For immediate filing among those factoids that never really occur to you, right up until they do, today is the centenary of my father’s birth on March 7, 1925.
That’s one hundred years, the sort of nice, round number we find ourselves drawn to.
Roger George Baylor has been gone a while now; he died in 2001, just before I turned 41. Our relationship was complicated, which is not to say troubled. I’d describe it as a state of ongoing, mutual puzzlement.
In his own way, my father was an exuberant and passionate man, with his primary issue being how to define and express his emotions, or not.
Positivity for him came through sheer physicality, first through sports, and then by blunt force hardcore work in the great outdoors: baling hay the old-school way, walking fence rows, mowing grass, building and maintaining and improving things.
It was as if he awoke each morning (very early, a former dairy employee’s lifelong habit) and confronted the world’s existential indifference by coming out swinging until he dropped from exhaustion many hours later.
I think these really were internal struggles, and absent a formula for talking them out into the open, he chose instead to try battering them into submission. We’ll never know for sure, but in my opinion much of this had to do with my father’s service during WWII.
In essence, he ran away from home to join the US Marine Corps in 1942 at 17 and returned still shy of 21, bearing the nickname “Pappy,” as earned by two and a half years aboard the battleship USS Washington in the Pacific Theater.
Following is a brief biography from the program of one of the ship reunions he attended in the 1980s and 1990s.
ROGER G. BAYLOR, Corporal, born March 7, 1925, Georgetown, IN. Joined the USMC Sept. 28, 1942. Transferred to 1Oth Replacement Bn., South Pacific; assigned to USS Washington in January 1943 with 7th Div. Served on board until July 1945 as a gun striker and shellman on the 5-inch guns.
Participated in all major action while on board, including Saipan, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Memorable experiences were the collision with USS Indiana and the encounter with the typhoon December 1944.
Honorably discharged Oct. 4, 1945, with rank of Corporal. Remained in USMCR, returned to active duty in Korean War in August 1950-August 1951,as a sergeant with D Co., 16th Inf., Camp Pendleton, CA.
