Part Five

Joseph Haywood was – I’ve seen pictures – not a handsome man. He was short and thick-fingered and his eyes were too far apart. His hair was jet black, his eyes were watery brown, and his skin alternated between too pasty and too ruddy.

He was born in 1942 in Eugene, Oregon. His mother disappeared soon after, and thus his father – an auto mechanic – was exempted from military service.

Joe Haywood had a macerating mind. It chewed slowly through problems. He was quiet and intense and relentlessly logical. He went to Syracuse and got an engineering degree and needed ROTC to pay for it all… so when he got his diploma he promptly did a stint in the Navy.

What he did, exactly, remains classified. My FOIA responses were mostly useless. It seemed to have had something to do with base security; it's not really important. At any rate, in 1965 he was at the Pentagon and sharing a little apartment in northwest D.C. with a Marine lieutenant named Gary Parks. And each morning on his way to work he would walk past a skinny blond girl sweeping the sidewalk in front of a florist shop a little further down his block.

Ellen Frechette was not particularly attractive, either, I must say. Her nose was sharp and her forehead was too high and she had angles where one would expect to see curves. By all accounts she was witty and impulsive and outgoing. And like Joe I never found anyone who knew her who had anything bad to say about her.

Also like Joe, she was raised by one parent; her father had been a fighter pilot (she was conceived during a bereavement leave) and he was killed in the Pacific two days before she was born. And just six weeks before the end of the war.

(It wasn’t even combat. He had 16 kills – there was no enemy pilot who could touch him, it seems. His plane exploded on the deck of an aircraft carrier as he was taking off. Some sort of mechanical failure. Frank Frechette's ace status will be marginally relevant later, trust me.)

So when she turned 18 she moved from her mother’s house in Virginia to work in her aunt’s flower shop in Washington. And somehow this quiet engineer found the courage to talk to her; somehow she was drawn to the fine-grinding intellect and subtle sense of humor of the young navy officer; within three months of their first date they were married. Lieutenant Parks was their witness at the courthouse.

The year 1967 found them in Falmouth, Massachusetts. Joe had finished his military obligation and the Department of the Navy promptly hired him back as a civilian contractor and sent him to Woods Hole. Ellen was very pregnant by then.

Keep in mind that what follows is complete fiction. I am relating from memory a story Preacher told me almost 20 years ago, which his mother had related to him almost ten years before that. Since this is NOT a biography I am perfectly sanguine about using quotation marks below, despite the fact that the quotes themselves are entirely fabricated:

In 1967 childbirth meant two weeks of laying in, so on a cold March afternoon, the first day of spring just around the corner, Ellen Haywood wandered into a big used book store to find something to read during her forced seclusion.

She had just picked up a book about Cotton Mather when the proprietress of the shop – “old and scary-looking,” is how Ellen described her to Preacher, years later – said “he’ll be such as that.”

Ellen jumped. The old woman was pointing at her swollen belly. “A preacher,” she said.

Ellen didn’t quite know what to say to that. As near as I can determine neither Ellen nor Joe ever attended any religious service of any kind, aside from the occasional wedding or funeral. So the prospect of her child becoming a preacher was not particularly appealing.

“Or a soldier,” another woman said behind her, and Ellen jumped again. This one was older and scarier looking that the first.

“Well,” Ellen said, trying not to freak out, “I, ah…”

“A preacher or a soldier, right,” the third old woman said. “He’ll be a preacher or a soldier. Long-lived, too, don’t worry.” Ellen remembered vividly that the third one had a pair of scissors.

At this the pregnant woman gave up any pretense at aplomb. She dropped the book and fled into the street and waddled as fast as she could down the cramped streets of Falmouth and up to their second-floor apartment and hid in the bathroom.

Joe, of course, was too much an engineer to be very sympathetic. But she was completely shaken by the three old ladies making prophesies about her unborn child. When dismissing it as senile babbling didn’t soothe his wife, Joe took a more creative approach.

“No man of woman born…” he said.

“What?” Ellen said. It was very unlike Joe Haywood to quote Shakespeare.

“Wasn’t that a famous prophesy? They made us go see this play in the eleventh grade, and…”

“It’s from Macbeth,” she said. “’none of woman born shall harm Macbeth.’”

(See, here I have her correct the quote. Because I can look it up. I have no idea if she got it right or not. I just know that -- according to Preacher -- she later told Preacher that his father brought up the Macbeth example.)

“Because that Macduff guy was born by c-section, right?”

“Are you saying our son is going to be king of Scotland?”

“No, my point is, these things are never that straightforward. They’re never as obvious as they sound. So just because they say he’s going to be a preacher or a soldier doesn’t mean that it’s what you think. Even if you think they’re not just a bunch of senile old biddies, which is my personal opinion.”

“What else could it mean?”

“He could be an actor. You know, he wins his first Academy award for playing a preacher, his second for playing a soldier.”

Ellen thought about this for a moment. “I wouldn’t mind having a movie star in the family.”

“Me neither. I could retire.”

“Maybe it means he’s going to be president. You know, commander-in-chief is a soldier. And he has the bully pulpit.”

“I’d rather he be a movie star than president.”

“Why?”

“Because I’d rather retire to Beverly Hills than to Washington.”

This tactic seemed to mollify Ellen somewhat. Keep in mind that it was 1967. Vietnam. Protests in the street. Being a soldier, being a preacher – neither one of these appealed to her at all.

One assumes that Joe thought his wife had put all this behind her by the time the baby was born a few days later. It was March 21, 1967. At 7:26 a.m., if the paperwork is to be believed.

Groggy from the gas, weirded out by the old ladies, and (by most accounts) a bit of a flake, Ellen was handed her beautiful baby boy and she insisted – demanded – that he be named Preacher Haywood. Thus, in her mind, both fulfilling the prophesy and keeping the kid’s future career options open.

She told Preacher that, in fact, she wanted to make his middle name Soldier, but was overruled by Joe. So he had no middle name. But when I was putting the archive together I would occasionally find something with “Preacher S. Haywood” on it – he used the S as his unofficial middle initial sometimes, one supposes either in homage to his mother’s thwarted wishes or as a sort of tribute to Harry Truman.

Jesus, all this typing and I’ve only described how the Navy brat got his name. I haven’t come close to explaining how he happened to be sharing a dorm room with me.