By Garland O. Goodwin

Editor’s note: This is not the first time the Bulletin has run this column, but it seems particularly appropriate to re-publish it before father’s day this Sunday. It’s also running on the birthday of NCSHP Lt. Garland O. Goodwin, Sr., born June 19, 1903.

   My father was born six months before the airplane, and lived a pretty full life before he married at age 25. He was kept at home to work so much that he completed only the fifth grade of school. His father bought the sanitary landfill at East Durham (N.C.) and made my Dad and Sam plow it repeatedly to prepare it for growing crops. Both Dad and the horse hated the stench. I don’t know what became of Sam, but my Dad finally revolted and left home for good.

He had learned to ride motorcycles at age 15 and was racing them professionally for Harley-Davidson in Havana by age 19. When repair of injuries sustained in a racing accident cost him most of his savings, he decided to look for a less dangerous line of work. He signed on with a crew surveying an alternate site for the Panama Canal. Working in dense jungle, they were told not to pick up anything they dropped. One of the men automatically reached for his pencil and came up with a brightly colored little snake attached to his finger. He was dead before he could be helped, so Dad decided again that it was time to move on.

He got work on a freighter headed for China, and later weathered a storm with heavy seas washing over the deck and more lightning and fierce winds than he had ever heard of. On shore leave on the Chinese mainland, he had to flee some sort of uprising. They gave him a .45 automatic pistol and a Chinese boy to keep reloading its ammunition clips as they ran back toward the docks, firing at their pursuers. He made it back to the ship and it sailed to Hawaii.

Dad liked the islands and enlisted in the U.S. Army there. He was assigned to Battery A, 8th Field Artillery, and learned trigonometry so well that he was soon promoted and was teaching other gunners how to aim the artillery pieces. He played a lot of baseball and enjoyed touring the islands. Since he had enlisted there, he had to use most of his savings again to get back to Durham when he left the Army.

There he joined the police force and met my mother. Their courtship helped the Roaring Twenties roar, and soon after they married an heir became apparent. Sure that I would be a boy, Dad practiced signing my name until he found one that looked and sounded good to him: “Joe Dennis Goodwin.”

In the meantime, Dad was appointed to the new N.C. State Highway patrol. When he came to Watts Hospital to see me for the first time, he found a placard on my bassinet proclaiming me to be “Lt. Garland O. Goodwin, Jr.” That which could not be denied was accepted, and I am now pleased to bear his name. However, when I started to school, I would rather have been just “Joe” and not had to explain and spell my name!
When the patrol ordered standard motorcycles, the Harley folks sent my Dad a deluxe model, compliments of the company. I loved to sit with him on that big Harley and to hear its throaty roar when he left for work. My Uncle Wallace told me that once when Dad was working the state fair, it included some stunt riders who put on quite a show on their motorcycles. Dad mounted his Harley and astounded them by performing all of their tricks!

I remember his sitting on the porch calmly reading the newspaper during a thunderstorm that produced the only “ball lightning” I ever saw. He said that if the Lord were going to take him by lightning, it would have happened in the South China Sea. He was right; he was fatally injured in someone else’s car a year later. He was barely 35 years old, and I was eight.

Dad had learned to fly airplanes at some point, so he could answer my questions about how they fly. I made a cardboard model airplane with movable control surfaces so I could bend them to produce the maneuvers I wanted as I put them through the motions of loops and rolls and so forth. We also went aloft with a barnstorming pilot for my first airplane ride. So you see, he started me on my way to becoming a pilot and a designer of airplanes.

I have lived more years than either of my parents, but my Dad certainly packed more adventure into his short life than I have in mine. I wish he had had more time to train me, and that I could have heard these stories from his lips instead of Mother’s. My parents loved each other and my younger brother and me very much, and I am thankful for my good fortune. I am the only one left to tell their stories, and I consider it more of a privilege than a duty to do so.

 

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