just a two-hour drive from Baguio. If I had planned a bit better, I would have gone down to see it in person. Ah well, next time. I wonder if Scott trekked up into the mountains to see the town again.
If I could go back in history and talk to one person, I would probably choose my great-uncle Scott. The more I find out about him the more fascinating his life becomes. Each new sliver of information only sparks my interest more.
Camp John Hay is not only where World War II began in the Philippines, but it is also where it ended. On September 3, 1945, the day after the Japanese officially surrendered to the Americans, the Japanese forces in the Philippines formally did the same to the Philippine forces. The ceremony took place at the American Residence within the Camp. These days, the American Ambassador to the Philippines uses that building as their summer residence.
History, of course, isn’t just dates, facts, and figures. It’s the stories of very real people living very real lives. Scott wasn’t known outside his own circle but whatever effort he made during those years helped us get to our ultimate victory.
Even the most well-known historical figures may have swept up crumbs, picked at a scab, daydreamed about doing something other than what they were doing, and occasionally sneezed. When world events happen, they might be spearheaded by the famous names that travel down to us, but the people underneath them are no less unique. They all have aches and pains and longings and quirks and habits and beliefs and skills and fears. Most of all, they each have their own complicated stories.
It is far too easy to lump throngs of people together into crowds and troops and platoons and companies and lose who they are. Even the word, family, tends to create an image in my mind of a collective mass of people rather than disparate singular beings connected to each other sometimes only by the accident of birth.
The more I find out about my great-uncle Scott the more real a person he seems to me. While I did meet the woman he married once, he died before I was born so I never got the chance to meet him personally. I’ve now seen the house he lived in as a baby in Vigan as well as the boarding school he went to as a teenager in Baguio. I’ve seen the dorm building he roomed in when he attended Harvard in Massachusetts. I’ve had tea in the living room of the last Park Avenue apartment he lived in New York before he took his own life. I have some of his drawings and a few of the tablecloths he designed while he lived in New York. It’s far from a complete picture, but the pieces I do have hold together in a way that makes sense to me. Each new thing I discover about him adds another line or bit of shading to the overall portrait.
There is no group more anonymous and faceless than the war dead. I am profoundly lucky that none of my immediate family have died in combat. I sadly can’t say the same for some of my friends.
This morning, my last day in the Philippines, I went to the American Military Cemetery. With over 17,000 graves, it is the single largest resting spot in the world for people who lost their lives fighting in World War II. White crosses and Stars of David radiate out from the center in ever-increasing circles. It doesn’t seem possible that so many people could be buried in one place.
I went there to visit the final resting spots of two people. Neither of them is a relative of mine, but they were the fathers and grandfather of friends.
Philip D. Carman was from Missouri. He and his mother were imprisoned by the Japanese in the Santo Tomaso Internment Camp in Manila for three years during the war. The camp was liberated by the Americans on February 2, 1945, but the Japanese continued to shell it, nonetheless. On February 8, 1945, a bomb exploded, killing Philip and taking his mother’s arm.
The University of Santo Tomaso campus was used to intern mostly American and British civilians. Over 3,000 people were kept there and by the end of the war, many had almost starved to death from lack of food. Their story is well worth reading about. I won’t relate it all here, but it sounds like it was hell on earth.
Philip’s daughter Nancy and his grandson Corey are friends of mine. Corey played Tommy DeVito in one of the tours of Jersey Boys and I’ve gotten to know his mom virtually through all these posts.
Charles H. Lawrence was from Ohio. He was a First Lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps. On January 14, 1945, his plane was shot down over the Marshall Islands and he perished. It was just five days after General MacArthur’s Sixth Army invaded the Lingayan Gulf with my great-uncle Scott in tow.
The Marshall Islands are a long chain of volcanic atolls in the Pacific Ocean to the east of the Philippines. They are just about at the halfway point between the Philippines and Hawaii. It was the scene of unspeakably brutal fighting for many years during the war.
Charles’ son Peter is one of the best stage managers ever to have worked on Broadway. I always say that everything I’ve done that’s good professionally I learned from him, and everything bad was not his fault.
Over 17,000 people are in this cemetery. Each of them has a story every bit as complex as those of my disparate family members. They all deserve to be remembered. They resisted, fought, and died to protect the freedoms we all now enjoy.
The very least we can do to honor their sacrifices in return is to prepare to vote in November. The choice, even with the very real issues, has never been clearer.
My family stories are intertwined with all the stories of all the people surrounding them. Peter, Nancy, and Corey will have to dig into their family stories, themselves. I’m working on my own puzzle.
I am, however, happy to say their names and give them their well-deserved due. Philip D. Carman. Charles H. Lawrence. William Scott Wilson. Thank you for your service.
To say that this post moved me is an understatement. I'm in tears... and I couldn't agree more about the importance of this election.
Oh this was a paragraph turner! The stories are each one significant. We have been to Normandy and the cemeteries there, German as well. The sacrifices (both physical and mental) as well are profound, especially when we would read the ages on the markers. Thanks as always for the sharing of the individual stories. Somehow the cosmos is bit brighter and clearer for the work, the writing and names being shared with us all.