Mystery in a Box
In June of 2019 my niece, “K”, who has lived on the East Coast for 40 years, got an Instagram message that said:
“I have found some things in a box in an old barn that I think may belong to your mother. There are pictures and papers and they talk a lot about you and your family.”
K’s mother, my younger sister Meg, had lived on the West Coast her whole life and had died in Oregon twenty years ago.
The message was strange. K was perplexed and unsure.
It came from someone who she didn’t know, from some place unknown, it knew her full name, and her mother Meg’s full name, and it wanted to establish contact. It also had information about places they had lived. The message asked her to call him.
She didn’t. She called me.
I asked her to tell him to call or email either me or her father. In no circumstances was she to give him any information or call him. He could well be a predator! We heard nothing.
Last November, 2019, my niece K. joined much of the family in Chico to celebrate Thanksgiving. We were sitting at Amber’s house, sipping a fruity Oregon Pinot, when K said:
“Oh Uncle Gerry, you remember that guy who said he had a box with pictures? He just posted some of them on Instagram. I don’t know who the people are. ”
WOW! We had pretty much the whole family there and we gathered around.We pulled up the instagram site with a bit of an off putting handle #Angry Logger
Angry anything is somewhat concerning….an “Angry Guy with axes and chainsaws” is slightly more troubling, especially when he has your family’s information.
We pulled up Angry Logger’s Instagram site and I saw this picture:
I was stunned!
There were my mother and father, in a old picture I had never seen before, a half a century ago, in a land far, far away. I really couldn’t understand it.
I felt like I was the keeper of the photos and the memories in my family, yet here was a wonderfully composed picture, rich with visual texture and complexity, somewhat mysterious. exotic and evocative. Yet, it was totally new to me. And whats more when I turned the picture over there was both my father’s and my mother’s writing – as familiar to me as if she was there sitting next to me.
Who was this guy who reached out of the ether, with a story of finding a box in an old barn, stuffed in with old papers and junk? Who was this Angry Logger? Where did he live? What was he up to? And was he dangerous? Why was he posting pictures of my mother on his site?
Below the picture, in standard Instagram format, was a beautifully written, insightful, and eerily accurate musing. Here is what Angry Logger wrote about his posted picture:
“This is a departure from the types of things I normally post here. As a photographer I can tell you, none of the people in this photo understood the value an image like this might have to future generations.
On the surface it’s a simple composition of a group of friends out for a walk in the park on any random weekend.
Things take a lovely turn when you look at the back of the photo and you see that someone took the time to annotate the following: “Ken Roku Park, Kanazawa, Japan December -1946”.
These people were making history. Note the military uniforms. These folks were amongst the first Americans in Japan as families after World War II. They were occupiers in a sense, yet they felt it safe enough and comfortable enough to bring their wives to a very foreign land, with a very different culture and not a lot of the comforts and resources of home.
This speaks volumes of the kind of people they were and the kind of people the Japanese are.
As a military dependant and years later as a young man who spent a significant piece of his life living and working in Japan I owe them all debt of gratitude and respect for building a beautiful relationship out of some of the most inhumane acts of modern times.All that from a photo I found cleaning out my barn.”
Well, here is the story of the picture:
That is my mother Phyllis Wood Greeve, in the light colored raincoat, in the center. On her left, my father Col. Gerald Greeve. Dad was Adjutant of the 8th US Army. The 8th was the occupying army of Japan from August 1945 until 1952. Dad was also the “Secretary of the General Staff” for Lt. Gen. Robert Eichelberger who was head of the Eight Army. I believe the military man and woman on my mother’s right are Colonel and Mrs. Connelly who were Mom and Dads’ great friends. They were pals again after Japan in Washington DC.
My father had left for the Pacific War in May 1944 as acting head of the 8th Army as he took them across the continent from Camp Croft, South Carolina, to San Francisco, then on to New Guinea where they entered combat against the Japanese. After fighting up through the Philippines, Dad accompanied General Eichelberger to Tokyo sometime after August 30th and the formal surrender on the Battleship Missouri on September 2.
I was born in February 1945. My father did not see me until December 1945 when he returned to Philadelphia. There he gathered Phyllis, my older sister, Kaywood, and me, and again trained across the continent, this time to Seattle, where we embarked on a troop ship, converted for some families and, via Hawaii, made our way to our new home in Yokohama. We lived there for 2 or 3 years, in a lovely house in the hills that once belonged to a senior official of the Kenpeitai.
In his position Dad was also “Chief of Protocol” and had a complete, furnished, Pullman like sleeping car-railroad train at his disposal for squiring visiting dignitaries like Eleanor Roosevelt and Dorothy Malone around Japan. When there were no formal events, Dad and Mom and their buddies would pack up and travel all over Japan. This scene was certainly on one of those trips.
The picture is taken at KenRoku-en in Kanazawa. It is one of the “Three Great Gardens” and sits near the Sea of Japan on Honshu Island. People wait their whole lives to make a pilgrimage to it. Margo and I spent a wonderful day in this park in 2014 and, God willing, will return there this April. We will look for the rock and the lantern.
AngryLogger had gotten it absolutely right!
AngryLogger had also posted this picture:
It is of K’s mother; my younger sister Meg – taken in my parents bedroom in Menlo Park California in 1964 – she is going to a high school dance I had never seen this.
We sat in my nephew’s living room in Chico getting ready for Thanksgiving amazed and confused. These were intimate and special family things. We all agreed, some how, some way they must be Meg’s but how had AngryLogger gotten hold of them.
So what was the story on the mysterious box he found? Who was he? Where was he?
AngryLogger is a fine man named Jason…He lives a while north of Vancouver, Washington on a five acre farm. He is a master craftsman who collects and keeps fine wood for decades and then makes beautiful hand made furniture of it. He was a war photographer who has spent many, many months in the combat zones of Asia. He is also a professional commercial photographer. He also is a computer system analyst and travels all over the USA. He has two young boys who seem very lively. He may be a spy..who knows? I’ve met several.
Jason’s Tale:
Margo and I made contact with the gracious and thoughtful man who contacted K those months before and posted the pictures on his site. We met in a parking lot near the Portland airport. He had two large decrepit cardboard boxes which had belonged to my sister Meg.
A few years ago Jason had bought his small farm from a couple. It was not in great shape and he and his boys have been fixing it up gradually. As he cleaned out the old barn he came across the boxes. Gradually he pawed through them. They were damp and encrusted with dirt. Many documents were stuck together. There was a small doll. There were many many pictures. There were some pens. Also masses of paper – many of them bills and papers from various business. There were some notes and letters. Several names came up but the names which came up most were my sister’s and her daughter’s. K and Meg. There were seemingly hundreds of photos – pictures of naked babies and people partying, pictures in Europe, snapshots of people sailing, old pictures of old people at least 100 years ago.
As Jason went through them one thing struck him most: these old pieces of paper probably had great meaning to someone, somewhere. These were looks at numerous folks that their friends or relatives might have never seen. They were happy times and adventuresome time. They were of families and lovers. Someone probably would like to look. Someone should have them.
So the AngryLogger, went on a quest to find K. And here we succeeded in closing that quest at PDX. last December.
I asked Jason how he thought the boxes ended up in that barn. He and I chewed over a few theories. My conclusion was that my sister had taken refuge up with the people who had owned the farm and from whom Jason had purchased it. My sister had been an acute alcoholic and was often destitute. She had been in and out of many half way houses and detox homes. At one of them she had met one of the farm owners, who themselves, according to Jason, may have had addiction issues. She had gone up to their farm for a while with her few possessions in a box and either forgot them when she left or intended to return to get them but ran out of time.
Meg was one who was not only lovely and fun but also was an optimist with a great love of life. She had come crossways with the “Wood Girls” affliction – booze. But maybe she knew we would someday come across a nice guy with stalwart ethics, who does what he says he’ll do and he’d take care of getting her few remaining treasures back to those who loved her. That guy is AngryLogger.
I spent the Christmas weeks in my Pearl District apartment with Margo – she decorated the tree, I went through the boxes. I recovered more than 300 pictures from my sisters life. There were scenes of us sailing the Med, there were at least 100 shots of K, and her dad, her uncle, and her grandparents. There were shots of our older sister Kaywood and Sean and Christy and Phyllis and Gerry Senior, and Waynette and Fran and Nick and Jen, and the Wood sisters. I cleaned them and packed them and sent most off to K. I am having copies made of some of the old ones and the ones from the sailing trip to Elba I’ll make into a book. It was a wonderful Christmas.
The original picture of Phyllis and Gerry Sr., taken in Kenroku-en, with her note on the back, I will take to Japan in April. I will carry it up to the garden and see if the people there can help me find that big rock and the big stone lantern. Margo and I will try and get on the stone for the pose. But it probably is not allowed these days so we will take a picture of it in its green glory and send it to Jason, the AngryLogger, to whom we owe so much.
gerrythetravelhund 