No Ordinary Joes (46 page)

He also held no negative thoughts regarding his treatment by the Navy. “I receive a generous pension and benefits,” he said. “I had a wonderful career in the Navy, and when I retired they honored me with a special ceremony. Men whom I’d served with all wore dress whites and formed an arc with crossed swords. It was very emotional.”

He disagreed with his shipmates who felt the U.S. government had
not done enough in pursuing the Japanese companies that used brutal and exploitive practices in building postwar fortunes on the slave labor of American POWs. “That’s another one I had to let go,” he acknowledged. “I could go nuts thinking about all the injustice.”

When asked about Captain Fitzgerald, his tone and posture shifted. He sat up straight behind the wheel. “It’s easy for all the Monday morning quarterbacks to question the captain’s decisions that led to our capture, but that doesn’t change a thing as far as I’m concerned,” he said, his voice now choked with emotion. “That man was as fine a captain as I ever met. Nobody endured more punishment than he did. It was inhuman. As far as I’m concerned, he deserves the Congressional Medal of Honor.”

As we reached the outskirts of Austin, the topic changed again, this time to his fight with Trigg in prison camp. The more he talked about it, the more worked up he got, his tone and voice peeling away the years and the Christian tolerance he’d been espousing a few minutes earlier. “He was a sonuvabitch,” he concluded.

Trigg stayed in the Navy after the war, eventually receiving a dishonorable discharge when he was caught stealing morphine from a base hospital. After that he moved to Dallas, found religion, and became a Baptist minister. In the early 1990s he was diagnosed with terminal cancer and moved to Austin, his hometown, to be with a daughter. He’d heard that Tim lived in town and called him.

“It was a surprise to get a call from him,” said Tim. “He told me he was a changed man and had been for a long time. He’d confessed his sins and accepted Christ as his personal savior. I told him what a wonderful thing that was. He admitted what he’d done in camp and apologized. I asked if I could take him out to lunch and he said yes. But when I called back a couple days later, his daughter told me he’d passed. I was sorry I didn’t get to see him.”

Tim waved a greeting to an acquaintance as he entered his favorite lunch spot, Rudy’s “Country Store” & Bar-B-Q. Located a few blocks from his office, Rudy’s is famous for its collegial atmosphere, friendly staff, and big
slabs of beef served on butcher paper and in Coke crates. Tim ordered the brisket.

“By golly, this is the best brisket in the good ol’ U.S. of A.,” he informed a lady standing behind him.

Sliding his tray down to the young woman at the cashier’s stand, he gave her a wink. “Dad gum it, y’all must have the prettiest smile in Texas,” he said, handing her a twenty. “Keep the change and buy yourself something frilly.”

Known by his friends as a terminal flirt, he carried his lunch to one of the communal picnic tables and offered a greeting to anyone within range.

Taking a sip of his iced tea, he scanned the room, looking for familiar faces, and spotted a local car dealer. He shouted a greeting across the room. “He’s a good man,” he said, pointing toward him. “A deacon at our church.”

The Baptist Church had become a large part of Tim’s life. It had been when he was a child growing up in Lubbock, but in the years following the war when he fell into the clutches of alcohol, he strayed from the church and his own moral code. In 1977, when he was fifty-three, he finally hit bottom after a long binge. He quit drinking, and hadn’t touched a drop in thirty years.

In his sobriety, he turned more to the church. It wasn’t that he just showed up every Sunday to pray—he became involved in a variety of community projects: he donated money; he gave the church two houses; he set up a scholarship fund for disadvantaged students; he mentored. Although he claimed not to impose his religious beliefs on others—“I’m no Holy Joe; I try to let my actions speak for me”—he certainly took to heart one of the basic tenets of the Baptist religion as stated in Mark 16:15:
“Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.”

In the past twenty years, he had given countless motivational speeches at business conferences, seminars, conventions, and schools. His most often delivered speech was titled “One Moment of Glory—Then What?”

“I believe that if you don’t believe in God and a future existence, then you are bound for hell,” he asserted, taking a last bite of brisket. “I guess
that’s what helps me behave better as an adult. I’m dumbfounded by people who are agnostic. Where do they go when they need a higher voice to tell them what to do? Like Bob Palmer. Every time I saw him after the war, he seemed so disconnected, not just to the people around him but to any sense of life and spiritual guidance.”

It was this moral rectitude that directed him to seek out Doug Graham, one of his former crewmates on the
Trout
, the sub that had transported the Philippine treasure to safety. For fifty years he held the memory of Graham taking coins out of one of the bags of silver and slipping them into his pocket. When Tim learned that Graham now lived in Houston, he tracked him down and called him to tell him he didn’t think what he did was right.

“He admitted that he’d done it, but told me he’d given the coins to his daughter,” said Tim. “He said he’d call her and get the coins back, and then mail them to me. I would donate them to the museum in Fredericksburg. Well, I waited and waited, and he never sent them to me. Guess that’s something he’ll have to deal with on Judgment Day.”

Tim McCoy Jr., Tim’s younger son and the CEO of NEAT, sat behind the desk in his office. In comparison to his father, he is far more laid back. A small framed picture of his older brother Chuck hung on the wall behind him.

“I’m sure it was my dad’s faith that allowed him to get through what happened to my brother,” he said. “He was devastated.”

Chuck died in 1994 at the age of forty-seven. The cause of death was listed as a heart attack, although friends of the family have sometimes wondered if there wasn’t something else involved. At the time, Chuck was going through some difficulties—a divorce, business failure, and dependence on alcohol and prescription drugs. Years earlier, Tim Sr. had gotten him involved in NEAT, but that didn’t work out. Then he loaned him the capital to start his own business, McCoy’s Lawn Equipment, but the shop hemorrhaged money.

Maybe the father had pushed the son too hard for too many years, some people speculated, and in the end the stress of trying to live up to a
war hero/self-made millionaire father just caught up with him. By Tim Jr.’s account, Chuck was never quite able to meet his father’s high standards. In high school, Chuck challenged his dad to a footrace and lost. As a young adult he got into drugs, a vice few parents from Tim’s generation could understand. The more Chuck’s personal life fell into disrepair, the greater the tension between them.

“My brother and I had a good childhood,” said Tim Jr. “Yes, Dad was a disciplinarian and pretty strict. But really, there weren’t many tough times. At the time [of Chuck’s death] he didn’t really go into a deep, dark depression. His faith got him through, and he also threw himself into his work. He never took a day off. He stayed focused, pouring himself into his job rather than sitting at home and dwelling on it.”

Tim Jr. has had a good relationship with his father. “For a long time I felt like I lived in his shadow, especially here at work,” he explained. “But he’s let me come into my own. Now I feel like I stand in his light. He’s been one hell of a mentor.

“I think one of the things that helped me through some of the tough times is that I have hobbies. I play golf and I’ve played guitar in rock ’n’ roll bands around town. Dad’s even come to see me play. But he doesn’t have any hobbies of his own. It’s work and being with my mom. Well, I guess you could count the church as a hobby. And he’s been a Mason for over fifty years.”

Perhaps it was the lack of a physical outlet that contributed to Tim’s health issues after his son’s death. He suffered a case of vertigo, and on a business trip to Chicago he had an anxiety attack and had to get off an airplane just before it took off. But with each setback, he fell back on his faith to help him through.

“There are quite a few sides to his personality,” Tim Jr. continued. “He can be gruff, giving to a fault, or deeply religious. And he’s definitely a big teaser, especially with his grandkids. He’s a fantastic grandparent, very involved in those kids’ lives. He likes to take them on trips with him—it
could be to the zoo in San Antonio or snorkeling in Hawaii. He’s a big hugger. But maybe the thing I notice most about my dad is that he’s really mellowed out. Maybe it was my brother’s death, or maybe it’s just age, but he is definitely a lot calmer.”

Maureen Bright, or Mo as she’s known to friends, has an office down the hall from Tim Sr. She has worked for him for over twenty years, starting as a secretary and working her way up to senior VP. Outside of his family, probably nobody knows him better, although in some ways they are very different. She speaks with a British accent; he has a thick Texas drawl. She’s divorced; he’s been married for over sixty years. He was a vigorous George W. Bush supporter; she thought Bush was “a fool.” But over the years, they have forged a deep mutual respect.

“He’s an up-front kind of guy,” she said. “Honest. Full of integrity. Big heart. Levelheaded. Great family man, completely devoted to his wife. Just an all-around nice guy. As a boss, he was demanding. Very no-nonsense, very forceful. He ran the business like a ship. Everything had to be tidy and shipshape. He’d walk around picking up staples off desks. He couldn’t tolerate clutter. And he wanted it done yesterday. He also can’t tolerate people being late. He fired his own grandson because the kid thought he could keep getting away with showing up late. Yes, he was tough, but he always treated his employees really well, although he kept a professional distance.

“He’s as generous as anyone I know. I’ve watched him loan employees money. He bought one man a set of dentures. And I can’t even begin to estimate how much he’s given to the church. He bought new Dell computers for the office and gave all the old ones to the church. He set up a foundation. And it’s not just money he gives. It’s also his time and energy.”

For all the success and money Tim earned in business, he also suffered setbacks. In the late 1980s, his company encountered significant financial problems. He lost his office, agents, just about everything. But he converted the bottom half of the split-level house in which he was living at the time into office space. He didn’t draw a salary for over a year, getting
by on his Navy pension. He and Mo diligently worked the phones and sent out mailers, and in time they rescued the business and built it back up bigger than ever.

“I think his attitude during that difficult time and with the loss of his son was that if he could survive being a POW, he could get through anything,” Mo concluded.

Tim steered his customized van into the driveway of his million-dollar home in an Austin suburb and flipped a switch under the dash, activating a lift for the side rear door. He hurried around the car and waited for the lift to fall into place, then stepped into the van to lend a hand to Jean. Since being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in the mid-1990s, she has been confined to a wheelchair. During that time, Tim has dedicated his life to providing her care—shopping, running errands, making sure she gets to lead as full a life as possible. It’s payback, he said, for all the years she took care of him. On this evening, they had just returned from dining out at a local steakhouse, Tim working the room like he was the newly elected mayor—a wave, a slap on the back, a quick visit to a table of suits, with Jean smiling all the while, well accustomed to her husband’s big-as-Texas style.

He followed her motorized wheelchair into the house and pushed the button to the elevator he’d had installed to make it easier for her to navigate the large house. As she headed upstairs, he walked to his office, a room with an expansive view of the rolling mesquite hills to the south. If this office was a testimonial to the life he had led, with plaques and pictures of his careers in the Navy and insurance, one memento stood out—a framed, handwritten letter to him from Chuck, written a couple of months before he died. Its last sentences read: “You’ve always been there for me, Dad, even through the hard times. Thanks. I love you.”

E
ighty-one-year-old Bob Palmer sat in an easy chair in the living room of his modest home in Ocean Pines, Maryland. Slowly, arduously, he got up to get himself a drink of water, his breathing labored. His body might have been a little wobbly, but his mental acuity was still sharp.

“When Barbara and I drove up to Reno after I got back from the war,” he said, sitting back down, “I thought we would get back together, especially after we spent that night dancing to ‘The Anniversary Waltz’ and making love. Didn’t work out that way.”

He stared wistfully off into space, thinking of what might have been if the love of his life hadn’t deserted him. Dressed in slacks and a white golf shirt, he was still a handsome man despite his failing health, with clear blue eyes and a thick shock of silver white hair. Peeking out just beneath the right sleeve of his shirt was a tattoo of a sailing ship riding the waves of a red reef. He got it back when tattoos were the province only of military men and convicted crooks.

“I was a little drunk when I got it,” he admitted. “Okay, I was real drunk.”

Bob regained his physical health after the war and decided to make a career of the Navy. His mental health slowly rebounded, too, although rarely an hour went by that he didn’t think about Barbara, who married Robert Kunhardt on March 2, 1946. His primary coping mechanism was alcohol.

In late 1947, while stationed at Treasure Island in the Bay Area, he met Jean Towne, a divorcée who worked as a secretary in the same naval office he did. She did little to hide the fact that she was looking for a husband. She wore her reddish-brown hair in pigtails and had a personality 180 degrees away from Barbara’s. Spirited and independent, she loved sports, especially baseball; she had worked as an usherette at Seals Stadium in San Francisco for the city’s Pacific Coast League team and liked to boast of seeing Joe DiMaggio before he got famous. Her quick temper and sassy mouth often got her in trouble. On a previous job when she was told to take her hair out of pigtails, she responded by telling her boss to “kiss my ass” and walked off the job.