I’ve been honing a poem about my father for well over ten years, and I think it’s time to share it. The Korean War has been in the news lately because of the return of Donald Born, 71 years after he went missing in that conflict. I put the WGAL news clip below. It reminded me of Dad.
The poem is as much about his mother, Florence Dartt Becker, as it is him. An only child, he was given her surname as his first. An odd one, to be sure, but beloved by those who knew him as a one-of-a-kind dude. I got Dartt as a middle name and so did my son William.
I’ve also written a small reflection below about my Dad’s Navy tour of duty that inspired the poem.1
The Saipan Lying on a sheet, stripped to his boxers, Dartt felt the sweat pooling on his sternum. He rubbed his toes on a cold water pipe that ran through the berths of The USS Saipan. He dreamt of Jeanne, his new wife from the wrong town and tried to push out his mother’s scrutiny. He thought of his young dad Ken laying ties in the west As the dark sea rocked him to sleep. Back in Watsontown, Florence Dartt gardened, ruefully turning over weeds among her lupines. Kenny brought her a sweaty glass of iced tea with lemon. Downtown, Jeanne sat on a stickleback chair, anxious.
Wartime Service
Dad’s longest tour of duty embarked just after he and Mom were married in 1951, and he was on boat for 16 months. One of my brothers still has the globe on which he traced his voyage around the world from Norfolk to places like Torquay, Hawaii, and the Philippines.
He saw no fighting, but he did witness a host of phenomena that affected the small town boy for life:
A playful school of dolphins racing beside the ship for hours and miles.
An initiation ritual that involved crawling through mess garbage and getting doused by fire hoses.2
A tattoo on his upper left arm, acquired long before any of my children sat under the needle: an anchor emblazoned with “Dartt.”
That Odd Name
Folks up in Wellsboro, PA still recognize its prominence. Albert P. Dartt and his three brothers were ambitious entrepreneurs of the PA wilds, leaving a family burial plot that sits along The Dartt Settlement Road.
The Dartt Carriage Works eventually became a longstanding Ford dealership and garage in town. The building still stands and creates strange longings in me. One day, maybe, this Dartt will buy it back. I know exactly what I’d do with it, and you can read about that somewhere in my book, Good Posture. Happy hunting!
It seems Kenny, as we knew him, “married up” slightly. Grandma Florence was not only a Dartt, she also attended Elmira College. She was the only other undergraduate in our extended family until I went to Bloomsburg University in 1980. Ken grew up in a farming household that eventually pivoted into dry goods.
And that’s a story I’ll pick up in my next column when I consider signs of life in my own hometown of Watsontown, the spot on the map Kenny and Grandma chose for their own five-and-dime store.
Becky’s father, W. Frank Johnson, was three years younger than Dartt. He served in the Army on a peace-keeping mission on the ground in Korea.
I recently discovered an 8mm film he captured of this manly ritual, in full color. I’m quite sure the content was not meant for public viewing!