Dear Hearts,
January 20th is the 99th anniversary of the birth of James Patrick Sullivan Sr.: son of John Jeremiah (Lefty) and Anna Conick Sullivan; brother of Bob, Sister Anna Rita and Sister Margaret Sullivan; husband of Mary Claire Wiley Sullivan; father of Jim, Mary Fran, John, Mike, Matt, Anne, Jerry, Margy and Patty; grandfather of 24, and great-grandfather of over a dozen more!
I was 24 when he died and had very little time to have an adult relationship with him. Today, 31 years after his death, I still talk to him--now with a mature perspective of his life and goals and challenges. I would love to bake him a big birthday cake (chocolate cake and chocolate icing) and tell him all about his incredible legacy on earth--his children, grandchildren and great grandchildren.
So, happy birthday in heaven, Dad. Please continue to watch over us. We pray that you are back in wedded bliss with Mom, dancing, laughing and singing with all your loved ones.
God bless us and save us and keep us from harm.
Love,
Pitty Pat
Jim's Message:
He is the uncle and mentor of many. And, as I have grown older, many of my buddies have told me how they felt that he was something of a father to them, in some small ways, never sentimental, but very real. The Sullivans of Bob and Darlene had a very special relationship with him, as did the Whalens, especially Christian.
And Stach- Al Stachura and Big Sully had a special bond. Big Sully loved Al for his goodness and toughness. (Enough to make him Patty's Godfather.) And he got a huge kick out of Whitey. He told with gusto the story of Whitey appearing, singing, over the dune at dawn the day after the bachelor party, fully clothed, but sleeves ripped off, and missing his pants.
Big Sully was born in Beloit, Wisconsin, on 20 January, 1921, while Lefty and Anna were on the road, in a hospital room which was later the hotel room where he and Mary Claire had their honeymoon! True story!!
He took the name of his older brother, James Patrick, who had died a few minutes after being born. This is the Irish tradition. He was named after his father's brother, one of the original inventors of whole life insurance schemes. Uncle Jim made and squandered several millions of dollars, was disowned and rejected by his father, Jeremiah, but was loyally supported by his brother Lefty, and so Big Sully got his name. Lefty called him "Big" and "Seamus." He was big in every way.
At age 8, he climbed to the top of the local grade school smokestack, some 60 feet up, and scared the whole neighborhood.
At age 17 he was ejected from Mount Carmel for punching the football coach in the mouth. The coach had made the mistake of swatting him in the face. He wound up at Saint Bede's and became the AAU heavyweight boxing champion of the state of Illinois, undefeated, at age 18.
At age 20, he left Marquette, where he was on football scholarship, to enlist in the Army Air Corps, becoming a bomber pilot and joining the 8th Air Force, the unit with the highest casualty rate of its size we ever put in the field, 88% during some phases of the war.
His crew had over 100% casualty rate. He descended from altitude with his boys in line formation, almost impossibly difficult to fly, especially in heavy bombers, just 100 feet over Omaha Beach at Normandy, three times, in direct support of the First and Twenty-Ninth Infantry divisions, who were wading through their own blood below him. Each of those three times, he told me, his airplane was horrifically shot up and damaged, crewmen wounded, by ground fire, and each time he swore he was not coming back over this beach, but he did- two more times. He himself was shot down three separate times, months apart, finally the last time captured, escaped, was recaptured, was wounded three times, and flew 28 combat missions in B-24's. He was 23.
When he got back to America, the downed airmen were in Texas and were sent home as the Army accumulated batches of men big enough to fill a whole plane. All these were pilots who had been shot down and imprisoned the last time they were aboard an Army aircraft, and they refused to get aboard without parachutes. The airfield commander balked, so a sitdown strike ensued right on the runway. The base commander, a two-star, came down to the airfield to see what was going on. He said, "Why are these men doing that?" The colonel said, "They won't get aboard without parachutes, general." The general said, "Well then give them the !@#$%^&*() parachutes!!!!!!"
They all got chutes, the plane took off, and somewhere over Oklahoma, all systems failed and everyone bailed out!!! True story.
The Caterpillar Parachute silk company sent Dad two gold caterpillar lapel pins because he had used their product to save his life, twice. One had a ruby eye, because the plane was on fire. He was and is a member of the Caterpillar Club. When I was in Jump School, I got a little scroll for being a second-generation paratrooper, as is John. Mick is a third generation U. S. Paratrooper.
The War Department sent his family word that he would arrive in Chicago at Union Station. Everyone was too afraid to go to the train because it would be the fourth disappointment and heartbreak, when he didn't show up, like after all his 3 shoot-downs. The death telegrams were sent to his parents by the War Department, saying he had been shot down and was presumed dead. Then he'd show up safe back in England after being rescued by the French Resistance and spirited back across the Channel.Then they would sigh in relief.
Then another shoot-down telegram would come, saying he was dead again. This telegram cycle happened three times! Everyone was scared to go meet the train. But his little sister, the indomitable Auntie Nan, went anyway, willing to have her heart broken again, on the off chance that he would be there-- and of course, he showed up.
There he was- 6 foot 2 1/2 inches tall and 130 pounds, broken teeth, broken jaw, broken knee cap, badly injured testicles, malnourished, limping, unable to lift anything, with a thousand yard stare in his eyes, and the worst case of post-traumatic stress imaginable.
And there she was, too. And he never forgot that. She saved his heart that moment. They were bonded together tighter than glue from then on.
Whitey and I now say, when it's time to do something tough, "Let’s meet the train."
He returned to Marquette, met Mary Claire, a pre-med student, in chemistry class, and the rest is history, and it is a world-class love affair.
He was drafted by the Cleveland Rams of the NFL, but wanted better job security.
He became a chemical engineer and steel mill metallurgist, and rose to the superintendency of US Steel's new BOP shop in the sixties. The BOP and Continuous Caster cast the world's biggest piece of steel. He was called the Big Bopper. He renamed Florence Furnace into Mary Furnace, after his wife, when it would not start up properly. It is making steel out there today, and still called "Mary Furnace."
He was a legendary steelmaker. They still talk about him. He was a bit of a maverick, barked back at the top brass, and they were a little scared he would smack one of them.
Once somebody shut off the water and there was a fire, the controls burned, and a batch of steel, known as a "heat," froze in the vessel. This was potentially a 100 million dollar disaster.
He scared the hell out of everyone there by riding a hook down into the vessel and walking around on the crust. He said he wanted to "see if he'd get a hot-foot." Big Sully poured hot metal on it, oxidized it a little with the lance and kept doing this until the bath broke free, ran over the mouth of the vessel and did one million dollars worth of damage to the superstructure. This is nothing compared to the other result.
He came home that night, after three days in the mill, with his eyes like two pee-holes in the snow. Next morning, he roused all of us before dawn, saying, "Come on, pack your stuff, we're going on vacation, hurry up." We didn't know what was going on, but the next thing you know, we're in two little U S Steel-rented airplanes at the Gary airport and they fly us up to our vacation spot in Door County, on Green Bay.
When we got home, there was a giant crate in the living room full of all kinds of goodies, and a ham that came from a dinosaur, and a cheese as big as a tractor tire, and a bottle of champagne bigger than Margy, and an envelope with more cash than we had ever seen. We got a new car. It was incredible. Those were the days when if anything glitched, the steel companies just raised the price of steel, and everyone accepted it.
He started up the US Steel plant in Bilbao, Spain, in the Basque country near the ancient site called Brigantia which is where our DNA was traced to. Lefty always told us we were Basque, and the DNA proved it. So Big Sully was right at home, and those Basques, the Vascos, just loved him. They pulled him right into the gang at the local pub and he had a posse while he was there.
He once swam after Patty's beach ball, which had blown out into Green Bay, until he disappeared from sight. John and Mike and I were standing on the pier, crying, for three hours, and then, a little dot appeared on the horizon. There he was- no beach ball, but not drowned either. The guy was a fish. Even when he lost his leg, he could swim forever.
These events of his life were much more numerous than these few here. He had the worst case of post-traumatic stress I have ever seen, and I now know quite a bit about it, having studied it in detail. Everything was "fight or flee." If I had known this, I think I would have treated him differently when he was alive, and offered him some comfort.
By the time he was 23, he had been blasted out of the sky by flak three times, belly landing in enemy-held territory twice and parachuting to his capture the first of two parachute jumps. (The second was on his trip home after the war, from Texas to Chicago- see above- they all had to bail out.) He had had his co-pilot, sitting beside him, decapitated, and inhaled his vaporized blood, delivered a breech baby from a French woman in a bombed-out town, probably killing her, had killed a retarded German guard with a cobble stone, watched the Rangers rip some prison guards in half with a jeep after liberation, left formation in terror, only to turn around and fall back in, only to be hit and downed over the target. He had had his parachute torn to shreds on his back, while he wore it, seated in the cockpit during a bomb run, without getting hit. He had a broken chin, a knocked-out front tooth, crushed testicles, a broken kneecap, malnutrition and had absorbed more terror than some people live in a lifetime.
When he was about to lose his second leg, I think he remembered that his grandfather, Jeremiah, died when they took his second leg. Because before they could operate, Big Sully slipped into the arms of God.
Yes, he was wild, an Irish pirate, born 1000 years early. Yes, he drank to excess, like all the men of his Y-chromosome, Jeremiah's Y-chromosome. He was really tough- I never saw one tougher. He was also as brave as three men, at least. And, he was a real, true honest-to-God hero.
It's true that he was crazy and did some things wrong, and he made a lot of mistakes, but he handed me pieces of my manhood, time after time. Butt chewings never impress me, because I have yet to see somebody deliver one as good as Dad's.
He trusted God. He always said, "God has a Master Plan." And with him, it was family, God, country before everything. And he and Mary Claire- that was a real love story. He adored her, and she him.
I'm so proud to be his son, and to have witnessed, along with the wild behavior, some of his purity of character. For instance, he was always, always for the little guy, for the poor, for the underdog. He wasn't real gentle about it, but you knew where he stood.
We all remember him having the laid-off workers at our house doing made-up jobs, so he could pay them. They once put a shuffleboard court behind our garage, for God's sake. Or busted up and re-laid the sidewalk around the house.
Or the time he stood up, in 1958, in front of the entire community, for the Ricks brothers, Willy and Wally, the only black people ever to go to a Lansing, Illinois little league game, because they were with us. He yelled and faced down forty people, and seated the Ricks brothers in the bleachers, among his family.
Or the time he took on the guy who had brass knuckles, because that guy had frightened Mom with a rubber snake at the Knights of Columbus Hall. The guy got in one lick, cutting Dad's eye and making a lot of blood, but Dad got to him and beat him to a pulp before the cops got there. We got him out of jail and he was sitting at the kitchen table with about 8 stitches around his eye.
I didn't know what had transpired in full and wanted to be filled in. So I said, "What happened, Dad?" He thought I meant about hiseye, and he said something I'll never forget. He said, "A rat bit me. And that made him die."
Or the time he was thundering at the dinner table about eating some obnoxious vegetable, because, "everything at this table was thought of by your mother, and it's good for you, and by God you will eat every last bit." Then, miraculously, a big bug flew in and landed on his forkful of spaghetti and sat there. The whole place got quiet as we all suppressed laughs. We were all thinking, "Oh yeah. big shot? What about that filthy rotten bug? Did Mom think of that?"
He stared at the thing and then- he ate it.
When Booma died and left some money, he and Bob signed theirs over to the Dominicans, because it would go right to the poor.
They said, "Hey- we have jobs."
He was a man.
He died in his bed in Upland, California, lying next to his only woman, his wife of 43 years, Mary Claire, in the wee hours of the morning, 29 September, 1990. It was the feast of the three Archangels, Michael, Gabriel and Raphael. Father Maher said at his funeral, "It took three of them to get him in the door."
I speak for us all when I say, Dad, goofy as you are, we love you so. You are the One And Only Big Sully. Please watch over us and lend us your undentable courage.
God bless us and keep us and save us from harm.
Love,
James Patrick Sullivan, Jr.
Seamus the Older
