Editorial: He's Still Not Home

My family has a box of aging relics that tells, if and when we want it to, the real story of war. With Veterans Day coming up, I decided to open this box. In it are the things pertaining to my father’s tour of Italy during World War II, the source of his undiagnosed, but now indisputable, PTSD. My siblings and I have, in recent years, become familiar with these relics and the events they represent in our father’s young life, and in ours. Let’s just say we were saddened and awed, or even stunned, by what we learned.

But there is another collection in the box, one that we have long put off for another time. After all, our questions about the subject of these relics were deflected throughout our childhood. It is, as it turns out, a rather complete collection of letters, photos, and documents pertaining to the uncle we never met, because he was, and still is, missing in action in or around Australia: our uncle John Myrle Long, who was our mother’s next-younger sibling and best beloved.

Son of an East Avenue grocer (delivery truck motto: “Hogan and Long, you can’t go wrong!” referring to both our and Mayor Shawn Hogan’s grandfathers), John was the second-born of our grandmother’s brood of seven. The family lived first on Depot Street, then at 45 Erie Avenue, three doors down from St. Ann’s, where all of them were baptized, educated, confirmed and married, and some buried, as well. John went on from Hornell High School to graduate from the University of Alabama and began working for International Harvester in Buffalo before entering the Army Air Corps. According to the IH company newsletter, John “was given a five-day furlough, arriving home Saturday, December 6, 1941. He had planned to be married the following Tuesday, but Sunday, the day following his arrival, was Pearl Harbor and he was ordered back to his post. They were married early Monday morning, and he left immediately. That was the last time he was home.” John’s bride, Winifred Rockwell, also of Hornell, never saw her husband again.

We grew up with only the scantest knowledge of our uncle: a black and white portrait of a young man who looked like the family in so many ways: our grandfather’s straight, slicked back hair; a nose much like my mother’s; pouty lips and puckered chin characteristic of certain of his aunts and uncles, and our aunts and uncles, and handed down to us as well. John was handsome, but not crazy about cameras, so none of the photos of him give much away. Nor did our mother’s silent tears as she stood rigid in Union Park dutifully watching her children in the Memorial Day parade, year after year, her own mother holed up in her apartment at Main and Erie, trying not to hear the screaming engines and rapid-fire reports of air-to-air combat that well-meaning trumpets and drums might inadvertently conjure up. Our uncle was a mystery to us, but his absence was not.

Now I have opened the box. Letters from John to his parents and to Winnie, describing his learning to fly, all the thrills and pride he felt, all the maneuvers and routines he had to quickly master. Letters to John from his siblings, aunts and uncles, and parents telling him all about Hornell news, with clips from the Evening Tribune—who got married, who enlisted—and small bits about the family’s goings-on. Really it’s a treasure trove of stories about their lives, and a lively portrait of John, so much of it in his own voice. I long to share this story of family love and Hornell history, but there’s too much. I will just close with my uncle’s words:

“Yesterday I was given the chance of going into Headquarters squadron as Operations Officer, which would relieve me of most of our eventual combat flying, but I turned it down. I just couldn’t bring myself to believe that I would be doing right, unless I flew with the rest of the men, and took my chances with them.”

It was his last letter. Lt. John Long was shot down on April 25, 1942. He’s still not home.