Six years old, getting ready to move to the Philippines, and I would have told a policeman, “We live in Chattanooga.”

“What street, kid?”

“Next to Mamaw’s house.”

“What’s your mamaw’s name?”

“Mamaw.”

Pow! Straight to the orphanage, where I would learn the matron’s full name or be sent to bed without dinner.

I don’t think I was dumb — else I would have ended up with fewer shoes in my closet than I counted this morning.

But Mountain View Circle in Flintstone, Georgia was an unexpected address when my Aunt Jess invited me and Linda to come for a visit.

I had been married ten years, earned two college degrees, and never once had it occurred to me that my people would be curious to know what I’d done with myself.

In fact, I barely knew my own brother — although I have an excuse for that.

Mike was nine years older. We didn’t connect until I was in my fifties and he in his sixties.

We had grown up in different decades, scattered to the winds, and did not circle around until the sun started to set.

That was when I learned how hard our natural father’s death was — on him and our mother — and why I remember so little of those days.

Except for being stung on the nose by a bumblebee when I was four, I do not have a childhood trauma index to use as a cross-reference to commonplace events.

Mom and Mike made sure of it.

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Would you trust that kid to keep his mouth shut?

No. Not in a million years. If I overheard someone say, “Have you met so-and-so’s querida?”, I would soon receive instructions not to repeat the conversation.

I would ask what a ‘querida’ was. Then I would ask what a ‘mistress’ was. Then I would ask what it cost to rent an apartment in Escolta.

It was usually too hot to dress up. Folks did it anyway.

Alan Maury Razovsky’s 8mm Travelogue — Volume 1

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The ghost of Spain remained, almost four hundred years’ worth. And then forty years as a commonwealth of the United States, enough to establish English as a prevailing second language.

Not to forget the Church, looming in the background like a welcoming aunt. Even if you’re not Austral-malay-nesian-something-something, who knows — you could be Catholic.

Manila was a great place for us to be.

YouTube — Manila 1958

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Electric companies are among the largest of all industrial enterprises. The product is manufactured by the Generation division. Delivery is carried out by Transmission and Distribution. Alan Razovsky’s job was Manager of T & D.

Draw a box around the power plant. Assign someone to be in charge of everything else. Mission. Apparatus. Logistics. Staffing. The big part. The spread-out part. For workers, the dangerous part.

Linemen were paying the price for inadequate tools. Dad’s assignment was to build out the infrastructure. His personal mission would be to serve the workforce, and in doing so, save their lives.

By the end of his tenure, Meralco would be a reliable power utility, operating with first-class line service equipment and a model safety program.

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The door was not locked. I almost fell out.

That’s the kind of stuff kids remember. Grade school not so much, although there is evidence I attended.

Everyone in this photo has an interesting story to tell. Most, but not all, were foreign nationals and of these, not all from the United States.

Many of the parents were in-country on temporary assignments. Others had resided in the Philippines for decades. A few of the families were Philippine citizens, firmly established but not necessarily Filipino.

There were said to be fifty-thousand Americans living in and around Manila when I was there. Military kids typically attended school on base. There were other private schools, including Catholic institutions, teaching classes in English.

Mail-order home-school academies were an option. My classmates and I were not the only world-traveling second-graders in town.

The chemistry teacher was German. The music teacher was Russian. Everyone in our circle, including my parents, were swash-bucklers, each in their own way.

Top left: Carolyn Razovsky, my stepsister. Top middle: Mike Dyer, my brother.

Bottom left: Mom. Bottom middle: Dad. Bottom right: Mrs. LeDoux, next door neighbor.

In 1948, Tyler Norton moved from Oakland, CA to take a job in the Philippines, where he met a girl from La Jolla, CA. Today I learned from an obituary that Jody’s dad was a gold mining engineer. She was born in the Philippines, and interned with her parents at Santo Tomas during the war.

I always thought Ty was the main event. Turned out it was Jody.

Pete Thauwald lost both legs below the knees in combat. He walked with a limp, and played golf from the ladies' tee, but you would not have known he wore prosthetics.

Assigned the postwar task of dumping U.S. military equipment in Manila Bay, USN Commander Byron Huie was rumored to have diverted inventory into the black market — which may explain how he became a pivotal figure in Philippine maritime operations.

Adventurers. Captains of industry. Deal-makers. Diplomats. Soldiers. Spies. Entrepreneurs. Rascals. Romeos. Workers. Parents. Church-goers. Sophisticates. Philosophers. Artists. Athletes.

It was a variety show, the likes of which I will never see again.

References

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/131841679/peter-jerome-thauwald

https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar///USN/rep/Normandy/Salvage-Huie.html

https://www.histclo.com/essay/war/ww2/pow/jap/camp/phl/jpp-camp.html

https://mdjuan.com.ph/

https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/lajollalight/name/tyler-norton-obituary?id=20930301

https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/lajollalight/name/josephine-norton-obituary?id=37797539

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The only way I know we stayed at the Bay View for more than a month is a memory of my birthday celebration in the hotel restaurant. I had never tasted frozen dairy, and misunderstood my parents to say it was Manila ice cream.

I heard that story long into adulthood — and if I had asked, “What happened then?'“ I might be able to write about it.

Mom passed away in 2005, at the age of 85. Today, I had to look up the history of San Lorenzo Village, where I lived for almost thirteen years. It’s an embarrassment. I have no idea what was going on with me, but I’m pretty sure it was not traumatic.

We moved into a house — I’m sure about that. There was only one air conditioner, in my parents’ bedroom. The Philippines is tropical. It was, at times, uncomfortably hot where I slept.

We had two house servants. They lived in a tiny room in the back.

Our driver, Leno Lenore, stayed with us until taking a job in the meter repair department at the Manila Electric Company, where Dad was manager of transmission and distribution.

That was around 1960. Leno’s daughter found my website about twenty years ago. We exchanged pleasantries. I could have asked questions. I did not. The only reason I knew he had a family is because he went home every night.

Yes, I could have been more curious. On the flip side, I don’t worry a lot. Perhaps I was living in the moment, carefree.

My amah, Lucina de Llacuna, stayed in the household until Mom and Dad left Manila. She was a sweet, strong lady. We used to speak Tagalog in front of my parents so they wouldn’t know a) she was scolding me, and b) what it was about.

Dad left her with a pension. I could have cashed it in after she passed away, but her family was drawing on it. I hope they still are.

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In the 1930s, the Razovsky family moved to Dallas, where Albert started a manufacturing business. Youngest son Alan went to U-Texas Austin, something I never knew about him until I found this. He earned a masters in engineering. I never knew that, either.

Norma Jean Roberts Dyer, circa 1945, with my brother. Frank Dyer was 26, home from the war. Mom was 25. Mike was 4.

They built a house with their own hands. Curiously, I was in my twenties before I learned we had lived in Georgia. I suppose that’s how important Chattanooga was in the scheme of things.

In 1950, Benjamin Franklin Dyer took his last breath on the other side of that window in the middle. He was 31. Mom was 30. Mike was 9. I was an infant.

My natural father had a $5,000 life insurance policy. The agent said he’d fallen behind on payments, a lie he repeated many times over until getting caught, years later.

In the meantime, Mom was a widow with 2 sons to support. She went to work at Tennessee Valley Authority, and eventually started dating an electrical engineer named Alan Razovsky who, in the winter of 1955, told her a story harkening back to his college days in the 1930s.

There were 12 Jews on campus at U-Texas Austin. They stayed in touch. One of these fellows ended up in banking, where he heard about a job opening at the Manila Electric Company.

My soon-to-be stepfather had gone to New York for an interview. He told Mom, “I’m taking you and the boys to the Philippines.”

She used to say I was excited to get a dad, but I’m sure I had no idea what was happening. Looking back, I doubt any of us did.

Wedding day. 1956.

Honeymoon. Atlanta

Hawaii. Mid-journey, with a local guide who I still remember, 70 years later. (Yes, the lady was that sweet.)

Dewey Boulevard. Manila Bay. January 1956, from our upper-floor lodging at the Bay View Hotel.

My brother Mike, 14, and newly-appointed stepsister Carolyn, 13, were finishing out school years in the States. They would not join us until May.

It was just the 3 of us. We celebrated my 6th birthday in the cafe at the Bay View. Never having tasted frozen dairy, I didn’t know the word ‘vanilla’. I called it ‘Manila ice cream’.

That’s how tight things were before Alan Razovsky came into our lives.

Johndyerwrites.com #expatlife #philippines #history #1950s

My natural father, Signalman Benjamin Franklin Dyer, United States Navy, the South Pacific, circa 1944.

He died in July 1950, heart stopped by a stray current traveling between an electric stove and a washing machine, in our kitchen on Mountain View Circle in Flintstone Georgia, far from the battlefield. I was 5 months old. My brother Mike was 9.

I have a USN semaphore flag, my paternal grandfather’s shotgun, a war trophy Japanese rifle, an engineering handbook printed in 1934 — but I never knew Frank Dyer.

He was, by all accounts, a prince of a man. My mother did not share the story of his passing until I was 10. My brother never spoke of it until long after we were both grown men.

And there was no opportunity to hear about it elsewhere. Mom remarried shortly before my 6^th birthday. Days later, we moved overseas, away from everyone who might have been able to tell me about my people and myself.

Manila, 1956, was something of a clean-slate event. If you have a minute, I'll tell you how it worked out.

Johndyerwrites.com #expatlife #philippines #history #1950s