Africa.” Johnson, who left home at fourteen to work on a cattle boat, later became the first filmmaker to capture classic aerial scenes of giraffes and elephants stampeding across the African plains. My father watched Johnson’s movies by sneaking into the local drive-in movie theater on foot, but the closest he came to being Martin Johnson was a mail-order taxidermy course he took in high school that cost him $12 of his hard-earneddrugstore money. Completing his taxidermy assignments required walking up and down the rural roads of Ohio to find dead birds and animals. Dad enthusiastically ordered the accessories he needed to complete his projects—squirrel skulls and birds’ eyes—through catalogs, just as he would order his first gerbils more than twenty years later.
My father’s thorough understanding of animal physiology and anatomy would come in handy like when he was making his own mini-documentaries of gerbils suffering seizures in our Virginia garage. First, though, Dad had to escape the confines of Montgomery, Ohio.
Love led him to join the Navy. Dad’s high school sweetheart was a fair-skinned, blue-eyed beauty named Ann Lloyd, whom he called “Angel Eyes.” Ann and her family represented everything my dad longed to achieve. Ann’s father, John T. Lloyd, owned Lloyd Pharmaceutical Company, which had made it big with Chigger-Ease. Her grandfather, John Uri Lloyd, was not only a research chemist but also a best-selling novelist. The family owned a vacation home with an in-ground pool—a rarity in Ohio back then—and a horse stable.
Before their high school graduation, a friend suggested that my father go to West Point. Dad took this idea to heart: West Point offered horsemanship classes, and Dad was bent on convincing Ann that he was worthy of her. He knew horses were the way to her heart. At the time, however, West Point had no vacancies, so my father’s congressman nominated him to the Naval Academy instead.
Dad was admitted to Annapolis despite the fact that he couldn’t swim and had never even seen the ocean. The Navywasn’t in my father’s plans, but it was his ticket to adventure. He eagerly left Ohio and set forth to serve his country.
In return for his service, the Navy led him straight back to love. My mother’s older brother, Donald Keach, joined the Navy and met my father during the Korean War, when both were young officers on the USS
John R. Pierce
. When my uncle Don was injured by gunfire on the
Pierce
, it was my father who was sent to accompany him home to Maine, where Dad met my mother.
“It was love at first sight,” Dad still says, “just because of the way your mother looked up at me and laughed with those brown eyes.”
At the time, Mom was a senior at the University of Maine and dating several different men. “Those were the days when every girl had just one goal, and that was to get married,” she explained to me once. “Marriage was our very reason for being.”
Men in the military had a certain aura, she said, and Dad had seen enough of the world to seem confident and decisive. He also had a movie star’s height and lean physique, a strong jaw, blue eyes, and tight curls of sandy hair. To add to his appeal, after their first date, Dad went back to sea and wrote my mother “a drawerful of beautiful letters.” She had graduated from the university by then and was working for a Maine newspaper while deciding between job possibilities at the UN, Pan Am, and the BBC in London.
“If you want to see the world, I’ll show you the world,” Dad promised during his next shore duty—officially, their third date—and confessed that he’d been thinking of asking her to marry him.
“Well, are you going to ask or aren’t you?” my mother wanted to know.
Dad, forever the prepared Boy Scout, immediately pulled a little blue velvet bag out of his pocket and showed her the diamond inside it. “How do you want it set?” he asked.
“When I told him I wanted platinum,
My father’s thorough understanding of animal physiology and anatomy would come in handy like when he was making his own mini-documentaries of gerbils suffering seizures in our Virginia garage. First, though, Dad had to escape the confines of Montgomery, Ohio.
Love led him to join the Navy. Dad’s high school sweetheart was a fair-skinned, blue-eyed beauty named Ann Lloyd, whom he called “Angel Eyes.” Ann and her family represented everything my dad longed to achieve. Ann’s father, John T. Lloyd, owned Lloyd Pharmaceutical Company, which had made it big with Chigger-Ease. Her grandfather, John Uri Lloyd, was not only a research chemist but also a best-selling novelist. The family owned a vacation home with an in-ground pool—a rarity in Ohio back then—and a horse stable.
Before their high school graduation, a friend suggested that my father go to West Point. Dad took this idea to heart: West Point offered horsemanship classes, and Dad was bent on convincing Ann that he was worthy of her. He knew horses were the way to her heart. At the time, however, West Point had no vacancies, so my father’s congressman nominated him to the Naval Academy instead.
Dad was admitted to Annapolis despite the fact that he couldn’t swim and had never even seen the ocean. The Navywasn’t in my father’s plans, but it was his ticket to adventure. He eagerly left Ohio and set forth to serve his country.
In return for his service, the Navy led him straight back to love. My mother’s older brother, Donald Keach, joined the Navy and met my father during the Korean War, when both were young officers on the USS
John R. Pierce
. When my uncle Don was injured by gunfire on the
Pierce
, it was my father who was sent to accompany him home to Maine, where Dad met my mother.
“It was love at first sight,” Dad still says, “just because of the way your mother looked up at me and laughed with those brown eyes.”
At the time, Mom was a senior at the University of Maine and dating several different men. “Those were the days when every girl had just one goal, and that was to get married,” she explained to me once. “Marriage was our very reason for being.”
Men in the military had a certain aura, she said, and Dad had seen enough of the world to seem confident and decisive. He also had a movie star’s height and lean physique, a strong jaw, blue eyes, and tight curls of sandy hair. To add to his appeal, after their first date, Dad went back to sea and wrote my mother “a drawerful of beautiful letters.” She had graduated from the university by then and was working for a Maine newspaper while deciding between job possibilities at the UN, Pan Am, and the BBC in London.
“If you want to see the world, I’ll show you the world,” Dad promised during his next shore duty—officially, their third date—and confessed that he’d been thinking of asking her to marry him.
“Well, are you going to ask or aren’t you?” my mother wanted to know.
Dad, forever the prepared Boy Scout, immediately pulled a little blue velvet bag out of his pocket and showed her the diamond inside it. “How do you want it set?” he asked.
“When I told him I wanted platinum,
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