When I was writing my historical fiction novel The Librarians of Lisbon, there were two people who kept appearing in mind, beloved ghosts from the past.
The first was my aunt, Carol Warfield Tallman, who worked as a librarian for over thirty years at the William Penn Memorial Museum (now the State Museum of Pennsylvania).
The second was my pop-pops, Robert Francis Thomas Reinoehl, who was a gunner’s mate in the United States Navy during World War II.
My aunt and my pop-pops were both formative people in my childhood, and it was their careers and war-time circumstances that, in part, helped to inspire The Librarians of Lisbon.
My aunt Carol Tallman was one of the kindest souls I’ve encountered in my lifetime so far: gentle, graceful, and soft-spoken. Because we lived on the West Coast during my childhood and she lived in Pennsylvania, my opportunities to see her were rare but delightful.
Visiting her during her work day at the William Penn Museum was an even greater treat. We could “lunch” at a restaurant in downtown Harrisburg after spending several blissful hours marveling at the museum’s animal dioramas and exhibits. She and I shared a love of literature, and later, as my writing career took wing, she was one of my greatest supporters.
One of the first questions she asked whenever I visited her was, “What book are you writing now?”
I thought of my aunt often as I wrote Bea Sullivan’s character in The Librarians of Lisbon, remembering her wisdom, love of literature, and quiet grace.
My pop-pops, Robert Francis Thomas Reinoehl, wasn’t a man of many words. He had a hard life, drafted as a gunner’s mate for the US Navy during World War II, and then working as a police patrolman serving with the Jersey City Police Department for twenty-eight years.
I remember the bitter smell of his cigarette smoke permeating his Jersey City house, his smile, how he called my dad “Bobby” instead of “Bob” the way everyone else did. Once, when I was in second grade, he visited us in Thousand Oaks, California. I came home one day to discover that he’d rescued a wild baby bunny from the jaws of our cat. We fed the bunny with milk from an eye dropper and he survived, turning into “Bun Bun,” named after the bunny in Susan Clymer’s The One and Only Bun Bun. Pop-Pops was always kind and gentle. I loved the way he said “yous” instead of “you” when he talked. I was too young to hear his stories of World War II before he passed away, but I heard about them years later, as an adult.
My pop-pops was a gunner who deployed with the United States Navy on the “Julia Ward Howe” cargo ship on January 13, 1943. The ship was carrying P-38 planes and supplies for Oran, Africa, in the aftermath of Operation Torch (the Allied invasion of Africa, which occurred from November 8-16, 1942).
They were destined for Oran, but on January 26, 1943, they were torpedoed by a German U-575 two hundred and fifty miles off the coast of the Azores Islands in Portugal.
Three men who had been sunning themselves on one of the decks of the ship were immediately killed by the blast and never found. The captain, too, was lost.
As the ship sank, the merchant marines on the ship were able to use the ropes to lower themselves into the lifeboats, but the drafted men had to jump into the water to swim for lifeboats. There was a hierarchy that was strictly followed.
Pop-Pops made it onto one of the life boats. Within minutes, the German U-boat surfaced to question the survivors. The Germans, who, according to the oral history of Donald Shaul, were young boys following the commands of the Reich, questioned the crew of the “Julia Ward Howe,” asking where they were headed and what they were carrying. The Germans, according to my pop-pops’s recounting, were satisfied with the answer, and let the survivors live. They provided them with blankets and made sure they had potable water before sinking beneath the ocean’s depths. The survivors of the “Julia Ward Howe” shipwreck were eventually rescued by the Portuguese destroyer the “NRP Lima.”
The seventy-one survivors of the “Julie Ward Howe” were picked up at sea, along with the sixteen survivors of the sinking of the “City of Flint,” another American ship sunk by a German U-442.
The trip back to Portugal was delayed by severe weather, and the ship was so overloaded with castaways that it listed to one side, barely making it back to port.
The castaways were taken to São Miguel Island in the Azores. According to Shaul’s oral history, they arrived dressed in dungarees to disguise themselves as civilians. But it wasn’t long before the Germans realized who they were and took them as prisoners of war. They stayed on the island as German POWs until early April, when the “USS Nyassa” arrived to bring them back to New York City.
The surviving crew boarded the “USS Nyassa,” accompanying over four hundred European refugees escaping Hitler’s regime, to the safety of America.
I wasn’t old enough to hear Pop-pops’s story of survival before he passed away, by my uncle and my father recounted the story for me in recent years.
He was rescued by a Portuguese vessel and was kept alive thanks to the efforts of the Portuguese sailors and fishermen who answered the distress call on that cold, storm-blown night in January of 1943.
I don’t know anything of his experience as a German POW on São Miguel Island during the three months he stayed there. I wish I’d been old enough to hear his stories of that time in his life before he passed away.
Whatever his tales were, he didn’t speak of them often to anyone. Like so many other veterans of World War II, he returned home haunted by what had happened to him but reluctant to burden any of his loved ones with his stories.
But I thought of him as I wrote the character of Pete in The Librarians of Lisbon, wondering what horrors he carried home with him, and how he found a way through them, to life on the other side of the war. He did find a way through them, because he married my grammies and made a life with her. He went on to have four children and lead an honorable career in the Jersey City Police Force.
I was never able to find a mention of his time in the Navy in any New Jersey periodicals. If he’d lived in a small town somewhere, perhaps his name might’ve been mentioned in the local paper, because the comings and goings of locals in small towns was a source of intrigue (and local gossip). But instead, he was one of hundreds of boys (I call them “boys” because they weren’t yet men) in the inner cities who answered the call of duty, whose honorable actions in that call of duty were too many to be recorded.
My aunt and my pop-pops were at the forefront of my mind as I wrote The Librarians of Lisbon, and I hope some of their spirits reside in pages of the book. I tried my best to impart it. Only they know if I succeeded.
