Veterans Day: RECONNECTION

On Veterans Day: RECONNECTION

As we commemorate the service of our veterans on this day, my thoughts go to my grandfathers, both of whom served in the military during World War II and beyond.  I am immensely proud of my ancestors and relatives, many of whom fought in our nation’s wars.  The earliest known American veteran in our family is Sgt. Moses Sanborn of Raymond, New Hampshire, who fought in the American War for Independence, or what we call the Revolutionary War.  He served in the Continental Army, fought at the Battle of Saratoga, and died in 1778, somewhere in New England, possibly at the Battle of Rhode Island. 

I am also proud to carry some of the same names as my grandfathers – Kenneth R. Dorey, Sr. and Charles E. Sanborn, Sr.    

 

My mother’s father, Kenneth Ronald Dorey, Sr., was born in 1921 in Livermore Falls, Maine, in central Maine’s Androscoggin River Valley, and was known both as “Ronald” and by his nickname “Hunky” (hunky-dory, get it?).  Livermore Falls was then a mill town, with the main sources of employment being a paper mill and a shoe factory.  His father was a native of Nova Scotia, had been a professional cigar-maker, and had apparently been drafted into the Canadian Army for World War I.  Grampa’s mother was a strong-willed Scotch-Indian woman who became an alcoholic later in life.

“Hunky” was drafted into the U.S. Army for the D-Day Invasion in early 1944 at about the same time that he had lost a younger brother, Robert Clayton Dorey, U.S. Navy, in the invasion of Italy at Anzio.  He was married and had two young children at the time he left for his basic training.  He returned home and joined the National Guard and later the Army Reserve, serving a total of about 40 years in uniform.  He was given full military honors after passing away March 18, 1993, and he was buried next to my grandmother (who passed in 1990) in a small cemetery in Peru, Maine that I drive by every day now when I go to work.  Every time I pass by and see their headstone, I sense them and feel the same spiritual connection I had with them when they were here with us. 

I think my first name comes from my grandfather, but if you ask my Uncle Ken, a veteran of the U.S. Navy with two tours of Vietnam in the mid-60’s, he’ll tell you I was named after him, he being my mother’s oldest brother.  My mother still refers to him as “Brother.”  When my Uncle Ken was born in December, 1942, about ten months after my mother was born (in February, 1942) – I guess they’re what’s known as “Irish Twins” – my grandmother named him “Kenneth Ronald,” because she didn’t want him to be a “Junior” and she thought my grandfather’s name was “Ronald Kenneth”.  Well, Grampa’s birth certificate said his given name was “Kenneth Ronald,” so Uncle Ken was, in fact, a “Junior.”  Even so, my grandfather’s headstone reads “Dorey, Ronald K.”  I’m not sure how that happened.  It’s funny:  My mother called her father “Daddy”; my Uncle Ken called him “The Old Man”; my Uncle Rick called him “Hunk”; and my Uncle Den called him “Dad.”  My sister and brother and I called him “Grampa” and my daughters called him “Grampy-pa.”

My Grandfather Dorey was my favorite relative ever.  Well, at least until my daughters Abbey and Kate were born (typical children, each thinks the other is my favorite…).  Grampa was always around when I was growing up and right up until he passed to Spirit, it seemed.  He was a piece of work.  He had a wicked sense of humor and loved to laugh but he was tough-minded and strict.  People, especially young people, loved being around him and few people dared to ever cross him.  As I wrote in an earlier entry, he loved watching professional wrestling during the days of Gorilla Monsoon, George “The Animal” Steel, Fred Blassie, Chief Jay Strongbow, and Professor Toru Tanaka (my grandfather, being a WWII veteran, had an ethno-racist nickname for the “Japanese” professor).  He had a spiritual side that he didn’t show to many people, but I used to watch the Sunday TV preachers with him – guys like Jimmy Swaggert, Jim and Tammy Fay Baker, Oral Roberts, and Billy Graham.  He taught me how to use a hammer and build things out of wood.  He taught me about humility, self-confidence, how to treat other people, and how to show others how I wanted to be treated myself. 

Grampa and my grandmother, Evelyn (Robinson), who we called “Nanny,” and who was herself a character, lived very near us most of my life.  The first place I remember living was in a second floor apartment in a soon to be run-down four-unit wooden tenement building in Livermore Falls.  The building actually had six units but the third floor was unsafe for anyone to live in or to even walk up to – us kids were ordered not to go up there, which we did once but were scared to death and never went back up.  My grandparents lived on the first floor.  A few years later, we moved into a trailer park in a rural part of town, and my grandparents bought a trailer and moved in a couple lots away.  When my parents bought a small piece of land at the edge of town, they set it up so my grandparents could move their trailer in next to us there, too.  My grandmother was a self-trained folk-painter, an independent scholar (who never finished high school), a great knitter, a crocheter, and a champion crab (she was a Cancer, after all).  She may have had a major depression condition related to motherhood issues, especially losing two children in childbirth.  The general view within our small tribe was that Nanny was a much better grandmother than mother.  I loved her.  She taught me how to paint, crochet, and play Canasta.  I never did figure out how to knit.  I think that one skips a generation as my younger daughter, Kate, is a wonderful knitter.  The craft gene also seems to run through my older daughter, Abbey, who makes incredible designer greeting cards. 

My maternal grandparents were able to live long enough to be part of my daughters’ lives, and I am grateful for that.  Both have to come to me through mediums’ readings and through meditation since their passings, and I am grateful for that, as well.

 

My middle and last names come from my paternal grandfather, but they were also my father’s names.  My father’s father, Charles Everett Sanborn, Sr., enlisted in the U.S. Marines during WWII but contracted rheumatic fever during boot-camp at Parris Island, South Carolina.  He was assigned to the U.S. Naval Reserve and was kept stateside during the war, which didn’t suit his temperament very well, I am sure (his service record includes at least one fine for fighting at his station in Texas).  “Chuck” was active in veterans’ services in his post-war home community of Oakland, California, until his death from complications of heart disease related to the rheumatic fever on November 17, 1956 at the age of 43.  He was buried in the colossal Golden Gate Veterans Cemetery in San Bruno, California.  Though I never met my Grandfather Sanborn (I was born in Maine in 1960), visiting his gravesite for the first (and to date, only) time in 2008 was an inspirational and deep spiritual connection experience. 

My Grandfather Sanborn was born, as was my Grandfather Dorey, in Livermore Falls, Maine.  My father was named after him – Charles Everett Sanborn – but never referred to himself as a “Junior” and went by his middle name Everett and by his nickname “Sonny” growing up.  My father, who grew up in foster care in Canton, Maine, from the age of about 10 months till he was 21 years old, had no memory of ever meeting his father.  As a note here, my father, who passed away in 2008, once told me later in his life that he had run away from his foster home when he was 15, in 1953 (during the Korean War), and enlisted in the Marines by forging his father’s name (which was, after all, his name, too, so he didn’t get in much trouble for it).  Dad said he made it through boot-camp but was soon tracked down and returned, unceremoniously, to his home.  Anyway, here’s a salute to my Dad for his brief stint in the U.S. Marine Corps!

“Charlie” as I came to refer to my grandfather, was born July 9, 1913, the first of three children.  He later had two sisters, Daisy and Bessie.  His father, Lester, worked for the railroad as an engineer. His mother, Leona (Oakes) was more than ten years younger than her husband.  A few months after the birth of her third child, Bessie, in late 1916, Leona died suddenly, probably from the flu or some other virus in early 1917, at the age of 24. (Bessie, who I met a year or so ago, is the only surviving member the three children at age 95 or 96, and lives in a nursing home in Connecticut).  My great-grandfather, then twice-widowed, never remarried and lived a fairly lonely life until his death in his early 50’s.  He was apparently rarely home to see his children, who grew up on a farm with Lester’s sister, Daisy Savage, and her husband in Canton, Maine.

“Charlie” – as he was called in his 1931 Canton High School yearbook – was popular in his small school, and considered a good-looking and charming young man.  He went on to Farmington State Normal School (a teacher preparation college, and now the University of Maine at Farmington – my college alma mater) in the early 1930’s and earned a two-year degree in Teaching.  When I was at UMF in the mid-90’s earning my teaching degree, the registrar’s office came across a letter my grandfather had hand-written from Oakland, California, after the war, asking for a copy of his transcript, and they gave me a copy of the letter.  That was my first tangible connection to my grandfather. 

Charlie taught for a while at Livermore Falls High School (my high school alma mater) but was apparently fired for smoking cigarettes in the boiler room in the basement of the school (he has come to me many times over the years in mediums’ readings, and once mentioned just how wonderful it was to “take in that first cigarette of the day”).  He then went to work in the Farmington area at a “corn store” (whatever that might have been) and met and married my paternal grandmother, Dorothy Gordon, who was born in Vienna, Maine, and raised in the Phillips and Farmington areas.  My grandmother had been married before and divorced by her first husband (for cruelty and neglect), and had a son who she had named after his father and placed in foster care.  My grandparents’ marriage in 1935 didn’t last either, and they divorced shortly after my father was born in December, 1937.   My grandfather then apparently stayed in the area and eventually married a woman from Livermore, Maine prior to entering the military.  That marriage was amicably ended by divorce sometime during or after the war.  My grandfather was married for a third time in California in the mid 1940’s to another woman named Dorothy, who I met in the Sacramento area in 2008, and who passed to Spirit in March, 2009.  It was obvious to me that, over 50 years later, she still wasn’t over his death.

I did spend time with my grandmother many times in my childhood.  She was a very petite dark-haired woman who I thought my father looked very much like.  As it turns out, from pictures of my grandfather we have since discovered, my father was his spitting image.  Grammie Dot, as we called her, was not close to my father, but she seemed to love her grandchildren.  She used to kiss us all on the lips whenever we arrived or left her apartments.  Dad must have hated her at some level for giving him up to foster care, which he despised.  Dad loved his foster grandparents but didn’t care much for his foster mother or the man she married when Dad was a teenager.  Dad said he first met his mother when he was in his early adolescence and had to ask his foster grandfather (also named Charlie) who she was.  The only reason I ever met my grandmother was because my mother insisted on it.  I was at my grandmother’s bedside as she was dying from emphysema in 1991, and I remember her looking at me, unable to speak, with plaintive eyes that seemed to ask me to end her suffering, which I couldn’t do.  My grandmother knew suffering her whole life.  Her twin sister died at 10 months of age, and her older sister and father died when she was 18 years old.  She was twice married and divorced, and lost custody of her two sons to foster care.  She did have a long relationship with a woman named Lois – they lived together for over 30 years.  The nature of their relationship isn’t really certain, but they were committed to one another till their deaths.  Grammie Dot did eventually pass away and is buried alone in a Farmington cemetery.  Her family’s plot is on the opposite side of the road in the same cemetery, but was unable to accommodate her as there was an extra unknown coffin in the plot. 

My father didn’t know until a few years before his death, from information provided by Charlie’s third wife, Dorothy, who called him “Chuck” and who was still alive in the Sacramento, California area, that his father had actually come back to Maine from California after the war to get his son but that my father’s foster mother, who had grown up with Charlie and was a best friend of his sister Daisy, wouldn’t allow it – not unless my grandfather married her.  He refused since he intended to marry his Dorothy in California.  He never saw his son and his son never saw his father.  But thanks to some detective work by my brother and me, and some messages that came through psychics and mediums, my father had a peace of mind about his life he would not otherwise have had.  My father was able to talk with his step-mother, Dot, and to talk with his half-brothers, Randy, who lives in California (who I met in 2008 and who looks a lot like me), and Rick, who lives in Washington.

This entry could go on to describe some of the messages, coincidences, and just flat-out strange things that have happened over the past eight or nine years that brought me the information that I needed to write some of this material.  But it is already longer than I expected or planned, and I will end here and simply restate my pride in my ancestors and the privilege of carrying on their names.

One of my grandfathers was close to me most of my life and I was solidly connected to him.  My other grandfather was an unknown entity to me most of my life.  But through spirit communication, meditation, research and some legwork, I feel connected to him very strongly as well.  Through both of these connections, I realize that I am indeed connected to the All of Creation, and have real relationships with those who have come and gone before me.  As are we All…

On this Veterans Day, I wish for all of us, and especially our Veterans, peace in our hearts and minds.

Kenneth Charles Sanborn