By Cornelia Read

Hi guys, I am reposting an entry I did for The Lipstick Chronicles blog on Saturday… this has been a hectic week–moved into new apartment, flew to Florida for a funeral the next day, now am in Syracuse visiting with my ex-inlaws, so I hope you’ll forgive me. Also, my Uncle Bill was an awesome guy, and I’d like to honor his memory twice…

I don’t call this post “Never a Dull Moment” because I expect there to be no dull moments while you’re reading it, because who can promise that, but because it is the Read family motto. I think I may have posted the mold of my grandfather’s crest ring here before, but hey, here it is again in case you missed it:

Just so you know I’m not kidding about the motto and everything.

I was thinking about it quite a bit this week, since–first of all–it was another kind of riotous week, in terms of basic Cornelia activities, and–second of all–because I just spent three days with a whole bunch of Reads.

This is because after moving in to my new apartment on Tuesday, which entailed getting up at six a.m., driving to Brooklyn, meeting the moving guys at the U-Haul storage place on Fourth Avenue in Park Slope, making sure the truck got loaded, driving back in to Manhattan, meeting the moving dudes here, and overseeing or whatever while they hauled all my shit up the four flights of stairs to my new apartment

and then driving back down to 157th street to my pal Muffin’s apartment where I’d been living for the last two weeks and packing up all my clothes and crap after the moving guys left (pause here to reflect that any person WITH an actual BRAIN would’ve done this the night BEFORE, so that the moving guys would’ve hauled the eight bags and one box of china up the four flights of stairs) and then hauled my eight bags and box of china up four flights of stairs by myself, and then buying some Chinese takeout for me and my kid–who was having a bit of a first-semester-of-college meltdown–I got up at six thirty a.m. the FOLLOWING morning and took the A train to 125th street and then the M60 bus out to LaGuardia and flew to West Palm Beach, because my very dear Uncle Bill Read died last Friday, and my sisters and I were going to his funeral.

Uncle Bill was the eldest of my father’s nine siblings. He was 93 years old. Two days before he died, he was hunting alligators on his wife’s family’s ranch near Immokalee. On Monday, his new wheelchair was arriving. He was not a wheelchair kind of guy, to put it mildly. So, he died peacefully in his sleep Friday morning instead.

Here is a picture of him when he was a little kid:

It was done in pastels. There used to be seven of these, of the oldest seven kids, hanging downstairs in my grandparents’ house in Purchase, New York. They’re all rather beautiful. Something about pastels makes the eyes very soft and wonderful.

He was named after his father and grandfather, both William Augustus Reads before him. Here’s a towel he had in Palm Beach:

I figure it has to be pretty old, since he hasn’t been a Junior since Grandaddy died in 1976, and somehow it just looks totally Twenties to me anyway.

Uncle Bill is the guy I got to go shooting with this summer on a ranch in Wyoming, which was pretty fucking awesome. He took me to his gun club, and I totally sucked at trap shooting, but then I did better when we did target shooting with pistols and a crossbow the next day, so he didn’t disown me or anything, and I felt slightly less ashamed.

This is a man who took shooting really, really seriously. And fishing. And being an honorable man. He was really nice, which is not often something one can say about people I’m related to, generally.

Also, he was kind of a hottie. Here’s a picture of him a while back, so you can see what I mean:

Yeah, right?

Here’s another one:

The Read brothers were damn good looking, and he was the best-looking of all of them, if you ask me. And quite possibly the nicest.

That second picture is of him in the Navy in World War II. In which he had some pretty amazing adventures. He was shot down in the Pacific and missing for almost two months, and ended up getting two purple hearts and a Navy Cross. I didn’t know before his funeral service that the Navy Cross is only topped by one medal if you’re in the sea services (Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard.) That would be the medal of honor.

Here’s a picture of some of his decorations. I’m sorry it’s sideways:

A Marine Corps general came to the funeral, and spoke, and presented the flag from his coffin to his daughter, my Cousin Edith. The Navy sent a sailor to play taps, and two to stand at either end of his coffin in the cemetery.

Here’s a short video of the latter guys (which pans around to one of the two cool cowboys who flew in from the ranch in Wyoming–AWESOME belt buckle):

 

 

The Marine Corps sent some guys to shoot off a salute. Which was awesome.

And the Navy also sent a bunch of planes that flew over the cemetery in formation. One of them peeled off and flew straight up trailing a stream of white smoke, then turned back and away. This is called the “Lost Man” formation, to signify the death of someone the Navy liked a lot. They sure liked Uncle Bill, and rightly so 

 

 

 

(added music… and I’m really happy I got the “lachrymosa” aligned with the planes… but check out how the little cloud at center left turns into a peace sign…. Looks good in full-page mode, because then the ad doesn’t cover the planes.)

 

Uncle Bill was shot down in the Pacific and stranded on an island with members of the crew of the plane for two months. With a compound fracture to his thigh from the second day on.

Nonetheless, he managed to drive a samurai-sword wielding Japanese soldier into the ocean by throwing coconuts at his head. The guy presumably died. If you’d like to read more details, check out this article from the U.S. Naval Institute, “Two Coconuts and a Navy Cross.” It’s pretty amazing:

Here is a closeup shot of his drawing of a Japanese plane getting shot down the next day over the island. The engine broke off and skidded up the beach and killed the man standing next to him, and really, really messed up Uncle Bill’s leg:

Here is the telegram that went out after he was rescued:

 

I asked him what it was like to be a bow-turret machine gunner in a glass ball on a Navy plane in the Pacific during World War II when I was in Wyoming last summer.

He said, “Well, I’ve always liked hunting, and the ammunition was free, and there was no bag limit.”

Here’s his drawing of the view from the turret:

He got a lot of Japanese planes:

Here he is sitting in front of my grandparents’ house, back in Purchase (probably before the war):

 

He’s sitting in the second row on the left with all his siblings, his parents, and his first wife, after they all got home safe from the war:

My dad was the baby brother–he’s sitting on the floor, in the white shirt.

Here’s Uncle Bill holding Cousin Edith, his daughter and the eldest of my generation. She’s a lovely,  remarkable woman in her own right:

And here is the service flag Grandmama Read had, during the war:

Her husband and six of their sons served. They all came home alive. That’s a goddamn miracle, if you ask me.

Here is Uncle Bill at age 92, or thereabouts, with a dead alligator:

Here he is with a twelve-foot alligator he shot last winter:

Here is his obituary from the NY Times (paid section…):

 

Never a dull moment indeed.

I am among many, many people who will miss this man dearly.

Requiescat in pace, Uncle Bill.