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Seized by the Sun
The Life and Disappearance of World War II Pilot Gertrude Tompkins
By James W. Ure Chicago Review Press Incorporated
Copyright © 2017 James W. Ure
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61373-590-9
CHAPTER 1
IT'S AWFUL HAVING A STUTTER
Nothing in Gertrude Tompkins's early life or upbringing would hint that this well-bred girl would grow up to fly fighter planes. She came from a wealthy family with roots deep in New Jersey's Hudson River villages. The Vreeland farm was settled around the year 1658 by Gertrude's Dutch ancestors on her father's side. Gertrude's mother, Laura Towar, was born in 1878 into the well-off Bentley and Towar families of Jersey City Heights, both involved in finance in New York City. Laura's grandfather, Thomas Towar, who died in 1903, had a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, an expensive position purchased by a privileged few.
As a child Laura yearned for adventure, and she confessed that once she had wanted to become a missionary in China. "She was very strong minded in some ways, but was brought up in a repressive era," Laura's daughter Elizabeth Tompkins Whittall recalled years later. "She had an easy life and was provided with servants all her life. Maybe she didn't feel useful. ... Mother was nervous and had poor eyesight. She had to drop out of school. She had what she called nervous headaches." This undercurrent of depression and anxiety would continue to surface in Laura in the years to come.
Gertrude's father, Vreeland Tompkins, was a graduate of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. In 1894, at age 23, Vreeland was working for John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company as a chemist. Because he stuttered badly, Vreeland was quiet and shy. He threw himself into his work. Each night he returned to his father's home at 533 Communipaw Avenue in Jersey City and in the basement puttered with chemical concoctions. Vreeland patented one of these mixtures. With a loan from his father he formed a company called Smooth-On to manufacture the compound, leaving Rockefeller's employment in 1895. Smooth-On Iron Cement was ideal for repairing leaks in cast iron and quickly became the industry standard for maintenance and repair. A contract with the US Navy for boiler repairs assured his fortune and the family's future. (Smooth-On Inc. is still in existence in Macungie, Pennsylvania, making molds and materials for a variety of applications, including special effects for motion pictures.)
It's uncertain how Vreeland Tompkins met the prettily freckled Laura Towar, but it is known that when he proposed to her in writing, she turned him down in writing. She felt she couldn't live with Vreeland's stuttering handicap. Later she changed her mind, and he agreed to leave his Dutch Reformed church to join her Episcopal church. They married on May 18, 1904, and purchased a three-story house at 113 Bentley Avenue in Jersey City. Its living room was big enough for their baby grand piano, which Laura loved to play. On the second floor were three bedrooms and two baths, one attached to the master bedroom.
Their first child, Stuart, died at birth, which tipped Laura into a lasting depression. "After she lost her first child, maybe it was just too much," her daughter Elizabeth later said. Life went on, and Margaret Tompkins arrived in 1906, blonde and bright-eyed. The witty Elizabeth was born in 1909. Gertrude, whose name in German means "strong spear," was born October 16, 1911. She was the last child born in the family.
From the beginning Gertrude had golden strands in her otherwise dark hair, a sure sign of her good fortune, her father said. To make certain the children were not spoiled, Vreeland and Laura maintained some distance from them. The parents were not demonstrative, leaving the care of the children to the servants. Vreeland and Laura routinely dined separately from their children.
By age four it was apparent that Gertrude was having difficulty with her speech. She had trouble getting her words out. Vreeland believed she must have inherited her stutter from him, and he felt both guilty and sorrowful.
Friends and family volunteered explanations for her stuttering. "It happened because you cut the child's hair before she said her first words," a relative insisted. "The child was frightened as a baby. Make her hold nutmeg under her tongue," suggested the family cook and nanny, Maggie. She and her husband, Thomas, who served as handyman, chauffeur, and gardener, occupied quarters on the third floor of the house.
Vreeland took a special interest in his youngest daughter. He had had difficulty being listened to when he was growing up. "S-s-someone else always said what I wanted to say long before I could get it out," he complained. He insisted that everyone patiently wait as young Gertrude shyly spoke.
Her father vowed to get her the help that he had never gotten for his own speech difficulties and decided to send her to a doctor in Jersey City who claimed he could cure stuttering. The doctor put Gertrude through a brief speech exercise, slapping her cheek each time she stumbled over a word.
"If we do this every time she stutters, she'll eventually stop," the doctor said over the crying of the little girl. "I'll need to see her three times a week."
Her father fled in outrage, Gertrude in tow.
Another doctor in New York City examined Gertrude and said her tongue was too short. He offered three devices guaranteed to cure stuttering. The first was made of silver, inserted in the mouth, and worn around the neck. The second was a narrow, flattened tube of silver that fit across the roof of the mouth. Finally, there was a disk with a projecting silver tube that was placed between the lips. They were to be alternated until the cure was complete.
Vreeland considered these gadgets and may have tried them with Gertrude. Being a skeptical inventor and lifelong stutterer, he didn't have much faith in them.
The next specialist they visited was James Sonnet Greene, medical director of the National Hospital for Speech Disorders in New York. Greene believed that stuttering was not a speech disorder but a nervous disorder. To Vreeland, this sounded too much like her mother Laura's mental illness, and he would not have his daughter branded as mentally deficient. As a stutterer himself, he felt this diagnosis reflected on his own mental health, and he was not prepared to accept this notion.
Then they found Samuel Potter, a medical doctor and also a stutterer. Following his guidelines, Gertrude spent two to three hours daily on breathing exercises and vowel-consonant practice. Vreeland patiently helped his daughter and hired a special nurse to provide the required therapy. Nothing seemed to work.
Despite the challenges that came with Gertrude's stuttering, she also experienced some joyful times as a child. She became close to the household's two live-in servants, Maggie and Thomas. They came from Virginia, and they held Gertrude and her sisters spellbound with their stories. Gertrude could sit for hours listening to Maggie's tales, and she watched with amusement as Thomas fell asleep in the middle of doing just about anything, including peeling potatoes. Her sister Elizabeth later wrote that the Tompkins girls never knew the last names of "this dear, sweet" couple.
Christmas brought excitement and joy that broke through the atmosphere of formality in the Tompkins household. After a breakfast the family trooped up the street to the home of the girls' grandmother Rosaline, Laura's mother. The living room door was closed, but through a crack they could see the glint of a bicycle or the wheel of a doll carriage. When the whole family was assembled according to age (youngest first), Laura played a march on the piano, and the children entered the room. Stockings were hung in a line across the marble fireplace. Only one gift was opened at a time. It was an hour of feverish excitement and fun for young Gertrude. After that, the family attended services at the Episcopal church.
Following a bountiful turkey dinner, they gathered in the parlor and played charades and word-guessing games. They also peered at Roman ruins through a stereopticon, a device that gave a three-dimensional appearance to specially printed photo cards. Christmas evening ended with a game of musical chairs, the family laughing and jostling for seats. On several Christmases, relatives of Thomas and Maggie joined them.
Gertrude became attuned to nuance, dialect, and lively expressions at a young age. Elizabeth noticed how Gertrude was able to repeat snatches of poems and songs without stuttering. Gertrude sang, "Things are seldom what they seem, skim milk masquerades as cream."
The family continued to search for stuttering cures. The book Stuttering and Lisping by Edward Wheeler Scripture had appeared in 1913. Using Scripture's guidelines, Gertrude was diagnosed by yet another doctor as having a type of stuttering caused by anxiety. Anxiety wasn't quite the same as Greene's "nervous disorder," and Vreeland could accept it because he knew from experience that stuttering and anxiety went hand in hand.
As part of Scripture's regimen, mild tonics of arsenic, quinine, and strychnine were given to little Gertrude. Many medicines of the day contained lethal as well as addictive ingredients. A nurse provided cold rubs, lukewarm or cold baths, sprays, moist packs, and massage. Gertrude was taken to Atlantic City for sea baths.
Despite some moments of joyful respite, the constant rounds of doctors and treatments during her youth made young Gertrude unhappy, everyone in the family agreed.
CHAPTER 2
CHILDHOOD UPS AND DOWNS
Jersey City is home to the Bergen School for Girls, founded by Gertrude's grandmother Rosaline Bentley Towar and several of her civic-minded friends back in the 1870s. There was no question where Gertrude would be educated. The rambling school was a mile from her home. Six-year-old Gertrude walked there and back with her sisters every day. The classes were small, just eight girls in each, "so it was wise to do your homework every night," wrote her sister Elizabeth in her memoir, From There to Here.
Elizabeth described the active lives of the Tompkins children and recalled, "The mile walk to school, church, dancing school or music lessons etc. was normal. There were at least a dozen tennis courts in the nearby park and excellent ice skating on the lake there. ... Between the edge of the park and the Jersey meadows was a wild strip which we explored each spring for wild flowers and migrating birds."
At first Gertrude found school pleasant, but her stutter soon changed that. When a teacher asked her to stand and read aloud, she flushed with anxiety and fear. She stuttered and stammered but successfully completed the page and sat down, among the titters of the other little girls.
Then she began to hear the other children chanting in the schoolyard at recess or on her way home:
My n-n-n-name is Little Gertrude
And I-I-I-I am only three
Some p-p-p-people say I stutter
And n-n-n-no one cares for me
My m-m-m-m-mama used to stutter
When she m-m-m-married papa, too
It t-t-t-t took three days to marry,
'cause the p-p-p-p preacher stuttered too.
She could never ask others to understand and help her. Her father's self-reliance and prideful ways were her ways, too. There was one bright spot: study of Latin and French began early at Bergen School, and Gertrude soon discovered that she seldom stuttered in foreign languages.
At home most mornings, the Tompkins girls were awakened by Maggie. After combing their hair and dressing, they trekked downstairs for a breakfast of hot cereal, supplemented by a tablespoon of sweet Maltine (a malt-based supplement) and cod liver oil, both considered guarantees of good health.
Each day after school, Gertrude and her sister Elizabeth walked hand in hand to Grandmother Rosaline's. The wealthy widow's imposing mansion sat on a hill that would later be called Jersey City Heights. The estate had stables, a large vegetable garden, extensive lawn and flower beds, and curved driveways with entrances on both Bentley and Harrison Avenues. Rosaline was a petite woman, but her voice came from deep within and her word was law. "Our whole family revolved around her," wrote Elizabeth.
Rosaline was said to be the last person in Jersey City to be driven by horse and carriage. Lady, the horse, clopped her way down Harrison Avenue, weaving between the honking autos as late as 1920. Grandmother Rosaline was old-fashioned and rigid. When two cousins from New York came to pay their respects, Grandmother Rosaline refused to allow one of them inside because she had recently divorced. The divorced cousin was left outside to pace the porch.
Laura insisted that her daughters pay daily respects to their grandmother. They were told to ask how she was and what she was doing. If Grandmother Rosaline was in good spirits, the girls might be invited to stay. Sometimes she read to them from the Bible. On exceptional days, Rosaline allowed Patrick Fitzpatrick, her sometimes-sober gardener and chauffeur, to take them for a carriage ride.
Most days, Gertrude passed the time in the rooms of her own house. Thomas and Maggie and her sisters kept her busy as her mother lay in bed with severe headaches. Gertrude explored the dark, fragrant rooms of the cellar, where canned fruit and vegetables and coal were stored. Here was also a tiny bathroom used by the servants. Gertrude liked the fragrance of a tin of sweet-smelling powder that Maggie used to dust her underarms. Gertrude prowled the top floors, sneaking into Maggie and Thomas's bedroom, examining the little corn husk dolls the maid had collected.
As she grew older, a new sound filled the Tompkins's house. The family listened in rapt attention to voices and music that were broadcast from a radio in the living room. Gertrude learned to love classical music almost as much as she loved reading books.
Their mother's condition worsened as the girls grew older. The demands of a husband and three daughters weighed on her. One day when Gertrude was around 10, Laura refused to get out of bed. For the next two years she would remain ill in bed. Laura received treatment in a small, exclusive sanitarium in Cornwall, a community not far from West Point on New York's Hudson River. She stayed there frequently and sometimes for prolonged periods; other times she remained with the family.
While visiting Laura one weekend at the sanitarium, Vreeland found a farm for sale, a place in Mountainville, near Newburgh, New York. It was owned by Mr. Doxey, who had suddenly found himself bankrupt. Glenbrook Farm was 81 acres of woods, meadows, and apple orchards, with an old farmhouse, a perfect retreat for the family's summers. Vreeland bought the farm, and he built a small house for Doxey and his wife and paid them to stay and farm the land.
Preparing to move to the farm for the summer involved a joyous melee of family, animals, luggage, swimsuits, and hats. The girls and their English shepherd, Fritzy, climbed into Vreeland's Cadillac (he would have no other car) and drove the 50 miles to the farm on a warm May morning. There were cheers when Gertrude's father turned down the dirt road that followed a brook a quarter mile to the house.
Despite the shadow of their mother's illness, summers were carefree during the 10 years the family owned Glenbrook Farm. The three Tompkins girls explored, discovering three brooks, and Vreeland named one for each of them. On hot summer days the girls paddled and splashed in the creeks while their father visited Laura at the sanitarium. A tennis court was built at the farm, and the girls were able to tune up their games. Black currants grew abundantly and were fun to eat, their purple juices staining small hands and mouths. At the end of the day the girls were worn out from the sun and ready to be bathed by Marta, the Danish governess Vreeland hired to care for them during Laura's absence. As she toweled them off, the girls listened with fascination as Marta told them of dancing at Sunday evening balls in Copenhagen.
Two gardens at the farm produced tomatoes, carrots, radishes, and cucumbers, which Mr. Doxey frequently sent to the family when they were home in New Jersey. Each week he sent a shipment of fresh eggs, which arrived by Railway Express. They raised cows, pigs, and chickens and grew apples and berries. Just before Christmas each year Doxey killed the farm's hogs and sent some meat to the Tompkins family, including pigs' feet and pork jowl. Vreeland made the cook prepare all of it.
Elizabeth wrote of their time on the farm:
How blessed we were with all those acres to play in — woods, orchards, pastures, three brooks plus all the fascination of a working farm with cows, horses, pigs, chickens, an ice house, barns, a huge garden, a tennis court and swimming in Moodna Creek down the long winding driveway and across the main road. Yellow cream too thick to pour rose in large circular milk pans in the cool cellar off the kitchen. Making butter in the tall wooden churn was no chore at all. The skim milk was either put on the back of the stove to "clobber" or fed to the pigs. Early Sunday morning one of us was allowed to make the ice cream. It was a simple mixture of cream and crushed berries or other fruit from the farm packed in rock salt. Turning the handle a few times was all there was to it. My, how rich and good it tasted.
Gertrude's school months were not nearly as carefree as her summers. An average pupil, her days at school were lonely, in spite of the efforts of Miss Van Cleef and Miss Moira, the headmistresses of the school, who exhibited a genuine affection for the girl with the gray eyes. At home she wanted so much to hug her father. She loved him. He did so much for her. She worked at pleasing him, but he remained archly formal and always just out of reach.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Seized by the Sun by James W. Ure. Copyright © 2017 James W. Ure. Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
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